Category: Sermons

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

This, too, is an epiphany. This, too, is something transformative. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds” as we heard last week from Paul’s letter to the Romans and so here too is a Gospel story that is utterly unique and which speaks profoundly to the mystery of human redemption. It is really a story of transformation not just of water into wine but of our humanity into community with God, captured best by a word coined by Dante precisely about the great wonder of Christianity. Trashumanar – transhumanized – becoming who we are in the sight of God and by the power of his redeeming love.

Perhaps no story speaks more directly to the real wonder of the Epiphany. 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,” as John puts it, happens at a wedding.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ admit impediments,” Shakespeare says famously in one of the better known of his sonnets. The idea of marriage as metaphor continues to have a strong hold on our minds and hearts almost to the point where there is only metaphor and nothing to which it attaches. The language of “impediment” in Sonnet 116 refers to the service of The Solemnity of Holy Matrimony in The Book(s) of Common Prayer, identifying what might stand in the way of the union of “this man and this woman” in “the holy estate of matrimony.” The service identifies the objective reasons for marriage as a state of life and, even more, as a state of sanctified or holy life, meaning that it concerns our relationship with God, with matters of eternal life. As a consequence there are impediments, things that stand in the way, things that belong to the disorders and confusions of our loves and our lives.

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“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”

A scriptural text frequently used and emphasized by the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse, one of my teachers and the teacher of many clergy and many students spanning many generations and scattered over several continents, it speaks directly to the confusions of contemporary culture within and without the Christian Church, itself confused and uncertain about itself. It will not surprise you, I suspect, that my response to the disturbing events of terrorism in France, on the one hand, and the ethical debacle concerning the Dalhousie Dental School, on the other hand, is an echo of this text captured in one word, teaching.

Perhaps, repeatedly, as in teaching, teaching, teaching! But you will want to ask, teaching what? How can education make any real difference? You are right to ask. For if teaching is simply about getting ahead in the world, simply about success, simply about what serves consumer and economic culture, then it only contributes to the dis-ease that occasions all of the problems that we confront. Such teaching is little more than cultural conformity to the world; the very opposite of what Paul is talking about. “Be not conformed to the world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Not by blowing up people; not by misogynistic fantasies, but by teaching what belongs to the truth of Islam as opposed to the fanatics which defame and debase it and what belongs to the moral responsibilities of ethical communities. For that is what is at stake. It is not about particular groups or individuals who are offended but about offences against the ethical communities of our humanity itself.

This leads to a question too for the Christian Church. How to engage contemporary culture without simply accommodating its agendas? For that is where most Christian churches are, at least in the western democracies, and why they are dying if not dead. That is not to say that the business of the Church is simply to be oppositional and reactionary. No. At issue is how the Church engages the world in which it finds itself. That requires one simple yet difficult thing: knowing and caring about what the Christian Faith actually is and how it matters.

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“When they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts;
gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.”

Epiphany. Such a rich and wonderful word. It signals something intellectual, something grasped in the mind but in such a way as to move our hearts. Christmas gives way, finally, to Epiphany. But what is Epiphany? The after-glow of Christmas? The post-Christmas ‘hang-over’ as we enter into the dreaded and dreary bleakness of the winter? January, as the forgotten poet of Stanley, Nova Scotia, Alden Nowlan, reminds us is about the truth of winter, “a truth that all men share but almost never utter. This is a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside.”

So it is good to stay inside where challenges of another sort await us. They are the deep and great challenges of the Epiphany season. Our thoughts turn away from what has so easily become the cloying sentimentalities of Christmas, all tinsel and wrap, on the one hand, and so over-laden with impossible expectations, on the other hand. Our thoughts are turned from the God made flesh to the God who came in the flesh. We are awakened to the mystery of God. We turn, as the 17^th century Anglican Bishop John Cosin puts it, 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 paradox is great. In making this turn we discover a far greater truth about our humanity. In thinking God we learn the deeper truth and meaning of ourselves. There is no greater truth for our sad and weary world where we are well along the way to losing our humanity. And in a myriad of ways: the nihilism of terrorism and consumerism; the techno-gnosticism which negates ourselves by the folly of turning ourselves into little more than digital apps; and the techno-scientific exploitation which wreaks such havoc upon the natural world and the human community. All signal a loss of our humanity through human arrogance and over-reach, on the one hand, and intellectual and moral folly and blindness, on the other hand.

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“Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son
and shall call his name Emmanuel”
(Isaiah 7.14)

“When the fullness of the time was come,” as Paul puts it, “God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” A powerful statement about the meaning of the Incarnation, the meaning of Christmas, it highlights at once the extravagant and wonderful idea of the intimacy of God’s engagement with our humanity and its meaning for us. God sent forth his son born of Mary that we might become the sons of God. His phrase captures the vocation of our humanity. God calls us into communion with himself through the Incarnation.

