Category: Sermons

“But if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the
kingdom of God hath come upon you”

The tune for our first hymn this morning is called “Batty” and the postlude which concludes our service is a musical meditation based on “Batty.” Today’s Gospel, too, may drive us all a bit batty!

Darkness and desolation, devils and wicked spirits, divisions and temptations. What dark and disturbing images are set before us in the readings for The Third Sunday in Lent! And yet the finger grace of God is more than enough, it seems, for the kingdom of God to be revealed and known.

The Lenten Sundays seek to draw us into the Passion of Christ and its meaning for Christian witness and life. The focus is on what Christ suffers for us and why. This Sunday marks the deepest and darkest part of that journey and corresponds, I suggest, to the shadows and darkness of Tenebrae, the service on the Wednesday of Holy Week that anticipates the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday; in other words, the days when the Passion of Christ is present to us in its most concentrated form. Somehow the darkness is light.

“The whole life of Christ was but a continuall passion,” the preacher John Donne reminds us, pointing out how the shadows of the Cross are ever with us. But how to think the meaning of the Passion? Holy Week will immerse us in its horror and its glory. It will seek to move our hearts and our minds with the spectacle of human betrayal and divine love and will do so in very profound ways, the way of the Cross and our part in it. To be sure. But to get to Holy Week and to make greater sense of it we need the Sundays of Lent and, perhaps, this Sunday more than most. Why?

Because we do not take evil seriously enough. We are unwilling to contemplate the darkness and the evil of our own hearts. We refuse to see that heaven and hell are all around us and within us on a daily basis. It is there in how we think, in how we speak and in how we act. And if ever the western world is going to make sense of terrorism and, particularly, the spectacle of jihadis, it will have to begin with itself and with this picture of ourselves that Jesus presents in this Gospel, the Gospel of darkness and desolation without which there can be no light and salvation.

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“Truth, Lord; yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall
from their masters’ table”

Such a powerful and instructive Gospel. It highlights so many things which are distinctive and important about the Christian journey of faith so wonderfully concentrated for us in the season of Lent. Here is the story of a remarkable woman who gets it, who gets what we so often forget or deny. Here is the story about sticking-with- it and not giving up, no matter what the obstacles.

She is a Canaanite woman, Matthew is at pains to point out. Mark describes her as a Syro-Phoenician woman. The point is abundantly clear: she is a non-Israelite. She is from outside the religious community of Israel.

And yet, she comes to Jesus seeking the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil,” possessed we might say, emotionally troubled, the therapeutic culture of our day would euphemistically say. She sees in Jesus something of the power of God which might heal her daughter. She has, quite simply, an insight into the truth of God in Jesus Christ. For who else can restore and redeem except the God who has created and made us? Such is the logic of redemption. It always turns us back to the doctrine of creation without which redemption – salvation and wholeness – really makes no sense.

What she senses in Jesus is a truth which she will not relinquish. It is her sticking with it in the face of adversity that makes her story so compelling. Yet at the same time, the responses to her request must trouble and disturb us. She is met, first, with silence; secondly, with what amounts to a rebuke; and, thirdly, with what must utterly seem to be a grievous insult. What is going on here? Simply the way in which we learn how the Christian Gospel is for all people and not the possession of a few. This gospel particularly challenges the tribalism of our churches and communities. It opens us out to what is for all people and in all places. The whole dynamic is not only about the woman but about us.

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“Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil”

Two phone calls, back to back; the one about the baptism of an eight-month old child, the other about the dying of a ninety-five year old lady – Helen Gibson. Birth and death, rebirth and the hope of the resurrection. “As dying and behold, we live,” as Paul puts it this morning (2 Cor.6.9). It is remarkable sometimes how the meaning of our lives is wonderfully concentrated and clarified in such seemingly serendipitous moments.

There is something wonderfully clarifying about the clear air of wilderness places, even about the air of the wilderness winters of February that have so beset us this year. “Jesus,” we are told, “was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted by the devil.” Mark is even more emphatic. He tells us that the Spirit drove him, literally threw him out, into the wilderness. “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by satan.”

