Category: Sermons

“That ye may know”

Jesus wants us to know that he is the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins connects us to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The forgiveness of sins is about the death and resurrection of Jesus in us.

St. Matthew’s story of the paralytic abbreviates St. Mark’s account. St. Mark’s fuller story reads like a burial-scene. The paralytic is helpless as the dead, he is carried out like the dead by his four bearers; a hole is opened for him, as for the dead, he is lowered into it, as unto his grave. But falling, he does not fall into clay, he falls before the feet of the Son of God, who says to him, first, “thy sins are forgiven thee” and then “arise and walk” (Austin Farrer).

With Matthew, too, we are brought dead in our sins into the presence of Christ. We are brought by faith and Jesus, seeing the faith of those who brought him, says, “Son be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee”.

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“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you”

A most compelling and touching scene, at once a story of friendship and forgiveness, of healing and restoration, it illustrates what St. Paul is saying in the Epistle. Here is the kindness of friends towards one another. Here in Christ’s words of forgiveness towards the man sick of the palsy is the tender-heartedness of Jesus.

And yet there is something else here too, something of a more sombre and disturbing nature. There is as well in this Gospel scene “the vanity of minds,” “the darkening of the understanding,” “the hardness of hearts,” “ the corruption of souls”; in short, all the other things that the Epistle mentions – the evil in the heart which resents and opposes the good that might be done to others.

The soul is the battlefield between good and evil. And we all stand convicted or better yet, in the imagery of the Gospel, we are all paralyzed, unable to move, palsied limbs reflecting a deeper paralysis of the soul which we see in the resistance and opposition of the scribes to Christ’s words of forgiveness to the one who was paralyzed. They say nothing but “Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?”

Christ addresses that obduracy of the mind, that stubbornness of the soul, which remains closed to the possibilities of God’s grace at work in people’s lives, the kind of grace which is already evident in the action of those who brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus.

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“Let me go to the field, and glean among the ears of grain after him
in whose sight I shall find favour.”

My thanks to Fr. Peter Harris and to St. Peter’s Cathedral for the privilege of being here and speaking to you this evening. I hope that this can be the beginning of an annual Choral Evensong in the Fall sponsored by the Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. There is something wonderfully calming, beautiful and intentional about Evensong. It is, dare I say, one of the glories of our Anglican witness to the Catholic Faith. I am most grateful for the wonderful musical offering of your choir. Actually, I think that all I have to say has been sung already in that lovely motet by Giovanni Croce. Gaudate et Exultate! “Rejoice ye and be exulatant,” uplifted, regardless of the hardships of life, even the hardships of persecution! Wonderful.

We seem to be very much in the company of grieving widows and sorrowing mothers! And yet we glean in the fields of Boaz to discover divine truth and human dignity. Perhaps, that is the real mission of the Prayer Book Society in times of uncertainty, of loss and sorrow. Perhaps, in so doing, we shall discover those “wholesome medicines of doctrine” delivered to us by such figures as St. Luke.

Naomi has lost her husband Elimelech and her two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, who were also the husbands of her two daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, the latter after whom The Book of Ruth is named. Such situations, though sad, are hardly unique. You only need to think about your own families and your own communities to recall similar sadnesses, sorrows and losses. And yet, as Paul suggests in our second lesson from his Letter to the Philippians, such commonplaces of sadness and sorrow, the things that have happened, can be the cause of joy and rejoicing. Somehow such circumstances can be the occasions in which Christ can be honoured and glorified. In another words, Scripture gives us ways to face the hard and sad things of human life.

Probably written sometime after the Babylonian exile, The Book of Ruth with its timeless and reflective mood is notionally set in the time of the Judges. In the Christian Bible, it is found immediately after The Book of Judges. In a way, it is a kind of critical commentary on The Book of Judges, offering a completely contrasting account of Jewish identity and mission. The Book of Judges, like many of the early books of the Hebrew Scriptures, is written from a kind of exclusionary viewpoint with the emphasis upon Israel as the Chosen People separate and apart from the nations round about. It is a point of view that has a long pedigree. Over and against that stands another perspective which emphasizes the role and mission of Israel as “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” as Isaiah puts it and which the Nunc Dimittis from Luke’s Gospel repeats in our evening liturgy, the idea that what has been proclaimed to Israel is for all people, something universal in principle. These tensions define Jewish history and thought, oscillating between the one and the other, and in the Christian understanding resolved in Christ.

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“He had answered them well”

The context is controversy. It almost always is when it is a matter of spiritual truth. Truth which unites frequently divides. Yet a deeper unity may sometimes be only found through the divisions of our hearts, when our hearts are broken and opened to view. For then, and only then, perhaps, we discover what it is that we believe, what it is that we stand for, if anything at all. Sometimes it takes controversy.

