Category: Sermons

“Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing;
nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net”

Nada, nothing, nichts rien. A powerful word, it captures something of the dilemma of modernity – the sense of nothingness, of emptiness. Is “at thy word” the counter? Or does it reveal a deeper problem? Does “at thy word” mean that suddenly we will have everything? Yes and no. The danger lies in what we think “at thy word” means.

The danger is in our thinking. If “at thy word” means a logic by which we acquire things then reason has become something merely instrumental, a means to an end. But what kind of end? An end where everything is turned into things. We not only get things – a full net of things – but our thinking turns us into things. And this is a greater nothingness, our greater nothingness, the loss of our humanity. It is a betrayal of the deeper kind of thinking that this Gospel along with today’s Epistle presents to us. If we think “at thy word” means getting things then we have missed Peter’s command to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts”.

In the Christian understanding, Christ is the Logos, the Word and Son of the Father. But as Word, he is not the means to our domination and manipulation of the world. That is exactly our contemporary problem. It is a problem about how we think about thinking. If we turn reason into a tool, then we become things at the expense of our humanity. We dismiss and ignore all the qualities of life signalled in the Epistle that are true blessings, blessings rooted in the compassion of Christ, the truth of God who is the author and meaning of all life. Life is more than things. It is our evil to turn reason into a machine-making thing.

The point of the Gospel is that Christ wants more for us than a net full of things. Ultimately, he has come that we “might have life and have it more abundantly.” That abundance of life does not mean an abundance of things. It has entirely to do with the quality of our life with one another that turns upon our life with God in Christ. It has entirely to do with the power of the Good alive and at work in us. It is altogether about a meaningful life, a life lived to and for God and with God.

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“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”

It is a familiar image and one which appears in the New Testament both in Luke and Matthew; in Luke in the form of a question and in Matthew in the form of a statement. The context of Matthew’s use of the image is the tension between Jesus and the Pharisees. His statement is an indictment about leadership which is also the common way in which this image is understood. We use it to talk about a lack or a problem about leadership. That implies that reason and understanding are important qualities when it comes to political life and to the life of institutions.

Luke’s interrogative use of the image is more intriguing since it is set in the context of mercy and forgiveness and serves as the entry point to the problem of hypocrisy, the problem of judgement. In a way, as his interrogative approach suggests, the image is being applied to all of us – to our judgments that stand over and against others and reveal our blindness. For Luke, the blind leading the blind is not simply about others; it is about us.

The idea and image are not limited to the Christian Scriptures. It is an important aspect of Buddhism in its reaction against and rejection of Sanatana Dharma, Hinduism. The Buddha comes to reject the leaders and teachers of Hinduism directly. The Canki Sutta, recalling, it is claimed, Buddha’s rejection puts it this way. “It is like a line of blind men, each holding one to the preceding one; the first one does not see, the middle one also does not see; the last one does not see. Thus, it seems to me that the state of the Brahmans is like that of a line of blind men.” It is a devastating critique of the Brahmin class, the teaching class of Hindu religious philosophy which is found in the Pali Canon, in a text set down before the time of Christ but sometime after the actual life of Siddhartha Gautama.

And yet, within Hinduism itself there was, far earlier, its own self-critique found in the Upanishads which speaks about the blindness of those who claim to know. “Fools, dwelling in darkness, wiser in their own conceits, and puffed up with vain knowledge, go round and round, staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind.”

The idea and image receives its most moving visual expression in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous and unique 1568 painting of The Parable of the Blind leading the Blind. (more…)

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Rejoice with me.

“I must have always wanted to rejoice”, Hagar Shipley Currie (no relation), a ninety year old lady says in Margaret Laurence’s Canadian classic novel, The Stone Angel. She is dying and yet in the days and weeks leading to her death, she is beginning to come to a better understanding of who she truly is. It is a kind of confessional moment, a conversion of the understanding. “Pride was my wilderness”, she realizes. She has recognized that she has been like the literal stone angel, a monument erected in memory of her mother but as an expression of the pride of her father in the cemetery in fictional Manawaka, Manitoba. The angel is literally doubly blind; as stone it literally cannot see and its eyes as carved do not even convey the illusion of sight.

