Category: Sermons

“Gather up the fragments”

T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland, written in 1922, captures an important feature of our modern world. The poem explores through a series of evocative images a world which has been largely destroyed through the madness of war, particularly the First World War, the catastrophic effects of which we are still beginning to try to comprehend and which has largely defined the whole of the twentieth century and carries over into our present anxieties. Near the end of the poem, he captures that world past and present in an arresting image: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The idea is that all that is left of the whole of a culture and a civilization are fragments, bits and pieces to which we cling in the memory of something which once was but is no longer. All is in fragments. All is in ruins.

We, too, are fragmented, unsure and uncertain about ourselves as selves having been willingly or unwillingly reduced to the bits and bytes of the digital economy, little more than clickbait for the benefit of our corporate masters. But over and against Eliot’s image of clinging to “fragments shored up against our ruins,” Jesus offers another image, the image of redemption, of the gathering up of “the fragments that remain that nothing be lost.” A gathering up that has to do with the sense of wholeness and completeness; in short, salvation.

This Sunday is about endings and beginnings in and through which we might begin to find our true end, not in the ruins but in God. How to begin and how to end and how to begin again? These are some of the questions which this Sunday presents to us, The Sunday Next Before Advent. Its very designation hints at the question. We come to the end of the church year and so to the beginning of the next. We stand on the brink of the Advent Season but at the same time at the end of the Trinity Season.

The point is that these times of transition speak profoundly to our lives in pilgrimage. In a way we are constantly turning back and turning towards what truly defines us, constantly circling around our spiritual identity in Christ in whose person God turns towards us.

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“Our citizenship is in heaven”

The leaves lie scattered on the wind, the trees barren, and the fields desolate and empty. Grey November has descended upon us, dark and drear, it seems. And yet, in that time of year “when yellow leaves or none or few do hang/upon those boughs which shake against the cold”, we are recalled to something more than ourselves, our culture, and even our churches, which may seem to be but “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” We are recalled in the November greyness of nature’s death to our life in the spirit, at once in the great and defining spiritual festivals of All Saints’ and All Souls’ and in their secular after-effects in things like the Remembrance Day weekend, but equally and most importantly in the Scripture readings which grace this time of year and which speak profoundly and reflectively to our spiritual identity.

“How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?” Peter asks Jesus as we heard last Sunday and, then, in response, Jesus says “until seventy times seven” before proceeding with a parable which illustrates the immeasurable and incalculable nature of God’s merciful forgiveness and the willful folly of our humanity which negates his infinite forgiveness by refusing to forgive others. And, now, as if in a kind of complement, this Sunday we are reminded of “our citizenship in heaven” in contrast to our worldly and economic concerns. In each case, the whole matter turns on our sense of spiritual identity. Who are we in the sight of God?

Our buildings, too, stand as eloquent testaments to our spiritual identity. The year 2017 marks the 135th anniversary of the building of Christ Church within the longer history of the Parish going back to the 18th century. The year 2017 also marks the 140th anniversary of the building of Hensley Memorial Chapel at King’s-Edgehill School, now in its 229th year. These are strong markers of our heavenly citizenship and ones which stand as stern and stark reminders to what is so easily forgotten and overlooked if not altogether denied and scorned.

Perhaps no Gospel story speaks more directly to our contemporary confusions and uncertainties about identity than this one about the tribute-money. The key question is the one which Jesus raises in the context of animosity about identity. The Pharisees seek to “entangle him in his talk”, to trap him in his speech with a question about paying taxes to Caesar. The context is about Israel under Roman domination but it extends to each and every form of domination. To what extent are we defined not only by the powers that be but by the ideologies of our world and day which compromise, confine, and constrain us to the agendas of profit and tyranny however much we are their willing or unwilling slaves? At issue is really nothing less than what it means to be human. There is already the increasing recognition that “we are slaves to the algorithm,” the invisible ghosts in the machines that dominate the social media world. As Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world-wide web, warns, “the system is failing. The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not fulfilling the goal of helping humanity promote truth and democracy”. Others have called it “the weaponisation of social media,” again highlighting the idea of domination.

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“So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you,
if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses”

Powerful words about the power of forgiveness. It is, I fear, often in short supply in our contemporary culture where the power over words trumps the truth of words and where forgiveness is largely a forgotten concept. Yet it remains one of the most distinctive features of the Christian religion. “Forgive and ye shall be forgiven.” “Forgive even as ye have been forgiven.” Can there be any more powerful words than these in our broken and disordered world?

