Category: Sermons

“Turn unto the Lord your God”

We are the broken-hearted and the community of the broken-hearted. It is the condition of our blessedness. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit”, the psalmist, David, reminds us in his great penitential psalm, the “Miserere mei, Deus” (Ps. 51, “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise”. And the prophet Joel bids us “rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God.” It is all about the turning in which there is the hope and the possibility of blessedness.

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

So begins T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, Ash-Wednesday, itself a meditation on the idea of our turning that is shaped not only by the psalmist and the prophet but by Dante’s Vita Nuovo, the new life, and by Lancelot Andrewes’ Ash Wednesday sermon of 1619 about the nature of repentance, and, even more, the nature of mystical theology. “Repentance itself is nothing else but redire ad principia, ‘a kind of circling,’” Andrewes observes, “to return to Him by repentance from Whom by sin we have turned away.” His text is from The Book of the Prophet Joel about “turning unto the Lord with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning”. The ways of purgation, illumination and union are set before us on this day of fasting and repentance, this day which marks the beginning of Lent.

To know ourselves as the broken-hearted is already the beginnings of the turn in us for it acknowledges, however obliquely and obscurely, the infinite and compassionate love of God; “for he is,” as Joel puts it, “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil”. It is a wonderful insight into the nature of God expressed in and through the images that belong to human emotions and assumptions and yet points us to the transcendent mystery and wonder of God. It is that idea which Eliot in his elliptical and elusive way wrestles with, a wrestling with God out of an awareness of human uncertainty and brokenness, presumption and confusion – a kind of seeking and hoping even against hope itself. And a kind of learning, or the very least, a wanting to learn. “Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still.” His poem undertakes a movement from “Because I do not hope to turn” to “Although I do not hope to turn”, which implies that a kind of turn is already underway. What makes the idea of the possibilities of turning is simply the reality of God himself. God turns to us in Jesus Christ who seeks our turning to him.

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“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

“Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guiltie of dust and sinne. /But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack/ From my first entrance in,/ Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/ If I lack’d any thing.” So begins the last poem by George Herbert entitled Love (III) which concludes his collection of poems known as The Temple. This Sunday, too, is about an invitation, an invitation to a journey. The poem in its three stanzas references three basic features of our Anglican liturgy: contrition – our sorrow for our sins; confession – our explicit acknowledgment of sin; and satisfaction – what restores us to wholeness. And yet the poem alludes as well to the essential character of the Christian journey as a pilgrimage of the soul by way of purgation, illumination and union. We are invited to a journey, to the pilgrimage of love. That is the character of our Christian journey concentrated for us in Lent.

There are of course different kinds of journeys, both ancient and modern. Some are flights from the world, a fleeing from all the attachments which belong to ordinary human lives and which are seen as ultimately illusory and nothing. We escape from them into a kind of emptiness, a nirvana of the spirit, if you will. All of the great religions of the world speak to the problem of our attachments though each in their own way.

Some are journeys of discovery, like Homer’s Odyssey. For Odysseus, the journey is about learning the order of things, the order of the cosmos and the place of our humanity in it. The way is through suffering, the suffering of ignorance and presumption in which truth is learned, at least by the hero. But the end is emphatically not union with God; at best there is a likeness, a commonality between the hero and the gods. He achieves his homeland, Ithaca, to be sure. And like his wife, the patient and wise Penelope, his journey weaves a story of virtue and understanding which delights the gods and men. But beyond Ithaca, his end is with all men in the land of the shades, in the indeterminancy and emptiness of Hades. There is even the sense that what belonged to his glory must also be forgotten; his last journey is to a land where his oars are mistaken for winnowing fans. Something is learned, but there is no abiding in the accomplishment, no end for man with the blessed ones. The end lies, instead, in the virtue of the striving, in what is learned through the suffering and in what is sung in the song afterwards.

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“I am the vine, ye are the branches”

“I am the vine,” Jesus says, “ye are the branches.” It is one of the greatest of the so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus with predicates – metaphors which have to do with God’s relation to us through the divine self-relation. In this case, the metaphor is that of the vine and the branches that belong to the idea of indwelling, our dwelling in God and God in us. As one of the “I am” sayings it points us to the divine revelation of God to Moses through the Burning Bush, “I am who I am.” It is a strong endorsement of the essential divinity of Christ and a powerful image about our life in and with God sacramentally. It is significant that this is the Gospel chosen for the commemoration of St. Matthias.

