Category: Sermons

“You have received a spirit of sonship”

We are by grace to be what Christ is by nature – sons or children of God. That alone guides and directs our lives with God in Christ. Who and what we are inwardly is to be expressed outwardly in bringing forth good fruit not evil fruit, to use the imagery of the Gospel. What is that good fruit? Doing what belongs to who and what we are as the “children of God” who “have received a spirit of sonship, in which we cry aloud, Abba, Father.” Our life in Christ is very much about our being imago Trinitatis as well as imago Christi, our life as ordered like his to the Father in the eternal bond of the Spirit. We have received a spirit of sonship.

Providence, “who from end to end/ strongly and sweetly movest,” as the poet George Herbert remarks, is the overarching idea. It “never-failingly ordereth all things both in heaven and earth.” God’s “never-failing” providence is the charity [that] “never faileth.” Our vocation is to write out the providence of God in our lives. For “only to Man thou hast made known thy wayes./ And put the penne alone into his hand,/And made him [us] Secretaries of thy praise.” Who we are as knowing and loving beings, and especially through what we know and learn through revelation, is to be lived out in our lives in and through all of the ups and downs of human experience.

But alas, we are often mistaken about providence. It is not just how “everything’s going my way,” as the old song puts it, nor is it our endless illusions with progress, as if things are always and endlessly getting better in our techno-utopian exuberance. Neither fits with human experience. Our identity as “children and heirs of God, and fellow-heirs of Christ,” is predicated on the reality of suffering; we are “heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ: if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” Our sanctification in seeking to bring forth the fruit of holy lives is always grounded in our justification through Christ’s saving work on the Cross. His suffering for us gives meaning to our suffering with and for him.

The word ‘providence’ perhaps misleads us. It seems to imply the idea of foreseeing, or foreknowledge but that imparts a temporal dimension when in truth God doesn’t foresee or foreknow, he simply and eternally knows all things, as C.S. Lewis observed in his commentary on Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. “What is, what has been, and what is to come,/In one swift mental stab he sees,” Lady Philosophy sings.

This past week marked the great summer festival of Christ’s Transfiguration which is the vision of glory in anticipation of Christ’s Resurrection and the hope of our transformation. John notes that while “we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” As Paul says, we shall know even as we are known in Christ.

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“Blessed art thou, Simon son of John: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.”

The Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul commemorates the twin pillars of Christ’s Church. Their joint commemoration is itself a work of Providence. It draws together into one festival two prominent figures from the Scriptures of the New Testament, and a later tradition about their martyrdom and the subsequent translation of their remains to a common resting place in Rome. It suggests a spiritual connection between Scripture and Tradition; namely, how we think about what is received and given to us in Revelation.

The Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul places us with Christ in his body, the Church, but only insofar as it stands upon the Word of God revealed and written, hence the primacy of Scripture as the Revelation of the Word of God. Therein is the important connection. The preaching and teaching of Saul, renamed Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, is about the primacy of the Scriptures, “things written for our learning (ad nostram doctrinam)” about our life in Christ. This is the basis for the understanding of our life in the body of Christ, the Church, established by Jesus upon Simon, renamed Peter, the rock, upon which he will build his Church against which ”the gates of hell shall not prevail.” The Church is not primarily or simply a human or social construct.

This feast also marks the 40th anniversary of the ordination of Fr. John Park to the sacred priesthood, to his ministry within the sacred body of Christ. We are delighted and honoured to have him as our celebrant this morning. It speaks to all of us about our life in Christ. The ministry is nothing less than sacrifice and service, nothing less than the motions of Christ in him and for us. The ministry is not self-referential, not a celebration of individuals in their various skills and talents, but a reminder to all of us about our vocation to loving service in the body of Christ. “Let no man glory in men,” Paul tells us in the second set of readings provided for use in the Octave of this feast. Ordination is not about the person in the office but the office in the person. The office of Priest is the ministry of Word and Sacrament founded upon nothing less than the Word and Spirit of God. “Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and the stewards of the mysteries of God,” as Paul puts it.

