Category: Sermons

Sermons

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 Tucked away in the back pages of our Canadian Book of Common Prayer (1962), on pages 715-721 are three important historical documents about which it may be of benefit to ponder and consider.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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Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent

“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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Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity

“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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Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity

“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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Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity

“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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Meditation for All Souls’ Day

“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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Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity

“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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