Category: Sermons

“Their sound went out into all the earth,/and their words unto
the end of the world.”

Andrew is the Advent saint. His feast day either immediately anticipates Advent or it falls within the first week of Advent, indeed immediately after the First Sunday in Advent. In either case,this feast inaugurates the cycle of the Church’s commemoration of the Saints throughout the course of the year. There is always, it seems to me, something rich and significant about beginnings.

Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland and, therefore, of New Scotland, Nova Scotia, as well, perhaps in both cases because of the connection to the sea. Yet, Scotland is a long ways from the land of the New Testament, a long ways from the setting of the story of the calling of the brothers Simon Peter and Andrew, and the brothers Zebedee, James and John, a long ways from the sea of Galilee. How much further away is Nova Scotia. This reminds us of the missionary impulse of the Christian faith. This doesn’t mean that Andrew ever laid eyes on either Scotland or New Scotland!

Yet, the spiritual point is clear. Those who follow Jesus become the ones who proclaim Jesus and make him known even “unto the ends of the world.” For much of the first millennium or more, Scotland must often to have seemed to be the very end of the world. Perhaps, too, the same might be said even now of Nova Scotia. And yet, the word has gone forth on the wings of the saints and has been carried forward by their witness to Jesus Christ. Critical to that witness, as the readings on this feast day reminds us, is the Scripture. The Feast of Andrew belongs to that pageant of Word and Song which is part and parcel of the Advent of Christ.

The epistle reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans is a kind of mini-treatise on what we might call ‘the theology of revelation’. It focuses on the significance of the Scriptures and upon preaching. The primary form of preaching is simply the proclamation of the Scriptures. Those that follow become those that are sent and those who are sent preach the good news of our salvation in Jesus Christ. There is an important emphasis upon the hearing of the Word of God through the preaching, meaning the proclamation of God’s word.

(more…)

Print this entry

“We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,
full of grace and truth.”

We beheld. Yet we can only behold what we are given to see. What we are given to see is something made. It is not the Word, but “the Word made flesh”. The shepherds say “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass,” literally, this saying that has happened, this Word that is made. God is the poet of Christmas. In Greek, poet means maker.

But the poet not only makes, he also makes known. We can only see “this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us”. We can only see in the light of God himself. Where God is, there his light is also.

By the light of God we are caught up into a greater understanding. We are born anew “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”; born from above into the company of the one whom we behold from above. His light perfects our light.

For by our own lights, we see but do not see. Our light is darkness. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” Our seeing is without a beholding, without an embracing in faith and understanding what we are given to see. There is no receiving. But by this greater light – the light which accompanies the Word, the light of God as illuminating grace – our light is taken up into something more. We are received into what we receive. “We beheld his glory.” The greater light is the light of grace, the grace to behold what “the lord hath made known unto us”, “the Word made flesh”. The Word who wills to be made also wills to be made known.

(more…)

Print this entry

“All the city was moved saying, Who is this?”

It is the great question of the Advent season, itself the great season of questions. It complements another great question, itself a biblical question, too, “what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the Son of Man that thou visitest him?” These questions recall us to God’s great question to us, to Adam in the Garden after the Fall, “Where are you?” with the implied question, ‘and what have you done?’ Somehow the questions about God and man ultimately meet in questions about Jesus.

“Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. This is the refrain or mantra, we might say, of the Advent season – the season of God’s coming to us. What does it mean that the kingdom of heaven is at hand? Jesus takes up this refrain from John the Baptist and makes it his own. In him it has its fullest meaning. But what is that meaning?

For centuries upon centuries upon centuries, the great gospel story for this day has been the triumphal entry of Christ into the holy city of Jerusalem. He comes as a king. His coming is greeted with eager enthusiasm and joyous expectation, it seems. He is hailed as king.

But is this not the gospel of Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week leading to the dark pain and agony of Good Friday, the somber silence of Holy Saturday, and then, only then, the paradoxical and overwhelming joy of Easter? To be sure. But “Christmas and Easter are but the evening and the morning of one and the self-same day” as the poet and preacher John Donne puts it. There is an inescapable connection between these two primary centers of Christian contemplation. Like an ellipse, our faith oscillates between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, each are implicated in the other. Neither makes any sense without the other.

We know, of course, the further irony of this triumphal entry of a king to his city. The cries of “Hosanna” quickly turn to the cries of “Crucify, Crucify!” And only so can we really begin to learn what it means for the kingdom of heaven to be at hand. “My kingdom”, Jesus will say, “is not of this world”. But that is precisely what we so often want to make it. That is precisely our darkness which the Light of Christ coming to us overcomes.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, / and a light unto my path”

What is the Bible? It is a book, to be sure, even The Book, though it was not always a book exactly. Formerly, there were scrolls of parchment as the Bible itself shows us. Jesus, for example, takes up the scroll of Isaiah and reads from it and proclaims the fulfillment of what he reads. But, at any rate, it has become a book, that is to say something enclosed between two covers. It is, moreover, a library of books, a book containing within itself a great number of books, a wide variety of literature, things written at different times and in different places. Is it just a collection of literary artifacts from times and places long ago and far away? And if so, why read it now?

Because it speaks not only to particular cultures but beyond them. Something of the answer to the question ‘what is the Bible?’ is captured in this characteristic. What we call ‘the Bible’ bears witness to this phenomenon of speaking beyond the particular context and circumstance for which or about which a particular text was originally written. It also bears witness to the writing down in one context of what is remembered from another context. For example, the people of Israel wrote down and put together while in exile in Babylon what was remembered of God’s Word to them at the time of the Exodus from Egypt.

Somehow what is remembered and written down is received as being altogether definitive, as defining the fundamental identity of Israel in quite different political and cultural circumstances. Somehow what is written down cannot be constrained to just one context. It reaches beyond.

The point is captured best, perhaps, by St. Paul’s marvelous summary phrase: “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” The Bible in all its varied literary array, is inescapably what is written. Hence, it is ‘Scripture’ – what is written. And yet what is written is simply what is remembered as Revelation. The Bible is the witness of God’s Revelation.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“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.

(more…)

Print this entry