Category: Sermons

“Be not anxious”

What could be more anxious making than talking about being anxious? Anxiety R’ us! Big time. And therein lies the problem. W.H. Auden in 1947 wrote a long and largely unread prose poem entitled “The Age of Anxiety” which provided a convenient image for our world and day, itself a culture of anxiety. The title more than the work itself has had considerable influence in capturing our uncertainties. To be fair, it is not easy to say what exactly Auden meant by anxiety. Yet it has become the default word for so many features of our contemporary culture. His solution, near as one might be able to discern, seems to be the idea of mutual sympathy or mutual love for one another even towards those who are really strangers. That is, I think, powerfully suggestive along with the ideas in the poem about the forms of modern self-consciousness which add to the anxiety, on the one hand, and to the antidote of sympathy, on the other hand, through a kind of toleration – not wanting to disappoint and as such being willing to go along with others.

While there may be something to this not wanting to disappoint others and simply being willing to go along in a kind of sympathy for one another, even the beginnings of a kind of care for one another, it seems to me to fall far short of the antidote to anxiety which today’s Gospel story presents. I have on occasion called it ‘the Gospel of Anxiety’ even though it is really the antidote to anxiety but in ways which are deeply challenging to our preoccupations and concerns.

The words anxious and anxiety are relatively modern, appearing first in English via the German in the 17th century and really only taking flight in the late 19th century before becoming rooted in our lexical imaginations in the 20th and going viral, as things only can, in the 21st century. Tyndale’s 16th century English translation of today’s Gospel does not use the word anxious or anxiety. He has rendered Jesus’ words as “be not careful”, an idea which is also found in Luke’s story about Martha and Mary where, as Tyndale puts it, Jesus says, “Martha Martha thou carest and arte troubled about many things”. Here  his “be not careful” was changed in the King James Version of 1611 to “take no thought,” while it more or less keeps to Tyndale in the passage from Luke with “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.” It was only in the late 19th and 20th centuries, that the shift in today’s Gospel was made to “be not anxious” as in the Revised Version as well as other translations, only to be changed, yet again in the New Revised Versions to “do not worry.” Interesting shifts, to say the least.

(more…)

Print this entry

“And one … turned back … giving him thanks”

There were ten that cried out for mercy. There were ten that were healed. Yet only “one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” Luke pointedly adds, “And he was a Samaritan.”“Where,”Jesus asks, rhetorically and ironically, “are the nine?”

Certain Gospel stories stand out and bear repeating even in the course of the year. They have a certain resonance. This is one such Gospel. Read today in the midst of the Trinity Season and in the beginnings of the turn to the Fall, it is also appointed for Thanksgiving Day; not for Harvest Thanksgiving but for our national thanksgiving day. As such it reminds us of the larger spiritual dimensions of giving thanks. And so, more significantly, it recalls us to the mystery of thanksgiving. It is, we might say, the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel which highlights the spiritual necessity of thanksgiving as altogether critical for our understanding of human redemption.

Thanksgiving is our highest freedom and yet it is nothing less than the grace of God active and alive in us. To give thanks requires our recognition of others and of God beyond ourselves. The counter to our selfish tendency to take everything and one another for granted, thanksgiving recognises the profound gift of life which God alone has given us in and through one another. It belongs to our life and walk in the Spirit, to our fulfilling the law of Christ, to our bearing one another’s burdens as well as our own.

You are alive. I know, we ‘all’ got problems. “All God’s children got troubles” as the old spiritual puts it. But we are alive only if we are alive to God, the author of life and of all good things. Thanksgiving is the realization in us of God’s surpassing goodness signalled in our recognition of God as life and the gift of life in each and every one of us. That is a kind of radical mindfulness – of God, of ourselves, of our world, and of one another. And all as gifts given – in short, grace. It is not about what we think we are owed. It is about freely giving thanks for the simple truth that we are, that we exist and that existence is itself an unconditional good. Such is the wonder of the God-given reality of creation and of our lives within it despite all our complaints and concerns. We can only have those, after all, because we exist. I know. There may be times when you think that you want to die – a very different matter from causing death – but wanting to die presupposes that you are alive and know yourself to be alive. From this standpoint, even the devil is good because he exists even if he exists in contradiction with the very principle of his being and truth, God. This highlights even more the significance of thanksgiving.

