A Sermon for Proper 11, Year A

A Homily for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Preached at Saint Matthias', Bellwoods

Sunday, 15 June 2008
Proper 11, Year A

We recently celebrated Trinity Sunday, when we thought about how Christians came to believe in God as a three-fold unity. We saw that the followers of Jesus came to believe in the Trinity because in him they experienced God in a new way, a way which compelled them to acknowledge him as divine, as Lord and God. To put this simply, the belief in the Trinity springs from the belief in the Incarnation. We also saw that this faith had to be maintained against those who taught that Christ was just a man, or a man adopted into Godhead, or a divine being but different from God the Father. But as the years went by, this defence of Christ’s divinity brought problems of its own, especially after those who had known Jesus in Galilee and Judaea, who had journeyed with him, eaten and drank with him, died. Then it was easier for the memory of him as a man to be overwhelmed by the faith in him as divine. Teachers arose who found the idea of the perfect God mucking about not only in this imperfect world, but even in human life, distasteful. Some said that he had only seemed to be human; these were known as docetists, from the Greek word to seem. The first letter of John teaches against them:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false spirits have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. I John 4.1-3a.

But John confesses Jesus Christ as the eternal God, that “which was from the beginning” and in the flesh, “which we have heard, seen with our eyes, looked upon and touched with our hands” (I John 1.1). There were many such teachings, and the formularies of faith were carefully drafted to steer the way between their errors, and preserve the faith. And the Church declared its faith in Jesus Christ as one Person uniting two natures: completely divine, of one substance with the Father, and completely human, like us in all respects apart from sin. This is not easy to grasp, since Jesus Christ is unique, and there is none to whom he can be compared. But such a definition is meant not so much to state the whole truth as to mark its limits, to guide us between the extremes, so that we may remain faithful to the whole teaching of the New Testament. But we cannot treat the whole doctrine of the Incarnation this morning; this is better dealt with in study: which might begin with the Athanasian Creed, or the definition of the Incarnation of the Council of Chalcedon [See below]. Instead, I wish to think about a verse in today’s Gospel reading which expresses the humanity of Jesus very eloquently.
It is said that at certain points in history Christians have tended to neglect our Lord’s humanity but today we tend to over-emphasize it, to regard our Lord first and foremost as a human being, albeit the best and noblest, and to thrust his Godhead into the background, if it is accepted at all. This is true of some, but in many Churches (like ours) the divinity of Christ is rightly taught. Sometimes ordinary believers who would never explicitly deny Jesus’ humanity, are often a little embarrassed by it. This especially comes when the Gospels speak of Jesus not know something. Some people ask, But surely if he is God he must have known? Answering such questions can be tricky, for too much humanity sometimes threatens belief in the divinity. But if we listen to what the Gospels tell us, there can be no doubt of that Jesus is human. Now today we heard that when Jesus saw the crowds,

he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd,

This is a moving statement. We can picture Jesus, perhaps standing at a roadside looking on the crowds – who were after all his own people – and being moved with compassion: they were oppressed by foreign occupation, they were not guided or cared for by their shepherds – but even their shepherds were harassed and helpless before the power of Rome. There was little relief from illness or poverty. To be a widow or an orphan was often to be oppressed. But does saying that Jesus “had compassion” show him to be human? Or is this the divine pity of the transcendent God, far beyond anything we know or feel? We need to look a little deeper into the text. Permit me to be technical for a moment.
The Greek verb here is σπλαγχνίζομαι (splangchnizomai); look it up and you find it means “to be moved with pity or compassion”. If you look further, though, you find that it comes from σπλαγχνον (splangchnon), which means the entrails, more or less; it used to be translated “bowels” (the root meaning might in fact be “spleen”). It was used in much the same way we use the word heart: the ancients tended to think of the abdomen as the seat of the emotions. This isn’t strange: we know what it is to feel something “in the pit of my stomach”; we all know of a gut-wrenching experience. The fact is that we really do experience many emotions as a feeling in the guts: this is not just what grammarians call a dead metaphor where the concrete has been forgotten. So when we read this passage and picture Jesus looking on the harassed crowd, we should imagine the scene quite literally hitting him in the guts. And this is a completely human feeling. We might be happier to say “he was gripped in his heart concerning them.” Article I of the Thirty-nine tells us, the living and true God is ‘without body, parts, or passions.” Here we see body, parts, and passion: we cannot doubt that Jesus is a real man, looking in his fellows, and being sickened by their misery.
There are many things to say about the mystery of the Incarnate Word, but my time is almost up. I shall simply ask, why is it so important to hold to the belief that Jesus is both God and Man? Of the many reasons it is important, the one we see in Jesus’ compassion for weak and faltering humanity is very important. The fact that God the Son really became human, so human that that he felt as we do shows our human nature — body, mind, soul, feelings, emotions, and all its experiences — as truly valued and loved by God. If all God wants to do is to wipe away sin, that is easy; if he wants he can wipe us out and make a more obedient race; but by sending Jesus Christ in the flesh God says that he wants to save us, and bring us into his life, to heal, cleanse and restore our human nature, not reject, abolish and destroy it. We, like the first disciples, are sent to proclaim Christ’s message that the Kingdom in at hand. As we go out to bring Christ’s message to our neighbours in word and action, let us never forget that the King is one who has shared this life, and knows its joys and sorrows intimately, that the King looks on the world not with hatred or harsh judgment, but with tender pity, and who is gripped in the heart by the misery of his people.

