Category: Sermons

“Cast off the works of darkness … and put on the armour of light”

Advent signals the coming of God towards us. But what is our response? Are we watching and waiting? Are we aware of humanity’s need for the coming of the one who alone can redeem? Are we looking for anything more beyond the dull, dark empty loneliness of our anxious and troubled lives? In short, are we aware of the Advent of Christ? That is the challenge of the readings on this day. Are we aware of the darkness? Not just the darkness of nature’s year but the darkness of sin and wickedness.

So often we think of Advent as simply the season of preparation for Christmas. To be sure, it is, but it is also something more. It is a season and a doctrine which has a real meaning and significance in and of itself. For Advent is the coming. The coming is about God’s challenging presence. There is the constant coming to us of God’s Word in proclamation and celebration.

In the great gospel for this day, Christ comes to Jerusalem. He enters the city triumphantly. It is a royal procession; the King comes to his own city. All is light and grace and glory. “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest”. It is the cry of “the multitudes that went before, and that followed”; in short, them before and us after! Yet at Christmas we will hear that “he came unto his own and his own received him not.” Here the whole city was moved to say in wondering ignorance and in perplexity, “Who is this?” We know the story. The King – God’s own Word and Son – will be rejected. All that is light and life ends in darkness and death; the darkness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the darkness of the cross and the grave.

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“And what more shall I say? For time would fail me …”

“Behold, the days come,” we heard this morning from Jeremiah and now again this evening from Malachi, we hear “for behold, the day comes.” In the order of the Christian Scriptures, Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament and deliberately so, it seems to me. It ends, as we heard this evening, with the prophetic words about those who fear the Lord even if our “words have been stout against God,” provided we repent. “Those who feared the Lord and thought on his name” are those whose names, it seems, are recorded not in the book of the dead, as in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Sumeria, but in “a book of remembrance.” It ends with a sense of the day of judgment, “burning like an oven” that leaves “neither root nor branch” unscathed, but also with another sense of judgment, the sense of hope and healing: “for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in his wings.” It signals, too, the sending of the prophet, Elijah, “before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes” who “will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers.”

Most intriguing words. In the context of Advent, the prophecy about Elijah is understood to be fulfilled in John the Baptist, the one who is sent to prepare the way of the Lord. No wonder that Malachi is placed at the end of the Old Testament, as Christians call the Jewish Scriptures. It points directly to the themes of the New Testament; in short, to the Advent of Christ.

This idea of Old and New, of the interplay and interconnection between the writings of the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament is wonderfully taken up, theologically and prophetically, in the lesson from The Letter to the Hebrews. Its authorship unknown, nonetheless, Hebrews offers a profound reflection upon the witness of the past in the history of Israel up to the present of Christ and Christianity. That is, of course, controversial and somewhat polemical; necessarily and deliberately so, for in the Christian understanding of things, the history of Israel has its fulfillment in Christ and that is the point which the lesson tonight makes.

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“The end of the matter … Fear God and keep his commandments”

A time of endings and beginnings is signalled on this day we call The Sunday Next Before Advent. There is something profound and wonderful in these moments of transition, yet it is not without some ambiguity. Do we end the year on a note of weariness and exhaustion? Too many books, so little time? “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” after all, whether it be books in print or e-books. Are we frustrated and perplexed with the relentless sameness of yet another year, a year in which, once again, there seems to be no progress, no change from the endless and dismal stories of hardship and struggle? If anything, it might seem that there is more grief and trouble, more sadness and dismay. “Everybody knows, that’s the way it goes,” as Leonard Cohen’s song puts it rather cynically. It may seem that we have been “fed with the bread of tears” and have had “plenteousness of tears to drink” as the psalmist puts it (Ps. 80).

Do we end, as Ecclesiastes seems to suggest, simply with the sombre awareness of death and mortality, the feebleness of old age and the barrenness of winter? “That time of year,” as Shakespeare puts it, “when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” an image which evokes at once old age and ecclesiastical ruins; a pile of holy stones, a Tintern Abbey centuries before Wordsworth.

Do we end, then, weary and worn with the attempts to take the world by storm only to find that the mysteries of life continue to elude us? If so, then we end well, it seems to me. Because to confront the vanities of our pursuits and ambitions is to stand on the brink of a great wisdom, the wisdom of God which alone can redeem and heal our weary souls.

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“Behold, the days come”

The times of endings return us to our beginnings. We come to the ending of the Church Year and to the beginning of yet another. Today is The Sunday Next Before Advent. With Advent, we begin again.

But what does it mean, these endings which bring us back to our beginnings? What does it mean to begin again? The mere repetition of the same old things in the same old places with the same old faces whether few or none or more, “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”? Or is it the dance of God’s grace and glory in human lives, come what may in the distresses and disorders of our world and day?

We come to the end of a year of grace and take stock of our lives in the light of God’s grace. It marks a kind of harvest-time, as it were, for our souls, a gathering up of the fruits of grace of the past year in our lives, which is why for centuries upon centuries the Gospel for this Sunday was about “the gathering up of the fragments” from Christ’s feeding of the multitudes in the wilderness. But it means too, that we are returned to our beginning, to Him who is the foundation and meaning of our lives. “Come and see.” The grace is God’s Word revealed.

