Sermonets for Christianets

Ash Wednesday

2011-03-09T03:55:00.000-08:00

Homily for Ash Wednesday

Preached at the Church of St Columba and All Hallows
9 March AD 2011

Matthew 6.1–6, 16–21

The Gospel we just heard has only one subject. It teaches us only one great principle : the new righteousness, the righteousness of the citizens of the kingdom, looks only towards God. God is its motive, God is its aim, God is its object; God, and nothing lower than God. No man is truly a citizen who is not in all his conduct and life looking directly God-ward. Christian righteousness, in all its departments, looks for divine praise; never for human praise. Jesus speaks first of righteousness in general, then of its different branches.
Our Lord applies the general principle of seeking only God's approval to the three great branches of human conduct. Christian, and indeed human conduct generally, looks in three directions. There is a duty to God, there is a duty to one's neighbour, and there is a duty to one's self. And each of these great departments of human conduct has one typical form of action, one form of action in which it specially expresses itself. Our duty to God expresses itself particularly in prayer. Our duty to man expresses itself in works of mercy, or alms. Our duty towards ourselves expresses itself in self-subdual, self-mastery that is, fasting. And so our Lord applies the general principle to each of these typical duties. In your prayers, in your alms, in your fastings, in each case you are to look to nothing lower than the praise of God.
As to alms, Our Lord is obviously using a metaphor. We don`t really think that the people of his day, when they went to give alms, literally blew their own trumpet; and in the same way, when he speaks of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it is clearly a vividly descriptive metaphor, for what our Lord is here forbidding is obviously ostentation in doing good. This teaching makes us ask what our motive is. We are not to be troubled because, when we are trying to do good, we are tempted to think that people are looking at us. That will happen but the point is, what is our motive ? We can find that out. Do we stop doing the good action when people are not looking at us? When we cannot be seen, do we omit it? If not, let us not be worried about being tempted with thoughts of pride. An old saint once said to Satan : 'Not for thy sake did I begin this ; and not for thy sake shall I leave it off!' But on the other hand if you give a twenty-dollar bill when it can be seen and a five when it can’t, then you have grave cause to doubt your motive.
Our Lord applies same principle of seeking only divine praise to prayer and to fasting, and we need not go into detail. Two things only need to be noted. One is that our Lord is not public religious actions. He assumes that we are going to give alms, and pray, and fast. Indeed, that we should pray in secret does not mean that there should be no prayer of the community.
The other is that sentence repeated three times in this Gospel : they have their reward. Every kind of conduct gets its reward on the plane of its motive. If you look out for human praise, on the whole you get it. If you aim vigorously at getting on and winning a good position, the chances are you will succeed. On the whole, then, you get the reward that fits your motive. Our Lord recognizes these lower motives and their proper reward. So then if your motive is earthly, your reward is earthly. You 'have out’ your reward to the full, and must not imagine there is anything over and above which still appeals to God.
With this in mind we turn our thoughts to the season of Lent which we are entering into in this service. This is the season par excellence of devotion, of alms-giving, of prayer, of fasting. No matter what we do, if we keep the rule of Lent and strive seriously to use its disciplines to prepare for Easter, people are going to notice. My friends, do not let that worry you; for if you do you will not keep Lent at all. Only keep your mind fixed on God, for these devotions are only tools to help you seek to do his will. Stay fixed on God, and do your duty as quietly as you can.

Last Before Lent

2011-03-07T13:31:00.000-08:00

This one didn't get any special comments, but I think it migt be appreciated ...

A Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after the Epiphany,
The Sunday called Quinquagesima

Preached at the Church of St Columba and All Hallows
6 March AD 2011

When I was an undergraduate, there was a professor living at Trinity College who was a priest of the Community of the Resurrection; he was a wonderful and moving preacher, one that most of us could hardly hope to be compared to. He was a man of wisdom and a sharp wit. I have heard it told that someone once greeted him after service with the customary complement on his sermon; he replied, What are you going to do about it?
That question underlies that first reading and the Gospel passage we just heard, as well as a whole mass of teaching in Scripture about the need not only to hear but also to so the word and will of God. In the first reading, Moses tells the people of Israel that the Law of God is so important that it must be kept in the mind and in the heart and obeyed. ‘And you shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise’. Then in the Gospel, our Lord adds the element of doing the words, the commandment. It is not enough just to hear. We find this again in Matthew 12.50: ‘For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother’. The point is hammered home by St Paul: ‘For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified’ [Rom 2.13] and by the second chapter of the Letter of James, and by the first letter of John, ‘he who does the will of God abides for ever’.
So the preacher was correct; it is not enough to marvel at the teaching (as the crowd did when they heard Jesus), the next question is , What are you going to do about it? And if that is true of a fine preacher today, let us not forget that the words we hear in the Gospel are more than that.
How often it is we hear someone say that they can admire Jesus as a great spiritual teacher or a great moral teacher or a philosopher, but cannot accept that he is the Son of God. This might seems like an attractive position; you can admire a teacher without having to do anything about his teaching. But it is not really a tenable position; for there is no way of teasing s supposed historical basis from the miraculous elements in the Gospel, or the moral teachings apart from that claim to authority which makes Jesus different. We have been reading that great epitome of his teaching, the Sermon on the Mount over the last few weeks, and have already seen the claim to divine authority in the words, You have heard that it was said …. But I say to you. There is in the section we just heard, the final section of that sermon, an even more daring and audacious claim. Before we say anything else about today’s Gospel, we need to note this. For we must guard ourselves against any temptation of thinking Jesus less than he is.
Now it is true that nowhere in this passage does our Lord make any explicit claim; rather, what he says is said in a way that implicitly declares that he, Jesus of Nazareth, is the one before whom all will be judged. First, we read, ‘On that day many will say to me. Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in thy name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ‘That day’ means the day of the Lord, the day of the final assessment. On that day, he says, ‘they will come to Me.’ Without preface, without emphasis, as a matter of course, He implies that He is the final judge of all men, not only as to the outward results they achieve, but also as regards the secret inner motives of their hearts and the character of their lives [Bishop Gore]. Then later we read, ‘Everyone … who hears these words of mine and does them will be like wise man who built his house upon the rock’; Here, again, is the tremendous claim: Jesus and His words are the only solid foundation for life.
So we must hear them, and do them. This is not only the sole ground on which our Lord judges us (and on this—and to find out what to do— we need to read the 25th Chapter of Matthew) it is also the sole ground in which the world may know that we prophecy or preach or do mighty acts in his name. For none of these things are by themselves evidence that we are Christ’s. Only his life-changing power by which we are enabled to do works of Love, Mercy and Righteousness will be evidence. So it is that those who claim to preach the Gospel cannot be trusted when they say ‘Lord, Lord did we not prophesy in thy name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ if what they preached was hatred and their actions were cruel, and they were as demons declaring a God of hate.
If nothing else, what many who call ‘Lord, Lord’ actually do demands that in our age we put more emphasis on calmly and clearly hearing the word and knowing what it is God Commands. Hearing the word is not rifling through the Bible to find something to support your beliefs and biases, it is to set yourself down at the feet of the Lord and hear him teach. And the simplest thing this means might just be to hear the great Summary of the Law, and bind it in your heart, and in your mind; to repeat it on going to bed and on rising from sleep, to think it while sitting in your home or when walking abroad. And with it on your mind to read again our Lord’s words in this great sermon, and find, as all who have made the effort have found, that you fall short of the goal, you will find your need for God’s forgiveness and God’s strength. For there is one fact of God’s will and grace that this sermon does not tell us, a fact that we will begin to ponder seriously in Lent and Easter: the atonement by which our Lord has taken the sins of the world, and brought us back to reconciliation with our Father which is in heaven, and the gift of grace by which we are empowered to live the new life.
Over the next seven weeks we will move from the end of the Sermon on the Mount into the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. If we are truly both hearers and doers of the word we will experience that mystery in us, renewing us. I invite you to join with me this Wednesday in the great act of Penance by which we begin the journey to the Cross and to life.

A Wednesday Reflection

2011-02-18T09:32:00.000-08:00

Note: it has been a long time since I've added a sermon here; far too often I don't think well enough of them; even more often I simple don't have time to get the text into a condition good enough for reading. Some people spoke well of this little piece, and others mentioned that they had not themselves see the point before, so I will send it out into the world.

A Reflection at Choral Evensong,
Trinity College Chapel, Toronto
Wednesday, 16 February 2011

The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. Mark 12.10.

The Daily Office Lectionary is arranged in such a way that someone who comes to evensong each Wednesday might think the readings skip merrily through the History of Israel and follow the Gospels on quite another plan, but someone who comes occasionally or just once may find it all fortuitous. Sometimes the effect is surreal, as when the late Mordecai Richler attended Evensong some years back: the first reading was from Esther and seemed to have the words ‘Mordecai the Jew’ in every other verse. The fact is that the Offices were not really meant for occasional use, and needs to be followed regularly to be understood, and while the lectionary recognizes that some will attend only on Sundays no one seems to have contemplated the likelihood of a regular Wednesday community. I say all this by way of apology for most of the readings and making one small point.
This evening we heard an episode from the life of Jacob; a lot’s happened since last week, when he stole Esau’s blessing, but I will assume that you can read the whole story yourselves. Preachers usually latch onto the fact that Jacob was a bit of a cad, making some important points about the surprising people God uses in his work of salvation. But Jacob’s complaint to Laban, about his long service reminded me of something which struck me recently about this story, which also shows God working through the unexpected person to an even more important end.
As you may recall, Jacob fled to avoid Esau, who was ticked off over the blessing, and went to his uncle Laban. There he fell in love with Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel, and agreed to work seven years to marry her. At the end Laban tricked Jacob and substituted the older daughter Leah. Genesis tells us that ‘Leah’s eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful and lovely … Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah’, and after a further seven years married her as well.
So we are clear: the beautiful sister, loved by her husband and worth fourteen years work, was Rachel; Leah was apparently despised. Rachel is the centre of the story, which for the next couple of chapters tells of the children born to them, and a sort of unseemly competition between them. And in the end Rachel is still the important one, because she is the mother of Joseph, the great hero and saviour of the people, and of the beloved youngest son Benjamin. But that’s not the whole story. Though Jacob hated Leah, God did not; she had many children and was the mother of six of Jacob’s twelve sons, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun. But even though this shows divine favour, in the story, Rachel is still ahead as favourite wife and mother of the best-loved sons. But what recently struck me about this story is one little fact in it which governs the rest of salvation history: Leah was the mother of Judah.
From the tribe of Judah came David the king (while Saul, of the tribe of beloved Benjamin, was rejected). And as the Gospels tell us, from the tribe of Judah and the house of David (by human reckoning) came our Lord Jesus Christ. So the main story of salvation hangs on Leah, the unexpected, the unloved. So the words of the Gospel are true of Leah as they are and because they are about Jesus, her descendant: The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. All through Scripture God chooses the one he wants, whether or not we would choose likewise; this is only one example. God’s choice is mysterious, and it knocks any chance anyone has of saying, if I am chosen it must show how good I am. In fact, the chosen instruments usually don’t know they’re chosen any more than Leah did.

Death

2009-11-04T18:13:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-03T08:08:00.000-08:00

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

2009-07-08T18:55:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-03-01T14:08:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-02-14T08:55:00.001-08:00

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?

2008-12-19T13:12:00.001-08:00

A Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent, Year B
Preached at the Church of St Columba and All Hallows,
Sunday 14 December 2008

We hear about St John the Baptist on the middle two Sundays in Advent, which might be a hint that the Baptist has something important to say to us as we prepare to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Last week we heard of the three Advents: Christ’s coming in humility to be born at Bethlehem, his coming again in glory to judge the world, and the middle coming, when he enters our lives today. John’s call to Prepare the way of the Lord referred at first to Christ’s coming of old, the first Advent, but it now speaks to us of that middle Advent, so that by penitence and prayer we both can prepare his way to us and prepare his way to others around us. The account of John’s witness or testimony in today’s Gospel helps us to understand more about our own witness to the coming of Christ.
The Gospel passage is in two parts. The two opening verses come from the Prologue to Saint John’s Gospel, the Hymn of the Word of God coming into the World as the Light of the World It declares that John was sent from God, not to be the Light, but to bear witness to the Light. After that we jump over the great Christmas Gospel of the Word Incarnate to hear of the witness that John bore when a delegation was sent from Jerusalem to inquire into his teaching, and, putting it bluntly, to ask Who do you think you are? It would be easy to think that this inquiry proceeded from malice as if they were trying to trap John and destroy him, as was later done to Jesus. But it was not necessarily so. If the religious authorities at Jerusalem (whom St John calls “the Jews”, v. 19) sent to inquire into John’s ministry, it was because they had the clear duty of investigating anyone who went about claiming to be a prophet and judge whether they were true or false. Since John’s preaching and his call to a baptism of repentance had stirred up the whole countryside and, as .St Luke informs us, “all questioned in their hearts concerning John, whether perhaps he were the Christ”, it would have been as wicked for them not to investigate his mission as it was, later to reject his message.
So their question, Who are you? meant in part, Do you claim to be the promised Messiah? Messiah means the Anointed one; in Greek the word is Christos, our Christ. To explain everything that the word meant in the time of Jesus would be more of a lecture than is helpful for preaching. The idea had both religious and political implications, and it is perhaps enough for us to note that not the least reason a claim to be Messiah was dangerous was that it would bring down the power of Rome. So we can understand that they would ask, Are you the Christ? That at any rate is the question John answered. He confessed, and he did not deny, but he confessed, I am to the Christ So they asked whom he claimed to be. What then, Are you Elijah, are you the Prophet? The coming of Elijah before the Day of the Lord was foretold in the third chapter of Malachi, while Deuteronomy 18 spoke of the coming a prophet like Moses. Both of these figures were associated with the fevered expectations of the people. Jesus in his time was also associated with this prophet (John 6.14, 7.40). When John denied this, they were perplexed: Who are you then? We have to say something to those who sent us! At this he gave the answer that is familiar to us from the other Gospels, “I am the voice crying in the wilderness”. This was not a help to the delegation, Why then do you baptize, if you are no one in particular? Now he could bear witness to the one to come after, whose sandals he was not worthy to untie. To loosen the sandal was beneath the dignity even of a humble disciple, for it was said, “Every service which a servant will perform for his master, a disciple will do for his Rabbi, except loosing his sandal thong.”
More of John’s witness than this is recorded in the fourth Gospel, and we should particularly bear keep chapter 3 verses 26-30 in mind as we read today’s Gospel,. In it we hear that John’s disciples come to tell him that Jesus was baptizing and that “everyone was going to him”. Then John reminded them that he had born witness, I am not the Christ, but I was sent before him. The friend of the bridegroom rejoices when he hears the bridegroom’s voice; therefore this joy of mine is full. He must increase but I must decrease.
John rejoiced that people went from him to Jesus; he must increase, but I must decrease. He knew that he was nothing in himself but God’s messenger to call folk to Christ. there can be no clearer message for us. God did not call us into the Church so that our neighbours can see how good we are, or to hear our voices or our ideas; he called us so that we can point to Jesus, bring peoples’ attention to him. But how often we get in the way. If it is not because we want to make people look at us, it is because we do things that make them look at us, and distract them from Christ. At worst, the things Christians do hinder love of Christ, their sins, their quarrels. But we prayed this morning that God would remove from us those things that hinder love of him.
In the eleven days left until Christmas let us ask as simple question: is there something I am doing that I one of the things that hinders the love of God? Do I somehow get in the way, so that my neighbours see and hear not Christ but me? Are we as a Church pointing to Christ, or are we pointing to ourselves. I am not going to answer these questions —I can’t answer these questions; I only know that a person or Church who does not regularly ask these questions is in great danger of being a hindrance. It is not enough just to ask the question; we must know what to do to point away from ourselves, to sit down, as it were, and stop blocking everyone else’s view. The answer begins, as always in prayer.
Assuming that you all pray regularly each day, if not necessarily “without ceasing”, it is very important to ask the Lord to make himself known to you. There is no one way of doing this; it may be enough, after saying the Lord’s prayer, and the usual daily ACTS of prayer to repeat some such verse of the Gospel, as “Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief” trusting that he will increase you faith and knowledge; or simply to ask the Lord for this in faith, each day. Such prayer is the first step to turning from self and knowing the Lord so that you can point to him. Then we in our day and our community can be like John, finding our true joy as Christ increases, but perhaps not even caring if we decrease, as long as we are with him.

