Death

Several people expressed a desire to read this one.

A Homily for All Souls’ Day
Trinity College Chapel:

Monday 2 November, 2009

St Matthias, Bellwoods:

Wednesday 4 November, 2009

I have to confess that I get tired of hearing people say “passed on” instead of “died”. To use a synonym or elegant variation of terms from time to time is one thing; but this is a euphemism, and that is quite another. Too often it seems that people are not so much afraid of death as afraid of talking about it. But on All Souls’ Day, when we remember in love all the Faithful Departed, we must think about death. Words are subtle, and as a metaphor to speak of death as “passing away” is respectable. In The Catholic Religion, Vernon Staley’s remarkably sane little manual of instruction for Anglicans, we read, “Death is the separation of the soul from the body. We speak of death as ‘the passing away’, for in death the soul leaves the body as a tenant quitting a house.” That’s fair enough, and it is certainly based on experience. Look on a dead body; something essential thing that made it a person is gone. But change the metaphor just a little, from “passing away” to “passing on”, or even, as I often hear “passing”, and you enter into a whole new world of thought. Perhaps it is because I have spent too much of my life in school, but I can’t help but think that when someone is said to have “passed” they’ve finished a course and moved up to the next grade. That image: going to the next stage in a process of growth and perfection seems to be an attractive metaphor for dying. Attractive it may be, but it is not an image found in Scripture: it is not the hope of the Gospel.
Many of the things we hear said about death are like that. Attractive images that are meant to help us cope. But the mission of the Church is not only, or not precisely, to give people attractive images that will help them cope with life, but to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ, who came to defeat sn and death, and raise us to new Life. And so on this All Souls Day we proclaim the words of Jesus,
Jesus said to them, … “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.

How different from this is the idea of a person passing on, perhaps to some disembodied life in paradise. But that is the idea many, if not most people have of the Christian belief and hope. For a good analysis of common beliefs, you would do well to read the opening chapters of Bishop N. T. Wright’s recent book Surprised by Hope; but I have recently had to look at other evidence of it. Not long ago, I was asked by my family to look over a selection of verses that were considered appropriate for a memorial card. The selection is well worth reading, for in it we find the words of Scripture side by side with other writings that express a wide variety of beliefs that suggests a muddle of beliefs. Some are vapid, and even if they can give comfort, there is little of hope in them:

When a loved one becomes a memory,

a memory becomes a treasure.

Treasure the memories.

Others express what Wright calls “a sort of low-grade, popular nature religion with elements of Buddhism. At death one is absorbed into the wider world, into the wind and the trees.” The example is well-known:

Do not stand at my grave and weep.

I am not there. I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow;
I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain;

I am the gentle autumn rain.

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft star that shines at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry!

I am not there. I did not die.

When you know perfectly well that someone you love and care for is dead, to be fobbed off with such stuff is galling. “Do not stand at my grave and weep.” What arrogance to say this among the people of Christ, who wept when he stood at the grave of his friend! Indeed we find that bit of gnosticism in the verses as well:

Don’t grieve for me, for now I’m free,

I am following the path God laid for me.

I took his hand when I heard him call,

I turned my back and left it all.

Is any of this Christian faith and hope?] Where is the goodness of creation, which God declares in the opening of Genesis? What of the promise of the renewal of creation, which is so triumphantly declared in the final chapters of Revelation, as we heard yesterday? Or is all this to wiped away, and replaced by something else? Where is the note of triumph that was once heard at every funeral? One would think that death was not the enemy that destroys God’s human creatures, an enemy defeated and trampled underfoot by Christ, but a friend who releases, even frees us from the body?
As Bishop Wright remarked, “if the promised final future is simply that immortal souls leave behind their mortal bodies, then death still rules—since that is a description not of the defeat of death but simply of death itself, seen from one angle.” And he calls us to look again to the scriptures and faith of the Church to discover once more the surprising hope that is promised: not of passing to another plane of existence, but the hope of the resurrection of the body and renewed life.