And what is the Church? A building? A bishop? A congregation? A denomination? A parish? A diocese? A synod? A national church? No. Those at best are nothing more and nothing less than the outward expressions in one way or another and to some extent or another of “the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church,” as we profess in the Creed. What we celebrate today with Fr. Park especially is that reality: the Church’s unity in God as Trinity, the Church’s holiness by the guiding light of the Holy Spirit, the Church’s catholicity in the fulness of the Faith, and the Church’s apostolicity as grounded in the mystery of Pentecost. In short, we are reminded of what we are called to be for that is the role and purpose of the ordained ministry of the Church. Forty years ago, John Park was ordained and enrolled in that understanding that reaches far beyond the mechanics and systems of our human devices. Father, remember that “thou art a Priest for ever” in the high priesthood of Christ, Tu est sacerdos in aeternum.

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“He who loveth God love his brother also.”

“The rich man also died, and was buried: and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments,” Luke tells us. Wow. Where is the love in that? It seems that we have gone from Heaven to Hell in the blink of an eye, from the wonderful vision of Heaven in the celebration of God as Trinity to a vision of hell. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven.” A door, not a window, a door through which we enter into what we see and hear.

And what did we see and hear? A vision of heaven, a vision of worship through the images of Scripture. The four and twenty elders, symbolic of the witness of the Old Testament to God, and the four living creatures, symbolic of the witness of the four Gospels of the New Testament, united in the worship of the Trinity. But how do we come to such a vision of God as Trinity, as absolute self-giving love? Through Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son, “the Word made flesh [who] dwelt among us” who is in the bosom of the Father and makes God known to us as Trinity. A fullness of Revelation.

In John’s Epistle this morning we hear about God as love, indeed that “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.” We know this as the refrain of the Trinity season as the abiding love of God. Abiding and dwelling are synonyms. John’s Epistle is a treatise on love. It opens out to us something which is heavenly in contrast to hell. Why then the Gospel reading from Luke in the parable of Dives and Lazarus? How do we reconcile that story with the idea of becoming what we behold?

“There was a certain rich man,” Dives. That is not his name. Dives simply means the rich man. He is defined by his worldly wealth; not named, but only identified in terms of his economic status, one who is “clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day.” Who is Lazarus? “A certain beggar,” but he has a name, an identity beyond his circumstance and situation. He lies at the gate of the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” Yet he is completely ignored by the rich man; only “the dogs came and licked his sores.” It is a graphic picture. There is a compelling contrast between the unnamed rich man and the named beggar, between the compassion of the dogs and the utter indifference of Dives, the rich man. Another dog story, it seems, much like the Canaanite woman who reminds Jesus that “even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master’s table;” what Lazarus desires but more than what he gets. It is all in the contrasts.

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“The only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father; he has made him known”

The historian and philosopher John Lukacs in ‘At the End of An Age’ (2002), quotes Feuerbach’s statement that “the old world made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit,” noting that it is “as good a summation of the historical philosophy of materialism as any” (p. 130). It is a view (early 19th cent.) that predates both Darwin and Marx and remains the dominant assumption for “the overwhelming majority of scientists as well as computer designers” who see the world and its future in this materialistic way. But, as Lukacs says, “they are wrong” (p. 131). Materialist philosophies, ancient and modern, are but one chapter in the history of Science. The assumption that “the universe is written in the language of mathematics is entirely outdated” (p. 112). At the very least it makes the epistemological error of conflating what belongs to the mental and intellectual world of mathematics with the physical and empirical world of nature.

The over-mathematization of the natural sciences, especially Physics ends up “explaining matter away” leaving us with “a complex but essentially empty scaffolding of abstract mathematical entities” yet recognizing more and more “the intrusion of mind into matter” (p. 131). The counter to this false sense of Objectivity – the idea of reality as completely mind-independent, the world which most of us have assumed and grown up in, has been shattered from within the world of Physics and not just by those who in the post-modern philosophies of reaction default to its opposite, namely, reality as completely mind-dependent, an over-exaggeration of Subjectivism which simply asserts the opposite – all mind and no matter.

The point is that these approaches conflict and contradict each other in failing to recognize the “confluences of mind and matter, indeed, of mind preceding matter” (p. 131). It is the reciprocity between human thinking and the world that is there for thought that is the essential concern. Now all of this is but prelude to the matter, pun intended, of the Trinity, the essential mystery of the Christian faith, a mystery which we can only enter into but not control or possess; it is the mystery of God himself who by definition is incomprehensible in terms of finite human thinking and yet makes himself known to us through the images of nature and word, especially the words of Scripture and in our liturgy that are set before us today. This is captured in my text from John’s Gospel, “the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father; he has made him known.” It complements both the Gospel reading about being born again, or anew or upward with the lesson from Revelation about a door being opened in heaven.”

