Saturday, December 31, 2016
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Friday, December 23, 2016
CHRISTMAS
Hebrews 1:1-12 * John
1:1-14
On
Christmas, this Feast of the Nativity, the hidden revelation we celebrate on
the Feast of the Annunciation becomes visible.
"Then the babe, the
world's Redeemer
First revealed his sacred
face
Evermore and evermore."
I
never tire of the prologue to St.
John’s
It is impossible to
overemphasize the Incarnation. Many heresies come about by overemphasis on one little part of
Christian truth at the expense of the rest of it. This cannot happen to the
doctrine of the Incarnation, for it contains all of the truth in itself. This
truth, that Christ is God the Son come to us in the fullness both of His Divine
Nature, and of His human nature, is the truth, the central doctrine, of
Christianity. Take it away and we have nothing. Keep it, and we have
everything. No wonder St. John
The doctrine of the Incarnation
contains all of the truth of Christianity. The full revelation of the Trinity
becomes necessary for God is the Son, and God is the Father; but the Son is not
the Father. And the Son is present with us by the Holy Spirit. But, the Son and
the Father are not the Holy Spirit. Yet, every Jew always knew that there is
only One God- sh’mai Israel
The truth of the Incarnation tells us
that we are sinners, lost because we are lost in sin. The light shines not
against lesser light, but in the very darkness itself, a darkness that neither
understands nor can solve the problem of this bothersome light. The darkness
comprehended it not, the darkness into which we have fallen, and in which we
were blind. Even many of the very chosen people themselves received not this
Light; no wonder then that most of the world cannot receive Him either. Those
who can receive Him do so because they face the light. This light hurts our
eyes at first; for it tells the truth, the truth about ourselves which we
wanted never to see nor hear.
The writer to the Hebrews wastes no
time in telling us that this Man, the Son of God who is the very icon of the
Father, in Whom the glory of God is perfectly seen, has purged our sins. The
Gospel we read in the second Mass of Christmas is from St. Luke. In it the words
of the angels are heard, “Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace,
goodwill toward men.” What peace is this? Is it some magic that makes sinful
and fallen men stop waging war, as if the cessation of violence alone is enough
to define peace? Is not the greater war shown to us in scripture? That God has
a right to wage war upon man because of our sins? As early as the story of
Noah’s flood we see that God accepted the sacrifice of Noah after the flood- a
sacrifice that pointed to Christ’s own death on the cross as did all the
sacrifices. We are told that God hung up His bow as a sign in the heavens. He
hung up what we call the rainbow, His bow of warfare, and promised not to
destroy mankind from the face of the earth. This is the peace of which the
angels speak. The sacrifice that had been offered in the story of Noah, after
he came out of the ark, was only a type
of the cross, the shadow of which hung already, over a newborn infant Son lying
asleep in a manger. This night is answered by "the night in which he was
betrayed." Only by his cross, by his sacrifice, is peace made between God
and fallen mankind.
“Nails, spear shall pierce
Him through
a cross be borne for me
for you,
hail, hail the Word made
flesh,
the Babe the Son of Mary.”
All of the events to come, right up to
His dying and rising again are foretold in these words of the angels. We do not
see goodwill among men, as some misinterpret the angelic words, but
goodwill toward men, from God. The whole revelation that God is Love is
thus given to us, also, by the Incarnation. This is the great gift of love,
that He would give His own Son; He offers the sacrifice that He would not allow
our father Abraham to make. Abraham was ready to obey God, and prepared to
offer his son, his only son Isaac whom he loved, upon whom had been laid the
wood of the altar while they had climbed Mount Moriah
Abraham was spared this terrible agony
of slaying his beloved son, and God used this dramatic means to teach His
people that He would never accept the sacrifice of their children, such
sacrifices as the pagans made to what were no gods. But, God in His love gives
His only begotten Son Whom He loves. This is the goodwill toward men.
This goodwill was seen that night in the manger in Bethlehem
In the Incarnation, now revealed, we
see that God would call a people to be His children, adopting them in the very
Person of His only begotten Son; for as St.
Paul
We see also that He would establish
His Church, and give to it His Word and Sacraments for the salvation of all who
believe the Gospel. St. John, in opening his First Epistle, tells us that he
had been among those whose hands had handled, and whose eyes had seen the Word
of Life; and he goes on to tell us that we too are called to fellowship with
God and His Son Jesus Christ through the invitation of the Apostles. St. John
In his classic, On the Incarnation,
St. Athanasius said that while Christ walked the earth as man, He still filled
the heavens as God. The Council Of Chalcedon taught us that He is fully God,
being of the same nature as that of the Father, and fully human, being of the
same human nature as ourselves, like us in every way except for sin, having
human nature from his mother Mary, the Virgin, the Theotokos- which means that God the Son has a
mother; and he is "like us in every respect apart from sin."
None of this is explained to us. How
is it that God is made man, that the Word is made flesh and that He dwelt among
us, that we beheld His glory? We do not really know all the answers- which is
part of the revelation. God cannot be figured out, dissected and explained. He
cannot be understood, analyzed and described. But, He can be known through Christ, the Only Mediator
Who Himself is God and Man.
How do sacraments work? How is bread
and wine made into the Real Presence of the Living Christ? How does water, with
the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, give new life when
applied to human flesh? How can priests, themselves men, absolve sinners? How
did Christ’s death take away the sins of the world? How does His resurrection
save us from death? If we needed to know the answers in some mechanical way,
then salvation would be reserved only for people far too clever for the likes
of me; people who are capable of much that is beyond the greatest achievements
of science. The point is to know that it is beyond our understanding,
because we are not God. We know not the how of it. But, what we do not
understand we can know; we can know the love of God shown to us in the coming
of Christ into the world. “For God so loved the world,” and that is the why
of it.