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The Chalcedonian Definition
In AD 451 the Council of Chalcedon met to settle the teaching of how Jesus Christ is truly God and truly human. This definition is, like the Creeds, part of our heritage as Christians. The American Church rightly prints it among the historical documents in its Prayer Book Since it is so important a formlary, I believe it should be readily available to the people of the Church. This translation of the Definition, taken from Bettenson’s Documents of the Christian Church, is the same as that found in the American book.

Following the holy Fathers we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of his Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer (Theotokos); one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence [hypostasis], not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ, even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the Fathers has handed to us.

Trinity Sunday Sermon, 2008

A Homily for the Feast of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity, Year

A Preached at Saint Matthias’, Bellwoods, Toronto

On The First Sunday after Pentecost, 18 May AD 2008

Christians of the Catholic tradition perform certain reverences: they bow at certain moments or words, bend the knee, make the sign of the cross, and so on. Contrary to what some think, they do not generally do these things for the fun of it, but because they desire to worship God in body as well as in mind and heart and voice. They desire to worship with the whole person. To bend the knee or genuflect before the Blessed Sacrament is to worship Christ who said This is my Body. If we did not believe his word, it would be blasphemy to bend the knee before a piece of bread. Now before you conclude that I have got my Sundays wrong and this is Corpus Christi sermon, let me asure you it is not. I mention it because the belief that makes us genuflect before the Sacrament signifies an even more basic belief. Unless we believe that the one who said This is my Body was (and is) himself God, then not only the reverence to the Sacrament but all our worship is blasphemy, divine honour paid to a mortal — indeed, if he is not God, paid to a dead Galilean carpenter — is nothing but blasphemy.

Not just our reverences, but all our worship proclaims our belief that this man, Jesus Christ, is the Living Lord, God the Son, whom the Father sent into the world for our salvation, and who sent the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, to give us life. And on this is founded our belief that in the unity of the Godhead there are three persons, of one substance, power and eternity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. each is God, each is Lord, but there are not three Gods and three Lords but One God and one Lord.

Now it is usually a mistake for a preacher on Trinity Sunday to try to explain the doctrine of the Trinity, or to use some homely object like a shamrock to make it easy to digest. Instead, I want to talk for a bit about how this belief arose, and particularly why Christians had to make it all complicated with doctrines and dogmas and other things that modern people don’t much like, but which are really only the tools we use to keep us safe when we try to explain what we believe. For the doctrine of the Trinity arose simply because Christians wanted to be faithful to all the experience of God recorded in the Scriptures, and we in our day can do no better than to stick to it.

In the first place, there is the undeniable truth that God is One and we are to worship him alone. God seems to have spent centuries hammering this fact into the heads of his chosen people To their everlasting credit, Israel has to this day maintained an absolute commitment to Monotheism and an absolute horror of idolatry. This was just as true two thousand years ago. As we know, Jesus and his disciples were Jews, raised and nutured in the belief in the One God. Every day they would recite the great words, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is one, and all the rest, which Jesus identified as the first and great commandment.