It is only through the images of Scripture and our thinking upon them that we can enter into an understanding of the mystery of God, our world and ourselves.

All our beginnings and all our endings have their place of meeting in the Trinity. It is the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost.” To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement.

Essential Christianity is Trinitarian. What do I mean? That the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to Christian identity, corporately and individually. You are baptized in the Name of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. At Holy Communion, we participate in nothing less than the Son’s Thanksgiving to the Father in the Spirit. Our liturgy is full of the Trinity.

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“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you.”

Pentecost is the alpha and omega of all the festivals of the Church year, the life-force, if you will, of their essential meaning. In every liturgy we are gathered and taken up in the Spirit. It would be hard to say which is greater,, the mystery of Christ’s incarnation, incarnatio Dei, the incarnation of God, or inspiratio hominis, the mystery of our inspiration, the inspiration of man. They are intimately bound together. Pentecost is not simply an add-on, one more item in a list of things, but brings out the essential unity of all that pertains to our life in the mystery of God. “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire … Teach us to know the Father, Son, and thee, of both, to be but One”. Who, not what is the Holy Spirit? Nothing less than the love-knot of the Father and the Son, binding God with God; the love-knot too that unites the two natures, the humanity and divinity of Jesus, God with man, and the love-knot that gathers and unites us to God and to one another, making us “partakers of the divine nature”.

For this day marks a royal exchange: “whereby, as before He of ours [our nature], so now we of His are made partakers. He clothed with our flesh, and we invested with His Spirit”. In Christ, God partakes our human nature so that we should be partakers of his divine nature. As Tertullian puts it, the coming of Christ was the fulfilling of the Law, the Old Testament, while the coming of the Holy Ghost is the fulfilling of the Gospel, the New Testament.

This is not abstract talk but the truth of the images of Scripture, especially on this day, the Feast of Pentecost, commonly called Whitsunday. The very names point to the paradoxes of spiritual life, of unity expressed through difference. Pentecost refers to the fiftieth day, looking back to the Jewish Passover (now the Christian Easter), on the one hand, and Whitsunday, meaning White Sunday, even though the liturgical colour is red, symbolic of the tongues of fire resting upon the Apostles of the New Testament, on the other hand. Why white? Because of baptism; our incorporation into the life of God through Word and Spirit, our being incorporated into Christ’s death and life. We are like those, as Revelation puts it, who have “washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” The paradoxes of revelation require our thinking through the images and grasping their unity in understanding. Pentecost signals the constant necessity of sticking close to the images and thus to their meaning as opposed to the modern tendency to fly from images into various forms of abstraction or the problem of reification, turning metaphors and images and behaviours into things, or objects but only through abstract categories of indeterminacy. This is a failure of thinking and a negation of the power of language and the importance of metaphor.

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“The end of all things is at hand”

It seems so dark and threatening, a complement perhaps to our current world of very real uncertainties and anxieties. This is the fearfulness of a culture that is no longer sure of itself and its future yet all the while clinging to the assumptions of the ideology of endless material and technological progress that belong to that uncertainty. There is at once all of the uber-hype of the techno-utopianism of AI, and all of the sense of foreboding and the fear of things falling apart, at the same time. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” as William Butler Yeats famously put it. That was in 1919.

Isn’t this really about ourselves? We have forgotten the centre and have willed ourselves to an endless emptiness. We can’t say what the Good is. This is an ethical dilemma. It is not exactly new. Plato saw the necessity of turning to philosophy and ethical thinking in the face of the self-destruction of the Greek city-states; such is his ‘Republic’ that examines justice as an ethical principle that belongs to the knowledge of the Good.. Augustine’s ‘City of God’ and Boethius’s ‘Consolation of Philosophy’ speak to the devastations of their world in the collapse of the Roman Empire, recalling us to the infinite goodness of God which alone transcends our divided loves and the divisions that result, culturally and individually. “Disdain to be discouraged” is Gregory the Great’s wonderful advice that, in some sense, derives from both. In short there is always the need to return to thought and prayer.