2008-12-19T13:02:00.000-08:00

A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, Year B
The Church of St Columba and All Hallows’, East York, Toronto
Sunday, 7th December, 2008

Before I say anything about the Gospel and readings for today, I hope that you will allow me to say briefly how pleased I am to be with you as your interim Priest in Charge. This is a new situation for me; so new that I have not yet been informed of the terms of my appointment. and know so little of the practical aspects that it is very much an act of faith. Oh, well, what matters most in priestly ministry is coming to the heart of the Christian life: the worship of God in beauty and decency, the celebration of the sacraments and the preaching of the word. It is my prayer that I may attend to this among you to the best of my ability. No more on that now, save to ask for your prayers that I may serve and minister as Christ would have me do as long as I am here.
It is the second Sunday of Advent, that time of preparation for Christmas that is so familiar in churches that follow the liturgical Calendar and so foreign and strange to the rest of society and even many Christians of a less traditional bent. In wisdom gained from the experience of centuries, the Church teaches us not to jump into the celebration of Christ’s birth, but to take time to ponder the meaning of his coming and prepare ourselves to hear and rejoice. The truth is that the more we prepare the deeper will be our joy on Christmas Day.
The four Sundays in Advent help us to ask one simple question that lies at the heart of our Christmas preparation: the question is “what Child is this?” On the first Sunday we look ahead to the second coming, in glory and behold the cosmic and eternal significance of the Christ Child. This is no mere baby, and our worship at the creche cannot be just a sentimental tenderness, or a devotion to a God who never grows up. This is the one who will confront evil and defeat it, the one weho has the right to judge the world. On the Second and Third Sundays we see the forerunner, John the Baptist, and hear his testimony: he proclaims that the Child born at Christmas is the one who will baptize with Fire and the Holy Spirit, who will call his people to turn around and begin a new life. John called the people to make themselves ready for the coming of the Lord. He also declared that the one who was coming would take away the sins of the whiole worl. On the Fourth Sunday we hear how Joseph and Mary learned that their child was the promised Lord, the Son of God, and here we see how the Lord of all entered into the tenderness and love of a human family.
Thus in Advent it is clear why we meditate on the Coming of the Lord long foretold by the prophets and in the Psalms, and why we look ahead to the second coming; it is clear, too, why we hear the stories of Mary and Joseph that will lead us to hear the story of Bethlehem, for that is the story of the first Coming. Why do we spend so long on John the Baptist? Surely we could hear his teaching during the year, or even at Epiphany, when we celebrate the Lord’s Baptism!
The answer here, my friends, is that there are really three advents, not only two. Let me read you some words from the fifth Advent Sermon of St Bernard of Clairvaux,

We know that there are three comings of the Lord. The third lies between the other two; it is invisible, while the other two are visible. In the first coming he was seem on earth, dwelling among me; he himself testifies that they saw him and hated him [John 15.24]. In the final coming all flesh will see the salvation of our God [Luke 3.6; Isaiah 40], and they will look on him whom they pierced [John 19.37] The intermediate coming is a hidden one.

This coming is hidden because only those who answer the call know the presence of Christ within themselves, and recognize him in the needy and suffering. Bernard goes on to say.

In his first coming our Lord came in our flesh and in pour weakness; in this middle coming he comes in spirit and in power; in the final coming he will be seen in glory and majesty … Because this coming lies between the other two, it is like a road on which we travel from the first coming to the last. In the
first, Christ was our redemption; in the last, he will appear as our life; in this middle coming, he is our rest and consolation.

OurLord Christ himself promised this intermediate Advent. He said: If anyone lives me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him [John 14.23].
When we understand the middle Advent we may more easily see why we need to hear John’s preaching in the Advent season. For if Christ is to come to us as he has promised, we must hear John’s call to repentance, that is, to turning around, to changing one’s mind, for that is what repentance means. John spoke to the people of his day and said: You hope for the Messiah to come and lead you from this wilderness into God’s kingdom? well, then, make yourselves ready; show yourselves to be the kind of people who want to live in God’s kingdom. He says the same thing to us. You rejoice that your Lord and Saviour has come to you? well, then, live like the people who follow the Crucified and Risen Lord. We heard this in the reading from Second Peter this morning: since Christ will come to judge the world, what sort of people ought you to be.
How far many Christians are from these questions. Many see themselves as pretty well all right, no worse than most, and all they want from God is some help and security. Just look after me and let my life go on as normal, is their prayer. For them, as Pope Benedict remarked last week, the coming of Christ is like “a beautiful decoration upon a world already saved” rather than what it truly is, “the only way of liberation” from the mortal danger, from the consequences of human sin that we see in violence and oppression around the world. The coming of Christ is God’s answer to the cry for help that the peoples of the world send up. Just how this is is something that we can only truly know by entering into his life, and allowing him into ours. For as John Baptist tells us our minds need to changed and our footsteps turned to follow the path of Christ. Our faith cannot be just business as usual and a pretty Baby at Christmas.
Those who know that the Christian life is not just business as usual are trying evey day to follow Christ; they have knowledge and experience that he helps them with his love and strength, they know the middle Advent. They know the true meaning and joy of Christmas and are able to share it with those around them. I invite you to make the eighteen or so days left a time of preparing, and welcoming the Lord Jesus, who so much wants to come to you.

All Souls' Day Homily

2008-11-06T17:23:00.001-08:00

After the All Souls' Day Requiem a number of people spoke kindly of the homily and suggested that it shoudl be published here. Although the written text is a only a shadow of the Homily as it was spoken, here it is.

Homily for All Souls’ Day
Preached at the Solemn Requiem,
at St Matthias, Bellwoods,
5 November 2008

Once upon a time you might expect to find among the books of a literate Church-goer a volume called

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, in which are described the Means and Instruments of Preparing ourselves and others respectively for a blessed Death; and the Remedies against the Evils and Temptations Proper to the State of Sickness.