In their life with Jesus his disciples experienced God in a new way. Now the best way I could stretch out this homily is to point out all the passages that show this; if you will forgive me I won’t do that now. (Some passages gathered by E. J. Bicknell are in the added note below.) Enough to say that the whole impression Jesus’ life and works made on his disciples convinced them he was divine. Not only the disciples saw this; even the religious authorities who opposed him had no doubt that his traching and actions implied a claim to be equal to God, and for this he was killed. The Resurrection crowned the disciples’ conviction and brought it to full consciousness, a consciousness so overwhelming that S.Thomas, a Jew, cried out, “My Lord and my God!”

They also has a new experience of God in the Holy Spirit. Christ himself had spoken of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, as divine yet distinct from Himself, and when that Spirit came upon his disciples in power they knew that He too could be no less than God. The belief in God as Trinity is grounded on the Christian commitment to taking seriously the experience of God in Christ and the Holy Spirit while at the same time remaining faithful to the revelation of God’s Unity. In the letters of the New Testament we find passage after passage which show that the first Christians thought of the supreme source of spiritual blessing not as single but as threefold—threefold in essence and not merely in manner of speech. (References to many of these passages may be found in the notes for today elsewhere in this blog.) A supreme example of this triadic language is the passage from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians which we heard a few minutes ago. As has been remarked, St Paul wrote these words in the expectation that his converts would understand their meaning from their own spiritual experience; it was nothing new or unfamiliar. “In speaking almost casually of ‘the grace or the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost’ (2 Cor 13.14), he simply sums up the working faith of the Christian community.”

Perhaps, though, we might be forgiven for asking why the Church couldn’t have stopped there without developing a doctrine of the Trinity, with all its difficult language about persons and natures, processions, generations, and spirations, and that blessed word Perichoresis, which is translated mutual indwelling but seems to mean that the Divine Persons are forever dancing with each other? ( This won’t be on the test)

Well at first, they did stop there. The first believers were hardly aware that there was any problem, or that their faith was inconsistent with monotheism. Divine names, titles and functions that belong to God alone in the Old Testament, are freely ascribed in the pages of the New to the Lord Jesus and to the Holy Spirit. As has been well said, ‘In the first flush of their new hope Christians rather felt than reasoned out their conviction that their master was divine. It was a certainty of heart and mind—but the mind could hardly subject the conception to the processes of reason—the soul leapt to the great conclusion, even though the mind might lag behind, They did not stay to reason; they knew.’[1]

Eventually they had to reason. In the first place, people then were no less intelligent, inquisitive, and argumentative than they are today, and asked questions (just like parishioners today). “If Jesus is God’s Son, is he really God?” “Uhm, right then, … does that mean there are two Gods?” All around them was a society that asked more or less politely, “What do you people believe that is so important you can’t just live like other folk?” “If you can worship Jesus, why can’t you offer a little pinch of incense to the Emperor?” And when persecutions arose, it was hardly unreasonable that people who might have to die for their faith should want to understand it. So Church leaders tried to give answers, like clergy do today. Some did a better job, some a worse, like clergy do today. Some of the answers had the advantage of being simple and easy to understand, but at the cost of ignoring or explaining away some of the facts. Some teachers fudged over the divinity of Christ; some acknowldedged that he was Divine, but not of the same being as the Father, conveniently forgetting the Unity of God; some made the Son and the Spirit temporary masks the Father put on, and were quite surprised when other Christians objected to the idea that the Father suffered on the Cross. The Christian Church, which preferred not to speculate about God, was forced to think out her belief and find words to express it. That was a long process, and we do not need to rehearse it all now. (If you want to read the story a good place to start is the book Fathers and Heretics by G. L. Prestige.)

