Category: Sermons

“He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me”

There is something wonderfully providential about the concurrence of The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude with The Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity. On the one hand, we have the wonderful vision in the lesson from Revelation of the heavenly city that anticipates the great spiritual harvest Festival of All Saints and, in the Gospel, grounds that heavenly vision in the life of the Trinity. The spiritual fellowship belonging to the redeemed human community is grounded in the life of God through his Word and Spirit. On the other hand, in the Gospel for Trinity Twenty-Two, we have the powerful yet instructive parable of the unforgiving servant which illustrates by way of the negative the whole point of having and keeping the commandments of Christ, namely, our abiding in the very love of God and acting out of that love towards one another. That is the very thing that the servant who is forgiven and indeed has been forgiven much doesn’t do towards others. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, he refuses to forgive others what little they owe to him. It is a refusal of love, of mercy and truth. Yet what is wanted, as the epistle reading from Philippians makes clear, is that our “love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement.” That love is found in Christ and Christ in us; in short, it makes us part of a company of love.

Today’s Scripture readings remind us wonderfully of another kingdom, the kingdom of God. It is another city, the heavenly city, the City of God, which stands in such stark contrast to the disorders and confusions of our contemporary world, the city of man, as it were, the “unreal city” as T.S. Eliot suggests in The Waste Land. The Unreal City is the human community as more dead than alive, an image that follows immediately upon the image of the Church as nothing more than “a heap of broken images” because it no longer lives from God’s word. Yet these readings remind us of the apostolic fellowship of the Church which, if it is to be the Church, must stand upon the authority of God’s Word. “Only/ there is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),” as Eliot’s poem argues, signalling the only hope in the modern wasteland, the hope that is grounded upon the rock that is Christ and upon the apostolic foundations of the Church. This is what we celebrate today.

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“And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him”

It is a poignant and touching story that speaks to the fears and the experiences of countless parents down throughout the ages. It is a story about a father’s concern for his son who is said to be “at the point of death.” The father is described as “a certain nobleman.” Clearly status and wealth are of no use in the face of death. “What helpes honour or worlde’s bliss”, a fifteenth century English medieval lyric puts it about the fact of mortality. “Death is to man the final way.”

And yet, as a 14th century tutor at Oxford wonderfully tells his students,“live each day as if you are to die tomorrow; study as if you are to live forever.” To study is to pay attention to words and the power of words, and, most especially, here, to the word of Christ.

We forget that we can be profoundly touched by words. Words can make or break our day, raise us up or put us down. How and what we think and say to one another is important. It is important to our spiritual health especially we might say.

Today’s epistle reading from Ephesians abounds with military imagery but in an entirely spiritual context, the idea of a spiritual struggle, the cosmic struggle between good and evil which is not about “wrestling against flesh and blood” but something much more serious:“against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” This must not be misconstrued as gnostic dualism – dividing the world into them and us in which we demonize the other and pretend that we are the good. Such conflict narratives only contribute to the forms of spiritual wickedness that Paul is highlighting.

There is a struggle, to be sure, but the struggle is always first and foremost in us. It is the struggle to  be defined by the good, by God’s Word and truth and not by “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” More than thirty years ago, the great English doyenne of mystery novels, Dame P.D. James, wrote a wonderful novel with the title “Devices and Desires.” Against the strong recommendation of her editors, she refused to provide an explanation of the title on the grounds that every educated person should know the reference. This was long before our current fascination and obsession with our digital devices which, paradoxically, reveal only too well “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” The phrase comes from the General Confession at Morning and Evening Prayer in the Prayer Book: “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.”

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Then opened he their understanding

The opening of the understanding is a recurring motif in Luke’s Gospel. It serves to highlight an important feature of his commemoration as the author of the third Gospel and the author of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. There is something significant and attractive about the figure of St. Luke and the role which he exercises in the Christian imagination. He is, as the Collect puts it,“an Evangelist and a Physician of the soul” and one “whose praise is in the Gospel.”

Healing is about more than just relief from bodily ailments. More important is the idea of the healing of the soul captured in the Gospel for his feast day. The Scriptures are opened for our understanding and in particular the understanding of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection from which flows the preaching of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. These are powerful ideas which Luke explores in his writings to the glory of God and the good of his church and people, we might say.

The healing of our souls. How we think about things and how we look upon one another are critical concerns. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that we should commemorate Luke, Evangelist and Physician, the day after the legalisation of cannabis in Canada. It is true that from a Christian perspective nothing in the physical and natural order is simply evil. Somehow there is  something good in the being of every creaturely thing, something good by definition about cannabis and its chemical components. But there is also the great and good wisdom about how we use the good things of our world and day.

