Category: Sermons

Sermons

Sermon for Monday in Holy Week

“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

On the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week we read Mark’s account of the Passion. His account is both informed by and informs the lessons of Morning and Evening Prayer – the readings from Hosea 13 and 14 and the beginning of the continuous reading from starting with chapter fourteen of John’s Gospel which will ultimately bring us to his account of the Passion on Good Friday.

In other words, the lessons help our understanding of the different accounts of the Passion even as the Passion illumines the lessons. Think of how Hosea’s words convict us in the betrayals of our hearts. “Men kiss calves,” he says, referring to our easy idolatries, mistaking the works of our hands for God. “I am the Lord your God from the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no saviour. It was I who knew you in the wilderness,” and yet, “when they had fed to the full, and they were filled, and their heart was lifted up; therefore they forgot me.” Such betrayals can only have consequences. “Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from Death? O Death, where are your plagues? O Sheol, where is your destruction?” words which Paul will re-echo in First Corinthians as belonging to the victory of the Resurrection. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” But we have yet to see that. What is before our eyes are the betrayals of our hearts which cut us off from God. “Compassion is hid from my eyes,” Hosea will say of God if only to illustrate the strong sense of sin’s separation from truth and love.

These words give added force to the heart-felt cry of God for Israel to return to the Lord your God. How? “Take with you words,” Hosea has God say, “and return to the Lord.” Why? Because he has an insight into the nature of God, an insight into the nature of the good which is always greater than our evil. “I will heal their faithlessness; I will love them freely,” and where there was wilderness, there shall be a garden. “They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden.” These are wonderful words which can only shape our sense of looking upon him whom they have pierced. “Whosoever is wise, let him understand these things,” Hosea concludes. This is precisely the project of the Passion.

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Sermon for Palm Sunday

“They shall look on him whom they pierced”

“They shall look on him whom they pierced,” as the Revised Standard version puts it, or, as the King James Version puts it, “they shall look upon me whom they have pierced;” either way, it is an appropriate and powerful text for our Holy Week meditations. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of the spectacle of Holy Week, not that we are merely onlookers standing idly by, but in a profound sense the whole of Holy Week is about the character of our looking upon the crucified. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ; our liturgy, literally, our public work or worship, the work of the people, is about the quality of looking upon the Christ whom we have pierced. How? By our sins.

That is one part of the deep message of Holy Week, the deep message of the Passion of Christ and one which is essential to the possibilities of any fruit of the Passion in us, namely, the Resurrection. No Passion, No Resurrection. It is as simple as that. There is a necessary and inescapable connection between the Passion and the Resurrection and it is the business of this week to make that point.

Holy Week starting with the Palm Sunday procession and the Passion Gospel of Palm Sunday is really one long, continuous liturgy that extends into Easter week. We contemplate as the poets of our tradition make so very clear, “two vast, spacious thing,” namely, “sinne and love,” as George Herbert puts it. We behold the spectacle of all our betrayals. It begins with the striking contrast, the utterly opposing moments that are the contradictions in our souls, made audible and visible on Palm Sunday in the cries of “Hosanna” while waving palm branches in the enthusiastic greeting of the coming of the King to his Holy City, Jerusalem, only then to cry out almost in the next breath, “Let him be crucified.” Our branches of Palms are cross-shaped to capture visibly the contradictions and the violence of our hearts. This is us.

We are part of this parade, this charade of human desires in disarray. It may be the tendenz of our age to want to celebrate our selves, to turn every parade into the charade of ‘look at me looking at you looking at me.’ It is so often the nature of many of our contemporary churches to turn religion into a mutual self-admiration society, tinged with not a little of that old Maritime vice of self-righteousness and sentimentality that makes such a mockery of religion, especially, the Christian Religion. Did we not hear last week Jesus’ strong counter to the ambitions of the Mother of Zebedee’s children who wanted power and prestige for her two sons? Did we not hear that domination and power – and what is self-regard and self-esteem if not a kind of assumption of superiority and arrogance? – are not to be named among you? Did we not hear instead about service and sacrifice? Did we not hear about the Son of Man coming “not to be ministered unto but to give his life a ransom for many”?

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Poets Preachers and the Passion of Christ: Four Lenten Addresses, 2015

Fr. David Curry has compiled his four Lenten addresses on Poets Preachers and the Passion of Christ into a booklet. Click here to download the pdf document.