The great good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as Paul intuited and knew, is that it is the truest liberation from the prison of ourselves. It is entirely about how we are “partakers of God’s grace,” not by any merit on our own but by virtue of the supreme goodness of God himself. In a paradoxical way, that is the message of the Gospel for this Sunday in the late days of the Trinity season. Forgiveness is shown; then forgiveness is rejected. How great is the forgiveness shown; how much greater is the forgiveness denied, but, paradoxically, that illustrates the absolute necessity of divine forgiveness, its infinite power and truth and its movement in us. Forget that or worse, deny it and Hell is the only conclusion, for whatever one might mean by that, it can only mean something negative in and of itself.

The consequences are huge. It is the fullest possible illustration of the denial of God’s goodness. But the Gospel is told to awaken us to the fullest possible understanding of the loving-kindness of God towards us. Such is the point of the parable of the unforgiving servant; the one who is forgiven does not himself forgive others and so negates what he himself receives. The fault lies in contradicting by your actions what God’s actions have bestowed upon you. And yet, God’s forgiveness is inexhaustible; hence, the deliberate exaggeration of seventy-times seven. You have to want it, however, and not deny it. In denying its power and truth, you deny yourself and others.

It is a sad testament to our confused and confusing time that this is an all too frequent occurrence and one which belongs to the narcissism and nihilism rampant in our world and day. Those factors rule out the very possibilities of forgiveness because they deny the truth of the self in relation to others. This is all part of the problem of the radical instability of the self. It thinks it is something when it is nothing and turns the other into an enemy, unable to see oneself in the other.

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“The man believed the word which Jesus had spoken”

“Faith cometh by hearing”, St. Paul remarks, setting up an interesting contrast between the two most intellectual of the senses, hearing and seeing. It is interesting to see how that contrast plays out in the Scriptures and, then, in the various forms of cultural expression. The ancient Greek world, as Alberto Manguel observes, largely expresses itself in monuments, statues and buildings, think of the Parthenon, the Venus de Milo, and Greek amphitheaters. Jewish or Hebrew culture, on the other hand, expresses itself more through words spoken and then written down, the Scriptures. Later one might contrast Catholic and Protestant Europe and its successors in terms of the prominence given to the visual – things seen – in Roman Catholic Churches as distinct from the emphasis given to things audible – words and music – in Protestant churches. These are, I hasten to add, primarily differences of emphasis and not categories of exclusion one way or the other. At issue are the respective forms of balance between the Word visible and the Word audible such as in our own liturgy in terms of Word and Sacrament.

Such things speak to the forms of our understanding about matters spiritual. In today’s gospel a certain priority is given to hearing in the story of the healing of the nobleman’s son. The nobleman having heard, believed, and having heard again, believed yet again and all without seeing. This happens in the context of Jesus’ general remark and critical observation that challenges the empirical aspects of our own culture. What is heard and believed actually stands in complete contrast to what apparently is wanted to be seen. As Jesus notes, “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.” It is a critical comment that hints at a problem, namely the idea of demanding that things be literally visible and sensible as distinct from intelligible. God, of course, by definition cannot be seen and his grace made manifest in human lives is not really something that can be empirically grasped and measured, put into a test-tube or particle accelerator or somehow quantitatively known. The deeper question is more about how God’s grace lives and moves in us, how God’s word has its resonance in us, literally, how it is echoed in us. The catechism, for instance, means an instruction but the actual word is about what is being echoed in us.

We meet in the Octave of All Saints, that marvellous festival of spiritual life that reminds us of our homeland of the spirit, the homeland of heaven in the Communion of Saints, reminding us, too, of the common reality of human mortality in the Solemnity of All Souls. The thread of Christ’s glory runs through the grave of our deaths. Such reflections speak profoundly to the worries and anxieties of our world and day, of our church and culture.

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“What are these who are arrayed in white robes?”

It is “that time of year,” in Shakespeare’s wonderful Sonnet # 73, “when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” And yet we find ourselves in a great company, the company of the saints, a company which embraces as well the solemnity of All Souls, the remembrance of our common mortality, the picture of death without which All Saints becomes simply an escape and a fantasy rather than a reality.

November is the barren month, to be sure, with the leaves all scattered on the wind and the fields all stripped of the harvest fruits, and where nature slowly settles into its winter’s sleep. In contrast to those natural themes we are recalled to our spiritual vocation and home. The vocation of our humanity is the call to holiness. “What are these?” the great lesson from All Saints’ Day asks about a multitude greater than any man can number. The same question is before us on All Souls’ Day. We try in our own poor way to remember those who have gone before us and whom we have known only to discover the frailties of our memories. Thus All Souls’ equally reminds us of the very thing which All Saints’ celebrates: the truth of our humanity as found in God which does not negate nor deny death.

