Category: Sermons

“He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light”

We will hear these words on Christmas Eve in the great Gospel of the Incarnation. But today, on The Fourth Sunday in Advent, we hear precisely about that one who is “sent to bear witness of that light” without whom we can hardly understand anything of the mystery of Christmas. The Gospel today is known as “the record” or “the witness of John”, the witness of John the Baptist who points us directly to the meaning of Christ’s coming. “Behold the Lamb of God,” he says, “which taketh away the sin of the world.”

In the darkest time of nature’s year, we look to the light, but it is not the light of nature that concerns us so much as the light of God’s Truth and Word. That is the greater light which “shines in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not”. Light overcomes darkness and not the other way around. The darkness is more than the longest night of nature’s year in the winter solstice which falls in the middle of this week, this longest week in the longest possible Advent season, marking the slow, slow turn towards spring. No. There is the far greater darkness of human sin and evil countered by the far, far greater light of God.

The readings for today are centuries old. They signal a sense of expectancy and heightened anticipation. The darkness of sin and judgment already gives way to a sense of joy and gladness. All the questions of Advent, that season of holy questions, reach a kind of crescendo in the Gospel of “the witness of John”, in the intensity of the questions about John which turn us to Christ. The Epistle reading from Philippians, too, conveys this sense of joyous anticipation in its repeated insistence on the notes of rejoicing and peace all of which counter the darkness of our anxieties. In every way, these readings speak to our contemporary dilemmas and concerns. We are, I am afraid, deeply anxious and uncertain, afraid and troubled about our world and day and about ourselves. Yet the winters of our discontent are really always about ourselves.

What these readings highlight are matters of the soul. They speak to the radical meaning of Christ’s coming as redeemer and saviour. That makes no sense at all if we somehow assume that we are all-sufficient in and of ourselves. The awareness of the darkness not only of nature but of human endeavour should provide a necessary reality check on that score. It is ancient biblical wisdom that “it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves”. “We are his people,” the psalmist says, “and the sheep of his pasture.” Therein lies a note of rejoicing as well. “Jubilate Deo”, “O be joyful in the Lord!”(Ps. 100).

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“And she was troubled at this saying”

The Ember days punctuate the changing seasons of nature’s year with a spiritual reminder of the centrality of the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit as the guiding principle of the Church’s life. Historically, Embertide provided occasions for ordinations to the diaconate and the priesthood and so there is a focus on the purpose and meaning of the ministry: in Lent, in Whitsuntide, in the Fall, and in Advent. Along with that overarching ministerial concern there is a specific focus of intention for each Ember season. For Advent the spiritual theme is ‘Peace in the World’ and the specific Advent Embertide service appoints a reading from Micah as the lesson and the story of the Annunciation from Luke for the Gospel.

The lesson from Micah highlights the very powerful and some familiar concept of “beat[ing] swords into plowshares” and “spears into pruning hooks”, images of the transformation of the city at war into the city of peace, at peace in the cultivating of the land but as well the cultivation of the soul. That peace is ultimately found in our “go[ing] up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob” where “he shall teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths.” These are all images that belong to the redemption of our humanity, to our being restored to fellowship with God. It is very much about our learning the ways of God in whom alone we may find peace and joy.

It cannot be found simply in ourselves. We need these spiritual reminders precisely in the face of such catastrophes and tragedies such as what we confront in war-torn Aleppo in Syria, a great city that was once at the centre of the world’s trade routes, a city with a remarkable history and incredibly diverse forms of architecture representative of many of the finest elements in human culture. And now? A place of rubble and despair, a humanitarian disaster area and an indictment on all our protestations to world peace. Aleppo is but one sober and sombre reminder of the complex and confusing forms of human sin and wickedness. Yet such things may awaken us to the message of Pentecost, namely, that the human community and city has no unity in itself. Its peace and unity can only be found in God and in God with us.

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“Behold I send my messenger before thy face,
Which shall prepare thy way before thee”

In the deepening darkness of nature’s year – not to mention the deep coldness of December! – we await the light of God coming to us. Such is the Advent of Christ. Our waiting is not something passive and static. Advent is about our being prepared for the one who comes. How? By way of “ministers and stewards of the mysteries of God” who are likened to “thy messenger”, the one sent to prepare the way of Christ before him. That messenger is John the Baptist and he is one of the two major figures of the Advent landscape of faith especially on The Third Sunday of Advent. The other is Mary. They both belong to the preparations for Christ’s coming.