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Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ – IV

This is the fourth of four Lenten reflections on Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.

Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ IV

The Lenten project of penitential adoration undergirds the whole life of Christian Faith but it reaches a kind of climax in Passiontide and especially in the events of Holy Week. As we have seen from some of the poets and preachers of the Anglican tradition, the Passion is a central concern throughout the whole of the Christian year and contributes to the understanding of the Christian pilgrimage of faith in terms of the interrelated principles of justification and sanctification as well as glorification that inform the character of spiritual life. At issue is the constant task of understanding the Passion which can only happen through our constant reflection upon it.

But “they understood none of these things,” Luke observes in the Gospel reading for Quinquagesima Sunday. What things? The things of the Passion. Jesus tells the disciples what will befall him in Jerusalem and yet “they understood none of those things.” Part of the Lenten journey is about seeing and understanding. It is not by accident that the Gospel reading continues with the story of the blind man on the roadside between Jericho and Jerusalem, symbolic of the earthly and the heavenly cities respectively. The purpose of going up to Jerusalem with Jesus is about seeing and understanding the Passion of Christ more and more clearly.

The Annunciation frequently falls within the season of the Passion. Mary responds to the angelic salutation that she is to be the theotokos, the God-bearer with a question, “how shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” Her question is not about doubting but about understanding what God seeks for our humanity. Her question leads to her ‘yes’ to God, her “Be it unto me according to thy word.” But that means as well a commitment to the constant learning about God’s will and purpose for our humanity. As Simeon profoundly remarks at the occasion of Christ’s presentation in the Temple, “yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also; that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” His words point already to the Passion and to our learning and understanding what it means both for Mary and about us and for us.

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Sermon for Passion Sunday

“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and consider my desire:/hearken unto me
for thy truth and righteousness’ sake”

I know. It is what we are all asking God for – less snow! Hear us, O Lord!

We live in a culture dominated by images. At their best, images can be icons of the understanding but they are really only as good as our understanding. One powerful image is the veiled cross. The cross at once present and yet not fully seen captures exactly the understanding that undergirds the pageant of the Passion.

We enter into Passiontide, into deep Lent where everything about the understanding of the Passion of Christ becomes more and more intense and more and more concentrated. As we have seen in our Lenten Programme on “Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ,” the Passion is a central theme throughout the whole year.

“The whole life of Christ was a continuall passion,” John Donne remarks even as Lancelot Andrewes notes that “Christ and His cross were never parted, but that all His life long was a continuous cross” This brings out an important feature of the Christian religion, though one which is often ignored or downplayed in the contemporary church. The point is this. The Christian Faith makes no sense apart from the Passion of Christ. It is altogether central. We can make no sense of Christmas without reference to the Passion. The Passion is what makes fully clear the meaning of the Incarnation. As Athanasius puts it, “he borrowed a body that he might borrow a death,” in that way having from us what to offer unto God for us.

This inevitably brings into play the theological doctrine of the atonement, a doctrine downplayed if not dismissed altogether. Even the most theologically minded of the philosophical atheists, like Slavoj Žižek, have the greatest difficulty with the idea of the atonement. And he is not alone. How does the Passion restore and make right what was wrong? What is the injustice that becomes justice in the sacrifice of Christ? “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5.21). Hymns, too, are often the conduit of theology, like our first hymn this morning, Venantius Fortunatus’ celebrated Passion Sunday Hymn, Vexilla Regis, from the 6th century which offers the same teaching. “And there, to cleanse the heart of man,/ From out his side life’s torrent ran … “The priceless treasure, freely spent,/ To pay for man’s enfranchisement.” Still the questions raise all of our uncertainties, our doubts, and even our contemporary scorn and dismissal of Christianity.

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Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ – III

This is the third of four Lenten reflections on Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ. The first reflection is posted here, the second here, and the fourth here.

The poets and preachers of our Anglican tradition help us in the spiritual journey of Lent by opening us out to the nature of penitential adoration. As Lancelot Andrewes notes in his Good Friday sermon in 1605, we are always to be “looking unto Jesus the Author and Finisher of our faith” but most especially upon Christ crucified. Paul, he says, “knew many, very many things” yet he decided “to know nothing … except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” “The perfection of our knowledge is Christ; the perfection of our knowledge in or touching Christ, is the knowledge of His Cross and Passion.” Somehow it is our comfort, the strengthening of our faith.

