sermon for the feast of our lady of walsingham

In the photo above, from left to right, Fr Michael Heidt, Fr Lucas Grubbs, Fr Will, in front of the icon of our Lady of Walsingham.

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

Today is the feast of our Lady of Walsingham. Walsingham, a place mystery and healing for a thousand years, has, since its destruction at the Reformation, been largely forgotten by Christians. For those, like us, in whose consciousness Walsingham has again taken root, are apt to make of it a touchstone for a certain kind of cultural religiosity: the kind of dogged and spikey Anglo-Catholicism, which Charles Ryder’s cousin Jasper thought to be the province of “sodomites with unpleasant accents” in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Or we are prone to allow Walsingham, and more blasphemously OUR LADY under that title, to become, by a kind of subconscious synecdoche, to become the chaplaincy wing of an anachronistic, tory-ish aestheticism.

These things, of course, Walsingham is NOT. But what is it? And more importantly: who is our Lady of Walsingham? The story of our Lady of Walsingham begins with a devout Christian noblewoman named Richeldis, who lived in Walsingham in the 11th century. Richeldis was widowed early in life, and giving herself to prayer, she was rewarded in the year 1061 by an ecstatic vision of the blessed Virgin. In her vision, Richeldis was taken in the spirit to Nazareth, where Mary showed her the holy house, where Mary had made an earthly home for the child Christ. Mary invited Richeldis to build a house in Walsingham representing the holy house of Nazareth. This vision recurred three times, and according to legend, after acquiring the materials to construct the house, and while keeping prayerful vigil, Richeldis watched as the house was miraculously constructed overnight.

A wooden statue of our Lady and our Lord was placed in the holy house, and the shrine was left in the care of a community of Augustinians. It became one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in Europe – a place of healing and renewal for Christians for five hundred years. English kings visited and patronized Walsingham, including Henry III, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, Henry VI, Henry, VII, and Henry the VIII.

King Henry VIII’s capitulation to political expediency is well known. When he could not obtain a fourth annulment from the pope, Henry set himself against the Church and her defenders. And some of her staunchest defenders were the monasteries, and unfortunately for Walsingham, the shrines in their care. In 1538, the government authorities arrived in Walsingham and destroyed the priory and shrine. All that could not be carried off and sold was burned, including the ancient statue of Mary and Jesus. The monks were hanged, drawn and quartered.

And so Walsingham became a memory until the year 1897 when Pope Leo XIII, at the behest of the English faithful, blessed a new statue of our Lady of Walsingham, which was installed in the Roman church at Walsingham, now known as the Slipper Chapel. In 1931, the Anglican Vicar of Walsingham, Father Alfred Hope Patten reconstructed the Holy House, and commissioned the remaking of the statue of our Lady, based on the image on the seal of the medieval priory. Ever since, Walsingham has again become a place of pilgrimage, of healing and renewal for Christians the world over.

That’s a brief sketch of the HISTORY of Walsingham; but what does it mean? As TS Elliott said in his great poem “Little Gidding” – “there are other places / which are also the world’s end.” Walsingham is, at its best, like every other locus of the sacred: a minor apocalypse, a place of theophany; a liminal space on the border between time and eternity. Walsingham is about Mary, and because it is about Mary we hold honor it as sacred, sacred because of HER sanctity – because all generations call her blessed, because the Almighty has kindly regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden, and exalted her humility and meekness. And while the Gospel is not about Mary, Mary is ALL about the Gospel.

Because of the shrine of the Holy House at Walsiingham, it has been called “England’s Nazareth”. And in the memory of the holy house at Nazareth, we are mindful of Mary’s unique vocation in the economy of salvation. We are mindful that Mary made a home for Jesus. In the holy house at Nazareth, Mary held Jesus close to her heart. There she guarded and nurtured him. There she contemplated the supernatural otherness of her divine Son, allowing his strangeness to begin to outpace her preconceptions about the vocation of Messiah. There Mary began the terrible journey of faith that would lead her to the very slopes of Golgotha, the highest, thinnest pinnacle of createdness, where her only Son would be transfixed, alone, beyond her reach, suffocating under the weight of the world’s sin – before the justice of God and the calumny of men.

Our Lady of Walsingham made a home for Jesus. She made herself vulnerable to the affliction of knowing Jesus, of constantly following after his receding strangeness, never abandoning hope, but daily enfolding him anew in her arms. Therein lies Mary’s greatness: the faith, hope, and love, that HOLDS ONTO JESUS, even when he is laid in her arms as a corpse, slain to take away the sins of the world.

We know Walsngham therefore to be a symbol for our Lady herself – who wrapped Jesus in the intimacy of her own body for nine months, who accepted the vocation of afflction for the sake of the redemption, life and glory Jesus would give to the world by dying. She accepted it though it meant a sword would pierce her own soul too (Lk. 2.35), and she persevered in love to the very end.

If our encounters with Walsingham, with the Holy House, with our Lady herself, are to be fruitful, if we are to find in them – and in HER – a pilgrimage destination, a locus of healing and renwal, then we must encounter them and encounter her as pilgrims, becoming vulnerable to the affliction of transience in the service of Jesus Christ. For at Walsingham, and in Mary, we find ourselves on the frontier of creation, in the borderland “between promise and fulfillment” (Rowan Williams), in the pathway of grace and the interplay of familiarity and strangeness. Here we stand with Mary, our Lady of Walsingham, malleable in God’s hands, subject to the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, and by grace with our Lady’s prayer on our lips: “be it done to me according to your word” – giving ourselves to the conception of Jesus within our own hearts and homes, and discerning, with her, and we may pray JOINING the angelic choir, heralding the advent of the Savior: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth: peace, goodwill toward men.”

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

sermon for pentecost 19 / proper 20

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

In today’s Epistle reading from Philippians, St. Paul shows us what communion with Jesus is meant to be. He says: “to live is Christ, and to die is gain”. What a depth of devotion lies behind those nine simple words: to live is Christ, and to die is gain. To be able to say that with honesty and with integrity would mean nothing less than deification – inextricable and persistent communion with God.

Similarly, today’s Psalm opens with an apparently innocuous couple of verses: “I will exalt you , O God my King, / and bless your Name forever and ever. Every day will I bless you / and praise your Name forever and ever.” How easy it is to allow those verses to pass through our minds and over our lips without notice, reading in them nothing but the platitudes we have grown accustomed to finding in the Bible. But in truth, these two verses disclose a breathtaking depth of faith. An honest engagement with the full significance of this statement should leave us convicted and penitent. Can I honestly say to God “Every day will I bless you”? To ask oneself this question can be to disclose within oneself the secret preconditions we have for our praise and thanksgiving. Can I really say with honesty “Every day will I bless you”? What about days of suffering? What about the days of listlessness or dissatisfaction? What about days when I simply wake up on the wrong side of the bed? What about the days when God vindicates your enemies, or appoints a worm to attack your shade tree?

Most of us are capable of praising God under certain circumstances, but who can praise him “forever and ever”? Who can bless him “every day”? We are rather more apt to set ourselves up as the judges of God, and the acceptability of his purposes; and our standard is the degree to which God conforms himself to OUR circumstances and desires. I am mindful of St. Cyprian of Carthage who, on the day he was informed by his captors that he was to be beheaded because he was a Christian, replied simply “Thanks be to God”. Who has that kind of faith in the promises of God?

It is this kind of faith that is the wellspring of Paul’s conviction that “to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” It is the conviction that flows from an integrated personhood united with Jesus Christ in the intimacy of a real and affective love for him, always remembering that if we love him, we will keep his commandments (Jn. 14.15). When we come to see ourselves – our lives – as an integrated whole, presented to God in union with the acceptable sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, then we are enabled to say with him: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23.46), we are able to look forward, with Paul, to “fruitful labor” or to the Christian obedience of death itself. When we unite ourselves to the sacrifice of Jesus, we become pure, redemptive power in the hands of God, vessels of his grace, and the lights of the world in our generation (cf. BCP Preface of a Saint 1).

But through our union with Christ and our love for him, not only are we granted a mystical objectivity with respect to ourselves – not only, in other words, do we find our true home in heaven and our true SELVES in God – but we also discover one another in Christ. In him we find ourselves able, as for the first time, to LOVE our fellow human beings – we are enabled to reach out with true empathy to the world, to the poor, to those who suffer, who are alone. It is only in Christ that our indifference, our cynicism, or even our do-gooding truly become PHILANTHROPIA, in the literal sense of LOVE for our fellow-man. In Christ alone our dispositions towards one another are transformed into true self-donation, true LOVE.

And this is why, in today’s reading, St. Paul locates his obedience not merely in God’s will, but in God’s will FOR HIS BROTHERS AND SISTERS. He is able to say (in faith, with conviction): “[for me] to remain in the flesh is more necessary on YOUR account”. And therefore Paul submits his life and labor to God, loving the love of God in the Philippians, pouring himself out, as he says, “for YOUR progress and joy in the faith, so that in me YOU may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus”. Jesus – the CROSS of Jesus – has become the axis around which Paul’s relationship to the Philippians turns. His self-possession is subsumed in his love for them and his obedience to God in Christ.

And that is God’s desire for each of us. That’s what HAPPENS to us when we discover our true selves in the sacred heart of the Crucified: God grants us a spiritual objectivity; we are enabled to see ourselves, our entire lives, as an integrated whole. When I find myself in God, I find that I have a PURPOSE and a HOME. I find that I was made for God, and because I was made for God, who is Love, I simultaneously find my meaning in God’s own self-gift on behalf of his children, my brothers and sisters. And so that too becomes my meaning: love for all creation, saying with Christ “Father, forgive them,” and desiring with Paul that “in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ”.

