Category: Sermons

“As dying, and behold, we live”

The conjunction of The First Sunday in Lent and Valentine’s Day is at once fortuitous and providential. Valentine’s Day, to be sure, has largely become a secular event caught perhaps in the tension between the erotic and the romantic, between kitsch and extravagance, overwrought with emotion and expectation. Yet somehow it is about love! No doubt there are temptations too! The temptations of wine, woman and song, perhaps?! The First Sunday in Lent is certainly about love and temptations though of a deeper and more serious nature. Nothing like a bit of Lenten discipline for us too gathering here in the Hall, Valentine’s Day notwithstanding. It is just a wee bit too cold in the Church given the cold snap and wind chill.

The temptations of Christ are our temptations seen in a certain light of clarity and with a kind of intensity. They raise important and necessary questions about love, about what we love and how we love and in what way. Lent is the pilgrimage of love, a journeying to God and with God in Jesus Christ, a journeying that seeks the perfecting of our loves which implies already that there are problems about our loves. Temptation shows us something about those problems. The temptations test us about our loves. Yet temptation is not sin. Sin lies in giving in to temptations in which our limited loves are confused with the infinite love of God. The temptations illumine the true nature of our loves.

Paradoxically it is through the temptations of Christ that we learn what is to be loved and in what way. It takes a struggle and one which belongs to the nature of our Christian identity. The temptations of Christ recall us to our baptisms, to who we are in the sight of God and in the body of Christ. The struggle is about life and death just as in baptism there is explicitly our dying and our living again through our incorporation into Christ, into his death and resurrection. The temptations of Christ illumine the struggle for us in our lives. They reveal what we have to die to and what we have to live for. They recapitulate, in a way, the vows of renunciation in our baptism which are critical for our affirmation of faith in Christ.

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“Remember, O man, that dust thou art”

We begin in ashes. We call this day Ash Wednesday for while we are reminded that we are but dust, it is ashes which are placed on our foreheads on this day. The dust recalls us to our origins. We are the dust into which God has breathed his life-giving spirit. But the greater emphasis of this day lies in the ashes, as it were, and not in the dust. The ashes are the ashes of repentance.

The ashes are made from burning last year’s palm crosses. “Fire ever doth aspire,/And makes all like itself, turns all to fire,/ But ends in ashes” the poet John Donne puts it in a poem celebrating love, actually a marriage. As he suggests, love is unlike fire that ends in ashes; there is something more. “Love’s strong arts” make one, create unity and life, where before there was division and separation and death. All love in the Christian understanding of things finds its ultimate meaning in the love of God.

The ashes of Ash Wednesday mark not an ending but a new beginning, a renewal in love. Lent is the pilgrimage of love. That pilgrimage is a renewal and a perfecting in love. That love is the perfecting grace of Christ, the divine love incarnate who goes the way of our imperfect loves to make perfect our loves. There must be in us the continual purgation and purification of our loves. They are purged and purified in the passion of Christ, in the pilgrimage of his perfect love for us. That is the intent of Lent and the significance of beginning in ashes. It is wanted that that perfect love should move in us. Our loves are to undergo a purgation and a purification through “Love divine, all loves excelling.”

We are called to repentance. There is to be in us the awareness of our imperfect loves. But the ashes do not mark an ending but a beginning again with a twofold emphasis. There is conversion from sin and there is contrition for sin. Fire ends in ashes but love – God’s love in us – is the greater fire which makes something even out of the ashes of our lives. The ashes of repentance are about divine love stirring up our hearts and minds, stirring up our souls and bodies to return again to him from whom we have turned away. We are to arise from the ashes in the renewal of faith, hope and love.

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“I will show you a yet more excellent way”

We meet in the bleak mid-winter on Quinquagesima Sunday, the Sunday that points us to Lent and to its proper meaning. And we meet, too, in the sweet afterglow of Candlemas, the feast that marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter. Central to that feast is the idea of sacrifice, of love in motion that seeks the greater good of our humanity. It is a feast at once of Christ, his presentation in the Temple, and of Mary, her purification and thanksgiving for birth. “This child”, Simeon says, “is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel” and then to Mary, he says, “a sword shall pierce through your own soul also.” And why? “That the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Such is the meaning, too, of Lent! “We see in a glass darkly; but then face to face,”as St. Paul puts it, that we may know even as we are known in the love of God. Candlemas marks the first time the Incarnate Christ is in Jerusalem and points us to his final journey to Jerusalem about which today’s Gospel speaks. In that lies the whole meaning of his Incarnation. There is a wonderful correspondence between Candlemas and Quinquagesima in the transition from Christmas to Lent and Easter.

Our secular culture celebrates February 2^nd as Groundhog Day and with a certain curious anxiety about the winter weather. But why February 2^nd? Why not February 1^st? Because it draws upon the far more ancient and far profounder Christian festival of Candlemas, a feast of light signifying life through sacrifice. You have a choice, I suppose, between celebrating a rodent to whom, somehow, we attribute self-consciousness in terms of seeing or not seeing his shadow and skills in weather prognostications (not a little unlike reading the entrails of birds!), and the feast of Candlemas which this year brings us to this Sunday which portends the near approach of Lent.

