All Souls' Day Homily

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.

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

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’.

A Sermon for Proper 11, Year A

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

Sunday, 15 June 2008
Proper 11, Year A

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________________________________________
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.

Sermon for The Sunday of the Passion, 2007

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

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

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

______________________________________

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

Introduction

Sermonets, Sermons, and Homilies

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

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

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

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

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