This is the exclusive gift of God in his only Son. It is what it means to obey the voice that finds us idle in the marketplace and whispers in our hearts “Follow me” – holding on in faith to this man as he toils up the steep ascent, burdened with the cross. And this is the test of our vocation: discovering within ourselves the voice of song, even on Golgotha – ESPECIALLY on Golgotha – “I will exalt you, O God my King, and bless your Name forever and ever” – and pondering here, in God’s most marvelous work, his kindness and compassion, and the glorious splendor of his majesty (cf. Psalm 145.5).

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

sermon for pentecost pentecost 16 / trintiy 15

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

 

“Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

 

Today’s readings reveal to us what it is to be a disciple of Jesus, a member of his Body. In this section of his letter to the Romans, St. Paul exhorts them (and us) to the “renewal of our minds” and to the personal transformation that is only possible in Jesus Christ, and through his power. This renewal and transformation he notes, on the one hand, forecloses the possibility of conformity to “this world” – because it means we no longer seek or find our identity in secular categories like “democrat” or “republican” or “gay” or “straight” or even “black” or “white”. Rather, now, we are to find our identity – who we ARE as persons – in Jesus Christ, and through him, in one another. And in so doing, Paul says, we will “prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect”. And because none is good, or acceptable, or perfect “but God alone” (Mrk. 10.18), therefore “proving what is his will” – namely our own conformity to his Son, and our reconciliation with him – is, in the end, the same thing as our transformation and the renewal of our minds, and the same thing as that which “is good and acceptable and perfect”.

 

But this process of transformation and renewal seldom happens as we expect it to do. And in today’s Gospel reading we see why: in short, as Paul says elsewhere, because “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor. 1.27), and because “He is not impressed by the might of a horse; he has no pleasure in the strength of a man / But the Lord has pleasure in those who fear him, in those who await his gracious favor” (Ps. 147.11f). This means that the avenues of fulfillment and vindication which we are prone to seek in an earthly way of operating, lead only to disappointment and failure. But by contrast, the way of the cross, which seemed like failure to all who saw it (Mary and the Apostles) or who saw it coming (Judas), was really the instrument of forgiveness, reconciliation, peace and communion.

 

In today’s Gospel reading Jesus begins to reveal the way of the cross to his disciples. He begins to teach them about the divine, ironic road to life and peace. He begins “to show them “that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things… and be killed” (Mat. 16.21). And Peter shows how difficult it is to shake off the secular economy of power and pleasure. Peter, who not five minutes before had confessed Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God, now has the audacity to “rebuke” the Son of the living God – which only goes to show how difficult it is to accept the Gospel. Peter says: “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” But of course it did happen to Jesus: it had to happen to Jesus. There was no other way in the world to “prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Because when perfect love enters a world grown old in his divisions and self-seeking and concupiscence and violence, perfect love becomes a Victim. There is no other way. The Son of Man MUST go to Jerusalem; he MUST suffer many things; he MUST be killed.

 

But no less MUST he, “on the third day rise”. Because the way of the cross is the way of LIFE. So we see why the peace given by the Lord “passes understanding” – and why the joy he gives transcends circumstances: because it’s a new kind of joy, a new kind of peace: it runs right through every circumstance, it abides in the heart of the believer and runs alike through tribulation and exultation, through trial and through triumph. And its material condition, its LOCATION, is the Body of Jesus Christ. It’s the kind of peace and the kind of joy that obtains equally in the Lord as we sweats blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, in his anguished cry “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me…” (Luke22.42 & Matt.26.39), as well as after the Resurrection in his almost playful greeting to the women: “Be joyful! And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him” (Matt. 28.9).

 

The Lord himself describes the way of the cross, this sacred inversion of secular expectation, in the Lord’s long discourse at the end of John’s Gospel: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.” And St. Paul picks up this image of the joy of pregnancy turning to the travail of delivery, and becoming again the joy of new birth. Paul says: “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.  We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved” (Rom. 8.21-24).

 

What we must DO, therefore, is to give ourselves unreservedly to Jesus Christ – to say “yes” to him, whatever this may mean for us, even if it should mean suffering and death – trusting all the time that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness” (Rom. 8.26). This is what it means to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Rom. 12.1). This also means the conformity of ourselves, our understanding, our moral life, and our potential, to the Catholic Church, which is the Body of Christ. This is how we give ourselves to one another: its how we are reconciled to God and with one another. So St. Paul says in today’s reading from Romans: “we, though many, are one Body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”

 

In the Communion of the Church, then, we will find the Cross, and we will find the joy of the Lord and the peace that passes understanding – through our marinating in the Word of God, and our inhabitation of the narrative of salvation in the sacramental life of the Church. Jeremiah speaks of this when he says: “Thy words were found, and I ate them, and thy words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart; for I am called by thy name” (Jer. 15.16). It begins with prayer, and with a willingness to obey Jesus Christ, whatever the cost.

 

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