Category: Sermons

Sermons

Sermon for Christmas Eve

“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”

Christmas challenges all the absurd certainties of our worried and weary world, a worried and wearied world, perhaps, because we are too much “assured of certain certainties” and only too “impatient to assume the world” (T.S. Eliot, Preludes). A virgin and a mother, a child who is God, a night that is eternal day, the Word and Idea of God made flesh, God with us and towards us and for us without ceasing to be what He is in himself – God. These are surely the ideas that challenge us. Christmas speaks powerfully to all our fears and worries, to the anxieties which arise from the absurd certainties and arrogance of the vanities of our reason when left to “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” It challenges all of the absurdities of power and domination in a world of violence and destruction, a worried and weary world, indeed.

“O weary, weary were the world / But here is all aright,” as G.K. Chesterton’s lovely poem, A Christmas Carol, puts it. Christmas proclaims the redemption of our humanity in all of its fullness, the redemption of our hearts and minds, of our souls and bodies. It is all found in God. That we might know this wonder and mystery, we have the wonder and mystery of God with us, Emmanuel. “The Christ-child lay on Mary’s heart, / His hair was like a fire./ (O weary, weary were the world,/ But here the world’s desire.)”

No doubt, it may seem de trop, all too much. And there have even been times when Christmas was banned by Christians, particularly those of a Puritan persuasion, not simply because people seemed to be having too much fun (and we can’t have that, can we?!), but because all of the images that came to surround the celebration seemed to be idolatry, mistaking God himself for the things which God has made, confusing the Creator with the Created. Christmas seemed to be mere superstition, “painted-over paganism” and anti-religious, a betrayal of the holy.

The first Book of Common Prayer (1549), too, was mocked as being “but like a Christmas game” by traditionalists, particularly in Cornwall, who wanted to retain the mystery of the Latin Liturgy and a sense of the holy as mysterious and incomprehensible. The association of the English liturgy with “a Christmas game” suggests something frivolous and not serious, something not really real. How to think the mystery of Christmas, it appears, is not a new challenge; it is the challenge for every age.

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Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent

“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”

We have come full circle from The Sunday Next Before Advent to The Fourth Sunday in Advent and indeed, largely by way of John’s Gospel. With the repeated acclamation by John the Baptist about Jesus as “the Lamb of God,” the Advent themes of expectation and longing for the redemption of our humanity reach a crescendo of intensity and excitement.

Today’s Gospel is known as “the record or the witness of John” and it presents a parade of questions and counter-claims about John the Baptist and the Christ. The repeated question about “Who art thou?” being asked of John is turned to the one who comes even on “the next day.” This year the very next day is Christmas Day.

It is a rich collection of images and ideas that this Sunday presents for us to ponder. “There was evening and there was morning, one day” we read in the Genesis story of creation. So now, too, it seems. Sunday for Christians is the Sabbath day because of the Resurrection of Christ, a day to ponder the mysteries of God in creation and redemption. Today is the last Sunday of Advent heralding the wonder of Christ’s nativity and yet today is also Christmas Eve. The next day is Christmas itself. All of the themes of the Advent are concentrated in the intensity of the questions belonging to the witness of John and are concluded in his statement, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” The intensity of the questions in the Gospel are complemented by the note of expectation and joy in the Epistle reading with its strong exhortation to rejoice, for “the Lord is at hand.”

“The Lord is at hand” means that God is with us, our Emmanuel, in the one who comes after John, the one who is worthy, it seems, of our attention and acknowledgement. We contemplate the mystery of God in Christ Jesus in whom alone we find peace. “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Christmas is not a game, a human invention, a figment of our imagination. No. It is about the wonder of God’s engagement with our humanity opening us out to peace and joy and love and hope. It passes human knowing because it is fundamentally about the motions of God coming to us in the humanity of Jesus. It does not negate the activity of our reasoning but gathers it into something more than all of the machinations and manipulations of an instrumental reason which seeks only to dominate and destroy.

