Category: Sermons

“If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole”

It is a most touching scene, if you will pardon the pun. But here is a story about someone who is suffering terribly and who has suffered “with an issue of blood twelve years” and who seeks healing not by the touch of Jesus but just by touching his garment. As touching as her faith is, it is a long ways from what Paul seeks for us in his letter to the Colossians, namely, our being “filled with the knowledge of [God’s] will in all wisdom and understanding” without which there cannot be that greater wholeness for our humanity, namely, our being made “meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light”. The wholeness that this woman seeks belongs to the vocation of our humanity realised in the communion of saints. It means a deeper understanding of human suffering and of human redemption, a deeper understanding of healing; ultimately it means an understanding of death and resurrection even in the face of scorn and mockery.

Our readings this morning can be seen in the light of the scripture readings that belong to the Festival of All Saints. It extends to an octave, eight days of consideration about the vocation of our humanity. For that is what All Saints is all about. We are offered a vision of heaven but not at the expense of the realities of suffering and death. All Saints’ embraces the Solemnity of All Souls which recalls our common mortality, for example. The Octave of All Saints’ prepares us, it seems to me, for a kind of secular All Souls’ Day in the commemorations that belong to Remembrance Day in our culture. There is something deeply spiritual about such things that speak directly and profoundly to an understanding of our humanity in its truth and dignity in and through the awful spectacles of death and destruction in the wars of the world.

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What are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence came they?

“Our revels now are ended”, it seems, as Shakespeare says in The Tempest. All the fuss and fun, fantasy and delight, horror and scare of Halloween is past. But is it? Or are only the ways in which contemporary culture co-opts the real meaning of Halloween finally over and finished, perhaps? What really is Halloween all about? Teaching children to become beggars and terrorists? Trick or Treat? All in the service of the candy world? Another commercial venture in pursuit of profit? There is no doubt that a number of events and activities have become associated with Halloween. But are they what it is really all about?

It is interesting to see how certain customs and practices arise and dominate our imaginations. In a way, Halloween has become hijacked to other secondary aspects and features of something else, something much more profound and significant which is easily lost from view. The point here is not to declaim against its ludic qualities – the sense of play and especially the play of the imagination signalled in masks and costumes, for instance. No. There is a deeper point captured in a wonderful Latin phrase. Abusus non tollit usum. The abuse or misuse of something does not take away from its proper use.

This is wisdom. We live in a world where all kinds of things are misused, a world where there is an abuse of language, of the world itself, of ourselves and of one another. The answer is not to be proscriptive but to recover a deeper sensibility and understanding of the better and proper use and purpose of things. And so, with Halloween. It is important to recall its truer meaning. Monday was properly speaking All Hallows’ Eve, the Eve of the Feast of All Saints in the western Christian traditions. While it connects with older themes about the borderlands between the living and the dead in many, many of the cultures of the world, it celebrates another view of our humanity than simply our mortality, another view of our humanity than the transformations of our own imaginations about ourselves. It offers us a profound vision of our humanity as a community of spirit which finds its truth in the worship and praise of God signalled in the lesson from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine.

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“Whose is this image and superscription?”

A coin? A bitcoin? No. An actual coin, a physical object, and not the term coined, if you will pardon the pun, for a computational algorithm belonging to the realm of bits and bytes in the digital world. All this fuss about a coin? Well, yes, it seems so. “Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar or not?” The Pharisees and the Herodians ask Jesus but only so as to “entangle him in his talk”. All this fuss about a coin turns on an image and a superscription, a picture and the words which surround or are about an image on a coin. Coins as physical objects have a powerful symbolical significance. Jesus uses something as ordinary and basic as a coin, a penny, to teach us something powerful about our identities and the structuring of our loyalties.

The picture is an image, a depiction of Caesar, the ruling authority of the political world of Jesus’ day. The superscription identifies in writing that authority. Our coins, to the extent that we still have them, are stamped with the image of the Queen – the sovereign principle of this nation of Canada. All on a coin. It suggests the interplay between politics and economics.

It is a much vexed problem which we can never entirely escape. The challenge is to think the relation between economics and politics, on the one hand, and, far more importantly, the relation between them both and spiritual life, on the other hand. It is the latter about which Jesus is most concerned. In a way, it is a question about what is the fundamental nature of reality. Is the real simply the social, the economic and the political? Or does the spiritual and the intellectual, the philosophical and the theological point us to the reality of God which in turn engages the realms of the social, the economic and the political?

This gospel story, like so many of the gospel stories, challenges our assumptions. They disquiet and disturb us. This gospel story confronts us with the fundamental question about our spiritual identity. In a way, Jesus’ question is really asking about us in relation to God. Whose image and superscription are we? The analogy here is between the coin, symbolizing economic and political might, and ourselves as made in the image of God as spiritual and intellectual creatures.

