Category: Sermons

“No one can say JESUS IS LORD, but by the Holy Spirit”

For centuries upon centuries, the Feasts of the Apostles were observed and celebrated even if they fell upon a Sunday, the only exceptions being in Advent, Lent, Holy Week, the Octave Week of Easter, and Whitsuntide (see BCP, p. 94) when such observances are transferred. The practice recognizes the centrality of the Apostolic Faith communicated to us through the life and witness of the Apostles. It is what we proclaim and profess in the Creeds. “I believe One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,” as in the Nicene Creed at Mass, and “the Communion of Saints” in the Apostles’ Creed. In both Creeds, these statements follow upon “I believe in the Holy Ghost.”

Today is the Feast of St. Bartholomew which happens to fall upon the Tenth Sunday after Trinity this year. I often find such conjunctions intriguing, instructive, and illuminating through the interplay of readings which invite us to a deeper reflection upon our life in the Body of Christ. At the very least they recall us to the radical meaning of what we profess in the Communion of Saints. This counters the overly individualistic aspects of so-called ‘personal faith’ which often betrays itself by overlooking or downplaying what we profess together. It is worthwhile remembering that “I believe” in the Creeds is actually “we believe” in the original Greek.

The Feast of St. Bartholomew complements and illustrates both the Epistle and Gospel readings for Trinity Ten; the one in terms of the gifts of the Holy Spirit as the uniting principle of our faith in Jesus Christ, the other in terms of Jesus’ weeping over the city of Jerusalem, because of our “knowing not the things that belong to our peace,” our “not knowing the time of thy visitation,” and thus betraying the nature and purpose of prayer, famously making “the house of prayer, a den of thieves.” In other words, the betrayals through sin of what belongs to our corporate life in Christ.

But what about the readings for the Feast of St. Bartholomew itself? What do they teach and how are they connected to the readings for Trinity Ten? First, they remind us of the lists of the Apostles among which Bartholomew is named in Matthew, Mark, and Luke and as well here in the Acts 1. Just a list of names? Yes, in a way, but as collected together again in the Upper Room and here after the Ascension and just before Pentecost, they are a reminder to us of their presence with Christ in his Passion, and in the events of the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Sending Down of the Holy Spirit; essential creedal moments, we might say, that belong precisely to the idea of the Apostolic Faith which we profess and which enrolls us with them in that Faith. In the Revelation of St. John, though their specific names are not given, the foundation of the walls of the holy city, Jerusalem, have “on them the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb,” as they are styled. A significant reference to Christ in his passion and sacrifice for us.

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“Now these things were our examples”

Examples of what exactly? Simply to think and do what is rightful as opposed to what is wrongful. Or, as Paul clearly puts it, “to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted,” before mentioning the problem of idolatry. All of this, including the Gospel, turns on the relation between thinking and doing, a question about the virtues and the vices in our souls.

Sanctification or holiness is the project especially of the Trinity season. The focus is on the virtues as the essential activities of our souls as infused by the grace of Christ. Thus the virtues become graces, aspects of the charity or love of Christ moving in us. That requires our thinking and our doing, especially our acting upon what has been made known by way of revelation. Both the Epistle and the Gospel emphasize the point made so clearly in the Collect that we “cannot do anything that is good without thee,” without God, and that only “by thee may we be enabled to live according to thy will.”

This is part and parcel of the core teaching of the Christian Faith. It complements and belongs to a rich and profound ethical tradition of teaching about the relation of the virtues of the soul as transformed into the forms of love. The virtues are the activities of our souls that belong to human excellence and perfection of character. The key point is the transformation of the cardinal or classical virtues into the forms of charity or love. What Paul and Luke present to us is the concept of the virtues as placed upon a new foundation, the foundation of charity or love; in short, Christ, in whom the end or perfection of our humanity alone is found. It cannot be attained by ourselves on the basis of our own power and intent.

