Category: Sermons

“My Lord, and my God”

The questions of the Advent season of questions culminate, it seems to me, in The Feast of St. Thomas, the Advent Saint par excellence. His feast falls, appropriately enough, about the time of the winter solstice, the darkest time of nature’s year, and yet heralds the coming of the Light of God in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. St. Thomas is an especially important part of the Advent preparations for Christmas.

And yet, there is a paradox. Rather than the intensity of explicit questions, such as the barrage of questions belonging to Sunday’s Gospel (Advent IV), known as the witness of John, meaning John the Baptist, with the heightened sense of wonder of the question, “who art thou?” which turn us to Christ, with The Feast of St. Thomas we are given a wonderful statement of faith which illumines the entire mystery of the Incarnation. “My Lord, and my God,” Thomas proclaims in the presence of the risen Christ behind the closed doors of the Upper Room in Jerusalem, eight days after the Resurrection. How does this story relate to Advent?

Because it illumines the radical nature of redemption which lies at the heart of Christ’s Nativity and to the deeper meaning of the Advent. Because it is the answer to the implicit question of Thomas which goes to the heart of the Christian faith. Because it challenges us all about our personal relation to God in Jesus Christ.

One of the darknesses of our world and day is the darkness of doubt and uncertainty about, well, almost everything, but certainly about God and religion. Thomas is traditionally known as doubting Thomas because of this Gospel scene. “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” He is not prepared to take on faith – on the authority of the other disciples – the news of the Risen Christ who had appeared to them. His eloquent though conditional sentence is a question about the reality of the Incarnate Christ and the truth of the Resurrection. He seems to be saying, ‘I will not believe unless I see and touch with mine own eyes, fingers and hands.’ He speaks to a kind of empirical necessity.

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Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world

The praises of Advent in the quiet darkness of nature’s year belong to the blessings of Christmas. They are God’s readying Word for us in preparation for his being with us and so they must be about his Word in us. The preparations of Advent are not only God’s doings for us, but also his work in us. Advent signals the great wonder of the Christian faith. Emmanuel, God with us, comes to us so that his life may live and take shape in us. The praises of Advent are God’s songs in the hearts of his people.

But what are those praises? In the watching and the waiting of Advent, we praise even the darkness; such is the purposeful expectancy of Advent.

On the darkest day of nature’s year we look to the coming of the light in a spirit quite removed from the forms of paganism both new and old. Our waiting is a waiting expectantly and not in the fear and the anxiety that, perhaps, just perhaps, the sun will not rise and that, perhaps, just perhaps, the days will not increase and that, perhaps, just perhaps, we must sacrifice ourselves to the order of nature to insure that the wheel of life rolls on. Our waiting is the counter to the greater darkness of despair and disillusionment that belongs to the fearful uncertainties of our utter hopelessness, the malaise of our contemporary world.

No. The greater darkness of the Advent season has far more to do with our spiritual lives than merely the physical phenomenon of the winter solstice. The darkness is about the forms of spiritual wickedness and folly in each of our lives, individually and collectively: “the far-spent night,” we might say, of our rebellion and revolt; “the far-spent night” of our turning away from the light of God’s Word in law and prophecy, in nature and in human experience; “the far-spent night” of the terrors of despair and destruction. But to be aware of this is part and parcel of the meaning and purpose of the Advent season. It means, strange to say, to praise the darkness.

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“In the path of thy judgments, O Lord, we wait for thee;
thy memorial name is the desire of our souls”

Two figures dominate the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, the Mother of our Lord. Together they illuminate something of the meaning of Advent for us and especially so on The Third Sunday in Advent which focuses on the ministry of repentance of John the Baptist and on the theme of gaudate, rejoicing, imaged in the rose candle of the Advent Wreath, reminding us of Mary’s role in salvation. The one points to Christ; the other carries the hope of the world in her womb. Nothing can come to birth in us unless their complementary yet contrasting attitudes to Christ are realised in our lives.

Advent is the season of penitential adoration. We are reminded of the darkness and the light. There is the darkness of sin by which we are less than ourselves. There is the light in which we find ourselves. The truth of our humanity is to be found in the truth of God. We have to say ‘no’ to the darkness in order to say ‘yes’ to the light.

