Category: Sermons

“I came forth from the Father and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father”

Today is known as Rogation Sunday. The days of rogation are days of asking, days of prayer, but with a particular emphasis upon the land. Rogation Sunday reminds us of the redemption of creation itself and our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The resurrection is cosmic in scope. Prayer is an activity of redeemed humanity. We make our prayers in the land where we have been placed. Our places in the land are to be the places of grace. How? By prayer.

Rogationtide embraces the world in prayer. The world is comprehended in the relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. What is overcome is sin, the world as turned away from God and as turned against God, the world as infected and stained by our sinfulness, by our forgetfulness of our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The consequences are our disrespect for the land and the sea, for the world in which we have been placed. We make a mess of it. We forget the place of creation in the will of God; we forget about the redemption of creation.

There are, it seems to me, three competing and contrasting contemporary approaches to our thinking about nature; they are the broken fragments of a more philosophical understanding captured in the Scriptures. First, nature is viewed merely as dead stuff, simply there for human manipulation. This assumes the dominance of our humanity over nature and our complete separation from everything else in the created order. It is a distortion of the Biblical idea of human dominance which emphasizes instead God as the Lord, the Dominus, and thus our dominance only as in the image of the Creator with the strong sense of stewardship of the world which is emphatically God’s world. Secondly, there is the view that collapses our humanity into nature altogether, such as the Gaia hypothesis, but in this view we are simply natural and material forces therefore what we do is natural. This makes it utterly impossible to account for human actions that are so destructive of nature. While it rightly reminds us of our creatureliness and thus a relation to everything else in the created order, it denies the distinctive features of the human creation. The first and second account contradict each other: the one asserting the separation from nature, the other denying the distinctive qualities of our humanity in creation.

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“Receive with meekness the implanted word”

In the secular culture of North America, today is Mother’s Day but in the sacred culture of the Church today is The Fourth Sunday after Easter which presents to us yet again, the Easter mantra of Jesus, “because I go to my Father.” In the face of our contemporary confusions about gender and language, it seems almost a kind of miracle that we still have Mother’s Day and the Easter mantra. But there is a great wisdom and a compelling and substantial truth in these images.

The coming together of the secular and the sacred in this way is suggestive, I think, and illustrates the nature of their engagement. The Resurrection is a redire ad principia that changes how we view everything. It signals the way all things are gathered back to God. Sacred and secular are not simply opposed; the challenge is to understand something of their interrelation, something of the way in which the sacred engages the secular and gathers it to God; something of the way, too, in which the secular reflects the Divine.

The mystery of motherhood belongs, as paradoxical as it might seem, to the mystery of the Son’s going to the Father. In short, it, too, belongs to the mystery of the Resurrection in its essential meaning. The Resurrection is radical new birth and radical new life. The Resurrection goes to the root of all life itself. That root is the reciprocal love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Having brought us to birth in this new life, the Risen Christ would also nurture us in this new life, like a mother nursing a child.

The point of the Eastertide Gospels is to teach us about that radical new life of the Spirit which has been inaugurated and established through Christ’s death and resurrection. We can only be nurtured in what we have received; in what has been given to us. We can only give as mothers give – sacrificially and selflessly – through what God has given us of himself in Jesus Christ – sacrificially and selflessly.

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“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”

Nowhere, perhaps, is the idea of the Resurrection as radical new life more profoundly and provocatively expressed than in this gospel story. We are presented with a compelling image of transformation, an image that somehow connects to our experiences, whether we are literally mothers or not. All of us can relate to the experience of pain and sorrow, suffering and disappointment in some way or another. For Marilyn and me, it is a particularly poignant image given that our daughter Elizabeth gave birth this week past to Silas Barry King. All is well. The pains of childbirth transformed into the joys of motherhood for her, fatherhood for Evan, and for us the new reality of being grandparents.

The wonderful point of the gospel story is that the difficult and hard things in life are neither denied nor ignored. In a way, it is the experiential reality of such things in our lives that is being emphasized in order to underscore the greater idea, the idea of transformation from the graves of our sorrows and pains to the paths of joy and peace, the idea of the Resurrection itself.

“Because I go to the Father” is the recurring refrain of the Easter season and that refrain becomes the critical matrix through which to understand the radical meaning of these readings on the third, fourth and fifth Sundays after Easter. The gospels that are read on these Sundays are all taken from the 16^th chapter of St. John’s Gospel, a chapter which belongs to what is known as the “farewell discourse” of Jesus. Jesus bids adieu, literally, we might say, to God but yet more profoundly to God as the Father and to his disciples and friends. Such things are, of course, wonderfully and emotionally charged but how much more so in this situation? Why? Because of the radical meaning of Christ’s going from us. It is, ultimately, the condition of his being with us. At the heart of that paradox lies the Resurrection.