This was published in 1651 by the great pastor and theologian Jeremy Taylor. I don’t know what devotional books Churchpeople have and use nowadays; too great a variety is available, but I would guess they would be less likely to include one on preparation for death, for our world has a tendency to avoid thinking of death, a tendency that the Church hasn’t quite avoided. We speak less of death than we used to, and certainly we speak less about death as the one thing for which eveyone has to prepare, especially all Christians. [As recently as when I was in my teens it was still remembered that the major theme of preaching in Advent was the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven. But who thinks of that now?] Fortunately here are moments when we have to think of death—in Holy Week, at funerals, and now, at All Hallows’ tide..
So here we are at one of those moments when we face the fact of death, and, lo! and behold, this is not the time to address preparation for death; this is the time to remember the faithful departed; those whom we love but see no longer. Nonetheless this commemoration, by calling us to remember the departed, is a part of preparing for a good death. Quite naturally it calls us to ponder death and the nature of death: What is it? What does the Christian faith say about death? What do we mean by life after death? How does the concepts of the immortality of the soul relate to faith in the Resurrection of the Body? What is the use of prayer for the dead? All these are important questions, but the last is probably the one we most need to ask on All Soul’s Day.
In Christian history, the practice of prayer for the departed came to be wrapped up in particular doctrines about what happens to the dead, particularly the doctrine of Purgatory. At the time of the Reformation, these doctrines in turn were mixed up in what seemed to be a money-making scheme of vast proportions. In our Anglican Tradition, most formal prayer for the departed was taken out of the liturgy. We do not need to discuss these disputes now, for in Christian experience Prayer for the departed is not part of the doctrine of Purgatory, it is something far deeper: it is a real experience of fellowship in the Body of Christ. The truth of this comes clear if we begin with the words of our Lord in the Gospel we just heard:

This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that every one who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. John 6.39-40

What a wonderful promise this is, that those who come to Christ in faith will not be cast out, will be raised up, will have eternal life. This is the ground of our assurance that whatever it is like for those who pass through it, death is not a separation from the love and life of Jesus Christ the Risen Lord. We hear the same assurance in words from the Letter to the Romans that are read at almost all Christian funerals

I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8.38., 39

Now we are assured that Baptism has made us members of Christ’s one body and in that body members of one another. Therefore none of these things—death, life, angels, height, depth and all the rest—can separate us from one another in Christ. Death does not break the communion and fellowship of the Church. As Eric Mascall put it, we enter the Church by baptism; we do not leave it by death. So it is as natural that we should pray for fellow members of Christ who have died as we should those we see every day. After all, we are members of the Lord who died and conquered death.
What specifically whould we ask for when we pray for the dead? That is easy—look in your Prayer Book or Book of Alternative Services (and if you don’t have copies of you own you really should) where will find good models to use. These are prayers founded on trust in the love of God, prayers that make no other assumptions about the condition of the dead. The Collect we used today is a good example:

Father of all, we pray to you for those we love but see no longer. Grant them your peace; let light perpetual shine upon them, and in your loving wisdom and almighty power, work in them the good purpose of your perfect will; through Iesus Christ Our Lord, who lives, &c.

This can be adapted for personal use. So you might say, “We [or I] pray to you for [Name], whom we love but see no longer; Grant him your peace,” and so on. The 23rd Psalm might be used in a similar way (The Lord is N's shepherd, she shall not want, and so on).
There are many other questions we could raise, but will not now. At another time we must all learn more of what the Church teaches about Death, and how we can prepared for it. Not all knowledge comes by study, or even by asking questions; we learn to know one another by speanding time together; and we learn to be members of Christ by spending time in the life and worship of his body the Church. This present is the moment not to ask any more questions, but to enter into the Church’s prayer for her departed members, those you know and love and those unknown who are still members of Christ with you. It is th emoment to experience the life which begins in Baptism but does not end with death. Perhaps from this experience we will all come to know a little more clearly the fact that death is not a separation, and that as we draw closer to Christ Jesus, the conqueror of death, we draw closer to those we love in him, and trust that it is not forever that we do not see them.

2008-10-05T10:20:00.000-07:00

A Homily for the Feast of Dedication

5 October 2008,
St Matthias’, Bellwoods, Toronto

“How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28.17)

Long before folk knew that the earth turned, they spoke of the year turning. And they were right, for no matter what the reason for it might be, the year does turn: the seasons have one after the other, winter, spring, summer, and autumn, and then the whole cycle turns back to begin once again. For this reason the old Romans called the celebration to mark something that happened every year the anniversarius, the turn of the year. So you can see, by the way, how silly it is to speak of a “three-month anniversary” (how can a year turn so soon?), and how redundant to say “one-year anniversary”, instead of the simple “first anniversary”. But I digress. We celebrate the anniversaries of many important things: the anniversaries of weddings, of ordinations, of births and deaths, and of the dedication of our churches. It is as if this place and this building came to life on the day the bishop declared that it was consecrated, set apart from profane and common use, and dedicated “to Almighty God for the ministration of his holy Word and Sacraments, and for public worship.”
Although we aren’t keeping the real anniversary of the consecration we didn’t just pick this Sunday at random. Long ago churches kept this festival on the real anniversaries and they kept them exuberantly, as parish revels, but the time came when the English government started to get worried about the number of holidays people had, and probably about how they couldn’t work well the next day, and possibly about the lower classes having that much fun, and twisted the arm of Convocation (that’s what they called the Church synod) to order every church to keep its dedication feast on the first Sunday in October, to get it over with all at once. Later on, this date came to be used for churches where the real date was unknown, and so everyone was happy. That’s why we keep this festival today.
The Church provides a list of suitable readings for this festival, from which we have chosen three readings and a psalm: the first reading, Genesis 28.10-17, speaks of a holy place, a place where a human being encounters the Living God; Psalm 122 sings of the joy of a pilgrim coming to the temple at Jerusalem, the centre of the worship of God’s people, and the heart the covenant. From the second chapter of the first epistle of St Peter (2-5,9-10), we hear his declaration to his readers of who they are as the Church. They are the ecclesia, the assembly, the people who have been called together by God. We may know this word best in our “ecclesiastical” or in the French église. In this passage St Peter speaks Christians as living stones, who are built on Christ the chief cornerstone into a spiritual house where acceptable sacrifices are offered to God. The House of the Lord is no longer thought of as a place you can find on a map, but as the household and family of God, held together not by nails and beams,[1] but the love of its members. The Gospel (Matthew 21.12-16) tells us of Jesus’ zeal for his Father’s house, which led him to drive out of it all that was unworthy and shaming. Today, as always, the Dedication Festival coincides with the date of the Animal Blessing, so let us look at the story of Jacob, and the idea of a holy place.
After Jacob had stolen the blessing that was due to his brother Esau, he left home to seek a wife from among his kindred in the land of Haran. On the way he stopped at a certain place for the night, taking a stone for a pillow. A vision came to him in his sleep, of a ladder or staircase uniting heaven and earth. Up and down went the holy angels running the Lord’s errands; the Lord himself spoke to Jacob, renewing his covenant to be with Jacob on his journey and to bring him back to the land of promise. When Jacob awoke he realized that unknowingly he slept in a holy place, and was awestruck: “This is none other than the house of God, this is the gate of heaven”. Because Jacob had encountered the Lord in that place that place was holy. He named it Beth-el, the house of God. When we hear this today we remember that our word church at its root means something like ‘house of the Lord’; it comes to us from the Greek κυριακον, of or pertaining to the Lord; another form is the Scots Kirk.
To read of Jacob’s encounter with God on the feast of Dedication is to be aware of similarity and difference between that house of God and this. Our churches are set apart to be houses of God in our midst, but rarely are they chosen for us, like Bethel. That was a holy place because God appeared to Jacob; most of our churches are built on land that was donated to us. We dedicate and consecrate them, that is, we offer them and set them apart to God. we encounter God in this place, both as a community and as individuals in prayer, in word and sacrament. Who knows what the encounters men and women have had with their Lord in this place?
In the liturgy of Thanksgiving for the Feast of Dedication we go to places in the church where there God has promised such encounters; to the font, where we died with Christ and were reborn through the waters of baptism; to the lectern, where we encounter the Lord through hearing his written Word; to the pulpit—in this church it may be the same object, but its function is different!—where the message and Gospel of the Cross of Christ is proclaimed, that message which gives unity to all the messages of Scripture; and to the Altar which is the Holy Table, where now we take part in the heavenly banquet that is to come, where we who can offer no worthy sacrifice are made part of Christ’s all sufficient sacrifice. When we give thanks for these things, when we consider the meaning of what font and lectern and altar, how can we not cry out, “How awesome is this place! Surely this is the house of God, this is the gate of heaven.”
Jacob went to Bethel unawares, and found that it was a holy place, the very gate of heaven. We do not come here to this Church all unknowing, as if we are surprised at God’s presence. For we were invited here and summoned, no, more, we have come here to keep a tryst, a rendezvous that our God has made with us. We have said, “we will go into the House of the Lord”; because our Lord has promised, “Where two or three are gathered together in My Name. there am I in the midst of them.” My friends, if there are any who think that these are just words, nice words perhaps, and pious sentiments, but only words; I tell you that it is not so. I pray that God will open your hearts and eyes and ears, that you may know that because of the promise of Christ This is truly the house of God, this is the gate of heaven.