Hagar comes to realize that she, too, has been doubly blind; blind about herself and about the needs of others. She was lost in the wilderness of pride but now is found. The catalyst for this self-discovery was the verse of the familiar hymn, All People That on Earth Do Dwell, Rev’d William Kethe’s sixteenth century paraphrase of Psalm 100. The melody and words were composed and written within ten years of each other. The tune, usually attributed to the French composer Louis Bourgeois, first appears in the 1551 edition of the Genevan Psalter; the words may have been composed by Kethe, himself a Scot, while in exile in Europe at the same time. The first verse provides the moment of self-understanding for Hagar.

All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him gladly serve, his praise forth tell,
Come ye before him, and rejoice.

The fifteenth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel tells three interrelated parables, the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, which we heard this morning and the lost or prodigal son.^[1] In each case, the parables end on the strong note of rejoicing, signifying the greater nature of the return to wholeness and completeness, to family and community, to self and God. What makes the return possible is the point presented in the first two parables where what is lost is found because, and only because, of the movement of God towards us imaged in terms of the shepherd leaving the ninety and nine sheep and seeking out the one lost sheep and the woman seeking diligently for the one lost coin. We are the one lost sheep and the one lost coin. The principle of return is emphatically and completely God. Neither the sheep nor the coin have any power of movement in and of themselves.

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“Hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us”

We have gone, it seems, from the heights of blessedness in the vision of the Triune glory of God on Trinity Sunday to the ground of human existence in all of its confusions and uncertainties both last Sunday and again today.

Trinity Sunday presents the cosmic vision of the whole of creation in its praise of the Triune God, the One-in-Three who is worthy “to receive glory and honour and power; /For thou hast created all things, /And for thy pleasure they are, and were created.” All created things find the truth of their being in the praise of the Trinity. One way to that vision is through the gathering up of the whole pageant of Revelation signaled in the four and twenty elders representative of the books of the Old Testament and the four living creatures signifying the Gospels of the New Testament. It is a remarkable image and one which requires ultimately a change in our thinking, a constant metanoia, we might say; in short, a deeper awareness of heart and mind.

“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked Jesus, only to be told that he needed to think in a new way, not by way of ratio but of intellectus, meaning not in a narrow cause and effect kind of reasoning but in a larger more comprehensive kind of thinking which draws the knower and the known together into one. “Ye must be born again,” is what Jesus had said to him. It means from above and so our thinking must be analogical, a thinking upward towards the goodness and into the oneness of God. But to think upwards on our part is only possible because of the downward movement of God himself. “No man hath ascended up into heaven but he that came down from heaven.” In the lifting up of the one who came down are found all the possibilities and the actualities of eternal life for us.

Thus the Trinity Sunday readings already embrace the downward movement towards our daily lives on the ground where we are placed. The way up is the same as the way down, as I and Evan and others were regularly reminded at the Colloquium and Conference which I attended last week. The phrase is from Heraclitus.

Last week we argued that we are Lazarus, both as lying on the ground “desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fall from the masters’ table” and raised up into the bosom of Abraham, for if we do not see ourselves in Lazarus then we will be like the Rich Man, ultimately lost and in torments. We noted as well the parallel to the other Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, dead and buried but raised up by his friend Jesus. “Lazarus, come out.” May we not say that is the same as “Ye must be born again”? Are these things, too, not the same as the invitation in today’s Gospel, “Come for all things are now ready?”

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“There was a certain beggar named Lazarus”

Lazarus ‘R Us. We are Lazarus. There are two people named Lazarus in the Gospels. The one is the blessed subject of a parable told by Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, the story we heard today. The other is the blessed object of a miracle done by Jesus in John’s Gospel. There is much that is similar about them.

But there is this difference. The one lays on the ground – a beggar in the dirt, unnoticed, at the gate of the rich man – and then dies. The other dies and then is buried in the ground – hidden in the grave for four days. But, then, both are raised up – the one into the bosom of Abraham, the other into the company of his family and friends, among whom is Jesus himself.

What does it all come down to? Simply this. The love of God compels us to love one another where we are – on the ground and even out of the ground, as it were. This is not a may-be but a must-be for our salvation and more generally for the health of our communities and cultures. We are commanded and compelled to love out of the vision of love which has been shown to us. Such was Trinity Sunday when we beheld the strong and defining love of God. “Behold a door was opened in heaven.” “Batter my heart three-personed God,” as John Donne puts it, for only that strong love can move us to God and to him in one another.

