Category: Sermons

“Come and See”

Times of transition signal the occasions for renewal, for a beginning again. Nowhere do we see those occasions for renewed beginnings more profoundly than on this Sunday which is wonderfully named, The Sunday Next Before Advent – proxima ante. What a wonderful pile of prepositions! They serve to mark a turning point.

‘Next’ and ‘before’ are the prepositions here which position us before the truth. What truth? The truth of God’s Word coming towards us awakens us to the promise and hope of God’s Word with us in Jesus Christ. This Sunday is really about the gathering up of the moments of spiritual grace in the year past and positioning us to begin again. Such is the hope and wonder of Advent.

The ancient gospel story that was traditionally read on this Sunday for centuries upon centuries captures profoundly the meaning of that gathering and that positioning. It is the story in John’s Gospel of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness where there is “the gather[ing] up [of] the fragments” left-over from the feast “that nothing be lost.” Read at this time of endings and beginnings, the end of the Trinity season and the beginning of Advent, it signals at once a Eucharistic theme and an Eschatological theme, that is to say, the idea of “the end of all things.” Eschatology means the last things – death, judgment, heaven and hell. That idea of an eschatological end only serves to bring us to the one in whom we have our beginning and our end, Jesus Christ. He is “the alpha and the omega” of our lives, something which the very architecture of this church reminds us with the alpha and omega beams directly above your heads, the very building preaching to you, as it were, about your spiritual path and identity and embracing you in the mystery of our life in Christ.

In following Christ, we have the hope of the gathering up of the spiritual moments of his grace in our lives, whether it means the little steps of progress against besetting sins and temptations to wickedness or the deeper awareness of those sins and wickedness stirring us to a renewed determination to do better. Such is Advent now so soon upon us and before us starting next Sunday.

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“For the maid is not dead, but sleepeth.”

There is no greater contrast than between the atrocities committed by radical Islamic terrorists, it seems, in Paris this weekend and the readings before us this morning; a contrast between death and destruction, on the one hand, and healing and wholeness, on the other hand. Troubling times that confront us with such contrasts.

Jesus spoke and arose. Jesus turned and saw her and said, “Daughter, be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole.” Jesus came and said, “Give place; for the maid is not dead but sleepeth.” Jesus “went in and took her by the hand, and the maid arose.” A double healing.

The year runs out in the strength and the gentleness of healing in contrast to death and destruction. The year runs out with Jesus turning and taking us by the hand. Such is the truth and the power of the Word spoken and felt. At issue is whether we are dead or only asleep. The whole pattern of the Church year in the ordered readings of the Scripture is really about two things: God turning to us and our being turned to God. This simple yet powerful Gospel story captures the whole point of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. In a way, it is simply about the purpose and meaning of God’s turning to us in the intimate humanity of Jesus Christ.

In relation to that turning of God to us in Jesus Christ the question is whether we are affected and changed, whether there has been any turning from sin to grace, from death to life, in us; in short, whether we are dead or merely asleep. If the latter, then there is the hope of our being awakened; if the former, then there is the hope of being raised up, so that, in either case, we “might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding” and that we “might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God,” as Paul exhorts us in his Letter to the Colossians. Powerful words, perhaps, even stirring words; words that can turn us about and change us. That is the whole point.

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“Whose is this image and superscription?”

What’s it all about? Can it be that we are defined, controlled and governed by money? Does everything comes down to money? “Money makes the world go round, of that we all are sure,” sings the chorus in Cabaret? Is the “cabaret of life, old chum,” simply the cash nexus as Thomas Carlyle first suggested and Karl Marx famously claimed? And if so, what does that make us?

“The love of money” is proverbially and scripturally said to be “the root of all evil”. Not money itself, but the love of money. Why? Because money is power. The misuse of money is the abuse of power. Money is twisted from a medium of exchange to being a form of domination and control. There is, at once, the use of money to dominate and manipulate others and the fact that money comes to dominate us. At issue are our loves, our desires.