Note

[1] Not until I reached this point in preaching did it strike me that it is precisely by nails and a beam that the people of God are held together, the beam and nails of the Cross. I cannot remember exactly how I said this, except that I turned and ponted to the figure of the Crucified on the Rood Screen.

Blessing your Enemies

2008-09-21T15:07:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 22 Year A
Preached at St Matthias, Bellwoods, Toronto
31 August 2008

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Romans 12.14

Just over sixteen hundred years ago, St John Chrysostom preached a series of sermons on the Letter to the Romans. When he came to Chapter 12, verse 14, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse,” at the beginning of the twenty-second sermon in the series, he commented that in these words St Paul does not simply say, “be not spiteful or revengeful, but required something far better.” and that although a wise man might act without spite or vengefulness, “this is quite an angel's part.” If “to bless those who persecute you” seemed to so great a saint as Chrysostom to be “an angel’s part”, can we hope to grasp it an make it our own? But this commandment is not some clever idea of St Paul’s; it is simply a repetition of the teaching of our Lord Jesus. That we should accept persecution without spite or rancour follows from the words of the gospel, that those who would follow the Lord must «deny themselves and take up the cross». That we should go further than this and bless those who persecute us we find in the Sermon on the Mount, «But I say to you that hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who abuse you» [Luke 6.27]. If we are to follow Christ then it is clear, not only must we never return cursing for cursing, pain for pain, evil for evil. not only are we never to avenge ourselves, but we are to be good and kind and loving to those who hurt us, and to be cheerful about it. Search the Gospels as you will; you will find no exceptions.
Now what St Paul says in this passage from Romans, and what our Lord Jesus says in the Gospel, are both very clear. There is no mystery about what is asked of us. But Chrysostom was right: “this is quite an angel’s part.” For the way of the world is, if not to take vengeance for wrong done or perceived, at least to feel slighted and hurt, and to think that you would be justified to try to get your own back. To follow Christ’s way, then, means not only a new way of acting, but a new way of thinking. It means, as we heard in the reading from Romans last week, not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect [Romans 12.2].
Every time we respond to persecution, or hurt, or even the unintentional slights that come our way with anger and resentment, with cursing and ill will, we are saying to the world that the will of God is not good, not acceptable, not perfect. For the will of God is seen in Christ, who suffered himself to be abused, beaten, and finally to be crucified, without complaint, without seeking revenge If we do not do the same, we are showing that, for all the faith we profess, we are conformed to this world. Worse than that, when we resist evil with evil, we are not overcoming evil, but adding to it, adding anger and violence to the world. For vengeance never heals wrong, it merely adds a new wrong, calling forth new resentment, fuelling bitterness and rancour from one generation to another. Has a wrong been done to you? St Paul’s words and the Lord’s example tell you to leave it to God. “Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord, “I will repay.” The Lord Jesus said, “Judge not;” but all vengeance is based on judgment. All that my vengeance shows is that I do not really believe that God will take care of me. And it is a simple fact that none of us is either wise enough or good enough to punish our enemies justly.
In reality in the lives we lead here, as we try to follow Christ, we may never have to face real persecution, or even hatred for our faith in him. This is not true for all Christians; it is for the most part for us. Nonetheless we need to learn the lesson, “Bless those who persecute you.” For what we do meet are the thousand slights and wrongs, some real, some fancied. If we are not hated for being Christians we do meet personal hatred, or at least dislike. We must learn to respond graciously to the petty hurts of this life if we are to learn to bless those who hurt us, and even those who persecute us. Indeed it is only with these things that we can learn to be gracious and forgiving, with the resentment we feel for people who cut ahead in line, or in traffic; or for people who cheat us or hurt us in petty ways. The Gospel calls us to let these things go.[1]
At first this may mean — it probably does mean — acting against your instincts. It means swallowing your pride and keeping your first response to yourself. The late Father Egan, who taught patristics at Regis College, used to say, “I thank God for the gift of my stutter; it keeps me from saying the first thing that comes into my head.” Having swallowed your pride and bit your tongue, you’ve won a moment to ask yourself whether you have really been hurt, or have any real reason to be angry, or indeed, whether it really matters. You have won a moment for giving the other person the same benefit of the doubt that you expect and give yourself This should wipe away most of the cases. It is in the ones that remain, when a real wrong was done, and you have really been hurt, that the job of being transformed begins, and the angel’s part has to be learned.
Someone has done you a wrong, and they meant it. You feel angry, hurt, and resentful. But you are forbidden to curse, indeed, you are commanded to bless the one who hurt you. This is not easy, indeed, it might seem impossible, truly an angel’s part. But ask yourself: do you ever really try? Do you really try to stop yourself every time you want to repay a real or imagined hurt with hurt, or cursing with a curse? And finding it hard, do you ask God to help you, or do you just give up? As Chesterton one remarked it is not that the Christian life has been tried and found impossible, but that it seemed difficult and has not been tried. Perhaps I should say, Get out there and try to follow Christ’s teaching, and then we’ll talk about the difficulties. But sermons don’t work like that, and I need to finish with some practical words
It takes time to learn the angel’s part. The first step is to stop yourself from doing or saying the first thing that comes into your head. Most of us can manage that. If we try, most of us can manage not to curse. The next thing is to bring those feelings to God in our prayers or to a confessor or spiritual counsellor. We don’t have to keep them bottled up until they explode. Getting this far, simply not returning evil for evil is a wonderful achievement. But we are commanded to take the next step and bless the one who curses us. As we ponder this, it is helpful to remember that Christ did more than bless those who killed him; he died for them. So perhaps he is not demanding as much from us as we think.
Still, perhaps, we cannot utter a blessing on the one who hurts us. The answer is the same as always, so we do what we can. I cannot bless my enemy? Then let me pray for my enemy, pray perhaps that God will forgive him, or that he will see the error of his ways, or that he will have a better day and find a better temper. Let me pray for his good, in fact; for what else does it really mean to “bless” someone? Every time I do this, I build up the right habit of mind, I come to act more like Christ, and I trust that I by his grace I will finally come to bless my enemy. The all-important thing is to trust God and to try.

Note

[1] It is worth remembering that in Our Lord’s word from the Cross, "Father, forgive them" (Luke 23.34), the word translated "forgive" (aphes) also means, ‘let go’.

Thoughts on Miracles: II

2008-08-22T14:29:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 19, Year A)
Preached at St Matthias’ Bellwoods, 10 August 2008

Last week we heard the miracle of the loaves and fishes; we have just heard how in the small hours of a stormy night, Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee many furlongs out from land to his disciples in a boat, and bade St Peter walk on the water as well, and saved him when he lost faith, and how when Jesus got into the boat, the storm ceased. Thus there are three miracles at least in this story, not just one. Last week’s gospel brought us to consider that there is no way around the miraculous element in the Gospel, but because this is an important matter, we will continue to think of it today. In fact to is going to take us at least into next week.
The events in these gospel readings truly fit the definition of “miracle” given by St Thomas Aquinas, quoting St Augustine:

A miracle is described as something difficult and unusual, surpassing the capabilities of nature and the expectations of those who wonder at it.[1]