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“I say not unto thee, until seven times; but seventy times seven”

Don’t worry, it’s not a math test. Quite the opposite. Jesus is pointing to something altogether beyond number though using numbers to make the spiritual point about forgiveness which is an infinite quality that cannot be constrained and tied down to a finite and calculative logic. After all, 490 or 490,000 or 490,000 trillion is just more of the same – one finite number after another. It is what Hegel called the false or spurious infinite (schlechtes unendliche) and not the true infinite.

Between “The Holy Catholic Church; The Communion of Saints” and “The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting” in the Apostles’ Creed, there is “The Forgiveness of sins.” I like to think of it as being the bridge between the community of the faithful and our individual participation in that spiritual community. A most important doctrine or teaching, yet the forgiveness of sins is either poorly understood or openly rejected.

Recently someone, closely connected to the therapeutic culture, remarked on the upswing in couples’ counselling and added that, surely, I must see a lot of that, too, since forgiveness is such a powerful concept and idea. Well, forgiveness is a most powerful concept and idea but, sadly, I am not sure that it is at all wanted when blame-and-exit is the real game and where there are really only victims jockeying for position. Thus the Church’s pastoral and priestly ministry is not wanted at all and precisely because of the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins. It is an almost too powerful and poetic idea for our prosaic and practical world.

Yet forgiveness is the great and necessary thing. It has a special force and potency in the Christian religion and challenges the contemporary culture of cut-and-run, do-it-and-be-done, get-it-and-be-gone, and let’s just move along. To be sure, there are no end of difficulties and hardships, especially in relationships, but the forgiveness of sins gives us a way to look at ourselves and one another differently and not just as the hurt and the hurting. It requires us to look at ourselves and one another as God sees us. That is the true wonder. How does God see us? As sinners who have been forgiven.

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“With thee is wisdom”

The grey month of November is not only the month of remembering but also of wisdom. In the pattern of the readings for the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer we begin on this Sunday to read from the Apocrypha, from those books which stand between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and which have a special sort of status, wonderfully captured in the sixth article of our Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion which articulate an Anglican understanding of the Catholic Faith.

The article does not provide actually give a generic term for these books, such as Apocrypha or Deutero-canonical. It simply and in a wonderfully economical way refers to them as “other books” before actually naming them individually; it doesn’t even clearly state that they are or are not canonical.

They are an interesting and intriguing collection. At issue is how they are read and understood. This is the point of the article: having listed the Old Testament books, it goes on to say, “And the other books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine” (BCP, p. 700). The appeal here is to the Patristic period which worked out both the essential doctrines of the Christian Faith ultimately creedally expressed and the canonical texts of the Bible. The reference to Hierome means Jerome, the outstanding translator of the Scriptures from Hebrew and Greek into the Latin Vulgate which was the defining text for 1500 years and more for the cultures of the West.

The Psalms in the Prayer Book bear quiet but eloquent testimony to the influence of Jerome’s translation: Latin titles derived from the first words of each psalm remain part of the Prayer Book Psalter and have since Coverdale’s 1535 translation. They remind us of the greater legacy and lineage of scriptural doctrine and introduce an important qualifier about the rightly celebrated reformation claim, sola scriptura, ‘scripture alone’. Yes, but in and through a tradition of translation and reception. In this case, the reformed elements of classical Anglicanism defer knowingly to the received understanding of the Patristic period, referring, after all, to Jerome, the Prince of Translators, and specifically to his understanding about the nature of these “other books.”

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“Above all, take the shield of faith”.

The scriptural images before us today have a wonderful cogency and power; they at once disquiet us, I suspect, as well as comfort us. We may indeed be inclined to prefer the gospel story of the healing of the son of a nobleman, not a poor man, we note, but one who is presumably well off; that alone, of course, might give us cause to pause. Yet, it is the story about something which is done by Jesus for us and so it suits the predilection of this age of entitlement to suppose that God should heal us and provide for us whatever we think we want. After all, ‘He owes us’, we might secretly think. We are happy to be on the receiving end, takers all and givers none. Of course, the gospel story itself will allow none of that kind of nonsense.

The challenge of the gospel is the wonderful openness to the grace of God by the nobleman who “believed the word which Jesus had spoken unto him”. He did not insist that Jesus make a house call. Jesus’ word was enough. That is the wonder and the effect of the grace of Christ at work in human lives. It illustrates what it means to “be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might” that St. Paul talks about in his Letter to the Ephesians, the strength and the might to work with what is conveyed to us by the Word of God. We are not just passive receivers, the couch potatoes of spiritual blessings, as it were; no, we are called to be actively engaged with what the Word of God opens out to us.

If comforted by the gospel, at first glance, then, I am sure we are equally made uncomfortable about the images in the epistle reading from Ephesians. The images are, in their sustained rigour, unmistakably military. They suggest an aggressiveness, even a kind of bellicosity that surely makes us pause, if not shudder uncomfortably.