This is the point of Paul’s reference to “these things” that are “our examples,” namely, the recapitulation of the Exodus story into the story of Christ. The reading begins and ends with the sacraments of baptism and communion, the very forms of our incorporation and life in Christ. Paul references the moments in the exodus in the wilderness of Sinai as signifying our spiritual life in Christ; at once anticipating it and participating in it. The cloud which protected and covered the people of Israel in the wilderness and the crossing of the Red Sea point to our redemption in Christ sacramentally understood: “our fathers … were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud, and in the sea,” thus, baptism, and “did all eat of the same spiritual food, and did all drink of the same spiritual drink,” thus, communion, both of which are explicitly tied to “the spiritual rock that followed them; and that rock was Christ.” This connects to one of the dominant metaphors for God in the Hebrew Scriptures, God as the Rock upon which everything depends, the Rock which in Moses’ song in Deuteronomy both begets and gives birth to all things, especially our humanity. Such imagery complements the profound revelation of God’s transcendent ‘Name’ to Moses in the burning bush as “I Am Who I Am” which is ultimately explicated by Jesus in terms of the Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

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“You have received a spirit of sonship”

We are by grace to be what Christ is by nature – sons or children of God. That alone guides and directs our lives with God in Christ. Who and what we are inwardly is to be expressed outwardly in bringing forth good fruit not evil fruit, to use the imagery of the Gospel. What is that good fruit? Doing what belongs to who and what we are as the “children of God” who “have received a spirit of sonship, in which we cry aloud, Abba, Father.” Our life in Christ is very much about our being imago Trinitatis as well as imago Christi, our life as ordered like his to the Father in the eternal bond of the Spirit. We have received a spirit of sonship.

Providence, “who from end to end/ strongly and sweetly movest,” as the poet George Herbert remarks, is the overarching idea. It “never-failingly ordereth all things both in heaven and earth.” God’s “never-failing” providence is the charity [that] “never faileth.” Our vocation is to write out the providence of God in our lives. For “only to Man thou hast made known thy wayes./ And put the penne alone into his hand,/And made him [us] Secretaries of thy praise.” Who we are as knowing and loving beings, and especially through what we know and learn through revelation, is to be lived out in our lives in and through all of the ups and downs of human experience.

But alas, we are often mistaken about providence. It is not just how “everything’s going my way,” as the old song puts it, nor is it our endless illusions with progress, as if things are always and endlessly getting better in our techno-utopian exuberance. Neither fits with human experience. Our identity as “children and heirs of God, and fellow-heirs of Christ,” is predicated on the reality of suffering; we are “heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ: if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” Our sanctification in seeking to bring forth the fruit of holy lives is always grounded in our justification through Christ’s saving work on the Cross. His suffering for us gives meaning to our suffering with and for him.

The word ‘providence’ perhaps misleads us. It seems to imply the idea of foreseeing, or foreknowledge but that imparts a temporal dimension when in truth God doesn’t foresee or foreknow, he simply and eternally knows all things, as C.S. Lewis observed in his commentary on Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. “What is, what has been, and what is to come,/In one swift mental stab he sees,” Lady Philosophy sings.

This past week marked the great summer festival of Christ’s Transfiguration which is the vision of glory in anticipation of Christ’s Resurrection and the hope of our transformation. John notes that while “we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” As Paul says, we shall know even as we are known in Christ.

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“Blessed art thou, Simon son of John: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.”

The Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul commemorates the twin pillars of Christ’s Church. Their joint commemoration is itself a work of Providence. It draws together into one festival two prominent figures from the Scriptures of the New Testament, and a later tradition about their martyrdom and the subsequent translation of their remains to a common resting place in Rome. It suggests a spiritual connection between Scripture and Tradition; namely, how we think about what is received and given to us in Revelation.

The Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul places us with Christ in his body, the Church, but only insofar as it stands upon the Word of God revealed and written, hence the primacy of Scripture as the Revelation of the Word of God. Therein is the important connection. The preaching and teaching of Saul, renamed Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, is about the primacy of the Scriptures, “things written for our learning (ad nostram doctrinam)” about our life in Christ. This is the basis for the understanding of our life in the body of Christ, the Church, established by Jesus upon Simon, renamed Peter, the rock, upon which he will build his Church against which ”the gates of hell shall not prevail.” The Church is not primarily or simply a human or social construct.