I will close with words written in
1765, by Christopher Smart, words which made it into our hymnal, and which work
equally well for this Feast of Christmas and also for the Feast of the
Annunciation which was nine moths ago:
O Most Mighty!
O Most Holy!
Far beyond the seraph’s
thought,
Art Thou then so mean and
lowly
As unheeded prophets
taught?
O the magnitude of
meekness!
Worth from worth immortal
sprung;
O the strength of infant
weakness,
if eternal is so young.
God all bounteous, all
creative,
Whom no ills from good
dissuade,
Is Incarnate and a native
Of the very world He
made.
Now unto God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, be
ascribed, as is most justly due, all might, majesty, dominion, power and glory,
now and forever. Amen
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Saturday, December 03, 2016
Second Sunday in Advent
Romans
15:4-13 * Luke 21:25-33
The opening of today’s Epistle and the last line from today’s
Gospel are the seeds of today’s Collect.
Together, they explain why this Sunday has come to be called “Bible
Sunday”.
That Collect speaks of the obligation we each have concerning
the Holy Scriptures: we are to “hear
them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them….” Then, the Collect suggests, comes the work of
the Holy Spirit as He uses those Scriptures within us to plant and grow the patience
and comfort that keep us upon, and help us along, the path to eternal life in
Jesus Christ our Lord.
Also, in the Epistle and Gospel for this day we find that
hope to be what our Prayer Book calls “the sure and certain hope of the
resurrection unto eternal life.” This
“hope” is not a mere wish for something that may never happen. When we examine the meaning of “hope” as it
relates to “faith”, we see that the Scriptures clarify their meaning by adding
the words “sure and certain.” This
important qualifying phrase comes from the Epistle to the Hebrews:
"Wherein God, willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us: Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.”[1]
"Wherein God, willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us: Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.”[1]
Thus we see that the Bible does not separate “hope” from “faith” and
never separated either of these two from “charity”. These three virtues grow together and hope
depends on faith. Hope believes, faith
works, and charity labors.
We find our sure and certain hope in the word of
God. Faith grows within us when we hear
that particular voice, the voice of God that we discern so clearly as he speaks
to us now within the Scriptures. Written
so long ago, when they are spoken or read God Himself speaks to us in the
present. Never are they worn out or
obsolete or irrelevant.
A common misconception is that the Bishops of the Christian
Church assembled in the city of Nicea
Something similar is true of the notion that those same
Bishops set out to prune the Bible of important books they did not wish the
Christian people to know about. The
truth is that the Bishops at Nicea did not decide which books then in
circulation were actually Scripture and which were not. All those Bishops did
was to affirm in unity of mind – and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit --
that the books the Church already perceived as the word of God
were, indeed, just that.
The process of recognizing the books of the Old Testament
and the New was what we might call the vox populi, the “voice of the
people”, that is, the common consensus of the household of the faith. The ancient Jewish people had discovered,
over time, which books spoke to them in what they recognized as the distinctive
voice of God; these books became the Jewish Bible which is now our Old Testament.
In the earliest days of the Church this Old Testament
formed the only Canon of scripture. But,
by the early years of the Second Century, additional books had
already been received into Christian congregations and there quoted as the word
of God. These twenty seven books eventually formed additional
and final portion of the Canon of Scripture, that we know as the New Testament.
In some places a few questions were raised about II
Peter, Jude and Revelation. But over
time skepticism about them disappeared.
In a few places some people thought that a work called The Shepherd
of Hermas might be part of the Canon of the Church’s Scriptures but it
failed the prime test for acceptance.
That question was, as it had been for the ancient Jews before,
did or did not the people of God recognize the voice of God in this book? In
this book, as in the other books that ultimately were not recognized as part of
the Canon, the early Christians simply did not hear the clear and
familiar voice of God in the same way as they heard God’s voice in the books
they recognized, and that we accept, as Canonical Scriptures.
Thus, before the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., the
Church had defined its Canon. [3] Thus, too, there were no books for the Bishops at Nicea
to delete, but, instead, only a Canon that had already been established before
any of them had been born.
In Advent, the Church traditionally reads Isaiah’s
passages about the Suffering Servant, the one by whose stripes we are healed
and who prolonged his days after dying, that he would live forever as the agent
of God's will. The Lord Himself assures us
that His coming again will be our redemption and that the fears and darkness of
this age will disappear in the light of His glory.
His coming to rule over heaven and earth, cleansing this
world from all evil, from death and suffering, and all such things, is sure and
certain. If instead of comfort, this
fills your heart with fear, then that means that you must repent from all your
sins. Turn, then, to the Lord, that you
may enter that blessed state of sure and certain hope, and be strengthened by
the Holy Spirit.
Today’s Epistle
speaks of Christ’s ministry, first to His own people of Israel , and then of the way that ministry
extends to all nations through those people of Israel who believed in Him and
became His disciples. This recalls the words of Simeon, when he held the infant
Jesus in the Temple : “A light to lighten the Gentiles,
and the glory of thy people Israel .”[2]
This light shines into the
darkest places where we try to hide from God because we are conscious of our
own sins. If we respond to His mercy, that same light of revelation brings
comfort and hope, the sure and certain hope of the resurrection unto eternal
life.
The invitation is
extended by His words: come, eat and be
filled with the food and drink of eternal life. Come feed on the Living Bread
that has come down from heaven, and with hearty repentance and true faith
receive Christ through these humble means unto everlasting life with him in
glory.
“Now the God of hope fill
you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through
the power of the Holy Ghost.”