The Orthodox-Catholic Anglican

On this Fifth Day of Christmas, let us reflect on certain passages of our Gospel account. Firstly, we notice that Saint Matthew wishes, in our Gospel account, to speak of Mary. He makes clear what a difference there was between her child-bearing and that of the rest of the genealogy of Jesus. The rest brought forth by the customary joining of male and female; Jesus, however, seeing that He was Son of God, was to be born into the world by a virgin. It was entirely fitting that when God wished to become a human being, for the sake of human beings, He be born of none other than a Virgin. When it happens that the Virgin bears a child, she bears no other son than one who is God.

Also Saint Matthew tells us that her husband, Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. Joseph saw that his betrothed had conceived, though he knew well that she had not been touched by any man. Since he was just and wished to do everything justly, he chose what seemed to be the best course, that he would neither divulge this to others, nor receive her himself as his wife, but privately changing the proposal of marriage, he would allow her to remain in the position of betrothed woman, as she was. Now he had read in Isaiah that a virgin of the house of David would conceive and give birth to this Lord, and he also knew that Mary took her origin from this house, and so he did not disbelieve that this prophecy had been fulfilled in her. But if he had sent her away privately and not received her as his wife, and if she as a betrothed woman were to give birth, there would surely have been few people to call her virgin rather than a harlot. Therefore Joseph all at once changed his intention for a better one, so that to preserve Mary’s reputation he would receive her as his wife, celebrating the marriage feast, but he would keep her perpetually chaste. For it seems that the Lord preferred to have some ignorant of the manner of His birth than have them attack His mother’s reputation.

We notice as well that Saint Matthew incorporates the example of a prophetic utterance with reference to the virgin birth, in order that a miracle of such majesty might be the more certainly believed if not only he himself proclaimed this fact, but if he also recalled that it was predicted by the prophet. Behold, the virgin, the prophet says, shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call His Name Emmanuel; and Saint Matthew adds, which means, God with us. The Saviour’s Name, because of which He is called God with us by the prophet, signifies both natures of His one Person. For He Who, born before time from the Father, is God Himself in the fullness of time, because Emmanuel, that is God with us, in His mother’s womb, because He deigned to take the weakness of our nature into the unity of His Person when the Word because flesh and dwelt among us. In a wonderful manner He began to be what we are, while not ceasing to be what He had been, assuming our nature in such a way that He Himself would not lose what He had been.

Lastly, let us reflect upon the fact that Joseph, as Saint Matthew records, called His Name Jesus. Jesus, a Hebrew word, means “saving” or “saviour” in Latin. Thus itt is clear that the prophets most certainly call upon His Name. Hence these words are sung in great desire for a vision of Him: “My soul shall be joyful in the Lord; it shall rejoice in His salvation” (Ps 35.9); “My soul hath longed for thy salvation” (Ps 119.81). And especially that verse: “Save me, O God, for thy Name's sake!” (Ps 54.1) as if the Prophet Isaiah would say: “You Who are called Saviour, make bright the glory of Your Name in me by saving.”

Jesus is the name of the Son Who was born of a Virgin, and, as the Angel explained, this Name signified that He would save His people from their sins. He who saves from sins is doubtlessly the same one Who will save from the corruption of mind and body which happen as a result of sins. “Christ” is a term of priestly and royal dignity, for from “chrism”, that is, an anointing with holy oil, in the law priests and kings were called “christs,” and they signified Him Who appeared in the world as true King and High Priest, and was anointed with the oil of gladness above those who shared with Him. From this anointing, that is, the chrism, He Himself is called “Christ,” and those who share this anointing, that is, spiritual grace, are called “Christians.” In that He is Saviour may He deign to reconcile us to God the Father. In that He is King may He deign to give us the eternal kingdom of His Father, which is the Holy Spirit: this one and the same Jesus Christ our Lord, our Saviour, our King, our Head, our daily bread, this Holy Child, Who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns as God, world without end. Amen.

(Adapted from Gospel Homily I.v by the Venerable Saint Bede)

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To acknowledge and celebrate in our Divine Liturgy the birth of time of the Mediator between God the Father and human beings, the man Jesus Christ, born of woman, born of Mary under the Law, we are now drawn to reflect upon the words of the blessed evangelist John concerning the eternity of the Word, that is, concerning the eternity of Christ’s divinity, in which He remained always equal to the Father. As a privilege, I think, of John’s singular focus on Christ, S. John grasped the hidden mysteries of Christ’s divinity at a more profound level and, thanks be to God, he was able to disclose these hidden mysteries to others. For it was not mentioned without reason that at the Last Supper John leaned upon the breast of the Jesus, for through this we are taught in figurative language that John drank the draught of heavenly wisdom from the most holy font of Jesus’s breast, and did so in a more outstanding way that the other evangelists.

Hence, in the symbolic representation of the four animals, John is rightly matched with the flying eagle. The eagle, indeed, is said to fly higher than all other birds, and is said to direct its sight toward the rays of the sun more piercingly than all other living things. The other evangelists (Ss Matthew, Mark, and Luke), as though they were walking with the Lord on the earth, explained brilliantly Christ’s emergence in time, along with His deeds in time; but they said relatively little concerning His divinity. John, however, as though he were flying to heaven with the Lord, expounded relatively few things concerning Christ’s acts in time, but recognized the eternal power of Christ’s divinity, through which all things come into being, and he handed this on in writing for us to learn. Whereas the other evangelists bear witness that Christ was born in time, John bears witness that this same Christ was in the beginning, saying, “In the beginning was the Word.” The others record His sudden appearance among human beings; John declares that He was always with God, saying, “and the Word was with God.” The others confirm that He is a true human being; John confirms that He is true God, saying, “and the Word was God.” And the others testify to the wonders which Christ did as a human being; John teaches that God the Father made every creature, visible and invisible, through Christ, saying, “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made.”

And to a remarkable extent blessed John, at this the beginning of his Gospel account, properly imbues us with the faith of orthodox belief concerning the divinity of the Savior, even anticipating false doctrine taught in the later centuries of the Church. For example, false doctrine taught by the 4th century priest Arius (called the Arianism heresy), who said, “If Christ was born, there was a time when He did not exist.” John refutes this beforehand with his first utterance when he says, “In the beginning was the Word.” He does not say, In the beginning the Word began to be, because he wrote in order to point out that Christ’s coming into being was not from time, but that He existed at the emergence of time, and so that through this wording he might point out that Christ was born of the Father without any beginning in time.

In the same way there was the 3rd century priest and theologian named Sabellius (with the heretical doctrine called Sabellianism or “modalism”), which denied that the Holy Trinity is three Persons, and said, “The same God is Father when He wants to be, Son when He wants to be, Holy Spirit when He wants to be; nevertheless, He Himself is one,” that is, one Person and not three. Rebuking this error, John says, “And the Word was with God.” For if the One was with the Other, unquestionably the Father and the Son are two, and not one as if He Himself were sometimes the Father, and sometimes the Son, and sometimes the Holy Ghost. And likewise against other heretics did John speak and, by the grace of God, condemn.

In a profound way, the evangelist describes Christ’s two natures, namely the divine nature (in which He always and everywhere remains complete) and the human nature (by means of which He appeared to be contained by place when He was born in time), saying He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world knew Him not. He came into His own home, and His own people received Him not. (The evangelist says “the world” to mean human beings deceived by love of the world, and by being attached to creatures have turned away from acknowledging the majesty of their Creator.) Indeed, Christ was in the world and the world was made through Him because He was God, because He was complete everywhere, because by the presence of His majesty He ruled without labor, and without burden He held together what He had made. He came into His own because when He was born He appeared through His humanity in the world which He had made through His divinity. He came to His own home because Christ deigned to become incarnate in the nation of Judaea, which He had united to Himself beyond other countries by a special grace. He was in the world and He came into the world. He was in the world through His divinity; He came into the world through His nativity.

Dear brothers and sisters, we who today recall in yearly devotion this glorious human nativity of our Redeemer, must always embrace His divine nature as well as His human nature with a love that is not yearly, but continual – we must continually embrace His divine nature, through which we were created when we did not exist, and His human nature, through which we were recreated when we were lost. And so, for this reason, the Word became flesh, that is, the Word became bread, that is, became Sacrament and dwelt among us, so that by keeping company with us in His human being become bread become Sacrament, He would be able to unite with us; by speaking to us He would be able to instruct us and present to us a way of living; by dying He would be able to struggle for us against the enemy; by rising He would be able to destroy our death – and so that through a divinity coeternal with the Father’s, He might raise us to divine things by bringing us back to life interiorly through the Sacrament, that in feeding us with Himself He might grant us forgiveness of sins and at the same time the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and that through the seven Sacraments He might not only lead us to see the glory of His glorified and sacramental humanity, but also show us the unchangeable essence of His divine majesty, in which He lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

(Adapted from the Gospel Homily I.viii by the Venerable Saint Bede)

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The eyes of all wait upon Jesus Christ. Indeed, the eyes of the world, the whole world, wait upon Jesus Christ. For in but a few short days comes the festival of our redemption, the festival of the redemption of the whole world: the whole world being at peace, Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to consecrate the world by His most loving presence, having been conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of His mother blessed Mary, was born of her in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man. All eyes are on Jesus Christ because of His Nativity, according to the flesh: that which redeems all humanity, indeed redeems the whole world.

Hence says our patron the Apostle Paul: rejoice! Hence he says rejoice in the Lord always. Why would he have us rejoice? Because the Lord is at hand. Because the Coming One Who is Christ is coming to comfort us. He is coming to reveal His glory. And in revealing Himself, He gives to us His true peace, the peace which passes all understanding, the peace of heaven. He gives us His true peace – which is Him, for as Paul says to the Ephesians, Christ Himself is our peace – He gives Himself as our peace that we would live in Him and He in us. Christ seeks to fill all things living with His plenteousness. He seeks to fill all things with His blessing. He seeks to fill all things with Himself, that He might be all in all, that all things might be in subjection under Him.

We know that the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, as Christ spoke through Isaiah. We know His glory will be revealed, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken, and He has spoken clearly: Behold, a Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and His Name shall be called Emmanuel. Emmanuel, which means, God with us.

And He shall be with us, on the great festival of our redemption. He shall be with us through the proclamation of the apostles, whose names are written on the walls of Jerusalem above, which is our heavenly citizenship. The apostles proclaim, This is Christ the King, this holy Child is the Son of the Highest, Who comes to us on donkey and foal. To this holy Child has been given the throne of His Father, David. This holy Child reigns over the house of Jacob forever. Of the Kingdom of this Child there will be no end. This holy Child is the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world.

And He shall be with us, on the great festival of our redemption, through Scripture opened to Him, in all its pages. For every word of Scripture, what we call the Old Testament, concerns Christ. He comes to us as our daily Bread to be read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested. Christ, the eternal Word of the Father, speaks through all pages of Scripture, that through preaching and prayer we know Him, even He Who passes all our understanding, He Who while conceived in the womb of Blessed Mary, yet the whole world cannot contain.

And He shall be with us in the Blessed Sacrament, administered by holy priests. The Word became Sacrament and dwelt among us. The Word became Sacrament in order that He might dwell in us, for we receive Him – all of Him: body, soul, and divinity – in the consecrated and transformed Bread and Wine, the true Body and Blood of Christ: that we might become what we receive.

(In the words of 20th-century Anglican divine Austin Farrar): Advent is a coming, not our coming to God, but His to us. We cannot come to God, he is beyond our reach; but He can come to us, for we are not beneath His mercy. As S. John teaches, we do not rise to God, but He descends to us, and dwells humanly among human creatures, in the glorious man, Jesus Christ, in the holy Child about Whom the whole host of Angels sing: that we shall be His people, and He everlastingly our God, our God-with-us, our Emmanuel. He will so come, but He is come already, He comes always: in our fellow-Christian (even in a child, says Christ), in His Word, invisibly in our souls, more visibly in the Blessed Sacrament. Opening ourselves to Him, we call Him in: Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord; O come, Emmanuel: come, He Who is our Saviour, Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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In the audio above is the third lecture of the Advent Study Series that I am doing at my parish. The series is called “Foundations of the Church: Introducing the Church Fathers.”

This lecture follows on from the overall introduction to the Church Fathers in my first lecture, as well as the second lecture on Ss Ignatius of Antioch and Anthony of Egypt.

The third lecture looks at three Greek Fathers, through an outline of their lives as well as a sampling of their teachings.

Firstly I look at Origen of Alexandria, who died in 254, and reflect upon a small portion of his Commentary on the Gospel of Saint John.

Secondly I look at Saint Basil the Great, who died in 379, and look at a portion of is Long Rules, also known as his Asceticon.

Thirdly I look at Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, known as the Theologian, who died in 389, and reflect on a portion of his Oration on Pentecost.

Below are the icons and texts displayed during the talk, for you to contemplate along with my own reflections.

The final lecture of this series, coming next week, will look at Saint Maximos the Confessor and the Venerable Saint Bede.

ORIGEN OF ALEXANDRIA

Commentary on S. John

The Gospel is the firstfruits of all Scripture. In my opinion, there are four Gospels, as though they were the elements of the faith of the Church. . . . But I think that John’s Gospel is the firstfruits of the Gospels. It speaks of Him Whose descent is traced, and begins from Him Who is without a genealogy.

For since Matthew, on the one hand, writing for the Hebrews awaiting the son of Abraham and David, says, “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham, and Mark, knowing what he is writing relates “the beginning of the gospel,” perhaps we find its goal in John, when he tells of the Word “in the beginning,” the Word being God. But Luke also having said in the beginning of Acts, “The former treatise I made of all things which Jesus began to do and teach.” Indeed John reserves for the one who leaned on Jesu’ breast the greater and more perfect expressions concerning Jesus, for none of those manifested His divinity as fully as John when he presented Him saying, “I am the light of the world”; “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; “I am the resurrection”; “I am the door”; “I am the good shepherd”; and in the Apocalypse, “I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.”

We might dare say, then, that the Gospels are the firstfruits of all Scriptures, but that the firstfruits of the Gospels is that according to John, whose meaning no one can understand who has not leaned on Jesus’ breast nor received Mary from Jesus to be his mother also. But he who would be another John must also become such as John, to be shown to be Jesus, so to speak. For if Mary had no son except Jesus, in accordance with those who hold a sound opinion of her, and Jesus says to His mother, “Behold your son,” and not “Behold, this man is also your son,” He has said equally, “Behold this is Jesus whom you bore.” For indeed everyone who has been perfected “no longer lives, but Christ lives in him” (Gal 2:20), and since “Christ lives” in him, it is said of him to Mary, “Behold your son,” the Christ.

SAINT BASIL THE GREAT

The Long Rules (Asceticon)

Q: Speak to us of the love of God; for we have heard that we must love Him, but we would learn how this may be rightly accomplished?

A: The love of God is not something that is taught, for we do not learn from another to rejoice in the light or to desire life, nor has anyone taught us to love our parents. In the same way and even to a far greater degree is it true that instruction in divine law in now from without, but, simultaneously with the formation of the creation – man, I mean – a kind of rational force was implanted in us like a seed which, by an inherent tendency, impels us toward love. This germ is then received into account in the school of God’s commandments, where it is wont to be carefully cultivated and skillfully nurtured and thus, by the grace of God, brought to its full perfection. Wherefore, we, also, approving of your zeal as essential for reaching the goal, shall endeavor with the help of God and the support of your prayers, and as power is given us by the Spirit, to enkindle the spark of divine love latent within you. Now, it is necessary to know that, although this is only one virtue, yet, by its efficacy, it comprises and fulfills every commandment. “If anyone love me,” says the Lord, “he will keep my commandments.” And again, “On these two commandments depend the whole law and prophets.”

What is more admirable than Divine Beauty? What reflection is sweeter than the thought of the magnificence of God? What desire of the soul is so poignant and so intolerably keen as that desire implanted by God in a soul purified from all vice and affirming with sincerity, “I languish with love.” Totally ineffable and indescribable are the lightning flashes of Divine Beauty. Words do not adequately convey nor is the ear capable of receiving knowledge of them. The rays of the morning star, or the brightness of the moon, or the light of the sun – all are more unworthy to be mentioned in comparison with that splendor; and these heavenly bodies are more inferior to the true light than is the deep darkness of night, gloomy and moonless, to brightest noonday. This Beauty, invisible to the eyes of the flesh, is apprehended by the mind and soul alone. . . . Men are by nature, then, desirous of the beautiful. But, that which is truly beautiful and desirable is the good. Now, the good is God, and, since all creatures desire good, therefore, all creatures desire God.

SAINT GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS (THE THEOLOGIAN)

Oration on Pentecost

The Holy Spirit fashions together with the Son both the creation and the resurrection. Be persuaded by these texts: “By the Word of the Lord the heavens were established, and by the Spirit of his mouth all their power” (Ps 33.6); “the divine Spirit created me, and the breath of the Almighty taught me” (Job 33.4); and again, “You will send forth your Spirit and they will be created, and you will renew the face of the earth” (Ps 101.10).

He also fashions the spiritual rebirth. Be persuaded by the text: “Nobody can see the kingdom or receive it unless he has been born from above by the Spirit” (John 3.3-5), unless he has been purified from his earlier birth, which is a mystery of the night, by a molding in the day and in the light, through which each is molded by his own choice.

This Spirit, who is most wise and most loving toward humankind, if He takes a shepherd makes him a harper subduing evil spirits by song and proclaims him king of Israel (a Sam 16.12). If He takes a goatherd scraping mulberry trees, he makes him a prophet (Amos 7.14). Consider David and Amos. If He takes a youth with natural talents, He makes him a judge of elder, even beyond his years (Susanna 45-60). Daniel testifies to this, who was victorious over lions in their den (Dan 6.17-23). If He finds fishermen, He catches them in a net for Christ, they who catch the whole world with the line of the Word. Take for me Peter and Andrew and the sons of thunder, thundering the things of the Spirit. If He finds tax collectors, He gains them as disciples and makes them merchants of souls. Matthew says this, who yesterday was a tax collector and today is an evangelist.

If He finds fervent persecutors, He relocates their zeal and makes Pauls instead of Sauls and binds them to piety as much as they had been bound to evil.

This Spirit also is most gentle yet is provoked to anger at sinners. Therefore, let us make His acquaintance as meek, not as wrathful, by confessing His dignity and fleeing blasphemy, and not choosing to see Him implacably wrathful.

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Jesus Christ is our King. Of that we must never have any doubt. Things in the world we can doubt, we can question, we can critique. Things of the world can, as kids today say, be “sus.” (That is shorthand for “suspect.”) Yet of Christ, none of this applies. He is our King, He is our Saviour, He is the Coming One. He is ever seeking to come to us, every day. This is why He came to visit us in great humility; this is why He will come at the end of days to judge both the quick and the dead; this is why He took our human flesh and nature upon Him, so as to be able to come to us in His glorified and sacramental Body as our daily Bread, received through the opening of Scripture and the Breaking of Bread.

We saw this in the teaching of the first two Sundays of Advent. The First Sunday of Advent dramatically illustrated that Christ is the Coming One by the Gospel reading of Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem upon the donkey and a foal, in which we are the citizens of heavenly Jerusalem to whom Christ is coming. And the Second Sunday of Advent emphasized His coming to us in the opening of Scripture: that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them: our daily Bread of Christ known and present to us in Scripture.

Today we hear Saint Paul teaching the Church that he and the other priestly ministers of Christ are servants and, more poignantly, are stewards. Paul, the other apostles, even John the Baptist, sent by God to go before Christ to prepare the way in our hearts for Christ’s coming to us, are stewards, Paul says, of the mysteries of God. Let it be clear that this word, which comes down in the Latin then English lineage of our scriptural translations, is in Greek the same word as Sacraments. So the priestly ministers of Christ are stewards of the Sacraments of Christ. This is an important teaching for Paul, which is why he gave it to the Church in Corinth and to the whole, universal Church.

Why is it an important teaching for the Church? It is because Christians need to know, and ever remember, that what priests do is make Christ known. They do so in their ministry of the sacraments. They make Christ known through the sacrament of Scripture in their preaching and in their teaching. And they make Christ known through the sacramental rites both in the Liturgy and flowing from it. In the Liturgy priests are stewards of the dominical sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, as well as the sacraments of Matrimony, Confession, Unction, and with the help of the Bishop, Confirmation. Bishops make possible these sacraments just mentioned, as well as the sacrament of Holy Orders. Each of these is a means and channel of saving grace.

As Jesus taught His disciples to regard Saint John the Baptist differently and uniquely, the Church is to regard priests differently and uniquely. Priests are set apart, which is what consecrated and ordained means. They are called to be servants of Christ so as to know Him deeply and profoundly, not merely for their personal benefit, but for others: that they are able to fulfill their calling to be effective stewards of the mysteries of God, of the sacraments of God, of that which is necessary spiritual food for the salvation of Christian disciples. Jesus and Paul want the Church to regard priests as means by which Christ comes: means by which He Who is the Coming One is known and recognized.

Priests are necessary to God’s plan of salvation, which is why the Church has always had them, and evidence of the existence of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons is shown in the earliest documents we have, documents dating to around AD 100, including letters written by Saint Ignatius of Antioch, a Church Father. Let us pray for the priests of Holy Church, that it may please God to illumine all Priests with true knowledge and understanding of His holy Word, that both by their preaching and living, they may set forth God’s Word, and make Christ known: always that Jesus transform those men called to the priesthood, that by Christ working through them, the hearts of the disobedient are turned to the wisdom of the just, and turned to follow Christ as their Saviour, Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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In the audio above is the audio from the second lecture of the Advent Study Series that I am doing at my parish. The series is called “Foundations of the Church: Introducing the Church Fathers.”

This lecture follows on from the overall introduction to the Church Fathers in my first lecture, which you can find here.

The second lecture looks at two early Church Fathers. For both I provide an outline of their lives as well as a sampling of their teachings.

Firstly I look at Saint Ignatius of Antioch, an Apostolic Father who died in the early 2nd century, and I reflect on portions of his Epistle to the Romans.

Secondly we look at Saint Anthony the Great (also known as the Great), a Desert Father who died in the fourth century. We reflect both on a portion of S. Athanasius’ Life of S. Anthony as well as portions from The Letters of Saint Anthony the Great.

Below are the icons and texts displayed during the talk, for you to contemplate along with my own reflections.

Next week’s lecture will look at Saint Basil the Great and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus. The final lecture of this series, in two weeks, will look at Saint Maximos the Confessor and the Venerable Saint Bede.

SAINT IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH

* S. Matthew 18:1-4

At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

* Ignatius’ Epistle to the Romans (2.2)

Do not allow me anything other than being poured out for God, while there is an altar still prepared, so that forming a chorus of love you may sing out to the Father in Jesus Christ, because God has made the bishop from Antioch worthy of being found at the setting of the sun, after being sent from where it rises. It is good for me to sink to God from the world, so that I may rise up to Him.

* Epistle to the Romans (4.1)

I am writing to all the church and I am instructing everyone that I am willingly dying for God, unless you prevent me. I beseech you, do not become an unseasonable kindness to me. Leave me to be bread for the beasts, through which I may be able to attain to God. I am God’s wheat and through the beasts’ teeth I shall be found to be pure bread for Christ.

* Epistle to the Romans (5.3)

Grant me this: I know what is right for me. Now I am beginning to be a disciple. May nothing, visible or invisible, show jealousy towards me, only let me attain to Jesus Christ. Fire and cross, packs of wild beasts, cutting, rendings, the scattering of bones, the chopping up of limbs, the grinding of the whole body, the evil torments of the devil can come upon me, only let me attain to Jesus Christ.

* Epistle to the Romans (6:1-2)

Neither the ends of the world nor the kingdoms of this age profit me anything. It is better for me to die in Jesus Christ than to reign over the ends of the earth. Him I seek, the one who died on our behalf. Him I desire, Him Who rose up for us. The birth-pangs are laid upon me. Grant me this, brothers: do not hinder me from living, do not wish that I should die. Do not give the world the one who wishes to be God’s, nor charm him with the material. Allow me to receive the pure light. When I have arrived then I will truly be human.

SAINT ANTHONY OF EGYPT

* Third Epistle

The advent of Jesus helps us to do what is good, until we have destroyed all our vices. Then Jesus will say to us, ‘Henceforth I call you not servant, but brethren.’ When therefore the Apostles attained to receiving the Spirit of Adoption, then the Holy Spirit taught them to worship the Father as they ought.

* Third Epistle

And to me, this poor prisoner of Jesus, this time to which we have come has brought joy and lamentation and weeping. For many of our generation have put on the robe of religion but denied its power. As for those who have prepared themselves to be set free through the advent of Jesus, over them I rejoice. But those who do business in the Name of Jesus, and do the will of their heart and their flesh – over such I lament. Those who have looked at the length of the time, and their heart has failed them, and they have put off the robe of religion, and are become beasts – for them I weep. Know therefore that for such men the advent of Jesus becomes a great judgment. But you, my beloved in the Lord, know yourselves, that you may also know this time, and prepare to offer yourselves as a sacrifice acceptable to God.

* Third Epistle

And to me, this poor prisoner of Jesus, this time to which we have come has brought joy and lamentation and weeping. For many of our generation have put on the robe of religion but denied its power. As for those who have prepared themselves to be set free through the advent of Jesus, over them I rejoice. But those who do business in the Name of Jesus, and do the will of their heart and their flesh – over such I lament. Those who have looked at the length of the time, and their heart has failed them, and they have put off the robe of religion, and are become beasts – for them I weep. Know therefore that for such men the advent of Jesus becomes a great judgment. But you, my beloved in the Lord, know yourselves, that you may also know this time, and prepare to offer yourselves as a sacrifice acceptable to God.

* Third Epistle

He who knows himself knows God: and he who knows God, knows also the dispensations [gifts of grace] which He makes for His creatures. Let this word be manifest to you: it is not bodily love that I have towards you, but a spiritual, religious love, for God is glorious in His Saints. Prepare yourselves while you have intercessors to pray to God for your salvation, that He may pour into your hearts that fire which Jesus came to send upon the earth (Lk 12.49), that you may be able to exercise your hearts and senses, to know how to discern the good from the bad, the right from the left, reality from unreality.

* Fourth Epistle

My children, we are dwelling in our death, and staying in the house of the robber, and bound with the bonds of death. Now therefore, give not sleep to your eyes or slumber to your eyelids, that you may offer yourselves a sacrifice to God in all holiness, which none can inherit without sanctification.

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I concluded my preaching for the First Sunday of Advent with these words: “Recognizing that Christ is always the Coming One is the basis of life in Christ’s Kingdom, and thus the basis of Kingdom culture.” How is He the Coming One? In Advent we especially recognize that Christ is the Coming One by means of Scripture and by means of Sacrament. The knowledge that He is the Coming One through Scripture and Sacrament makes for a truly lively faith, a life in the Holy Spirit. And I said that the apostles, whose names are inscribed on the walls of the foundation of heaven, preached Christ the Coming One so that all who hear it with faith may be caught up in the life of wonder, awe, and openness to the coming presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit: living and moving and having our being within the Kingdom of our King.

The Second Sunday of Advent is particularly given over to celebrating, savoring, and wondering at the fact that Christ always seeks to come to us through Holy Scripture. Hence the famous and beautiful Anglican collect for this Second Sunday of Advent: Blessed Lord, Who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: grant that we may in such wise (wise is the old word for way: that we may in such way) hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of Thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which Thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Through the Scriptures, inwardly digested, Christ is known. Indeed, Christ took on our human nature in significant part because in doing so He would be known through the opening of Scripture: the opening of it, and our reception of Him, inwardly digesting Him because as He said, “I am the Bread of life.” This Bread, our daily bread, is received both through opening Scripture and by the breaking of bread. And we know Christ, the Eternal Word of God, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, took on our human nature to be known and received as our daily Bread because on the very day of His Resurrection, He taught the disciples to interpret Scripture as always concerning Him and to receive Him in the Eucharist.

Hence we have Saint Paul teaching the Romans: “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction.” What kind of instruction? Paul specifies and says, “that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Because Christ is our hope, then we are to read Scripture to know Christ in the Scriptures, and in knowing Him in Scripture, we may together with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, Paul says that Christ took on our human nature, the nature of a servant, to show the truthfulness of God the Father. In reading Scripture – in marking, learning, and inwardly digesting Christ as He is known through Scripture – the root of Jesse will come, and through His coming by the opening of Scripture, the God of hope will fill us with joy and peace, that by the power of the Holy Spirit, we may abound in hope.

Let us “inwardly digest” Christ through Scripture. That phrase “inwardly digest” has taken on a special meaning unique to Anglican tradition. The Anglican Divine blessed John Keble has this to say about “inwardly digesting”: “When something is digested, it agrees with him, nourishes him, is changed, as it ought to be, into the substance of his body. So the word and commandments of God, made known in Holy Scripture, are inwardly digested, when a man so receives them, as that they shall enter into his character, become, as it were, part of himself. How may that be? There is but one way. We must actually do as God bids us.” And this is a strong echo of the words of Saint James in his Epistle, that we must not only be hearers of the Word, but doers of the Word. To be a doer of what God commands us to do, and what He reveals of His Son through Scripture as our daily bread, is what it means to inwardly digest. Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction – our instruction in how to pray, how to love, how to worship, how to be humble, how to be a disciple, how to live a godly life of Scripture and Sacraments through the Liturgy: how to live, in other words, in Kingdom Culture, taken up into the life of the Holy Spirit, as He teaches us all things and guides us into the Truth Who is Jesus as He seeks to come to us and be known through the opening of Scripture and the Breaking of Bread: He who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the same Holy Spirit: ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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In the audio above is the audio from the first lecture of the Advent Study Series I am doing at my parish. The series is called “Foundations of the Faith: Introducing the Church Fathers.”

In the lecture I reference the icon above, which is of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, which happened in AD 325.

In the part of the talk not included in the audio above, I went through many of the major Church Fathers. The text of the slides I showed during that part of the lecture are reproduced below.

The Apostolic Fathers – 1st and 2nd centuriesSaint Clement of Rome (d. 100)Saint Ignatius of Antioch (d. 110)Saint Polycarp (d. 155)

Uncertain authors:The DidacheThe Epistle of BarnabasThe Epistle to DiognetusThe Shepherd of Hermas

The Desert Fathers – 3rd and 4th centuriesSaint Anthony the Great (d. 356)Saint Athansius the Great (d. 373, also a Greek Father)Saint John Cassian (d. 435)Saint Macarius of Egypt (d. 391)Saint John Chrysostom (d. 407, also a Greek Father)Many others, collected in books of “Sayings” and anthologies such as the Philokalia

The Greek Fathers – 2nd through 8th centuriesSaint Justin Martyr (d. 165)Saint Irenaeus of Lyons (d. 202)Saint Clement of Alexandria (d. 202)Origen of Alexandria (d. 254)Saint Basil the Great (d. 379)Saint Gregory Nazianzus (d. 389)Saint Gregory of Nyssa (d. 395)Saint Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444)Saint Maximos the Confessor (d. 662)Saint John of Damascus (d. 749)

The Latin Fathers – 3rd through 8th centuriesSaint Tertullian (d. 222)Saint Ambrose of Milan (d. 397)Saint Jerome (d. 420)Saint Augustine of Hippo (d. 430)Saint Leo the Great (d. 440)Saint Gregory the Great (d. 604)Saint Bede the Venerable (d. 735)

The Syriac Fathers – 4th through 8th centuriesSaint Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373)Saint Isaac of Ninevah (d. 700)

Click here for lecture two, on Saint Ignatius of Antioch and Saint Anthony of Egypt.

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As is mentioned in the Service Bulletin and described in more length in the December Parish Journal, starting today with the First Sunday of Advent we are using the traditional one-year lectionary for the Scripture readings for Sundays and Holy Days throughout the year, and doing so with the permission of Bishop Justin Holcomb, which is required. We are one of five parishes in our diocese doing this three-year experiment, to gain knowledge and experience of this lectionary which goes back to at least the 7th century – yes, this venerable cycle of yearly readings is one thousand, four hundred years old – so as to decide with our Bishop whether to make it our normal lectionary. More details about this can be found in this month’s Parish Journal, so give it a look.

I mention this upfront in my sermon as a way to acknowledge that the Gospel reading today might be disorienting to hear. The Entrance of Our Lord into Jerusalem we normally hear during Holy Week, for this episode in the life of Christ is the kickoff to Palm Sunday and the procession we make from the Resurrection Garden outside into our Church, holding blessed palms and singing All Glory, Laud, and Honor. The entrance into Jerusalem of our Lord on a lowly donkey is one of the stations that make up the liturgical extravaganza of Holy Week: one station to the next, from the Raising of Lazarus to the Raising of Christ in His glorious Resurrection. In hearing this Gospel today, at a great distance liturgically from Holy Week, the point of it being the Gospel reading for the First Sunday of Advent is not to think so much about Holy Week. But if that is not the point, what is the point? In what way are we to understand our Lord’s entry into Jerusalem and then into the Temple?

Whereas in Holy Week on Palm Sunday we read of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem in the literal way, and focus on that literal reading, as we hold blessed palms and accompany Him, in Advent we must read it on the spiritual level, as symbolic of our spiritual life, which is the life of receiving Christ into our mind and heart. For this we ask these questions: what is the Jerusalem into which Christ enters, and what is the Temple? Other parts of Scripture provide answers that illustrate the profound symbolism of this passage in Advent.

To identify what Jerusalem is, we have Saint John and the Revelation or Apocalypse which He recorded. Revelations 21:14 speaks of the New Jerusalem when it reads: “And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.” Christ enters this Jerusalem – and on the walls of its foundation are the names of the apostles.

As far as the Temple, Saint Paul teaches what the Temple is. The Temple is us. As he said to the church in Corinth: “We are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will live in them and move among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’” He also said, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.” And he said, “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you.”

Thus we put the symbolism together in this spiritual interpretation. Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, as read on the First Sunday of Advent, is His entry into the proclamation of the Gospel by the Apostles. His coming into the Temple is His coming into our inward contemplation, into our soul, into our heart. And this matches the Collect prayer for all Advent, that “Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility.” The living Church and its lively faith rests on apostles and their apostolic proclamation, which makes Christ known to us and shows that Christ is always the Coming One, seeking to come to us, in every moment of every day of our earthly life. All God wants is the human heart, and He comes to our heart on a lowly donkey.

Christ in His great humility seeks to enter our heart through the preaching and teaching of the apostles recorded in the New Testament, and He desires to drive out from the Temple (which is us) all that mucks it up and gets in the way of us perceiving Christ the King of all Creation and King of us. He demands that His house, that is, His temple, that is His Body, which is us, to be a house of prayer. Hence we must keep the commandments as Saint Paul writes to us today in his epistle the Romans: let us love our neighbor as yourself, which sums up the Law, as Jesus taught, indeed because love fulfills the law. This is what keeps our Temple clean, and allows us to recognize Christ Who is the Coming One, coming to us, or in Paul’s phrase: “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.” Nearer to us, because Christ has come closer to us, having cast off the works of darkness which we wore as newborns babe in Christ having put on more of the armor of light.

Recognizing that Christ is always the Coming One is the basis of life in Christ’s Kingdom, and thus the basis of Kingdom culture. He is the Coming One by means of Scripture and by means of Sacrament. He is the Coming One through the Liturgy of the Church, which arranges Scripture and provides the Sacraments. The knowledge that Christ is always the Coming One makes for a truly lively faith, a life in the Holy Spirit: a life of constant wonder, constant awe, ever looking for the divine presence in our heart and in the world, and a constant openness to divine disclosure. The apostles, whose names are inscribed on the walls of the foundation of heaven, preached Christ the Coming One so that all who hear it with faith may be caught up in the life of wonder, awe, and openness to the coming presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit: living and moving and having our being within the Kingdom of Christ the King: He Who is before all things, and in Whom all things hold together, Our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the same Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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I want to bring together threads that have occupied my preaching these last Sundays. These threads included reflections on the Holy Spirit, the image of our parish as a garden, our dedication of this holy house and ourselves with the clear and singular purpose of giving God the love which He is owed, and having a living faith.

I spoke of how the Holy Spirit is the Lord and giver of Life: the giver of growth, and the only giver of growth, the only giver of increase. Our parish is a garden; this was my theme all throughout the Stewardship season. Gardens in the world have a culture of biological and microbial activity; without that microbial culture, little to no plant growth happens; the soil is not fertile. If a parish is a garden it will grow, therefore, if it has the right culture: that culture is life in the Holy Spirit, that is, genuine spiritual activity. A parish will grow if its culture is of the Holy Spirit and His Kingdom – indeed, if it has a “Kingdom Culture,” within which our Saviour Jesus Christ lives and reigns as the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Lamb of God around Whom worship all the Angels and all the Saints.

I spoke last Sunday about the fact that for the same reason Our Lord came to the Temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the Temple, and overturned the tables, so we celebrate the Feast of Dedication. That is, as a reminder of our fundamental purpose as catholic Christians in the ancient tradition of Anglicanism. And that purpose must always be God. Our primary purpose of worshiping in this church to love God because He is God and is owed our love, owed our adoration, which we realize through prayer and most prominently through liturgical prayer, the daily and weekly Liturgy of the Church throughout the year, that God might grant us in this world knowledge of His truth, and in the world to come life everlasting. In our worship, in the Liturgy, we present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, and this, says Saint Paul our patron, is our spiritual worship

Genuine spiritual worship means a lively faith, here in this parish. A lively faith is life in the Holy Spirit: constant wonder, constant awe, ever-sensing the divine presence in our heart and in the world, and a constant openness to divine disclosure: a constant openness to God’s revealing something of Himself through His Son Jesus Christ, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Christ Who is the image of the invisible God, through Whom all things were created, and for Whom all things were created. In Christ, the fullness of the Father dwells. How can that not throw us into awe, a lively faith? This is the Gospel, and joy it brings us!

Undoubtedly this is what happened to Andrew and Peter and Philip and Nathanael. About this Jesus of Nazareth, was said “Behold the Lamb of God!” – words of S. John the Baptist. We can hear in their words awe and wonder and joy, the stirrings of a lively faith in them: “We have found the Messiah,” said Saint Andrew to Saint Peter. “We have found Him of Whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph,” said Saint Philip to Saint Nathanael (later renamed Saint Bartholomew). This was He who was foretold by the Prophets, such as Jeremiah, Who heard Christ speak to him and say, “Behold the days are coming, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and He shall reign as King.”

Thus their lives took on a new level of spirituality. Their life in the Holy Spirit sprang forth as their relationship with God became a lively faith, a true life in the Holy Spirit: a life of constant wonder, constant awe, ever-sensing the divine presence in our heart and in the world, and a constant openness to divine disclosure: a constant openness to God’s revealing something of Himself through His Son Jesus Christ. And these and all the apostles preached so as to proclaim the Gospel that all who hear it may be caught up in the life of wonder, awe, and openness to the presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. They preached and proclaimed with all their heart that people might be stirred up into inhabiting Kingdom culture, where the very soil of the parish is the life in and of the Holy Spirit; stirred up to a living faith; stirred up with the singular purpose of loving God; stirred up to be gardeners in the garden of Christ, living and moving and having their being in a Kingdom culture in which Jesus Christ is King: He Who is before and things, and in Whom all things hold together, Our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the same Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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Our gospel story gives us again the beautiful, simple, and touching story of the poor widow. And it is held up in our lectionary in our stewardship season, as it is reaching its conclusion. And that is so very fitting. Because Christian stewardship, for as much as I have said about it in my recent preaching, really is as simple as the poor widow. Just as she put in everything she had, her whole living, so are we to give our time, talent, and treasure for the glory of God and for the benefit of this parish church. Giving to the church her whole living, everything she had, means she gave her heart.

It means that her intentions in giving could not be but pure and godly. She was humble like the Tax Collector; she made no pretense of long prayers or showiness like the Pharisee. Her offering meant everything to her, and God beheld her offering and lifted it up to heaven, lifted it into glory for all to behold. I wish we knew the name of this poor widow. We are not told her name. But if we were told it, I am certain she would have the word “Saint” before her name and a feast day on the calendar. She surely was full of the Holy Spirit, and she shares that dual-quality of the Saints: that in all things she is to be admired, and that we should imitate her how we can. We admire her for her humility and her faith; let us imitate her in giving to the Church all we can: our heart.

In all things of the Christian life, the Saints are always to be remembered, celebrated, and venerated. I spoke these words about the Saints last Sunday: The Saints are examples to us of genuine stewardship. We can speak of the Saints as gardeners, in that they are dedicated to helping growth happen. Likewise the Saints certainly show humility before Almighty God, Who alone gives the increase. Saints are filled with the awe and fear of God, of the fact that all creative power comes from God, Who is the maker of all things, and through Whom all things are made. And the Saints know that in Christ’s garden, which is the Church, the Holy Spirit dwells, the Holy Spirit acts, the Holy Spirit leads us to Christ. The Saints themselves do not imitate the Pharisee, who does works to be rewarded by God, but rather they imitate the Tax Collector, the Publican, who is pure humility falls to his knees before God and asks simply for His mercy.

In the Apostles’ Creed, we say that we believe in the Communion of Saints. We say that because the Saints are the living foundation of the Church. They are the living foundation of the Church, the living foundation of the Body of Christ, because Christ lives in them. Certainly Christ was living in the poor widow. He lives in all the Saints. And Christ lives in the poor widow and all the Saints because the Saints are full of the Holy Spirit. We remember the Saints, we celebrate the Saints, we venerate the Saints, because in looking with the eyes of faith upon the Saints who are our fellow wayfarers, our friends, our contemporaries, our colleagues, the “Hall of Fame” Christians: in looking upon the Saints we see people whose ordinary lives were transformed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ into extraordinary lives of virtue, of faith, hope, and love, and divine wisdom. But it really is as simple as this: the Saints are full of the Holy Spirit. They were full of the Holy Spirit during their existence on earth, and they remain full of the Holy Spirit having run with patience the race set before them, and set before us, they have been taken up into heaven and received the crown of glory that fades not away, the same crown promised to all those who maintain a lively faith in Jesus Christ.

I say “lively faith”—not just “faith,” but faith that is “lively.” What do I mean by that? A lively faith is life in the Holy Spirit: constant wonder, constant awe, ever-sensing the divine presence in our heart and in the world, and a constant openness to divine disclosure: a constant openness to God’s revealing something of Himself through His Son Jesus Christ, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

If a parish takes seriously Christian stewardship, it becomes a garden with gardeners seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who is the Lord and giver of Life: the giver of growth, and the only giver of growth, the only giver of increase. Gardens have a culture of biological and microbial activity; without that microbial culture, little to no plant growth happens. A parish is a garden that will grow if it has the right culture, as well: a culture of genuinely spiritual activity. A parish will grow if its culture is of the Holy Spirit and His Kingdom – indeed, a “Kingdom Culture,” within which our Saviour Jesus Christ lives and reigns as the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Lamb of God around Whom worship all the Angels and all the Saints, through Whom all things are made, and Who lives and reigns with the Father and the same Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede is a homily podcast. The episodes are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with the Venerable S. Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.12

While the King was on His dining couch, my nard gave forth its fragrance. My Beloved is to me a bundle of myrrh that shall lie between my breasts. My Bloved is to me a grape-cluster from Cyprus in the vineyards of Engaddi.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

Surely the Church, having received such gifts or promises from her Creator, continually responded and further declared the devotion with which she would undertake these works, saying: “While the King was on His dining couch, my nard gave forth its fragrance.” Now “the King’s dining couch” is what she calls the time of His Nativity, during which He deigned to be humbled for our sake and to be brought down Himself so that we might be raised up. Clearly, on this dining couch He has willed both to refresh His Church with life-giving food and to be refreshed Himself with her good deeds. For this reason He says: “I am the living bread that came from heaven; whoever eats of this bread will live forever” (Jn 6.51); and again to the disciples, concerning the people who believe in Him, He says, “I have food to eat that you do not know about” (Jn 4.32). And the fragrance of nard represents the ardor of right action. “While the King was on His dining couch,” she says, “my nard gave forth its fragrance,” because when the Son of God had appeared in flesh the Church increased in its fervor for heavenly virtues – not that she had no spiritual persons devoted to God before His Nativity, but because she subjected herself without any hesitation to the more rigorous practice of virtues at the time when she learned that access to the heavenly kingdom is open to all who live rightly, as soon as the bonds of flesh are dissolved. Now we should note that the figure in this little verse was also fulfilled according to the letter in the deeds of Saint Mary Magdalene, who contained a type of the church when she anointed the Lord’s head and feet with an ointment of nard as He was reclining at supper, “and the house was filled with the odor of the ointment” (Jn 12.3), as the holy Gospel accounts bear witness. In one of them it is also indicated what kind of nard that was, for it is said, “A woman came with an alabaster jar of ointment of nard of very precious spikes” (Mt 14.3), evidently because its tips extend themselves into ears and therefore they will up the spikes and leaves with a double portion of nard oil. The naturalists write that it is the chief among ointments, hence it was deservedly used in anointing the body of the Lord.

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In professional sports there are all-star games. This is certainly true of professional baseball, professional basketball, professional hockey, and professional football (although football calls theirs the “pro-bowl” and basically no one pays any attention to it). To arrive at the group of players in these sports that participate in the all-star game involves balloting, they are elected. What are these all-star teams but those players who have been given gifts by God up and above their colleagues, and who have cooperated with those God-given gifts, in a way notable and singular, so as to be recognized by the peers as extraordinary? This same sort of thing is seen as well in the halls of fame in professional sports (and college sports, I might add). Those elected to the hall of fame play the same sport as young children do in their pick-up games, or their little league games. The game is basically the same no matter if you are playing in your backyard or the local park or arena, or if you are playing at the highest professional level. There is a spectrum of skill, and certain players are given gifts up and above the rest; those players are admired and imitated.

It is the same with the Saints of holy Church. Whereas in sport the discipline is centered on developing skills, in Christianity the discipline is centered on discipleship. Every baptized Christian is a disciple, but like sport we see in the Church a spectrum of discipleship. On one end are the Christians baptized yesterday – no matter the age, because every baptized person starts at square 1 in terms of relationship with God, Who (in the teaching of both S. Peter and S. Paul) shows no partiality, emphasized by the famous teaching of S. Paul to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” And on the other end are the canonical Saints of the Church, “canonical” meaning on the Kalendar with the title “Saint” before their name. Saints are those holy men and women who have been given certain gifts by God of prayer and service, and who in recognizing the gifts given them by God have cooperated with this grace so as to give all of their time, talent, and treasure to the glory of God and the upbuilding of His Church.

Thus we see how, on the Feast of All Saints, the Saints are examples to us of genuine stewardship. We can speak of the Saints as gardeners, in that they are dedicated to helping growth happen. Likewise the Saints certainly show humility before Almighty God, Who alone gives the increase. Saints are filled with the awe and fear of God, of the fact that all creative power comes from God, Who is the maker of all things, and through Whom all things are made. And the Saints know that in Christ’s garden, which is the Church, the Holy Spirit dwells, the Holy Spirit acts, the Holy Spirit leads us to Christ. The Saints themselves do not imitate the Pharisee, who does works to be rewarded by God, but rather they imitate the Tax Collector, the Publican, who is pure humility falls to his knees before God and asks simply for His mercy.

In the Apostles’ Creed, which in Anglican liturgy is also called our Baptismal Creed, we say “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, and the Communion of Saints.” These all go together, not merely in a sequence of words but the very nature of God’s economy and saving plan: the Holy Spirit establishes the Church, which is Christ’s Body, and He calls men and women as Holy Saints to lead the Church, both in their life and in their heavenly intercession and supplication. The Saints are full of the Holy Spirit. The Saints have been transformed by the Gospel. Thus the Saints are concrete proof that the promises of the Gospel are true. We are in communion with the Saints through Jesus Christ: they are our friends, they are our colleagues, they are our teachers in how to follow Christ, they are our contemporaries.

I said before that the all-star professional players are admired and imitated. Again, this is the same as with the Saints. Everything about them we should admire – and there is so much to admire in the lives of the Saints, for the diversity of the Saints baffles simple analysis. And what we can imitate of the Saints, we should be ever trying to do. To imitate the Saints is to imitate how they follow the Law as summarized by Jesus: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind: and to love our neighbor as ourself. In loving God and our neighbor, the Saints demonstrate what Christian love is, how Saint Paul describes love: love is patient, love is kind, love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And without this love, says Saint Paul, no matter what we do, we are a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal; indeed without love, we are nothing.

What Saint do you seek to not only admire but imitate? If you do not have one, it is time to get one. Who is your favorite Saint? If you do not have a favorite Saint, start to read about the lives of the Saints, and start to come to our weekday liturgy where we keep the feast days of the Saints of the New Testament as well as certain other important Saints, like S. Francis of Assisi and several others. If we want the Holy Spirit to come, to inspire our souls, if we want to be gardeners in Christ’s garden, if we want the culture of our parish must be one in which we are constantly asking for the Holy Spirit to come, which means His Kingdom come – let us deepen our communion with the Saints, let us build our living relationship with the Saints, one Saint at a time. To celebrate and venerate Saints is to celebrate and worship Christ in them, because Christ is in us and we in Him. In the simplest of terms, the Saints teach us how to be a better parish, better disciples, better gardeners: indeed the Saints teach us how to be an adoring and merciful congregation in a beautiful church with a strong desire to know God. All because the Saints are completely full of Christ, full of grace and heavenly benediction, completely filled by Him Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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“And Jesus said to him, ‘What do you want Me to do for you?’ And the blind man said to Him, ‘Rabbi, let me recover my sight.’” What could sight be for us, except the capacity to discern what is holy from what is unholy? As we heard from the Epistle to the Hebrews, having the “faculties trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.” To distinguish what is of the Holy Spirit from that which is from the flesh, the world, and the devil? So that we can recover our sight, so that we can truly see. And in seeing, all the more readily and effectively exercise our stewardship, through our threefold tithe of time, talent, and treasure.

This is the third of my sermons on stewardship. I am offering sermons on this topic because our stewardship reflects our entire attitude to the Church, which is realized within our parish. In my first sermon I spoke of stewardship as seeing ourselves, members of this congregation, as gardeners: that we are to do what gardeners do: help growth happen, through cooperating with God; gardeners who have in mind an image of the harvest to get through the difficult work, which for us is the image of an adoring and merciful congregation in a beautiful church with a strong desire to know God.

In my second sermon, I spoke of being gardeners who show humility before Almighty God. As Saint Paul teaches, it is not us but God Who gives the growth, only God Who gives the increase. And we are made humble by our awe of God, from Whom all growth comes – in awe of the fact that all creative power comes from God, Who is the maker of all things, and through Whom all things are made.

Stewardship entails being a gardener in the garden of Christ with profound respect for the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life. In Christ’s garden, the Holy Spirit dwells, the Holy Spirit acts, the Holy Spirit leads us to Christ. For our parish to be Christ’s garden is for us to recognize that the Holy Spirit can act powerfully, such as to make the impossible possible. Our stewardship is thwarted by pride, yet it is genuine in humility. I spoke of always seeking to serve our awesome God, serve His awesome power, serve His incredible creativity, serve His loving energy that gives all things life, that fills all things with His sacramental blessing, that shines with the brightness of heaven in even the darkest of places, illumining all things with the torch of Christ’s light which ever burns with health, with salvation, with the peace that passes all understanding.

In support of all of this understanding of stewardship, we hear this teaching from the Epistle to the Hebrews: “For God is not so unjust as to overlook your work and the love which you showed for His sake in serving the saints, as you still do. And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness in realizing the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.” In hearing these words “our work and the love which we show for His sake in serving the saints,” as about us as well, we can hear them as directly about our stewardship. Our work and the love which show for God’s sake in serving the saints, which here means fellow Christians alive as well as faithfully departed, this is our threefold tithe of time, talent, and treasure. Our tithe is for God’s sake, that He will give the growth if we, as gardeners, through work and love shown for God’s sake, truly serve Christians; that is through work and love help Christians grow in their faith. For that to happen, we need to give our tithe: of time in worship and prayer, that we ourselves are fed by grace and remember God’s law to love Him with our whole being, and love Him in our neighbor; for that to happen, we need to give our tithe of talent, in support of the ministries ongoing in this parish (Vestry, liturgical ministry, ECW, Daughters of the King, Atrium catechesis, the various teams we have, and the rest); and for Christians to grow in their faith, we need to give our tithe of treasure, to allow the parish to operate within the financial realities of the world today.

Yet the passage from Hebrews recognizes a common problem in parish stewardship, which is sluggishness. Sluggishness is really a word that often describes normal parish life, isn’t it? We know the Gospel, and we are sluggish in proclaiming it. We know the Gospel, but we are sluggish in living it out, day to day. We know the Gospel, but we are sluggish in offering our threefold tithe, especially our tithe of time and talent. And so understanding the remedy for sluggishness is central to stewardship.

“And Jesus said to him, ‘What do you want Me to do for you?’ And the blind man said to Him, ‘Rabbi, let me recover my sight.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Go your way; your faith has made you well.’ And immediately he recovered his sight and followed Him on the way.” And immediately his sluggishness gave way to a full-hearted offering of himself as a disciple of Christ. And so, as part of our stewardship, which emerges from our whole attitude toward the Church, we must ask Jesus to help us see. We must ask Christ for His mercy. We must ask for the Holy Spirit to come, to inspire our souls. The culture of our parish must be one in which we are constantly asking for the Holy Spirit to come; constantly seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit; constantly aware of His power, His creativity, ever humble before Him Who is the Lord and giver of life: a culture soaked in relationship with the Holy Spirit. Let us ask, knowing that our Saviour Christ hears all prayers, and sends His Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father, to those who are humble and devout; all because Christ lives and reigns with the Father and the same Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede is a homily podcast. The episodes are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with the Venerable S. Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.8

If you do not know yourself, O fairest among women, go forth and follow the tracks of the flocks, and pasture your kids by the shepherds’ tents. I have compared you, my friend, to my company of horsemen among Pharaoh's chariots. Your cheeks are beautiful as a turtledove’s; your neck as jewels; we will make you necklaces of gold, inlaid with silver.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

Emphasizing the importance of keeping the sobriety of a turtledove, the Bridegroom adds: “Your neck as jewels; we will make you necklaces of gold, inlaid with silver.” Surely it is through the neck that we both take in food to nourish the body and bring forth words with which we declare the secrets of our hearts to our neighbors. For this reason the role of the church’s teachers is rightly represented by the neck, since they both instruct the unlearned with an edifying word and in the process of that same instruction convey the food of salvation to the members of the holy Church entrusted to them. Clearly, this neck is rightly compared to jewels. . . . The necklaces are also ornaments for a virgin’s neck, namely, little chains woven with golden bands. . . . These aptly signify the weaving together of the divine scriptures through which the loveliness of holy Church increases when every single one of the faithful strives to shine with virtues by observing the words and deeds of the fathers more and more. For the gold from which He says that the necklaces are made is the splendor of the spiritual sense of Scripture, and the silver with which he states they are inlaid is understood as the luster of heavenly eloquence. Now what He promises in the plural (“We will make you”) is said with reference to those through whom sacred scripture has been ministered to us by the agency and cooperation of God’s spirit, of whom there have been very many from the time in which Solomon foretold these things until that which is to come. Therefore, He encircles the Bride’s neck with gold necklaces inlaid with silver because He has prepared divine diadems for the Church by inspiring those whom He has placed in authority with responsibility for teaching His faithful, and He encircles her neck with necklaces fashioned by the craftsman’s art when every faithful soul continually looks towards the holy Scriptures in all that she says or does, or perhaps I should say in everything that she lives and hopes, and diligently directs both her mind and her words according to their pattern, and thus this little verse is joined to the one above, for the reason that holy Church’s cheeks are beautiful as a turtledove’s (that is, that her modesty remains inviolate) is because frequent meditation on divine Scripture does not allow her to err.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

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Our Gospel passage picks up with two of the close apostles of Christ – Ss James and John, sons of Zebedee, sons of thunder—asking our Lord to sit one at His right hand and one at His left in His glory. This is their processing of the Transfiguration of Jesus, which they, along with S. Peter, witnessed. They were in awe of Christ’s Transfiguration, and wanted to emulate the two they saw with Jesus at that moment: Moses and Elijah, and Christ’s right and left hand. They wanted to emulate Moses and Elijah out of their yearning for intimacy with Jesus, of Whom they were utterly in awe. And their awe, along with the awe of the whole of the Upper Room Church of Jerusalem grew when they read passages out of the prophet Isaiah as we hear today—that this Jesus, the eternal Son and Word of the Father, begotten before all worlds, King of kinds, Lord of lord, this Jesus has bourne our griefs and carried our sorrows; that this Jesus was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. And their humility grew when they realized they too were the sheep that had gone astray, that they too had turned every one to his own way, away from Him who poured out His soul to death, bearing the sins of us all.

Awe and humility—I believe both are tied in to stewardship, as I will seek to illustrate.

This is the second of my sermons on stewardship. I am offering sermons on this topic because stewardship summarizes our entire attitude to the Church, which includes the local expression of the One Church our parish. In my first sermon I spoke of stewardship as seeing ourselves, members of this congregation, as gardeners. Understanding the stewardship of this parish means seeing ourselves, seeing this congregation, as gardeners.

I went into last Sunday what this means. God has brought each and every one of us here, to this Parish, to be gardeners of His new creation. God wants us to help Him bring about the increase of the harvest. God has called each of us forth to do in this Parish what gardeners do in their garden: help it grow. That is what our tithe of time, talent, and treasure is for: the means for growth. If we want this parish to grow, then let us do the hard work of giving our time in attending the Liturgy and praying at home, let us give our talent in support of the ministries ongoing in this parish, and let us give generously of our treasure, to allow the parish to operate within the financial realities of the world today.

I also spoke last Sunday about having an inspiring image in our minds, as we take up the work of offering our threefold tithe. We need such an image because the work is often arduous, difficult, and in the immediate sense, it can be not very rewarding. A gardener would have in his mind the image of the harvest, and this image inspires hard work in the present. For us, I offered up the image of an adoring and merciful congregation in a beautiful church with a strong desire to know God. Adoring: in that with reverence we adore God Who transcends all conditions of time and space; merciful: in that we perform acts of mercy to help those in need; all with a strong desire to know God: in that we are a congregation with inquiring minds, discerning hearts, a courageous spirit that perseveres to know and love God, with the gift of joy and wonder in all of God’s works, and in God Himself, as He is known in the power of the Holy Spirit through His Son Jesus Christ our Lord. This image, this portrait, is both who we are now, and who we seek to become more intensely, more thoroughly. We seek here nothing less than participation in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, not as a superficial social club as is sadly too common in today’s American Christianity, but as a holy organism, in holy fellowship, filled with the Holy Ghost.

Another aspect of stewardship is humility. If we are gardeners in the garden of Christ, then we must be humble. As Saint Paul teaches, it is not us but God Who gives the growth, only God Who gives the increase. As it is with a garden, so is it with our parish: God gives the increase, the growth: our job is to cooperate with God, and do all within our power to cultivate the conditions by which God-given growth can occur.

And we are made humble by our awe of God. Let again be in awe of the fact that all creative power comes from God, Who is the maker of all things, and through Whom all things are made. To be a gardener in the garden of Christ is to have profound respect for God’s omnipotence. It is to have profound respect as well for the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life. In Christ’s garden, the Holy Spirit dwells. For our parish to be Christ’s garden is for us to recognize that the Holy Spirit can act powerfully, such as to make the impossible possible. Our stewardship is thwarted by our pride, yet it is genuine in our humility.