That is a far greater question. We know that we can abuse all manner of good things. What I must confess to being utterly uncertain about is the recreational use of marijuana, of cannabis. What exactly is that good? We know only  too well about the misuse and abuse of alcohol, namely, drinking to excess, drinking to get drunk, to intentionally lose control and imagine that one is ‘feeling good’ while under the influence. We know only too well what dangers that can lead to and the cost it brings. But abusus non tollit usum. The abuse of something doesn’t take away from its proper use. What is the proper use of cannabis exactly?

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“See then that ye walk circumspectly,
not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time”

These are strong words which complement wonderfully the strong and disturbing words of the Gospel. On the one hand, there is an invitation to a royal wedding – what’s not to like about that? – and yet, on the other hand, after the refusal, the denial even to the point of violence about that invitation, someone who is gathered in from the high-ways is cast out for not having a wedding-garment! The parables of the Gospel are not always easy to understand! They always challenge our assumptions. That is the point. They do so by opening us out to a larger and more comprehensive understanding.

In a way, it is has everything to do with “redeeming the time,” a concept which is about more than just making the best of things. It is, instead, about seeing the good and acting accordingly. We see, as Paul and Aristotle and others have observed, but “in a glass darkly.” It is an important insight about the limits of our knowing, on the one hand, and the realization of a deeper darkness in the heart of our humanity, on the other hand.

Walking circumspectly. What does that mean? Walking carefully, paying attention to where you are and what is happening, walking while looking around you; in short, walking thinkingly or thoughtfully. The word in Greek relates to the term used for Aristotle’s school of philosophy, the Peripatetics, thinking while walking. It gives a whole new and deeper meaning to thinking on one’s feet!

Walking circumspectly is a feature of this very building and its spiritual purpose. Just above the main doorway in the narthex leading into the Church is a curious phrase from Ecclesiastes. “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God.” I have often wondered why no-one has ever asked me about what that means. I can only surmise that perhaps they have been looking down at their feet literally and so are completely unaware of what was over their heads.

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“For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven,
and giveth life unto the world”

Michaelmas is a feast of intellection, we might say, a festival of the gathering of the thoughts of God; such are the angels as the intellectual principles of the universe in its diversity and unity. Similarly, Harvest Thanksgiving celebrates a gathering, the gathering of the visible fruits of creation in an intellectual way to God, the invisible source and principle of all that we see and feel and taste and smell. It is a particularly significant festival for our agricultural communities where there is some sort of real connection to the land and a proper concern for the good of the land.

Gathering the fruits and vegetables from the fields into the Church is an entirely spiritual activity. We aren’t feeding God, offering sacrifices, as if were, to some idol of our imaginations. We are honouring God as the source and truth of all that belongs to our lives physically and spiritually. This point cannot be emphasised enough. It is the counter to our materialism, on the one hand, and our complacency, on the other hand; a counter, too, to the deadly dualisms of our world and day. You cannot take the harvest for granted. While there is a physical aspect to our thanksgivings for food, for healing, and even for our social and political lives, thanksgiving itself is a profoundly spiritual and intellectual activity.

That is why the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel is actually the Gospel appointed for The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, which we heard five weeks ago. Look in your prayer books on page 240. Then look on page 308 and you find it again as appointed for Thanksgiving Day. That refers to the idea of a nationally appointed day of Thanksgiving, a thanksgiving for the rational principles that properly belong to our collective life without which our social and economic lives cannot flourish; itself a point worth pondering in our current confusions.

The Collect on page 307 wonderfully captures that larger sensibility. We “humbly thank” our merciful God and Father, “for all thy gifts so freely bestowed upon us.” Those gifts are clearly specified and are comprehensive in the sense that they pertain to every aspect of our lives. We thank God “for life and health and safety; for power to work and leisure to rest; for all that is beautiful in creation and in the lives of men.” Think and ponder on those words for a moment and see how they counter and challenge all forms of entitlement and complacency and every sense of whining and complaining. Notice how they open our eyes and our minds to whole different approach to life. Such ideas are only possible on the basis of the pageant of creation that Genesis 1 unfolds, that the Benedicite Omnia Opera sings, and that Isaiah proclaims in this morning’s lesson; all affirm the essential goodness of creation because of the goodness of God. But those ideas of thanksgiving, our thanksgiving for all manner of good things, are altogether secondary to our thanksgiving “for our spiritual mercies in Christ Jesus our Lord,” which ties together the themes of creation and redemption.