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Sermon for the Feast of St. Thomas

“My Lord and my God”

The cycle of the Saints’ Day celebrations illumine the seasons of the Church year. Andrew heralds the Advent and inaugurates the tradition of Christian discipleship of bringing others to Christ, in his case, initially Simon Peter. Other figures, too, such as John the Baptist and Mary, belong to the theological landscape of Advent, the one preparing the way by repentance, the other as the chosen vessel of Christ’s Incarnation. What, then, about Thomas, the Saint of the Advent, too, it seems? His feast day falls so close to the winter solstice, the darkest day and longest night, and so close to Christ’s nativity. Two things, perhaps. His feast marks the intensity of the inwardness of the Advent of Christ and grounds Advent and Christmas in the mysteries of the crucifixion and the resurrection without which they have no meaning.

The Epistle reading from Ephesians not only recalls the apostolic foundation of the Church but also our Christian vocation through that foundation to be “an habitation of God through the Spirit,” even as Christ is the Divine Word who dwelt among us, Mary being the “habitaculum dei,” the little habitation of God for us, as the Fathers put it. But it is the Gospel that especially arrests our attention. It is the story of so-called “doubting Thomas,” the Thomas who was not with the other disciples on the evening of the Resurrection when Christ appeared to them “behind closed doors,” the Thomas who hearing about Christ’s appearing said he would not believe “except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side.” Not just seeing as believing, it seems, but touching is required as well.

The story already anticipates and belongs to the refutation of what will be the earliest heresy known as docetism. The distinction between spirit and matter, between God and the world, between God and man is held absolutely and in a dualist manner. Spirit is good, and matter is evil and in its various gnostic forms, salvation is about the liberation of spirit from matter in which it is trapped. There is, in other words, no redemption of the natural world, no redemption of our humanity, only a “beam me up, Scotty” kind of Star Trek view of salvation which denies the integrity of the material world empirically speaking. From such a view, the Incarnation of God is impossible and an affront to the Divine nature. Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection can only be a kind of play, a mere seeming; in short, a sham. And, by extension, the virgin birth must be false. Contrary to the wonderful words of the Te Deum, God would have abhorred the Virgin’s womb!

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Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent

“What went ye out into the wilderness to see?

Jesus’ question to the multitude in the wilderness concerning John the Baptist is equally his question to us in the wilderness of our contemporary world. It is complemented, I think, by Mary’s questions at the Annunciation about “what manner of salutation this should be” and “how shall this be seeing as I know not a man?” Advent is the season of questions which open us out to the truth of God coming to us as Word, as Judge, and as Light. On this Sunday, there is a change of emphasis, a kind of lightening of the darkness even as we enter into the darkest week and day of nature’s year with the near approach of the winter solstice.

This Sunday is sometimes called Gaudete Sunday, the term derives from an introit anthem taken from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians which we also hear in the Epistle reading for next Sunday. The emphasis is altogether on rejoicing. Gaudete means Rejoice!

The third candle on our Advent wreath is rose or pink coloured suggesting a lightening of the purple or violet colour which symbolizes the penitential aspect of Advent. In some places, too, the vestments are rose-coloured for this Sunday. Gaudete Sunday in Advent has its parallel with Laetare Sunday in Lent which is another word for rejoice. But the rose or pink colour also signals the special role of Mary in the divine work of human redemption, something which is captured in many of the carols and hymns of the season such as the lovely 15th century German Marian carol, Es ist ein Ros entstprungen, ‘Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming,’ especially as set to Michael Praetorius’s 1609 harmonization of a sixteenth century melody.

It is hauntingly beautiful, at once reflective and joyful. The image of a rose in bloom “mitten im kalten Winter, wohl zu der halben Nacht’, ‘amid the cold of winter when half spent was the night,’ is especially lovely and moving. The second verse underlies the theological theme which complements our readings today; at once the fulfillment of prophecy and the role and place of Mary in the redemption of our humanity. “Isaiah ‘twas foretold it, / the Rose I have in mind; / With Mary we behold it, the virgin mother kind. / To show God’s love aright, / She bore to men a Saviour, / When half spent was the night.”

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Advent Meditation 2: Book of Common Prayer Prefaces

This is the second of two Advent Meditations on the Book of Common Prayer Prefaces. The first meditation is posted here.