“Put on the armour of God,” Paul tells us and he continues to tell us through the language of image and metaphor that we contend “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spiritual wickedness in high places”. Strong stuff. I wonder if we can hear it even in the approach to Remembrance Day and at a time when we confront the forms of active nihilism even here in Canada which arise out of our communities and ghettoes of passive nihilism, out of our spiritual emptiness; the nothingness of evil which breeds a destructive nothingness.

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“The wedding is ready, but they who were bidden were not worthy”

“I had not thought,” says Dante to Virgil, “that death had undone so many.” A passage and a scene from Dante’s great work, The Divine Comedy, he has pictured himself as contemplating the hordes of lost souls in the Vestibule of Hell as they run to and fro following this or that fad or fancy, souls who willed and then unwilled their will unable to commit to anything; unworthy even of Hell, it seems. It serves, perhaps, as a kind of metaphor for the age of distraction.

T.S. Eliot quotes that same line in his great poem about the ambiguities of modernity, The Wasteland. “I had not thought death had undone so many”, it is said, but in the context of contemplating “a crowd flow[ing] over London Bridge.” His comment is about the living as dead, the walking dead, as it were, in the “unreal city” of the modern world.

There is something wrong and not quite right with us. Yet precisely in the gloom and grey of November, we are awakened to the end of our humanity in the glorious vision of the Communion of Saints, “a multitude that no man could number.” Such is the meaning of All Saints. We have an end with God and with one another, as a community united in and through the diversities of human personality, a community united in prayer and praise of God. But when we neglect that vision, we find ourselves very much in the company of the walking dead, “cast into outer darkness,” as our Gospel puts it so frighteningly this morning, where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” and all because of our indifference and our hostility and our unreadiness; in short, our lack of commitment.

The contrasts between the communion of saints and grim realities of outer darkness could not be greater.

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“And the wall of the city had twelve foundations,
and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb”

The feast of St. Simon and St. Jude completes the annual parade of Apostolic Saints and brings us to the festival of All Saints, the celebration of the Apostolic city and fellowship in the Communion of All Saints.

All that really can be said about St. Simon and St. Jude has to do with their apostleship. They simply belong to the company of “twelve poor men, by Christ anointed,” as a hymn puts it. What more needs to be said than that?

They have, to be sure, lent their names to certain features of human life as patron saints, symbols, we might say, of some aspect or other of the virtues of Christ individually considered. St. Simon is the patron saint of zealots; St. Jude, more curiously, is the patron saint of lost causes, something with which I have more than a passing acquaintance. The zealous passion for a perfect political and social and spiritual righteousness often complements the despair at lost causes that often accompanies such worthy and necessary aspirations. Ultimately, such zeal brings us to the true righteousness of Christ, realized in the city of heavenly Jerusalem. What we have here is only “the unreal city” as T.S. Eliot memorably puts it, a lost cause.

“Zeal for thine house hath even consumed me,” the psalmist says. Yet through the myriad of lost causes, the deeper yearning for peace and righteousness is glimpsed, the deeper yearning which belongs to a peace, “not as the world giveth,” but as Christ gives.

The readings concentrate our attention on the Apostolic Foundation of the Church and the end of our humanity. Apostolic Foundation and Apostolic Fellowship are two realities which we are badly in need of recovering and reclaiming. Without them our parishes, our communities, our institutions either become the mental ghettoes of passive nihilism, empty, angry and in despair, or the activist sects and cells of active nihilism trumpeting one of a myriad of the social and political agendas of the day at the expense of the spiritual vision of redeemed humanity which is ours to proclaim. We are too much with ourselves because we are not with God.

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“Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord; / Lord, hear my voice”
(Psalm 130.1)

The psalmist’s cry echoes the cry of Jonah from the belly of the great fish, a cry, he suggests, that is from “the belly of Sheol,” the term for the Jewish underworld. Jonah is as far from God as he can be. And yet, not unlike Christ on the cross in his cry of dereliction, he cries out to God. In the case of Jonah, he cries out to the God from whom he has tried to get as far away from as possible. The biblical, theological, and psychological point is that you can’t.

As another psalm (Psalm 139) reminds us, “O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me:/ thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts from afar” (vs.1). It goes on to ask “whither shall I go then from thy spirit?/ or whither shall I flee from thy presence?/ If I climb up into heaven, thou art there:/ if I go down to hell, thou art there also” (vs. 6,7). God would not be God if we thought we could escape his presence and his truth.

The story of Jonah is partly told to make this point about God and about God as the universal God and not just the God of a particular people, a tribal god as it were. The Book of Jonah is actually a profound satire upon the folly of that kind of thinking. A most unusual book of Hebrew prophecy, to be sure, it yet offers an important spiritual insight into the nature of God, not altogether unlike The Book of Ruth with her insight that “your people shall be my people, your God my God” for God is for all people. They may have been written about the same time in the third century BC.

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