Category: Sermons

“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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“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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