Lent is about our going up to Jerusalem with Jesus in his final journey to Jerusalem. “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”, Jesus tells us. He has something in mind that is greater than death. In that going up he would teach us and he would heal us. He would set our love aright. We do not really know what we want. We do not really know what is truly good for us. We do not really know what is rightly to be wanted except through the perfecting path of his love. In the Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples what it means for him to go up to Jerusalem with them.

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“A Light to lighten the Gentiles”

This is an ancient feast and an ecumenical feast, uniting both east and west. Its full title suggests something of its rich significance, a double feast in which we honour both our Lord and his Mother Mary, our Lady, in one festival. It is “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin”. But its simpler and more usual name is Candlemas. These are all terms and names which contain a host of associations.

Its most basic sense is the remembrance that Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem forty days after his birth to offer the required and ancient rituals of purification and the presentation of the first-born.

Luke alone gives us this story. The focus is on the encounter between the Child Jesus and the Old Man Simeon; a meeting which is rich in significance.

The Song of Simeon is the Nunc Dimittis, for instance, which has long been a feature of the Church’s evening sacrifice of prayer and praise. It is, we might say, the Song of Candlemas. It signifies the meeting of the Child Christ and aged Simeon. It signifies the bridge between the old and the new. In the Eastern Church this feast is known as “Hypapanti” – which means “meeting”.

The meeting signifies something more than just the passing away of the Old and the inauguration of something new; it captures as well the sense of fulfilment. There is the sense that what was looked for is actually more than what was expected.

Simeon and Anna are in the temple at Jerusalem waiting, watching and hoping. The overarching theme here is hope. What Simeon beholds in Christ is the hope of the Old Testament brought to an intensity of expression, to its fullness of meaning. It marks the inauguration of something new, ultimately we may say it is the Church; but this does not mean the eclipse of the old so much as its redemption and the purification of its intention; “a light to lighten the gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.” This is its ringing theme and song.

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“How readest thou?”

At the heart of the Common Prayer tradition is the Eucharistic lectionary, a creedal way of reading the Scriptures and one which, at the very least, has the virtue of being able to say what the Scriptures are and why and how they should and can be read, a lectionary, too, which is at once catholic and ecumenical.

We meet for Evening Prayer, a wonderful service which provides us with the luxury of luxuriating in longer passages of Scripture than that to which we are ordinarily accustomed and especially for extended passages belonging to the wonderful narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the story of Joseph which we begin to read tonight. But the Gospel this morning about the parable of the Sower and the Seed provides the interpretative framework. It complements the question raised in this evening’s second lesson, “How do you read?” “Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God.” There is a parable and there is its interpretation. The parallel to tonight’s second lesson could hardly be clearer. The force of the question, “how readest thou?” could not be greater.

The year 2015 marked the 30^th anniversary of The Book of Alternative Services here in Canada and in some sense the anniversary of the founding of The Prayer Book Society of Canada. The conjunction of the two is at once necessary and unfortunate. What was unfortunate is that it appeared that the Prayer Book Society arose and exists essentially in reaction to institutional authority, particularly, the Bishops in their mistaken and misguided attempt to impose the new alternative liturgies upon parishes over and against the constitutional principles of the Anglican Church of Canada and the doctrinal magisterium of an Anglican Christian identity embodied in the principles of the Common Prayer tradition. What is necessary is the task of upholding and reclaiming the fullness of our spiritual identity and life.

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“Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God.”

Misunderstood and often overlooked, the three Pre-Lenten Sundays, with their exotic and strange sounding names, provide a necessary preparatory interlude between Epiphany and Lent. Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima are vestiges of older patterns of the biblically based practice of the Quadragesima, the forty day period of fasting, penitence and prayer commonly known as Lent – a term for Spring from Old English referring to the lengthening of the days – which marks our participation in the passion, death and resurrection of Christ. The pre-Lenten Sundays point to different ways of marking the forty days of Lent. Septuagesima, the week of seventy days, Sexagesima, sixty days, and Quinquagesima, fifty days before Easter, these Sundays have coalesced to form a transitional season having its own intrinsic spiritual character.

They warrant our special attention. Displaced by radical changes in the ordering of the ecclesiastical calendar and the lectionary pattern of scripture reading in recent times, their educational, spiritual and practical significance has been largely ignored. Yet the spirituality of these Sundays is really about appreciating certain crucial and defining features of Christian moral doctrine and life. It has to with the classical and the theological virtues; in short, with the rich interplay between nature and grace that shapes character. These Sundays carry forward a theme which we have also seen in the Epiphany season.

The scriptural lessons on these Sundays prepare us wonderfully for the journey of Lent as the journey of our souls to and with God in Jesus Christ; in short, our whole life. Ultimately, they ground us in the way of our journeying, at once presupposing and anticipating the way to Jerusalem. They prepare us by way of the forms of love. Lent, after all, is the pilgrimage of the soul in love. The love of God perfects and renews our loves. These pre-Lenten Sundays are all about the interplay of the cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice with the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

As such they offer a powerful narrative of the love which perfects our humanity and which engages critically with the assumptions of the therapeutic culture. They recall us directly to the moral discourse of Christianity with its rich legacy of terms and categories which speak profoundly to the nature of the soul in its desiring. In short, they belong to the theology of amor, love.