Time will not permit us even to start considering all that this implies. But let it remind us that we need to have a clear idea of what they believe about these deep and central questions of human life. And I would suggest that before we run off to look for our beliefs in other places, we look into our own traditions. At the core of traditional teaching we find the promise of the Resurrection, which is nothing less than the promise that it is the whole human person that is to be saved. This speaks volumes about the moral value of our life, of the body, of the actions we take in this life. But all I can do now is to urge you to look more deeply into the matter. Bishop Wright’s book is a good place to start, but you find the same doctrine in older works of theology, including Staley’s Catholic Religion, where we are reminded that the disembodied soul is only a part of the complete human person, and only by the resurrection can the whole person be perfected in eternity

Now I must finish with a word about the final verse of the epistle, which describes the end of faith as “the salvation of your souls”. Does this not teach that salvation is about our souls, with the implication, “not our bodies”? I hope you will forgive me if I quote the Bishop of Durham now, for he made a very helpful comment on the meaning of the word psyche in this verse:

'The word psyche was very common in the ancient world and carried a variety of meanings. Despite its frequency both in later Christianity and (for instance) in Buddhism, the New Testament doesn’t use it to describe, so to speak, the bit of you that will ultimately be saved. The word psyche seems here to refer like the Hebrew nephesh, not to a disembodied inner part of the human being but to what we might call the person or even the personality. And the point in 1 Peter 1 is that this person, the “real you,” is already being saved and will one day receive that salvation in full bodily form. That is why Peter quite rightly plants the hope for salvation firmly in the resurrection of Jesus. God has, he says, “given us new birth to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah from the dead.”'
Indeed, psyche is often to be translated not as soul but as life, as in Mark 9.35, “For those who want to save their life (psychen) will lose it, and those who lode their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it”. Elsewhere the dictionaries tell us it means a human individual. It seems then, a bit arbitrary to insist on its meaning immaterial soul in 1 Peter.

There is more to say,* but perhaps I can sum up all with an adaptation of the traditional prayer for the departed which is fortunately becoming more common.
Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord; and may light perpetual shine upon them.
May they rest in peace and rise in glory.

*After I preached at St Matthias, the thurifer expressed the hope that on another All Souls' Day I might explain that people do not become Angels when they die. I said that I believed most people at St Matthias were aware of this

Thy Will Be Done

Sermon for All Saints’ Day [Year B]
Preached at the Church of St Columba & All Hallows, East York
Sunday, 1 November AD 2009

Every day, Christians repeat the words, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Since we say this prayer every day, it can easily become so familiar that we pray it without much thought — this is not only true of those who seem to be trying for a new speed record in getting through the Lord’s prayer; it really does take some effort to concentrate on familiar words. So it helps to give some thought to the meaning of the prayer before we pray it, and there are questions that we can ask about these words. We can ask if we have a very clear idea of what God’s will is, and what the world would be like if it were done here as it is in heaven. We can ask ourselves just who we expect to be doing God’s will on earth. Perhaps we are content to imagine that someone, somewhere, will do God’s will, and everything will be all right. But I hope that all of us have at least a suspicion that this prayer means thy will be done, on earth, by me, as it is in heaven, that God’s kingdom comes whenever I , and other Christians, and other folk, do God’s will.
On All Saints’ Day we think of how this prayer has been answered, for it has indeed been answered and is being answered today in the lives of Christian folk, of men and women who respond to the call to follow Christ, men and women who turn away from self to serve those in need, men and women who seek to give themselves to their Lord and in him to their brothers and sisters. For the Saints whom we remember and celebrate this day are not beings of some different species, holier than the rest of us, but those whose witness has been made visible in this world the love of God and his victory over sin and death in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We have all heard many times that when we hear or read references in the New Testament to “the saints”, what is meant is the members of the Church. For example, in the ninth chapter of the Acts we read,

Now as Peter went here and there among them all he came down also to the saints that lived at Lydda