John is vox clamatis in deserto, “a voice crying in the wilderness”, in Isaiah’s rich imaginary. Yet, here in Matthew’s gospel we are made aware of another kind of darkness, another kind of wilderness. It is neither the darkness nor the wilderness of nature; it is the darkness and the wilderness of human sin. Here John cries out from prison, a victim or victor, too, we might say, of those who speak truth to power. Matthew does not tell us right away why John is in prison but later reveals that it was because he denounced Herod for marrying his brother Philip’s wife, Herodias. This leads to the infamous scene of the daughter of Herodias dancing before Herod on his birthday who “promised with an oath to give her whatever she might ask.” “Prompted by her mother,” Matthew tells us, “she said, ‘Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter’”. And so it was done. We know “the daughter of Herodias” as Salome only from the first century Jewish historian Josephus. She is unnamed in the Gospels.

Knowing the fuller story of John the Baptist only adds to the poignancy of the Gospel. John is the great prophet; indeed, Jesus says “more than a prophet” precisely because everything in his life points to the coming of Christ, both his wondrous nativity and his death under persecution. Here Jesus points us to John the Baptist, pointing us to the ministry of preparation, awakening us to the meaning of the one who comes. How? Through the back and forth, the to and fro of questions. “Art thou he that should come,” John asks from prison through his disciples, “or do we look for another?” The question is not rhetorical; it is genuine. There are always uncertainties and confusions. “How shall this be seeing I know not a man?” Mary asks the Angel of the Annunciation. The questions are pertinent. They belong to our active waiting upon the coming of God’s Word, then and now. The task of “the ministers of Christ and the stewards of the mysteries of God” is to point us faithfully to God’s judgment. He alone “will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts; and then shall every man have praise of God.”

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“Blessed are those servants,
whom their lord when he cometh shall find watching”

Advent is the season of watching and waiting. In our Advent meditations we are watching and waiting upon the meaning of Revelation as the counter to Gnosticism which underlies two of the earliest heresies – false teachings – of the early Church, Docetism and Marcionism. Last week we considered Docetism which is an explicit denial of the Incarnation because of its gnostic dualism which regards the material and physical world as something intrinsically evil as opposed to and distinct from the spiritual which is good. Thus redemption can only be a flight from the physical and the material. All of the accounts of Christ’s birth and crucifixion are subsequently regarded as fiction, as mere appearance, a kind of seeming, hence the word, docetism, from the Greek meaning to seem to be or appear.

The most explicit counter to Docetism in the New Testament is found in the Gospel of St. John in the idea of “the Word was made flesh” which is the great Christmas Gospel and in his first Epistle in such things as “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life” which echoes and affirms the Christmas Gospel and which is read in the Christmas holy days on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist (Dec. 27^th). This suggests something of the importance of the writings of John in the formation of the canon of the New Testament, the coming to be of the collection of gospels, letters, and other writings such as Acts and Revelation that comprise the Christian Scriptures but always, interestingly enough, in tandem with the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures.

Paradoxically, Mariconism is actually the first canon of Scripture, the first attempt to say what Scriptures should be included and read and which ones should not. This is where our attention turns to the idea of Revelation and to the necessity of thinking about what we read and how we read. Marcion was a figure from the second century, c. 144 AD, who looked at the writings of the Jewish Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, as well as at many of the writings of what would come to be part of the New Testament. Some things he liked, other things he didn’t. What he didn’t like he simply threw out. What he liked he kept in. Upon what basis? That is the interesting question, an important question.

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“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope”

Why we need Hell might be an apt title for this sermon. The answer is not so as to have a place for those who annoy us nor is it to make us appreciate heaven as the desperate alternative to the usual parade of human miseries; the idea that life is Hell. No. The reason, paradoxically, has more to do with the reality of hope itself and the possibility of the redemption of our desires.

The poet/theologian Dante clearly teaches that Hell is about getting exactly what you want, only as it truly is which is not the same thing as what we think we want. Hell is for those who have lost, as he puts it, “the good of intellect”, for those who have not remembered or better yet, have not wanted to remember what we have “received and heard” and so have not “kept the word” and have not repented. They have not learned what in fact was written for our learning. Hell, too, Dante suggests, or at least in terms of the virtuous pagans whom he locates in Limbo, a kind of melancholy suburb of Hell, is the condition of those who have no hope meaning that they do not look for anything more than what belongs to the horizons of the world.

But the Word which comes is, unavoidably, a word of judgment as the Gospel reading from St. Luke reminds us in its litany of apocalyptic images. This is an undeniable feature of Advent. The Word calls us to account. The Word convicts and convinces our hearts about the reality of God and his kingdom by which our lives are measured and, inescapably, found wanting. Hope comes into play precisely at this point. In the awareness of an objective measure and standard to which we are accountable, we are brought before the absolute goodness of God. At the very point where human desires discover their limitation, there something more is opened out to us. We want something more.