But if we define ourselves primarily and essentially by money, property, and power then we deny the one in whose image we are made and remade. It is the challenge and the issue for contemporary culture. What is a means to end, a medium of exchange, becomes instead the defining reality of our lives. We forget what money really is because we forget who we truly are. The consequences are enormous and inescapable.

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“That your love may abound yet more and more”

Abundant love. Super-abundant love. The love which cannot be numbered. The love which cannot be constrained. It is a beautiful concept. How is it to be realised in us? In a way, that is the great question of the Trinity season. How are the living words of Christ to be made alive in us? How will we act out of what we have heard and seen? Will we? The point is that we hear and see things that require a response in us.

The Gospels often provide us with powerful illustrations about our human failings, on the one hand, and God’s redeeming grace at work in us, on the other hand. The Gospel for the 22^nd Sunday after Trinity is one such example. It begins with a question from Peter to Jesus about how often do you forgive the one who has sinned against you. Is there a set number? Can forgiveness be limited to an algorithm, to a mathematical formula? Everything else is in our world and day, it seems. We are quite content to let the algorithms of Googledom send us birthday greetings and tempt us with endless advertisements programmed to our supposed interests, not to mention letting the entire stock market be run by algorithms. So why not forgiveness? Why not seven times?

Jesus’ response is about abundant love. “I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.” Literally? Four hundred and ninety times? And, then, at the four hundred and ninety-first time, what? Forget it, your allotment of forgiveness is up? Tough luck, buddy. It is, of course, a deliberate exaggeration. Who, after all, is going to keep track of such a number? Why, you would need some sort of algorithm just to do the numbering! But that misses the entire point. Forgiveness is not something that can be quantified. To think that it can misses the whole meaning of forgiveness. Ultimately it is something from God that is meant to live and move in us, if we will let it.

There is the crux of the matter brought out in the parable which Jesus tells to illustrate the point about the immeasurable nature of forgiveness. It is the parable of the unforgiving servant who having been forgiven a great debt of “ten thousand talents”, a huge sum, turns around and refuses to forgive a lesser servant a far, far, smaller debt owed to him, a mere “hundred pence”. It is a brilliantly clear example of someone being forgiven who does not forgive in turn; the complete opposite of the petition in the Lord’s Prayer. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.”

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“Then opened he their understanding,
that they might understand the Scriptures”

The Collect for the Feast of St. Luke identifies him as an Evangelist and a Physician of the soul. Paul’s Epistle from 2^nd Timothy says that only Luke is with me but also refers to “books” and “parchments”, two forms of written media through which ideas are conveyed, namely, the codex and the scroll. The Gospel from the last chapter of Luke’s Gospel reminds us of Luke’s interest and focus on Christ’s opening out to us the Scriptures for our understanding. It is a theme which is especially prominent in the season of the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ and in the readings from Luke in those seasons.

The image of Luke as a Physician of the soul is most apt. For most of the long Trinity Season, Luke is we might say the Church’s spiritual director and there is an intriguing and important feature to Luke’s writings, both his Gospel and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles attributed to him. That feature is wonderfully captured in the epithet which Dante uses for St. Luke, calling him appropriately enough, “scriba mansuetudinis Christi”, ‘the scribe of the gentleness of Christ’. It is I think an important insight into the character of his writing.

There is a quality of gentleness to the way in which Luke pictures Christ in his encounters with our humanity. It is not by accident that Luke is both the patron saint of doctors and artists, particularly painters. No one provides more compelling and vivid pictures of the Passion than St. Luke. Think of the power of his depiction of the Agony in Gethsemane and the way in which Luke reveals to us something of the inner turmoil and conflict in the soul of Christ, “on the night in which he was betrayed”. And, perhaps, even more there is the powerful scene of Peter’s betrayal. In Luke’s vivid account, “the Lord turned and looked upon Peter”. That look was enough to remind him of what Jesus had said about Peter denying Jesus three times. “And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.” It is a masterful and powerful moment, a picture of firm gentleness. Sometimes a look is more effective that spoken words. But what kind of look? A look of gentle compassion and understanding for the human condition, for the individual. A look that recalls us to truth, even through our tears.

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“And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken”

“Faith cometh by hearing”, Paul famously tells us, adding “and hearing by the Word of God”. It is a challenging and important concept especially in our rather visually fixated age where so much emphasis is placed on images seen on screens, on what is curiously called ‘virtual reality’ which already suggests something not entirely real, something not fully actual. It is commonly said that ‘seeing is believing’ and yet we are only too aware of the ambiguities and the distortions about what is claimed for as being seen. Is it actual or merely a simulacrum of reality; indeed, something merely photo-shopped?