This feast also marks the 40th anniversary of the ordination of Fr. John Park to the sacred priesthood, to his ministry within the sacred body of Christ. We are delighted and honoured to have him as our celebrant this morning. It speaks to all of us about our life in Christ. The ministry is nothing less than sacrifice and service, nothing less than the motions of Christ in him and for us. The ministry is not self-referential, not a celebration of individuals in their various skills and talents, but a reminder to all of us about our vocation to loving service in the body of Christ. “Let no man glory in men,” Paul tells us in the second set of readings provided for use in the Octave of this feast. Ordination is not about the person in the office but the office in the person. The office of Priest is the ministry of Word and Sacrament founded upon nothing less than the Word and Spirit of God. “Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and the stewards of the mysteries of God,” as Paul puts it.

And what is the Church? A building? A bishop? A congregation? A denomination? A parish? A diocese? A synod? A national church? No. Those at best are nothing more and nothing less than the outward expressions in one way or another and to some extent or another of “the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church,” as we profess in the Creed. What we celebrate today with Fr. Park especially is that reality: the Church’s unity in God as Trinity, the Church’s holiness by the guiding light of the Holy Spirit, the Church’s catholicity in the fulness of the Faith, and the Church’s apostolicity as grounded in the mystery of Pentecost. In short, we are reminded of what we are called to be for that is the role and purpose of the ordained ministry of the Church. Forty years ago, John Park was ordained and enrolled in that understanding that reaches far beyond the mechanics and systems of our human devices. Father, remember that “thou art a Priest for ever” in the high priesthood of Christ, Tu est sacerdos in aeternum.

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“He who loveth God love his brother also.”

“The rich man also died, and was buried: and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments,” Luke tells us. Wow. Where is the love in that? It seems that we have gone from Heaven to Hell in the blink of an eye, from the wonderful vision of Heaven in the celebration of God as Trinity to a vision of hell. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven.” A door, not a window, a door through which we enter into what we see and hear.

And what did we see and hear? A vision of heaven, a vision of worship through the images of Scripture. The four and twenty elders, symbolic of the witness of the Old Testament to God, and the four living creatures, symbolic of the witness of the four Gospels of the New Testament, united in the worship of the Trinity. But how do we come to such a vision of God as Trinity, as absolute self-giving love? Through Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son, “the Word made flesh [who] dwelt among us” who is in the bosom of the Father and makes God known to us as Trinity. A fullness of Revelation.

In John’s Epistle this morning we hear about God as love, indeed that “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.” We know this as the refrain of the Trinity season as the abiding love of God. Abiding and dwelling are synonyms. John’s Epistle is a treatise on love. It opens out to us something which is heavenly in contrast to hell. Why then the Gospel reading from Luke in the parable of Dives and Lazarus? How do we reconcile that story with the idea of becoming what we behold?

“There was a certain rich man,” Dives. That is not his name. Dives simply means the rich man. He is defined by his worldly wealth; not named, but only identified in terms of his economic status, one who is “clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day.” Who is Lazarus? “A certain beggar,” but he has a name, an identity beyond his circumstance and situation. He lies at the gate of the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” Yet he is completely ignored by the rich man; only “the dogs came and licked his sores.” It is a graphic picture. There is a compelling contrast between the unnamed rich man and the named beggar, between the compassion of the dogs and the utter indifference of Dives, the rich man. Another dog story, it seems, much like the Canaanite woman who reminds Jesus that “even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master’s table;” what Lazarus desires but more than what he gets. It is all in the contrasts.

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“The only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father; he has made him known”

The historian and philosopher John Lukacs in ‘At the End of An Age’ (2002), quotes Feuerbach’s statement that “the old world made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit,” noting that it is “as good a summation of the historical philosophy of materialism as any” (p. 130). It is a view (early 19th cent.) that predates both Darwin and Marx and remains the dominant assumption for “the overwhelming majority of scientists as well as computer designers” who see the world and its future in this materialistic way. But, as Lukacs says, “they are wrong” (p. 131). Materialist philosophies, ancient and modern, are but one chapter in the history of Science. The assumption that “the universe is written in the language of mathematics is entirely outdated” (p. 112). At the very least it makes the epistemological error of conflating what belongs to the mental and intellectual world of mathematics with the physical and empirical world of nature.