The whole marvel of the stories of the temptation of Christ is partly about the significance of the wilderness. It is an important biblical concept found in the Scriptures time and time again: from the Fall to Moses; from Joshua to the Babylonian captivity, itself a kind of wilderness; from the prophets in exile to the ministry of John the Baptist. “What went ye out into the wilderness for to see?” Jesus asks the followers of John about John. Now Jesus is in the wilderness and so must we. There is something intriguing and complex about the wilderness both for the ancients and for us as moderns. That intriguing complexity and ambiguity about the theme of the wilderness is captured in the story of the temptations of Christ.

Somehow in the wilderness of human life we learn about the nature of our life with God, about life and death, rebirth and renewal.

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“Make me a clean heart, O God, / and renew a right spirit within me”

And so it begins, the great ‘make-over’ which is the purpose of the pageant of Lent. Once again we are being challenged that life does not have to be just the ‘same old, same old’. Lent is the pilgrimage of love, the divine love which seeks the redemption of our human loves which are in such sad and sorry disarray.

And so it begins with dust and ashes recalling us to creation and repentance and challenging us about our hearts and minds. “Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double-minded,” James exhorts us. “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” and “not upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Jesus tells us. Where are our hearts? What do we treasure? Somehow this is critical to the whole project of transformation captured in the great Penitential Psalm of Lent and this day we call Ash Wednesday.

What does it mean to ask God to “make me a clean heart” and to “renew a right spirit within me”? Only that we know ourselves to be incomplete, fallen, and wounded, unhappy and sad, miserable and, perhaps, even in despair, and yet somehow desiring something more in spite of ourselves.

The poet ,T.S. Eliot, begins his poem called Ash Wednesday with the sense of despair and uncertainty that calls into question the whole idea and purpose of any kind of journey that might make us clean and new, as if this journey, the journey of Lent, were far more folly than even the Epiphany journey of the magi. “’A cold coming we had of it,/ Just the worst time of the year/ For a journey, and such a long journey: / The ways deep and the weather sharp, / The very dead of winter’,” Eliot says, quoting a nativity sermon of Lancelot Andrewes, and imagining the thoughts of the magi-kings about the hardness and the uselessness of the journey, “with the voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.” And yet the journey to Bethlehem concludes with the journey from Bethlehem whereby they are changed by virtue of what they had been given to see, “no longer at ease” in the ‘same old, same old’. Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and for us here in the Valley it might seem all folly, too, and, certainly, “just the worst time of the year/ For a journey”, “the ways deep” with mountains of snow, “the weather sharp” and cold, “the very dead of winter”.

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“If I have not charity, I am nothing”

Charity – Love. Love is in the air. I know, so is the snow, indeed, snow upon snow, but also love upon love! Quinquagesima Sunday is commonly known as Love Sunday because of St. Paul’s great hymn of love in 1^st Corinthians 13. This year it follows upon Valentine’s Day, the great Hallmark festival of commercialized romance and sentiment. But love, to be sure, is in the air. But what is love? That is the great question that connects St. Paul’s great hymn to the great ethical turn in philosophy to the good life and, more specifically, to Plato’s great treatise on love, The Symposium.

Plato’s word is eros; Paul’s is agape, the Latin translation of which is caritas which has carried over into English as charity. The word is used eight times in what is one of the greatest passages of English prose, poetic prose, I would add, in the King James Version of the Scriptures which became the text for the epistles and gospels in The Book of Common Prayer in 1662 and contributed to the enormous influence of the King James Version on the many, many different forms of the English language right down to our own day.

Much ink has been spilt in trying to draw a large distinction between the Platonic Eros and the Pauline Agape. I prefer to see them in a more complementary way. For both Plato and Paul, love is about the good, about the good life and never simply about self-love. The question, ‘what is love?’ is a question for both and for us and both Plato and Paul offer, I suggest, a way of seeing how divine love ultimately gathers up all of the forms of love into the highest love, the love of God. Plato, to be sure, emphasizes love not as a god but as desire, the passionate desire to know which always entails truth and beauty. Such insights cannot be ignored. To say that “God is love” is not the same as to say love is a god. Paul emphasizes in a more direct way the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves without which our human loves, as Augustine saw so clearly, are not only incomplete but empty and end in despair.

