Category: Sermons

“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three:
but the greatest of these is charity.”

These wonderful words we hear on Quinquagesima Sunday, Love Sunday as it is sometimes called because of these words. They are words which catapult us into Lent and which capture the real vocation and character of our life together. Our churches are to be communities of love, the places where we participate in nothing less than the divine love shown to us so paradoxically and profoundly in the way of the Cross, in the pilgrimage of Lent. Charity means love. Lent is really nothing more than the concentration of the Christian life as the pilgrimage of love.

Paradoxically and yet providentially, Ash Wednesday this year falls on February 14th. Whatever one makes of Valentine’s day – and there are a number of different accounts – it has entered into the imaginary of the Western Church and extends into the secular world where it now dominates; in part, as an economic generator for chocolatiers, vintners, florists, and various aspects of the silk industry. It speaks to modern romanticism and eroticism.

These, too, are forms of love which ultimately belong to the deeper and profounder forms of love highlighted in Paul’s great hymn to love from 1st Corinthians 13 and signaled in the great Gospel story from St. Luke about our “going up to Jerusalem” with Jesus. That journey instructs us in the lessons of love about which we are blind, like the disciples who hear what Jesus says about the meaning of the journey explicitly in terms of his passion and death but “understood none of these things,” and like the blind man “sitting by the way-side begging” and incessantly calling out to Jesus. What does he want? “Lord, that I may receive my sight.” To know our blindness is the necessary condition for our coming to see. In a way, what drives the Lenten journey, here imaged as “going up to Jerusalem” is desire, itself a kind of love. The point is about our seeking what God seeks for us with all our heart, mind, soul and strength; in short, love.

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“Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God.”

“He spake by a parable: A sower went out to sow his seed.” Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell us this parable but only Luke explains that “the parable is this.” In other words, Luke provides us with a deeper understanding of the meaning of this parable and, by extension, all the parables. Parables are stories with meanings, usually of a moral sort. They all work by way of analogy, making a likeness between one thing and another. They only work because we sense or grasp the analogy and its application to our lives.

But there is a paradox about the parables, it seems to me. Far from being easy and self-evident, they require considerable reflection and even explanation. We don’t always get the message. This parable reveals wonderfully that paradox in the realization that something is being made known that not all will understand. “Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God,” Jesus says to the disciples (literally, the learners) only to go on to say “but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand,” a point which both Matthew and Mark also make. In Matthew’s case, it refers to a passage from Isaiah about hearing and not understanding because “this people’s heart has grown dull,” “their ears heavy of hearing,” and “their eyes closed.” But only Luke gives this fuller explanation of the parable, making explicit what we might say is at least implicit in the other Gospels.

It is his directness of expression that is noteworthy. It conveys the idea that perhaps in the explanation of the parable we just might hear and understand rather than be left in our ignorance and indifference. In other words, this parable in Luke’s telling suggests a kind of necessary interchange between story and meaning, between parable and instruction. That is the challenge to us. It speaks to our desire to learn which Luke here somehow wants to encourage and promote. Those that “are the good ground” as Luke alone explains “are they which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.”

While his treatment of the parable of the sower and the seed has its parallels with Matthew and Mark, the emphasis is significantly different. It emphasises explicitly the meaning of the seed. Matthew later explains that the seed is “the Son of Man.” Luke here says “the seed is the word of God” and further provides a fuller explanation of the analogy between ground and soul: “they which in an honest and good heart”.

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“They brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord”

It is a double-barrelled feast; a feast at once of Christ and of Mary. All the festivals of Mary are tagged to the feasts of Christ, but here uniquely they are together in one. This is signaled explicitly in the Luke’s first sentence of this evening’s Gospel reading in the words “purification” and “presentation”. A most intriguing scene, it is also rather complex. The celebration itself is more familiarly called Candlemas, acknowledging the words of the aged Simeon who sees in the infant Christ the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about Israel’s vocation to be “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.” Few passages concentrate so wonderfully the interdependence, connection, and difference between Judaism and Christianity in the interweaving of the particular and the universal.