“These are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb.” It is all about how we are defined not by the circumstances and trials and tribulations in our lives but by grace, the grace of the lamb. That is the great point of both the lesson from Wisdom tonight and the great Gospel of The Beatitudes. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” It doesn’t mean that there won’t be loss and grief, suffering and death. Even more “blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” There is no hiding the grim and barren realities of our world and day which witnesses more and more to the radical instability of the self, to a kind of destructive nihilism, either of one self or others. All Saints and All Souls recall us to our spiritual identity in and through the realities of our everyday lives, including death. We are being given a way to think positively and in a healthy way about death and suffering, even about sin and evil.

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“All things are ready”

Are we ready? “All things are ready,” we are told. Ready for what? What does it mean to be ready for the banquet, for the wedding feast? And what is the wedding garment which seems to be so necessary such that without it we are cast out just when we think we are safely in; indeed “cast into outer darkness” where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”. Not exactly a pleasing prospect.

The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them. “The days are evil,” St. Paul reminds us, and yet he bids us “be ye not unwise”. The quality of the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. The times in which we live are rather the setting in which virtue is shown and character is proved. The question for Christians “at all times and in all places” is whether we will be defined by circumstances or by grace. By grace, we mean the highest perfection of human virtue which is God’s work in us and for us, come what may in the world around us including the sad parade of our own sins and follies.

One thinks, for instance, of St. Augustine, dying in his Episcopal see of Hippo Regius in 430 AD, even as the armies of the Vandals were besieging the city, about to obliterate what had been the work of a life-time in the formation of Christian souls and the development of a Christian culture. It was the first of a series of invasions that would virtually obliterate any trace of North African Christianity. It was to survive principally in the writings of its theologians, chief of whom was Augustine, whose writings would contribute greatly to the shaping of Europe.

Or one thinks, perhaps, of a Dante, cast out of his beloved city of Florence and into the dark wood of exile. And yet, in spite of his exile, or, perhaps, because of it, he produced the greatest epic poem of Christian pilgrimage of all times, The Divine Comedy, “to lead those”, as he says, “in a state of misery to the state of felicity”.

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“Then opened he their understanding”

Luke, “dear and glorious physician”, as the novelist Taylor Caldwell styled him, has been the Church’s spiritual director for much of the Trinity season. Tonight we celebrate his witness and writings – The Third Gospel and The Book of the Acts of the Apostles. What we celebrate are the things which are particularly outstanding about Luke, identified by Dante as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. But what kind of gentleness?

A gentleness that is expressed in compassion and in intellect. Luke alone of the evangelists gives us some especially poignant examples of compassion, such as the story of the Good Samaritan, the great classic of care and compassion, and the story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain, a classic of compassion. In both “he saw and had compassion”, a favourite phrase with Luke. But as our Gospel for his commemoration reminds us, Luke presents Christ most powerfully as the one who opens our understanding that we might understand the Scriptures. The emphasis is on the understanding, particularly as he says, about repentance and the forgiveness of sins. It is not by accident that the winged ox is the symbol for St. Luke’s Gospel.

Luke tells the story, too, about Mary and Martha in which Martha, distressed and distracted by much busyness in playing hostess to Jesus, complains about Mary “sitting at Jesus’s feet and listening to his word.” Jesus’ response is at once most direct and most gentle. “Martha, Martha,” he says, “thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things”, naming precisely one of the diseases of our disordered times, yet, he says “one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.” It is a gentle rebuke and a strong reminder to us about the dangers of getting too caught up in all our busyness with all of the stresses and sense of preoccupation and self-importance that comes with it. One thing is needful. What is that? To seek to learn and to understand by listening to his word.

This is not to deny the activities of Martha but to call attention to the contemplative activity of Mary as being the one thing needful in every age. We so easily get caught up in our own busyness and forget the purpose and truth of our being which is found in God. It is a gentle reminder about the opening out of our understanding of the Scriptures without which we cannot really act properly and charitably in the world around us. Contemplation is about that one thing needful without which we lose our humanity in the mindless busyness of our contemporary world. ‘Don’t just do something, sit there’; this is the gentle wisdom of Luke signalled in his Gospel and in Acts and in the witness of his life. Only so will we find healing for our anxious souls.

“Then opened he their understanding”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Luke, 2017

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“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”

Pumpkins, pucks, and parades seem to define Windsor, particularly on this post-thanksgiving weekend! How they relate to the matter of love is another question. For here today love constrains us to speak of love. It might not seem all that remarkable a thing to say but I wonder if we do not altogether fail to see how special, how precious, how extraordinary Christ’s lesson is for us here in this gospel. It goes to the heart of the matter, to the heart that was willing to be pierced and broken for you and for me, indeed, for the whole world. That heart is the heart of Christ. That love is spoken and shown in the face of controversy and debate; in short, in the midst of the hostilities and animosities of our human hearts and so, too, in the midst of all of our current confusions and uncertainties within and without the Church. “And yet the common people heard him gladly.” Can that be said of us?

