Category: Sermons

“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

It was behind closed doors, literally and figuratively, that Jesus made known to us his resurrection. But it is not only behind closed doors that the things of God are made known to us. Through the fullness of the meaning of God’s Revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, “behold, a door was opened in heaven”. We behold the glory of God. God makes himself known to us.

Trinity Sunday sets before us the vision of God which is the end of man. Trinity Sunday, we might say, is the great Te Deum Laudamus of the Church. We proclaim God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. We proclaim what we have been given to behold through the fullness of the scriptural witness to God’s revelation. It is what we have been given to proclaim and in which we are privileged to participate.

We meet together in the glory of the revealed God, the glory of the Trinity. All our beginnings and all our endings have their place of meeting in the Trinity. It is, we may say, the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor.12.3). To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement. It is the burden of the Church’s proclamation precisely because what has been shown to us in Jesus Christ. The open door captures clearly this idea of this revealed and learned, things known and loved, things which we can only enter into more fully in order to love and understand more deeply.

We are given to behold and enter into what we behold. What we behold are the highest things of the Spirit; in short, the spiritual reality of the living God. But it is what we are given to participate in, too.

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“Thou art worthy, O Lord”

Well, that was quite an intellectual and spiritual work out, wasn’t it? You are probably completely exhausted and utterly mystified, confused and bewildered. And well you should be! Yet the Athanasian Creed is one of the three catholic creeds of the universal Church. For Anglicans there was a time when it was stipulated to be used thirteen times a year, once a month and on Trinity Sunday. That intention says a lot about how the Anglican Churches once appreciated and understood the fundamental importance of the doctrine of the Trinity as the essential and defining doctrine of the Christian faith. If the Anglican Church is going to be an integral portion of “the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” and not merely some fideistic sect, it will only be through the intentional recovery of the centrality of the Trinity. The Church is about our communion in the Trinity. The Church is herself Trinitarian.

The “Supplementary Instruction” in the Catechism of the Prayer Book (BCP, p. 552) makes this clear. “What is the Church?” It is asked. The answer is “the family of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit.” It is, in a way, a remarkable summary of what the Church is in the witness of the Scriptures creedally understood. The Church, too, is one of the creedal mysteries. Though not mentioned in the Athanasian Creed, unlike both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, the Church is completely presupposed, as our liturgy puts it, as “the blessed company of all faithful people” whose faith is in God the Blessed Trinity revealed through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Such is the twofold focus of the Athanasian Creed. It presents a remarkably concise and concentrated understanding of the Scriptural witness to the nature of God.

The very first article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles complements the Athanasian Creed. It is “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity”, an article which expresses, first, the philosophical and theological understanding of God that Jews, Christians and Muslims hold and, second, the specific Christian form of that understanding. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible”, it begins and, then, concludes, “and in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”. What the Athanasian Creed sets before us is a theological way of thinking God as Trinity. Thinking about God in a certain way.

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“At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you”

What is that day? It is Pentecost, this day, the fiftieth day after Easter when we celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples to establish the Church as the spiritual community of our abiding in the Trinity. And what a day! Wind and fire, as it were, the most elusive and intangible of tangible things, signify the spiritual presence of God through the Holy Spirit, the promise of the Father and the Son. Out of the chaos and confusion of tongues come order and praise, worship and life, light and love, and the peace of God. Pentecost recalls us to the spiritual mystery of God and to our being with God in the spiritual community shaped and informed by the Spirit, the Church. “Christ, being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear”.

Things seen and heard betoken an understanding of things invisible and spiritual. “A sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind” and “cloven tongues, like as of fire.” There is everything in those little words “as of” and “like as”. The Holy Spirit is not wind and fire. The winds and fires of our world are nothing in comparison to the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son. We have seen the conflagration of wind and fire that has destroyed Fort McMurray, for instance, and there is the deep memory, too, of the Great Fire of Windsor in 1897 which destroyed nearly three-quarters of the town, a fire which this building somehow miraculously escaped. We know about the fire-storms and wind-storms, too, of human hearts in disarray. We know about the fire-storms and wind-storms of our contemporary social and political landscape, globally and locally. We know, too, about the fire-storms and wind-storms of the churches in their various confusions, sins and follies. Confusion and chaos seem at times almost rampant and overwhelming. Pentecost is really the wonderful counter to all of the forms of confusion and chaos of our world and day.

