Category: Sermons

“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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“The spirit of truth will guide you into all truth”

Along with the repeated mantra “because I go to the Father”, the Gospel readings on these three last Sundays of the Easter season open us out to the power and truth of the Holy Spirit, “the spirit of truth”. Christ’s going to the Father is the condition of the coming of the Spirit. These spiritual movements speak to the fears and uncertainties of our own age and culture, fears and uncertainties which raise important questions about our humanity and about our lives together.

What are our fears and uncertainties? In one way, they are legion but in another way they come down to felt sense of an emptiness within the soul of a culture when we can no longer say what it is that is worth living for, when we can no longer identify the principles and the ideals that dignify our humanity.

If there is nothing to live for, then we are the proverbial ‘walking dead’. Zombie Apocalypse is us! There is nothing to give your life to. Yet our lives are primarily about relationships and connections with and for one another. This is precisely where the Eastertide Gospels come so prominently into play. They provide a kind of counter to our current fears and worries about the empty darkness of our world and day, the emptiness within out of which comes such frightening and senseless acts of violence witnessed so frequently in our schools, our cities, our streets, and our world; acts which destroy all relationships. The essence of such acts is their meaninglessness born out of a sense of the nothingness within our souls and our culture, resulting in the active nihilism of terrorism. Added to that are the paralyzing fears of our uncertainties about what we can and should do, throwing up our hands in despair, as it were, retreating into the ghettoes of a kind of passive nihilism. The fearfulness that we have to confront and overcome in every way is our fearfulness. How will we confront it? How will it be overcome? Only in Christ.

Jesus confronts our fearfulness. The Gospel of the Resurrection is especially about his overcoming of our fearfulness. The message of the angel to the women, coming early to the tomb and finding it empty, was “be not afraid.” Jesus comes into the midst of the disciples whether they are huddled behind closed doors in fear in Jerusalem or on the road to Emmaus in flight from Jerusalem in fear.

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“What is this that he saith, A little while? We cannot tell what he saith”

Perplexity and wonder are among the dominant features of the Easter season. It is all about the perplexity and the wonder of the Resurrection, the new reality which challenges all of our preconceptions and attitudes. The various accounts of the Resurrection are all about the changes and transformations in our understanding of what it means to be human and about how we think the things of the past as well as the things of our present experiences. It happens through the encounters with the Risen Christ, on the one hand, and through what Jesus teaches prior to the events of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, on the other hand.

The Gospels for the last three Sundays of the Easter Season are all taken from the so-called ‘farewell discourse’ of Jesus in John’s Gospel. They are the very profound ideas which Jesus sets before the disciples about which they are puzzled and uncertain. Jesus is preparing them for two mysteries which they do not and cannot understand before they happen. The two mysteries are Christ’s Crucifixion and his Resurrection and Ascension. The latter go together; the Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection, its fuller meaning, we might say, insofar as it marks his “go[ing] to the Father”. The great Eastertide refrain is precisely “because I go to the Father”. This is the meaning of his Crucifixion and his Resurrection which culminates in the Ascension.

What this means is shown in these remarkable Gospel passages. We read them in the light of the Resurrection and as illuminating the meaning of the Resurrection for us. The aspect of not-knowing is very much part of the human drama of our life with God. Our unknowing is part of the fallen condition of our humanity. The Resurrection is something which we have to be taught, something which we have to grow up into an understanding of its meaning. It means seeing everything in a new light.

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“I am the Good Shepherd”

This Sunday presents us with one of the great and most familiar images of care, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. It is at once commonplace and yet altogether radical in its meaning. The root of care is cure. The care, we might say, is in the cure.

Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd.” What distinguishes good shepherds from bad is care. The Good Shepherd cares for the sheep. The meaning of that care is that he lays down his life for the sheep. There is sacrifice – the total giving of oneself for the good of another. It is what we have been privileged to see in Holy Week, on the one hand, contemplating the utter failure in and of ourselves to seek the good of one another and, on the other hand, contemplating the sacrificial love of Christ who alone accomplishes what belongs to our eternal good.

