Category: Sermons

Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you

It doesn’t get much more radical and more challenging than this. A parade of seemingly impossible and impractical demands. Love your enemies? Do good to them which hate you? Bless them that curse you? Pray for them which despitefully use you? Don’t just turn your cheek away from him that smites you but offer the other cheek as well? Hit me again, Sam! To the one who takes your cloak, let him take your coat too? Give to everyone that asks you? To him that takes away your goods, do not ask to have them back? What is going on here?

As utterly impossible and, perhaps, utterly ridiculous as these demands might seem, they simply belong to a rich and powerful tradition of ethical understanding, to what is sometimes called ‘the golden rule,’ summed up here by Jesus who says “as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise;” a concept of reciprocity. He elaborates upon this concept as being the very nature of love and mercy, qualities that have everything to do with the goodness of God alive in us, principles of the highest ethics of justice and the Good. They counter and correct the more commonplace tendencies of our instrumental use of one another. Indeed, “lend,” Jesus says, “hoping for nothing again”! Try telling that to the financiers of Wall Street or to the Davos elites of our world and day.

Nothing could be more radical, it seems, than this Gospel. Yet it belongs to the radical nature of our incorporation into Christ as the Epistle reading from Romans makes so abundantly clear. Baptized into Christ, we are baptized into his death so that we may be partakers of his resurrection, walking now “in newness of life.” And so we are bidden “be ye therefore merciful even as your Father also is merciful.” Here the impossible becomes not only possible but necessary.

Love your enemies. This is one of the great Christian contributions to the moral discourse about the virtues of the soul, especially justice. Is it right to give back to your neighbour who is gone mad the axe which you borrowed from him? It is his but he is mad and therefore a danger to himself and others; in short, an enemy of all, an enemy of the human community. This is Plato’s argument against the commonplace but mistaken or at least incomplete idea that justice is about giving to each what is their due. The deeper question is precisely about what do we owe to one another? Or is justice simply doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies? Again, Plato in the Republic makes the strong point that justice cannot be about harming anyone or anything. “Love your enemies, and do good,” Jesus says. Somehow we have to think the Good in order to do what is right.

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“Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; nevertheless,
at thy word I will let down the net.”

Knowledge is power, it is commonly said. It serves as the defining cliche or mantra for our modern technocratic world, a world dominated by our assumptions of power over nature through technology and, paradoxically, over ourselves. But it is a dangerous and destructive mantra and one which is largely false. What kind of knowledge and what kind of power? To ask the questions is to begin to be more critical about human reason and to realise our limitations.

The phrase “knowledge is power” is usually attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, the father of empirical philosophy in the early sixteenth century. Certainly the question for him was about how our knowledge could be used to better the human condition but he was under no illusion about how false and falsifying our claims to knowledge, either through the physical senses or through the mental operations of our minds, could be. His was a cautious interrogation of nature, forcing her to give up her secrets through careful experimentation. Marx would later take up the scientific idea to say that the point is not to know nature but to use nature for our ends. With industrialization and now digital automation, we confront the dark side of these assumptions and their realizations.

We are no longer at ease in a world of human domination of either nature or ourselves. The narratives of progress are equally fraught with the conditions of loss and destruction: the seas have been overfished; the land diminished and destroyed by pesticides and machines belonging to the industrialization of agriculture. We have lost our connection to land and sea; in short, to creation.

We also have got the narratives all wrong. For Bacon, the world was God’s creation and he did not say that knowledge is power but that God’s knowledge is power. Therein lies an important distinction and one which belongs to the insights of our religious and philosophical traditions. They provide a counter to our hubris and destructive domination of nature and ourselves.

Nautical, sea-faring and fishing images complement the more abundant agrarian, agricultural and farming images in the Gospels. They belong not to our domination and manipulation of nature and our humanity, not to the dynamics of power, but to the truth of our incorporation into the life of God in Jesus Christ. They recall us at once to our necessary and inescapable connection to the created world and to the God in whose image we are made. As such they provide a self-critique of human reason without which there is only loss and destruction, a loss and a destruction that is entirely our doing.