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“The seed is the word of God”

Sometimes it is hard to know about what to preach given the parade of events that appear each day and each week, events that cry out sometimes to be addressed. I don’t pretend to have the answers but there are the questions. What to make, for instance, of President Obama’s gratuitous swipe at Christianity in an attempt to absolve Islam of the latest fundamentalist atrocity committed by the militant ISIS in burning alive a Jordanian pilot? Or what to make of the Supreme Court’s decision about assisted suicide? As Fr. Raymond De Souza observes, there are questions here about whether Canada has abandoned the legal principle that every life is a good to be protected and has embraced the idea that suicide is a social good and that the law no longer upholds the particular obligation to protect the weak and the vulnerable. These are serious questions. As Rex Murphy notes, the President’s swipe at Christianity is a straw man argument, actually, “the logical equivalent of an entire thatched roof of those stuffed puppets,” as he puts it in his own inimitable way.

So much to think about. But how? Ultimately, through the optic of the Scriptures doctrinally understood that challenge us about our humanity in relation to God. And so it seems best to focus on the readings for Sexagesima that encourage us to be “the good ground” namely, those that “in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience”. Perhaps, that is what best speaks to our contemporary concerns. It is about finding a way to think through the confusions that beset us. It means, at the very least, our patient attentiveness to God’s Word proclaimed and celebrated.

The ‘Gesima Sundays’ mark the transition from learning to living, a turn to the practice of the virtues as transformed by divine love to become the means of our participation in Christ’s work of human redemption. That work is the project of Lent, the pilgrimage of love that brings us to “the book of love opened out for us to read” (Lancelot Andrewes) on the cross of Good Friday. Already we are being turned towards Holy Week and Easter.

Today the virtues of courage and prudence are set before us in the Epistle and Gospel respectively. This focus on the classical virtues as transformed by divine love to become forms of love locates the ‘Gesima Sundays’ within a larger tradition of ethical thinking. They connect to the great ethical turn in philosophy by Socrates via Plato and to the idea of philosophy as something lived, the idea of the good life.

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“Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you”

Transitions. Today is a day of transition. It marks a change in focus and direction. Epiphany was the season of teaching, of opening us out to the essential divinity of Christ and to what that means for human redemption. We were shown what God seeks for our humanity. Epiphany segues into the season of the Gesimas which mark the transition towards Easter. Tomorrow, too, is Candlemas, which marks the midway point between Christmas and Easter, the transition from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, the transition from light to life.

If Epiphany taught us about the divine will and purpose for our humanity, then with Septuagesima we begin to enter into the divine work of human redemption itself. The Gesima Sundays are the pre-Lenten Sundays that turn us towards Easter as suggested in their names; Septuagesima signals the week of the seventieth day before Easter, Sexagesima, the week of the sixtieth day before Easter, Quinquagesima, the fiftieth day before Easter; terms already clearly associated with an older Latin term for Lent, namely Quadragesima; the word ‘Lent’ is an Old English term of Germanic origins that probably refers to the lengthening of days that heralds the coming of spring.

I mention these things not to be pedantic as if this were some sort of esoteric and useless kind of knowledge but because they belong to the essential pattern of our corporate lives as a community of faith and because they speak rather directly to some of our contemporary problems such as the so-called ‘nature deficit’ of the digital age and to the general sense of a disconnect between our humanity and the natural world as well as between us and God.

The lessons are clear about the change of focus and emphasis. We turn from what is revealed from above to what is to be accomplished below, if I may use such spatial metaphors without being taken literally. But notice. The Epistle speaks about running a race but that race is about disciplining the body, about the exercise of temperance or self-control, and about a prize that is “incorruptible” in complete contrast to what is “corruptible”. Notice, too, that Paul speaks directly to the idea of living out what he has been preaching; in other words, a transition from learning to living.

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“He who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High
will seek out the wisdom of all the ancients.”

