Category: Sermons

“He was received up into heaven”

“We ascend in the ascension of our hearts,” Augustine memorably says, capturing in a phrase the doctrinal meaning of Christ’s Ascension. The fortieth day of Easter marks the Ascension of Christ, itself the culmination of the Resurrection. It opens us out to its deeper meaning and truth.

There is a wonderful sense of joy which belongs to Easter and Eastertide that reaches a kind of crescendo in the Ascension. All of the scripture passages, old and new, are full of a sense of joy and wonder. Why? Because the Ascension marks what the Fathers astutely call, “the exaltation of our humanity.” Through Christ’s death and resurrection we have a place, a home with God. It is signalled profoundly and beautifully in the Son’s homecoming to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to the redemption of the world and our humanity. All the themes of Eastertide find their fullest meaning in the Ascension of Christ.

“I go to prepare a place for you,” Jesus says, “that where I am there ye may be also.” The Ascension celebrates the return of the Son to the Father in which return our humanity realizes its end in God, on the one hand, and has its participation in the life of the Trinity through prayer now, on the other hand. The Ascension reveals the true movement of our liturgy. It is the liturgy of the sursum corda, the liturgy of the lifting up of our humanity to God and into God. “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up unto the Lord.”

The Ascension is the necessary counter to the spirit of accommodationism so dominant in our church and culture, the idea that the Christian Gospel must accommodate itself to the fads and fancies of each and every passing age. To engage our world in all of its confusions is not the same thing as catering to every passing fad and fancy. The Ascension signals the real meaning of the engagement between God and Man. We ascend in the ascension of our hearts in prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament. We are gathered into the divine life. It is the very opposite of supposing that the divine life is collapsed into our world and day.

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“I will that all men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands”

Praying everywhere and all the time. That is the radical meaning of prayer. It signifies, as Richard Hooker puts it, “all the service that we ever do unto God.” In short, it is about the Godward direction of our lives. What that means is the challenge. But at the very least it suggests something about the power and nature of prayer. It suggests that prayer belongs to our thinking and our loving and our doing; in other words, our very being.

This opens us out to a broader view of prayer, though one which is deeply embedded in our liturgical tradition of prayer, in liturgical prayer itself. Nothing signals the Godward direction of our lives better than the liturgy, itself a labour, a human work but one which has been infused with the grace of God. Paul’s Letter to Timothy alludes to an aspect of this, namely, the physical gesture of holy hands uplifted in prayer. It suggests the orans position, a visible way of signifying our openness to divine grace and to the ways in which God’s grace shapes our lives through prayer.

The Gospel from Luke reminds us that the heart of all prayer is the Lord’s Prayer. That prayer gathers us into the intimacy of the Son’s love for the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the prayer which Jesus teaches us to pray – when you pray, not if. Apart from the literal words there is the deeper meaning of that prayer. The story which he tells that accompanies the teaching about the Lord’s Prayer is about persevering in prayer.

What is that about? Simply this, that God wants us to want what he wants for us and through prayer we are engaged in learning to ask what it is that we should be seeking. Knowing and desiring are both part of the dynamic of prayer. The Gospel makes it clear that persevering in “asking, seeking, knocking” results in “receiving, finding,” and in the “opening” to the will of God. Something is required of us. It is our wanting God’s will to “be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Rogationtide is all about prayer and prayer is all about asking. It means, however, the willingness to learn what to ask for and in what way. It is nothing less than the reality of our lives as lived for God and with God and in God; and all because of the Resurrection. We are gathered into the very motions of the love that is the Trinity.

“I will that all men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands”

Fr. David Curry
Rogation Monday, 2015

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“And the Lord showed him all the land”

How do we look upon the land, upon our world? Do we see it as something to be exploited and used to our benefit and interest economically and materially? Or do we see the land more spiritually and intellectually in ways that might condition our use of it? How can we separate ourselves from the land? How we look upon the land equally speaks to how we look upon ourselves.