When we ignore the stranger in our midst or neglect the beggar at our door, then we deny the God who became poor for our sakes, who came into our midst, and who knocks at the door of our hearts. When we are consumed by envy at the good fortune of others, when we are filled with hatred and wrath for the hurts and injuries inflicted upon us, whether real or imagined, when we are complacent and indifferent to the sufferings of others, then we place ourselves very far from God and do great harm to others as well as to ourselves.

To put it in terms of the parable, there is a great gulf fixed between us and God when we ignore the poor man at our gate, the neighbour close at hand, and our loved ones all around. Then we place ourselves in torment, the torment of our self-willed distance from God. Then we are pretty far gone – like Lazarus in the ground four days, “behold, he stinketh”, says Martha, and so do we in the sins of our indifference and selfishness. But, “Lazarus, come out”, Jesus says.

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“Apart from me you can do nothing”

A strong and provocative statement, perhaps, but surely no less so than Jesus telling Nicodemus who came to him questioning in the night that “ye must be born again”, a phrase, I fear that has often been misunderstood if not hijacked to the agendas of a purely experiential religion of sentiment and feeling and its corollary of authority and self-righteous presumption devoid of thought. Does not Jesus also tell Nicodemus “marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again”? He goes on to talk of the great mystery of spiritual life. Ultimately, he speaks about the mystery of his own life, the mystery of the Trinity. “If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not; how shall ye believe heavenly things?”

And yet, it is precisely heavenly things that he reveals in and through the things of this world. We are in the presence of the great mystery of God, the holy and blessed Trinity. “He therefore that would be saved let him thus think of the Trinity,” the great Creed of Athanasius puts it. What does that mean? To think of the Trinity in a certain way. What is that way? It is the very way which Jesus shows us, taking the things of this world and showing us that they only have life and meaning when they are lifted up into the life from which they come and to which they return. Apart from me you are nothing, we might say.

That way of thinking is the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology. Fancy words, perhaps, but words which reveal the necessary and important way of thinking God. They are the forms of our negative and positive thinking about God, the counter to our idolatry and atheism. They are about our freedom and life.

God is nothing, meaning no thing like other things, no being like other beings. It is entirely proper to say that God is nothing if by that we mean something different from our world and day, from us and our being. That is negative theology. It distinguishes God utterly from everything else in the created order. The Creator is not the same as the created. And yet, there is a relationship between them that is also positive; nowhere more profoundly so than in the idea that we are made in the image and likeness of God. God reveals himself to us by way of the things of the world, perhaps most wonderfully in the parables of the kingdom. “The kingdom of heaven is like unto” this and that image from our world and day. That is positive theology. The Athanasian Creed dances us through the necessary paradoxes of reason without which our reason is dead and deadly, destructive and empty.

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“We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.”

Pentecost. Whitsunday. A day of marvels and mysteries. A day of contrasts and contradictions. And that is the whole point. Wind and fire are elusive qualities, hard to contain and tie down, like Daedalus’ statues in Plato’s Meno – wonderful to look at but unless they are tied down by reason they run away from us as do all of our opinions. Pentecost challenges the religion of sentiment and emotion at the same time as it counters any and every idea of self-righteous importance and opinion, of presumption and pride. In so many ways, it is about a kind of growing up. A growing up into a more spiritual understanding of reality being led by the Spirit of truth who “will guide you into all truth.”

Pentecost means the fiftieth day, fifty days after Easter. It looks back to the ancient rituals of the harvest for Israel but takes on a whole new meaning in the descent of the Holy Ghost to give birth to the Church as the place of our abiding in the life of God. Such is the radical meaning of Pentecost. It is about our life in the spirit, our life with God. Through the descent of the Holy Ghost, something new and splendid happens which challenges and changes our whole outlook on life.

The story of Pentecost recapitulates the ancient story of the Tower of Babel. That story along with the story of the flood, speaks profoundly to our contemporary world and its concerns and confusions. Far more than just historical narratives expressed in mythological form, they are philosophical reflections on the major themes of identity and violence. Pentecost especially signals the redemption of Babel.

The story of the Tower of Babel is at once familiar and yet mostly misunderstood. It is only too often regarded as a just-so story, a story told to explain the diversity of tongues and cultures as if that were a kind of bad thing, as if there should be only one language, one culture. Think about that in relation to western culture which has assumed such a dominance of the world. The truth of the matter is that the story of the Tower of Babel is really a story about human presumption and arrogance. As Samuel Huntington notes in his book, The Clash of Civilizations, the belief in western culture as universal is “false, immoral and dangerous”. Babel means confusion. The confusion is us. We are Babel in our arrogance and ignorance. As Jonathan Sacks suggests in his magisterial work “Not In God’s Name”, if the story of the flood in Genesis is about “freedom without order”, then the story of the Tower of Babel is about “order without freedom.” At issue is their necessary interrelation and interdependence.