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“What manner of child shall this be?”

“What manner of child shall this be?”the neighbours of Zacharias and Elizabeth ask, highlighting the strange and yet compelling character of John the Baptist whose nativity we celebrate today and whose feast day marks the anniversary of the landing of Giovanni Caboto, englished as John Cabot, perhaps, though by no means for certain, in Newfoundland in 1497. Thus he has become the patron saint of what later became Canada.

To state this obvious fact of history is regarded by some as politically incorrect; regardless, it is a feature of this country of displaced peoples which is about more than just the encounter between various European cultures and the so-called indigenous peoples, a term which historically would be utterly meaningless to those whom it is meant to describe. That history is about more than just economic and cultural exploitation though that is inescapably part of the story. That is hardly new as one can see from Bartholomew de Las Casas 16th century work, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, or Voltaire’s classic critique of his own 18th century European culture in Candide. There is no right side of history which is not to say that there aren’t lessons to be learned about good and evil and about right and wrong. History as an intellectual discipline is inherently revisionist which requires, I think, a recognition of the complexities and the vagaries of the contingent world of human actions and motives rather than forcing history into some sort of ideological strait-jacket such as the idea of progress. Such things on all sides are really a kind of blindness, a lack of awareness and a failure of the ethical imagination. It is invariably a kind of judgmentalism.

There are the ups and downs of history but there are also those moments of the breakthrough of the understanding into “the fullness of time”, an awakening to the truth of our lives in God. There are profound and providential things that happen in the course of history even in and through our follies and sins, despite all our certainties.

Thus the conjunction of this feast with the Gospel for The Fourth Sunday after Trinity about the parable of “the blind leading the blind” is particularly compelling. It concerns our awareness, our vision of the mercy of God, which alone counters our self-certainties and self-assurances, our judgmentalism. This is our blindness. Instead, we are called to Christ who, theologically speaking, is not simply the icon of any one particular culture as the native peoples of Canada themselves amply show; they are, after all, largely Christian. Abusus non tollit usum is an older medieval principle; the abuse of something does not take away from its proper use. Therein lies the real question with respect to the historical interaction of cultures past and present, something articulated very well in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease about the clash between British Imperial culture and the Igbo tribal culture in parts of Nigeria in the twentieth century.

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Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth

Repentance is our joy. It is the counter to all and every form of self-righteousness. Why? Because we are called to our right mind. The word is metanoia, a turning of our minds to God. It signals the powerful idea of our being turned back to God from whom we have turned away, ‘a kind of circling,’ as Lancelot Andrewes suggests, a return to a principle. We turn back and we are turned back. It is all God in us, and it is all us in the truth of our being. Repentance is itself the motion of divine love in us. That is its power and its joy.

Such is the power and the joy of this morning’s Gospel. It is really about the love of God whose goodness is our joy and our good. It is imaged here in terms of the shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep and the woman who seeks diligently for the one lost coin. Those images belong to a third image, the story of the return of the prodigal son, a return which is about the father’s love. Three stories. We have the two parables here; the third is appointed as the Gospel for a parochial mission (BCP, p. 327), precisely to underscore the point of our being returned into the Father’s love. Repentance is our joy.

And yet this is so often ignored, derided and denied. “All we like sheep have gone astray,” Isaiah reminds us, in a passage which shapes the General Confession in our liturgy. “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” Why? Because “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” We are, however, more like the Pharisees and the Scribes who murmur against Jesus. Such is their self-righteousness. “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them,” they say. It is in response to their self-righteousness that Jesus tells these three remarkable parables. They are told to counter their judgmentalism which is about claiming a kind of spiritual superiority over others. They are told to move our hearts by illustrating the love of God which is “greater than our heart,” our heart of condemnation, as we heard last week.

It was a common complaint about the Prayer Book during the liturgical revolutions of the past decades that it is too penitential. People murmured against the idea of repentance, reluctant, it seems, to “acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness,” wanting, it seems, to assert their own essential self-worth and self-esteem. Such murmurings miss the point that Luke presents to us in the fifteenth chapter of his Gospel, the very point about the essential joy of repentance, the very point about the Father’s love to which we are returned, the love which recalls us to our rightful minds.