But what does it mean to stand for something? Is it simply a matter of assertion, a matter of self-definition which demands recognition upon no other basis than our subjective desires and opinions? Is the truth just what we make it? Or do we stand for something objective and received, truth that defines us even in our untruth?Sometimes we learn through controversy. Sometimes through controversy something of the truth of God is at once communicated and received. What is to be looked for is some deeper understanding of truth, “tam antiquo, tam novo”, “truth so ancient and so new,” as Augustine puts it. Jesus is engaged in religious disputation. “Which is the first commandment of all?” he is asked by a member of the literary caste, the scribes, the writers of words which are like pictures into which we may step if we choose. We shall never be the same for truth always confronts and convicts us. This scribe, about whom Jesus will ultimately say, “thou art not far from the Kingdom of God” perceived that “[Jesus] had answered them well” and so is led to ask the overwhelming question, “which is the first commandment of all?” He is, we might say, compelled by the truth itself in the context of controversy and even intellectual animosity where power seems more at issue than truth. But “Jesus had answered them well”. And he continues to do so in his magisterial “Summary of the Law”. The greatest commandment is the love of God and the love of neighbour, no “commandment greater than these”. Powerful stuff. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” as our liturgy notes. And yet, profoundly provocative and controversial. Why? Because of its clarity. It cuts through all the clutter and confusion of history and experience. It crystallizes the whole of the Jewish Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament. It is a kind of distillation of its teachings, almost, we might say, a kind of Old Testament Creed, and certainly one which challenges many perspectives about that remarkable collection of books and stories and poems. Is it really all about love? How can law be love? Because the Law is nothing more than the expression of God’s will and truth for our humanity and, if it convicts us of our own shortcomings, as it most surely does, then it does so only to recall us to truth. Such is repentance and prayer.

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“And one turned back … giving him thanks”

In returning and giving thanks, we are made whole. This text signals the profoundly spiritual nature of thanksgiving. In a way, today’s Gospel is the quintessential gospel of thanksgiving. At Harvest Thanksgiving, though, we usually read the lesson from Isaiah about the word of God in creation and the Gospel from St. John about Jesus as “the Bread of Life” (BCP, p. 620/1). This Gospel story from St. Luke we usually hear on The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity (BCP, p. 240), but that Sunday happened to be The Feast of St. Matthew this year. Yet this Gospel is also the appointed Gospel reading for Thanksgiving Day (BCP, p. 308). It embraces and shapes all our thinking about thanksgiving. We need to ponder its essential meaning.

Pumpkins and prepositions. Both abound in the culture of the Maritimes, often in interesting ways, but I fear we probably take more notice of the pumpkins than we do of prepositions. Pumpkins, especially given the parade of pumpkins and the pumpkin regatta in the Pisiquid puddle, are part of our thanksgiving celebrations here in Windsor. But prepositions! You’ve got to be kidding. Grammar on a Sunday?! Yes. Why? Because we can’t make any sense of the concept of thanksgiving without giving serious consideration to prepositions, particularly three prepositions. Which prepositions? They are ‘for’, ‘to’, and ‘with’.

But what are prepositions? Prepositions are those little words which carry such a weight of meaning and are so hard to master when learning a new language. They position nouns and verbs in relation to one another to indicate meaning and purpose.

Thanksgiving is a profoundly spiritual activity. It is the freest thing that we can do. Like learning and religion, it can’t be forced. It has to come freely from our hearts and minds. We can constantly remind our children to say ‘thank-you’, but real thanksgiving cannot be coerced. It belongs to the intellectual and spiritual freedom of our humanity. It is the counter to all and every aspect of the entitlement culture, to the assumption that we are owed whatever we want and think we deserve. Its significance is captured in the power of these prepositions.

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“Young man, I say unto thee, Arise”

Michaelmas daisies and burning bushes abound in the softness of autumn – even if the burning bush is one that has been hacked to pieces on the corner of the Parish’s property! Michaelmas daisies and burning bushes are, to my mind, strong and visible reminders of the primacy of spiritual and intellectual matters. No doubt, this week will inaugurate a great parade of pumpkins. I am a little less certain what things pumpkins remind us about matters spiritual and intellectual.

