from gregory of nyssa's commentary on the canticle of canticles

It is the angels to whom the Gospel precept compares us. Be like unto men who await their master returning from the marriage feast. They awaited the return of the Lord from the marriage feast, keeping close to the gates of heaven, constantly watching for Him so they would be ready to open the gates for the Lord as He came from His wedding feast to enter into supracosmic blessedness, 'like the bridegroom who leaves his wedding chamber,' after having united Himself, in the regeneration of the sacraments, to the virgin who had prostituted herself on idols -- that is, with us, having restored our nature in all its virginal integrity. The wedding feast is over, the Church is united to the Word (for according to the word of St. John, 'he who has the bride is the bridegroom') and has been admitted into the wedding chamber of the sacraments; the angels await the return of the King, raising up the Church to share in His own blessedness.

holy cross sermon for pentecost 4 / proper 8 / year b / june 28 2009

Power made perfect in weakness.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today’s Gospel reading treats of Jesus raising a twelve year old girl from the dead. The passage begins with the girl’s father coming to Jesus and beseeching him on her behalf: “seeing Jesus, [the little girl’s father] fell at [Jesus’] feet, and besought him, saying, ‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live’” (vv. 22-23).

This passage teaches us several things. First, it shows us something about prayer. In prayer, we come before the Lord, and we ask him for things, just as the father of the little girl has done. Moreover, the father of the girl shows us a kind of prayer that has transcended superficiality in one important respect: he is not praying for himself and his own needs.

Perhaps the most superficial kind of prayer is the kind where we ask God for a million dollars – something we think we want. But a soul that has been cleansed, to some degree, from self-seeking, will turn first toward the Lord, seeking him for his own sake, and then for the sake of others. And we see this in the father of the girl: he comes to the Lord in supplication, and he comes because of his love for his daughter.

We should also notice that the man comes to the Lord BELIEVING IN THE POWER OF THE LORD TO DO WHAT HE ASKS. Prayer must begin with faith in Christ: believing that Jesus is who he says he is – namely, that he is the Lord. And being the Lord means that he has power over every circumstance – both our own, and the circumstances of those whom we love.

We must learn to ask the Lord for good things, and we must ask him out of faith in him, and out of love. We know that the Lord’s own desire is to give us good things – indeed to give us EVERY good thing. Jesus said, “If you… know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7.11). Why then do we so often find ourselves bereft of goodness? Saint James answers that question: “You do not have, because you do not ask” (James 4.2). We must learn to ask the Lord for GOOD THINGS.

What are good things? In short, as the father asks for his little girl: that we may be made well and live. Good things are things that pertain to life – and not simply the humdrum life of the world, but things that pertain to the kind of abundant life that is ours in Christ. We must learn to ask him for things like healing, contrition, forgiveness, wisdom, discernment, prayer (pray for the gift of prayer!), joy in doing his will, the peace of God, and that we might be made vessels of his grace.

While Jesus is on his way to the house of the little girl, “there came from the… house some who said, ‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?’” (v. 35). There is a worldly vantage point, and there is a heavenly vantage point. To the eyes of the world, many situations seem hopeless. But we should always be mindful of the fact that “with God, nothing will be impossible” (Luke 1.37), and that Jesus tells us “if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, `Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you” (Matt. 17.20).

And so we find the Lord exhorting the faith of the girl’s father, who has just been informed by the clamor of the world that the situation is hopeless. Jesus ignores the clamor of the world. The passage says, “Ignoring what they said, Jesus said to the [man], ‘Do not fear, only believe,’” (v. 36).

When they get to the house, the house is filled with the same clamor of hopelessness, the kind of noise that does not come from faith in the power of God, but in the inevitability of the natural. Jesus says to them, “Why do you make a tumult and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And those who have no faith in his power laugh at him.

Very often Christians encounter what seem like hopeless situations. And often the Lord, in his providence, allows situations to seem hopeless so that we might call out to him in faith and so draw closer to him, and secondly so that he might make his power known. It is easy to give in, in the face of what we think is the inevitability of the natural. The situation is hopeless; end of story. But the Lord desires us to bring our hopelessness and fear to him in prayer – firstly so that we may be drawn more closely into his presence and his care, and so that he can manifest his power.

In 2 Corinthians, Saint Paul tells the brethren about a troubling and difficult situation – he doesn’t say exactly what it was, but he does say that he prayed repeatedly to the Lord about it, and the Lord spoke to Paul’s heart: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12.9).

