Category: Sermons

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry