Category: Sermons

“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”

The Feast of Stephen comes right after the great festival of Christ’s holy birth. It illustrates something of the deeper meaning of the mystery of Christmas.

St. Stephen is the proto-martyr, the first Christian martyr, to be sure, but the word ‘proto’ here signifies something more. He is not only the first but also the prototype of all martyrdom. Martyrdom is about witness. Stephen shows us what Christian witness really means. And I don’t simply mean by being stoned to death, either literally or metaphorically! What, then, is the witness of St. Stephen which serves as the prototype of all Christian witness? Simply what is captured in the medieval carol of this season and, more specifically, of this day, “Good King Wenceslas look’d out/ On the Feast of Stephen”.

And what did he see? “A poor man…gath’ring winter fuel”. And what did the king do but set out with his page, his servant, with food and wine to attend to the poor man? The story of the carol tells us of the fears and uncertainty of the page-boy about the journey and of the answer of the kingly saint to “mark my footsteps, my good page, / Tread thou in them boldly” and so “in his master’s steps he trod”. The carol concludes by pointing out the moral that “Ye who now will bless the poor, / Shall yourselves find blessing”. True but only if we follow in the master’s steps. In a way, the carol is a parable of Christmas itself. Christ has come to our poor and impoverished humanity in the early winter of our discontent. He has come with food and wine and those who would be his followers must mark his footsteps and follow in them bearing the gifts of Christ to others as well.

Something of what that means is signaled in the Feast of St. Stephen as a parable of the Christmas message. “Christ”, as another carol, puts it, “was born for this”, meaning death and rejection, sacrifice and crucifixion. And by extension, it means that Christ’s holy birth embraces all the miseries and sorrows of our lives as well as the forms of persecution and evil that are either visited upon ourselves by others or that we visit upon ourselves and others in our rejection of God.

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“And this shall be a sign unto you”

In the quiet calm of Christmas morning we celebrate Christ’s holy birth. There is a certain meditative quality to our gathering, it seems to me, after all the fuss and bother, the excitement and the expectancy of Christmas Eve. There is a certain uncertainty to our world and day, a world of fears and anxieties, to which the quietness of Christmas morning wonderfully counters. We are called to the truth of ourselves individually and collectively by our gathering at Bethlehem. The real and deep truth of our humanity notwithstanding the parade of atrocities globally is found in our communion with God in Jesus Christ. It is found in the humble yet awesome scene in Bethlehem.

We are no longer “assured of certain certainties” nor quite so “impatient to assume the world,” as T.S. Eliot puts it. Our world is a dark and disturbing place where we confront the disorder and the disarray of human hearts in acts of terrorism and destruction. Suddenly our cultural certainties seem far less certain; our cultural arrogance much more dangerous. How do we face such things? Do we simply retreat into the ghettoes of our churches, huddled behind closed doors of “certain certainties”, clinging to what we call our personal faith having despaired of the Faith itself? Or do we take a hold of this story contemplatively and enter more fully into its mystery and truth, the mystery and truth of the universal and catholic Faith?

“This shall be a sign unto you,” Luke tells us the angels say to the shepherds and so to us. We are one with the shepherds as the receivers of angels’ words. They are together the messengers of “good tidings of great joy”. “For unto you,” to you and me, “is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” A saviour – Jesus, Yeshua, means saviour. Christ means the anointed one of God. Words which we take for granted through their familiarity take on a special significance. What it all means is startling. It contrasts with all of the expected signs of salvation and exaltation. What does salvation mean? What does Christ the Lord mean? Salvation speaks to the wholeness and the completeness of our humanity, to our re-creation and redemption from sin. Christ the Lord speaks to the deep mystery of Christ as God, as “I am who I am” via the biblical circumlocution of Lord for the holy name of God revealed to Moses in the burning bush, the revelation of the principle upon which the being and the knowing of all things depend.

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“When all things were in quiet silence and the night was in the midst of her swift course, then thy Almighty Word leaped down from heaven, from thy royal throne”

What does Christmas mean in a post-Christian and post-secular culture? Perhaps a time to reclaim something of its essential meaning. There are, to be sure, all of the many and varied traditions of family and community, of secular and social customs and practices that surround and often overwhelm us. What does Christmas really mean?