Candlemas marks the transition from the light of Christmas to the life of Easter. It reminds us that the twin centers of the Christian contemplation are Bethlehem and Jerusalem, each bound up in the other, each incomprehensible without the other. Once again we are presented with something very different from a linear narrative. Instead, the focus is doctrinal. With Candlemas, we learn with Mary about the deeper and truer significance of her holy child. Throughout the Christmas and Epiphany mysteries, Mary has been very much in the picture both in the paradox of virgin and mother and in the activity of “pondering in her heart all the things that are said” about the child Christ.

Here on the fortieth day after Christ’s birth and in accord with the cultural and religious custom of Israel, she and Joseph are in Jerusalem “to do for him after the custom of the law” – honouring God for the gift of the first-born male. It is also “when the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses, were accomplished” – forty days after childbirth. This has its later expression in the little service “commonly called The Churching of Women,” a service of “Thanksgiving After Child-Birth” in the Prayer Book (pp.573-575), a service that also acknowledges the frequent loss of children in childbirth. These are very real human realities and experiences. Both presentation and purification are in keeping with the customs and practices of Israel and yet both presentation and purification open us out to something universal and for all.

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“Go ye also into the vineyard”

In the western imagination, perhaps nothing speaks more profoundly to the idea of civilisation and culture than vineyards. In a way, they epitomise our humanity’s proper relationship to nature and to the theme of cultivation and learning. Scripturally speaking vineyards, too, are an important image about our relationship with God.

The older classical and catholic patterns of reading the Scriptures in the course of the year are intentionally instructive. With the older “Gesima” Sundays, there is a turn towards the human soul. They mark the beginnings of a kind of inwardness that has very much to do with the classical traditions of moral philosophy. The “Gesima” Sundays provide a catechism, an instruction, about the virtues. The virtues are the qualities of excellence belonging to the ancient Greek and Roman understanding of the good of human personality but which undergo a kind of sea-change, transformed by the three Christian ‘graces’ of faith, hope and love.

In the imagery of the “Gesima” Sundays, the Gospel readings from Matthew and Luke locate our humanity first, in a vineyard, secondly, on the ground, and thirdly, on the road to Jerusalem. Viewed in conjunction with the Epistle readings from 1st and 2nd Corinthians, they comprise a short treatise on the virtues of temperance and justice today in the Epistle and Gospel respectively, the virtues of courage and prudence on Sexagesima Sunday, and through the Epistle and Gospel of Quinquagesima Sunday, the realisation of their transformation into forms of love through the theological virtues of “faith, hope, and charity” or love which is the basis of the Christian pilgrimage of life concentrated for us in the season of Lent.

The Latin terms Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima are, I suppose, a bit intimidating and a bit of a mouthful, but they are easily explained. These three Sundays orient us towards Easter, marking the week of the seventieth day, the sixtieth day, and fiftieth day before Easter, for which the Quadragesima, meaning the forty days of Lent, prepare us. The terms reflect in part some of the history of the development of the forty days of Lent in terms of the number of days allowed in each week as a break from the rigour of the Lenten fast. They are simply the three pre-Lenten Sundays which prepare us inwardly for the Lenten pilgrimage by recalling us to the virtues as the active principles that belong to the Christian journey of faith. Critical to this instruction is the recognition that by themselves, as Augustine memorably put it, the virtues are but splendid vices, meaning that the journey of the soul to God cannot be undertaken simply by us alone but only by way of Christ in us; in short, by grace perfecting nature, by the virtues transformed into the forms of love. The point is that something is required of us; we are not simply passive beings, mere automatons, if you will.

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“Brother Saul, receive thy sight”

There is something providentially wonderful about the celebration of the Conversion of Saint Paul in the last week of the Epiphany Season this year. For his conversion can be seen as a kind of epiphany, a making known to us about what God seeks for our humanity. It is all about light and life. His so-called conversion, so-called because there are a number of ambiguities about what is to be understood here about the word conversion, is nonetheless about a breakthrough of the understanding.

His conversion is not about a change of allegiance from Judaism to Christianity because the latter does not yet exist either notionally or institutionally. Paul, after all, is a critical figure in the ultimate development of what will come to be called Christianity. As the accounts make clear, his story is entirely within the context of late Judaism in its encounter with Greek language and thought and its domination by Roman law and order. Such is the real richness of The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. It reminds us that Christianity cannot be understood apart from the collision of those principles: Jewish religion, Greek philosophy and culture, as well as Roman order.