“Take with you words and return to the Lord,” Hosea the prophet tells us, pointing out the problem of putting our trust in the works of our own hands, the idols of our minds, and in defaulting to worldly matters of political expediency. Assyria, he tells us, will not save us. Nor is salvation to be found in the technologies of war in any given age. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things.” At issue, is our lack of attention to the spiritual and intellectual principles which shape our understanding and guide our actions. Our idolatry of the practical and of the technocratic – the techno-utopianism that assumes that technology will save us – is really a kind of anti-intellectualism at once anti-life and ethically bankrupt. What is it that is right to do turns on the greater question of what is it that is good to be. “To be is to be understood,” Gadamer says about Heidegger, but that requires an understanding of ourselves in relation to God. We are known and loved in his knowing and loving of all things.

The Sunday After Ascension Day speaks to these necessities in the face of our uncertainties. It offers us a way of thinking about our world and about ourselves, about how we are understood by God. It recalls the dynamic of God’s redemption of our humanity and our world. The Ascension is the return of all things to their end in God, the “lift[ing] up our hearts” is the lifting up of the world to God, and so connects with the credal doctrine of the Session of Christ, his “sitting at the right hand of the Father.” It speaks to us about the homeland of the spirit, our home with God, not just by-and-by, later on, but here and now in prayer and praise. In short, we find our place with God because God has placed us with him through his Son. “I go to prepare a place for you,” Jesus tells us, words that speak to the blessed conjunction of his divinity with our humanity. We are partakers of his divinity only through his partaking of our humanity.

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“I am ascending unto my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

Christ’s Resurrection words to Mary Magdalene reveal the necessary connection between Resurrection and Ascension. No Resurrection without the Ascension, paradoxically! Christ’s homecoming is ours too. We have a place or end with God.

The Ascension of Christ marks the culmination of the Resurrection; its fullness and completion, we might say. In the Ascension we see the homecoming of the Son to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption in Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, all “because I go to the Father,” as he has said. That is the meaning of his Ascension as marking the end of his going forth and return that signals the gathering of all things to God. As Aquinas says, “God is the beginning and end of all created beings, but especially rational beings.” Thus Christ’s Ascension is “the exaltation of our humanity” to its end or place with God in the dynamic of the spiritual life of the Trinity. His homecoming is equally ours.

We catch something of the drama and the intensity of the Ascension in the readings from Acts and Mark. “He was taken up and a cloud received him out of their sight,” Luke tells us in Acts. The cloud refers to the symbolic form of the divine presence or glory of God, the shekinah of the Exodus and elsewhere that serves as prologue to Christ’s Incarnation. “He was received up into heaven,” Mark tells us in what belongs to the so-called longer ending of his Gospel.

The doctrinal significance of the Ascension is that Christ returns to the Father in the flesh of our humanity, that “where he is there we may be also”; in short, it signals the idea of our abiding with God. Yet at the same time, the Ascension signals the meaning of prayer. Prayer is the ascension of our hearts and minds to God, and thus to our abiding in his will and purpose. Prayer is sursum corda, the lifting up of our hearts, as we say in the liturgy. Prayer is ascension.

In that sense, the Ascension is both direction and action. Yet it is also cosmic in scope, since the return of the Son to the Father is the gathering of all creation to God. Our prayers participate in that sensibility and activity; the lifting up of all things to God. As Christ has “ascended into the heavens,” as the Collect puts it, “so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell.”

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“For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me.”

The comings and goings of God in the Scriptures reach their climax in the Ascension of Christ this Thursday, the fortieth day after Easter which marks the culmination of the Resurrection and Eastertide. Today, Easter 5 is also known as Rogation Sunday. It concentrates for us the meaning of these images of comings and goings. Theology consorts with images, especially the images of the Scriptures through which we are gathered into an understanding of our life as grounded in the dynamic of God’s life.

Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation that precede Ascension Day signal the larger dimensions of the Resurrection. It is at once cosmic and psychological: cosmic because it emphasizes the gathering of the whole of creation to God, and psychological because that gathering has very much to do with ourselves and our blessedness, coming to self-knowledge and awareness as both ‘hearers and doers of the word’ through which we glimpse a true image of ourselves, as the Epistle from James puts it. Otherwise we are deceivers of ourselves; beholding ourselves in a glass but then forgetting who we are. The whole purpose of the Resurrection is to make known who we are in the sight of God.

