Category: Sermons

“Turn unto the Lord your God”

And so it begins. Holy Week immerses us in the Passion of Christ from all four of the Gospels. We turn from The Passion According to St. Matthew on Palm Sunday to the beginning of The Passion According to St. Mark today and its continuation tomorrow.

That Passion begins with the woman who breaks open “an alabaster jar of ointment of spikenard, very precious” and pours it out upon his head, as Mark tells it. This beginning of his account of the Passion ends with the tears of Peter. Both stories are about turning to Christ, the one in anticipation of his Passion and its meaning; the other in the awareness of his sin and betrayal. “She has come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying”, Jesus says, indicating that her action already participates in his Passion.

His words are the counter to the complaint that this breaking open of the alabaster box was a “waste of the ointment” which might have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor, a reasonable point, we might think, but one which misses the deeper point of the Passion. It is not simply about our projects of worldly improvement as if the world in itself were the goal and purpose. “The poor you have with you always,” Jesus famously says, but adds more profoundly, “and whensoever ye will ye may do them good,” encouraging a strong sense of our obligation to help those in need. “But me ye have not always”. Something more is before us, namely the redemption of the world by its being turned to God in Christ. The events of the Passion disabuse us of any idea that we of ourselves can fix the problems of the world. After all, the Passion reveals that we are the problem.

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“Turn unto the Lord your God”

The words of the prophet Joel serve as one of the mantras for the season of Lent, a recurring refrain which shapes the Lenten journey. But even more it provides the matrix through which to contemplate the Passion of Christ which is set before us with great intensity in Holy Week beginning today, Palm Sunday.

It is the holy business of this Holy Week to be constantly turning us to Christ who has turned to us. In a way, it is really one long liturgy that begins today and ends on Easter, a kind of circling around and around the mystery of God in the work of redemption. “Rend your hearts,” Joel exhorts us and “not your garments.” It is the business of Holy Week to break our hearts. In our turning to God, we are invited to learn two necessary and interrelated ideas. The one is the truth and dignity of our common humanity as found in our being with God; the other is the disorder and disarray of our humanity which is equally common to human experience. How will we learn to think these two contraries together? Only by immersing ourselves in the fullness and completeness of the Passion of Christ as set before us in all four accounts of the Passion in the Gospels. Such is the intensity of the logic of Holy Week.

That logic is set before us today. We turn to Christ who enters Jerusalem triumphantly. Palm branches are strewed before his way and garments, too, are laid out before him and yet he enters riding, as Zechariah prophesied, “upon an ass and a colt, the foal of an ass,” in other words humbly and in meekness. Here is no cavalcade of high-end cars and limousines, no great retinue of the rich and the mighty; instead there is the sense of joy and expectancy on the part of the common people who turn to Christ, crying out “Hosanna to the Son of David.” It moves the whole city. “Who is this?” they say, to which the multitude answer, “Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee”. Part of the project of Holy Week is for us to realise with “the Centurion and they that were with him” that “truly this is the Son of God,” God with us to redeem us. And that means confronting the sad and sorry realities of our faults and failings, not to mention the sad and sorry realities of our broken and disordered world.

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“Ye know not what ye ask.”

“April”, it seems, “is the cruelest month of all” (T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland). Hardly the time for a pilgrimage, a journey unless it is like that of the Magi “with the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter” (Eliot, Journey of the Magi) all over again with more snow! Yet we enter into the deepest and most intense pilgrimage of all, the inward pilgrimage of our souls to God and with God and in God, the pilgrimage of Passiontide.

The Cross is veiled, present and yet unseen. Such is the paradox of Passiontide. We see but “in a glass darkly.” We know and yet, we do not know. We make our way to the Cross. The first word that we will hear is “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. The darkness of our ignorance is so much greater than we realize. It embraces our willfulness, too, signaling our willful ignorance born out of pride and prejudice, born out of folly and pretense, born out of presumption and envy. Such are the realities of sin.

Yet, this is the way that somehow we must want to go, if nothing else than for the clarification of our desires and the purification of our wills. We are on a journey with Christ, only now to discover that he and he alone “by his own blood enter[s] in once into the holy place” to obtain “eternal redemption for us”. We can only follow. We can only be among the crowd, at once deceivers and deceived, and yet to learn and be changed. The Epistle reading from Hebrews presents the stark and uncompromising logic of the atonement. Christ is the Mediator between God and Man whose labour of love makes us at one with God despite ourselves, and even in and through the darkness of our ignorance and the danger of our arrogance, and even more because of our betrayals of his love. Passiontide is really the parade of our betrayals.