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“He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father”

They are words from the Creed but as taken more or less directly from the Scriptures. The Ascension and the Session of Christ are among the creedal mysteries of the Christian faith. They are set before us on this day, The Sunday after the Ascension. Often overlooked and ignored, these two doctrines provide a necessary corrective to the religion of sentiment and emotion, on the one hand, and the religion of morality and self-righteousness, on the other hand. We are reminded in the strongest possible way that the meaning of our lives is to be found in the comings and goings of God, not God in our comings and goings. There is all the difference in the world between these two perspectives: the one would make God subject to us; the other would place us with God in the revelation of his truth and love.

But these mysteries also instruct us about the meaning and understanding of spiritual life. Rather than the simple and false opposition of spirit and matter, for example, or spirit and logic, too, for that matter, the Ascension and the Session teach us that the spiritual embraces and perfects the material and physical world as well as the various forms of our reasoning. These two mysteries signal the radical meaning of human redemption which is about the gathering of all things to God. It is a kind of redire ad principia – a return to a principle – in which we find the true meaning of our lives.

In terms of the rich imagery of Eastertide, which has focused on Christ’s refrain “because I go the Father”, we learn that our comings and our goings find their place and have their meaning in the comings and goings of God. In the Ascension and the Session of Christ there is a kind of ending, a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment, of triumph and joy. Christ enters into the Father’s glory and so into the eternal rest of God. “The end of all things is at hand”, says St. Paul, with a sense not of foreboding but of joy. The ending of all things is indeed celebrated in the Ascension and the Session of Christ. It is an ending in the sense of meaning and purpose. It is about the divine reason and purpose of our existence. From there we await a new beginning through the Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit to keep us in the love and knowledge of what has been accomplished by Christ Jesus for us. It always remains to be more fully realized in us.

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“He was received up into heaven”

The seventh and last sonnet in John Donne’s cycle of sonnets called La Corona is Ascension. La Corona is a remarkable literary achievement. It consists of seven sonnets which are all closely connected in such a way that they form a crown, a circle, la corona. The last line of each of the seven sonnets becomes the first line of the next sonnet. Thus the last sonnet entitled Ascension ends with what becomes the first words of the first sonnet, “Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.” In other words, the seven sonnets form a “crown of prayer and praise” based on the sequence of creedal and doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. The Ascension marks the beginning and the ending of a perfect circle, a redire ad principia, at once a going forth and a return to God.

Donne’s poetic achievement captures the significance doctrinally of the substantial moments in Christ’s life. The sonnet on the Ascension reflects on the mystery of the Ascension. What is that mystery? It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father in the Spirit having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption. “Salute the last and everlasting day” – such is the Ascension. We are opened out to the homeland of the spirit, our true homeland. The Ascension proclaims our spiritual identity and home; the truth of our humanity is found in God. This is the counter to our worldly preoccupations and yet provides us with the means to live in the world without being defined by its concerns and follies. Such is prayer.

The ancient fathers of the early Church speak of the Ascension as “the exaltation of our humanity.” We are lifted up in Christ’s being lifted up. “We ascend,” Augustine says, “in the ascension of our hearts.” Our humanity finds its truth in God. We participate in that homeland of the spirit here and now through prayer. Prayer signifies all the service that we ever do unto God. In prayer we are lifted up into the life of God. There we place our cares and concerns about others, about our world and day, especially in a world and day fraught with despair and destruction. We place these cares and concerns with God because of Christ’s Ascension.

There is “joy at the uprising of this sun, and son” because he has prepared a place for us. “Nor doth he by ascending, show alone,/ But first he, and he first enters the way.” Donne suggests something of the scriptural tenor of the Ascension as a kind of breaking into heaven. “O strong ram, which hast battered heaven for me” but then in almost complete contrast, Christ is also the “mild lamb, which with thy blood, hast marked the path”, the path for us to follow. The Ascension inspires us to prayer and praise. “Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.” All because he was received up into heaven.

Fr. David Curry
Ascension Day, May 25^th, 2017

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