Matthew in the Gospel which accompanies the Epistle reading from Galatians tells us about the birth of Christ. Christmastide is all about the richness of the stories of the Incarnation and its purpose and meaning. The Nativity accounts are in Luke and Matthew but as direct and straightforward as they are or at least seem to be they are far from simple linear accounts. They are themselves profoundly poetic and philosophical.

It is easy to raise skeptical questions about the details of the Nativity. The stories are ones which have come down to us long after the events they relate. But it belongs to almost all forms of writing, including journalism, to create a narrative, a story with a meaning, to take the events or the so-called facts and put them into an order without which there is no story. At the heart of the Christmas story is that ordering of ideas by the Evangelists and others that open us out to a new reality, the reality of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity. There is, inescapably, the awareness of the something new and different, something which changes our entire outlook. With Paul it is the concept of the fullness of time; with Matthew, the sense of the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.

I know of no passage of Scripture about which so much ink has been spilled and to so little purpose than the passage from Isaiah that Matthew quotes. (more…)

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“And all they that heard it wondered at those things
which were told them by the shepherds”

Wonder is one of the strong and great features of Christmas, and, of course, of Christianity and of Religion in general! Philosophy, too, it is said begins in wonder. The wonder of Christmas is about “this thing which is come to pass,” literally, this thing that has happened, “the shepherds say one to another,” saying in their own country fashion what John in his Prologue proclaims as the central mystery of Christmas, “the Word was made flesh”. For that is the wonder of Christmas.

The shepherds’ Christmas is about that sense of wonder and about their witness to what “the Lord hath made known unto us,” as they say. For “when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.” What saying was that? “For unto you,” the angel had said to the shepherds in the fields, “is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” This is the occasion for our wonder.

But what does it mean to wonder? It means to hold in awe and to ponder in our hearts and minds the meaning of what we have been given to behold. The truest sense of wonder is captured in the figure of Mary who “kept all these things,” all these things that were said about the child Christ, “and pondered them in her heart.” “Love is the weight of [our] soul[s],” Augustine said long ago, and the Latin word, pondus – weight – gives shape to the verb to ponder, namely, to weigh the meaning of things in our hearts and minds. It is the thing most necessary and yet for our culture and day, the hardest thing.

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“Herod … was exceeding wroth; and sent forth and
slew all the children that were in Bethlehem”

So much for the idea that Christmas is for children! Could there be a more disturbing scene than this? But then we have only just recently had to contemplate the slaughter of students at a School in Peshawar, Pakistan, at the hands of Taliban jihadis. Sadly we could extend the litany of the deaths of the little ones in a myriad of ways whether as the victims of the convenience of others or as expendable causalities in the pursuit of one agenda or another.

Be that as it may be, it must still trouble us to find such a feast as Holy Innocents and such a troubling story as part and parcel of the mystery of Christmas. It should trouble us, to be sure, but even more it should make us think more deeply upon the Christmas mystery. In a way, I like the way this story troubles our sensibilities because it suddenly makes the Christian mystery that much more real and redeems it from all of the comfortable and cozy sentiments that clog and cloy our thinking.

The story underscores the radical meaning of Christ’s holy birth. He comes to redeem a sad and broken world where the slaughter of the innocent ones belongs to the folly and wickedness of human power which overextends itself in tyranny and destruction. Matthew provides an insight into the character of Herod – his rage – but elsewhere in the Gospels we are made aware of another motive that moves Herod’s policy of infanticide, namely, the fear of another king who will displace him. Wrath and fear – a deadly combination for persons in positions of power.

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“We have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you that eternal life,
which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us”

So much in a parenthesis! It is not by accident that the great Gospel of Christmas is from the Prologue of John’s Gospel and I think that it is most fitting and providential that The Feast of St. John the Evangelist is a Christmas feast. For with John we are provided with a royal feast of words that have deep spiritual meaning. His Gospel and his Epistles offer a profound insight into the theological meaning of Christmas.

He bears eloquent testimony to the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” his Gospel begins, locating the Christian understanding already within an intellectual and spiritual milieu that our rather prosaic and materialistic culture finds hard to comprehend. Such wisdom, Augustine notes, for instance, is found already in the philosophical cultures of pagan antiquity and he would probably allow in the wisdom of the Hebrews. He could not know that it would also be regarded as the received wisdom of Islam. But the point of Christian emphasis lies in what is not to be found in the libri platonici, the books of the Platonists, but which lies at the heart of the Christian understanding, namely, “and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” It is the great Christmas mystery articulated so profoundly in the words of John.

John’s First Epistle bears strong testimony to that insight and truth, echoing the theme of the great Christmas Gospel. “That which was from the beginning which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life,” he says, that is what he declares unto us. “These things,” moreover, “write we unto you, that your joy may be full.” There is a kind of intellectual intensity to his argument, and a sense of something new and wonderful, the intensity of truth.