We want what the mother of Zebedee’s children and her sons want. What is that? We want the very best for ourselves and for our children. But, inescapably, what we want for ourselves and for our children sets us and them at odds with everyone else. A benefit for a few is necessarily at the expense of the many. The poignancy of Passiontide lies precisely in the awareness of that paradox; our good is often sought for at the price of another’s hurt.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary often falls within the season of Lent. Indeed, there have been times even when it has fallen on Good Friday which moved a poet like John Donne to write a powerful poem about the nature of God’s comings and goings with us, a theme which Lancelot Andrewes develops over and over again as well. In Upon the Annunciation and the Passion falling upon one day. 1608, Donne explores in a rich and allusive way the comings of God to us and the goings of God from us in the double mystery of the Annunciation and the Passion. “At once a son is promised her, and gone,/ Gabriel gives Christ to her, he her to John.” As Donne wonderfully puts it, “All this, and all between, this day hath shown,/ Th’Abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one/ (As in plain maps, the furthest west is east)/ Of the angels’ Ave, ‘ and Consummatum est”, a wonderful contraction of the mystery of God’s turning to us and for us. It is a kind of circling.

The turning is about God’s turning to us and our turning to him. Such are the motions of God’s comings and goings to, with and in us. Redire ad principia, a kind of circling, is all about turning. It is the dominant feature of Andrewes Ash-Wednesday sermons entitled in the collection made by Buckeridge and Laud as Of Repentance and Fasting.

In the first of those sermons preached in 1598 before Queen Elizabeth, Andrewes reflects upon the nature of the turning. He takes as his text what might seem an unusual passage, the 34^th verse Psalm 78, “when He slew them, then they sought Him; and they returned and enquired early after God.” The sermon undertakes to explore “the matter of repentance, expressed here under the terms of seeking and turning.” It focuses on the one to whom we turn just as the Annunciation is about God’s turning to our humanity in Mary and her turning to God in affirmation of the divine will for our salvation. Both Donne and Andrewes have a high regard for the significance of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the economy of salvation. In poems and in sermons, they contribute to the tradition of Marian devotion in seventeenth century Anglican divinity, a tradition that is largely shaped by a strong commitment to the doctrine of Chalcedon and to the measured sense of adiaphora, things indifferent though not unimportant, that allow for a breadth of expression about Marian doctrine but without sacrifice to the principles of essential faith as measured primarily by Scripture and Creed.

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“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

March has been brutal, hardly a picnic. And as for there being “much grass in the place,” it certainly hasn’t been here unless in the Cannabis shops, legal or otherwise, or perhaps the Prime Minister’s Office. One way to escape the madness of March, perhaps, particlularly if you don’t like basketball. “Surely the people is grass,” withering away in the cold winds of March. Yet in contrast to the miseries of March we have these wonderful lessons which strengthen and refresh the soul in the things of God.

Our text speaks profoundly and eloquently about the nature of grace and about the meaning of our lives in faith. The gathering up of the fragments, κλασματα, literally, the broken pieces left over from the picnic in the wilderness with Jesus, signals the nature of redemption itself, the gathering up of the broken fragments of our lives, especially, it seems to me in our broken world and in the realization of our own brokenness. The gathering is about the coming together, literally, a συναγωγη, of our wounded and broken humanity in the wilderness of the world. But a gathering to what end? That nothing be lost. Such is the picture of redemption.

The gathering of the broken fragments of our lives is about our being gathered to God. Such are the Lenten mercies of Christ on this day variously known as “Mothering Sunday”, because of the Epistle reading from Galatians which identifies Jerusalem as “the mother of us all.” The nurturing, caring mother is the image of the Church that nurtures and cares for us with the things of heaven. It is also “Refreshment Sunday”, because of the Gospel reading from John about the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness and the further provision for us in “the gathering up of the fragments that remain.” And finally, it is “Laetare Sunday”, because the Introit psalm for the day at Holy Communion is Psalm 122, which begins “Laetatus sum”, “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘We will go unto the house of the Lord.’” That psalm belongs to what are called The Psalms of Ascent, the songs of the going up, the pilgrimage, to Jerusalem. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says in the Gospel for Quinquagesima Sunday just at the outset of Lent.

In the Christian understanding, Jerusalem has become less a physical entity, less a geographical city, and more the image of our spiritual homeland, more the city of God, in which the gathering up of our humanity finds its freedom and its fulfillment in God as a gathering, a συναγωγη, a synagogue, if you will, the place of being with one another in our being with God.

