Category: Sermons

“Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David”

It is a most powerful Gospel story, the encounter between “a woman of Canaan”, as Matthew calls her, and Jesus whom she addresses as “Lord” and as “the Son of David”, terms of address that arise out of the story of Israel. Some of the most intense encounters with Jesus happen with those who are somehow outside of Israel and yet remind Israel of what actually belongs to her truth and life. One thinks of the Centurion about whom, Jesus says, “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel” or about the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob with whom he has an extended conversation about the living waters of eternal life and about worshiping “the Father in Spirit and Truth”. But this encounter is, I think, almost unparalleled in its troubling intensity.

She comes out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon crying out to Jesus “have mercy upon me”, but her concern is for her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil.” This is of another order than the healing of the body though soul and body are intertwined and interdependent, we might say. It’s just that spiritual and mental disorders are deeper and darker, it seems. And as such, there is the suggestion of the diabolical, of our allowing ourselves to be taken over by other forces and so surrendering our freedom and dignity. We become captive to some disorder in ourselves. The problem is within us, however much we might like to blame others, society, or the environment, whatever. We can sense the distress of a mother dealing with a deeply troubled daughter. It is the stuff of our own times.

The encounter illumines the nature of faithful prayer and challenges our indifference to matters spiritual, the casual and lukewarm way in which we approach Church and religion, the easy and indulgent excuses that we make that keep us from the very things that contribute most to the good and the health of our souls. The woman is insistent on what she senses and knows about Jesus. But this, paradoxically, is her humility that grants her access to the mercy she seeks. What we have here is what we pray in our liturgy in The Prayer of Humble Access; a prayer shaped by this Gospel story and the story of the healing of the Centurion’s servant.

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“Turn unto the Lord your God”

The words of the Prophet Joel belong to the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Yet they have a powerful resonance throughout the whole of Lent and even more throughout the whole progress of the Christian life of Faith. In a way, it is all about the turning. This is an important spiritual principle which was well understood by one of the outstanding preachers and masters of the spiritual life in our own Anglican tradition, Lancelot Andrewes.

A celebrated preacher at the courts of Elizabeth and James in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, he stands not only with one foot in one century and the other in another but in the moments of transition between the medieval world and the early modern world and in ways that look back reflectively and profoundly upon the Fathers of the Patristic Period as well as ahead to the ambiguities and uncertainties that belong to our contemporary world. His sermons and his prayers are themselves an outstanding monument to the spiritual tradition which has come to be known as Anglicanism and which above all else connects that tradition to the essential Catholicism of the universal Church. It is, we might say, one of the counters to the fideism of our current situation by which I mean the narrow retreat into the ghettoes of our minds at the expense of the breadth and depth of the Catholic Faith in its truth and beauty.

Andrewes was a celebrated preacher in his day and his sermons and prayers have had a remarkable influence well beyond his time and place. While they are intense and demanding sermons, it seems to me worth considering the salient features of some of his Lenten Sermons precisely because they bring out a deep biblical wisdom understood creedally and doctrinally. They are indeed a redire ad principia, not just in terms of repentance which he especially refers to in these terms but because the whole of the Christian life is a turning back to God, a return to the principle, a point which appears in many of his sermons. Our endeavour will be simply to point out some of the themes of repentance that are presented and explored in some of the sermons which he preached in Lent.

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“One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin”

The temptations which belong to the beginning of Lent connect to the end, to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. He who is pierced for us is tempted for us.

To be tempted and to be pierced are related words. The overcoming of temptation belongs equally to the overcoming of his being pierced, namely, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The cross and the resurrection are obliquely, yet strongly, present in the temptations of Christ. There is a resurrection into the presence of the living Word and Spirit of the Father, but only through the burning love of the crucified, a love which is already signaled in the temptations of Christ read on the First Sunday in Lent.

To be tempted is to be drawn to think and act in ways which we know to be wrong and false. This implies as well that we are drawn away from what we know to be right and true. Our reason is beguiled; our will is seduced. We are at once deceivers and deceived.

Temptations are received in the soul. It is there that they have their force of attraction, drawing us to what we know in some sense we should refuse. But there is always a choice, a crucial moment of decision, whether to give in or withstand. This is the counter to all of the forms of determinism in our culture and day. The problem is not that there are temptations – these there must be – but how we face them. Sin, after all, does not lie in the temptations themselves, but in our yielding to them, whether inwardly in our thoughts or outwardly in our deeds. Temptations actually belong to the path of our spiritual journey to God and with God. They are, we might even say, necessary to the perfecting of our wills, to the matter of setting love in order. They belong to our freedom in Christ.

The temptations of Christ are our temptations. His will to bear them belongs to the divine will to redeem. The temptations of Christ clarify the meaning of all and every temptation. There is no temptation which does not fall under one or other of the temptations of Christ. Our understanding is clarified and our wills are fortified by reflecting on the temptations of Christ. They sanctify our temptations. They are made part and parcel of the way of perfecting grace in us. By virtue of Christ’s temptations, we are inwardly strengthened in resisting, even as the force of the temptations themselves is abated, because we can see them in Christ for what they are and how they can be overcome.

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“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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