We might perhaps note here that the tradition does not only give us language to safeguard our faith, but warns us that our langauge is limited. For example, Latin-speaking Christians used the word Person to describe the three, but St Augustine says of this word “Yet, when the question is asked, What three? human language labors altogether under great poverty of speech. The answer, however, is given, “three persons”, not that it might be [completely] spoken, but that it might not be left [wholly] unspoken.”[2] This is true of all our words, of course; but the fact that they cannot express all the truth does make them untrue or worthless. So far I have only attempted to show that the Christian belief in One God in three Persons is not a piece of clever speculation but the natural result of the Christian experience that the source of spiritual blessing is not single but threefold. This belief grows from, supports, and allows our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Much more ought to be said, but there is no time. So I end with the simple thought that the Christian life does not consist in what we can know about God the Holy Trinity, but in coming to know and live with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This knowledge and life comes through the faith and love which we find in word, prayer, and sacrament, and the love of our neighbours. It comes in following Jesus Christ who has promised to bring us even now into his life,

in union with the Father and the Holy Spirit;

to whom be given, as is most justly due,

all praise and glory now and for ever and unto ages of ages, Amen
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Added Note:
The Gospel Passages referred to above, as mentioned in E. J. Bicknell, A Historical and Theological Introduction to the XXXIX Articles.

Through their prolonged intercourse with Him the disciples became convinced that our Lord too was divine. He spoke of Himself as ‘Son of Man’,[3] and Himself interpreted the meaning of that title in the light of Dan 7.13 (e.g. Mark 14.62). They were compelled to ask ‘what manner of man is this?” (Mt 8.27, &c.) By His question He encouraged them to think out for themselves who He was. He commended S. Peter who could find no word short of ‘Messiah’ able to contain all that He had shown Himself to be. He claimed a unique intimacy with the Father (Mt 11.25-27) In His own name He revised and deepened the law of Moses (Mt 5.2, &c.). He taught His disciples to repose in Him an unlimited confidence that no mere man had the right to demand of his fellow-men (Mt 7.24, &c.). He died for His claim to be the Christ and the Son of God (Mk 14.61). The whole impression made upon them by Hid life and works was crowned and brought to consciousness by His Resurrection(e.g. Rom 1:4). He was indeed the Son of God. No language short of this could express the place that He had come to take in their knowledge of God.

He had spoken to the disciples of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, as divine yet distinct from Himself[4] (Jn 14:16 and 15:26). They were to expect the Spirit’s coming when He was gone (Acts 1.4-5). In that coming He Himself would come too (John 14.18). At Pentecost they had a personal experience of the Holy Spirit. A new and lasting power entered into their lives. They knew that He too could be no less than God. Further, in the Baptismal formula the teaching of Christ is summed up. Converts are to be baptized ‘into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’ (Mt 28.19). The name is one. It belongs equally to the three Persons, who are associated on an equality and distinguished from one another by the use of the definite article.
Footnotes [

[1] Bethune Baker, Christian Doctrines; how they arose, p. 16.

[2] De Trinitate, V.9.

[3] [Bicknell's note] The title seems to come from Dan. 7.13. There it denotes not an individual but a figure in human form, which is interpreted as ‘the saints of the most high’, v.27. That is, it stands for Israel in contrast with the beasts, which stand for heathen nations. But very soon ‘One like unto a son of man’ came to be interpreted as an individual, the Messiah. In the Book of Enoch this interpretation is made explicit. ‘The Son of Man’ is a superhuman being, who executes God’s judgement. How far it was a recognized Messianic title in our Lord’s day, is disputed. He would hardly have assumed it if it was popularly regarded as synonymous with Messiah. For discussion of this title, see A. E. J. Rawlinson, The New testament Doctrine of Christ, pp 242ff.; C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, pp 241 ff.; A. M. Farrer, A Study in S. Mark, pp 247ff.

[4] [Bicknell's note.] It is not easy to distinguish in the fourth Gospel between our Lord’s actual words and the Evangelist’s own meditation on them

A Homily Preached on The Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year A

