It is, to my mind, the darkest moment in the journey of Lent, at least before the dark intensities of Holy Week. Not only are we still in the company of demons and devils but that sense of struggle against the spiritual forces of evil has become intensified in the strongest way possible. Jesus, who in the gospel performs a double healing, at once exorcising a devil and making one who was dumb to speak, is accused of being in cahoots with Beelzebul, the prince of the devils. No good deed goes unpunished, it seems. Doing good he is accused of being evil. He is accused, actually, of being demonically possessed.

What is good is called evil. It is the perfect picture of sin and evil really. Nothing in themselves, sin and evil are privations of what is good and true. The interchange between Jesus and his detractors here is most instructive. He reminds them about Beelzebul, an ancient name for the devil, a name which literally means “the Lord of the Dwelling” but which can also mean, “Lord of the Flies”, suggesting death and decay. Lord of the Flies, of course, is the title of a famous novel by William Golding, a novel written in the period of the cold war which examines “the darkness of man’s heart.”

Some accuse him; others want more signs and wonders from him, “tempting him,” as the gospel so tellingly puts it. Jesus’ “knowing their thoughts,” Luke tells us, points out the obvious contradiction. He plays upon the name of Beelzebul, with its suggested cognates of kingdom and house, to show the folly of their accusation and the consequences of their rejection. A kingdom, Baal or Beel, “divided against itself is brought to desolation”. A house, Zebul or Zebulon, “divided against itself falleth”. If Satan who is Beelzebul, the Lord of the house of rebellion, is divided against himself, how can he stand?

How can he stand, let alone, how can he cast out demons? He stands but only as upon that which he denies. He is a standing contradiction. Satan is the spirit of contradiction and rebellion, the spirit of the refusal to acknowledge the truth and goodness of God, the refusal to honour his own derivation. He defines himself in antagonism towards the known truth of God. But the fact of his denial of God cannot negate the fact of his creation. He simply exists in the contradiction of depending upon the God whom he denies. Such is utter futility. Such is the devil. Such, too, is the darkness of our own hearts.

We are no strangers to darkness and despair. At issue is how we face them. T.S. Eliot in his famous poem Ash Wednesday captures what has been the recurring motif of the dark side of modernity. “Because I do not hope to turn again.” A kind of mantra, it expresses a profound sense of unease, a sense of hopelessness and uncertainty.

The poem opens with this sense of hopelessness – despair – a denial of espoir, hope. But it also signals another aspect to despair, namely, the death of desire, the dying of love in us. And yet, by the last section of the poem, the line has shifted ever so slightly and yet, ever so significantly: “Although I do not hope to turn again”. The poem actually ends with a prayer, “And let my cry come unto thee”. Hope, over and against even the denials of hope, ultimately cries out in prayer.

There is, finally, at the very least, a sense of the possibilities of turning, of a metanoia, the repentance which signals transformation. The Scriptures are much more emphatic about such possibilities of transformation. “Ye were once darkness but now ye are light” Paul tells the Ephesians, but light only “in the Lord”, light only in the one who is the very “light of light”, the very light of God, who gives his life to be our life. The light is Christ. He is the one who casts out the demons of our souls and fills us with the light of his truth. He is the cause of the casting out of demons and of making the dumb to speak.

In a lovely image we grasp the wonderful sense of the power of God over and against the vain pretensions of our humanity. The mere “finger of God” is enough to overturn the wicked follies of man. By it you know that “the kingdom of God hath come upon you,” Jesus says. “The right hand of the Lord hath the preeminence,” sings the Psalmist. “Stretch forth thy right hand,” pleads the Collect. “The finger of God” shall suffice, says Jesus. That finger is stronger than any strong man armed.

The Holy Spirit is the indwelling Spirit of the love of the Father and the Son. Where that Spirit dwells, there can be no place for demons. They are cast out by the finger grace of God. Yet Jesus is not content to leave things at this pass. There is more at stake in this business of Lent than simply cleansing the soul. There is more involved than just chasing out the demons of the soul’s disorder and disarray. What’s the point if our souls only remain barren and desolate, if our souls only become some sort of empty space, a kind of vacuum land, as it were, totally devoid of purpose? There is no point at all, surely, if we simply become a desert within. For then we are in danger of a greater possession, a sevenfold possession, having despaired altogether, it seems, of the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of wisdom and understanding, the gifts of counsel and might, the gifts of knowledge and the fear of the Lord, the gift of reverence.