Why? Because of the interrelation of the two concepts of substitution and indwelling or incorporation into the body of Christ. Matthias is the disciple chosen by lot and by prayer to take the place of the traitor Judas. As the Collect reminds us, we cannot think about Matthias without recalling Judas’ betrayal. He is chosen to take Judas’ place not as a betrayer but as a faithful apostle. He is chosen to be an essential part of the apostolic fellowship which lives and can only live from Christ. The imagery of vine and branches is something organic and dynamic. The life-blood of the Church as the body of Christ is Christ’s life in us sacramentally.

The Gospel and the Lesson are most instructive. The Lesson from Acts focuses on the act of choosing, implicitly confirming the origins of ecclesiastical polity but as based upon a theological insight. What is that insight? The form of our indwelling God through the Word made flesh and the way in which that truth is made known to us.

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“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart,
having heard the word, keep it and bring forth fruit with patience.”

The parable of the sower and the seed focuses our attention on the quality of the ground upon which the Word of God is sown. It recalls the story of the Fall. The ground is cursed. Adam, who at once signifies our humanity collectively and as an individual, is told “cursed is the ground because of you, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” The ground is cursed because Adam and Eve succumbed to the beguiling wisdom of the serpent and thus lost the ground of their standing with God. The ground of creation becomes the place of alienation from God. Our labour, as we saw last week, is based upon this sense of separation yet becomes a part of the work of redemption. We are returned to God but only through our awareness of our connection to the ground, to the dust of creation.

Recall the story from Genesis. In a lovely image, God is said to have “walked in the garden in the cool of the day”, but where were we? We had hidden ourselves from his presence. Why? Our fear is the beginning of an awareness of our self-willed separation from him. It is important to understand something of what this means.

The story of the Fall seeks to explain the origin of sin and evil, of suffering and death. It locates the problem not in the material universe – the problem is not with the dust of nature – but in the disobedience of man. As disobedience, it is an act of the will against what is known as good. Creation as a whole and in its individual parts is emphatically and unambiguously declared to be “good”; in fact, “very good.” The commandment given to man – and only to man – is also by definition good. It is implicitly known as good.

Alone of all creation, the Adam – our humanity – is said to be made in the image of God. Less abstractly but in a complementary image, man is said to be “formed from the dust” and to have had God’s spirit “breathed into him”. He is a spiritual creature with a relation to every other created being and with a special relation to the Creator. The Fall is about the disorder of that relationship. As made in the image of God, man is capable of knowing God. Hence he is given to name the things of creation, which is to say, he is capable of knowing God’s knowing of the things he has made. And he is given a commandment.

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“Why stand ye here all the day idle?”

The answer is clear and prescient: “because no man hath hired us.” Welcome to the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Welcome to the “brave new world” of digital exuberance. There will be fewer and fewer jobs. There will be more and more of the idle and the unemployed. Welcome to the world of automation only just beginning to ramp up. No work and all play? Think again.

Alarmist? Reactionary? Maybe. But when Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk concur that the greatest danger facing our humanity is AI – artificial intelligence – then, perhaps, even the most confirmed digital cheerleader might, just might, pause for a moment and reflect. Even, perhaps, Yuval Noah Harari, the latest super-exuberant cheerleader for a brave new world of a digitally enhanced humanity. “Now we see through a glass,” digitally, some may think, but make no mistake it will still be “through a glass darkly”. Quite apart from the myopia! There is nothing else to see, after all, if it isn’t on your screen. What can’t be seen on your screen doesn’t exist. “O brave, new world”, indeed.

Okay. A bit of rhetorical excess on my part, I admit. The rant’s over. The readings for Septuagesima Sunday speak rather profoundly to an important aspect of our contemporary dystopia. On the one hand, we are easily seduced by the obvious wonders of technology, especially in medicine and in terms of communication, or so we think. We are rightly impressed with some of the progresses in medical science, to be sure, but I leave it to you to decide whether our culture is really better informed and wiser than previous ages. On the other hand, we are largely oblivious to the ethical and intellectual problems that come with all of that. They are not insurmountable, in my view, since all of these problems are our problems. This is, as you have probably guessed, the segue to the Gospel. The very point when we realise that “Houston, we [don’t] have lift off”, is the point when we realise that the deep dilemmas of the human community cannot be solved simply by us through technological ingenuity. Ancient wisdom, certainly Christian wisdom, has been largely ignored and forgotten. The problem is not with technology – that over-used, abused and largely meaningless word – the problem is with us, with our approach to one another, to nature, and, ultimately, to God.