On the occasion of the Baptism of Josephine Carol Eyford

at Saint Matthias’, Bellwoods, Toronto, 20 April 2008

This is a very joyful morning; today we welcome Josephine Carol into household of God. Through the waters of baptism she will symbolically die to sin and rise to the new life of Christ; through the anointing of Holy Chrism in sign of the Cross she will be marked as Christ’s own for ever; by the light from the Easter Candle she will receive a pledge that she has passed from darkness to light, so that she can do good works to lighten others and show forth God’s glory. Even more; after centuries of infant baptism this rite has also become a sign that the community welcomes this child and rejoices with her family. All these symbols are mixed and jumbled in a rather wonderful way. A family party comes into Church; the Gospel is proclaimed in the middle of a family party. Her parents show her off proudly, as if to say, “Look what we’ve got!, but the community replies “Oh but she’s one of us, you know!” It’s all wonderful, it’s all fun, and it’s all important.
Now experience has taught me that parents bring their babies baptism for a variety of reasons. One might be that since the parents are themselves part of the Church, they want it for their children, as well, so that they may grow up knowing the fellowship and the faith. So perhaps our question should be why people come to the Church. John Baycroft, in The Anglican Way, notes two main reasons: some come primarily for the fellowship, and some come for what he calls ‘the transcendent’, but he notices that in reality whichever you come for, you get both. This is very true, but it is only one side of a more important range of ideas. Both reasons see coming to Church and seeking Baptism as our choice and decision; but when we turn to the Bible, we find a different picture.
From the very beginning, the history of salvation has been the story of God seeking men and women and calling them into fellowship. Indeed, even when Adam and Eve sinned and hid themselves away, God called, “Where are you?” After that God called Noah and Abraham and Moses and Samuel and all the rest; $until at last he sent his Son into the world to seek and save the lost. Jesus went about calling people: fishermen from their boats and tax collectors from their offices or their sycamore trees. And so it has continued. In the last few weeks we have been reading from the Acts of the Apostles. The first converts surely thought they came because they found the teaching of the Apostles convincing or the life of the community attractive, or for a myriad other reasons, but when the author of Acts describes the growth of the Church he says “three thousand persons were added” and “day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved”. To all of them, apostles and disciples, men and women and children, whatever they thought they were doing and for whatever reason, Jesus said, and he says to us, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” (John 15:16)
This call does not always come with a flash of light or a choir of angels. The Wisdom of God, who mightily and sweetly orders all things, desires our cooperation. He wants you to want him; he doesn’t much care, I think, if it seems to you to be your own idea.. The dramatic call, the Damascus experience, probably means that we weren’t listening. But our coming to faith and baptism is no more our own bright idea than was our creation. It is as C. S. Lewis describes in The Silver Chair: When Aslan tells Jill that he has called her out of her own world, she replies, “Could there be some mistake? Nobody called [us] … It was we who asked to come here.” Aslan says, “You would not have called me unless I had been calling you”.
Now this is mysterious; but in Christian language a mystery means not a puzzle to be decoded but an unseen reality that is revealed in God’s good time. The Church might seem to be a very human community, an odd assortment of people trying to live by God’s grace and to love one another, and muddling the job as often as not. But the First Letter of Peter shows us the Church as it is in God’s reality, a reality we can only know by faith. In this reality it is a temple built up of living stones, a people sharing in Christ’s royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people God claims as his own. The church as temple and priesthood is the Body of Christ, the Word of God to the world and the offering to God for the world. And while God does promise us all that we seek: life and salvation for our souls; healing of our hurts; and finally a place in the Father’s house, God has called us to be his instruments, to be knit together in this fellowship, to work together in this priesthood, to be built together into his temple, to be a sign to the world of the mystery of Christ.
Sheri and Dean: this morning you are answering Christ’s call for Josephine Carol. Remember that he is not calling her only for the sake of the good he wants to do her, but also so that she can serve him. Today you are promising that, just as you will take care to nourish her to grow strong and healthy, so you will feed her with spiritual food, so that she will grow to be a living stone, making God’s house strong and beautiful, and come to take her part in the royal priesthood. Now my friends, this speaks to us as well as to these proud parents; all of us are here because in many and varied ways we have answered God’s call. So let us remember that we, too, must always seek the spiritual nourishment that will build us up as living stones into the temple of God in this place.