In the farewell discourse Jesus is talking about his going from them in a twofold sense: his going from them in his passion and death for “where I am going you cannot come”; and his going from them in his ultimate homecoming to the Father in his Ascension, that “where I am you may be also”. He goes “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us that he might open out to us the true homeland of the spirit. But the wonder of it all is that we live in that homeland of the spirit now through the comings and goings of the Son to the Father in prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament, and in holy lives of service and sacrifice.

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“Believe me,that I am in the Father, and the Father in me;
or else believe me for the very works’ sake”

There is something quite powerful about the readings from the Gospel according to St. John which belong to the Sundays after Easter. The Gospel reading for the Feast of SS. Philip and James belongs to those readings from what is known as the Farewell Discourse of Jesus. They contribute to our understanding about the mystical theology of the Prayer Book.

Jesus speaks about Deus in se, God in himself in our text tonight. “I am in the Father, and the Father in me,” indicating that we believe in God because of God in himself through Jesus. But, on the other hand, there is the recognition that others come to faith through “the very works’ sake;” in other words, because of the words and deeds of Jesus which is Deus pro nobis, God for us. These are the two interrelated forms of the Christian Faith which provide two avenues of approach to the understanding of God and our life in God. Believe in God because of what he is in himself or through what he has done. His works are the outflowing of his being. These are not opposed forms of faith.

The Epistle and Gospel for this day reflect on the matter of Christian faith, illustrated best in the first Collect for this Feast. To know God truly is everlasting life. That is the end and purpose. As John’s Gospel argues, and profoundly so, Jesus says that he is “the way, the truth and the life” but the way in which we participate in that heavenly and divine life is through following the steps of the holy Apostles, particularly Saint Philip and Saint James, “steadfastly walk[ing] in the way that leadeth to eternal life.” The paradox, partially illustrated in the second Collect, is that we really don’t know much about either Apostle other than their names as enrolled in the list of the Apostles and the recognition of several James’s, for instance, one of which, along with Jude, are said to be in a quaint phrase “kinsman of the Lord”. Other translations say brother. The point here is a kind of honesty about the witness of the Scriptures.

Yet the overall point is clear in the context of Eastertide. It is all about the form of our participation in the life of God revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Something of the meaning of his going from us as indicated in the farewell discourses is about who he is in himself and who he is for us. The two aspects go together. Each shapes the understanding of the other. Each belongs to one of the avenues of faith. Either we believe because of the idea of God in Himself or because of his mighty works. Either way we come to God through Jesus Christ and participate in the divine life which Christ has opened out for us. In so doing we are one with the community of faith which is the Apostolic and Catholic Church, the Church mystical and universal. Such is the Resurrection; it is about our corporate life together in the body of Christ.

“Believe me, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me;
or else believe me for the very works’ sake”

Fr. David Curry
SS. Philip and James
May 1st, 2017

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“Jesus said, ‘I am the good Shepherd’”

It is one of the great and classic images of care and one which is much beloved. It appears frequently in glass and stone, in tapestry and mosaic even as the Shepherd’s Psalm (Ps. 23) shapes story and song, prayer and praise. The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is very much with us.

Yet we easily forget the radical nature of care that the image of Christ the Good Shepherd presents to us. The Good Shepherd, after all, “lays down his life for the sheep”. In other words, the care of the Good Shepherd has death and resurrection in it. The care is not so much cozy comfort as it is challenge. It is something which the poets help us to see as well.

Against the cheery optimism that so troubled Thomas Hardy, for example, because such an attitude was unable, as he puts it, to “exact a full look at the worst” of things, there is the deeper realization of Gerard Manley Hopkins that “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things”. Thus Hardy’s salutary caution that “delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom and fear” can give place to a world seen as “charged with the grandeur of God”, once we realize that God has not only looked upon the bleak, black darkness of our very worst but has entered into it. Such is the radical nature of the cure – the remedy – in the care.

Jesus says, ‘I am the Good Shepherd’. Through the eyes of John we learn just how radical an identification with us and with God that statement is. It involves an intensification and a re-working of at least two Old Testament passages: the Shepherd’s Psalm and the story of the revelation of God to Moses in the Burning Bush. In Christ, the Psalm takes on an added dimension. There is an inescapable identity with God who reveals himself to Moses in the Burning Bush as “I am who I am.”

“The Lord is my shepherd”, the psalmist says. Jesus in the Gospels, takes that image upon himself and gives it a deeper meaning. Beyond the accompanying presence of God with us in “the valley of the shadow of death”, there is the God who goes into the darkness and loneliness of each and every death, the God who embraces our death as well as our life.

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“Trembling and astonishment had come upon them … for they were afraid”

It is known as the short ending to The Gospel according to St. Mark because some of the earliest texts of St. Mark’s Gospel end at verse eight of the sixteenth chapter rather than with the further aspects of the resurrection that take us to verse twenty. To be sure, the canonical gospel, the gospel that is authoritative for orthodox Christians, includes those additional twelve verses. The shorter ending does not mean that Mark does not believe in the doctrine of the resurrection or that the additional verses are somehow unrelated and disconnected to the rest of his gospel and unfaithful to it. Quite the contrary. The Gospels could not even be written apart from the Resurrection. It is the Resurrection that brings everything into a new light of understanding. It changes everything.

“Be not afraid” is the good news of the Resurrection, after all, in the shorter ending. The word for being afraid is more about a kind of amazement or wonderment. The women were amazed to find “the stone rolled away” and to see “a young man clothed in a long white garment.” He responds to their amazement. “Be not affrighted” – meaning ‘be not amazed’. “Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: his risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.” But this only adds to their amazement. They “trembled and were amazed”, literally, they were beside or outside of themselves. Here the word for amazement is ecstasy – ex stasis. The whole scene is about confronting a mystery, the great mystery of the Resurrection.

So what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think it is powerful and poignant ending, and serves to make the doctrinal point about the resurrection even more strongly. Only in the light of the resurrection does the story of Jesus makes any sense. The resurrection has captured the imaginations of the gospel writers and compelled them to see things in a new light without which the Gospels would never have been written.

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“This is the victory that overcometh the world; even our faith”

There is such a thing as being dead before you are dead. It happens when we give up on what defines us, sing the poor-me’s and succumb to despair. But it is really all about us. That has been the situation it seems to be for quite some time in our churches and our culture. “O ye of little faith,” Jesus upbraids us. One of the homilies in the sixteenth century Book of Homilies is about “liveliness of faith” which is only possible where one confronts a certain deadness of faith. I sense this problem in varying ways when people start talking about things like the Church and Parish dying though without distinguishing between the institutional church and the mystical Church universal, a distinction without which I certainly could not even begin to function. But that kind of talk about death and dying is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are dead before we are really dead because we have given up on the life of faith. We are dead because we have accepted what is really the world’s way of looking at things.

Numbers matter but they are not everything. And in fact they can become a kind of idolatry; measuring the truth of things quantitatively is an extremely limited and limiting way of thinking and living. It is a problem the Scriptures frequently address. There is even “the sin of David” in taking a census of the Israelites, as if to say that our strength and the truth of our being lies in our numbers. As such it is a denial of God and the truth and power of his life in us. Elijah the Prophet, too, laments in a kind of despair about the condition of Israel, thinking that he is the only one left! God rather drily and strongly reminds him that no, there are far more than he realizes who are faithful, indeed, “seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal” a passage from 1 Kings that Paul recalls in Romans 11.4. The problem, it seems, is perennial. We forget that where two or three are gathered there is Christ also. Our life and our joy are found in the gathering.

To my mind, the Gospel of the Resurrection speaks profoundly to the great question of our age which is about our common humanity. Because of the Resurrection, it is not an exaggeration to say, you are not and do not have to be a robot. You are already a robot, however, if you have succumbed to a kind of technocratic determinism and think that machines can think. In other words, you become a machine precisely because you have given yourself over to a certain kind of reasoning which is limited and limiting. It was interesting to see an article in the Chronicle Herald about a Professor from St. Mary’s talking exactly about the problem of big data and Artificial Intelligence which can only replicate human patterns of behavior but are incapable of mind and therefore ethical reasoning.

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“Turn unto the Lord your God”

The words of the Prophet Joel provided the critical matrix through which to ponder the mystery of the Passion in Holy Week. They equally carry us into the mystery of the Resurrection at Easter. Why? Because neither the Passion nor the Resurrection can be thought about without each other. The accounts of the Passion can only be written and can only be considered because of the Resurrection. Easter, in a way, signals the great turning of God to us. Only so can there be our turning to him.

The Resurrection is radical new life. The turning is about the hope of transformation, a change in outlook and understanding, a change from death to life. Easter signals the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, of good over evil. And that is all God in his eternal turning and all God in his turning to us. Christ goes into darkness of death and death is changed for evermore. “For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.” And this changes everything for us. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above”.

We are no longer to be defined by the dust of death and by our turning to the ground and to the emptiness of ourselves. We are turned to the Risen Christ and find in him the new and radical truth of our humanity. We are turned to God and only then are we alive. Death is swallowed up in life, the Life that has overcome death, which is to say that everything is not nothingness. Nihilism is the philosophy of nothingness, the sense of meaninglessness and the absence of purpose, the philosophy of despair and disappointment. The Resurrection of Christ counters the nihilisms of our world and day. It is all about the turning, the circling around and around of God to God in our humanity and our humanity in God.

We turn to the grave, like Mary Magdalene, seeking a corpse, a dead body, only to find “the stone taken away from the sepulchre”. The empty tomb marks the beginning of a change. She turns and runs to Peter and John with the report that “they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” She assumes however that he is dead. It is merely a question of where the body is. Yet she has been set in motion to the other disciples who in turn run to the sepulchre and find it empty. It marks the beginning of a resurrection of the understanding, a new understanding about our humanity.

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