The love of money causes us to forget who we are. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more prevalent than in our day. Whether we are rich or poor, employed or unemployed, pensioned or unpensioned, we are under a constant barrage of images that seek to persuade us that we are merely economic beings, that our worth and the meaning of our lives is to be measured materially and financially. This is not only destructive of human personality and the human community but destructive of the forms of honest and meaningful exchange so necessary to the welfare of souls and communities. Their end, our end, “is destruction, whose god is their belly” as Hebrews provocatively observes.

Money comes to possess us because we allow it to define the space in which we live out our lives. Means become ends which they cannot be. Economic ends fail for the simple reason that our lives and the worth of our lives cannot be reduced to an economic quantity. When we are defined economically, then we are but “bellies”, as it were, consumers (and, no doubt, “bellyachers” as well!). We are seduced into thinking that everything, including religion, must be a consumer product, a marketable commodity. The evil of money lies precisely in making us forget who we are.

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“It was winter; and Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch”

It is a provocative and compelling image and the setting for the continuation of the radical meaning of Christ the Good Shepherd. In other words, it belongs to the theme of gathering, to Christ’s gathering of our humanity to himself in truth and love. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give them eternal life.” Pretty powerful words that go to the answer to the question, “If thou be the Christ tell us plainly,” to which Jesus responded, “I told you and ye believed not.” Somehow our believing hinges upon our hearing the voice of Jesus. Only so can we discover that we are embraced in the Son’s love for the Father.

The Feast of All Saints’ embraces the Solemnity of All Souls’. From the glory of the Saints we turn to the somber realities of our common mortality. The gathering of the Saints in glory does not simply eclipse the darkness of death, the common death that awaits us all. Such thoughts may seem to belong to the winter of our souls but they simply underline the point of the Burial Office that nothing “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing, not even death. Why? Because Christ goes through the valley of the shadow of death for us and with us. The golden thread of the life of Christ runs through the grave and gate of death.

We are tasked to remember and in so doing we discover yet another one of our failings. We cannot always remember even those who were once so close and dear to us. Names and faces fade from our minds and memories. They may or may not be stirred again to memory by some thought, word or action but they are not simply and readily always there in our minds. We confront our limitations. Our memories are fragile and fragmented.

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“And he opened his mouth and taught them”

It is, to be sure, “that time of year… when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” And yet in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering, a great and profound gathering. Christ the King strides across the barren fields of our humanity to gather us into glory. It is the glory of the Communion of Saints. It is his gathering, a kind of collecting together of all that is scattered and lost.

The image of human lives as scattered leaves goes back to the Sibylline Oracles of Roman Antiquity conveyed most wonderfully by Vergil and then used by Dante even more wondrously to capture our being gathered together into the Communion of Saints. The whole human story belongs to one book, divinely written, to be sure, but scattered about on the wind; the leaves of the pages, like the leaves of the trees, are scattered and blown about. But by God’s grace the scattered leaves are gathered together into one volume; the leaves of the autumn likened to the pages – the leaves – of a book.

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“For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will,
but the will of him who sent me”

The feast of St. Simon and St. Jude completes the parade of Apostolic Saints. With this feast, the holy band of twelve is gathered together in the unity of Jerusalem and in that gathering we glimpse something of the meaning of our eternal home. St. Simon and St. Jude complete the festal round of the Apostles and prepare us for the harvest festival of All Saints.

St. Simon and St. Jude, Apostles of Christ. Very little can be said about them. What can be said has simply to do with their apostleship. They are of the company of “twelve poor men, by Christ anointed,” as a hymn puts it. What more needs to be said than that? And how appropriate, too, on the eve of Nick Hatt’s deaconing in our diocese tomorrow night and whom we keep in our prayers this evening. Simon and Jude speak directly to the nature of the ministry.

They have, to be sure, lent their names to certain features of human life as patron saints, symbols, we might say, of some aspect or other of the virtues of Christ individually considered. St. Simon is the patron saint of zealots; St. Jude, more curiously, is the patron saint of lost causes, something with which I have more than a passing acquaintance! The zealous passion for a perfect political and social and spiritual righteousness readily complements the despair at lost causes that often accompanies such worthy and necessary aspirations. Ultimately, such zeal brings us to the true righteousness of Christ, realized in the city of heavenly Jerusalem. For what we have here is really “the unreal city” (T.S. Eliot), a lost cause.