Homily for Good Friday 2008

A Homily for Good Friday

Preached at St Matthias’, Bellwoods, Toronto Friday, 21 March 2008

I take my text for today not from the words of scripture but from the Church’s liturgy, the second Eucharistic Preface for Holy Week, in which we give God thanks and praise, “through Jesus Christ our Lord, who for our salvation became obedient unto death. The tree of defeat became the tree of victory; where life was lost life has been restored.” The more ancient liturgy said, "that whence death arose, thence also Life might rise again: and that he who by a Tree was once the vanquisher, might also by a Tree be vanquished."
On this Good Friday, as we stand before the cross of Jesus, let us contemplate the deep mystery that these words express. What does it mean to say that life has been restored where life was lost? What is the tree of defeat, and how can it become the tree of victory? A thousand sermons or a million learned expositions cannot explain such a mystery as this as well as one simple story that our ancestors in the faith developed over the years in their love of Christ and his Cross. If we it myth or legend we must remember that myth is only story meant to convey truth, and a legend is literally something to be read, whether fact or fiction. So as we stand at the foot of the Cross this Holy and Great Friday, let me tell you the traditional legend of the Holy Cross.*

Adam and Eve broke the commandment of God by eating the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; for this God drove them from the garden of Eden to a hard existence of tilling the soil. They and all their posterity were afflicted with woes, and in the end died, as we do today, for God had barred he way to the tree of life. Adam, we are told, lived nine hundred and thirty years and then died. In his last weary sickness he sent his son Seth to Paradise to ask for promised oil of mercy. Seth came to the gate of Paradise, where the way to the tree of life was guarded by the cherubim and the flaming sword; there St. Michael the Archangel appeared and said to him: “Do not waste your effort seeking this oil: for you may not have it till five thousand and five hundred years be past.” Nonetheless he gave Seth three pips of the fruit of the tree of which Adam had eaten, told him to place them under his father’s tongue, and promised that when they bore fruit, then Adam would be healed. Three days after Seth had returned Adam died. Seth put the pips under his tongue and buried him. From the three pips there grew up three rods, of cedar, cypress, and pine. They remained growing from Adam’s grave. Some say it was in the vale of Ebron, others that it was outside Jerusalem.

Our ancestors delighted in fitting any and all available details into one complete whole, and if we searched we could probably find every bit of wood mentioned in the Bible worked into in one version of this history or another. So we are told elsewhere that Moses found the three shoots and carried them with him on the wanderings of Israel, and that they are the staff of which the scriptures speak, and that he took them to his secret grave. Long after David was led in a vision to bring them back to Jerusalem. When he left them in a tank overnight he found that they had grown into a single tree. David wanted to use its wood in the Temple, but was told that that work was not for him, but for Solomon his son.

Be that as it may, it is with Solomon that we pick up the central thread of the story again. When Solomon was building the temple the workmen were at a loss for one suitable beam in a some important part of the structure; they begged the king’s permission to cut this holy tree down, sure that it would make a fine beam, but wherever they tried to use it this beam shrank or stretched so that it was useless. The builders rejected it and would have thrown it away, but Solomon in his amazement set it up at the temple door to be venerated. There a wise woman, Maximilla by name, sat on it unawares, and her clothes caught fire and she prophesied; after that it was set across a brook on the edge of the city, so that people could walk across it.

Now when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon and saw the wood, she refused to cross the stream by it but lifted her skirts and waded across the brook instead. For in her wisdom she foresaw that this wood would one day bear the Saviour of the world, and bring about a new covenant. Fearing this meant evil for the people of Israel, Solomon had the wood buried deep in the ground.

Afterwards, in the place where the wood was buried, a pool was built in which the animals for sacrifice in the temple were to be washed. This was the pool Bethzatha or Bethseda of the five porticos on which an angel had come down and stirred the water and the first sick person to enter it was healed of whatever disease they suffered.** It was the virtue of the wood buried there which was raised by the moving water, and not only of the angel.