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I have called you friends

St. Barnabas is sometimes known as “the son of consolation.” Do we not sometimes find strength and comfort, in short, our consolation from one another? To be sure. And what is our consolation? Simply our abiding in the love of God the Blessed Trinity. The Gospel for this feast complements the lessons from John’s first Epistle which we have heard on these past two Sundays in the early days of the Trinity season about the divine love which commands us to love. And this Gospel follows directly upon one of the greatest Scriptural images of our abiding in the love of God; namely, the idea of the vine and the branches. “I am the vine, ye are the branches,” Jesus says, “abide in me.”

Yet the most powerful statement about our abiding in the love of God appears in this astounding statement where Jesus says “ye are my friends.” Somehow in Christ we are made the friends of God and so, too, friends of one another.

It is a powerful idea and one which has an ancient and profound pedigree. It reaches back to the story of Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh. Enkidu is created by the gods to be a second self to Gilgamesh so that in respecting and honouring the other he will be no longer a domineering and brutal king, a bad king but a good king who seeks the good of his people. Friendship appears as the solution to the problem of bad kingship, to the misuse and abuse of power.

And sometimes the Greeks, too, can imagine a kind of commonality between the gods and men. “Two of a kind are we, deceivers both,” Athena says to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, implying a kind of commonality at least of character. And in the Old Testament there is the wonderful friendship between Jonathan and David, a kind of kinship of the soul.

One could go on but the point is that in Christ, God declares himself our friend. This shows something of the deeper meaning of the Trinity mantra that “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” In a beautiful treatise that takes up the ancient theme of friendship, such as in Cicero’s treatise de amicitia, Aelred of Rievaulx’s 12th century work, Spiritual Friendship, goes so far as to suggest that “God is friendship”.

What does friendship mean? It means our attention to the good of one another in the goodness of God. The divine friendship shapes our fellowship, our care and concern for one another. That is our consolation and strength. It is about the goodness of God in us making us good and, indeed, good for one another. Such is the power of the Trinity. It is altogether about our abiding in the love of God intentionally and thoughtfully, attending to the Good that is God in all things.

I have called you friends

Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Barnabas, June 11th, 2018

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Hereby we know love

God invites us. “Come, for all things are now ready.” That is at once a privilege and a wonder. To what are we invited? To love imaged as a banquet but as signifying the real meaning of our lives. In the Christian understanding it is about our life in Christ. “Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” The love in which we abide is sacrificial love. That love is active and alive in seeking the Good, the goodness of God and that self-same goodness for one another.

Do we accept the invitation? Do we embrace the demands, indeed, the commands of the divine love in which is all our good? Well, that is the problem and the challenge. It is the problem of sin. “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his heart against him: how dwelleth the love of God in him?” This is the problem of our indifference towards one another which separates us from the love of God, illustrated so powerfully for us in last Sunday’s parable, the parable of Lazarus and Dives. It is really all about what is alive in us.

Those lessons are again concentrated for us and developed more fully in this Sunday’s readings. The Epistle instructs but also convicts; the Gospel illustrates profoundly our refusals of the invitation to love and live yet emphasizes the divine commitment to our good. As such they are powerful persuasives to the truth of our lives in Christ.

The paradox is that we are commanded to love. This seems counter-intuitive. How can love be forced or coerced in us and still be love? It can’t. What we encounter is the absolute nature of God’s love as the truth for us. That love is constant and unconditional. It is not changed by our refusals; we are. We encounter simply what God seeks for us even in the face of our disorderly and distracted hearts. Yet “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” It is one of the great teaching insights into the nature of God opened out to us in John’s First Epistle, itself a veritable treatise on love as Trinity and our abiding in that love. “And this is his commandment, That we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment.” Notice the double emphasis on commandment. What does it mean? Simply that we should want what God wants for us.