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“Another parable put he forth unto them”

Epiphany runs out this year with talk, a parable, words rather than signs and wonders. Perhaps it is words that are the real signs and wonders. Epiphany season suggests that we are constituted for thought and it is often words that convey ideas and thoughts to us. But what kind of words?

“As all of the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time, flowers in the spring, corn in the summer, and apples in the autumn, so the fruit of winter is talk.” Basil the Great, one of the great philosophical theologians of the early Church, one of the Cappadocian Fathers, captures well the point of our considerations and an essential aspect of our liturgy. Epiphany is all about the light of divinity, light conveyed by words which are sown in our hearts like seeds upon the ground. But what kinds of seeds, what kind of words will be made manifest in us, in our lives? The seed and words of good wheat or the seeds and words of deceit and despair? This is the question that the Gospel presents to us while reminding us that Epiphany is equally about judgment. The judgment is God’s judgment not the limited and biased judgment of humans. That is the good news actually. We are held accountable to the word of God. That is the point of the parable.

It is complemented by the Epistle reading from Colossians which exhorts us to put on “mercy and compassion” “forebearing one another, and forgiving one another”, important spiritual concepts that belong to our living in the light of God’s truth made manifest to us in the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. In a way, it is all about the words. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another”, as Paul puts it. Epiphany is the season of teaching. The words are words of purpose and meaning. The fruit of winter is talk that is meaningful and purposeful, serious talk that recalls us to who we are in the light of God revealed in Jesus Christ. “In thy light shall we see light”, is our constant prayer but that means an openness to the teachings of Christ, to his talk to us while among us. That is the condition of his epiphany in us.

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“Why are ye so fearful?”

“From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire and flood; from plaque, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us.” Thus prays the ancient Litany in the Book of Common Prayer, the first part of the Latin liturgy translated by Cranmer into elegant English which would be one of the distinguishing features of the Book(s) of Common Prayer. It offers a wonderful and ordered way of praying all that belongs to prayer and to our creedal identity in Christ. Such petitions teach a doctrine that, I fear, we have forgotten.

In our technocratic exuberance, we presume to think that we can control the elements but are fearful about every rumour of a snowflake in the air. We forget that we are creatures but are fearful about the brute forces of nature to which we are subject too. We forget that nature does not simply exist for us, for our pleasure and interest. We forget that nature is affected by our disorder; in other words, we find ourselves in a world of earthquake, tempest and fire, a world of woes and suffering, a world where nature, if not always “red in tooth and claw”, can be pretty foreboding and pretty threatening; at the very least deserving of our respect.

We forget even more that nature is subject to a higher authority as are we, too, as Paul reminds us this morning. There is an order and a purpose to nature, as Aristotle puts it, “at least for the most part.” We forget about that phrase, “for the most part”. What that means in Christian terms is that nature, too, is implicated in the Fall of man, that nature is no paradise. There are, I’m afraid, always the blackflies and the black ice, the winds and the snow.

We forget these things and yet are fearful about them. It takes an epiphany to awaken us to the Lord God of all creation and, especially, the Lord God of the human heart.

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“What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you”

Paul’s speech on the Areopagus in Athens shows something of the meaning of his so-called conversion. Saul, the persecutor of the followers of the Way, the followers of Jesus, becomes Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles. It is not a conversion from Judaism to Christianity because the latter does not yet really exist. It marks instead a conversion in thought and understanding and therein lies the real importance and significance of Paul’s conversion and indeed, the meaning of all conversion.

The Book of the Acts of the Apostles deals with the emergence of the early Church focusing largely on the apostolic characters of Peter and Paul. The story of Paul’s conversion, of which the change in name from Saul to Paul is a part, is told in Acts three separate times. The accounts are all interesting and informative and reveal the tensions and the dynamic of the time. In a way, the stories and the accounts of the missionary travels of Paul provide the foundations for the apostolic and catholic nature of the Christian church as it begins to emerge out of the cauldron of Jewish religion, Greek philosophy and Roman political order.