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“These things have I have told you, that, when the time shall come,
ye may remember that I told you of them”

“God has gone up with a merry noise, / the Lord with the sound of the trumpet” as the Psalmist wonderfully puts it in what is the gradual psalm for today, capturing in a strong image the joy and the meaning of The Sunday after Ascension Day. We celebrate the “going up” – the Ascension – of Christ to sit, as the Creed puts it, at “the right hand of God the Father Almighty”. What is this all about?

The Ascension marks the culmination, the fullness, we might say, of the Resurrection. If the Resurrection is about the fullest vindication of our individuality as persons comprised of soul and body, then, the Ascension is the fullest possible vindication of the spiritual nature of the world in which we live.

In other words, there is an inescapably cosmic dimension to the doctrine of the Ascension. In the comings and goings of God with us and among us, signaled in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, we are opened out to the understanding of the spiritual nature of our lives and our world. The whole world participates in Christ’s redemption of our humanity. Our liturgy, to use a phrase and idea of a remarkable seventh century theologian, Maximus the Confessor, is a cosmic liturgy. Or, to put in the words of a seventeenth century Anglican divine and poet, Thomas Traherne, “you never love the world aright until you learn to love it in God.” The Ascension and the Session belong to this larger theological sensibility. We are not in flight from the world as if it were evil. By no means. The Ascension and the Session are entirely about the redemption of the world and as such they are doctrines which free us to the world in responsible thought and action.

To think the world in God counters the very real dangers of thinking God in the world which often runs the risk of collapsing God into the world. The paradox is that this makes the world less than what it is in God. We make the world into our little playbox or spielraum only to discover that we have made it into a wasteland and a mess. The teaching of the Ascension and the Session corrects our mistaken ways of thinking about God and the world and our relation to both.

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He ascended into heaven

The Ascension signifies the homecoming of the Son having finished his course having accomplished the will of him who sent him and returning to the Father. The whole life of the incarnate Christ is his going forth and returning to the Father in the power of the Spirit. In his going forth and return to the Father he returns all things to their source and end, to the divine life which he is with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Why the Ascension? Because the Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection, the fullness of its meaning. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is not to the world; it is to the world in God. Everything is gathered into the primacy of the spiritual relationship of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit realized in the celebration of the Ascension. Ultimately, it signifies the meaning of prayer as well as the cosmic dimension of our liturgy of prayer. Our liturgy is all ascension.

“Lift up your hearts.” Prayer is the motion of the Ascension in us. “We ascend,” says Augustine, “in the ascension of our hearts.” We ascend in the lifting up of our hearts. We have someone and somewhere to lift them up to. The Ascension of Christ is directly related to Jesus Christ as the “High Priest” of our salvation whose perfect humanity is the vehicle for our redemption and whose perfect sacrifice is the forgiveness of sins. He, and he alone, is the mediator of the new and better covenant. “For Christ has entered, not into a sanctuary made with hand, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Heb.9.24).

Prayer enters into the presence of God because of the Ascension of Christ.

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“Lord, teach us to pray”

Rogation Monday is one of the formal days of prayer that bring us to the culmination of the Resurrection in Christ’s Ascension. In other words, these days of Rogation prepare us for the homecoming of the Son to the Father which is about our home with God, that “where I am there ye may be also”, as Jesus says. That homeland of the Spirit is the true meaning of our Christian fellowship. We participate in it now through prayer.

For prayer, too, is about our being with God without whom we cannot be with one another. The Gospel from Luke is about learning to pray; the prayer which shapes all prayer is the Lord’s Prayer. It signals nothing less than the nature of our being with God and with one another. In that sense, it is quite radical in its scope and meaning.

In prayer we are constantly seeking God’s will. “Thy will be done,” we pray, a very different thing from simply asking and getting what we think we want as if God were some sort of grace-dispensing machine, a kind of candy-man giving whatever we demand and want. A good part of prayer is about learning what God’s will is for us and for our lives. It is not some sort of wish fulfillment, fantasy or dream. It is about reality, reality as defined by God, the source and principle of all reality. Part of that reality is about human sinfulness – our pride and folly which stand in the way of God’s will for us and in us.

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“Ye believe in God, believe also in me”

The readings for The Feast of St. Philip and St. James complement wonderfully the themes of Eastertide especially in the last three Sundays after Easter and particularly on this Sunday known as Rogation Sunday. The fundamental orientation of the Son to the Father is ever so strongly and rather provocatively expressed in the Gospel reading. “No man cometh unto the Father but by me,” Jesus says, pointing out to Philip, too, that “he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.” And yet, Jesus also says, “believe me, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for the very works’ sake.”