The Good Shepherd, and this is the great and wonderful paradox, is also the Lamb of God. His sacrifice is the cure for our sins but it also imparts his care for our lives. The pastoral ministry of the Church is rooted in this sense of care which is often called “the cure of souls.” It goes beyond the superficial and external matters of comfort and ease and convenience to address the distempers of our souls, the disenchantments of our hearts, and the despair of our lives. There is no pastoral care without the naming of the cure and there is no cure without the acknowledgement of our need to be cured in the very root of our being. Once again, it belongs to the pageant of Holy Week to point this out to us. But it also belongs to the parade of Eastertide to show that sacrificial love is a living love. It belongs to the divine life of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the divine love that has been made visible in the passion and crucifixion of Christ and in the wonder and triumph of Christ’s resurrection.

Jesus, as today’s Collect so marvelously puts it, is “both a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life”. He is the sacrifice for sin. He is the cure, the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep. He stands in the face of the destroyer of the sheep – ultimately our sins are his destroyer even as our sins diminish and destroy us. He is the shepherd who wills to be struck, not so that the sheep may be scattered, but so that through his being struck and our being scattered, he may gather us to himself. He gathers us through his care for us. He cares for us through his cure for us.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Mary’s word captures the truth of our humanity. It signals the virtue of humility, the virtue of an honest deference to what is absolutely prior, namely, the word of God. This is what defines Mary and, in turn, defines the Church.

The Annunciation is ordinarily celebrated on March 25^th, nine months before Christ’s birth from Mary in Bethlehem on December 25^th. For centuries March 25^th has marked the beginning of the Christian new year; time itself being measured by the doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. Her Annunciation is his conception in Mary, the beginning of his incarnate life. Her Annunciation marks the beginning of the intimate engagement of God with our humanity. Christ becomes human through Mary, through Mary’s great ‘yes’ to God.

This year, 2016, the 25^th of March coincided with Good Friday as it has at various times, such as in 1608. Then it occasioned a poem by John Donne on the paradox of Christ’s coming to us through Mary and Christ’s going from us into death through the Crucifixion, what he called in a marvelous economy of language “the abridgement of Christ’s story” in the conjunction of the Angel’s Ave and Christ’s Consummatum Est. There is something wonderful in the overlap between the Annunciation and Good Friday. It underscores a fundamental and necessary Christian insight; namely, the intimate connection between Christmas and Easter, between the Incarnation and Redemption. The interplay of theological concepts is an integral feature of orthodox thinking; the abridgement of Christ’s story, the story of human redemption.

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“Jesus came and stood in the midst”

“April is the cruellest month,” the poet, T.S. Eliot, notes in The Wasteland. He must have had a Maritime spring in mind, a kind of April’s Fools Day joke that never ends! And yet there is a counter to the misery and the cruelty of the Maritime spring in April. It is the Resurrection.

The Resurrection is not a static event. It is the dynamic truth “that God hath given us eternal life; and this life is in his Son”. We behold the Risen Christ. We are set in motion by what we see. The Church does not simply stand upon the doctrine of the Resurrection; the Resurrection is the running life of the Church. It means that there are always breakthroughs in our understanding; resurrections of the understanding, we might say. They belong to the dynamic reality of the Resurrection.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this more dramatically illustrated than on The Octave Day of Easter. “On the same day at evening, being the first day of the week”, John tells us, the disciples were huddled together in fear behind closed doors. The Octave Day places us in that endless day, the day of Easter, to show us the Resurrection in motion. It shows us something of the meaning of the Resurrection for us and in us. The symbolism of being “on the same day”, the day of Easter, becomes the meaning of our Sunday worship. It is always a celebration of the Resurrection. We are always in the presence of the Risen Christ and never more so than in the Easter Season when the Resurrection is our principal consideration. The only question is whether we are alive to his presence or dead in ourselves.

“Jesus came and stood in the midst”. They were behind closed doors. They were in fear and great anxiety, not unlike many of us today, perhaps. The world of their hopes and expectations had been utterly shattered. Then “Jesus came and stood in the midst” of them and suddenly all that was shattered begins to be knit together into something new and strange. His presence changes everything. The nature of that change is the Resurrection in us.

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Fr. David Curry has collected his eleven Holy Week and Easter homilies, based on the Scripture text “One thing is needful”, into a single pdf document. Click here to download “One thing is needful”. These homilies were originally delivered and posted earlier this week on Palm Sunday through Easter Day.

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