We should note the words for what we call “miracles” that are used in the New Testament. The first is τέρατα, ‘wonders’ or ‘prodigies’; in this word the astonishment of the beholders is applied to the deed itself. This word is the closest to our word “miracle” which comes from the Latin mirari, to be astonished. It is never used alone, but always with one of the other words, as “signs and wonders”; which brings us to the second word, σημεια, ‘signs’. Σημεια is used in all the gospels, but particularly in John, where it is the ordinary term for miracle as a sign pointing to Christ’s glory, or the presence of God in him.[2] What matters here is not the wonder produced in the beholder, but in the meaning of the act. The third word is δυνμαεις ‘powers’ or ‘works of power’ we find this word at Matthew 7.22, Mt 11.20, Mk 6.14, Ll 10.13. These three words describe the same works under different aspects than three different classes of works. The most important of them is σημεια, ‘signs’, for the most important thing about a miracle is that they point us to belief in God. Now although all miracles are signs, a sign is not necessarily a miracle. Common events may be signs that authenticate some word or announcement. Thus, the Angel said to the shepherds that the sign of the good news would be their finding a Child wrapt in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. There are many such signs in the Old Testament.[3]
That said, we can return to the definition. If a miracle is something which “surpasses the capabilities of nature” it is obvious that the whole question of whether we believe that God works miracles depends on what we mean by nature.
First, however, it is important to remember that “nature” is not a thing—just as the world is not a thing—the word nature originally meant “birth”, it is from the same root as “native”; it came to mean a quality or character, and rerum natura meant the nature of things, the order or course of the world. Now over the centuries, human beings have observed that in the world there is a regular and uniform activity, which regular activities are given the name laws of nature. Unless uniform and regular rules are assumed, as C. B. Moss put it, “we could never be sure that the sun would not rise in the west or that a hen’s egg would not produce a crocodile, natural science and indeed human life would be impossible.” However, the records of scripture and history include events which could not be explained by any natural cause. It is sometimes naively said that that is because people in past ages did not know of or believe in the uniformity of nature. But if this is so, there would be no reason to speak of wonders, prodigies or works of power. Unless people knew the ordinary way in which children are begotten, there would be nothing surprising in a virgin conceiving without the aid of human father. It is fair to clarify the definition: a miracle is an occurrence which surpasses the capabilities that are known of nature. The New Testament scholar Reginald Fuller said that

This formula is attractive for both its scientific and theological humility. It admits that we don’t know everything yet, that our scientific knowledge … is still limited. But it is also prepared to surrender belief in a particular miracle, if it should turn out to be a natural occurrence after all. And on this definition the day may come when we shall know so much about nature that there will be no place for a miracle after all.[4]

That is a sensible statement. People have learned that some wonders have causes within nature; one might think of solar and lunar eclipses, for example, or rainbows. It is much harder to see how we can ever know enough to do away with the resurrection or the virgin birth. You will notice, I hope, that Fuller does not define “nature”. Moss points out that

The word "nature" can be used in three different senses: (a) It may mean "all that exists". Spinoza … uses it in this sense. Nothing can be "beyond nature" if this is what we mean by nature. (b) It may mean "all created things". St. Thomas Aquinas uses it in this sense, for he is careful to say "created nature". (c) It may mean "all material things", as when we say "natural science". This is the usual modern sense.

Now which of these senses we mean is not decided by scientific experimentation; it is a philosophical question. If you say that only such things as can be measured have reality, you have excluded the possibility of a miracle before the question is raised, and will have to reject or explain away any accounts of miracles. We will return to this question next week. Now we need to consider a fourth word from the New Testament. The miracles of Christ are often called έργα, ‘works’ i.e., such works as might be expected of the God-man, and which reveal his Person. It is almost as if they come forth by necessity. Archbishop Trench wrote.

They are the periphery of that circle whereof he is the centre. The great miracle is the Incarnation; all else, so to speak, follows naturally and of course. It is of no wonder that He whose name is wonderful’ (Isa 9.6) does works of wonder; the only wonder would be if he did them not

The miracle of walking on the sea is such a work, and a work of power, and we must turn to it before we use up the little time we have. This miracle is unlike the miracles of healing and mercy; and we might ask why God should overrule nature in this way. Taken as a work of power, this miracle declares the power of Christ over the sea. This points us back to very ancient beliefs in the Old Testament that God in creation was victorious over the sea, a symbol of chaos and evil.[5] For Jesus to walk on the sea is for the power of God in him to be manifest. On a symbolic level, it is a miracle of teaching: by it Jesus teaches his disciples to trust in him, that he is with them and will help them even when it seems least likely, and that nothing can come between them and his love. It is a preparation for their mission in the world, which is our mission. Notice that he has gone up the mountain to pray; while he has sent disciples out onto the sea. Just so, he will send the disciples out into the stormy world, and himself ascend into heaven. But in heaven he is with his Church, in heaven he ever intercedes for it and watches over it But there I am past my time and we will have to turn to Peter and his faith another time. If it is manageable I will produce further notes on this passage. Next week we will think further about miracles.

Notes

[1] Miraculum dicitur aliquid arduum et insolitum supra facultatem natura et spem admirantes praeveniens. ST 1a Q 105 7.2, quoting Augustine De utilitate credendi 16 (Miraculum voco quidquid arduum et insolitum supre speam vel facultatem mirantis apparet.
[2] We find this meaning in Deuteronomy 13: “If a prophet arises among you, or a dreamer of dreams, and gives you a sign or wonder, and the sign or wonder comes to pass, and if he says, Let us go after other gods, which you have not known, and let uis serve them, you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams”
[3] Luke 2.12; Exodus 3.12; 1 Sam 2.34; 10. 1-9; Jer 44.29-30; Jgs 7.9-15; 2 Kgs 7.2, 17-20)
[4] Interpreting the Miracles (1961), p. 8

[5] One thinks also of the miracle of the Red Sea in Exodus 14, which also took place in the morning watch. Job 9.8: [God] alone stretched out the heavens, and trampled the waves of the sea; Psalm 64.12-17: Yet God is King from of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth. Thus didst divide the sea by thy might; thou didst break the heads of the dragons on the waters. Thou didst crush the heads of Leviathan, and didst give him as food for the creatures of the wilderness; Psalm 77.19; Psalm 89.9-10: Thou dost rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, thou stillest them. Thou didst crush Rahab like a carcass, thou didst scatter thy enemies with thy mighty arm; Isaiah 43.16: Thus says the Lord , who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters. (Rahab and Leviathan are names of a sea-monster and personify the restless power of the sea.)

Thoughts on Miracles: I

2008-08-22T14:22:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost,
Preached at St Mathias Bellwoods, Toronto
3 August AD 2008

There was once a parish priest who was preaching to his parishioners and said that our Lord fed five hundred persons with five loaves. When the parish clerk heard him say this, he stood up and whispered softly in his ear: “But Sir, you’re mistaken; the gospel says five thousand.” “Hold your peace, you fool,” said the preacher; “they will scarcely believe that they were five hundred.”