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“Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me”

It is really all about the turning, our turning back to God from whom we have turned away. Such are the realities of sin and grace. And yet, as the Psalmist indicates and as today’s disturbing Gospel illustrates, there can be no turning, no healing, no cleansing of our souls simply on our own merit and strength. Not only do “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves”, but our attempts lead to greater dangers and, perhaps, to the greatest danger of all, despair. We give up on ourselves because we forget God. We give up on him and then we are in darkness and despair, depressive and depressing, oblivious to others because we are buried in our bitter resentments, worries, fears, and judgments about others.

Lent recalls us to the one who knows us better than we know ourselves and in being turned and turning back to him we find the truth of ourselves. It is the counter, indeed, the only counter to the depressed and depressing nature of our current concerns, our broken world, and our broken selves.

Jesus “himself knew what was in man”, John tells us just after the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee, just after the casting out of the money changers in the temple at Jerusalem, just after the prediction of his death and resurrection imaged in terms of the destruction of the temple and its being raised up in three days, just after “many … saw the signs which he did” when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover. Wonderful lessons, we might think, and ones which might awaken faith. Indeed, “many believed in his name” and yet, “Jesus did not trust himself to them, because he knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man; for he himself knew what was in man” (John 2. 24,25)

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“To them which sat in the region and shadow of death, light is arisen”

We are those, too, who sit or have sat in “the region and the shadow of death”, having heard and seen and then, perhaps, have forgotten the light that has arisen upon us and is in our midst. The story of St. Patrick is the story of the conversion of Ireland, of a turning from “the region and shadow of death” and darkness to the light and glory of Christ. The paschal light lit upon Tara’s hill marks the transition from paganism to the beginnings of Christian culture. There is nothing about shillelaghs or shamrocks or snakes in Matthew’s Gospel, let alone about green beer; only something about sea-girt places such as Ireland and, I suppose, Nova Scotia, which while meaning New Scotland, has had its full measure of settlers whom are designated as Scots-Irish., not unlike St. Patrick himself born in Scotland in 387 AD.

More importantly, the Gospel appointed for the commemoration of a Missionary such as St. Patrick, speaks about the preaching of Jesus seen as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about light coming to those in places of darkness, about repentance, about discipleship, and about healing and salvation; in short, all the things that belong to the turning to God through God’s turning to us in the Gospel. It is very much a part of the meaning of Lent. It is all about the turning.

And the epistle, too, underscores the same theme. “The word of God grew and multiplied”, Acts tells us, meaning what, exactly? A new gospel, new things added to the essential proclamation of the faith? This is, unfortunately, a feature of our contemporary confusion, a kind of arrogance, really, which assumes that we know more and better than others before us about the nature of God and even about our humanity. Don’t we, though? Have there not been discoveries that challenge and overturn older ways of looking at things? Are we not always progressing?

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“Nevertheless, not what I will, but what thou wilt”

Christ’s words in Gethsemane are echoed in Leonard Cohen’s beautiful song of reflection, “If it be your will”. The challenge of our lives in faith is to find our truth in God’s truth but that means some serious thinking about the will of God for our humanity. The very rich, suggestive, and profound readings set before us on this The Second Sunday in Lent provide us with such an opportunity.

But first, let me thank your rector, the Revd Dr. Paul Friesen, and the Parish of St. Paul’s for the kindness and the privilege, the pleasure and the honour of preaching tonight and for hosting the Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. The work of the Society has been primarily about reclaiming our fundamental spiritual identity as Anglican Christians embodied in the Prayer Book tradition of theology and spirituality. It is especially an honour to be here at St. Paul’s, Halifax, because of the significant role St. Paul’s plays in the history and life of the Diocese and beyond. It was, to take one small but important example, the St. Paul’s Mite Society which contributed to the building and support of many of our rural parishes, particularly along the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia. That kind of outreach and commitment to the Gospel was altogether crucial for the life of the Church in the remoter parts of the province. Having served for a number of years in such parishes and churches assisted by the St. Paul’s Mite Society, this gives me an opportunity to say thank you.

The Scripture readings that are before us this evening and as well at the Eucharist speak wonderfully to our current distresses and anxieties. We live in a broken world. One of the recurring refrains of the Lenten season is that we are the community of the broken-hearted. To know that is the condition of our turning back to God. “A broken and a contrite heart thou wilt not despise”, as the Psalmist, perhaps David himself, puts it. “Rend your heart and not your garments”, the prophet Joel tells us, “and turn unto the Lord your God.” The season of Lent reminds us of a basic biblical insight expressed in the Collect. “We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves”. But far from leading to a kind of paralysis and helplessness, it moves us to repentance which is about our turning to God and with great insistence. Nowhere is that great insistence seen more clearly than in the Eucharistic Gospel story of the “woman of Canaan” who engages so wonderfully and yet so disturbingly with Jesus, seeking mercy from him as Lord for her daughter who is “grievously vexed with a devil”.

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