The over-mathematization of the natural sciences, especially Physics ends up “explaining matter away” leaving us with “a complex but essentially empty scaffolding of abstract mathematical entities” yet recognizing more and more “the intrusion of mind into matter” (p. 131). The counter to this false sense of Objectivity – the idea of reality as completely mind-independent, the world which most of us have assumed and grown up in, has been shattered from within the world of Physics and not just by those who in the post-modern philosophies of reaction default to its opposite, namely, reality as completely mind-dependent, an over-exaggeration of Subjectivism which simply asserts the opposite – all mind and no matter.

The point is that these approaches conflict and contradict each other in failing to recognize the “confluences of mind and matter, indeed, of mind preceding matter” (p. 131). It is the reciprocity between human thinking and the world that is there for thought that is the essential concern. Now all of this is but prelude to the matter, pun intended, of the Trinity, the essential mystery of the Christian faith, a mystery which we can only enter into but not control or possess; it is the mystery of God himself who by definition is incomprehensible in terms of finite human thinking and yet makes himself known to us through the images of nature and word, especially the words of Scripture and in our liturgy that are set before us today. This is captured in my text from John’s Gospel, “the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father; he has made him known.” It complements both the Gospel reading about being born again, or anew or upward with the lesson from Revelation about a door being opened in heaven.”

It is only through the images of Scripture and our thinking upon them that we can enter into an understanding of the mystery of God, our world and ourselves.

All our beginnings and all our endings have their place of meeting in the Trinity. It is the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost.” To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement.

Essential Christianity is Trinitarian. What do I mean? That the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to Christian identity, corporately and individually. You are baptized in the Name of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. At Holy Communion, we participate in nothing less than the Son’s Thanksgiving to the Father in the Spirit. Our liturgy is full of the Trinity.

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“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you.”

Pentecost is the alpha and omega of all the festivals of the Church year, the life-force, if you will, of their essential meaning. In every liturgy we are gathered and taken up in the Spirit. It would be hard to say which is greater,, the mystery of Christ’s incarnation, incarnatio Dei, the incarnation of God, or inspiratio hominis, the mystery of our inspiration, the inspiration of man. They are intimately bound together. Pentecost is not simply an add-on, one more item in a list of things, but brings out the essential unity of all that pertains to our life in the mystery of God. “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire … Teach us to know the Father, Son, and thee, of both, to be but One”. Who, not what is the Holy Spirit? Nothing less than the love-knot of the Father and the Son, binding God with God; the love-knot too that unites the two natures, the humanity and divinity of Jesus, God with man, and the love-knot that gathers and unites us to God and to one another, making us “partakers of the divine nature”.

For this day marks a royal exchange: “whereby, as before He of ours [our nature], so now we of His are made partakers. He clothed with our flesh, and we invested with His Spirit”. In Christ, God partakes our human nature so that we should be partakers of his divine nature. As Tertullian puts it, the coming of Christ was the fulfilling of the Law, the Old Testament, while the coming of the Holy Ghost is the fulfilling of the Gospel, the New Testament.

This is not abstract talk but the truth of the images of Scripture, especially on this day, the Feast of Pentecost, commonly called Whitsunday. The very names point to the paradoxes of spiritual life, of unity expressed through difference. Pentecost refers to the fiftieth day, looking back to the Jewish Passover (now the Christian Easter), on the one hand, and Whitsunday, meaning White Sunday, even though the liturgical colour is red, symbolic of the tongues of fire resting upon the Apostles of the New Testament, on the other hand. Why white? Because of baptism; our incorporation into the life of God through Word and Spirit, our being incorporated into Christ’s death and life. We are like those, as Revelation puts it, who have “washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” The paradoxes of revelation require our thinking through the images and grasping their unity in understanding. Pentecost signals the constant necessity of sticking close to the images and thus to their meaning as opposed to the modern tendency to fly from images into various forms of abstraction or the problem of reification, turning metaphors and images and behaviours into things, or objects but only through abstract categories of indeterminacy. This is a failure of thinking and a negation of the power of language and the importance of metaphor.

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“The end of all things is at hand”

It seems so dark and threatening, a complement perhaps to our current world of very real uncertainties and anxieties. This is the fearfulness of a culture that is no longer sure of itself and its future yet all the while clinging to the assumptions of the ideology of endless material and technological progress that belong to that uncertainty. There is at once all of the uber-hype of the techno-utopianism of AI, and all of the sense of foreboding and the fear of things falling apart, at the same time. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” as William Butler Yeats famously put it. That was in 1919.

