Category: Sermons

“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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“They found him in the temple”

Where do we find God? In the places where he is named and praised, honoured and worshipped. “This is none other but the house of God … the gate of heaven” is written on the walls of this Church. “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God” is written in the narthex above where you enter into the Church. How little do we notice these things that remind us that this place, this Church, is and must be a place of teaching, a place where we find God because this is his temple. This is the house of God, where God is to be sought and found, where the things of God are to taught and learned. If the Church is not the place of teaching about God then it is not the Church.

This doesn’t mean that only the Church is the place where God is sought and taught. No. One of the sad tragedies and peculiar paradoxes of our contemporary culture is the failure to realise that there is not a single discipline of the mind, not a single aspect of human intellectual and spiritual culture that is not shaped and formed by religion and religious discourse. And the churches, more sadly, have been complicit in an atheist agenda – trying to make religion acceptable to the age, accommodating the teachings to the assumptions of the culture. From this standpoint, Christmas has become the atheists’ delight since it seems to confirm the essential atheist insight that God is made in the image of man. In the God made man, we see, the atheist claims, the fundamental point that we make God in our image. Nothing could be further from the truth of the Christmas story yet it is easy to see how Christians so easily collapse the Gospel into their own lives and expectations. Christmas quickly and easily becomes a form of self-worship.

Epiphany to the contrary is the atheists’ nightmare. Why? Because it is so resolutely set upon the themes of divinity. Its primary focus is the argument for the essential divinity of Jesus Christ and as such it argues for the essential attributes of God. We “turn ourselves” as John Cosin, the 17^th century Bishop of Durham in northern England puts it, “from his humanity below to his divinity above,” a turn from our contemplation of “His coming in the flesh that was God to His being God that was come in the flesh.” Epiphany is full of divinity.

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“They departed into their own country another way”

Epiphany marks the completion of the mystery of Christmas with the coming of the Magi-Kings to Bethlehem. They are the proverbial Johnny-come-latelies as well as the come-from-aways. They add a certain exotic quality to the humble scene at Bethlehem. Suddenly we realise that Christmas is omni populo, for all people, for rich and poor, for humble shepherds and wise kings, for men and women.

The coming of the Magi-Kings elevates the vision of paradise that Bethlehem represents into something more. It becomes a polis, a city-state, as it were. The social and the political aspects of our humanity are added to the simpler, more agrarian and humble features of our humanity. God’s great little one is not just for the little ones of our society and world but importantly for all. Little Bethlehem, “great among the cities of Judah,” is great not just because of the coming of the wise men but because their coming reveals something more than simply the harmonies of the created order; something more than paradise renewed. Suddenly, the paradise of Bethlehem becomes an image of the City of God!

The coming of the Magi-Kings also marks the beginning of the tradition of gift-giving. Yet, importantly, their gifts are more than the stuff they bring: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Their gifts reveal the greater gift of Christ, the gift of divine love incarnate in the child before whom they fall and worship. Their gifts honour the greatest gift of all, the gift of God’s love for us in the Child Christ. Their gifts reveal who he is both in himself and for us. No greater gift and no greater way for us to be gathered into the circle of eternal glory.

Their gifts of sacred meaning reveal Christ to us as King, and God, and Sacrifice. They at once complete the circle of Christmas love and set us upon another journey into a greater circle, one which is implicit already in everything that belongs to the celebration of Christmas in the cycle of holy days that belong to the Christ Child’s crown of glory. The transition from paradise restored to an image of the heavenly city deepens the mystery of Christmas; nostalgia for a lost past changes into a prophetic present. Bethlehem is complete; everything has been gathered around the Word made flesh.

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“But while he thought on these things, behold”

Christmas really is all about what we are given to behold. To be sure, there is rather a lot to behold in the richness of Christmas, itself a twelve day wonder that not even twelve days can exhaust. After St, Luke’s story of the nativity and St. John’s theological tour de force, we have St. Matthew’s account. It sounds a more human and a more personal note. It is not by accident that the symbol for St. Matthew’s Gospel is a winged man. His account of the nativity shows us the perplexity of Joseph finding himself in the strange predicament of being betrothed to Mary who is found to be with child. Matthew quickly adds “of the Holy Ghost” but Joseph has yet to learn that. His initial response is to make private arrangements. “But while he thought on these things, behold…”

To behold is to pay attention. It requires something of us. What it requires is exactly what we see in Joseph. There is the equally outstanding measure of Mary, who is really in the background here, the figure of Joseph’s musings and perplexity. “How can this be,” it might seem he is asking, even though that is, quite literally, Mary’s question at the Annunciation. Matthew, of course, does not provide us with the account of the Annunciation to Mary; only Luke does. Here in Matthew’s account, however, is a kind of angelic annunciation to Joseph. In his quiet musings, “being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example,” he “was minded to put her away privily.” An angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream to direct him otherwise but only because he was thinking on these things, things which have all his attention.