Not much of a joke, I suppose, even with the language updated a bit. And really, five hundred or five thousand makes little difference; both are difficult to believe or imagine. This may be why this miracle sometimes gets explained away, and we are told something like this. When Jesus made all the people sit on the grass, they saw that he was taking all the food that he and disciples had, and were moved to take food they had and share it, and so all were fed. The true miracle was a miracle of sharing and generosity, for such virtues are always miracles. I suppose that is a good lesson, but ever since I first heard in Sunday School, I’ve been suspicious. Surely if that’s the lesson the Gospel writer (and the Holy Spirit) wants us to learn from this passage, the text might say something like, “and the people began to share the food they had and all were filled.” I must admit that this explanation is not without support. The Revised Common Lectionary Commentary website from the diocese of Montreal notes that “A peasant in Palestine, then and now, travelled with food”. We will consider that point in a moment. What we must do first is read the passage a little more closely. Some of the finer details are in the lectionary notes on my blog.
Over the past few weeks the Gospel readings have been taken from Matthew 13, which is a chapter of parables taught by the sea, but the last six verses and the opening section of chapter 14 are not read in the Sunday lectionary. At the end of Matthew 13, Jesus returned to his Nazareth, where he taught in the synagogue; the people were astonished by his teaching, because he was a local boy, and took offence at him. Jesus utters the words, A prophet is not without honour except in his own country and in his own house, and is not able to do many miracles there, because of their unbelief.
Chapter 14 begins with the report of Herod Antipas asking who this Jesus was, and declaring his own conviction that Jesus was John the Baptist raised from the dead. Then the Gospel writer tells how Herod had ordered the Baptist’s execution, because he preached against Herod’s unlawful marriage. The first words of the passage we heard refer to John’s death: Now when Jesus heard this. John’s death moved Jesus greatly; here, perhaps he saw what the call of God could, and would mean. We are not allowed into Jesus’ private thoughts here, beyond the notice that he withdrew from there, Nazareth, in a boat to a lonely place apart.
When they heard this people followed him on foot from the towns. This is where we have to consider the comment that peasants “travelled with food”. If it is nit-picking to ask whether these townsfolk were peasants, it is reasonable to ask whether going out to hear a preacher in the countryside is travelling. Tabgha, traditionally said to be the site of this miracle, is only 2.5 km from Capernaum and about the same distance from Chorazin. Rather than thinking of people preparing for a journey, we should imagine people going out rather suddenly, so that they find themselves away rather longer than expected and so caught without food. Some may have had food and other may not. This has to be left up to your judgement of human nature, but I believe it is the natural interpretation of the text.
When Jesus landed on the north-west shore of Galilee, and saw the throng, he had compassion on them, and healed their sick, and that they were there till evening, when the disciples suggested that he send the crowd away to get food. St John Chrysostom noted that Jesus waited to be asked, as always not stepping forward first to do miracles, but when called upon. In passing we may take this as a reminder that God wants us to pray. Like us the disciples are weak in faith, they say This is a deserted place, which calls to mind the complaint of the people in the wilderness, They spoke against God saying, Can God prepare a table in the wilderness? He smote the rock so that water gushed out and streams overflowed. Can he also give bread, or provide meat for his people? One of the important lessons of this miracle is that God can and does supply his people’s needs even in the wilderness.
When the Lord replies, they need not go away, we might expect him to say, I will give them food. But he says, you give them something to eat, to which they reply, We have only five loaves here and two fish; essentially, we do not have enough. Two points emerge from this: the first is that Christ gives the authority and ministry of service to his disciples, so that this miracle is one of the foundations of the apostolic ministry; but the second is that all their, all our, resources are nothing unless first offered to God in Christ. We cannot discuss in detail Christ’s actions on receiving the bread and fish, except to note that they are described in exactly the same terms as his actions in taking the bread at the Last Supper, showing that this miracle is a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. Indeed, the eucharistic teaching of John’s Gospel is entirely centred around thios miracle, a fact which should remove any doubt. What we must stress is that there is not the slightest hint that this is a “miracle of sharing”. There is no earlier version we can look to to show that the miraculous element was added later, no evidence of such a story underlying the Gospel accounts except what we might read into it if we start off disbelieving in miracles.
So the question we will end with is the one really should have asked at the beginning. How do we start off? If we reject the possibility of miracles out of hand, then we will never accept the Gospels without making them say what we want and not what they say, that is, by doing violence to them. Nonetheless, stories of miracles have been a stumbling block to the faith of many in our day, and we need to consider them very carefully. But that is a good place to stop for this morning, because it opens up the question of whether we can believe in miracles or have to turn the story into something else. Since next week’s Gospel reading is also a miracle story, the account of our Lord walking on the sea, I will return to this theme of miracles next week.

The Unjust Steward

2008-07-20T12:54:00.001-07:00

A Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity
Preached at the Church of St Bartholomew, Regent Park Toronto
21 July 2008

Quia filii huius saeculi prudentiores filiis lucis in generatione sua sunt. For the children of this age are in their generation more prudent than the children of light. Luke 16.9

A steward who cheats his master, and when he is fired cooks up a scheme to cheat him even further and is then praised by his master for his prudence and shrewdness is hardly someone you would expect Christ to hold up as an example for us. But this seems to be what we have just heard in the Parable of the Unrighteous Steward. Though there are other characters in Jesus’ parables who are pretty shady: the unjust judge, the neighbour who does not want to be bothered in the night, and the man who pockets someone else’s treasure by buying his field, but this fellow takes the cake. The only way to make the steward’s actions anything other than embezzlement and fraud is by making excuses.
From ancient times enemies of the Church have seized on the seeming incongruity of a story that praises a scoundrel as a charge against the faith. Christians themselves have found it to be rather an embarrassing story, and have come up with an almost endless variety of ways to make sense of it, Usually, they fall back on allegory, but this has only confused the issue. One of the wisest of nineteenth-century Anglican commentators on the parables, Archbishop Trench of Dublin, began his look at this one by saying,

No one, who has seriously considered, will underrate the difficulties of this parable—difficulties which Cajetan found so insuperable that he gave up the matter in despair, affirming a solution of them impossible.

Cardinal Cajetan was one of the great biblical scholars of the sixteenth century: if this parable was to much for him, it is daunting indeed. (If you want a good book on the parables, by the way, I commend Trench’s Notes on the Parables of the Lord; it is readily available in libraries or on-line at the Internet Archive.) Trench notes many of the previous attempts to interpret this parable, but finds that

very many of its interpreters have (to use a familiar expression), in my judgment, overrun their game. We have here, as I am persuaded, simply a parable of Christian prudence, —Christ exhorting us to use the world, and the world’s goods, so to speak, against the world, and for God.

If we read the story carefully it is obvious that Jesus is not praising the dishonesty of the steward; rather it is the rich man in the story who praises his steward’s prudence, on hearing of his scheme. And perhaps it is no more than saying something like: “There’s a clever fellow!” The whole incident makes the point in the verse that I have taken as my text, “For the children of this age are in their generation more prudent than the children of light.”
To understand this verse, we need to note that “in their generation” is not the clearest of translations. What the Greek actually means is ‘towards or for their own generation,” or as Moffat rendered it, “for the children of this world look farther ahead in dealing with their own generation than the children of light.” Another rendering could be “for their own ends and purposes”. Who are the more prudent? The “children of this age” or “of this world”—where we think physically of “the world”, the ancients thought temporally of “the age”. [There really is no difference. In our prayers the phrase “World without end” translates in saecula saeculorum, “unto ages of ages.” I am reminded of the CBC broadcast of Pierre Trudeau’s funeral where the voice-over translation given for the French version of this phrase was “for centuries and centuries. But I digress.] Trench explains the phrase well:

The children of this world' are the Psalmist's ‘men of the earth,' those whose portion is here, and who look not beyond; who, born of the world's spirit, order their lives by the world's rule. The phrase occurs only here and at Luke 20.34; 'children of light' he has in common with St John (12.36) and St Paul (1 Thess v.5; Eph v.8) The faithful are called by this rather than any other of the many names of honour which are theirs; for thus are their deeds. which are deeds of light, done in truth and sincerity, even as they are themselves children of the day and of the light, are contrasted with the 'works of darkness.’

What Christ declares in this verse is that the people of this world, make their business with one another more profitable,—obtain more from it,—manage it better for their interests, such as those are, than the children of light manage their business with one another.
Here our Lord does not hold the actions of the steward up as an example to us. But his actions have two aspects: one, his dishonesty, is blameworthy; the other, his prudence is something which should be abundantly, but is only too weakly, found among Christians. The heart of this parable, then, is found in the Lord’s words, “Ecce ego mitto vos sicut oves in medio luporum; estote ergo prudentes sicut serpentes et simplices sicut columbae; Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matt 10.16).
Indeed, this parable sends us to learn from the worldlings. Christ says to us that it is good for us, at least occasionally, to learn from them. For the children of this world rake their ends seriously, and work hard to achieve them. How often do we hear of those who sacrifice themselves, their families, their comfort, their digestions, in order to achieve success. How often do we hear people praised for their drive. We claim, we preach that the ends for which these sacrifices are made will pass away, but that our faith offers us an eternal reward.
It is not just the ordinary worldly folk, who are neither particularly bad or good, who can teach. us. Trench, quoting St Bernard, noted that

deeds of bold bad men have a side, that namely of their boldness and decision, on which they rebuke the doings of the weak and vacillating good. They are the martyrs of the devil, who put to shame the saints of God; and running, as they do, with more alacrity to death than these to life, may be proposed to them for their emulation.