The Michaelmas daisies remind us of Michaelmas, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels celebrated at the near end of September. The Angels are very much part of the larger spiritual company defined by the worship and love of the God who has revealed himself to us and in whose life “we live and move and have our being”. The burning bushes of autumn recall the essential moment and story of revelation: God makes himself known to Moses as “I AM WHO I AM” through a burning bush, which not only gets Moses’ attention, but is not consumed, not burned up. We stand on the holy ground of divine revelation. God reveals himself in his truth and majesty – “I AM WHO I AM” – but he does so through the things of nature. The natural world, too, is used as the vehicle of God’s revelation. In this lies the logic of the sacraments and our liturgy. It means that even pumpkins can remind us of the God who creates and redeems, whether or not paddling a pumpkin in the Pisiquid puddle on the Thanksgiving weekend.

God creates “out of nothing”, late Judaism and Christianity affirm, meaning that what is and what comes to be is not shaped and formed out of pre-existent matter but comes to be radically out of the mind and will of God. God after all is no-thing; not one thing among many things, but the cause and principle of all things. The revelation of God to Moses in the burning bush is the real starting point for the doctrine of creation. God is not a burning bush. He is not to be confused with anything in the created order. But, then, there is the Greek view that “nothing comes from nothing”. It belongs to Christianity to unite these two opposed concepts.

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“Be not anxious”

The strong words of this gospel are large letters written to us by Jesus, as it were. What are the strong words? Behold, consider, seek. Through them we see the world with new eyes even as we bear in our own bodies, as Paul suggests, “the marks of the Lord Jesus”. Large letters to be written in our lives.

Jesus tells us not to be anxious more than once. He knows our anxieties and how prone we are to being anxious, quite literally, about “a multitude of things”. It is “the Martha Syndrome”: “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). We all have our fears and our worries, our troubles and our concerns, our heart-aches and our despairs. We can worry ourselves, quite literally, to death about them. What are we anxious about? What are our anxieties? Quite simply, they are our cares, the things which, quite literally, occupy our thoughts.

The first Books of Common Prayer, 1549 and 1552, use the phrase “be not carefull” following Tyndale. The King James Version of the Bible, some sixty years later, uses the phrase “take no thought” to capture the Greek word about how our thoughts are taken captive or occupied, possessed, we might even say, with various concerns. The phrase, “take no thought”, became the version in the Books of Common Prayer from 1662 onwards until 1959, when in Canada the word “anxious” was introduced, a word which has 17th century provenance in English but which has been given a greater weight of interpretation in the 20th and 21st centuries; in part, through the influence of the psychology of Sigmund Freud and, in part, through existential philosophy. Angst r us.

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“God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness,
hath shined in our hearts”

It is not often that a Saints’ day intrudes upon our Sunday worship. I say “intrudes” because there is a modern liturgical opinion that such celebrations get in the way of the primary focus of each Sunday service, namely, the Resurrection of Christ. There is the fear that the celebration of a saint might detract from the centrality of Christ. A legitimate fear, I suppose, but it overlooks the ancient wisdom which sees the saints as saints only in the light of Christ’s Resurrection. As today’s epistle appointed for The Feast of St. Matthew reminds us, “we preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake”. The focus, we may safely conclude, is Christ. And if, we look more closely, we shall see that the Call of Matthew is altogether about the Resurrection of Christ in us and about our being with Christ; in short, The Feast of St. Matthew illumines the very nature of salvation for us. Light shining out of our darkness and light shining in our hearts.

And all because Jesus is passing by. It all seems so casual, so accidental, so incidental but, to the contrary, Jesus’ passing by is not casual; it is essential. That is to say, it belongs to the very principle of God who is light and life itself, who is always active, and never static, and whose activity is always purposeful and therefore, always requires a response from us.

Jesus’ passing by is not without consequence. Something happens. He glances upon us. “Salvation begins by our being seen by Jesus, by his turning toward us his compassionate eyes”. Here Jesus “saw a man named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom,” at the tax collector’s bench. Everything unfolds from that glance of Jesus. “Follow me,” he says to Matthew who “arose, and followed him”.

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“They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh,
with the affections and lusts” … “Go and do thou likewise”

A double text. Words from today’s Epistle and Gospel, yet words, too, which illumine and are illumined in turn by another feature of this day, namely, Holy Cross.

I have often been struck by the coincidence of the early beginning of Fall and the return to School with The Feast of the Holy Cross on September 14^th, and especially, with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks profoundly and yet paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise. Inventio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the historical and celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem, and from her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Inventio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.

In the Christian understanding, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual and spiritual life. The cross is the meeting place of lovers which demands our action of loving service, our acting out of the charity of Christ, something which belongs to the deep meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Who is the true neighbour? “He that showed mercy on him.” But what is that mercy except exactly that which is ultimately seen on the Cross of Christ.

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