“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away”

The prefaces to the Book(s) of Common Prayer are intriguing and instructive. They have a certain quality of restraint about them that is remarkable given the turmoil and controversies about theology and polity in the 16th and 17th centuries. They advance modestly and firmly a spiritual ideal and purpose. The Original Preface of 1549 Concerning the Service of the Church, altered slightly in 1552 and again in 1662, identifies what was a common concern for both Roman Catholics and Reformers; namely, a sense of the primacy of Scripture and the desire to provide a clear and easy method of reading through the whole Bible “or the greatest part thereof” in the course of a year. Cranmer quotes the Spanish Cardinal Francis Quignonez almost verbatim in describing the problem and in advocating the solution.

The only difference between them was about whether that method would be in principle for all people or just the clergy and about translation from Latin to the vernacular. Even on that point there was some common ground. While the Roman Catholic liturgy would remain in Latin, there would be translations of the Scriptures authorized by the Roman Catholic Church and preaching would be largely in the vernacular tongues of the emerging national states.

What the Prayer Book Original Preface by Cranmer discloses, however, is a central and essential principle that underlies the idea of Common Prayer. It has to do with an attitude and outlook towards the reading of the Scriptures as ‘a doctrinal instrument of salvation’ wonderfully expressed in Cranmer’s homily on A Fruitful Exhortation Unto the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture as well as in the beautiful Collect for The Second Sunday in Advent. “He that keepeth the word of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling-place, or temple, of the blessed Trinity.” That means attending to the Scriptures. “The Scripture of God,” he says, “is the heavenly meat of our souls; the hearing and keeping of it maketh us blessed, sanctifieth us, and maketh us holy. It turneth our souls; it is a light lantern unto our feet. It is a sure, steadfast, and everlasting instrument of salvation.” Scripture is a doctrinal instrument of salvation because it is written for our learning. It turns our souls to God “that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.”

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Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent

“And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up,
and lift up your heads”

Well, Apocalypse Now to be sure, with “signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear”. Sounds like the evening news. But perhaps you took some comfort even from the Dies Irae last week in the contrast between the forms of the secular apocalypse and the features of the sacred apocalypse; the one seemingly hopeless and in despair, the other precisely about hope and joy. Not however by putting any trust in ourselves but by looking unto God and his Word.

Advent is inescapably apocalyptic. It is about our watching and waiting upon the motions of God’s Word coming to us, the Word which awakens us to the truth of God which is the true and only measure of our lives. On The Second Sunday in Advent we are awakened to the presence and the truth of God coming to us in the pageant of Holy Scripture. In the face of the impending doom and gloom of our world and day, we are awakened to hope and joy. “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” Paul tells us, referencing the Hebrew Scriptures, though, ironically, what he says will extend to the writings of the Christian Scriptures including his own letters. But learning what? He tells us the purpose of the “things [which] were written,” the purpose of the Scriptures: “that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” That word “hope” is mentioned four times in today’s epistle. That hope is about our life in Christ now and always. The point is wonderfully captured in Cranmer’s celebrated Collect which expresses an Anglican sensibility about the Scriptures as God’s Word which we are to “hear…, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest; ” in short, fully immerse ourselves in them. Why? Because they gather us into the life of God.

In his homily on A Fruitful Exhortation Unto the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture, Cranmer notes that “he that keepeth the word of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling-place, or temple, of the blessed Trinity.” That means attending to the Scriptures. “The Scripture of God,” he says, “is the heavenly meat of our souls; the hearing and keeping of it maketh us blessed, sanctifieth us, and maketh us holy. It turneth our souls; it is a light lantern unto our feet. It is a sure, steadfast, and everlasting instrument of salvation.” Scripture is a doctrinal instrument of salvation because it is written for our learning. It turns our souls to God.

This is a high doctrine of Scripture that emphasizes a learning that is about wisdom and truth in contrast to an instrumental reason which all too often manipulates and destroys by reducing ourselves and one another to machines, objects, and things at the expense of the thinking that makes us truly human. Advent offers a corrective and a critique of human reason at once confronting us with the continuing sagas of folly and wickedness in a world where power trumps truth and opening us out to the redemption of our humanity by recalling us to God through his Word and Son.

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Advent Meditation 1: Book of Common Prayer Prefaces

This is the first of two Advent Meditations on the Book of Common Prayer Prefaces. The second meditation will be delivered on Wednesday, 13 December.

