Category: Sermons

“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”

The words of the kneeling Stephen as he dies echo Christ’s first word on the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” It is no accident that the first of the holy days of Christmas is The Feast of St. Stephen. It signifies two things that are of the greatest importance. The first is that without the Cross there is no manger. The second is that Christ’s holy nativity inaugurates the mission of the Church. We are to follow in the steps of Christ. He is, as one of the Eastertide collects puts it, “both a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life” (Easter 2). The Feast of Stephen the Martyr reveals the real depth and meaning of Christmas.

It is about sacrifice and about a new orientation to life, a living for others in the spirit of forgiveness. Stephen is the proto-martyr, the first witness of Christ in the form of the giving of his life. In a way, he marks the beginning of a significant tradition, the tradition of the saints. What is that about? Simply the living reality of Christ in the body of his Church and in the lives and actions of his members.

Christmas celebrates the mystery of God with us. Part of its radical meaning is that Christ lives in us. His Incarnation marks his being with us but for a purpose. It is redemption. “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given”, to be sure, but born and given for what? To suffer and to die for us. Why? To show us the true life which God seeks for us – life with God. To show us that sin is the negative feature of our humanity and not its real and radical truth which is found in our being with God. Sacrifice, meaning the giving over of ourselves to the one who has given himself fully for us, becomes the true measure and meaning of our lives. It is ‘another who lives in us’, the other who is Christ Jesus the Lord. Herein lies the importance of the Feast of Stephen.

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“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour,
who is Christ the Lord”

We meet in the contemplative wonder of Christmas morn after all the excitement of Christmas Eve. “And so it was, that while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her first-born son”. He is “the only-begotten of the Father full of grace and truth” as we heard last night from the heights of heaven, as it were. We come to Bethlehem. Why? What does it signify?

We contemplate the great wonder of the unity of God and Man and the whole of the created order. There are the three great masses of Christmas: first, the proclamation and celebration of the eternal Sonship of the child Christ which we heard last night; second, the story of his actual birth made known in the songs of the Angels in the gospel this morning; and, then, later, the Christmas of the Shepherds to whom this angelic news from heavenly heights is proclaimed and made known. The three masses of Christmas present to us something of the fullness of this wonder and delight. Bethlehem is paradise restored, to be sure, but Bethlehem is something more. It inaugurates a new vision and a new life, the new vision and the new life of what has been made known to us, God with us and God for us. “Unto you”, the Angels say to the Shepherds and to us, “unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord”.

We are in the company of the Shepherds, it seems; only so, it seems, can we be in the company of the Angels; and even more, unless we are in the company of Angels and Shepherds, we shall not be with the holy Child who comes to us. The Angels proclaim something great and wondrous for us. Their words are strong words of proclamation that point to a wonder and mystery. They say it is for us. And for them? Only through us it seems, for in what they proclaim and make known we see the unity of the whole of creation with its Creator. The Angels, too, are part of that order. They do simply what belongs to their office and being, to their ministry, as it were. They are the messengers, the audible and visible thoughts of God made known to us.

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“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”

She was an old woman, weary and worn, burdened with the cares and worries of life. She paused for a moment before a Crêche scene in the park of a big city. It was a time when such things were more common and were yet to be regarded as politically incorrect. She put her bags down and looked upon that quiet scene in the midst of the city’s bustle. I watched as she slowly crossed herself before picking up her bags and shuffling on. A Christmas blessing, I thought.

Christmas seems sometimes just too much. Perhaps some of you know what I mean. Kathy and Scotty Cameron have a pillow inscribed with the letters OCD meaning Obsessive Christmas Disorder! All the hustle and bustle, all the frantic press and bother, all the manic shopping and travel, all the tinsel and wrap; all too much. Not to mention the great plethora of images, the sights and sounds that surround this thing we call Christmas. Not to mention the sad array of images of violence and destruction, of war and sorrow that equally confront us and which stand in such glaring contrast to the claims of peace and prosperity, goodwill and charity. All too much, it seems. No time to stop and think.

Such a rich fullness of images. Are we simply to pick and choose whatever suits us or whatever happens to come to the surface of our hearts and minds? Are we like Dylan Thomas in his celebrated poem “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” simply to plunge our hands “into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea” and see what comes out? What comes out is “Mrs. Prothero and the firemen” attending a kitchen fire on Christmas day, a memorable event, no doubt, but it is the question which Jim’s aunt raises, Miss Prothero, who “said the right thing, always” which frames the narrative. “Would you like anything to read?” she asks.

Christmas Eve is about something read. “How do you read?” Jesus asks a questioning lawyer, meaning how do you read the Law, the Torah? He draws out of him what is known as The Summary of the Law, the ethical and spiritual teaching which is at once common to Judaism and Christianity, to Islam and to Greek philosophy and which connects to the teachings of the great religions of the world. The love of God and the love of humanity are somehow inescapably bound together. The lawyer’s answer, itself a collation of passages from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, two of most your favourite books, I am sure, leads to another question by the lawyer, “and who is my neighbour?” Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. It is, we might say, part of the Torah of Jesus. Torah properly means instruction or guidance, an instruction and a guide for life. How you read is also about what you read. It leads to how we live. As we read so we do, as it were. In the mystery of Christmas, God becomes neighbour.

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“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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