Again, many of St Paul’s letters are addressed to ‘the saints’ of such and such a place, or to ‘those called to be saints’, by which he means simply the members of the church.. Now the word ‘saint’ means ‘holy’; as the Catechism says, the Church is called Holy, “Because the Holy Spirit dwells in it, sanctifying all its members and endowing them with gifts of grace.” Or we could say that Christians, who are made members of the Body of Christ by Baptism, are called to be holy because he is holy. So to speak of Christians as ‘saints’ does not mean that the people God chooses and calls are particularly holy people themselves, but that he calls sinners to forgive them and make of them a holy people. Read what St Paul has to say to the saints at Corinth: they do not seem to have all been super-holy people. Indeed, we may say that the Church has no saints who are not redeemed sinners. The Psalm today [24] tells us that it is those who have clean hands and pure hearts who can ascend the hill of the Lord: but we know that those hands are clean because God has washed them, and those hearts are pure because he has cleansed them with his Spirit.
Now in the history of the Church, the word ‘saint’ came to be used in a special way for particular men and women whose witness to Jesus Christ was known to the world and gave an example to others. In the first place, it was those who would not turn back from Christ Jesus evne though it meant death. These were called the witnesses, which in Greek is “martyrs”. The day of their death on earth was counted as a heavenly birthday. It is of such folk that we read in the Book of Wisdom [3.1-9]: in the sight of men they were punished, their end seemed to be destruction, but they found life in God. When the days of persecution ended, others who gave all for Christ, and whose lives were a constant witness, were honoured as particular saints. Look at the calendar at the beginning of the Book of Alternative Services and you will find the names of some 120 individuals from many countries and all centuries of the Church whom Christians have delighted to honour because they lived lives of faith and commitment to Christ and through them his work has gone on in the world. In other Church calendars there are countless more, too many for each to have a particular commemoration —which is why we have a day to remember All the Saints, and to thank God that the fellowship of the Church is made up not just of those on earth today, but of all who are bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise.
I have not said anything of today’s Gospel [John 11.32-33]: there we are shown the model for all the saints, and for all of us who want to follow Christ. And that model is Lazarus. For all who are called to follow Christ are called out of a tomb as Lazarus was, which is the life without God. There is a resurrection at the last day, but Christ is calling us to the new life now, now he wants the stone rolled away,—the stone which shuts the soul in its tomb of anxiety, or worry, or resentment—so that he can call us from death to life.
In the lives of the saints we see those for whom this has happened and in whom the work is perfected, and we learn from them that is may be done and perfected in us Their lives show us that they are like us, not a special breed of super-holy men and women. I do not have time to go through the list, but we all know that St Thomas doubted, that St Peter denied his Lord and had to be forgiven. I can mention St Jerome, a great scholar who was also a man with quite a foul temper, who seems to have fought with just about everyone. We commemorate King Charles I, who was a devout man and a good father, but perhaps not the wisest of rulers, and whose life was tragic. There are trivial details that show how human the saints were: St Thomas Aquinas was a very fat man. In other calendars we find some unlikely saints, such as a British abbot, St Pyr, who died when he fell down a well blind drunk. His monastery was so badly governed that his holy successor had to resign. I can’t go on with this, but I assure you that to read the lives of the saints not only inspires to follow them in following Christ, it assures us that there is very little that can stand in the way of Christ’s love if we care to follow him. There is excusing ourselves by saying “Oh, I’m no saint”.
But do we really care to? Or do we put up the one real barrier to his grace? This barrier to grace is indifference, being content to do what we want, to stay as we are and follow the path we choose. Oh, we believe in God and in Christ all right, but we want them to work for us, so that our will be done. Often our faith means that we want our life on our terms, with God and his blessings as an added extra to make everything better. So here is another reason to learn from the saints: they sought to do God’s will, even when it meant denying their own. But as I said at the outset, it is for this we pray every day when we say: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The Gossip Sermon

A Sermon preached at the Church of St Columba and All Hallows
on
Sunday, 28 June AD 2009
The Third Sunday after Pentecost

The Epistle General of St James, Chapter 3, verse 5
So the tongue is a little member and boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!