Christ knows the greater dangers of our disillusionment, how our sense of the seeming endlessness of one thing after another leads us to deny that there is anything absolute, that there is any purpose or any purpose that can be known. To the contrary, he would make that purpose known even in the midst of the experience of desolation and despair. Ultimately it belongs to the darkest moment of the Cross: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me.” But the point of the finger grace of God here is not to leave us empty and desolate, but to fill us with the grace of God.

It would place us in the company of Christ, hearing the Word of God and keeping it. He who cast out the demons of sin would fill us with his grace. He is the absolute goodness of God, the antidote to despair. All purpose is to be found in him.

For centuries this gospel story was extended to include what immediately follows, namely, a voice crying from the crowd, a voice of a woman calling out to Jesus in praise. She says, “blessed is the womb that bare thee and the paps that gave thee suck”. Jesus’ response, too, is most intriguing. It has often been misunderstood, I think, as a kind of rebuke. He says, “Yea, blessed rather are they that hear the word of God and keep it.” He isn’t denying her insight and her honouring of his maternal and human origins, his mother, Mary, as it were. Rather he is pointing out the purpose of his Incarnation. Rather than being in the company of demons who deny the goodness of God, we are to be in the company of those who “hear the word of God and keep it”. That means, of course, attending to the word which overcomes our rejections and refusals of that word.

It is in this sense that the gospel complements the epistle. Paul, in Ephesians, is reminding us of the radical uniqueness of Christ who has given himself for us, “an offering and a sacrifice for God,” as he says. In Christ, we need not keep fellowship with the forces of darkness but rather with the company of the faithful who are those who seek the word and the truth of God, hearing and keeping his Word. That is the project of our lives, concentrated for us in Lent but certainly the real meaning and struggle of our world and day. Ours is the culture of empty souls and empty churches, and, yet, here is the counter to our emptiness, if we will “hear the word of God and keep it”, which is to say, honour and strive to live it.

Darkness and light. We are reminded of the darkness of our hearts but we are reminded of the one who overcomes the darkness of sin and ignorance. In Christ we are “light in the Lord” and therefore must “walk as children of light.” In the contemplation of the darkest moments of human despair, we just may discover the light of Christ.

“Ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord”

Fr. David Curry
Christ Church in the Hall
Lent 3, March 7^th, 2010

Tuesday, March 9th
6:00pm Prayers & Praises – Haliburton Place
6:30-7:30pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall
7:30pm Parish Council Meeting

Thursday, March11th
1:30-3:00pm Seniors’ Drop-In
5:00 pm Fr Curry preaches at King’s College Chapel, Halifax

Sunday, March 14th, Fourth Sunday in Lent (Mothering Sunday)
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Morning Prayer (followed by Semnel Cake)
4:30pm Evening Prayer at Christ Church

WE beseech thee, Almighty God, look upon the hearty desires of thy humble servants and stretch forth the right hand of thy Majesty to be our defence against all our enemies; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 5:1-14
The Gospel: St Luke 11:14-26

Artwork: Limbourg Brothers, The Exorcism, c. 1416. Illumination (from Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry), Musée Condé, Chantilly.

O holy God,
who gavest great courage to Perpetua,
Felicity and their companions:
grant that we may be worthy to climb the ladder of sacrifice
and be received into the garden of peace;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Hebrews 10:32-39
The Gospel: St Matthew 24:9-14

Perpetua, Felicitas, and five other catechumens were arrested in North Africa after emperor Septimus Severus forbade new conversions to Christianity. They were thrown to wild animals in the circus of Carthage.