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“Speak the Word only”

The grandeur of God meets the misery of man in the bleak mid-winter of all our discontents. Such is Epiphany. The season of teaching is also the season of miracles. The miracle stories of the Scriptures make manifest something about the nature of God and about our humanity. The miracles make known what God seeks for our humanity, namely, our healing and our wholeness. Here we have the story of the healing of the leper and the healing of the Centurion’s servant, a story which complements it seems to me the familiar Epiphany story of the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee where Jesus turns the water into wine, the very best wine.

That story in John’s Gospel was the “beginning of signs” which Jesus did “and manifested forth his glory”. That is an Epiphany but within that story there were some other epiphanies captured especially in the exchange between Jesus and Mary. “They have no wine”, she says to Jesus and, then, she says to the disciples (and us) “Do whatever he tells you”. In between those two statements is Jesus’s seemingly strange and disconcerting remark. “O woman what is that to me and you. Mine hour has not yet come.”

“They have no wine” is an epiphany, a making known of the human predicament. More than just a factual statement about the wine running out – party gone bust, as it were – it is a symbolic statement about human emptiness and futility. We lack in ourselves what we need for our ultimate good and happiness. We lack the wine of divinity that gladdens the heart of man and that brings joy to our lives. How shall we achieve that which we desire but cannot get on our own because of the disorders and disarray of our lives? Only through his “hour”. What is his “hour”? The passion and crucifixion of Christ which belongs to the purpose of God’s engagement with our humanity in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. “This beginning of signs” is connected to the central event in the story of Christ, his sacrifice for us.

Do what he tells you is our response to what God seeks for us. What is asked of us is our response to his word and will.

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“He sent them into his vineyard”

January, the forgotten poet of Stanley, Nova Scotia, Alden Nowlan, remarks, signals a truth about Maritime winters, “a truth that all men share but almost never utter. This is a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside.” He was speaking about this kind of week and day here. Charles G.D. Roberts, a celebrated Canadian poet from New Brunswick and a professor at King’s College when the University was located here in Windsor, captures the winter scene as well in a poem entitled The Winter Fields written for the Centenary of Shelley in 1890.

Winds here, and sleet, and frost that bites like steel.
The low bleak hill rounds under the low sky.
Naked of flock and fold the fallows lie,
Thin streaked with meagre drift. The gusts reveal
By fits the dim grey snakes of fence, that steal
Through the white dusk. The hill-foot poplars sigh,
While storm and death with winter trample by,
And the iron fields ring sharp, and blind lights reel.

“Winds here,” he says. I like to think that “here” means the winter fields of the environs of Windsor. But while the octet – the first eight lines of the sonnet – evokes the harsh realities of winter, the sestet, which completes the sonnet, opens us out to another reflection. Hid “in the lonely ridges, wrenched with pain” of the bleak mid-winter landscape is “the germ of ecstasy – the sum/ of Life that waits on summer, till the rain/ Whisper in April and the crocus come.” Lurking beneath the snow and ice of the cold death of winter lies the hope of spring – “the sum of Life that waits on summer”.

These poetic reflections complement the Scriptural readings for this Sunday, a day designated and adorned with what might seem to be a rather antiquated and awkward term, not a little mysterious and strange, Septuagesima. It signals a shift in emphasis. The contemplations of divinity that are so much a strong feature of the Epiphany season with its concentration upon the essential divinity of Jesus Christ give place to the ground of creation, to the vineyard of human labour and work.

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“Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”

It is a most wonderful and yet a very challenging gospel scene. Mary, the Blessed Mother of God, says two things. “They have no wine” and “whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”. Both statements are an epiphany – the making known of the barren, empty reality of the human situation, on the one hand, and the revelation of the conditions for the divine perfection of our humanity, on the other hand. “This beginning of signs” manifests God’s purpose for our humanity, a purpose which ultimately has to do with our being with the one who has come to be with us.

In between Mary’s two statements stands the profound yet disturbing response of Jesus to her first remark. “They have no wine”, she says. “O woman, what is that to thee and to me? Mine hour has not yet come”, Jesus says. What does he mean?

We hear this gospel story in the Epiphany season, a season which is variable in length according to the date of Easter, whether early or late. This is the last Sunday in the Epiphany season this year which is as short as it can be. Yet this story is always read regardless of the length of the Epiphany season. Why? Because it captures something of the fundamental meaning of the Epiphany. “This beginning of signs” contains the meaning and significance of all the signs and wonders and all the words and deeds of Jesus in the gospels.

It seems that “this beginning of signs” extends beyond a simple country event to touch upon the larger meaning of our lives together in the body of Christ. “This beginning of signs” includes all the signs, and indeed, most especially, those signs which are what they signify, the signs which we call the sacraments, “the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace”.

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