“Blessed are those servants,
whom their lord when he cometh shall find watching”

Advent is the season of our watching and waiting upon the motions of God’s Word coming towards us. That emphasis upon the Word of God is a distinctive feature of the Christian Faith and a defining feature of the Common Prayer tradition. Tucked away in the back pages of our Canadian Book of Common Prayer (1962), on pages 715-721 are three important historical documents about which it may be of benefit to ponder and consider. They are, first, The Original Preface (1549) altered in 1552 and 1662: Concerning the Service of the Church; second, Of Ceremonies: Why Some Be Abolished and Some Retained (1549), and; and third, The Preface of 1662. They provide, in short, a kind of apology in the sense of an explanation about the whole enterprise of Common Prayer.

Unlike the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles which some of you may have thumbed over during a particularly boring or trying sermon, these documents are probably completely unknown, if for no other reason than the extremely small print in which they are written. But they speak to the form of God’s Word coming to us and to our watching and waiting upon that Word through the pattern of doctrine in devotion that comprises the Book(s) of Common Prayer. They assist us in understanding something of the nature of an Anglican witness to the Christian Faith.

The Original Preface (1549) Concerning The Service of the Church, slightly altered in 1552 and again in 1662, and Of Ceremonies: Why Some be Abolished and Some Retained (1549) were written by Thomas Cranmer and help to locate some of the motivating factors that contributed to the creation of the Book(s) of Common Prayer. The third document along with the slight alterations made in 1662 to the Original Preface: Concerning the Service of the Church were written by Robert Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln. The reason for two prefaces has to do with the English Civil War and its disruptions in the seventeenth century including the abolition of bishops and the Book of Common Prayer for fifteen years between 1645 and 1660. The restoration of the Stuart monarchy after the Cromwellian Inter-regnum brought with it the return of bishops and the Prayer Book but in new circumstances requiring some modest but significant revisions. The changes were in many ways quite few; the most notable being the adoption of the King James version of the Bible for the Epistles and Gospels appointed in the Eucharistic lectionary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, itself the great mother book of the Common Prayer tradition for the next three and half centuries. Once again, it suggests an emphasis on the Word of God and the way it is read. There was also the provision for The Ministration of Holy Baptism to such as are of Riper Years, to use the rather quaint sounding expression, And Able to Answer for Themselves, since infant baptism had been largely proscribed during the Inter-regnum period. A reasonable and understandable provision.

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Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent

“The night is far spent, the day is at hand”

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, Proverbs (1.7) reminds us. It is a recurring feature of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding. At first glance, it may seem a troubling phrase and yet it complements Aristotle’s idea that philosophy begins with wonder. The fear of the Lord is really our awe and wonder at the majesty and truth of God, the God, to be sure, who as Truth calls us to account. Others in our contemporary world, such as Simon Critchley, have argued that philosophy begins with disappointment but, perhaps, such a view can be redeemed and turned to wonder if we realize that our disappointments have entirely to do with our own nihilisms and the ways in which we close ourselves off from God and from one another. Advent, in that sense, should be a welcome wake-up call for our souls, for our churches, and even for our world.

We live in apocalyptic times, times of fears and anxieties about impending doom. There is the fear of nuclear holocaust as the result of decades of arrogant indifference to the ambitions of North Korea. There is the fear of catastrophic changes to the climate and the environment resulting in the deaths of millions through famine and flood. There are the on-going spectacles of genocide and war and the recurring acts of terrorism throughout our world and day. The doomsday preachers are the secularists; even the optimists among them can only naively advocate the notion that technology, especially AI, artificial intelligence, might save us even as, at the same time, they deny any reality to our humanity and to human personality. In Yuval Noah Harari’s view we are only organic algorithms. There is no you. That, too, is a feature of the secular apocalyptic in its essential nihilism. There is really only despair; a kind of emptiness. The night is more than far spent. It’s gone and we’re done for.

In complete contrast to these secular forms of Apocalypticism, the sense of the catastrophic ending of all life, human and natural, there is the long, long tradition of reflection on the last things, known as eschatology, in our religious traditions. Advent is apocalyptic.