So in the Gospel, the little girl is dead to the world, but to God she is sleeping. St. Bede says that sub specie aeternitatis, from the divine vantage point, “both the soul was living, and the flesh was resting, [in order] to rise again”. Jesus quiets the clamor of the faithless crowd: he puts them all outside, and taking the girl’s father and mother, along with Peter, James, and John, he enters the room, takes the girl by the hand, and says to her, “Little girl, I say to you, arise” (v. 41). “And immediately the girl got up and walked” (v. 42).

The power of the Lord extends over the whole creation, and over every circumstance, even death. He desires to give us good things. Very often we do not receive good things for the simple reason that we do not ask for them. At other times, we are unable to see or to understand what is truly good. For example, we may pray for money, but God may know that were we to get it, we would rest in the security of our wealth rather than in his power. “For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses himself?” (Luke 9.25).

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2.9). God has unutterably good things in store for us. And we can begin to receive them even now, this side of Paradise. We have only to trust him, to love him, and to beseech him out of trust and love. “You do not have, because you do not ask.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

'that catholic show' -- priests

holy cross sermon for easter 5 / may 10 2009

Our Lady of light and life, pray for us! (From here.)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today’s readings set before us the great mystery at the center of our faith: the mystery of love, and the great commandment of Christ: that we love one another as he has loved us.

There is perhaps a seeming incongruity in the commandment to love: namely that it is a commandment. How can love be undertaken in obedience? This apparent incongruity arises from our aptitude to misconstrue love as a sentiment, as something purely touching our affections, our FEELINGS.

But while love does indeed touch our feelings, while it does dispose us to feel a certain way toward the object of our love, yet this feeling is a symptom of love and does not constitute love itself.

Indeed the love that is enjoined on us as Christians persists through whatever we feel. And we know that our feelings can be fickle, that we are prone variously and at times to feelings of elation, satisfaction, disappointment, despondency, and everything else. Yet obedience to Christ’s commandment to love is possible no matter how we feel. In the Epistle reading, St. John says “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (v. 16).

We learn what true love is through the contemplation of Christ. When we consider Jesus, his life and his death for us, we come to know what it is truly to love. We come to see the connection between love and life – that love is the gift of life; and likewise how “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death” (v. 14) – and so why it is that “any one who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (v. 15). Because love is the gift of life for the beloved. “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us.”

So likewise we see the reason for the Church’s otherwise puzzlingly dogged devotion to LIFE wherever she finds it, her persistent proclamation of the dignity of every human person, no matter who they are, no matter how good or wicked, no matter how sick or malformed, and no matter how apparently hopeless a person’s situation may be. The unchanging truth of the Gospel, to which we bear witness, is that every person has a God-given dignity, integrity, and beauty, and that the gift of life is to be cherished and defended wherever we find it, from conception until natural death. Because “by this we know love,” that God has given us life – even the life of his only and eternal Son.

Here too we see the Church’s lament at the cultural situation of our day, where we find love having grown cold, and where all to often we see a cynical disregard for the gift of life and the dignity of the human person. Before we congratulate ourselves on being enlightened, modern people, we should remember that there have been more people killed in war in the last century than in all the wars of the rest of human history put together. Mothers and fathers kill their own children in the womb. Young people speak of murder with truly horrifying nonchalance. Movies, music, and magazines celebrate death and violence. Fashionable clothing is emblazoned with skulls and images of violence and invective. Our culture begins to think of euthanasia as a convenient way to rid ourselves of the elderly and the infirm, the lives of whom we have so devalued, or who have so devalued their own lives, as to be unable to see them as anything but problems to be solved by death. We have a criminal justice system that is very often more interested in getting convictions and being “tough on crime” than it is concerned with honestly pursuing justice. Right here in Dallas, thanks to the efforts of our District Attorney, Craig Watkins, over 20 men have been exonerated through DNA evidence that was not available – or that was simply not admitted – at the time when cases went to trial. Some of them spent 20 years or more in prison for crimes they did not commit. Some were on death row. How many innocent people have we executed over the years? Why does this not bother us more?

“But if any one has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth.” (1 John 3.17f).

In order truly to love, one must cultivate an open heart; one must come to Christ with an open heart. The Lord spoke through the prophet Ezekiel, saying that in the days of Messiah, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36.26). Jesus Christ is the one whose heart was truly open, the one who loved God perfectly and completely, who held on to the promises of God, to his eternal communion with the Father, no matter what the world hurled at him, through slander and abuse, through derision and scorn, through being scourged and beaten and nailed to a tree, through his three hours of bleeding and suffocation, Jesus showed us what loving communion with the Father looks like; he showed us the Father’s gift of life, and he empowers us to receive and to offer that same divine life, to ransom the world from its enthrallment to suffering and corruption and death. Through his denunciation and the heartbreaking cries of “Crucify him! Crucify him!” – even as he was being nailed up, the Lord announced the dignity of human nature, and his gift of divine life, in the conviction of his prayer, “Father, forgive them.”