The things which Jesus does are the works which reveal that “I am”, as he says, “the way, the truth and the life”. And how are we to participate in that? Through prayer, the very theme and meaning of Rogation. Prayer is fundamentally asking. “If ye ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” All prayer is about nothing less and nothing more than asking the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. All prayer gathers us into the fundamental orientation of the Son, “because I go unto my Father.” Here again, and providentially, we have the recurring Easter refrain, “because I go to the Father.” Everything is rooted and grounded in the life of God, the holy and blessed Trinity.

And yet, this is bound to trouble and disturb us. Are there not other ways to God, the ways that belong to the other religions of the world, for example? No doubt, the other great religions have much to offer in the way of wisdom and truth, and wonderfully and profoundly so, it seems to me. Each of them, whether it is Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism and so on, have important and distinctive insights. So, too, does Christianity. The point is to be able to respect the integrity of each religion and not reduce them all to some common political, social or psychological idea, subjecting them, in other words, to some feature or other that contemporary secular culture finds amenable with itself; in short, accommodations to the ‘secular’ culture of our day. The point for Christians is not to deny and diminish the claim that Christ is “the way, the truth and the life,” but to connect other insights to that idea and to realize that there can and must be a respectful dialogue among the religions of the world only in and through what belongs to each.

The centrality and the uniqueness of Christ is an essential doctrine of the Christian Faith and one which is highlighted in the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion in Article XVIII. The only anathema is disbelief in Christ‘s uniqueness. Only through the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ can Christians engage the religions of the world and the forms of contemporary culture.

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“They were afraid”

It marks, if you will pardon the pun, the ending of Mark’s Gospel at least in terms of what is known as the shorter ending since the earliest texts of his Gospel end at verse eight rather than verse twenty of Chapter 16. To be sure, the canonical gospel, the gospel that is authoritative for orthodox Christians, includes those additional twelve verses. The shorter ending does not mean that Mark does not believe in the doctrine of the resurrection or that the additional verses are somehow unrelated and disconnected to the rest of his gospel and unfaithful to it. The Gospels, after all, could only have come to be written in the light of the resurrection.

Still, what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think it is powerful and poignant ending, and theologically only serves to make the doctrinal point about the resurrection even more strongly. The resurrection has captured the imaginations of the gospel writers and compelled them to see things in a new light without which they would never have written what they have written.

The additional verses serve as an epilogue and as a further point of confirmation; whether as added by Mark or by someone else later on is entirely uncertain and unknowable, and, I must add, quite irrelevant to our understanding of the Christian Faith.

I like to think that the shorter ending expresses something of the character and experience of Mark. I like to think of him as the young man who ran away naked leaving his loin-cloth behind at the scene of the capture of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane by the temple authorities. We all betray Christ in one way or another; we all run away naked from the truth of our betrayals. But what happens when we are forced to confront those betrayals of our hearts in light of the empty tomb? Suddenly there is “trembling and astonishment” in which we become aware of something greater than ourselves, namely the power of God. It renders us silent, “they said nothing to anyone”. What could they say? “They were afraid”. I like to think that St. Mark is one who has had to confront his fears and his failings and in so doing has written his Gospel.

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“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”

It is a powerful and familiar image and yet one which I think we often fail to comprehend. Perhaps the most familiar of all of the biblical images and certainly the one which is most commonly represented in the church culture of the Maritimes, it has, I fear, been co-opted by the therapeutic culture and emptied of its deeper meaning. It speaks to us about care, of course, but it does so in the deeper context of sacrifice. It is about something more, though not less, than hugs and squeezes, far more, though not less, perhaps, than the comforts of pharmacare as wonderful as those can be.

We forget that this image so popular and familiar belongs to the pattern of death and resurrection and the way that pattern informs our lives of sacrifice and service. For centuries the Gospel of Christ the Good Shepherd has been read in the Easter season. Christ, the only Son of God, has been given to us as “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life,” as one of the prayers of the Church puts it. These are powerful and profound theological concepts that relate to the quality of our lives in faith. There is something quite suggestive, important and necessary about connecting the image of Christ the Good Shepherd to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For that is exactly what the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is primarily about. It illustrates the theological idea that God can make something good even out of our evil. The power of the good is always greater than all and any evil.

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