Category: Sermons

“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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“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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