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“They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb”

We are in the company of angels, no more blessed company to be with in these disturbing times and yet, angels? What are we, pseudo-enlightened moderns such as we are, to make of angels? Cutsy decorations for Christmas trees? Chubby cherubs with rosy cheeks? The more refined and aesthetically pleasing Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque angels? How do we think about angels?

The simple point is that you can only think them. You can’t see them. The visual imaginary, the way in which angels are depicted in art, is only as useful as it contributes to our intellectual and spiritual understanding of the angels. As such The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels yesterday – today is Michaelmas Sunday, we might say – is a strong reminder to us that there is more to reality than the merely physical, a strong reminder that the most important things in our lives are things that you cannot see. At the same time today’s service reminds us ever so strongly that the things you cannot see are made known through the things you can see. Such are the sacraments.

Blythe’s baptism this morning is a wonderful reminder of that spiritual truth. Through the water of death, the water of life, the water of the washing away of original sin and all sin, she is reborn and made “a member of Christ, the child of God, an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven” (BCP, Catechism, p. 544). Such is baptism. It is all grace perfecting nature and as such requires the renunciation of all that stands between us and God; in short, “the world, the flesh and the devil”as the Collect for Trinity XVIII puts it (BCP, p. 247). But only because “the devil and all his works,” what Michaelmas alludes to as “the great dragon”, “that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world,” nicely gathering up a variety of biblical images for all that opposes the absolute truth and goodness of God, has been “overcome by the blood of the Lamb,” by the sacrifice of Christ. How can this be? we might ask, in the manner of Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night in the baptismal Gospel this morning. “How can a person be born again when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” Note the literalism of such questions, as if the empirical and the physical were literally all there is.

Michaelmas is a splendid reminder to us of the nature and the reality of the spiritual without which we have no way to think anything. The greatest and most important things in our lives are the things we cannot see, only think and feel, the things of intellect and spirit. You cannot see love. You cannot literally see a number, only the representations of number; you can only think them for they are mental realities. You cannot see a quark or a neutrino or any of the many other features of quantum physics. You cannot see words which are thoughts before they are spoken or written, only then can you see or hear them physically as it were. Think of the magic and wonder of reading. Black marks on a white background that somehow entrance and engage our minds with the thoughts and ideas they represent. There is a constant dialectic between what is seen and unseen.

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“Friend, go up higher”

Friendship is the antidote to arrogance and presumption. “I have called you friends,” Jesus says to us. And here in today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable in which the crux of the matter is “Friend, go up higher.” It captures the moral of the story and scene. “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” Such is the power and significance of divine friendship. Friendship seeks the good of each other.

“God is friendship,” Aelred of Rievaulx suggests in his wonderful 12th century treatise, Spiritual Friendship, boldly translating “God is love” into “God is friendship.” The friendship between God and man is the great wonder and mystery of the Christian faith but it connects powerfully and wonderfully with the idea and concept of friendship as it is explored in other religious and philosophical traditions.

At work in today’s Gospel parable is the idea of friendship as the counter and corrective to pride and presumption, to arrogance and domination. In the oldest literary work known to our humanity, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” friendship is an essential element. Described by the German poet Rilke as “das Epos der Todesfurcht,” the epic of the fear of death, the epic poem is equally about the power of friendship. The friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is central to the dynamic of the story and to the making of Gilgamesh as the hero of the culture as knower and doer, as the one who faces the fears of the culture and in some sense transcends them. He does so only through the coming of Enkidu.

The prologue proclaims Gilgamesh as the hero, as the king of Uruk, and specifically as one who is wise and knew all things, all countries of the world, and who brought us the tale of the time before the flood engraven on stone. These are significant accolades and features of Gilgamesh. But the story of the Epic is really about how Gilgamesh comes to be these things. For, at first, he is a bad king and is seen as such by the city. How is he a bad king? By lording it over everyone. By using the people of the city and its resources for his own interest. He is an arrogant bully, simply put. The description is a kind of foreshadowing of the questions about justice that Plato wrestles with in The Republic more than twenty-five hundred years later. Does might equal right? Is justice the interest of the stronger as Thrasymachus asserts?

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Follow me

The Feast of St. Matthew coincides with the Fall or Autumnal Equinox, that point of nature’s year, at least for us in the Northern Hemisphere, when the length of the day and the night are equal. We know, of course, that it marks the official end of summer and the not so slow march to winter with the lengthening of the night. Yet that moment of a kind of equilibrium between day and night, between light and darkness, has a spiritual significance captured in the St. Matthew’s feast day which coincides more or less with the equinox. With St. Matthew, we mark “the closing down of summer” to use Alistair MacLeod’s felicitous phrase, the end of summer officially and symbolically and beginning of autumn. Light and darkness in a kind equipoise, even if it signals the coming increase of darkness.