Luke tells us about the story of Saul on “the road to Damascus.” The phrase has entered into world culture as the image of conversion, a kind of breakthrough moment. In Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, Paul tells his story three times. The epistle reading for his feast day provides us with the third and, perhaps most moving account, especially when one considers the setting. It is one of hostility, the hostility of the Jews towards Paul who has to be rescued by the soldiers of the Roman legion and who is allowed to address his own people “speaking unto them in the Hebrew tongue” after having spoken in Greek to the tribune, Claudius Lysias, a Roman officer. We see the interplay of Hebrew, Greek and Latin in the story of Saul who by virtue of his experience will be renamed Paul.

What is his story? It is his conversion, and here the word must be used literally, from being the persecutor of Christ to becoming an Apostle of Christ. It is, also literally, about seeing former things in a new light. He is blinded into sight, into a new way of thinking about the Messiah, a new way of thinking about God’s engagement with our humanity in terms that without destroying the law transcend the law, especially in its narrow Pharisaic sense. His story is about his mystical encounter with the risen Christ. In a way, the critical moment lies in the exchange between Christ and Saul.

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“Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”

The story of the miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee where Jesus changes water into wine, indeed, the very best wine, has been read in the liturgical traditions as an Epiphany story. Something is made manifest, made known, about who Jesus is, about who he is for us and about what he seeks for us. In “this beginning of signs … he manifested forth his glory, and his disciples believed on him.” It is a most powerful, a most intriguing, and a most instructive story. Like so many of the Gospel stories it arrests our attention and demands our thoughtful consideration.

Most intriguing, perhaps, even beyond the questions about miracles which are an important feature of Epiphany, is the dialogue between Jesus and Mary. It sets the context for the miracle and provides the key to its interpretation. More than that, though, it alerts us to the sacramental nature of the Christian faith with respect to the making known of the essential divinity of Christ and to the work of human redemption. Just as his divinity is made known through his humanity, so too the work of human redemption happens through the things of the world. The Christian religion is not about fleeing the world; it is about the redemption of the world. Word and Sacrament are intimately and inseparably entwined as essential aspects of Christian faith and life.

Christ’s Incarnation is God’s intimate engagement with our humanity. God enters into the conditions of our world and day. But why? The great 14th century German mystic theologian, Meister Eckhart, astutely observes that “the greatest good God gave to man was in becoming man.” It is in these stories that we see the goodness of God towards our humanity. Christ’s essential divinity, as one of our hymns highlights, is made “manifest in Jordan’s stream,” referring to his baptism by John. As we saw last week, huddled in the cold of the Hall, that does not mean that Jesus recognises himself as a sinner which is all that John’s baptism really means – a kind of metanoia, a recognition in us about ourselves that expresses a desire to be freed from sin.

Christ’s baptism is about his entering into the conditions of our sinful world. It signals the idea of the divine purpose of the redemption of our humanity. Christian baptism builds on the baptism of John but imputes Christ’s righteousness to us so that we are freed from original sin because we are in Christ. But only through his hour, the hour of his passion and resurrection. It is not just about the recognition of sin but redemption from sin through our incorporation into Christ’s death and resurrection.

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“Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”

Throughout the Advent and Christmas season, we have largely been in the company of Luke and Matthew and John with respect to the Gospel readings. So, too, with the Epiphany. Christmas reaches a kind of climax with Matthew’s evocative account of the coming of the Magoi from Anatolia, the wise men/kings from the east who come to Bethlehem, at last, it seems, to complete the rich tableaux that belongs to all our Christmas imaginings. With the coming of the Magi, the Christmas mystery is complete.

Epiphany marks the making known to all of the Christmas mystery which is why for one half or more of the Christian world, Epiphany is the Christmas celebration. For the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy – Russia, the Ukraine, Greece, Georgia, Egypt, Armenia, and so on, Epiphany is Christmas. Why? Because it marks the making known, the manifestation of Christ’s nativity to all the world. With Epiphany, Christmas is omni populo, for all people. What is proclaimed to the Shepherds in the fields surrounding Bethlehem by the Christmas Angel about “good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people” comes to pass with the journey of the proverbial “Come-From-Aways” and “Johnny-Come-Latelies” to worship the child Christ. They come bearing gifts, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning,” gifts which teach us about the meaning of Christmas.