In our secular or civil culture, this is Mother’s Day but in the liturgical patterns of prayer and praise it is Rogation Sunday. The word rogation signifies prayer but with a profound connection to the land and our world. In the great Eucharistic gospel for today, Jesus tells us about his coming into the world and about his leaving the world. Somehow the world itself is gathered into the spiritual motions of the Son’s love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” And this makes all the difference for the understanding of our lives wherever we find ourselves in the world. There is the possibility for our affection for our places in the land and for a real commitment to the good of the land. The world does not stand over and against us in terms of our relation to God. As Jesus says, “I have overcome the world.”

We are challenged about how we see the land and about how we see ourselves in the landscape of creation redeemed. That is the great message of Eastertide and of this Sunday. The lesson from Deuteronomy tells the story of Moses being allowed to see the promised land before he dies. He sees but does not enter into the promised land. In the lesson from Acts, Paul preaches the Resurrection in Antioch Pisidia by way of reference to the Exodus and the promised land. “And as they went out [of the synagogue], the people begged that these things might be told them the next sabbath,” (Acts 13.42). We can be changed by what we hear – again and again, it seems.

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“Because I go to the Father”

There is at once a fearful and a sad emptiness to our world and day which the YouTube Fanfest in Toronto, perhaps, illustrates. Jenna Marbles has issued her 200^th YouTube video. Her YouTube Channel has over 15 million subscribers. Her latest and perhaps last YouTube is a kind of good-by. It captures wonderfully the narcissism and the nihilism of contemporary culture. It begins with her “want[ing] to share some thoughts” with us. But what are those thoughts? A series of rather trite clichés; trite but true which is the nature of clichés, I suppose. “Because to me, I’m just Jenna. That’s all I am,” she says. But there are questions. What are they? Our questions to her, she thinks. “What are you going to do next? Where is this all leading? What about your future?” To which she replies with disarming honesty and sincerity, “The truth is, I don’t know.”

There are the pressures about having plans and goals. But as she says, “what if your goals are vague? Like mine.” What are they? “To be happy. To laugh every day. To experience life. To find love and loss. To just feel what it feels like to be a human being. To feel alive.” All rather commonplace, a tad sentimental and, perhaps, a wee bit poignant but no doubt undeniable. We are likely all suckers for them. Yet, as she says, “where do you go with goals like that?”

“People associate being lost as something bad. Fear is bad. Confusion is bad. But it’s not,” she claims, “It’s life. Because the way I see it, no one knows what they’re doing. Ever.” True enough, I suppose. Our confusions can be the beginning of learning and living; so too, with fear, especially, “the fear of the Lord” which “is the beginning of wisdom” from the biblical perspective. But if people think they know what they are doing, they’re lying, she says. “No one knows what life has in store. You can take some steps towards what you want. But you can’t control where the cards fall.” True enough, too, I suppose. So then what? With respect to drive and desire and ambition, “people focus on how to get somewhere they’re not right now,” she observes only to ask, “what’s wrong with the step you’re on?” while falling on her face. And then, like the sentiment of a Hallmark card, she advises. “Look around you. Don’t miss what you have today. Your friends. Your family. People you love.” Okay. All rather sweet and cute. But then what? The sad recognition that her time in the limelight may be coming to an end. “The novelty of me has worn off” she says, rationalizing that “we get tired of people every day.” “And that’s okay,” she says, trying to put a brave face on it but wrestling with the transitory nature of fame and glory. Sic transit gloria mundi, she might have said more profoundly. So it’s not all Jenna any more. So passes the glory of the world. Those that live by the image, must die by the image.

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“Ye believe in God, believe also in me”

The readings for The Feast of St. Philip and St. James complement the themes of Eastertide. The fundamental orientation of the Son to the Father is ever so strongly and rather provocatively expressed in the gospel reading, “no man cometh unto the Father but by me,” Jesus says, pointing out to Philip, too, that “he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.” And yet, Jesus says, “believe me, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for the very work’s sake.”

The things which Jesus does are the works which manifest the truth and the life and the way of God. And how are we to participate in that? Through prayer. “If ye ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” All prayer is about nothing less and nothing more than asking the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. All prayer gathers us into the fundamental orientation of the Son, “because I go unto my Father.” Here again, and providentially, we have the recurring Easter refrain, “because I go to the Father.” Everything is rooted and grounded in the life of God, the holy and blessed Trinity.