But then isn’t there a similar ambiguity and uncertainty about what is said and heard? Especially in the current culture where truth seems to have flown completely away, at least if the American presidential election campaigns are anything to go by. We confront a world, it seems, where fear and negativity and lies that are known as lies triumph over truth and honour, over considered belief and honesty, what Rex Murphy has called, with due apologies to Tom Wolfe, “the bonfire of the inanities”. But the world wants, it seems, something good to come out of America. Perhaps that explains the awarding of the Nobel prize for literature to Bob Dylan, one last paean of praise to the sixties and its siren calls to a kind of peace and truth, to a kind of innocence in contrast to hypocrisy and deceit, for “Where preachers preach of evil fates/Teachers teach that knowledge waits/Can lead to hundred-dollar plates/Goodness hides behind its gates/But even the president of this United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked.” Not exactly a pleasing mental image in the current situation, to be sure. Yet the idea that “Goodness hides behind its gates” is a powerful thought and, perhaps, just perhaps, it is in the context of that awareness that this gospel can begin to speak to us.

It is really a question about the resonance of God’s word in us, about our being alive to truth over and against the lies and the deceits of our own hearts. Here in this powerful gospel story what is heard and seen stands in stark contrast to what is wanted, even demanded and required to be seen. Jesus addresses this directly. “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”. He speaks, it seems to me, to an almost universal feature of our humanity – the desire for signs and wonders. Jesus names our expectation and its consequence – our unbelief. For where God is wanted to be tangibly present – immediately there for us, subject to us, as it were – faith has no meaning. The Word has, literally, no resonance in us.

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“So shall my word be”

Thanksgiving is a profoundly spiritual activity. It is about a certain kind of attitude and approach to life. It is about being thoughtful, the exact counter to the many forms of thoughtlessness in our culture and world. Thanksgiving, too, is counter-culture especially in relation to the entitlement culture which surrounds us. Thanksgiving is not about taking things for granted or worse, thinking that we are owed whatever we think we should have and want. Thanksgiving is not thanksgetting!

The idea of thanksgiving is a powerful concept that connects to the theme of creation. Thanksgiving speaks to the respect and dignity of our humanity and to our human vocation. It complements the idea in Genesis about God placing our humanity in the proverbial Garden of Eden “to till it and to keep it”. Thanksgiving extends that idea to taking delight in the good order of creation and in the good will of the Creator. Thanksgiving is a kind of grammar lesson, too, because it involves the idea of being thankful for the good things of creation which we are privileged to enjoy and to the idea of being thankful to God. You’ve got to love the power of prepositions!

Thankfulness is a kind of thoughtfulness, a redire a principia, a return to a principle but that return is something fundamentally positive. It involves our recognition that the world as intelligible and orderly is not just there for us but is something which is to be honoured and respected both in itself and because it is God’s world. It says something about us as human beings that we can be thankful. It is a profoundly spiritual idea. As the poet, George Herbert, notes, it belongs to our humanity to be “the secretaries of thy praise”, the secretaries of the praise of God, giving voice to the voiceless creation, giving praise for the simple truth that a zucchini is a zucchini, or in the context of Windsor, that a pumpkin is a pumpkin even when it is being used as a boat! All of which comes from God. Our praises and thanksgivings all go to God.

The Thanksgiving weekend in Canada combines several forms of thanksgiving. Traditionally and globally, there are the celebrations of the harvest, harvest thanksgiving. In the countries which derive many of their cultural traditions from northern Europe, harvest thanksgiving is a bit of a movable feast, depending on when the harvest is gathered. The idea of harvest has very much to do with our engagement with creation raised to a higher order by gathering the fruits of the harvest into the churches as a symbol of our recognition of the Creator and his creation. To that notion of thanksgiving has been added the idea of giving thanks for political freedoms, the idea of national thanksgiving. All of these things speak to our spiritual freedom.

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“That ye may know”

The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, also known as Michaelmas, celebrated Thursday past, reminds us that there is a cosmic dimension to the conflicts between good and evil. “There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels”. Here there be dragons? Who is this dragon? We are told that he is “that old serpent, called the devil and Satan which deceiveth the whole world”. We are presented with the reality of finding ourselves in a moral universe where there are conflicts and tensions, battles between good and evil. It is a world which, perhaps, we know only too well (unless we have deceived ourselves).

But left at that we have simply a kind of fatalistic dualism in the idea of two equally powerful and opposing principles, good versus evil. Yet that is neither the lesson of Michaelmas nor the lesson in today’s readings. “The dragon fought and his angels”, but, more importantly, they “prevailed not” against Michael and his angels. There was war but there was also victory, the triumph of good over evil.