There is a certain logic to these differences of celebration between East and West as well as some common concerns. For the Churches of the Western world, both Catholic and Protestant, Epiphany recognizes and celebrates the universal aspect of Christ’s nativity but also focuses on a new theme. There is a shift of emphasis from the Word made Flesh, a focus on the humanity of Christ in the Incarnation, to the divinity of the One who becomes human. Epiphany is all about the making known of the essential divinity of Christ revealed in and through his humanity in its engagement with us. Thus, for East and West, Epiphany is really Theophany, a manifestation of God.

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“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”

Today we ponder with Mary the things that were said about “this child” by the Shepherds who have now come to Bethlehem to “see this thing which is come to pass”. Yesterday, we were with Joseph thinking “on these things”, namely the difficult mystery of Mary’s being with child of the Holy Ghost. There is an inescapable intellectual quality to Christmas.

So much so that the ideas about its meaning go before us in our coming to Bethlehem. In the linear narrative, it is only in the Gospel for the Octave Day that we have the shepherds going now “even unto Bethlehem”. Like the Easter mystery, so too with Christmas, we witness to the way in which the mystery comes to light and takes birth in our souls. We witness to the ways of pondering and thinking upon these things in the discovery of their truth and meaning.

Truth and meaning. These are inseparable. Meaning by itself might simply mean what is true for me which is not necessarily truth at all. But put truth and meaning together and then you have something powerful and wonderful, something worth pondering about our commitment to truth without which it has no meaning in us. Truth and meaning together have entirely to do with our participation in the mystery of Christ and his holy nativity.

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“He thought on these things”

In terms of the infancy narratives in Christmastide, should we be so wedded to such a linear way of thinking, we have yet to get to Bethlehem! Apart from Joseph and Mary and her first-born son, the only other visitors to Bethlehem in the readings for this past week have been those whom Herod sent forth who “slew all the children that were in Bethlehem,” a gruesome, yet significant and important Christmas story, and one that is largely overlooked and ignored in our contemporary celebrations of Christmas. It is, perhaps, somewhat remembered by way of the carol, Puer Nobis Nascitur, “Unto us a Child is Born”, in the verse “Herod then with fear was filled:/ ‘A prince’, he said, ‘in Jewry!’/ All the little boys he killed /At Bethlem in his fury.” Not exactly the most familiar and comfortable of carols yet profoundly concise about this aspect of the Christmas mystery.

No, in the narrative sequence of the Christmastide Gospel readings, it will actually only be tomorrow on The Octave Day of Christmas that the Shepherds, the representatives of our common humanity, will actually “now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass.” Even the Christmas angels, it seems, were only in the countryside round about Jerusalem, the one announcing to the Shepherds about the sign of “good tidings of great joy” in the birth of a Saviour in the city of David, “who is Christ the Lord”, only to be joined by “a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, good will toward men.”All rich and wonderful words and saying, events and thoughts, which illumine for us something of the mystery of Bethlehem, the mystery of Christ’s nativity. All about its meaning and significance, and less about a linear account. All about the radical and disturbing meaning of the Incarnation and its deep joy for us in the redemption of our humanity which it reveals and makes known.

But only through the compelling way in which we are drawn into the mystery – through its significance and meaning first and then in terms of the narrative sequence. Today we have Matthew’s account of the infancy narrative and yet, even with Matthew we do not get to Bethlehem. We – meaning aspects of our humanity who witness to the birth in some way or another – don’t get to Bethlehem until the coming of the Magi/Kings. And they are, to be sure, both the proverbial “Come-From-Aways” as well as the “Johnny-Come-Latelies”. But with Matthew’s account today, we confront what appears to be a scandal. It is not too much to say that his account presents us with more than one scandal, humanly speaking. With Matthew we see a certain intellectual wrestling with extraordinary matters all of which belong to the theological mystery of the Incarnation.

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