Through the oblation of the cross, the gift of divine life was poured out on all flesh. That is what the gift of the Holy Spirit means – the gift of God’s own inner life, the gift of eternal and mutual communion-in-love of Father and Son. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. I will not leave you desolate; [but] I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” (Jn. 14.15ff).

In Christ alone we not only learn what love is, but we receive the power to love others, as God has loved us, and to bear witness, in our own time and place, to the love and mercy of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

holy cross sermon for easter 4 / may 3 2009

The above 4th century image is from the Catacombs of Peter and Marcellinus in Rome. It depicts Jesus with the iconographic attributes of Orpheus -- the Phrygian cap, the lyre, etc.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In today’s Gospel lesson, the Lord tells the apostles that he is the “good shepherd”. The idea of the good shepherd has been a very popular one in the Christian imagination, almost from the very beginning. There are very ancient murals and mosaics from the catacombs depicting the Lord in this way. Indeed many of the ancient Romans saw a reflection, however pale, of Christ in the myth of Orpheus; and many scholars and art historians have noticed strong affinities between the iconography of Christ and of Orpheus. In at least one fourth century mural from the catacombs, the Lord is depicted AS Orpheus.

Its little wonder. In mythology, Orpheus was a great poet and singer. So enticing was his voice that even wild animals were tamed at the sound of it, and would follow him with docility. Perhaps the greatest part of the Orpheus myth was the story of his descent into Hades in search of his wife Eurydice, who had been bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus is said to have secured Eurydice’s release from the dead by the power of his singing; but he lost her again because he failed to obey the condition laid down by the gods that he not look back at her until they had again reached the land of the living.

Its no wonder that at the dawn of Roman Christianity, in the Church’s earliest days, pagans who converted to faith in Christ discerned something Orphic in the Gospel narratives. In the passage just before today’s Gospel reading, for example, the Lord introduces the figure of the sheep, the shepherd, and the sheepfold, and he says, “The sheep hear [the Shepherd’s] voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice” (Jn. 10.3-4).

The Lord is here referring to the experience of spiritual awakening and illumination. Jesus is saying that those who belong to him, those who are on the side of love, as he is love; those whose hearts are open, as his heart is open; those who find themselves awakened to the thirst for God – they recognize in Jesus, in his person, the object of their most profound desire. “Cor ad cor loquitur” – “heart speaking to heart” – or as the Psalmist puts it, deep calling to deep in the thundering of God’s cataracts (Ps. 42.7).

Christ’s song entices those whose hearts are open, those who have made their hearts vulnerable to the wounding of love. We know the voice of the Lord to be the call of love because of what Jesus goes on to say in today’s reading: “I am the good Shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (Jn. 10.11). As he says elsewhere – a verse we all know well – there is no greater love than “that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15.13).

After Jesus is betrayed, as he stands before Pilate, as he is about to lay down his life for his friends, he returns to the theme of his own hearing his voice. Pilate asks Jesus whether he is a king, and Jesus replies, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I have come into the world: to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice” (Jn. 18.38). And Pilate, in a moment of world-weary and hard-hearted cynicism, asks that famous rhetorical question, a question that echoes down the corridors of our own self-consciousness: “What is truth?”

The devotees of Orpheus knew better than Pilate. The story of Orpheus’ pursuit of Eurydice into the land of the dead speaks of a fundamental intuition in the heart of man: that the hold of death over the beloved devastates love’s peace – that love rages against the power of death, love’s most bitter enemy. But an air of melancholy hangs over the story of Orpheus, because he fails; in the end he loses Eurydice forever. Orpheus was under the power of the gods, and the power of the gods proved stronger than Orpheus’ love for Eurydice.

But when Christ descends to the dead in search of his Bride, in search of humanity, he descends there as the Lord of Lords, the one “to whom all things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth bow and obey” (BCP prayer at Unction), the one who startles the nations, and at whose voice kings shut their mouths (cf. Isaiah 52.15). Unlike Orpheus, Christ is not compelled by the power of the gods, but rather announces that their dominion has been destroyed by the power of the Father’s love, the victory of Christ crucified.[1]

This is what the Lord is talking about in today’s Gospel reading: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep…. I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.”