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“Herein is love”

“Our life and our death are with our neighbour,” says St. Anthony the Great, according to Athanasius’ biography of the Desert Father. Anthony was an important figure in the development of Christian monasticism. Heaven and Hell, we might also say, are with with one another. Today we are given a vision of both in the Epistle and Gospel. Heaven is the love of God in us in our love for one another and Hell is our indifference to one another and thus to God.

How we think about death and dying says everything about how we think and deal with one another. The great pageant of literature and philosophy which presents us with the images of the after-life are entirely about life itself and about how we think and live with one another. That is really the main point about such great works of literature like The Epic of Gilgamesh in Enkidu’s vision of the afterworld as the house of dust, Homer’s Odyssey in Odysseus’ journey to Hades to speak with Teiresias, Plato’s Myth of Er in the Republic, Vergil’s sixth book of the Aeneid, St. John the Divine’s Revelation, Dante’s great summa, The Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faustus, the novels of Charles Williams, and many, many more. They are really profound teachings about our humanity in its relation to God and to one another. Such teachings are wonderfully concentrated for us in John’s little treatise on love in his First Epistle and in Luke’s profoundly poignant Gospel story about Dives, the rich man, and Lazarus, the poor man.

That there is a kind of role reversal in the Gospel highlights the significance of our thoughts and actions towards one another. As we saw last Sunday with Nicodemus, we have to learn to think upward, to think into the things of God. The rich man utterly ignores Lazarus lying “at his gate full of sores,” hungry and destitute, bereft of human company. It is the dogs who “came and licked his sores,” the dogs who show the compassion and charity that humans ought to show to one another. In his indifference to Lazarus, the Gospel suggests, there is equally an utter indifference to God, to the truth of our lives as lived with God and with one another. That indifference is nothing short of Hell. The Gospel highlights the “great gulf fixed” between heaven and hell. In our refusals to love one another, we separate ourselves from the love of God, the love that John saysis God. Hell is our refusal to let that love live in us.

These lessons follow directly and rightly upon the celebration of the mystery of the Trinity, the mystery of God as love: not just our love for God, not just God’s love for us, but God as love. In the Epistle we have the familiar mantra of the Trinity Season. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him,” as found in our liturgy as one of the sentences for the Offices. The King James Version uses “dwelleth” for “abideth.” Without that love, we are nothing. We are Hell.

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“How can these things be?”

This might well be our question after such a challenging, demanding and dauntingly robust exercise as saying together the Athanasian Creed, one of the three great Creeds of the Christian Faith! But perhaps the question helps to awaken us to the wonder of God.

“Blessed be God that he is God only and divinely like himself.” A phrase used by John Donne as a kind of meditative mantra, it captures something of the mystery and the wonder of this special day, The Octave Day of Pentecost, commonly called Trinity Sunday. And it is a most holy and special day, one of the most holy and special of days because it is, first of all, unique and, secondly, the ground and basis of all our days and all our life. It is simply a forthright celebration of God.

Trinity Sunday celebrates God himself, we might say, Deus in se, as distinct from thinking about God in relation to us, Deus pro nobis, which so easily turns into our concerns and our interests and our ways of thinking and doing which so easily becomes the basis for our thinking about God. It is as if God is made in the image of our thinking rather than our being made in the image of God and participating in the life of God. Trinity Sunday challenges us precisely on that score. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity,” as the Athanasian Creed puts it. To think God as Trinity is to think God in himself and only through that to begin to think God in relation to us.

The doctrine of the Incarnation, the doctrine of the redemption of our humanity, the doctrine of the Trinity: these are the three great and essential dogmas of the Christian faith, and the greatest of these is the Trinity, we might say. The distinctive and essential way of thinking God in the Christian understanding, it is the doctrine through which Christians can respectfully engage the other great monotheistic religions of Judaism and Islam, however much the Trinity is repudiated and denied by them, as well as engaging the other religions and philosophies of the world. In other words, the Trinity is not some speculative add-on to the other fundamentals of the Faith. It is the fundamental and essential doctrine without which all of the other principles of Faith are really meaningless and empty.

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