This is not the same question as what does Christmas mean to you and me individually and subjectively. What Christmas means to you and your family and circle of friends is important but results only in a kind of relativism which is unable to explain what anything means in itself. How do we think about Christmas and about its essential meaning?

“I am tired of hearing jingle bells,” someone said at the Capella Regalis concert here last Sunday night. That wasn’t on the programme. And yet that is one of the songs of the season, I suppose, just like Santa Claus is invariably and unavoidably part of the season, if not for many the heart of Christmas. We confront an almost overwhelming array of images that bombard our ears and eyes, not to mention their effect on our pocket books. It increasingly appears that Christmas is an economic event. Do your duty to the economy and spend, spend, spend. That is surely one of the reasons for the season! And yet, however much such things as giving and getting, buying and spending, consuming and consuming and consuming are a feature of the Christmas season now extending in the commercial world from at least Halloween to sometime late this afternoon, they don’t really explain anything. Why Christmas? Why a word that has inescapably a Christian religious reference in a post-Christian world?

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“My Lord, and my God”

Words of faith arise from doubt and uncertainty. The Feast of St. Thomas occurs on the shortest day and the longest night of the year in the week of the winter solstice that brings us to the Christmas festival of light and love. Somehow his feast helps us to think more deeply about the advent of Christ and its meaning, even to “melt the clouds of sin and sadness” and to “drive the dark of doubt away.”

“’What is Truth’, said jesting Pilate; and wouldn’t stay for an answer,” Sir Francis Bacon famously begins his celebrated essay On Truth. Like Pilate, Thomas asked a question of Jesus earlier in John’s Gospel just after Jesus spoke of “go[ing] to prepar[ing] a place for you … that where I am there you may be also. And you know the way where I am going” to which Thomas asks, “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Jesus responds famously “I am the way, and the truth and the life.” Unlike Pilate, Thomas, it seems, stayed for an answer and then again returned for an answer to his doubts and questions about Christ’s resurrection. “My Lord, and my God” are his profound words of faith that arise from the face-to-face encounter with the Risen Christ whose body bears the marks of his crucifixion.

It is that question and answer about the bodily reality of Christ that makes The Feast of St. Thomas an advent feast and catapults us into the mystery of the Incarnation. It serves as well to connect Christmas and Easter; the nativity and the resurrection are like two complementary mysteries, each illumining something of the deeper meaning of the other. The Gospel for his Feast day is the resurrection story of Jesus teaching the disciples behind closed doors and finally Thomas, too, about the resurrection, itself a testament to the Incarnation.

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“The Lord is at hand. In nothing be anxious”

Ready yet? Or are you still running madly about in circles in the mindless busyness that so often and so easily overtakes us? Perhaps we need this Sunday in Advent just like we need Advent more than we realise in order for Christmas to have any real meaning. “Repent ye, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand,” is the Advent mantra. It comes to further expression today in the notes of expectancy and joy, of wonder and peace signalled in the readings. “The Lord is at hand,” Paul says in Philippians with a sense of rejoicing, a “rejoic[ing] in the Lord alway”, he says.

And in the gospel reading from St. John, too, we seem to be going in circles, indeed to have come full circle. The passage this morning ends where the gospel reading for The Sunday Next Before Advent in our Canadian Prayer Book begins. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” John the Baptist says, pointing us to Jesus. There, on The Sunday Next Before Advent, it serves as a kind of transition between the ending of the Trinity season and the beginning of Advent. Here on The Fourth Sunday in Advent it signals the meaning of the one whose coming we await, the one who is at hand always.

We are going in circles just not mindlessly but mindfully, I hope. At least that is the purpose of the Church’s proclamation in Advent. Perhaps it is only now in an increasingly post-Christian and post-secular world that we can begin to enter more fully and more mindfully into the mystery of God with us now and always without the social veneer and cultural patina so often mistaken for the real thing. Perhaps we can begin to see how the Christian Faith simply intensifies the great religious mystery of our being with God that belongs to philosophical religion more generally and which allows for a principled discourse with other religions and even our post-secular culture, particularly in its multicultural confusions.