Matthew’s account unfolds the story of Christ’s nativity through the quiet, humble eyes of Joseph to whom the angel speaks. His words to Joseph are like the angel’s words to the shepherds, “fear not.” What we are given to behold is something wonderful, something for all. Notice how Matthew, quite marvelously really and with great economy of words, unfolds all of the significant points. Mary is your wife. What is conceived in her is “of the Holy Ghost” – though what exactly he is meant to make of that remains unclear! “She shall bring forth a Son,” and, here is something else quite wonderful, “And thou shalt call his name Jesus.” The explanation is precise, “for he shall save his people from their sins.”

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“His name was called Jesus”

What’s in a name? Mere words signifying whatever we choose? Or something more signifying the truth and the reality of what is signified? How do we name things? Are the terms of our naming merely conventions which could be otherwise? Are there not many different names for the same things and are there not different meanings and shades of meaning belonging to words themselves? Such is the wonder and the mystery of words and names.

Something of the wonder and the mystery of words and names are concentrated for us in Bethlehem. What are we to make of the strong words and names proclaimed in the Scriptures on this Octave Day of Christmas? Bethlehem, it seems, is the place of words and names that speak beyond the confines of a stable and a manger. Bethlehem is the place where the Word made flesh is named and signified as Jesus. Such is the wonder and the mystery of this day.

The idea of the Word made flesh, it seems to me, challenges the all-too-easy nominalism and relativism of our culture, as if names were merely of our choosing and at our convenience and as if names and words convey no real meaning beyond what meaning we choose to give to them; in short, that words and names signify no reality. We are really only talking to ourselves.

But Bethlehem shows us something more. It makes visible the astounding wonder of the unity of creation with the Creator and the unity of the whole of our humanity considered in and through the objective differences of its constituent parts. Bethlehem speaks to the deep desires of human hearts and to the form of those desires in their contemporary complexity. What are our environmental concerns about except a yearning and a longing for some sort of connection with the world of which we are a constituent part but from which we have alienated ourselves by our technocratic exuberance and arrogance? What are our social and political concerns about except a yearning and a longing for peace and harmony, for true unity and respect for all the peoples of the world?

Does not Bethlehem speak to such hopes and aspirations? Does not the spectacle of the Word made flesh in the lowliness and humility of Bethlehem speak to our desires? “Rich and poor, high and low, one with another”, shepherds and the Magi-Kings, the poor of the earth and the angels of heaven, humans and animals, men and women, and, especially, God and man, are all one in the wonder and worship of the child of Bethlehem. Here words and names begin to find their meaning.

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“These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth”

The Feast of the Holy Innocents is perhaps the most challenging of the three Christmas holy days. It challenges the sentimental aspects of Christmas and opens us out to its deeper meaning. Like The Feast of Stephen, nothing of our world of cruelty and suffering is glossed over or hidden from view. Yet nothing could be more disquieting than the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, the killing of children simply because they happen to be in the way, simply as a policy of political expediency.

The Feast of the Holy Innocents open us out to some of the larger biblical features of the Christmas story, particularly the flight into Egypt seen as the fulfillment of the ancient prophecy that “out of Egypt have I called my Son”. But how and why is the child Christ in Egypt? Because of Joseph being warned in a dream about the wrath of Herod seeking to kill the child whom he thinks is a rival to his kingship, little knowing that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, and little knowing, too, like Pilate, that he has no power at all except it were given him by God. The story also looks back to the story of Moses, to the policy of infanticide enacted by Pharaoh as an attempt to control the Hebrew population.

Yet the real power and the poignancy of the story lies in its theological meaning, especially as indicated in the reading from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. We are privileged to see things there from a heavenly viewpoint and to learn something about suffering which otherwise remains simply unfathomable in our lives. Like “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not”, we are often distraught and inconsolable and destroyed by the deaths of little infants or of those who never come to full birth. Such deaths are part of the tragedy of our humanity and yet this feast suggests that there is meaning to be found even in such loses.

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“Even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written”

Books and books, a world of books and a world of words but even and always more than the world. Christmas celebrates something more than ideas and words wafting about on the wind or drifting in and out of our minds. Christmas celebrates the Word made flesh. The three holy days of Christmas underscore something of the radical meaning of the Incarnation: first, with The Feast of Stephen reminding us of the integral connection between Christmas and Easter, and, especially, of the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins which belongs to our Christian witness; now, secondly, with The Feast of St. John the Evangelist; and, then, thirdly, with The Feast of the Holy Innocents.

The Feast of St. John the Evangelist recalls us to the great mystery of Christmas wonderfully signalled in The Prologue of his Gospel read on Christmas Eve. It recalls us to his teachings, his doctrine, found at once in his Gospel and in his Epistles. The Epistle reading from 1^st John echoes the great Gospel of Christmas and serves as a kind of homily or commentary about the meaning of the Incarnation, something which John is especially concerned to proclaim, to think and to contemplate. “That which was from the beginning” namely “the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” is that, he says, “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life”, that is what “we declare unto you.” And why? “That ye also may have fellowship with us … and that your joy may be full.”

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