Isn’t this really about ourselves? We have forgotten the centre and have willed ourselves to an endless emptiness. We can’t say what the Good is. This is an ethical dilemma. It is not exactly new. Plato saw the necessity of turning to philosophy and ethical thinking in the face of the self-destruction of the Greek city-states; such is his ‘Republic’ that examines justice as an ethical principle that belongs to the knowledge of the Good.. Augustine’s ‘City of God’ and Boethius’s ‘Consolation of Philosophy’ speak to the devastations of their world in the collapse of the Roman Empire, recalling us to the infinite goodness of God which alone transcends our divided loves and the divisions that result, culturally and individually. “Disdain to be discouraged” is Gregory the Great’s wonderful advice that, in some sense, derives from both. In short there is always the need to return to thought and prayer.

“Take with you words and return to the Lord,” Hosea the prophet tells us, pointing out the problem of putting our trust in the works of our own hands, the idols of our minds, and in defaulting to worldly matters of political expediency. Assyria, he tells us, will not save us. Nor is salvation to be found in the technologies of war in any given age. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things.” At issue, is our lack of attention to the spiritual and intellectual principles which shape our understanding and guide our actions. Our idolatry of the practical and of the technocratic – the techno-utopianism that assumes that technology will save us – is really a kind of anti-intellectualism at once anti-life and ethically bankrupt. What is it that is right to do turns on the greater question of what is it that is good to be. “To be is to be understood,” Gadamer says about Heidegger, but that requires an understanding of ourselves in relation to God. We are known and loved in his knowing and loving of all things.

The Sunday After Ascension Day speaks to these necessities in the face of our uncertainties. It offers us a way of thinking about our world and about ourselves, about how we are understood by God. It recalls the dynamic of God’s redemption of our humanity and our world. The Ascension is the return of all things to their end in God, the “lift[ing] up our hearts” is the lifting up of the world to God, and so connects with the credal doctrine of the Session of Christ, his “sitting at the right hand of the Father.” It speaks to us about the homeland of the spirit, our home with God, not just by-and-by, later on, but here and now in prayer and praise. In short, we find our place with God because God has placed us with him through his Son. “I go to prepare a place for you,” Jesus tells us, words that speak to the blessed conjunction of his divinity with our humanity. We are partakers of his divinity only through his partaking of our humanity.

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“I am ascending unto my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

Christ’s Resurrection words to Mary Magdalene reveal the necessary connection between Resurrection and Ascension. No Resurrection without the Ascension, paradoxically! Christ’s homecoming is ours too. We have a place or end with God.

The Ascension of Christ marks the culmination of the Resurrection; its fullness and completion, we might say. In the Ascension we see the homecoming of the Son to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption in Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, all “because I go to the Father,” as he has said. That is the meaning of his Ascension as marking the end of his going forth and return that signals the gathering of all things to God. As Aquinas says, “God is the beginning and end of all created beings, but especially rational beings.” Thus Christ’s Ascension is “the exaltation of our humanity” to its end or place with God in the dynamic of the spiritual life of the Trinity. His homecoming is equally ours.

We catch something of the drama and the intensity of the Ascension in the readings from Acts and Mark. “He was taken up and a cloud received him out of their sight,” Luke tells us in Acts. The cloud refers to the symbolic form of the divine presence or glory of God, the shekinah of the Exodus and elsewhere that serves as prologue to Christ’s Incarnation. “He was received up into heaven,” Mark tells us in what belongs to the so-called longer ending of his Gospel.

The doctrinal significance of the Ascension is that Christ returns to the Father in the flesh of our humanity, that “where he is there we may be also”; in short, it signals the idea of our abiding with God. Yet at the same time, the Ascension signals the meaning of prayer. Prayer is the ascension of our hearts and minds to God, and thus to our abiding in his will and purpose. Prayer is sursum corda, the lifting up of our hearts, as we say in the liturgy. Prayer is ascension.

In that sense, the Ascension is both direction and action. Yet it is also cosmic in scope, since the return of the Son to the Father is the gathering of all creation to God. Our prayers participate in that sensibility and activity; the lifting up of all things to God. As Christ has “ascended into the heavens,” as the Collect puts it, “so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell.”

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