Paul’s speech to the men of Athens is a kind of highlight moment. It marks an essential feature of Christian witness, namely, the engagement with other cultures and religious philosophies and allows us to see what is distinct about Christianity. Paul is a major theological voice who sets the stage for the development of Christian doctrine about Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Hans Urs Von Balthasar notes, as a kind of thought experiment, however, that Paul’s speech would never get off the ground today simply because it assumes that God is a concept and a topic which while widely shared then cannot be assumed as such now. The idea of God was the starting point from which to talk about judgment and resurrection; in short, Christ as the God “in whom we live and move and have our being”, referencing the poets of ancient Greece, specifically, Aratus, whose invocation to Zeus has been appropriated by Paul.

That is itself significant and shows the nature of the cultural and intellectual interplay that belongs to the emergence of Christianity and, especially, as grasped by Paul whose learning and grasp of languages as well as his deep study of the Torah make him such a significant figure.

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“Ephphatha, that is, Be opened”

On behalf of The Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, let me thank the Parish of St. George’s for the great privilege and pleasure of being here this evening for this service of choral evensong and for the wonderful music provided by Garth McPhee and the choir. Boyd and Buxtehude, words of Sedulius and a tune named St. Venantius – it doesn’t get any better! Thank you.

Epiphany is the most theological of the seasons of the Church year. It is God in your face, as it were, and yet speaks profoundly about who we are, who we are in God’s sight. The whole focus and emphasis is upon what are sometimes known as the divine attributes, the attributes of God. Three of the essential attributes of God that are made known in the season of the Epiphany are “the infinite wisdom, power and goodness” of God, concisely named in the first of The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion as found in our Canadian Prayer Book. They are attributes that belong to the theological reflections of Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought. For Christians these are all made manifest through the humanity of Jesus Christ.

Epiphany is pre-eminently the season of teaching and therein lies the modern dilemma and challenge for our divided, confused, and despairing world. The Magi-Kings from Anatolia came to Bethlehem bearing gifts to the one to whom the star brought them. Unlike the Caesars of the world whose veni, vidi, vici, “I came, I saw, I conquered”, captures the dominance meme of the regimes of power, the Magi-Kings viderant, venerunt, et adoraverunt, “they saw, they came and they adored”; in short, they worshipped. The gifts they present are gifts which honour and teach, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”. Epiphany is the pageant of mystical theology. We participate in what we behold. We are in the midst of great mysteries. Gold signifies that Christ is King; frankincense that he is God; and myrrh that he is sacrifice.

Such things are both revelation and redemption; the revelation of God and the redemption of humanity. But only through something taught and learned. That makes all the difference – then and now. “They departed into their own land another way”, having been warned in a dream, Matthew tells us, “not to return to Herod”. There is a sense of ominous danger that foreshadows the richly allusive but disturbing story of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents; the theme of myrrh and sacrifice, the theme of redemptive suffering. “How vain the cruelty of Herod’s fear”, as we sang. But they return, as T.S. Eliot famously intuits, “no longer at ease”, no longer comfortable and secure in their former assumptions and outlooks. The suggestion is that they are changed by what they have been given to see. Such is the purpose of Epiphany. It opens us out to the presence of God and to the purpose of God for our lives. The intent is to change how we see, how we think and feel about God and about the suffering realities of our humanity. But what kind of change?

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“Speak the word only”

The Gospel which orders our thoughts on this The Third Sunday after Epiphany is the double healing of the leper and the Centurion’s servant by Jesus Christ. Epiphany season abounds in miracles. They belong to the making visible of the glory of God. A miracle, after all, is a sign of wonder. The healing miracles are a wonder. But what exactly do we see? Only the signs of the glory in the effects of what is said and done. The wonder, really, is the wonder of Christ.

Christ heals a leper and he heals the paralysed servant of the Centurion. He speaks and he acts. There is healing. The healings are within Israel and also beyond Israel. “He came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.” It is at once universal and particular. Such are the properties of God. Through the history and meaning of Israel the glory of God is not only made known to the world but for the world. The leper is healed within the context of the particular customs and practices of Israel and is held to the requirements of the Law in Israel. But with the Centurion’s request, Jesus acknowledges something more: there is the wonder of faith which coming out of Israel transcends Israel. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel,” Jesus says about the Centurion. For both the leper and the Centurion, Christ is the wonder. There is an epiphany. Something is make known about who God is for us in Jesus Christ.

He is the wonder before he puts forth his hand and before he speaks. The healing miracles are surprisingly not the glory. They are only the making visible of the glory which is present in Christ Jesus. He is the glory. And he is the glory which is somehow known and known not just in his effects but in his person.

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