Every now and then it is useful to turn aside from the course of readings and think about sme aspect of faith or the Christian life which, while it might not easily fit into the regular pattern is nonetheless something we would do well to ponder in our hearts, to examine how we have behaved. Now the week, the readings are not difficult to understand and we may safely take a moment to think about an aspect of community life. The text from James with which I began might give some hint what this aspect is, but the whole thing will become clear from a good old story that has been told for centuries.
In the sixteenth century there was a priest at Rome who was known for the holiness of his life and the wisdom and shrewd with with which he taught the ways of faith and morals to the people. His name was Philip Neri. He is known to history as the founder of the Congregation of the Oratory This is perhaps the best-known story told of this holy man.
In those days there was a woman in the neighbourhood whose besetting sin was gossip. She loved to pick up bits of information about her neighbours and pass them on, likely as not a bit embroidered. More than one reputation was tarnished because of her quick tongue. Now much as most people like to gossip little, a bit of gossip can go a long way and a touch of scandal gets tiresome quickly. The neighbours were too well aware that at the rate this woman talked, no one was safe, be they never so virtuous, but no one could do anything to make her stop.
It happened one morning that St Philip Neri, who was well aware of the problem, met this woman on the street, and after wishing her a good morning, asked her if she could do him a favour.
“Why, certainly!” said the woman “I would like you to go to the market and buy a chicken for me. Here is the money.” As she took the money he added, “To save time, pluck the chicken on the way back, so that it will be all ready to prepare.” She agreed, and toddled off the market. Perhaps she was storing up this slightly odd request to add to her repertoire! A little later she came back, and handed the priest a freshly-plucked chicken.
“Thank you, Ma’am,” said the priest , and added, “Now go back and gather up all the feathers and bring them to me.” “But Father,” she cried, by now they will have blown down all the streets and alleys and across the piazzas. I could never get them back!”
“Indeed,” he replied. “And that is how it is with the things you say about your neighbours. Once spoken your words are like the feathers you plucked; as the ind carried the feathers, people repeat your words, and they go down all the streets and alleys, and across the piazzas. Whether good or ill, you can never get them back.
No one has recorded whether this woman changed her ways, but all of us can remember this little story and be carefull of what we say about others.
Now like all moral questions, it is hard to make a hard and fast rule about gossip. Often we tell good stories about those we know; sometimes we pass on information out of concern for someone’s well-being. However, it is also hard to find where to draw a clear line different kinds of gossip: between gosssip that is helpful and that which is at least harmless and then the gossip that is harmful (even though you were only trying to help) and gossip that is really malicious. Even for a person who would never want to do harm, it is easy to walk down the path to harmful gossip without notice. There is no sign warning you to turn back, unless you post one in your own conscience.
Now this goes far beyond the simple question of gossip. The damage the tongue can do is put clearly in the 3rd Chapter of James, and I hope you wil read it. But we know the many ways we can do wrong by speaking,a dn we al know that it goes beyong what we would call gossip. We often say things we regret in the heat of argument, or through thoughtlessness: we don’t need to wait for them to blow around like chicken feathers before they do harm. We often say things that we have no right to say, or tell of things that are not ours to tell, and spoil plans. Time does not permit us to go into much detail, but we all know of people who have misunderstand some action they have seen or heard, and even though it is none of their business, take it on themselves to go and tattle, and when some plan fails or some spouse is accused of unfaithfulness (the classic case), or whatever it might be goes wrong, they cry out: I was only trying to help! This is fne in a soap opera, where the plot needs to be moved along; it is not good in real life. Helpful Harry is always a better help when he keeps his mouth shut.
How should we govern ourselves. We can begin by remembering our duty as taught in the Catechism

To hurt nobody by word nor deed: To be true and just in all my dealing: To bear no malice no hatred in my heart: to keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering.

Or we could remember what we all learned as children: If you can’t say anything good about someone, don’t say anything at all. I will to return to this matter another time, for there is much more to be said about governing the tongue (which might seem like a contradiction!). I’ll just finish for today with some helpful rules to follow. These are in no particular order.
First, before you say anything, ask yourself whether you have the right to say it. If it is about someone else always ask permission to repeat it.
Second, in every case, make sure you have your facts right. If you’re not sure, check with someone, and if there is any doubt, don’t say anything at all. Most rumours could be stopped if we all did this.
Third, if there is the slightest chance that it might do harm, or embarrass someone, or even put them in a bad light, then don’t say it. If you’re not sure, it is better to keep quiet.
Fourth, he who hath a secret to keep must keep it a secret that he hath a secret to keep. We are all weak, and probably shouldn’t be trusted with secrets. If you have a secret, don’t say, “I know a secret”, for that is a challenge to get it out of you..If you don’t want something repeated about you, don’t tell anyone.
Fifth, it is sometimes better to lie than to speak and do harm. Telling the truth is highly overrated. This is a difficult point, and the main reason we will have to pick this subject up again at a later date.
Well, we have to stop there: but I hope you will remember the story about St Philip Neri and the Chicken and the reason we need to keep guard on our tongues. I will give the last word to the late Fr Egan, a man of wisdom who was a professor at Regis College. Once in class he said something that we would all do well to remember: “I thank God for the gift of my stutter: it keeps me from saying the first thing that pops into my head and getting into trouble.” May God grant us all such custody of the tongue that we may always speak kindness and blessing, and never utter harm.