(more…)

Print this entry

Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?

A confusion or a profusion of Mary Magdalenes? Or just Mary Magdalene’s profuse confusion? She “supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.”It is surely one of the great moments of mistaken identity! It leads to one of the greatest moments of witness to the Resurrection in the encounter and exchange between Mary Magdalene and the Risen Christ recalled in this morning’s Gospel. Yet her confusion, like Thomas’ doubting in the same chapter, all contribute to our faith and understanding.

Today, in the Providence of God, The Feast of St. Mary Magdalene coincides with The Eighth Sunday after Trinity. She is the great witness of the Resurrection, apostola apostolorum, an “Apostle to the Apostles,” as some have styled her, the first witness to the Resurrection, as Mark in his Gospel explicitly states, and thus, by extension, more theologically speaking, to the Gospel of Christ itself. The Gospels, after all, can only have been written in the light of the Resurrection. That is a key point with respect to our understanding. All four Gospels name Mary Magdalene as a figure at the death and resurrection of Christ, a witness to the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

And yet, there is, perhaps, no greater perplexity and confusion than with the figure of Mary Magdalene. It begins, I surmise, with a statement made by Mark and Luke about Mary Magdalene as the one “from whom [Christ] had cast seven demons,” as Mark puts it, or, as Luke simply says, “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out.”This introduces a whole new dynamic and, I think, an intriguing one that has led to much confusion and perplexity and, I fear, no end of fancy and fiction.

The interpretive narrative currently in vogue is that Mary Magdalene became seen more as the figure of repentance and less as the primary witness of the Resurrection. That is really a false dichotomy, a false or at least unhelpful opposition, and one which obscures more than it clarifies. Mark clearly connects both repentance and resurrection in one economical phrase: “on the first day of the week, [Christ] appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.”She is both a figure of repentance and a witness to the Resurrection.

(more…)

Print this entry

How can any one satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness?

We are in the wilderness, an empty and solitary place, a desert, to be exact, and yet the desert becomes a paradise where we are fed with more than what we need. Wilderness and paradise are powerful and important scriptural images in the Christian pilgrimage of faith. What do we mean by wilderness? What do we mean by paradise?

The latter is a Persian word used in Genesis about creation as a garden, the proverbial garden of Eden “in the east,” as Genesis 2 explains, in which God plants our humanity. That connection between Paradise and a garden which, as Dante envisions, is “full of every seed,” includes as well the idea of trees and a forest such that Paradise is not only imaged as a garden but as la divina foresta, a divine forest in contrast to the dark and savage wood that is wilderness, too; a particularly apt image for Canada. The image of trees recalls us to “the tree of life in the midst of the garden” and “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” in the Genesis account of the paradisal garden of Eden.

The contrast is between an original harmony of man with the natural world, a harmony with God and with one another, a place of innocence, and the loss of that harmony and innocence; thus paradise becomes the wilderness of our exile. Is our pilgrimage, then, about reclaiming paradise?

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

The refrain of Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” seems to make this claim. And in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rendition of her lyrical ballad, it has become, quite “uncritically,” as Camille Paglia notes, “a rousing anthem for the hippie counterculture” in the forging together of the “Romantic ideals of reverence for nature and the brotherhood of man.” Joni Mitchell’s own rendition, Paglia suggests, offers an altogether different interpretation. “With its slow, jazz-inflected pacing,” she writes, it becomes “a moody and at times heartbreakingly melancholy art song,” indeed a critique of the unbearable shallowness of the sixties’ dreams and aspirations; in short, “an elegy for an entire generation, flamingly altruistic yet hedonistic and self-absorbed, bold yet naive, abundantly gifted yet plagued by self-destruction.” Such things haunt our own culture and disordered world.

(more…)

Print this entry

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

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

Print this entry