Finally, it must be said, that unlike the story of Orpheus, which was mere myth, the Gospel is true. It is about a man, a person. It is about Jesus Christ, who is real, who really died, and really rose; who is alive forever, and who calls to our hearts. This is why it is so important to cultivate prayer, to practice prayer daily. Because prayer is the language of the heart, the place in which we listen for the Lord’s voice; as the Lord revealed to the Seer of the Apocalypse: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him...” (Rev. 3.20).

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

---

[1] This is the meaning of the otherwise obscure passage from 1 Peter 3.18-20: “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.” “The spirits in prison” are the evil spirits (i.e. the gods) of the underworld, bound by God in Tartarus for their disobedience “in former times”. Cf. 2 Peter 2.4.

america

Its sometimes helpful to remind ourselves that America is not the Kingdom of God. As much as I love it, and as grateful as I am to have been born in this nation, it is not eternal, and it will pass away. Some parts of it already are. Like Detroit.

Go through these haunting images from photographer James D. Griffioen.

holy cross sermon for easter 2009

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Then Simon Peter came… and went into the tomb; he saw the linen cloths lying, and the napkin, which had been on his head, not lying with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

Alleluia, Christ is risen.

Today the Church sets before us the Father’s seal of approval on the work of his Son. Time and again in the Gospels, Jesus goes around doing things and saying things that his disciples do not understand. And the chief object of their misunderstanding, and OUR misunderstanding, is what Jesus did on the cross. And it should not be surprising that the cross should be so misunderstood. St. Paul said: “we preach Christ crucified, a scandal to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1.23). And the Gospel of John records, with reference to the things relating to the Lord’s suffering and death: “His disciples did not understand this at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that this had been written of him and had been done to him” (Jn. 12.16).

This is indeed the experience of most of us. Very often we fail, or we refuse to understand that “it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead” (Acts 17.3). This is the pattern of our lives and the hardness of our hearts. We go through life, and when things are fine, when we have our health, when we have our family and our friends, when we are provided for physically and financially, we tend not to be much interested in recollection. We have a kind of meta-satisfaction with our satisfaction. We are content with the contentment we get from our circumstances. And when suffering comes, as it inevitably does, as it MUST, when we hear from our doctors some dreadful diagnosis, or when the phone rings in the middle of the night with some horrible news, when we have to watch a loved one slowly drift beyond our reach into death – then our tendency is to wall our hearts off from the recollection that Jesus said only comes by the Holy Spirit: “it was necessary for the Christ to suffer…. AND TO RISE FROM THE DEAD.”

And we do not like to remember that “A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master; it is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If they have called the master of the house [a devil], how much more will they malign those of his household” (Matt. 10.24). We do not like to remember what the Lord said as he was being led away to be crucified: “…do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children…. For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23.28ff). We do not like to remember that the Lord said that “whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14.27).

It is a natural human tendency, a kind of defense mechanism, that we harden our hearts in the face of suffering and death. A kind of Darwinian instinct for the purpose of self-preservation, and sometimes the pain is simply too much to bear. But there was one who did not harden his heart. There was one who refused NOT to love God, who was willing to be afflicted and abased, to be misunderstood, mocked, derided, cursed, defiled; there was one who loved God, who believed in him to the bitter end; one who would not let go of his intimate communion with the Father, no matter what the world threw at him, no matter how much he was denounced as a lunatic, or a blasphemer.

And today we see the Father’s seal of approval on the determined love of Jesus Christ: the empty tomb. For God will not abandon his beloved to Hades, nor let his Holy One see corruption. The communion-in-love of God and man – the communion which Jesus Christ shows us, which he himself IS, and which he makes possible for us, is a communion in love that cannot remain in the tomb, because that communion is the will of God, and he will see his will carried into effect. He loves us, he desires us, he wants to be with us, to meet all our needs and to fulfill all of our desires – that is his will. And the openness of hearts to the carrying-out of that will means openness to affliction in the world, but it also means our inhabitation of God’s omnipotence, that we become a part of his victory over every unclean thing, every evil. It means an empty tomb, and not just Christ’s, but – through the power of God in Christ – it means the emptiness of our own tombs too.

The Holy Father recently said, “... St. Paul makes clear how decisive is the importance that he attributes to the resurrection of Jesus. In this event, in fact, is the solution to the problem that the drama of the cross implies. On its own, the cross could not explain Christian faith; on the contrary, it would be a tragedy, a sign of the absurdity of being.” The empty tomb is the lens through which we can understand the cross. “His disciples did not understand [these things] at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that this had been written of him and had been done to him.”

Then the disciples went in to the empty tomb, and they saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.