A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, Year B
Preached at the Church of St Columba and All Hallows, East York
1 March AD 2009

Note: the response this morning was most gratifying, so much so that it seems that posting this sermon might be welcome. As always, the written text is a shadow of the sermon as it was spoken, in which many other ideas came to mind. There are also many other things in the readings for Lent I which deserve attention. Some of them, such as the fact that God's bow now hangs in the sky aimed upwards, towards God, are mentioned in the Lectionary Notes for today in "William Craig's Magazine". There are many others, such as the mention in the Epistle of the "eight persons" saved in the Ark which suggests consideration of the mystical meaning of the number eight. Have you ever wondered why baptismal fonts usually have eight sides? But one cannot mention everything in a sermon.

The Sundays in Lent are not fast days, but are nonetheless marked by a devotional tone fitting this season of penitence: the Gloria in Excelsis is not sung, nor is Alleluia; the Eucharistic Prayer has its proper Lenten prefaces; indeed the BAS provides a Penitential Order appropriate for beginning the eucharist on Sundays in Lent (you may find it on page 216).

Since ancient times the Gospel account of our Lord’s temptation has been read on the first Sunday in Lent, to give us the example we follow in our Lenten abstinence. However, We are now in Year B of the new revised lectionary, which centres each of its three years on one of the synoptic Gospels, and so the account of the Temptation we hear is that of St Mark, which gives somewhat less detail than do the accounts in Matthew and Luke: where they tell us of three attempts of the Adversary against our Lord, Mark simply says that after his baptism by John, the Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert,

And he was in the desert forty days and was tempted by Satan and he was with the beasts and angels ministered to him.

We have only the barest of bare bones of a story here, certainly not the rich treasure that allowed Lancelot Andrewes to preach seven sermons on the temptation. But there is something else missing, and I wonder if you noticed it. Mark does not mention that our Lord fasted these forty days in the desert. It is perfectly reasonable to conclude that if Jesus was in the desert forty days he was fasting; scarcity of food and water is a notable feature of deserts; but the fact that the fasting is not mentioned suggests that we should be attending to some other detail of the Gospel account. So what do we have in these twenty-four words? We have four statements

He was in the desert forty days and
He was tempted by Satan
He was with the wild beasts
Angels ministered to him

Terms like forty days and forty years are used in the Bible in a vague kind of way to mean a significant period of time; the period of forty days for Lent was modelled on Jesus’ time in the desert.

There are many things the desert calls to mind. The first one is probably the Exodus of Israel from Egypt: after the miraculous escape through the Red Sea, God’s people journeyed forty years in the desert of Sinai, and in that time they were both beset by temptation themselves and tempted the Lord. Without stretching the image too much, the desert can also remind us that when Adam and Eve were tempted and disobeyed God they were cast out of the garden into a harsh world; the ground was cursed, for it would only provide food in return for great labour. So the desert is the world, where the descendants of Adam eat bread in the sweat of their faces.
In the desert Jesus was tempted by Satan, whose name means “the Adversary” or the Accuser.* By the time of Jesus, the serpent who tempted Eve and Adam had been identified as Satan, or Satan’s instrument. Now he comes to tempt the Son of God; but where he had succeeded in tempting our first parents, he fails with Christ, the new Adam. But nothing is said of the details of this temptation, and we shall leave that to another year, when one of the other Gospel accounts is read.
Next we come to the one part of Mark’s account which is not found in the other two. This must be important, for, as the experts tell us, the evidence suggests that Mark was the first to be written, and both Matthew and Luke made use of it, and incorporated almost every bit of it in theirs. Here we read that he was with the wild beasts. Wild beasts can be interpreted in a number of ways. One commentary says

The Judean wilderness was the habitat of various wild animals. The link between these animals and ministering “angels” suggests an echo of Psalm 91:11-13: “For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone. You will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot”. [RCL, citing NJBC]

Thus, In the wilderness wild beasts may attack him, but angels protect him. But to say that he was with the beasts is not the same as to say they attacked him. Another possible interpretation is that the beasts are mentioned “to emphasize the loneliness and awfulness of the desert”. This is supported by such passages as Isaiah’s prediction of the fall of Babylon:

… wild beasts will lie down there, and its houses will be full of howling creatures; there ostriches will dwell, and there satyrs will dance. Hyenas will cry in its towers, and jackals in the pleasant palaces … Isa 13.21-22

But a more probable explanation is that the wild beasts are thought of as subject and friendly to our Lord. In his commentary on Mark, D. E. Nineham suggests that this passage

should be understood against the background of he common Jewish idea that the beasts are subject to the righteous man and do him no harm … and also that when Messiah comes, all animals will again be tame and live in harmony.