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An Advent Meditation

“Turn us, O God our Saviour”

The Psalms of David are the Prayer Book and Hymnal for Jews and Christians alike. They embrace a wide range of poetic forms of expression and provide a way of praying the Scriptures.

Among the many treatises of Augustine, one of the most charming and most instructive devotionally is his Enarrations or Expositions on The Book of Psalms. For the English reader, it was only translated in the 19th century as part of the project of recovering the Patristic heritage of the Church, an interest both in England and on the continent. As E.B. Pusey, one of the outstanding figures of the Oxford Movement, remarks in an 1857 advertisement of the translation of Augustine’s Enarrations:

St. Augustin was so impressed with the sense of the depth of Holy Scripture, that when it seems to him, on the surface, plainest, then he is the more assured of its hidden depth. True to this belief, St. Augustin pressed out word by word of Holy Scripture, and that, always in dependence on the inward teaching of God the Holy Ghost who wrote it, until he had extracted some fullness of meaning from it. More also, perhaps, than any other work of St. Augustin, this commentary abounds in those condensed statements of doctrinal and practical truth which are so instructive, because at once so comprehensive and so accurate.

This doctrinal and practical sensibility about the Psalms means that they are read in the light of a theology of Revelation. They are not read as a mine of historical information and they are not read ‘critically’ as that term has become to be used by the schools of biblical and historical criticism, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are read with a certain insight into the nature of Scriptural Revelation. In Augustine’s case, they are read from a Christian perspective as bearing testimony to Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law. This point is made explicitly in the beginning of his commentary on Psalm 85.

Its title is, “A Psalm for the end, to the sons of Core.” Let us understand no other end than that of which the Apostle speaks: for “Christ is the end of the law.” Therefore when at the head of the title of the Psalm he placed the words, “for the end,” he directed our heart to Christ. If we fix our gaze on Him, we shall not stray: for He is Himself the Truth unto which we are eager to arrive, and He Himself the Way by which we run …

What this means is a necessary emphasis on a multi-layered approach to the reading of the Psalms: allegorical, moral, and mystical. It means a way of reading the Psalms that identifies different voices: the voice of Christ, the voice of the human soul, the voice of the Church. As Augustine remarks on Psalm 139: “Our Lord Jesus Christ speaketh in the Prophets, sometimes in His own Name, sometimes in ours, because He maketh himself one with us.” The Psalms are seen, in other words, through the lens of the doctrine of the Incarnation and with constant reference to the doctrine of the Trinity implicated in the Incarnation, as well as to various aspects of the doctrine of Redemption, particularly, the passion and resurrection of Christ. The use of the Psalms in the early Church belongs, in short, to the development of Christian doctrine.

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Sermon for the Feast of St. Andrew

“We have found the Messiah (which is being interpreted, the Christ).”

Andrew is the saint of the transition from our endings to our beginnings. He is the herald of the Advent season; his feast day falls either just before or just within the Advent season. Thus it is no surprise to find him mentioned in the Gospel for The Sunday Next Before Advent. Neither it is surprising that the Epistle for his feast day reflects on the major theme of God’s Word coming to us. His commemoration has very much to do with the important Advent idea of God’s engagement with our humanity through the Word of God. “What saith the Scripture?” is a large part of that idea.

Andrew is one of the two who heard John speak about Jesus as “the Lamb of God” and, as a consequence, followed Jesus. Andrew belongs to the first dialogue in The Gospel of John between Jesus and our humanity. Andrew is one of the first to turn to Jesus and one of the two to whom Jesus turns and asks, “What do you seek?” This leads to the back and forth of conversation that concludes with Jesus’ invitation to “come and see.” That becomes the immediate context of Andrew finding his own brother, Simon Peter, and bringing him to Christ as we heard on Sunday and as alluded to again in the Gospel tonight about becoming the disciples of Christ.

So we have with Andrew the two motions of our life with Christ and in Christ. There is our turning to him because of his turning to us; and there is our following him who bids us learn from him by our being with him. Such is the true nature of our following Christ and the true nature of our fellowship with one another in Christ. Andrew brings his brother, Simon Peter, to Christ. “We have found the Messiah (which is being interpreted, the Christ).” It is a loaded term theologically and doctrinally. It expresses with a certain intensity the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity in Jesus Christ.

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