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“Peace be unto you”

Peace and forgiveness flow out from the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. They are the first-fruits of his resurrection in us. Jesus appears behind closed doors where the disciples are huddled in fear. He proclaims peace and forgiveness. He institutes the means by which his peace and his forgiveness continue with us – through the Holy Spirit breathed out upon the disciples who will be the apostles of his church. They are sent forth to bestow the peace and the forgiveness of God to a fearful and an uncertain world. “Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosoever sins ye retain, they are retained”.

What an awesome charge! And, yet, how little understood. Sometimes known as “the power of the keys,” the proclamation of God’s forgiveness through the ordained ministry to his penitent people effects what it signifies. If we truly confess our sins and truly seek God’s forgiveness, then we receive the grace of forgiveness objectively proclaimed in the words of absolution pronounced by the priest and signified in the sign of the cross. We are forgiven. That is the grace which extends from the Upper Room “the same day at evening,” the day of the resurrection of Christ to us even today. It is as if we are there, in an arrested moment of time and space, the eternal now. Something happens in the liturgy. At every service, Christ appears, as it were, behind closed doors to speak peace and forgiveness to us all.

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“Because I go to the Father”

There is confusion before and after. “Because I go to the Father,” Jesus says, but what does he mean, the disciples wonder? And many, many have wondered and continue to wonder ever since. Yet, it is the recurring refrain of the Easter Season that appears time and time again, especially in the last three Sundays of Eastertide.

The refrain goes to the heart of the Christian mystery, to who Jesus is and who he is for us. “Because I go to the Father”, your sorrow – our sorrow – shall be turned into joy. “Because I go to the Father,” the Holy Spirit will come upon you “to guide you into all truth” and “to bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you”.

The phrase “because I go to the Father” speaks to the essential identity of the Son with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. This lies at the very heart of the Christian religion, to the mystery of our communion with God, to our life in Christ. The phrase “because I go to the Father” speaks to the divine intimacy into which Christ would bring us and place us. He would place us in his love for the Father in the Holy Spirit.

These are resurrection words. They speak to us of the hope of the Gospel. They are resurrection words into which all that belongs to sorrow and suffering have been taken and out of which all that belongs to joy and peace come forth. The resurrection, after all, is new birth, new life. Its radical meaning is life to God with God and in God, “because I go to the Father”. Where would we be without prepositions?

His words speak to us about the pilgrimage of salvation: the way he goes for us and that way in us. The psalmist puts it this way:

Blessed are they whose strength is in thee/ in whose heart are the pilgrim ways; Who going through the Vale of Misery use it for a well;/ yea, the early rain covereth it with blessings.

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“I am the good shepherd”

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says, who also says “I am the Good Shepherd.” The two phrases go together and inform our understanding of what we do here today, an understanding of things spiritual and intellectual that were well known and understood by the very person who gathers us into that understanding.

We meet here at Christ Church for the Christian funeral of Helen Katharine Gibson. We meet in accord not simply with her wishes per se but her wishes in accord with the pattern and understanding of the Christian faith which she believed and to which she gave such eloquent testimony by her example and service, her commitment and generosity.

“O Jesus, I have promised.” They are the first words of one of the hymns which she wanted sung at her Requiem. Nothing captures more profoundly the character of Helen. Her whole life was about a promise to the Christ who promises salvation to all that seek his will. Helen knew this and knew something else. It is not a one-off moment of assertion but a life-long process of learning about “put[ting] on the Lord Jesus Christ,” about living with Christ in his body, the Church. For Helen it was essential, “the one thing necessary.” She combined in her approach to Parish and community life both the service qualities of a Martha, “busy with many things,” and the contemplative qualities of a Mary, “sitting at the feet of Jesus.” She knew that service and worship go together and belong to the nature of our life in Christ. It was not simply what she wanted; it was also what she thought was right and proper.

