Christ Church

“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”

It is, we might say, the promise of the Resurrection. But it is not just  ‘pie in the sky by and by’; it speaks to a profound Christian reality here and now. We “mourn and rejoice at once and at the same time in this world,” T.S Eliot suggests in his play Murder in the Cathedral. It is the very nature of the life of the Church; the life of prayer and praise is about our communion with God. And yet, we are allowed to look beyond mourning, beyond sorrow and lament to joy and delight as being the true hope and reality of our humanity. Only so can we both mourn and rejoice at one and the same time.

We live, the French Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf argues in a “disordered world.” In one way, that is not new. It belongs to the human condition, to what is the reality of the Fall. But how to live in a disordered world is the far more interesting question. I want to suggest that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection speaks directly to the situation and reality of our living in a disordered world.

What do we mean by the disordered world? We can no longer deceive ourselves about being “assured of certain certainties” (T.S. Eliot, Preludes IV), it seems to me. We live in the ruins of a revolution. We live, certainly, in the failure and collapse of certain assumptions about material prosperity and about scientific progress. We are beset by the prophets of apocalyptic doom and, no, they are not religious fanatics so much as doomsday environmentalists. And yet, even that is being challenged. In short, without giving a full blown chronicle of the contradictions, confusions and complexities of our contemporary world, disordered seems to fit the bill rather nicely and to capture our present sense of uncertainty and unease.

How to deal with it? I think this is where an openness to what we have forgotten and dismissed and even denied is required. What is it? Simply what we are being given to see in these remarkable lessons which belong to the season of Easter. They offer nothing less than a new and radical way of looking at our humanity. The doctrine of the Resurrection, I wish to argue, speaks wonderfully and profoundly to the disorders of our world and day.

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“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”

It is, we might say, the promise of the Resurrection. But it is not just  ‘pie in the sky by and by’; it speaks to a profound Christian reality here and now. We “mourn and rejoice at once and at the same time in this world,” T.S Eliot suggests in his play Murder in the Cathedral. It is the very nature of the life of the Church, concentrated for us in the Great Thanksgiving Prayer at Holy Communion. And yet, we are allowed to look beyond mourning, beyond sorrow and lament to joy and delight as being the true hope and reality of our humanity. Only so can we both mourn and rejoice at one and the same time.

We live, the French Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf argues, in a “disordered world.” In one way, that is not new. It belongs to the human condition, to what is the reality of the Fall. But how to live in a disordered world is the far more interesting question. I want to suggest that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection speaks directly to the situation and reality of our living in a disordered world.

(more…)

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“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”

It is a powerful and familiar image and yet one which I think we utterly fail to comprehend. Perhaps the most familiar of all of the biblical images and certainly the one which is most commonly represented in the church culture of the Maritimes, it has, I fear, been co-opted by the therapeutic culture and emptied of its deeper meaning. It speaks to us about care, of course, but it does so in the deeper context of sacrifice. It is about something more, though not less, than hugs and squeezes, far more, though not less, perhaps, than the comforts of pharmacare as wonderful as those can be.

We forget that this image so popular and familiar belongs to the pattern of death and resurrection and the way that pattern informs our lives of sacrifice and service. For centuries upon centuries the Gospel of Christ the Good Shepherd has been read on the Second Sunday after Easter. The Collect makes the explicit point that Christ, the only Son of God, has been given to us as “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” These are powerful and profound theological concepts that relate to the quality of our lives in faith. There is something quite suggestive, important and necessary about connecting the image of Christ the Good Shepherd to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And yet, that is exactly what our readings do this morning. The lesson from 1^st Peter is quite explicit. It speaks about Christ “who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” as well as signifying that it is by his stripes – his wounds at our hands – that we are healed and even more, “returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of [o]ur souls.” This is strong stuff; the theological idea that God can make something good even out of our evil and the philosophical idea that attends it that the power of the good is always greater than all and any evil.

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“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Ad Jesum per Mariam – through Mary to Jesus.  Mary does not want us to come to her, the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther observes, but through her to Jesus. It is, ironically, it might seem, one of the great mottoes of the Jesuit order founded several decades after Luther’s outstanding commentary on the Magnificat and after the cataclysmic shift in religious sensibilities that changed the map of Europe to this day and which is part and parcel of the emergence of early modernity.

There is something quite marvelous about The Feast of the Annunciation. Perhaps one of the most common and familiar scenes depicted in Art and Sculpture, in Stained Glass and Tapestry, the Feast of the Annunciation always coincides with the seasons of Lent and Easter, sometimes even falling on Good Friday or Easter itself. By virtue of the coincidence of the 25th of March with the weeks before and after the Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox which marks Easter, her feast day is sometimes transferred to the first Tuesday after The Octave of Easter; in short, after Holy Week and Easter Week. What does this mean and what is its significance doctrinally and devotionally? Simply this, Mary points us to Jesus and to our life in Christ even as her Annunciation marks the beginning in time of God’s being with us in the intimacy of his humanity which he derives from her. It signals the humility of our true humanity in the one who points us to Jesus even as it is through her that Jesus is with us.

Christ is, as Irenaeus put it is “that pure one opening that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” That pure womb is Mary; her purity is about her pure openness to God.

Mary’s word to us in the season of the Resurrection is her word to us at all seasons. “Be it unto me according to thy word.” We attend to this text in the tones of resurrection joy. His word living in us even as it lived for us through her. Our yes to his Resurrection through her yes to the Annunciation.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of The Feast of the Annunciation (transf.)

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