It happened that, when the time came that the sin of Adam should be cured, the tree arose and floated on the water, and this timber was taken and cut and made the cross of our Lord. The legend goes on to tell how the cross of Jesus and those of the thieves were buried after the crucifixion. In later years Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and then rebuilt; the Emperor Hadrian had a temple of Venus built over the site of Golgotha. Long afterwards, when the Emperor Constantine had been cnverted by a vision of the Cross, and won a great victory by making the sign of Christ his standard, he commissioned his mother St Helena to see to the building of a Church in Jerusalem. She cleared away the pagan temple and in the process of building, discovered the true Cross. These relics of the True Cross kept in Jerusalem were the beginning of the liturgical Adoration of the Cross which came to be imitated in other churches and which we celebrate here at St Matthias’. The story of how the Cross was recognized must wait for another day; we have followed the story of the true cross far enough for this Good Friday. Or else where would we stop? The legends say so much: how Golgotha, the place of the skull is so called because it is the place where Adam is buried. In countless paintings of the crucifixion you can see a skull at the base of the Cross: in this legend we find the meaning of the symbol; or we might consider how the old Adam’s skull was the container into which fell the new Adam’s precious blood; and how by dying on a Friday the Word of God recreated the human beings he had called into being on the first Friday of the world.

The history of the True Cross might seem just the product of a vivid (if not fevered) imagination, but it is meant to show how after all that time and all that history, the cross by which we are saved was in fact the tree by which we were damned. In a sense it is all a commentary on the words of St Paul, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” The Tree of Adam’s fall indeed bore fruit when Christ was hung upon it, and his blood is the promised oil of mercy and healing. All the elements that have been gathered into the story—far more than we have had time to mention—are moments of power, of healing, of mercy; it is a deep truth and mystery to see them as parts of the story of the Cross, for the Cross stands at the centre of history and from it grace flows to past and future. It is because of the Cross, as the letter to the Hebrews tells us, that the throne of God is the throne of grace.

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*There are many versions of this history ; see Barbara Baert, trans. by Lee Preedy, A Heritage of Holy Wood: the Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image (Leiden, Boston, 2004), and Arthur Napier, ed., History of the Holy Rood-Tree, a Twelfth Century Vesion of the Cross-Legend, EETS (London,1894). The version presented here is based on Caxton’s edition of the Golden Legend, with some material from other versions.

**See John 5.2-5.

Sermon for The Sunday of the Passion, 2007

Note: While working on a sermon for this year I read over last's year's again and thought perhaps I should make it available. Much of it is founded on Dorothy L. Sayer's notes to her radio plays The Man Born to be King, but I can no longer identify exact quotations.

Homily for the Sunday of the Passion, Year C Preached at Saint Matthias’, Bellwoods, Sunday 1 April 2007

It's strange when you think about it. Every day all over the world thousands of people recite the name of a fairly undistinguished man who lived many centuries ago. It is very likely most of them never give much thought to this fact. We aren’t sure where he was born – though it was probably in Italy – or when – but I’d guess he was middle-aged by the time he stumbled into world history. We don’t know his first name, though his family name was Pilatus of the clan called Pontius, and we know him as Pontius Pilate. (There is a tradition that his first name was Gaius.) We know nothing of his early career, but in about AD 26 the Emperor Tiberius named him to the responsible but not very prestigious post of Prefect of Judaea; he was the fifth Prefect since the Romans had given up on home rule in that part of the empire. They usually kept the job for about three years, but Pilate held it for ten: Tiberius often left men in office. We know that he was married. In his term several incidents occurred which were recorded by contemporary historians, but one stands out.
Once, on the occasion of a feast, the Jerusalem authorities handed over to Pilate for punishment a man they said had threatened the Temple sanctuary and pretended to be king. When Pilate examined the man he concluded that he was inconsequential and that the Jewish leaders were acting for their own reasons. Herod Antipas of Galilee became involved in the case, but sent the fellow back to Pilate. Pilate announced that he was not going to execute him. Yet when he saw that a riot was breaking out in Jerusalem because of the announcement, he backed down and acceded to the demands of the religious leaders. The man was executed. Later Pilate was recalled to Rome on entirely different grounds and nothing more is known of him, although legends have grown about him. Thousands of times every day this rather undistinguished Roman official is named all over the world; his name has even been set to music by some of the world’s finest composers, and all because his name is in the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds. Well, of course you know that. But have you ever wondered why we don’t say that Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried and just stop there, but insist on saying that it all happened under Pontius Pilate? If you’re ever going to wonder it, now is as good a time as any, when we have just heard the Passion of Christ according to St Luke. Now as I said last Sunday, in Holy Week we should perhaps preach less and let the story speak for itself. But we must be prepared to listen carefully and hear this story, and part of that preparation is to be aware of what kind of story we are listening to. The Gospel was first proclaimed in a world of myth and legend, where it would have been very easy for the story of Jesus to be presented as another myth. The same temptation is real today. But – despite what you may hear - the gospels do not read like myths, and we do not do well to hear them as myths. From the first, the Church has insisted that it is not a myth, but something that actually happened. This is why Pilate is named in the Creed: not so that we can blame him for Christ’s suffering – for surely then we would name Judas and Caiaphas too – but simply because his name fixes within a few years the date of the crucifixion. This is not just a curious fact: it is of great importance. There have been plenty of founders of religions who have dates: Mohammed, for example lived from about AD 570 to 632, but he never claimed to be God, and his followers would reject the very idea. Again, the religious literature of the world is full of incarnate deities and gods who came to earth in mortal guise; but they are all in the ever-never of myths and heroes, once-upon-a-time. Christ is unique among gods and men: He is the only dying and reviving God who has a date in history and among the founders and prophets only he is personally God. In the epistle this morning St Paul wrote that Christ humbled himself to death on the cross and therefore God has highly exalted him above all names. But if we say that without saying when and where it happened it is really nothing but empty air. In human life things do not happen unless they happen somewhere, sometime, and to someone. It does little good to keep insisting that you love someone if your actions never show it. It is no different for God: St John says, In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. All the rest – our faith and message, our community and our theology – is based on what happened in Jerusalem all those years ago. Although Sunday by Sunday and day by day all through the year we learn from preaching and experience what it means to hold that faith and belong to that community, this week we can come face to face with the history of the Passion of Christ. We do this in the celebration of the mystery as it unfolds in the Upper Room, on the way of the Cross, and in the Tomb cut from the Rock. Come and enter into it in the confidence that what we remember and celebrate are events that happened when God came into our lives in the days of Pontius Pilate.