Two things are extraordinary here. First, God commands us to love him. Secondly, Christ unites the love of God and the love of neighbour in himself. At first glance, such things may not seem so amazing, partly because they are so familiar. After all, they are words which we frequently hear: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength;” in short, with the whole of our being. “Hear O Israel,” says the One who is the Word of God himself.

To hear that Word is to be Israel, a people who are open to the Word of God, who are defined by that Word. That self-same Word now proclaims that “the Lord our God is one Lord.” That unity is no mere oneness, no empty aloneness. It is the fullness and the completeness of the divine life in itself. As Aquinas remarks, “the perfection of Christian life consists in charity.” That charity begins and ends with God whose grace defines us against “the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil” as the Collect puts it, reminding us of our baptismal identity in Christ, a far, far different thing that pumpkins, pucks, and parades!

God commands us to love him. This is the first extraordinary thing. What does this mean? Does God stand in need of our love?

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“So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth”

It is not often that the epistle reading at Holy Communion is a lesson from the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, what Christians know as the Old Testament, and in this case, a passage from The Book of the Prophet Isaiah. It is an especially wonderful passage that deals with the overarching theme of God’s providence at work in creation and redemption and that belongs to a theology of the land and our labours on the land. As such it connects with the celebration of Harvest Thanksgiving.

We are being reminded of the spiritual nature of thanksgiving precisely through the power of the divine word without which there can be no harvest and no thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a profoundly reflective and spiritual activity as well as the freest thing that we can do. The Greek word is one which is somewhat familiar to you: eucharist. The root of that word is charis – grace. Thus thanksgiving is the movement of grace in our souls. It can’t be forced and it can’t be denied. It extends beyond mere courtesy, important as courtesy is. The act of thanksgiving to God raises the character of our duties and obligations to one another to an entirely different and higher level: quite simply to the nature of our engagement with God and his Word and that Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. In turn, as the Gospel for Harvest Thanksgiving makes perfectly clear, it is that Divine Word Incarnate whose “word” is the bread of our lives, the very principle of our existence in, to and with God. It is all a kind of redire ad principia, a return to God as the principle of our very existence.

And while this activity of thanksgiving seems to be predicated and therefore dependent upon our experience of the good things of creation and human labour that we enjoy, it is actually something far more radical and far more challenging because it is about our life with God, summed up, perhaps, in that rich and provocative statement in the great Eucharistic prayer. It is about “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving”. And all because the Word which “goes forth” from God goes forth with purpose and becomes first, the Word made flesh and, then, the Word which is given to us as “the bread of life.”

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“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

Dante describes Luke as the scriba mansuetudinis Christi, “the scribe of the gentleness of Christ”. It is not by accident that St. Luke’s Gospel is sometimes called the Gospel of Compassion and rightly so. The phrase “he saw… and he had compassion…” appears in several places in the Gospels and particularly in Luke’s Gospel. Somehow how we see leads to how we act.

This is almost the reverse of our age which tends to think of thinking as what follows action rather than what precedes or is implicit in each and every thing that we do. Thinking is more than reaction to actions; it is more than afterthought which doesn’t mean that it is simply predictive – a feature of the scientific world or at least one of its desiderata.

We meet in the angelic air of the early Fall and just after Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael and All Angels. The Angels are very much part of the liturgical and spiritual landscape of our thinking and praying. We are very much a part of a spiritual community – the host of heaven comprising saints and angels. Redeemed humanity finds itself in the company of angels – such is our liturgy. Unseen and yet known, the Angels belong to our thinking the good and refusing the evil; they are the ideas of God in creation. Perhaps it is with angels’ sight that we can best think about the seeing that is compassion, even the compassion of Christ.

Luke consistently links seeing with compassion but with the awareness that our seeing others in need does not always result in acts of compassion. “A certain priest” and “Levite” “see” but “pass by,” after all. Ten men were cleansed but only one “when he saw that he was healed” turned back “giving thanks” to the one whose compassion upon our humanity results in healing. In the parable of the prodigal son, the Father “saw” his wayward son returning to him and “had compassion on him”. Just so, too, “a certain Samaritan” who “when he saw him” – meaning the man who is in need – “he had compassion on him.” There is something important about the seeing that results in compassion and restoration; in short, salvation. And just perhaps it has something to do with angels’ vision.

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