Category: Sermons

“For he himself knew what was in man”

Jesus “himself knew what was in man,” John tells us. It is a perplexing and yet an illuminating comment. It comes in John’s Gospel just after the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee, just after the casting out of the money changers in the temple at Jerusalem, just after the prediction of his death and resurrection imaged in terms of the destruction of the temple and its being raised up in three days, just after “many believed in his name when they saw the signs which he did” when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast. About those “many [who] believed in his name,” John tells us, “Jesus did not trust himself to them, because he knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man; for he himself knew what was in man” (John 2. 24,25). Wow.

“He himself knew what was in man.” And what is in us? As the context reveals, what is in us is the spectacle of deceit and distrust. “O put not your trust in princes nor in any child of man; for there is no help in them” (Ps. 146.2), the psalmist observes and reminds us, too, that “vain is the help of man” (Ps.60.11). So what is in us? Not much. Even more, there is nothing. And even more than nothing, there is the will to nothingness in us that is a disillusioning and destructive spirit. There is nothing in and of ourselves but the will to nothingness. It is really nihilism.

This is to speak in a kind of contemporary language, the language of a kind of existentialism, the language of the despair of reason and knowledge, the language of the triumph of the will to power over the will to truth, the language of atheism. But, such a way of speaking has its biblical basis, it seems to me, in the rather dark and bleak readings for The Third Sunday in Lent upon which Jesus’ word from John provides such an important commentary. Jesus “himself knew what was in man;” it is not a pretty picture.

The remarkable epistle reading from Ephesians and remarkably even more disturbing gospel story from St. Luke speak directly to the climate of disillusionment and despair in our contemporary culture, and yet offer the real and true remedy to our fears and worries; in short, they provide the counter to the culture of nihilism. “For ye were sometimes darkness,” as Paul puts it.

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“You have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed”

Words from The Book of Genesis (Gen. 32.28), from the classic story of struggle, Jacob wrestling with an angel, wrestling with God, it seems, and by virtue of prevailing becomes Israel, one who strives with God. It is all about the struggle, the jihad.

The word, jihad, has been largely hi-jacked, if you will pardon the expression, in the contemporary discourse about Islamist terrorism and by the continuing and constant confusions in the Middle East. Yet, in its proper spiritual sense, jihad is about the struggle of the soul in relation to the will of Allah, the will of God. So, too, for Christians and Jews, there are the struggles of the soul with respect to God and our life with God in prayer and praise, in service and sacrifice. The struggle means acknowledging our own faults and shortcomings, our sins, to be blunt about it, which is only possible through the prior recognition of the goodness of God. The struggle is “to decline from sin and incline to virtue”; the struggle, quite simply, for “holiness” as Paul tells us in this morning’s epistle. We “are called”, he says, “to holiness” which is the quality of God in our very being. It is a constant struggle intensified for us in the disciplines of the Lenten journey. Lent is about embracing the struggle.

But what kind of struggle? Will it be a struggle which diminishes and destroys or the struggle which dignifies and ennobles? In any event, the struggle is defining. It is nothing less than a “striv[ing] with God and with men,” as the Genesis story reminds us. The struggle, the jihad, is altogether defining. It is ultimately about character and virtue.

This is what we see in the story of the Canaanite woman. We see her perseverance. She tenaciously hangs on to what she believes about Jesus. She senses in him the presence of God in whom there is health and salvation. She seeks in him healing and grace for her daughter. She seeks it by the only means we can receive it – through the prayer for mercy and help. This is no weak and wimpy prayer; this is the prayer of a strong woman who, like Jacob become Israel, will not let go. That tenacity of spirit, that persistent willfulness about what is objectively perceived, that willingness to hold on belongs to the truth of Israel but finds its expression here in one who is from outside Israel, a non-Israelite, yet one who strives with God and breaks into the very heart of God in Jesus Christ.

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“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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