Epiphany, the great 17^th century Bishop of Durham, John Cosin, notes, turns our thoughts from considering “His coming in the flesh that was God” to “His being God that was come in the flesh”; in short, “to turn ourselves from his humanity below to his divinity above.” The entire season of Epiphany, whether short or long, is about teaching and learning. The gifts of the Magi-Kings are “sacred gifts of mystic meaning” that teach us about the one to whom they are given.

The First Sunday after the Epiphany presents us with the utterly unique story from Luke’s Gospel of the boy Jesus being “found in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.” “Did ye not know,” Jesus says to Mary and Joseph, “that I must be about my Father’s business?” Something divine is revealed in and through his humanity. The Epistle reading that accompanies that Gospel provided one of Fr. Crouse’s favourite and frequent scriptural texts, “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds”. Epiphany is emphatically about such transformative teaching.

Epiphany, too, is the season of miracles but they also teach us about the divine will and purpose for our humanity. Not just miracles of healing and wholeness but the real reason for the restoration and redemption of our humanity is signaled in the Gospel story for The Second Sunday after the Epiphany in the story of the water turned into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee. We lack the wine of divinity in ourselves but Christ seeks our social joys not just providing for us but seeking the very best for us which is ultimately accomplished in the hour of his passion and death. Our humanity finds its real truth and dignity in communion with God in Christ without whom we have no wine. We are empty and lost. Epiphany in every way teaches us about God’s will for our humanity. Our thoughts are turned to Christ’s divinity above without which we are bereft below, empty and in despair, having lost our humanity.

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“And the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee”

Epiphany means manifestation. It is about things that are being made known to us. It is about teaching. Teaching is transformative. “Be ye transformed,” Paul tells us, “by the renewing of your minds.” This story is utterly unique in the New Testament. Only John tells us that this was the “beginning of signs” in which Jesus “manifested forth his glory.” It speaks to the mystery of human redemption. It is really a story of transformation not just of water into wine but our humanity into community with God.

The real wonder of the Epiphany is about what God wants for our humanity. The real wonder of the Epiphany is that our humanity finds its greatest truth and greatest happiness in communion with God. The mystery of the Epiphany is a kind of marriage, the communion of God and man which is the basis for our communion with one another. It is not by accident that “this beginning of signs” happens at a wedding.

Yet this Gospel story is not simply about marriage as a state of life. It speaks profoundly to the whole reality of the human situation. It challenges us to pay attention to God’s engagement with our humanity.

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“For thou shalt be his witness unto all men of what thou hast seen and heard”

The Conversion of Paul is an epiphany and for that reason, in the Prayer Book, it is to be observed when it falls on a Sunday in the Epiphany Season. Paul’s story is quite a story, full of drama and intensity, controversy and struggle. The importance of his story for the life of the Church is wonderfully captured in this feast. Paul’s conversion is the only conversion celebrated among the principal holy days in the life of the Church.

And rightly so. With Paul, the Christian Faith goes global. With Paul, the Christian Scriptures come to birth – his writings comprise the largest part of the New Testament after all. He is, as some have put it, the second founder of Christianity. In a sense without Paul, there would be no Christianity. His conversion, then, is a matter of great significance.

We are told about his conversion in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, a book which John Donne remarks, following Chrysostom, could just as easily be called “the Book of the Acts of Paul, so conversant it is with the life of Paul.” Paul’s conversion is told to us three times in Acts albeit in various ways. In our lesson this morning, we hear Paul himself tell his story. What is his story? Saul the Persecutor becomes Paul the Apostle.

There is a change from being the Persecutor of The Way, as the followers of Jesus were first called, to becoming the great preacher of the Gospel of Christ, the Apostle to the Gentiles, the one who takes the Gospel to Rome and by extension to the world. What his story reveals is conversion as transformation. It is an epiphany of the truth and power of Christ that transforms human lives. What is that transformation? It is really about becoming more truly and fully human. The truth of our humanity is found in communion with God. Nowhere is that more fully expressed than in the God/Man Jesus Christ and in our life with Christ. Paul’s conversion is his encounter with the Risen Christ, the one whom he is persecuting in persecuting the followers of Jesus Christ. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds,” Paul will tell us, echoing exactly his conversion. His conversion occurs through a vision on the Road to Damascus.

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