The wonder of The Feast of St. Matthew is that it signals a kind of inversion of the patterns of nature. If with the Fall Equinox we mark the beginnings of the turn towards the darkness of nature’s year, with St. Matthew we mark the turn to the greater light of Christ. We celebrate two things: the call of Matthew to apostleship and its result in the first Gospel, The Gospel according to St. Matthew. The connection to light and darkness is wonderfully captured, it seems to me, by two paintings by the renaissance painter, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), a master of the chiaroscuro which is precisely about the interplay of light and darkness, hinted at in the shadowing forth of more profound ideas.

Caravaggio’s painting, ‘The Call of St. Matthew’ (c.1599/1600), represents  the Gospel story for this feast. Another painting, ‘The Inspiration of St. Matthew’ (c. 1602), hangs with it in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. The themes of darkness and light are central to both.

The painting of ‘The Call of St. Matthew’ depicts a dark and interior scene of men at a table counting money with huddled heads, a worldly scene, we might say, of cupidity and cunning (think Wall Street imaginatively). Into the darkness of the scene, following the pointing finger of Christ, light illumines the face of St. Matthew. His face is not only illumined but transparent and open to the face of Christ in a way which the other characters in the scene are not. That openness is the moment of Matthew’s conversion. Out of the darkness of human intrigue, with the accompanying overtones of deceit and dishonesty, comes the contrasting and compelling glance of Christ, a look and a word which challenges and changes everything. “And he arose, and followed him.”

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“To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”

The Epistle reading from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians complements wonderfully the Gospel story from St. Luke; in a way, the Gospel illustrates the teaching of the Epistle. We are shown something of “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.”

But what does that mean? Does it mean that love is unknowable or even irrational? The love that is shown to us here and elsewhere in the Gospels is the love of God which by definition goes beyond human knowing because it is a divine knowing, the knowing love of Christ for our humanity which always exceeds the limitations of all and every form of human knowing. What is known is something which goes beyond what we can produce by our knowing. In short, something is known; it is just not something which we produce as knowledge.

Faith, too, is about something known but known as beyond us, as something divine and as such something which is always beyond our finite comprehension. We are being raised up by God to learn and know what belongs to our life with God. It is the idea of being raised up that is key, our being raised up by God and to God. Such is the power of the Gospel story. It illustrates wonderfully the love of God in Christ.

The poet, Dante, in a wonderful phrase, designates Luke as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ (De Monarchia I, xvi). The Gospel story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain is one of those stories which reminds me of that description. It shows the gentleness of Christ and illustrates the nature of the divine love which seeks our good. We are raised up out of our falleness, out of sin and death, out of grief and sorrow. Here is a kind of resurrection story which shows us something about what God seeks for our humanity. It the love which “passeth knowledge” because it goes beyond what we could imagine or do for ourselves or for one another.

It teaches us about what it might mean to be “rooted and grounded in love.” To be rooted and grounded in love is about being raised up into that divine love by “comprehending”, itself a verb about knowing or understanding, “with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth and height” of that love, the love “which passeth knowledge.” It is not a knowing which comes from us but from God to us. How that is shown is the wonder and the marvel of the Gospel.

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God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ

Sunday’s epistle reading (Trinity 15) from Galatians complements and informs Holy Cross Day. The major feast days are all about important moments in the life of Christ and of the Apostles and other figures that are named and mentioned in the Scriptures. Holy Cross is a minor feast day which reflects on things or people that emerge in the history of the Church and which have theological significance.

The cross is central to Christian thinking, to be sure. We are signed with the sign of the cross in baptism. The cross is often a central feature of the architecture of the Church as cross-shaped and as in the rood screen here at Christ Church. Rood is an old English word for Cross. Then there are other visible things like the processional cross and the altar cross, as well as the cross above the pulpit and at the back of the Church which bear the figure of Christ crucified on them. We are reminded of the Cross as the dominant symbol of Christian identity. In the liturgy, absolution and blessing is pronounced in word and action, the action is the sign of the cross made by the priest and some people make the sign of the cross themselves. Somehow the cross signals our Christian identity.

A symbol of comfort, it also must discomfort us, a “strange and uncouth thing,” as the poet George Herbert puts it. There have been those who find it a disturbing sign because it recalls the ineluctable cruelty of our humanity; in short, a symbol of violence and torture. Yet the symbolic power of the cross has everything to do with Christ’s overcoming of all and every form of evil: past, present, and future. It is that victory of Christ through the cross that is constantly being recalled to us. It has become a “beauteous form”which assures “a piteous mind,” as John Donne puts it,  a mind in need of pity.

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