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Note: The Prefects of Judea were: Coponius (6-8), M. Ambivius (9-12), Annius Rufus (12-15); Valerius Gratus (15-26); Pontius Pilate (26-36); 37 (Marullus); Herennius Capito (37-41); from 41-44 Judea passed into the rule of Herod Agrippa I, after whose death it was under the Procurator of Palestine. (All dates CE

Introduction

Sermonets, Sermons, and Homilies

It seems to me that my main blog, William Craig's Magazine is starting to get cluttered, and that it would be a good idea to have another site for posting the texts of sermons that people have said kind things about. The notes on readings, Tales from the Slippery Slope, and other items will continue to appear in that blog.

The title comes from a remark I heard many years ago, at Saint Matthew's in Ottawa, I think. It was said that an elderly priest had commented on the trend towards shorter sermons, "Sermonets make Christianets". Some decades later, when sermons tend to be even shorter, I cannot get that phrase out of my mind.

Why not call these shorter addresses homilies? That seems to be the current usage. When asked the difference between a sermon and a homily, however, the only real difference I can suggest is that sermon is Latin and homily is Greek. Both words mean "speech" or "discourse". In practice homily now seems to mean a shorter, less formal (an perhaps less structured) address meant to comment on the day's readings, or, in other words, a sermon. I will only note that the rubrics in both the Book of Common Prayer and the Book of Alternative Services call the thing that follows the Gospel a Sermon, suggest that if there is any real difference between a sermon and a homily we might all be breaking the rules, and say nothing more on the subject.

I am afraid that the printed text of any discourse, whether sermon or homily, is a pale shadow of what the people found interesting or moving on a particular Sunday morning. It is my practice to preach from a fully-written text rather than from outline or memory. I admire preachers who can deliver a coherent and interesting sermon from outline notes or even off the cuff; but the I admire all sorts of things I cannot myself do. However, when I have the text in front of me I am free to adjust the delivery when thoughts and corrections come to me - or cut when it seems to be a bit dull.

So here I offer a selection of the texts of my sermons, or sermonets, or homilies, as you like it, but not the sermons themselves, which were events of a moment, in which I and the people and God all had a part. It is dedicated to Fr Jeffry Kennedy and the people of Saint Matthias', Bellwoods, who are in no way "christianets", but people of such great good humour and understanding that they have made happy church home for me in Toronto.