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“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

The words are familiar to us from the Benedictus in the liturgy just before The Prayer of Consecration at Mass. A phrase from Psalm 118 (v.26), it is also familiar to us from the story of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday also read as the Gospel for The First Sunday in Advent. Perhaps less familiar to us is Matthew and Luke’s use of the phrase in the context of judgment and warning by Jesus to the Scribes and Pharisees in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem. Not Bethlehem and yet the mystery of Christmas in Bethlehem is incomprehensible without reference to Jerusalem. The Feast of Stephen illumines the deeper meaning of Christ’s Nativity. It has altogether to do with service and sacrifice, things perhaps that we don’t really want to hear and yet these are the things that belong to the greatest truth and dignity of our humanity. They belong to the Christmas mystery.

What, if anything, is known popularly about St. Stephen is known by way of a nineteenth century carol by John Mason Neale, Good King Wenceslaus, that refers to a touching medieval legend and one which captures certainly the theme of service and even the idea of the imitation of Christ which is certainly at the heart of The Feast of Stephen. The lesson from The Book of The Acts of The Apostles concludes the story of Stephen with his martyrdom; he was stoned to death for his testimony to Christ and in the moment of his dying he, like Christ on the Cross, prays for the forgiveness of his executioners, not the least of which is Saul who will become Paul the Apostle. “Lord Jesus,” Stephen says, “receive my Spirit,” an echo of the last word of Christ from the Cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit” and then, echoing the first word, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” Stephen’s last word is his prayer, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” The words of the dying, it seems, are often the beginning of something profound and deeply moving.

Stephen is the proto-martyr in the Christian understanding of things and what makes his feast so important is the way it illumines the deeper meaning of human redemption. His feast signals the idea of redemptive suffering and the nature of Christian witness as participation in the sufferings of Christ. We probably forget certain aspects of the larger story of Stephen.

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“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour,
who is Christ the Lord”

In the gentle quiet of Christmas morn, heedless of the wind and weather, we hear of the simple birth of Christ, laid in manger in Bethlehem “because there was no room for them in the inn,” where Mary, like so many mothers over so many millennia, “brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes”. So common, so touching. Yet, the real meaning and significance of this birth is not first made known in Bethlehem and not by man or woman. No. It is an Angel’s word to “shepherds abiding in the field” in the surrounding countryside.

The symbolism is profound and speaks, I think, to the question about what it means to be Christian in a post-Christian and a post-secular world. It does not mean huddling in the ghettoes of our minds or in the various conventicles of self-righteous sanctity. Such are really only other forms of nihilism in a world that refuses to address the wonder of Christmas. The wonder of Christmas is about the mystery of God, on the one hand, and the mystery of our humanity embraced by God, on the other hand; in short, the mystery of the Incarnation.

We can make little sense of Christmas beyond the acquisitive madness of consumer culture and the syrupy sentimentalism that attends it and manipulates us. We can make little sense of Christmas because we are busy about everything except the mystery of God. And without that, the mystery of the Word made flesh, the mystery of God with us, makes little sense. How, then, to recapture for our hearts and minds the mystery of Christmas?

Theology is a wilderness affair. Advent has been very much about the wilderness of human darkness and sin to which comes the redeeming Word of God. But on Christmas morn, in what is sometimes known as the Christmas Mass of the Angels, we are, at least in the imaginative power of the Gospel, in the wilderness with Shepherds. Only with Angels and Shepherds can we make our journey to Bethlehem. Only by way of an Angel’s word.

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“And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father”

“Let us now go unto Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass which the Lord has made known to us,” the shepherds say one to another. Yet in our readings tonight there is not a single mention of Bethlehem at all! Instead we hear the strong and profoundly meditative words of John’s Prologue who only mentions Bethlehem once elsewhere in his Gospel and in a context of controversy. Mark in his Gospel never mentions Bethlehem at all. The imaginative centrality of Bethlehem is left to Matthew and Luke whose story is amply captured in the hymns and music of this season.

Yet everywhere is Bethlehem tonight. But what is Bethlehem, we may well ask, and what does it mean that “everywhere is Bethlehem tonight”? We may be somewhat cynical about Bethlehem. After all, what’s so great about Bethlehem? Christmas? And where is the glory, the peace, the joy, good will towards men in a world distraught and dangerous, a place of terror and foreboding, of violence and abuse? Where was the glory, the peace, the joy, the good will and all that jazz in the School in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the Lindt Café in Sydney, Australia, on Canada’s Parliament Hill and in Quebec in November, in the bewildered and bedeviled communities of Africa striken with Ebola, not to mention some of the examples of moral turpitude more closer to home? And that is only to make a beginning of all our woes, our confusions and uncertainties, globally and locally.

Is not Bethlehem itself a place of confusion and chaos, of violence and strife, of hatred and blood, of blood shed, quite literally, in the holy places? As the journalist, Neil Lochery, once observed “modern day Bethlehem is little short of a rundown dump of a town, located in the middle of a war zone, troubled not only by war but by the incessant hassle of local souvenir sellers desperate to peddle their goods, the place of the tyranny of conflict and the tyranny of consumerism,” caught between consumerism and terrorism, it seems, between Walmart and Jihadis, trampled in the aisles or blown up by terrorists! O joy!

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