Nineham also applies the verses from Psalm 91, but as saying that “dominion over the wild beasts is coupled with the promise of service by angels,” and concludes that

St Mark probably means that by his victory over Satan Jesus has reversed Adam’s defeat and begun the process of restoring paradise. Thus the whole passage is illuminated by this remarkable quotation from the Testament of Naphtali, [a non-Biblical Jewish text]: “If you do good, my children, both men and angels shall bless you, and the Devil shall flee from you, and the wild beasts shall fear you and the Lord shall love you.”

The wild beasts, then, signify a return to that happy state when God brought all the birds and beasts to Adam to see what he would call them.; he brought them as companions.
Restoring paradise: just as human beings submitted to the temptation and as a result lost paradise and were sent into the desert, so our new champion, Jesus, enters into the desert to face our old tempter, and after his victory is seen in the state of paradise, with the wild beasts and served by angels. Marks account does not call us to ponder temptation in the same way that the others do but simply shows us the result. Like the others, this gives us confidence that the tempter has no power over us, but that one who trusts in Jesus can defeat it, but more importantly, it presents in stark simplicity the goal of Christ’s mission, which was the defeat of sin and the restoration of human beings to unity with God. This does not call us to think about the process of Lent, its disciplines, as much as it calls us to think about the goal of Lent. The purpose of all discipline is to seek this goal.
In closing, we may see that this question of the goal of Lent will be more clear to us if we think of all our discipline as leading not just to festivity, but to a concrete, particular action which will mark the end of Lent and the beginning of Easter. This action is one which demands careful preparation. It is the celebration of Baptism or the renewal of Baptismal vows.
Now here we need to consider the notion of covenant, which is the name the Bible uses for the relationship God establishes with his people. We hear the first mention of a covenant in the first reading for today, the covenant that God established with all humanity and all living creatures through Noah, when God promised never again to destroy all life in a flood. Over the next four weeks, the first readings tell us of the covenants God made with Abraham and Sarah and with Israel through Moses, and we will hear Jeremiah proclaim the promise of a new Covenant. Over the weeks of Lent, we are listening to a history that was constantly pointing to and which were fulfilled in the the Passover of Christ Jesus from death to new life, a covenant which is offered to all people, in which God will bring to fulfillment the restoration of paradise that we see in te temptation story. Through Baptism we have been made people of that covenant, and at Easter when we chiefly celebrate the Mighty Acts by which it was achieved, we are asked to renew the promised we made in Baptism (see BAS, pp. 330-332); it is no accident that in the liturgy of Baptism these vows are entitled: The Baptismal Covenant (p.158). If you read through these promises, it should become clear how our Lenten discipline leads us to renew them more carefully and thoughtfully, by calling us to consider whether we have kept them well or badly. I cannot take the time to go into this now. But I recommend as the heart of lenten discipline that we read through these promises carefully, and ask ourselves what we need to do to make sure that we keep these promises more faithfully.

*When the Hebrew Satan was translated into Greek it came out as Diabolos, from which our English Devil is derived.

Why Did This Happen to Me?

A Sermon for Proper 5, Year B
Preached at the St Columba and All Hallows, East York

Sunday, 8 February 2009,
The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

One of the first questions that have been submitted for the planned Lent Series seemed to be a little outside the theme of that study. Nonetheless, it is an important question, indeed an age-old question, a question that comes to everyone at some point. However, it is a question that is better dealt with in a homily than in a study series, partly because more people come to Church on Sunday than come to a study series, and partly because this is a question that touches on a person’s faith as a question about worship or history, important as it might be, does not. What is this question? Let me quote you the question exactly as it appears on the file card I received:

Why did this happen to me? (e.g., accident, accidental death, severe illness)—where is God in this?

