Category: Sermons

“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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“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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