The early church writer Tertullian records, in what appear to be Perpetua’s own words, a vision in which she saw a ladder to heaven and heard the voice of Jesus saying, “Perpetua, I am waiting for you”. She climbed the ladder and reached a large garden where sheep were grazing. From this, she understood that she and her companions would be martyred.

Tertullian’s The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas is posted here.

Merciful God,
who didst inspire John and Charles Wesley with zeal for thy gospel:
grant to all people boldness to proclaim thy word
and a heart ever to rejoice in singing thy praises;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Isaiah 49:5-6
The Gospel: St Luke 9:2-6

]]> http://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/03/02/john-and-charles-wesley/feed/ 1 http://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/03/02/saint-chad/ http://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/03/02/saint-chad/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:00:46 +0000 admin http://christchurchwindsor.ca/?p=3405 The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Chad (d. 672), Bishop of Lichfield, Missionary (source):

Almighty God,
who, from the first fruits of the English nation
that turned to Christ,
didst call thy servant Chad
to be an evangelist and bishop of his own people:
grant us grace so to follow his peaceable nature,
humble spirit and prayerful life,
that we may truly commend to others
the faith which we ourselves profess;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Philippians 4:10-13
The Gospel: St Luke 14:1,7-14

Artwork: St Chad of Lichfield, 19th-century stained glass, from the East window, North transept, Cartmel Priory, England. Photograph taken by admin, 9 August 2004.

Almighty God,
who didst call thy servant David
to be a faithful and wise steward of thy mysteries
for the people of Wales:
in thy mercy, grant that,
following his purity of life and zeal
for the gospel of Christ,
we may with him receive the crown of everlasting life;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
to whom with thee and the Holy Spirit
be all honour and glory,
world without end.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 2:2b-12
The Gospel: St Mark 4:26-29

It is one of the most outstanding statements in the whole of the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures, in what Christians know as the Old Testament. It marks and establishes the real meaning of Judaism and its further fulfillment, dare I say, in Christianity, or at least, in Jesus Christ in the Christian understanding. Nowhere does the striving with God and man appear more completely and more concentrated fashion than on the way of the Cross, the way of our Lenten pilgrimage.

The tragedy of our age lies in our ignorance, wilful and otherwise, of this understanding and perspective. We have become so accustomed and cynically inured to the endless posturing and manipulations of power politics, on the one hand, and the defeatist mentality of victim and entitlement politics, on the other hand, that we have little or no capacity to grasp the transcendent truths that the Scriptures constantly open out to us. We are, I fear, as dead to metaphor as we are to metaphysics (read God). And yet, these stories, by virtue of their being proclaimed, speak to our need and our situation.

Jacob is the deceiver, the trickster, the supplanter, a clever fellow, we might say, perhaps too clever by half and, no doubt, that view of things has influenced the whole tradition of anti-Jewish sentiment and bias which, in turn, issues in the hideous realities of anti-Semitism and racism signalled so graphically and so disturbingly in the unforgettable horrors of the Holocaust. The Jews of Europe, after all, were betrayed by the culture which betrayed itself. Such things are the very spectacle of deceit and betrayal. But that is not, ultimately, who he is.

This is, I think, what makes the story of Jacob so compelling. It is the picture of a soul who in his struggle persists in the quest to understand and be faithful to what is understood such that there is a remarkable transformation. Indeed the transformation of Jacob into Israel complements the Eucharistic gospel for this day, where the Canaanite woman shows herself to be a true Israelite, indeed, precisely because of her tenacity of intellectual spirit in holding on to what she has rightly perceived as the truth of God in Jesus Christ. She will not be put off and her struggle, akin to Jacob’s, is the great struggle, the great struggle of faith that reveals the true nature of Israel. It is accomplished in its fullness and truth on the Cross.