It is a good thing that the questions are anonymous, for it means that I can teat the question as a general inquiry, rather than the cry of help of someone in distress, and that the treatment can be more abstract, and one can say things that under other circumstances might be less helpful. Or, more bluntly, one doesn’t have to tread quite so carefully.
You will note that I spoke of “treating” the question rather than “answering” the question. For there has never been a simple answer to this question. Not even the Bible offers us a complete answer, even though the question comes up again and again in its pages. In treating this matter, first, I shall make some observations about the question itself; then look at an assumption it seems to contain, and then by dealing with that assumption think about the problem. There will not be enough time to deal with this today. Indeed, it may well be necessary to spread this topic out over the next weeks, and through Lent.
So we begin by examining the question itself, and notice at one that there are two questions here. The first one is fairly simple: Why did this happen to me? Such a question assumes that that things happen for a reason. The moment you say that all sorts of questions come up: do things happen freely? or is everything happening according to a set plan? How does my free will exist with God’s providence? Does the belief that God directs the world to a certain end mean that he controls all events like a puppeteer? If I set off down that road we will never come to an end. Perhaps, though, all we need to say now is that each one of us needs to ponder these questions now: don’t wait for something bad to happen before you start thinking, or you will end up in a worse mess. And don’t just think, read: for thousands of years people have studied these questions and come up with suggestions, and you don’t need to start again from scratch. More importantly, read what wise Christians have said about the problem. I would recommend two books in particular: The Problem of Pain, by C. S. Lewis and The Third Peacock by Robert Farrar Capon (don’t let the title put you off: it is about God and the Problem of Evil). Right now I don’t know where my copies are. If you can’t find these books in your library, go to the Anglican Book Centre and pester them to order them for you.
We will just flag that point lest it distract us. I will assume in the rest of these homilies that in the mystery of this world. events happen because things act according to their natures — rocks fall down, storms rise, men and women are free. I do not know how this all works together under God’s will to come to good; I only trust that it does.
So back to the question. When someone asks “Why did this happen to me?” there is another assumption: either that whatever happened, which for convenience’ sake I’ll call the disaster, has some cause, possibly hidden, in the behaviour of the person it struck or that it was simply undeserved. This is why the classic formulation of the problem is “Why do bad things happen to good people?” and the usual way we all express it is “Why me?” or “What did I do wrong?” here again we could get thrown off track by the question of how far any of us are really good or innocent. This is problematic, to say the least, but it is something each one of us should consider. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “use every man according to his deserts and who’d escape a whipping?” It doesn’t solve the problem, though, since bad things do seem happen to apparently good people.
Back to the main question. How often do we hear someone ask Why me? of their good forthune in life? I have a feeling that while this doesn’t solve the problem, it is good to ask from time to time what one did to deserve the good things of life —or even life itself. And we will come up with the answer, Nothing. I did nothing to deserve the good in my life. I did not chose to be born in Canada in the twentieth century to hardworking and successful parents, and so get a head start in life. I did no more to deserve this than I have done to deserve some bad things that have happened. And right there we cut down the assumption that things happen to us as rewards and penalties. That is a very easy and convenient assumption, and some people have got through life without ever questioning it; and it is clearly written in some places in the Bible but it has the slight disadvantage that it does not seem to be true. Our Lord Jesus teaches the truth in Matthew 5 45, when he commands his disciples to love their enemies, so that they can be like their heavenly Father

for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust

and more bluntly, in Luke 6

for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.

These words cannot be true if there is a regular one-for-one correspondence between our behaviour and the good and bad things that happen to us.
The things that happen to us result from a complex of causes. When we try to examine these causes we find ourselves facing mysteries: many disasters are the result of freedom misused: that is the only real answer when an innocent bystander is gunned down on the street, or war devastates your country; while some famines are caused by natural processes, some are the deliberate result of the choices of human beings in positions of political or economic power. So too are caused violence against and abuse of spouses or children or employees. The blunt answer is that these things happen because human beings choose to do them and the innocent are often hurt. Often their choice is the result of someone else’s choice, as when those who have themselves been abused act out abusively in life. Some people are led to believe that love means control, or that others are here to gratify our desires: some of the most revolting things that happen stem from this. Other disasters —such as accidents on the road or elsewhere might be said to be a step removed from choice, but too often they are the result of someone’s carelessness, in driving, or in failing to keep brakes in good repair, or a myriad of other human acts. Others, such as sickness are harder to understand, and we will come back to this point in a later sermon.
I have to stop here. We have seen, I hope, that the answer to the question, Why did this happen to me? is complex and difficult to answer. If we examine a particular disaster that befalls a particular person, we might come up with suggestions, though that is not very helpful, as Job’s friends found out when they tried to explain his disasters. We will find our way further into the mystery when we turn to the other part of the question, Where is God in this?

Note: This sermon was very kindly received by the parishioners, who made some very interesting comments, including one I always hesitate to make, Why shouldn't this happen to me?