Category: Sermons

“Above all, take the shield of faith”

Most of you came into the church through the main entrance as did their Honours, the Honourable J.J. Grant and her Honour, Mrs. Joan Grant. As you did you passed under an inscription just above the doors. “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God,” it reads. I wonder how many of you noticed it. But don’t worry. You are in good company. Hundreds and hundreds of parishioners over more than a hundred years haven’t noticed either!

A most curious phrase it comes from that most philosophical of all the books of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes. It speaks metaphorically and poetically about the spiritual purpose of the holy places, places which are to be entered upon intentionally, paying attention to where we are and what we are doing, especially here this morning. I wonder if the men of the 112^th took notice of it as they came here for Divine Service in the winter, spring and early summer of 1916, wondering if it was simply code for more marching, but perhaps wondering, too, about the war over there.

A tablet erected by the congregation of Christ Church commemorates those of the parish who gave their lives in the Great War. Placed on the other side of the font from where the Colours of the 112^th rest, it also commemorates “the placing in this Church of the Colours of the 112^th Battalion C.E.F whose Officers and Men were faithful attendants at the services of the Church previous to their Departure for overseas in Defense of the Empire, July 1916”. Today we celebrate that commemoration of the laying up of the Colours of the 112^th Battalion. You are sitting where the Officers and Men of the 112^th sat a hundred years ago in the months leading up to their embarkation to England and to the theatres of war on the continent of Europe.

The hymn which we sang was written by Mrs. Annie L. Pratt who also designed and executed the Colours. The hymn was composed from a poem which she wrote in 1915. The hymn captures something of the hopes and fears that defined the war generations both of the First World War and the Second. It draws upon the language of the scriptures about God’s providential care, “a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night”, images from the Exodus journey in the wilderness of the people of Israel. There are as well scriptural references to strength and wisdom, to justice and light, to life and peace. Throughout the hymn and in the story of the 112^th Battalion, there is the sense of being caught up into something momentous and all-defining. It was the war that changed all wars, the war that shattered civilisation. It had a profound impact upon rural and small town Nova Scotia.

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“Rejoice with me”

“There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance”, Jesus says in a series of three famous parables that comprise the 15^th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke. The parables appear in response to the criticism of the Pharisees and Scribes – 1^st century Jewish religious authorities, as it were – who criticize Jesus for the company he keeps, the company of tax-collectors and sinners. Jesus response is to tell three parables two of which are before us in this morning’s Gospel: the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin.

The parables are all about repentance and joy, about being lost and found. They illustrate the deep love of God which seeks our restoration to wholeness in the community of spirit, the ekklesia of God, the Church universal. The return of the lost is the occasion of the greatest joy, a joy both in heaven and in earth. Redemption occasions a greater joy than the joy of creation itself, it seems. It is a powerful moral and intellectual idea.

What is so powerful is that there is something more precious and more important about our humanity and our individuality than just our wayward and sinful actions. Good news indeed! For if we are defined simply by our thoughts, words and deeds that we are utterly condemned. Our hearts condemn us but God we have learned in these early days of the Trinity season is greater than our hearts. Such is the divine mercy.

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“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart”

The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday complement each other and contribute to a way of thinking and doing, especially so for the Sundays in the Trinity season. Today’s Gospel is Christ’s parable about the kingdom of heaven being likened to a great supper to which those who were invited all made excuse. The consequence of our refusals would seem to mean “no feast” and all because of our refusals of God’s inviting grace, as if our convenience were to take priority over God’s will. But such arrogant indifference is simply our atheism, our denial of the will of God for us. No feast because there is no God.

But can it be that our excuses frustrate God’s will? Surely not. We can only frustrate ourselves. God will have his house filled with those whom he makes ready – bringing them in who could not come on their own, compelling them to come in who would not come any other way. The parable signals the strong love of God for our humanity, for what he seeks for us even in spite of ourselves.

But those whom God invites are those whom he would have come willingly and freely – out of love – those of whom it may truly be said, “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” To refuse the invitation is to deny that love. To be sure, our refusals of God’s grace belong also to the freedom of our will. But to be freed to our own pre-occupations is to be enslaved to ourselves – to the misery of our self-will, to the condemnation of our hearts. It is not what God wants for us nor what he wants us to want either.

The purpose of the parable is to convict our hearts of our folly and foolishness but only so that we will be thrown back more fully and more freely upon the goodness of God. In this way, the Gospel for today follows the same logic and purpose as last Sunday’s Gospel. These are Gospel parables of strong encouragement to take seriously our life with God. It is all about our faithful abiding in the love of God. The epistle, too, signals the further extension of the theme of forgiveness that the goodness of God presents: “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart”. God is neither indifferent to our predicaments nor is he captive to our concerns. At issue is how we are awakened to his presence and will for us in our lives.

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“We love him because he first loved us”

St. John’s Epistle is a treatise on love which complements and underscores with emphasis the love which his Gospel proclaims. It is, it seems to me, primarily through the eyes of John that we enter into the mystery of God. This epistle intends the application of the Gospel proclamation “God is love” to our lives. It is the underlying theme of the Trinity season. Love is of God and so we ought also to love one another. But what is that love?

That love is the communion of God with God in God – the communion of the Trinity. This is the love by which we have communion with God and so with one another. Our loves find their place and meaning in God’s love.

“God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” This is the recurring mantra of the Trinity season: This is the love which the Church is empowered and compelled to proclaim. But more than that, the Church is to be the place of the indwelling love of God, the place where God’s love is called to mind, and the place where that love takes shape in us. The Church is to be the place where we seek the perfection of our loves in the grace of Jesus Christ because the Church proclaims and confesses that love.

The Church, of course, refers to more than merely a building, just as the building, of course, points to so much more beyond itself, so much more beyond wood and stone, glass and tapestry. Our holy places signify a greater purpose and one which extends into the stuff of our daily lives with the intent that they should be holy lives. We are called to love out of the love which has been shown to us.

Four things are to be noted here as arising out of what we see through the eyes of John. First, that the love which is of God has been revealed to us as the communion of the Trinity; secondly, that our lives find their place and meaning in the Trinitarian love of God; thirdly, that our loves are expressed in the concrete realities of our everyday lives; and fourthly, that in seeking the perfection of our loves in the grace of Christ, we acknowledge that our loves are imperfect and disordered. It is only in the communion of the Trinity that we begin to find the proper expression and the true meaning of our loves and our lives.

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“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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