“Zeal for thine house hath even consumed me,” the psalmist says, in a passage recalled by the disciples in John’s Gospel in relation to the cleansing of the temple. Through the myriad of lost causes, the deeper yearning for peace and righteousness is glimpsed, the deeper yearning which belongs to a peace, “not as the world giveth,” but as Christ gives.

The readings for this feast concentrate our attention on the Apostolic Foundation of the Church and the end of our humanity. Apostolic Foundation and Apostolic Fellowship; these are two things which we are badly in need of recovering and reclaiming. They belong to the truth of the ordained ministry. Without them, our parishes become little more than a club for seniors and a playground for children – we wish!. The church becomes a sect, championing one spiritual idea or quasi spiritual idea at the expense of all the rest, or trumpeting one of a myriad of the social and political agendas of the day while ignoring the larger vision of the whole of redeemed humanity that is hers to proclaim. We are too much with ourselves because we are not with God.

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“To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge…”

The raising of the only son of the widow of Nain reveals the love of Christ “which,” as Paul tells us, “passeth knowledge,” which goes beyond what we can know and do simply on our own. Without the love of God, we are utterly incomplete, bereft and empty. To be aware of this is to be awakened to an ethic of action rooted in compassion.

Compassion is the operative word in The Parable of the Good Samaritan. That compassion is ultimately the love of Christ, the Son of God who became man for us and who engages us in our brokenness and hurt to heal and restore and to set us in motion towards one another. Christ’s compassion, too, is the motivating force in the story of the one leper who “turned back, giving him thanks and he was a Samaritan.” Thanksgiving is ultimately rooted in the divine love which perfects our human loves. Thanksgiving is a form of love at work in us.

We just heard the powerful story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain. It is one of three stories where Jesus meets us as mourners and each time something happens that is transformative. The operative word is compassion. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” Compassion is deep love, the deep love of God in Jesus Christ which reaches out to our humanity, at once to the sorrow and loss of the widow and to the death of her only son. We are meant to empathise with her loss and to feel its depth. She is utterly bereft – a widow who has lost her husband and now a mother who has lost her only son. We sense her desolation, the utter emptiness of her being.

What happens? We see compassion at work. The active love of God creates and now recreates. Why is there anything at all? Why creation? The best and only answer is love, the love which manifests love. And that love is so powerful, so great, that it extends to the restoration and redemption of all that is broken and dead, empty and bereft.

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“Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”

In one way, it is a curious criticism. After all, the concept of Revelation begins with signs and wonders. God reveals himself to Moses in the Burning Bush, a sign and a wonder, to be sure, and one that catches our attention, a bush burns and is not consumed out of which God speaks his Name, “I am who I am.” It initiates the Exodus, the journey into the understanding of God’s will for our humanity. But there is a further question.

What is the effect of God’s Word on our minds? His Word is proclaimed in our presence. His story is told in our hearing. It is told for us. It is even written out for us to read in Jesus Christ. We hear it. We know it. But what effect does it have on our minds and in our lives?

“This is again the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judaea into Galilee,” John tells us. In telling us this, he reminds us of the first sign, the first miracle, which Jesus did. Moreover, it is the second time that he is in the same place. What is that place? It is Cana of Galilee. It seems to have been the place of signs. At the very least what happens here in Cana of Galilee signifies something of the effect of God’s Word on human minds.

God’s Word causes delight. God’s Word causes healing. God’s Word creates new life and new birth. Such are the desired effects of God’s Word upon our minds.

What was the first sign that Jesus did in this place of signs, Cana of Galilee? It was at the Wedding-feast in Cana of Galilee that Jesus turned the water into wine, a story which we hear every year during Epiphany. The effect was to cause delight and wonderment. They who heard the word “receive[d] the word with joy”. Christ gives not only wine but the best wine. Wine, as the psalmist says, “makes glad the heart of man”. That most excellent wine belongs to the abundant life which he would give us – our joy and our blessedness in his presence with the Father and with one another in the fellowship of faith. The effect of God’s Word is our joy. Such is the purpose of God’s Word in the first sign that Jesus did in Cana of Galilee.

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