That something more is conveyed in the pageant of Scripture. St. Paul teaches us that “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” He signals the purpose of the Scriptures. By Scripture he has primarily in mind the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures since it will only be later that the New Testament comes into being as Scripture including a good deal of the writings of St. Paul. They, too, are written for our learning. Learning what? Among a number of essential things that are ultimately concentrated in the Creeds, there is learning about hope. The Scriptures are read that we might have hope. Hope is a strong feature of the Advent. In judgment there is the prospect of hope.

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What saith the Scripture?

St. Andrew is the first saint of the Church year, the Advent saint, really, since his feast day almost invariably falls within or near the season of Advent. The readings for The Feast of St. Andrew complement the advent theme of the coming of God towards us in Word and, ultimately, in the Word made flesh. The theme of revelation is a critical aspect of Advent. Scripture is the crucial vehicle of the revelation of God towards us as Paul’s vibrant passage from Romans makes so abundantly clear.

What do the Scriptures say? The question is in part rhetorical. Paul has in mind the grand pageant of the Torah, the Jewish Scriptures, at once in their limited sense and in a more expanded sense. In other words, the Torah refers both to the first five books of Moses, the Pentateuch or five scrolls, but extends as well to the whole of the Hebrew writings, just as the word Gospel refers immediately to the writings of the four evangelists but extends its range of meaning to the New Testament and even to the whole of the Bible which for Christians means the Old and the New Testament, not to mention a host of other writings in between, as it were. But Paul’s question is more pertinent. What do the Scriptures say?

They reveal God to us and in turn they reveal things about the truth and untruth of our humanity. The concept of revelation especially in and through the witness of the things written about God and Jesus Christ is the critical theme and idea. It is altogether about what comes from God to us and not about the imaginations of our hearts. Revelation is mediation. God’s reveals his word and truth through human agency, of course, but the point of revelation is that the content is divine. We are made only too aware of concepts which require our thinking but which are not of our own making. That is the challenge to faith and to anti-faith; in short, to atheism in almost equal regard. The very idea of revelation is about what is mediated to us and this challenges our thinking and our living. Things long ago and far away and in vastly different contexts and circumstances somehow speak to our present; our experiences and those who have gone before us are gathered up into the eternity of God. We are bidden to attend to what is universal however much it is made known through what is particular and limited.

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“Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness”

Adventus Christi. The Advent of Christ. What does it mean? It means the coming of Christ. Advent celebrates the coming of God towards us in Jesus Christ. One of the Advent questions asks “who is this?” who comes. In the coming of Christ we learn the meaning of the coming of God towards us.

The mystery of Advent is wonderfully captured in today’s readings. Paul talks about the law, explicitly referencing the Ten Commandments understood as fulfilled in love, a love which has to do with our “cast[ing] off the works of darkness” and “put[ting] on the armour of light”, even more “put[ting] on the Lord Jesus Christ”. It marks a transition, a turning from darkness to light, to our lives as lived in the light of God’s Word and Truth. The Gradual Psalm prays that God will turn us as well as “turn[ing] again and quicken[ing] us” and for what end? “That thy people may rejoice in thee.” Advent is about the turning of God towards us in Jesus Christ.

What does that mean? It means that there is at once joy and judgment, even the wrath of the angry Christ! There is joy in the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem but, in the wisdom of Thomas Cranmer in the sixteenth century, instead of ending the passage with the response of the multitude who answer the question “Who is this?” by saying “This is Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee,” the reading continues with the story of Christ’s “cast[ing] out all them that sold and bought in the temple”, “overthrow[ing] the tables of the money changers”, and berating all who heard him with the words: “It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” The contrast could not be greater between the joyous cries of “Hosanna to the Son of David” and Christ’s words of anger and rebuke at the betrayal and misuse of the temple, the house of God, and the things of God. Yet that is exactly the point of the Advent.

There is joy and there is judgment. The joy is in the judgment. God cares enough to turn to us! Why? Because he seeks our turning to him. It means that we have to confront the works of darkness which stand in such stark opposition to the light of Christ. How do we begin to turn and be found in the turning of God to us?

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“Come and see”

“Compassion without holiness is moral softness”, Aelred of Rievaulx reminds us, a voice from 12^th century northern England. The church year runs out as much in compassion as in judgment. It is really the compassion of Christ that allows us to look upon our follies and our failures and not be destroyed by what we see about ourselves. The compassion of Christ encourages us to renew our love and to seek his holiness. “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people” is our prayer on this day which marks the transition from the end of one church year to the beginning of the next, from the end of the Trinity season to the beginning of Advent.

It doesn’t mean that there is no judgment, rather it qualifies what the judgment is about. Judgment belongs to the love of God – to the love which is God and the love which comes from God. Judgment is God’s love of his own righteousness for the sake of which he seeks our good. Our good – what is good and meaningful for us – can only be found in his will. God’s will for us is what is right for us. What is right for us belongs to what God wants for us. The theme of judgment is ever before us because our lives always stand under what God wants for us. Ultimately that is the greatest compassion.