The repentance that John the Baptist calls us to is not about a guilt trip – more beating up on ourselves or feeling sorry for ourselves. It is, instead, an honest recognition of the mystery of sin and the honest recognition of ourselves as sinners. It is captured in our confession of sin in its eloquent honesty that “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep”, that “we have followed too much the devices and desires our own hearts”, that “we have offended against thy holy laws” in “thought” if not in “word and deed”, that “we have left undone those things which we ought to have done”, that “we have done those things which we ought not to have done”. Who isn’t caught up in this net of understanding? The conclusion is inescapably obvious that “there is no health in us”. We are not perfect and complete. It may be, as Shakespeare put it, that “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark”, but, more importantly, there is something rotten in us, in you and me, I am bound to say.

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“A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet”

We live in the meantime between the already and the not yet, between the first coming and the second coming of Christ. Advent prepares us not just for Christ’s holy birth in Bethlehem but also for his coming again in glory at the end of time. “He shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead: Whose kingdom shall have no end,” we just professed in the Nicene Creed. And in the Apostles’ Creed, Christ “sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” And more fully, and perhaps more disturbingly, the Athanasian Creed proclaims that Christ “Ascended into heaven, sat down at the right hand of the Father,/ from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead./ At whose coming all men must rise again with their bodies,/ and shall give account for their own deeds./ And they that have done good will go into life eternal;/ they that have done evil into eternal fire.” Wow! We probably don’t want to hear this and yet it belongs to the great good news of the Gospel. It is what is prayed in the great Eucharistic prayer, “remembering the precious death of thy beloved Son, his mighty resurrection, and glorious ascension,” things that are already, but then “looking for his coming again in glory,” to what is not yet.

That there is judgment means there is truth; that there is judgment means that our thoughts, words and deeds mean something.

All these creedal and liturgical statements are scriptural. They reflect a recurring theme about God’s engagement with our humanity and about the redemption of our humanity in Christ. The judgment, as today’s Epistle makes clear is God’s judgment, not mine, not yours, come what may in the experiences of tyranny and corruption, disorder and disarray, death and destruction in our world and day.

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“Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb”

These are Elizabeth’s words upon the occasion of Mary coming “with haste into the hill country of Judaea” to visit her aged cousin just after the Angel Gabriel announced that she who is “highly favoured” is to “conceive in [her] womb” and “give birth to a child who will be called holy, the Son of God.”

And yet, today we commemorate another conception, the conception of Mary herself. How paradoxical that we should commemorate an event which has no biblical basis whatsoever in the week of The Second Sunday in Advent, the Sunday that signals so strongly an Anglican sensibility about the centrality of the Scriptures as revelation, about the Anglican understanding of sola scriptura, we might say! How to reconcile that strong sensibility of the purpose and the defining force of the Scriptures with this non-biblical feast?

It signals to us, I think, that sola scriptura is to be understood creedally or doctrinally and not just in a positivistic or literalist fashion. The Scriptures are God’s word “written for our learning” and part of that learning has to do with our thinking upon the Word of God in all the fullness of its meaning. That means the Creeds, themselves an intellectual reflection upon the Scriptures without which it would be hard to say how the Scriptures are the Scriptures beyond dogmatic assertion and which provide us with a way to think the Scriptures without getting bogged down in a quagmire of contradictions. No. There is a deeper purpose and meaning to sola scriptura at least in some of its Anglican forms.

That deeper purpose and meaning has altogether to do with the priority of doctrine. Mary is absolutely critical to the meaning and understanding of God coming to us in “the Word made flesh.” There is no thinking upon the Incarnation without due regard to the role and place of Mary. She is “the Mother of God” as orthodox theology insists, “blessed among women,” as Elizabeth proclaims. And what is her blessedness? That she is “the handmaid of the Lord,” the one who says ‘yes’ to God, and whose ‘yes’ results in Christ’s conception and holy birth, He who is Lord and Saviour, both God and Man; “God of God,” to be sure, but man through her. He is the Lord with us because the Lord is with her.

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“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away”

Strong words, but then, this is a day of strong words, strong words reminding us of the strength and power of God’s Word coming to us in judgment and in hope.

“Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” St. Paul tells us in a powerful passage signifying the fundamental idea of a theology of revelation, a point by no means lost on the architect of common prayer and the author of the fine and wonderful collect for The Second Sunday in Advent, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. The collect captures and establishes an entire Anglican sensibility about the purpose of Scripture as revelation. Something is made known to us about the high things of God and about our lives with God in the witness of the Scriptures and through the creedal tradition of the Church faithful to that witness. The issue for our day is whether we are willing to hear and receive that Word coming so powerfully to us.

“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” Hope. Hope for something more beyond the struggles and limits of human experience. And yet there can be no hope without the theme of judgment awakening us to the reality of the human situation, described so powerfully and accurately in the Gospel. There shall be, it seems, “upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth”. It seems? Let’s be frank. There is much to disturb and trouble us in our own world and day, in our own church and country, in our own hearts and souls. To deny this would be utter folly.

It would also mean to deny the true desire of our hearts which is always for something more beyond the agony and the pain of the conflicts and divisions within and among ourselves. But where the Word of God is faithfully proclaimed and the Sacraments faithfully celebrated, there and then “know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand”. Such are the signs of the presence of God with us. These lessons are a strong reminder to us of the very nature of the liturgy and its purpose. It is about our being faithfully with the one who comes in judgment and in hope.

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This is the first of a two-part Advent Programme.  The second part, presented on 16 December, is posted here. Both parts have been combined into a single pdf document which can be downloaded here.

Advent Programme at Christ Church – 2014
The Themes of Nativity and Resurrection in P.D.James’ The Children of Men
Part I

“What saith the Scripture”

Last week, a much celebrated English writer, Dame P.D. James passed away (Nov 27^th, 2014). An accomplished novelist in the genre of detective mysteries, she also tried her hand at writing in the style of Jane Austen in a late novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, with mixed results, perhaps, though laudably so, I think. But it is another novel outside her detective fiction that warrants our attention in Advent. It is The Children of Men which had the fortune or misfortune of being made into a movie which, as the culture critic Mark Steyn notes, managed to miss the point of her novel almost completely. As he quips, the Baroness was the first to write on barrenness. It serves as a metaphor for the culture of our world and day. It is about a kind of spiritual barrenness, the counter to which can only be found in the Word of God coming to us which is what Advent is all about.

Her 1992 novel The Children of Men is, in many ways, a contemporary mystery play, at once of the Nativity, but also of the Resurrection. Medieval mystery plays were important vehicles for conveying the teachings of the Christian Faith, especially to a largely illiterate world. Perhaps they should be revived. One of the last things that Dame James published relates as well to the ways in which the Christian Faith is communicated to the world.

Deeply appreciative of The Book of Common Prayer, she wrote an essay in 2011 for a volume entitled The Book of Common Prayer: Past, Present, & Future upon the occasion of the 350^th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother book of the Prayer Books of the Anglican Communion. Her essay, “Through all the Changing Scenes of Life: Living with the Prayer Book,” provides a wonderful witness to the formative nature of the spirituality of the Prayer Book conveyed principally through the power of words. Here is a writer acknowledging one of the most powerful influences on her own thinking and writing and reminding us, too, of the power and nature of words.

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“Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, good will towards men”

They are familiar words that belong to the hopes and joys of the Christmas season. We forget, however, that they are Angels’ words, words conveyed on Angels’ wings to shepherds first and from them to us.

Christmas is far more than a one day wonder. Apart from the celebrated twelve days of Christmas, there is the interesting feature of Christmas itself, a festival that embraces three masses, three celebrations that emphasize certain distinct but interrelated features belonging to Christmas. The three masses are variously named but they focus on the Angels’ Mass, the Shepherds’ Mass and the Mass of the Divine Word, Mass here being a word referring to the liturgy. Christmas means simply Christ’s Mass, the celebration of the Incarnation, liturgically speaking, from which the term Christmas has carried over into the reality of the season and even into secular culture.

The Angels’ Mass focuses on the role of the Angels in bringing the news of great wonder to the Shepherds and rejoicing angelically in words which become the basis of the Gloria. “Glory to God and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.” Such commemorations by no means exhaust the rich and deep and beautiful meaning of Christmas but they order our contemplations and serve to underscore the great wonder and mystery of Christmas.

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