Michaelmas reminds us of the idea of evil as that which opposes the good, hence the concept of Satan, the devil, “that old serpent”, recalling us to the story of the Fall in The Book of Genesis as well as to the theme of deception. But the important point is that the power of the good outweighs all and every form of evil. In the Christian understanding, St. Michael and his angels defeat the dragon and his angels, not through any special force or merit of their own simply, but “by the blood of the lamb”, an obvious reference to Christ and his sacrifice, and “by the word of their testimony”, their witness to God in Christ, and by extension, our witness. There was war in heaven, not there is war. A major point of difference.

Yet Michaelmas also reminds us that the dragon and his angels have been “cast out into the earth”. Conflict and war are inescapably features of our world and disturbingly so. Who cannot be moved with indignation and outrage at the bombing of relief and aid convoys in Aleppo, Syria, to mention but one of many global atrocities? Is the world, then, the place of dualism between two equal but opposing forces? No. The radical idea of Michaelmas means that while there is no end of wars and conflicts between good and evil in the world, the good is always greater in principle and in truth. At issue is whether we are capable of grasping this thinking any more. Not the least of our problems lies in how we think about good and evil whether in relativistic terms which deny their reality or in dualistic terms which despair of the ultimate truth of the good and its power over all evil. Part of the problem for all of us has to do with our discernment about what is the good and what is evil in our world and in ourselves.

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“Michael and his angels fought against the dragon”

“Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress … In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo” (T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock). Michelangelo? The ninja turtle? No, the great Renaissance artist. Or is this simply all a digression? The name, Michelangelo, derives from The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels’ which marks the closing down of September, on the one hand, and the beginning of the School Term, on the other hand, especially at Oxford and Cambridge and the schools which derive their traditions of education from them.

Turtles and angels do have something in common. They are both part of the created order. They both belong to our reflections upon the world as intelligible. Angels remind us of some very important features of our humanity. They remind us that we are spiritual creatures by virtue of our thinking and our loving. When we think and love we are in the company of angels.

Michaelmas speaks about the things which belong to our intellectual and spiritual life. One of the wonderful thing about angels is that you can’t see them. You can only think them! For some that seems crazy. If you can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist; it isn’t real, some may think. Well, to the contrary, there are lots of things which we can’t see but nonetheless respect and recognise: our thoughts and feelings for one thing as well as lots of things in particle physics such as quarks, neutrinos, and nuons or in math with such things as numbers and shapes – these are not sense perceptible things. They are realities grasped by our minds through our thinking. Like the angels, we can only think them.

Angels belong to a long and profound tradition of poetic and philosophical reflection, to the ways in which the world is intelligible. They are the invisible reasons for the visible things of the world, intellectual principles which are intermediate, in some form or other, between God and man. We can only think the angels and, in some sense, when we are thinking we are in the company of angels.

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“Thou shalt love …with all thy mind”

There is something wonderfully reflective about the Scripture readings in the late part of the Trinity season that is particularly necessary in our rather unreflective age, however challenging we may find it. Here we are being told to love with the whole of our being including “with all thy mind”. Something inescapably intellectual belongs to the spiritual realities of our life in Christ.

We are presented with an imperative, something commanded, not a maybe or a might be but a must be. Here are strong words that challenge all our assumptions about what we think is love. Strong words, too, that are voiced in the context of controversy, a controversy between Jesus and the questioning scribes, one of which, at least, “answered intelligently” by recognizing the significance of the Jewish Shema, what is sometimes called the Summary of the Law, as being “better than all the burnt offerings and the sacrifices.”

But it is a curious thing. Jesus’ answer to the question “which commandment is the first of all” is to relate the Summary of the Law. Love here is about the orientation and direction of the inner activity of our being. Love is commanded. It means loving God with the whole of our being – “with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.” With the exception of “all thy mind”, this is simply to quote Deuteronomy, though the addition is really only an explication of what is implicit in the Hebrew parallelism of “all thy heart” and “all thy soul.” Much has sometimes been made of the absence of “all thy mind” in Deuteronomy and its presence in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Certainly it reflects a new and important focus on the logos of God, the Word of God, as apprehended by our minds in the Christian understanding of things. And certainly, the word here for mind is the term which Plato uses as the highest form of human intellectual activity, διανοια.

But Jesus doesn’t stop with just that passage from Deuteronomy; he goes on to say that “the second is like it, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” to which he also adds “There is none other commandment greater than these.” And, at least one of the scribes responds positively recognizing that the Summary of the Law is a complete statement. It comprehends the true meaning of the Law of Israel. The Law is love. We are commanded to love.

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