What God wants for us always contrasts with where we are and what we do. There is the judgment that we are sinners precisely because we do not measure up to God’s will and purpose for us. To be sure. We do not, if we are honest, measure up to what we would like to be about ourselves. We are not right with ourselves because we are not right with God. The problem is not with what God wants for us but with our failure to be faithful and obedient to his Word. What God wants for us, after all, is not a mystery hidden from view; it is revealed. In other words, if judgment is the sole principle of reality, then we all stand condemned, hopelessly and utterly unable to be right with God.

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“They shall gather together his elect from the four winds,
from one end of heaven to the other”

It is called the Matthean Apocalypse. To some it might seem a fitting commentary on the whole spectacle of the American presidential election! Yet today’s readings belong to a deeper and more profound reflection on the end-times than what is part of our current uncertainties. It speaks of realities which go beyond the social and the political at the same time as they serve as a kind of commentary upon them.

We don’t often hear these readings. You will note that this is The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity and yet the readings are those of The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany. Why is that? Because the Trinity season and the Epiphany season in the order of the Church year are both variable in the number of Sundays, varying in length according to the date of Easter which is later or earlier in any given year. The Trinity season can be as long as twenty-six Sundays; Epiphany can be as short as two Sundays. Each offsets the other. But for centuries there were no readings specifically appointed for the Fifth and Sixth Sundays after Epiphany since they don’t happen every year or for the Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Sundays after Trinity which equally occur relatively infrequently. But in the 17^th century, in an important post-Cranmerian development, Bishop John Cosin of Durham, wrote two collects, following Cranmer and the older Eucharistic tradition of prayers based upon the scripture readings at Communion, and appointed epistles and gospels for the fifth and sixth Sundays after Epiphany. Intriguingly, and with great insight, these were appointed as well for the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth Sundays after Trinity. In other words, they are intentionally designed to do double duty, serving at once within the sequence of ideas in the late Epiphany season and in the late Trinity season when needed.

Well, this may seem merely academic stuff, mildly interesting, but of no real importance to your life and to the life of faith. So there has been a development and an evolution to the way the Scriptures are read in the Church. Fine. So things can change. True. And they have but in what way and upon what principles? There is a huge difference between modest, incremental developments and revolutionary developments: the one demands attention to underlying and essential principles; the other is its own principle to which everything else must submit. There is something of radical importance about these developments that challenge the revolutionary changes that have beset the Church and the culture. It is twofold. First, the whole business of the Scripture readings at the Holy Eucharist in the course of the Church year is of the greatest significance because it has entirely to do with our living in the Word of God revealed in the witness of the Scriptures; and, secondly, it recalls us to the question about what are the Scriptures. In other words, how we read and what we read are inescapably intertwined and interconnected. These are questions which have sadly been ignored.

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“Who are these?”

The Festival of All Saints in all of its richness and glory provides us with the best if not the only reason to love the Church and a counter to all of the reasons to hate the Church. The vision of the communion of saints is the vocation of our humanity. We are reminded of the forms of our spiritual fellowship that properly define the end and purpose of our lives. In prayer and praise, we participate in that heavenly city and community even now. In the greyness of nature’s year, in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, we celebrate the spiritual gathering that is our homeland, the homeland of the spirit.

Our evening readings complement the powerful lessons which belong to All Saints’ Day. The lesson from Revelation echoes the reading tonight from Second Esdras about “a multitude” which cannot be numbered who are those who have “put off mortal clothing and put on the immortal” and have “confessed the name of God”. It is a vision of the confessing Church in its truth and glory. The lesson from Revelation expands on the nature of that confession. It is about the praise and worship of “our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb”, images that extend the concept of “the Son of God” who is “in their midst” in Second Esdras. It becomes a reference to Christ and to our fellowship in and with Jesus Christ, “the author and the finisher of our faith”, as the lesson from Hebrews reminds us, a lesson, too, which complements, it seems to me, the rich and powerful Sermon on the Mount centered on the Beatitudes which is the Gospel for All Saints’ Day.

“Who are these?” Second Esdras asks, a question which Revelation takes up with even greater intensity. “What are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence came they?” A rhetorical question, it is answered with the profound insight that “these are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” extending and developing further the idea in Second Esdras of having “put off mortal clothing and put on immortal”. Somehow it is in and through suffering, not unlike the examples of suffering which the lesson from Hebrews enumerates: “mockings and scourgings,” being “chain[ed] and imprison[ed], stoned and sawn in two, killed with the sword, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated, those whom the world was not worthy.” Quite a list of nasties and yet all those forms of suffering are drawn into and belong to the sufferings of Christ who “endured the cross, despising the shame”. No glory apart from the litany of suffering.

And that is a hard lesson for our times and yet a most necessary lesson.

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