Our advent wreath is about a circle of light. It challenges the rather linear nature of our thinking and our doing, as if time were all and everything, itself a kind of mindlessness in the endless parade of the contingent and the random. It reminds us instead of how our lives are embraced in the eternity of God and that time has no meaning apart from its being gathered into the fullness of God’s truth and light, into the eternal present of God.

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“What went ye out for to see?”

Jesus asks with threefold intensity, “what went ye out for to see?” He is speaking about John the Baptist, one of the outstanding figures of the landscape of Advent. About him Jesus says he is “more than a prophet.” He is the one sent “to prepare the way of the Lord.” Advent is all about the preparations for Christ’s coming.

Yet what a strange and a beguiling figure John the Baptist is! Angels and bells, culturally and certainly biblically, often signal messages and warnings. We had occasion this week past to bury Bert Galley, the long-standing and faithful bell-ringer of Christ Church for so many, many years. Yet, angels and bells, as it were, are here wrapped in “camel’s hair with a girdle of leather about his waist and eating locusts and wild honey”. For such is the rather forbidding picture which we are given of John the Baptist, the great prophet of the Advent of Christ. He is vox clamatis in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, even more a voice crying from prison, “art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” Somehow the Advent message of John the Baptist has a powerful and poignant intensity at the point where he is questioning his own life and ministry.

What is that life and ministry? He came, as Mark tells us, “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” He came, as John tells us, teaching that “I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.” His whole ministry is a ministry of deference: “he must increase, but I must decrease”, he says about Christ and himself. He is not the Christ. He is not the forgiveness of sins. But he is the essential preparation for the coming of Christ whom he identifies to us as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” We are, it seems, totally caught up in the motions and the mystery of God coming to us, in part through the ministry of John the Baptist.

He is the counter to the soft indulgence and easy complacency of our world and day, a world defined by material comforts and sensual pleasures or at least a desire for such things. A figure of ascetic rigour, he is defined by a fierce and uncompromising commitment to the things of the spirit, a figure of the desert who challenges us about the meaning and direction of our human lives. What do we live for? For our creaturely comforts? Or for the righteousness of God which perfects and gives meaning to our human lives? There is little that is comforting, perhaps, about John the Baptist in our modern sense of comfort. There is everything that is strengthening for us, perhaps, in his message; the older sense of comfort as strengthening us in the things that really matter.

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“Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning”

‘Why we need hell?’ might be an apt title for this sermon. The answer is not to have a place to put our enemies and those who trouble us nor to make us appreciate heaven as the desperate alternative to the usual parade of human miseries. No. The reason, paradoxically, has more to do with the reality of hope itself and the redemption of our desires. As the poet/theologian Dante so clearly teaches, Hell is about getting exactly what you want, only as it truly is, which is not the same thing as what we think we want. Hell is for those who have lost, as he puts it, “the good of intellect”, for those who have not remembered or better yet, have not wanted to remember that “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning” and have not repented.

But the Word which comes to us is, inescapably and necessarily, a word of judgment, a word calling us to account, a word convicting and convincing our hearts of the reality of God and his kingdom by which our lives are measured and, invariably, found wanting. “There is none that doeth good, no, not one.” All our motives are tainted by self-love. Hope comes into play precisely at this point. In the awareness of an objective measure and standard to which we are accountable, we are brought before the absolute goodness of God. At the point where human desires discover their limitation, something more is opened out to us. We seek something more. And so does God.

That something more is conveyed wondrously in the pageant of Scripture. Advent reminds us of the coming of God’s Word to us. That coming is threefold: a coming historically, in the ‘then’ of Christ’s coming in carne, in the flesh; a coming ab judicio, in the judgment which is past, future and yet ever present, because it is now and always; and, a coming in mente, in our minds to shape and order our desires. And these three ‘comings’ are all comings of God in and through his Word.

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