Such is Lent. But to return to the story of Jacob. Notice his concern to be reconciled with his brother Esau. Why? Because he knows how he has tricked him. In one way, it is his birth nature, we might say. Jacob and Esau are twins, birth brothers, but in their birth Jacob had taken hold of his brother’s heel; it was taken as an indication of his stronger spirit. He supplanted his brother. To add to the picture, Jacob later “stole” his brother’s inheritance in a remarkable act of cunning and deception. First, Esau allows his hunger to get the better of him and to “sell” his birthright to his twin, Jacob, for “a mess of potage.” Secondly, Jacob tricks his blind father, Isaac, by pretending to be his first-born, Esau, putting on the skins of lambs so as to make him appear hairy like his brother Esau. There is just the sense that Isaac realises this. “The voice is Jacob’s voice,” he says, “but the hands are the hands of Esau.” Just so, we might say, in the manner of the philosopher, Descartes, our senses deceive us. Of course, they do. In this case, as Isaac says to Esau, “your brother came with guile, and he has taken away your blessing.” “Is he not rightly named Jacob?” Esau laments with real chagrin, “for he has supplanted me these two times. He took away my birthright; and behold, now he has taken away my blessing.” Needless to say, this does not exactly make for good brotherly relations! Esau hated Jacob.

Our story takes place years later. The context is Jacob’s concern for reconciliation. Where does that come from, we might ask? What does it mean to want to be reconciled with those whom you have offended and from whom you have become estranged? It means “a sea-change,” as Shakespeare puts it, into “something rich and strange,” a sea-change into a whole new way of looking at reality. It means that we are no longer taken up with the enterprise of dominance and power, the lust to triumph over others for our own advantage either psychologically, politically, or materially. No. A larger concern and interest has intervened. It is not too much to call it a philosophical moment, a moment of reflection and self-examination; a Lenten moment, we might say.

It is this which provides us with a way of grasping the nature of this extraordinary encounter between Jacob and one who is described as “a man” and yet indicates that Jacob has actually wrestled with God! It is, in the ancient understanding of things, one of those super-extraordinary encounters between God and man. “Two of a kind are we,” Athena says to Odysseus in the Odyssey, “deceivers both.” Here Jacob, the deceiver, becomes Israel through the wrestle with God; Israel means “one who strives with God.”

This defines faith, really, and it is something which cannot be reduced to the dynamics of family and culture. What happens in this scene is testimony to the change that has already taken place in the deceiver, the supplanter, the master of one-up-manship, namely, Jacob. It is, more importantly, about the power and truth of God who engages our humanity to bring about who we truly are. For that is the point. Jacob becomes Israel because he is above all else, open to the transcendent truth of God. That defines him and propels his desire to be reconciled with his brother Esau.

It defines a whole people; the Hebrews become the people of Israel from this moment. It enters into the Christian discourse in numerous ways. Jesus will say of Nathanael that he is “an Israelite indeed,” because there is in him “no guile,” no tricks, no ulterior motive, just the simple desire to know and love. The Canaanite woman is also a true Israelite, even though she does not come out of any of the tribes of Israel. Her directness of approach to Jesus, her refusal to give up and give in, parallels Jacob’s wrestling match with God. In that sense her behaviour and attitude are like Israel. Like him she receives a blessing.

The lesson from Hebrews, then, takes up the argument, showing us that the wrestle with God is unending and requires our complete devotion. The wrestle, the striving has changed in a way, but in a fundamental sense, it remains the same. Our struggle is about our commitment to the truth which is, as Augustine says, tam antiqua, tam nova, at once ever ancient and ever new. Hebrews keeps us focused on the necessary things which belong to this experience, the things that belong to the disciplines of Lent, actually, the things of study and prayer, of service and ministry, “not forsaking the gathering” but persevering in ministry and service, encouraging one another.

There has, perhaps, not been a whole lot of this in our own Anglican Church. The story has been one of betrayal and folly. Regardless, we rejoice in the lessons from Genesis and Hebrews and, without presuming upon our own righteousness, hope that we can continue to grow and mature in the faith and in our witness to the faith.

To be blunt, it is our vocation. Only so does Jacob become Israel. It happens through the struggle.