Though diminutive in stature, she was great-souled in character. There was a remarkable toughness to Helen. She was not one to give up and remained courteous and lively in heart and mind right to the end, undeterred by such minor things as broken bones! Those were only inconveniences. She was not one to complain. The major frustration for her was not being able to do all the things that she wanted to do. I am talking about her when she was in her nineties! For years upon years, she attended the 8:00am service here at Christ Church, nestled in the back Choir pew, often with Cecilia and Lynn Pascoe and rarely, if ever, did she miss a mid-week service at least until these last few years. Even then, she was always present either in her room or Aggie’s room at Kingsway Gardens, now Macleod House, with Bill and Wilfred and one of her Newfoundland Angels/caregivers for Holy Communion. She delighted in the worship of the Church. She had a strong sense of duty, duty towards God and duty towards neighbour. In both she was, I think, an inspiration to us all.

Helen had a strong sense of what was proper and right, not in a narrow and pedantic way but as alive to the things that matter. Shortly after coming to Christ Church some seventeen or eighteen years ago, I remember her speaking to me about two things. First, why had I omitted at the 8:00am Communion Service a part of the service commonly called The Comfortable Words? I assured her that I had no objection to The Comfortable Words but was only trying to keep the service reasonably short. Her reply was, “well, they surely don’t take that much time, do they?” She was right and needless to say I have never omitted them at the 8:00 Sunday service ever since and certainly not today!

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“Come and have breakfast”

An odd text for Evensong, I suppose, but then time and sense often seem no more when we are dealing with matters of eternity. It is one of the more delightful resurrection appearances of Jesus. It takes place on the seashore, “by the sea of Tiberias.” It is, I suppose, a fish story but one which goes to the heart of the proclamation of the Resurrection. St. John’s breakfast-with-Jesus-on-the-beach story is “the third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.”

Two themes present themselves. First, that the Resurrection entails “the resurrection of the understanding” and secondly, that the Resurrection involves “the reconstitution of the human community” into fellowship with God after the disarray and disintegration of our humanity, individually and collectively, in the pageant of our betrayals of God made so heartrendingly visible in Holy Week.

In Luke’s Gospel, too, Jesus appears to the disciples and asks them whether they have any food before opening to them the Scriptures. “They give him a piece of broiled fish, and of an honey-comb.” Here Jesus-on-the-beach has a charcoal fire and bids them “bring some of the fish that you have caught”. “Come and have breakfast” means come and have bread and barbecued fish.

What’s with the fish, broiled or barbecued? Nothing, really, other than the remarkable ordinariness of the extraordinary thing. Nothing, really, except an aspect of the reality of the idea of the Resurrection. That, of course, is everything. The Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, themselves the fons et origo of the Gospels have a simplicity and unadorned directness about them. They compel, I think, by the quality of their quietly restrained narrative that remains remarkably understated.

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“For ye were as sheep going astray”

Sometimes known as Good Shepherd Sunday, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is set before us today as part of the Easter season. It is, most tellingly, an image that connects the Passion and the Resurrection. As Isaiah says in a passage that belongs to our Good Friday liturgies, “all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Peter picks up on this image in this morning’s epistle. “For ye were as sheep going astray,” he says, “but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls,” on the one hand, echoing Isaiah, and, on the other hand, seeing the image of sheep and Shepherd through the Cross and Resurrection of Christ.

God as the Shepherd of his people is a powerful Old Testament image. It is further intensified and made visible in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. He goes “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us and with us, an image which in the Passion and Resurrection takes on a greater depth of meaning and suggests the greater gathering of our lives to God.

Christ identifies himself with the Old Testament images of God as the Shepherd of his people. “I am,” he says, “the Good Shepherd.” He makes explicit what that means. In other words, he teaches us who he is for us in this image. “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep,” he says. We are the sheep; he is the shepherd. What that means is signaled in the events of the Passion recalled for us in 1 Peter. “Christ also suffered for us” and in his suffering we find ways to face the sufferings of our own lives, sufferings that arise from our own sins and follies or sufferings that happen to us as a consequence of the actions of others, sufferings that in some sense or another belong to the general disorder and disarray of our humanity, like sheep going astray, indeed.

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