The Fourth Sunday marks the midpoint of the Lenten journey. Variously known as Mothering Sunday, because of the Epistle reading from Galatians about “Jerusalem which is above is free; which is the mother of us all,” and, Refreshment Sunday, because of the Gospel story from John about the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, and Laetare Sunday, because of the Introit at Mass from Isaiah 66. 10, “Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her,” it recalls us to the end of the Lenten journey; in other words to its purpose and meaning. It opens us out to “the comfort[s] of thy grace by which we may mercifully be relieved” as the Collect for The Fourth Sunday in Lent puts it, even given the knowledge “that we, who for our evil deeds do worthily deserve to be punished.” The juxtaposition of punishment and comfort is instructive about the dialectic of redemption.

Tonight, too, is The Feast of St. Patrick, which somehow can be allowed to pass without celebration, even in Lent! Yet, the Saints are part of our spiritual journey; “the cloud of witnesses” that compass us about in our “running the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”

George Herbert in his poem on Lent speaks of it as a “deare feast.” It is on The Fourth Sunday in Lent and the week which it graces that perhaps we get a glimpse of what that means. As he begins the very last poem of his collection of poems known as the Temple, a poem called Love (III), “Love bade me welcome” and, indeed, that captures the meaning of Lent as the pilgrimage of Love. Laetare Sunday reminds us that the Love of God provides for us. The end of the journey is equally what sustains and provides for us in the way of the journeying. The eschatological, meaning the last things, and the eucharistical, pertaining to communion, are inescapably connected. They are about our being gathered to God. As Andrewes says in a Nativity Sermon “even thus to be recollected at this feast by the Holy Communion into that blessed union, is the highest perfection we can in this life aspire unto. We then are at the highest pitch, at the very best we shall ever attain to on earth, what time we newly come from it; gathered to Christ, and by Christ to God.”

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Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ – II

This is the second of four Lenten reflections on Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ. The first is posted here, the third here, and the fourth here.

Lent is the season of penitential adoration. It concentrates our attention upon the Passion of Christ. But the term passion is complex and perplexing for us. We tend perhaps to associate it with our desires, what we often term our passions and more often than not we associate it particularly with erotic desires.

Plato, to be sure, uses the term eros in a more extended sense than simply the erotic in his dialogue The Symposium, using it to signify the passionate desire to know, the eros that compels us up the ladder of being and knowing. The Symposium means literally a drinking party but one in which we decide not to drink but to think, an idea that perhaps has some connection to the disciplines of Lent.

“Welcome deare feast of Lent,” the poet George Herbert begins in a poem called, Lent. “Who loves not thee,” he says, “He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie, /But is compos’d of passion.” Passion but not the Passion of Christ. Passion here is juxtaposed with temperance and authority. Lent would bid us discipline our bodily appetites – our passions or desires for sensual pleasures. Temperance is the virtue of self-control, the self-control of our appetites for food, drink, or sex. “Authoritie” here refers to the Scriptures, to the Church, and, ultimately, to the authority of all authorities, God, the author of all things. There is the paradox that our strong desire, our passion for God, means the disciplining of our passions; our spiritual passion or desire vying with our bodily passions. The point of Lent is about setting our loves, our desires, our eros, in order. Ultimately, in the Christian understanding of things that brings us to the Passion of Christ.

His Passion signifies his being acted upon; passion meaning suffering. Buddhism, too, recognizes the problem of suffering which arises from our attachments and desires, all of which belong to our attachment to ourselves. All desire is suffering. Get rid of desire, you get rid of suffering but it means getting free of the idea of you. There is no you is the radical insight of Buddhism. This contrasts with the Christian idea of redemptive suffering. The Passion of Christ is what we have to contemplate in order not to be free of passion but to set our loves in order. Christ’s Passion is about his suffering the consequences of the disorders of our passions; in short, our sins. Herbert’s poem calls us to the disciplines of Lent as the way of “starving sinne” and in ways that have to do with compassion towards others, “banqueting the poore, /And among those his soul,” as he puts it.

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Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ – I

This first of four Lenten reflections on Poets, Preachers and the Passion of Christ was originally delivered on the Feast of St. Matthias, 2015. The second reflection is posted here, the third here, and the fourth here.