“Your name shall no more be called Jacob but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed”

Fr. David Curry
Second Sunday in Lent
Morning Prayer
Feb. 28^th, 2010

There is a wonderful devotional prayer in our Prayer Book Communion Liturgy that is known as The Prayer of Humble Access. I won’t go into how it has been mocked and derided by the literalism of some liturgical scholars, who being tone deaf to the nuances and beauty of poetry, suppose that the last phrases attribute one power to the Body of Christ and another to the Blood of Christ with respect to our bodies and our souls, having forgotten the doctrine of concomitance, it seems, namely, that the sacrament is whole in each of its parts. The prayer works doctrinally as well as devotionally. It is profoundly sacramental.

The prayer says it all, however:

We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord; Trusting in our own righteousness, But in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, Whose property is always to have mercy…

We pray this as a necessary part of our preparation and approach to the Sacrament. The prayer echoes explicitly the Gospel for this day, the story of the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus so resolutely, so determinedly and yet so humbly.

Two words stand here in a complementary relation. They are the words “humble” and “access.” Humility is the condition of our access to God. What the prayer expresses is a fundamental attitude of Faith. It is not our presumption, our “trusting in our own righteousness,” but our humility, our trusting in the “manifold and great mercies” of God. Against everything that is thrown at her, she has a hold of this one thing, namely, the mercies of God in Christ Jesus. To have a hold of that is humility. She presumes upon nothing else and it is this that gains her access to the heart of Christ.

Humility is not the same thing as low self-esteem. It is not the whinge of “I can’t do this” which really means “I won’t even try”. It is not the whine of the “poor-me-s” which is really only our grovelling for attention. Humility is not grovelling self-pity. For such things are really our presumption. We demand all the attention as if we were the centre of everything. We aren’t. Humility is the recognition that Jesus is the centre and that we have access to him.

“Then came she and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.” There is an encounter and an engagement with Jesus. The dialogue is quite intense – even frighteningly so. But her kneeling down is neither manipulation nor cringing self-abasement. It is instead the attitude and posture of Faith. It says, in effect, that God is God and we are not. Such is humility. It is also the first commandment. “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods.” Here, it is the condition of our access to God. “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve”, we heard from Jesus in the wilderness of our temptations last Sunday. The woman does not presume to be the centre of attention. For all her persistence, what is constant is her focus on Jesus. He has her undivided attention. “Even so our eyes wait upon the Lord our God,/until he have mercy upon us”, as the Psalmist puts it (the Gradual Psalm for Lent II, Ps. 123.3). She sees in him the mercies of God which she seeks; “Lord, help me”, she says with quiet insistence.

It is not a plaintive cry. It is the prayer of Faith. The strong sense of the mercy of God is the counter to our self-presumption and self-preoccupation. We look unto him, “as the eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress” (Ps. 123.2b).

She seeks a healing mercy from Jesus not for herself but for her daughter. A mother’s love is a strong and compelling motive. The sickness of a child or some other crisis in our lives will often bring us to our knees. We are rendered helpless. “We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves,” as the Collect so clearly puts it. It would be foolish to deny this.

But the point of this Gospel really is not that we should wait for some emergency to bring us on our knees before God. No. The point of the Gospel is seen in its application as expressed in The Prayer of Humble Access. “Lord, help me” is a constant prayer, a daily prayer. It belongs to the constantly recurring theme of our liturgy: “Lord, have mercy upon us.” It is especially the signal note of the Lenten journey of our lives, “trusting” not in ourselves “but in thy manifold and great mercies.”

Humility ever looks to Christ. It is our openness to him as the centre of our lives, “even as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters” (Ps. 123.2a). It is the condition of our access to him. When we are presumptuous, then we are full of ourselves. There is no room for God. We presume to be the centre which we are not. Humility opens us out to the mercies of God in Jesus Christ. It is, we might almost say, the rhapsody of Lent.

The humility of Christ is the hope of our exaltation. He lifts us up even when we seem most down and are even “utterly despised.” Humility is not only the condition of our access to God; it is also our exaltation. For in our humility our wills are one with God’s will. We are open to what he wants for us, “our eyes wait[ing] upon the Lord our God until he have mercy upon us.” It is what we see in this extraordinary woman, and it is what Jesus sees.

“O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

Fr. David Curry
Lent II, 2010
8:00am
Christ Church, Windsor, NS