Christ’s Resurrection is not a flight from the world and our embodied being but their redemption. It makes visible what is hidden and present in the Passion just as the Nativity of Christ makes visible what is hidden yet present in the Annunciation. In each case there is the idea of our humanity as a microcosm of the world; we are a little world in which there is a recapitulation or gathering together of the elements of the world in us. This reminds us that we are intimately connected to everything in the created order. Thus Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation emphasize our connection to nature, to the world, and to our place in the world, particularly our parishes as the places where we dwell as sojourners in the land, the land in which we abide with God, via ad patriam, the way to our home with God signalled in Christ’s homecoming. His return to the Father is the exaltation of our humanity, and signals the hope that where he is there we may be also, that as he is so shall be also, that we shall be as Christ. Rogation Sunday is very much about ourselves and the world in which we are placed but as gathered to God through the comings and goings of Christ. The spring of nature’s year is a parable for the spring of our souls to God.

The overcoming of the world that ends the Gospel reading from John is not the negation of nature in a denial of creation – a kind of gnosticism – but the overcoming of the opposition between the world and God which belongs to the Fall. That is the meaning of redemption and thus marks the restoration of the truth of our relation to God and creation; in short, to our end with and in God. Such ideas speak powerfully to the confusions and disorders of our contemporary world which exhibit a profound sense of disconnect, not only of ourselves from nature and from God but also from ourselves. Rogation Sunday teaches that prayer is the real antidote to the forms of our disconnect. Why? Because in prayer we are gathered into the very life of God himself.

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“Of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth”

The Resurrection makes visible the essential life of God as Trinity, the source and end of all life. The burden or purpose of these Eastertide Sundays is to bring that essential life more fully before us. The Resurrection is neither an add-on, a kind of holy extra, nor just one more detail, one thing after another in an endless list of things. It opens us out to the truth and life of God by gathering everything together. It looks back to the Passion and ahead to the Ascension but even more it opens out to us the Holy Spirit as the guiding principle of our lives.

The reading from the Epistle of James complements the Gospel passage, once again from the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus is speaking to the disciples prior to his Passion and Resurrection about himself and his mission; it is nothing less than a making known of the radical nature of the divine life which is the source and end of all life. It is a gift, something given, but given as that upon which all life depends; the truth and end of creation itself is found in the life of God. “Of his own will,” James says, “he brought us to birth by the word of truth,” highlighting our vocation to be “a kind of first-fruits of all his creation.” Wow. You are not nothing, at least not in the eyes of God. And what else matters?

In other words, the Resurrection makes visible the real truth and purpose of creation and of our humanity. It signals the restoration of the truth of our being as made in the image of God and of our humanity as “the abridgement of the world” (Andrewes). Our humanity is a microcosm of the world; there is a kind of recapitulation of all that belongs to creation in our humanity. But only as grounded in the total self-giving life of God as love. In Christ there is an abridgement of heaven and earth, of God and our humanity.

Today’s Gospel focuses on the motions of God himself and in relation to us. There is the paradox of the comings and goings of God which reveals the truth and presence of God with us. “I go my way to him that sent me,” Jesus tells the disciples, fully knowing their incomprehension and puzzlement but actually preparing them (and us) for what will be made clear in his Resurrection. Its radical meaning is precisely about his relation to the Father and to the Holy Spirit; the revealing to us of the all-sufficient life and love of God as the principle of reality and our lives. These ‘Eastertide’ passages from John’s Gospel, the so-called “farewell discourse” of Jesus, portends his Passion and Death and his Resurrection and Ascension as well as teaching us most fully about the Holy Spirit, the bond or “love-knot” of the Father and the Son (Andrewes).

Theologically, we are being lifted up into the mystery of God as Trinity through the comings and goings of God to and from the world and us. We are meant to learn about the abiding presence of God revealed in Christ’s sacrifice and its meaning for us as new birth and life. The emphasis on the coming of the Comforter, or Paraclete, meaning counsellor, as John alone uses the term in chapters 14, 15, and 16 of his Gospel, grounds all of the activities of God towards us in the life of God himself, the spiritual reality of God which is the ground of all life.

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