The conjunction of The Feast of St. Matthias and the first week of Lent complements our Lenten programme. Matthias is chosen to take the place of Judas in the company of the Apostles. His feast day frequently falls within the Lenten orbit and reminds us of the interplay of the theological themes of justification and sanctification that belong to the classical Eucharistic lectionary including the propers for the Saints that expand the range of our incorporation into the life of glory.

The Epistle from Acts (Acts 1. 15-26) tells the story of his being chosen by lot and situates his election within the context of Judas’ betrayal. Lent bids us confront all our betrayals for such is the deep reality of sin but in the choosing of Matthias we also see the theme of restoration and redemption; the conquest of sin, we might say, by divine love.

Sin and love are the grand and great themes that belong to Christian meditation especially in the season of Lent. Some of the poets and preachers of our Anglican tradition help us to think about the themes of sin and love as concentrated in the Passion of Christ.

What I purpose is to consider certain poems by George Herbert and John Donne, especially, as well as some of the Lenten and Passion Sermons by Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne; all figures from the later 16th and early 17th century who contribute greatly to the praying imagination about the centrality of the Passion of Christ and its meaning for us in the pilgrimage of our souls to God and with God.

These poets and preachers all recognize the centrality of the Passion of Christ. It is not too much to say that it is a consistent and common emphasis for all of them. Donne and Andrewes are emphatic that the whole life of Christ is concentrated in the Passion.

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Sermon for Lenten Quiet Day

“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”

The kiss of Judas gathers into itself all of the forms of betrayal. Not least is the idea of the betrayal of brotherhood and fellowship, betrayals that are related to our betrayals of ourselves and God and that lead to disorder and disarray. In a way, those aspects of betrayal are captured best in the Old Testament story of Joseph and his brothers and in the New Testament story of the Peter’s betrayal of Christ. Both stories bring out the nature of betrayal and the prospect of forgiveness through contrition and repentance; paradoxically, the very things refused and denied by Judas himself.

Giotto’s poignant portrayal of Judas’ betrayal has Jesus look directly into the face of Judas and speak to him. And yet, the story of Judas is also the denial of redemption, of the possibilities of forgiveness and mercy. That is, it seems to me the horror of the kiss of Judas. It shows us the fullest possible extent of human sinfulness – not only do we deny the truth of God but we persist in our denials to the point of willful destruction. Such is the end of Judas. And it serves as an object lesson precisely about lessons not learned!

The stories of Joseph and his brothers and of Peter’s betrayal concern the matter of recognition. Joseph makes himself known to his brothers and they, in turn, confront themselves and the consequences of their actions. Jesus, “on the night in which he was betrayed,” is hauled before the High Priest and turns and looks at Peter who has just denied him. Powerful moments of recognition and repentance.

But who are we that God should recognize us? How are we known to him and to each other? How shall we divine an understanding of who we essentially are? We are so good at deceiving ourselves and one another. We are so good at betrayal.

But coming to terms with ourselves is not easy. It is often a matter of tears, “a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou shalt not despise.”

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Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

“Now there was much grass in the place”

John’s account of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness contains this wonderful little detail. “Now there was much grass in the place.” No. Not that kind of grass! But it is wonderful to think about the approach of spring and to think that somehow under the mountains and mountains of snow that surround us there just might be green grass! How wonderful, too, to think of a picnic in the wilderness!

It is a marvellous story within the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel which is known as the “Bread of Life” discourse. It is read in the midst of the journey of Lent and signals a moment of refreshment in the course of the disciplines of Lent. Discipline is about learning and so too this story is about teaching. The teaching is the feeding; food for our souls and minds. What is it about? Simply this. God provides for us in the wilderness journeys of our lives. The feeding in the wilderness looks back to the wilderness journeys of the Exodus when Israel learns how to live from every word that proceeds from the mouth of God and is provided with “manna from heaven” and “water from a stricken rock,” all their kvetching and complaining notwithstanding. The story also looks ahead to the Passion of Christ, to the Passover meal with his disciples on the night in which he is betrayed. There he identifies himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover meal on the night when Israel departs from Egypt.

The story is profoundly symbolic and sacramental. In the Christian Mass, Communion or Eucharist, to use three common terms for the central event of Christian worship, bread and wine, themselves the results of human interaction with the things of nature – wheat and grapes – become by the Word of God the means of our union with God, the body and blood of Christ. In terms of the Christian understanding of Lent, we journey to God and with God. It is really about learning to live in communion with God and with one another.

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