An illustration of this point is found in a story of one of the Egyptian desert fathers:

Chancing to see a dancing girl, he was moved to tears; being asked the reason, he replied, 'That she should be at such pains to please men in her sinful vocation; and we in our holy calling use so little diligence to please God.'

Here we may begin to see why Jesus would tell such a story about a scoundrel, for only such a stark contrast can realty make this point.
The parable goes on, and in the remaining verses the focus is set more sharply on how it is that the children of light must be more prudent in dealing with their own generation. The best interpretations of the parable tell us that just as the Steward used money—and that is all that the expression “mammon of unrighteousness” really means here—to ensure his temporal habitation, we are to use it to ensure the eternal habitation. In short, by almsgiving. However, our time is pretty well up—for the days when a real hour glass guided the preacher are long past—and for today we must rest content with this consideration of the parable of the Unrighteous Steward. But this is enough, for in what we have considered, the Unrighteous Steward says to us in challenge and in rebuke, “I pursued temporal things as if they were eternal, with all the intensity I had: you pursue eternal things as if it were less than the temporal.” Let us look into our hearts to find what answer we can make.

2008-07-06T12:24:00.000-07:00

Homily for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity
Preached at The Church of St Bartholomew, Apostle And Martyr,
Regent Park, Toronto
6 July, 2008

Some of the congregation this morning were kind enough to ask me to make this available, and will now find out that the spoken version was probably better than the written one!

One of the advantages of not holding a permanent appointment in the Church is that one has so many more opportunities to be in different Churches and experience their customs and practices. When you're Rector of a parish you never have the same opportunities to Church-hop on a Sunday, or the need to fill in for clergy on vacation. I am glad that at last I have come to be with you here at St Bartholomew’s for the Sundays of July.
Of all the beauties of the Book of Common Prayer some of the finest are the Collects of the Day. But they are so short and said so quickly that perhaps we do not always hear them and appreciate as we might. It doesn’t have to be so, since they are appointed to be said morning and evening (at least) for the whole week, and might well be seeds of contemplation.
Now most of the Prayer Book Collects are translations of the old Latin Collects, but not slavish translations. To examine how the old Collects are given new expression in English shows not only the different genius of each language, but opens the words for deeper contemplation. Consider the original on which today’s Collect is modelled. The genius of the Latin Collects is their terse simplicity; the richer vocabulary of English alows for a greater nuance. To make the point obvious, here is a literal translation of the Collect: In fact I've tried to be so literal that it is actually a bad translation!

God of powers, everything that is best is from you, put into our breasts the love of thy name, and furnish in us the increase of religion, that you may nourish us with the things that are good, and by the zeal of faithfulness guard those that have been nourished.[1]

Or something like that; I’m not quite sure of the last clause. The new Roman Missal has by your constant care protect the good you have given us. But that’s not really the point. Now let us hear again the collect as we prayed it at the beginning of Mass:

Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of thy Name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of thy great mercy keep us in the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

As T. S. Eliot said of Lancelot Andrewes’ sermons, the English version of the Collect squeezes the last ounce of meaning out of the Latin words. Where the Latin said that all good is, or perhaps comes of God, the English spells it out: He is the author and giver of all good things. They not only come from him but he gives them to his people; he is the author, the one who gives with authority. By considering how the revisers of the liturgy adapted the Collect. we can go more deeply into its meaning Now I can’t be all day talking about the prose style of the Prayer Book, so we will think rather hand allow it to help us to hear today’s Epistle and Gospel with profit.
In the first place, we have acknowledged that all good comes to us from God: He is the author and giver of all good things. The first good thing we pray for is the love of God’s Name, that is, of himself and his power. Look, though at how we pray this; we say, “Graft in our hearts the love of thy name.” The original verb was insere. Now it just so happens that there are two almost identical verbs inserō in Latin; one meaning "to put in, insert," and the other meaning "to implant, or graft." Insere in the original might be either, and it must have been a conscious decision of the revisers to use “graft” rather than “insert” or “fill” as the new Roman translation has it. The use of this image from gardening seems to have been suggested by the the idea of good and evil fruit in the Epistle reading. That idea of course, is found elsewhere in the Gospels, in particular in next Sunday’s gospel where our Lord declares, by their fruits ye shall know them. and in the passage where he declares that he is the vine and we are the branches. It is though our baptism that we are grafted onto him, and that love of God is grafted into our hearts. Through this grafting we are liberated from bondage to sin and enter into the new obedience of righteousness. The contrast St Paul draws between the bondage of sin and the service of Christ is probably the source of the beautiful expression “Whose service is perfect freedom,” in the second Collect at Mattins.
The Collect goes on to pray that God, the giver of all good things, will “nourish us with all goodness,” a graft will wither if it is not nourished. But today’s collect and readings also show us where we are to look for the nourishment we need for our new obedience The words of the Collect should resonate in us as we hear the Gospel account of the Good Shepherd feeding his flock of four thousand with seven loaves and a few small fishes.
There are many interesting questions about this miracle: how it relates to the other miraculous feeding, what the numbers involved might symbolize. But while these are important, the fundamental good news of this miracle is first the abundant love of God who nourishes us with all goodness, then the gracious courtesy of God, who takes the meagre offerings we have for him, and of that produces the abundance. How often is it that we see a need, and recognize our responsibility as Christ’s people, but think our resources are too poor to do any good. At such times we must remember this miracle. Christ took the few loaves and fishes and, giving thanks to God, broke and commanded his disciples to set them before the people, and all ate ande were filled. What else should we do when we look around and say, How can anyone fulfill this need here in the wilderness, but offer what we have to the Lord and then move ahead in faith. Only by doing that can new ever learn to have faith.
We have abundant reason for faith. This Lord Jesus looks on the needs of his people and is stricken to the heart. In our translation he says “I have compassion on the multitude”, and though compassion means “suffering with,” that meaning is no longer a living metaphor; by compassion we mean no little more than “caring”; but the word here translated “have compassion” means to feel in one’s abdomen, to be struck in the heart. We know that feeling. How wonderful that through the Incarnation our Lord God should condescend to feel it, too. If he feels that way for his people, we may be sure he will give the good things needed to help them.
There is much more that can be said. For instance, another link between the Epistle and Gospel comes in the idea of obedience. Obedience runs through the Gospel, where Christ’s command that the people should sit down (though it seemed a mere arbitrary command), was followed by the reward of obedience, His bounty. But it is summer time, and though there is much to be said, there is even more to be said for brevity. So to finish, it is my hope that if you do not already, you will use the Collect every day in your personal prayers, saying it slowly and carefully so that the full meaning enters your mind and heart, and the links to the Epistle and Gospel will return to mind. I hope, too, that (if it is not already your practice) you will read and ponder the Collect and readings for next Sunday as part of your preparation.

[1] Deus virtutum, Cuius est totum quod est optimum; insere pectoribus nostris amorem Tui nominis, et praesta in nobis religionis augmentum, ut quae sunt bona nutrias, ac pietatis studio quae sunt nutrita custodias. Per Dominum. A version of this is the Collect for the XXII Sunday in Ordinary Time in the current Roman Missal.

A Sermon for Proper 11, Year A

2008-06-16T07:11:00.000-07:00

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.

_______________________________________________________
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

2008-06-16T06:39:00.000-07:00

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
_________________________________________________________
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

2008-06-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-16T06:21:00.000-07:00

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.

_________________________________________________________

*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

2008-06-16T06:13:00.000-07:00

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.

______________________________________

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

2008-06-16T05:44:00.000-07:00

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.