As is written in the Epistle to the Hebrews, “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” And, the Epistle goes on to say, “Before Him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with Whom we have to do.” This is true power, indeed flowing from the heavenly realms, the aroma of which fills our church. Our God is indeed an awesome God, because of His awesome power, His incredible creativity, His boundless loving energy. He gave Himself on the Cross that we might grow into Him through the Sacraments. Let us in the stewardship of our parish always seek to serve our awesome God, serve His awesome power, serve His incredible creativity, serve His loving energy that gives all things life, that fills all things with His sacramental blessing, that shines with the brightness of heaven in even the darkest of places, illumining all things with the torch of Christ’s light which ever burns with health, with salvation, with the peace that passes all understanding because it is of the mind of Jesus, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede is a homily podcast. The episodes are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with the Venerable S. Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.8

If you do not know yourself, O fairest among women, go forth and follow the tracks of the flocks, and pasture your kids by the shepherds’ tents. I have compared you, my friend, to my company of horsemen among Pharaoh's chariots. Your cheeks are beautiful as a turtledove’s; your neck as jewels; we will make you necklaces of gold, inlaid with silver.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

Because the verse “I have compared you, my friend, to my company of horsemen among Pharaoh's chariots” teaches how the Lord protects the Church in the midst of misfortunes, it remains to be shown how much the Church herself preserves the love of the same Lord and Protector when misfortunes occur. There is added: “Your cheeks are beautiful as a turtledove’s.” It is said that it is the nature of the turtledove that if it is deprived of the companionship of its mate it will never be joined to another. This is appropriately applied to the chastity of the Church, for even though death has deprived her of the Lord Who is her Bridegroom, nevertheless she can by no means accept the company of strangers, since she holds so dear the remembrance of the One Whom she knows to have been resurrected from the dead and to reign now in heaven, and she is content with only the love of Him to Whom she longs to come one day. For this reason she is accustomed to declare in words she learned from an eminent teacher: “For neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, for depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39). This is what holy Church says when she is fearful that perhaps she might turn aside from the way of truth by wandering after the examples of the foolish: “Let I begin to wander after the flocks of Your companions.” Therefore, since the seat of decorum is in the cheeks, Truth Himself rightly says to her in reply: “Your cheeks are beautiful as a turtledove’s,” which is to say, “I have adorned you with such virtue of wholesome modesty that neither the desire for transitory things nor the noisy dogmas of the foolish ever seduce you into drawing back from the chastity you have promised to me in good faith.”

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

This is the first of several sermons on stewardship. Yes, it coincides with the fact that pledge cards for next year are being sent out to every household. Yet it will be a sermon series not merely because of pledge cards. It is a sermon series because the topic of stewardship includes not only the household tithe for next year’s budget, but really the entire attitude we have toward the One, Holy Church and her local embodiment, this very church of Saint Paul in New Smyrna Beach where we are worshiping. To flesh that out will take a number of Sundays.

I want to begin by noting that one of the primary themes of Saint Mark’s gospel is creation. It is Mark’s argument that Jesus of Nazareth initiates a new creation, and is Himself the new creation: that the new creation is embodied in Him. Saint Paul picks this up in his teaching, that everyone who is in Christ is a new creation. The first words of Mark’s Gospel account are: “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” and this was an intentional move by Mark to immediately bring to mind the Book of Genesis, which starts in a similar way, “In the beginning…”. Christ is the true beginning of the new creation, which is in Him. At the end of his Gospel, Mark describes the women at the empty tomb as full of astonishment. That is a translation of a Greek word, the root of which is our word “ecstasy,” but it has to do also with creation. That is shown by the fact that this same word “ecstasy” used to describe the holy women at Christ’s resurrection is the new word that Moses used in Genesis to describe Adam when God fashioned Eve from his rib, and Abraham when God was making a covenant with him, both moments of new creation.

If Christ is the new creation, and every person who is in Him is a becoming a new creation, our human destiny, our vocation, the way God called (and calls) us into existence, is to become partners or agents of Christ’s new creation, ambassadors for Christ, that God makes His appeal to the world through us, His Church. Another image for this is that God has called us to be gardeners of His creation, the growth of the world and the people of the world into His new creation in Christ. And what do gardeners do but help things grow? It is patient work. It is work based upon hope—hope that the conditions will prevail and the flowers and fruits will bear forth. And indeed it is that thinking about the harvest that fuels the patient, arduous work.

Understanding the stewardship of this parish means seeing ourselves, seeing this congregation, as gardeners. God has brought each and every one of us here, to this Parish, to be gardeners of His new creation. God wants us to help Him bring about the increase of the harvest. God has called each of us forth to do in this Parish what gardeners do in their garden: help it grow. The Church asks of her members, and this church is asking of each one of us, to continue and even increase our tithes—to continue and even increase our offerings to the Parish of our time, our talent, and our treasure. Our tithe is not merely of money: it is of time, talent, and treasure. This is the patient work of the gardener in the time before the flowers and fruits come: tilling the soil, planting seeds, watering, pulling weeds, pruning, fertilizing, and all the rest. Without that work, there will never be beautiful flowers, ripe fruit—and so without our tithe of time, talent, and treasure, the garden here will not grow, but its holiness will wither away.

I said a moment ago that it is that image of the harvest that fuels the patient, arduous work. What such images can inspire us now to continue and even increase our tithe to the Parish? As your Rector I witness many inspiring images, and I know I am not alone in seeing them. We have a beautiful church, a truly holy house of God’s sacred presence and power. We have truly reverent worship, with real devotion to the Eucharist. We are a church that outwardly shows our inward adoration of God. We have a strong sense of outreach to those in need. We have daily activity on our church campus, in our Liturgy, our Fellowship ministries, our Preschool ministry. We have a growing and lively Atrium for our youngest members. These are images that keep us inspired.

Let me share another image that fuels me. It is that we are a parish that wants to learn about God. This is fresh on my mind because we started a new Bible study session on Saturday mornings, which came out of our Summer book study, and because I am soon to announce the subject of the Advent Sunday study. We are getting great turnout at these and our other formation opportunities. We are a parish that wants to learn about God, and we have the resources to provide a godly pedagogy that is wholesome, engaging, and comprehensive.

This is a very important thing. The importance is underscored in the concluding prayer in the Liturgy for Holy Baptism. To the newly baptized person, we ask God to give him “an inquiring mind and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love Thee, and the gift of joy and wonder in all Thy works.” As your rector, this is what I want our parish to support: a congregation with inquiring mind, discerning hearts, a courageous spirit that perseveres to know and love God, with the gift of joy and wonder in all of God’s works, and in God Himself, as He is known in the power of the Holy Spirit through His Son Jesus Christ our Lord. The secret of parish growth is spiritual growth in the existing congregation. This is because spiritual growth is the result of the Holy Spirit’s power. And the Holy Spirit acts especially in groups of people that decide to want to learn more about God. The questions that arise in these groups are heard not only by the priest or formation leader, but more importantly these questions are heard by God. And God always responds to the faithful, always responds to those who show they love Him and want deeper relationship with Him.

Having brought to mind all these different images of what our parish is and what it can be, let us put them together: A reverent, merciful, adoring congregation in a beautiful church with strong desire to know God—what an a garden, brothers and sisters. Implant this firmly in your mind and hearts as you receive this week the 2025 pledge cards. Growing this garden demands the patient work of time, talent, and treasure. But God wants His garden to grow, to flourish abundantly through Jesus Christ, Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost lives and reigns, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede is a homily podcast. The episodes are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with the Venerable S. Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.8

If you do not know yourself, O fairest among women, go forth and follow the tracks of the flocks, and pasture your kids by the shepherds’ tents. I have compared you, my friend, to my company of horsemen among Pharaoh's chariots. Your cheeks are beautiful as turtledove’s; your neck as jewels; we will make you necklaces of gold, inlaid with silver.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

Because the Lord does not want holy Church to be ignorant of her true self, but that she should readily desire to learn what gifts she has received from Him and what she ought to suffer and to do for the sake of His love, He consequently indicates what her status is when He goes on to say: “I have compared you, my friend, to my company of horsemen among Pharaoh’s chariots.” Surely His “company of horsemen” is what He calls the host of the children of Israel whom He freed from slavery in Egypt. Leading them through the Red Sea into the desert, He eventually brought them into the land promised to the m as an inheritance. The chariots of Pharaoh, who were pursuing them because Pharaoh wanted to drag them back into servitude, He caused to sink into the same sea. Now He calls them a “company of horsemen” from then on, because just as a charioteer is accustomed to preside over a company of horsemen, the Lord Himself then ruled over that same people in such a way as to take charge of it, and guided it in such a way to lead it along the way of salvation. Clearly the one being compared to this company of horsemen is His Church, which He made His friend through the water of regeneration, for He has taught her that when persecutors threaten she should always have faith in His help, just as that former people was certainly terrified and very fearful when Pharaoh’s chariots came upon them but was saved at that time by heavenly protection. For it happened then that a fiery pillar gave light for the people of God but thickest darkness covered the Egyptian hordes so that all through the night they were unable to come near to one another, and this constantly happens also in the night of this world when Divine Providence uses meticulous discernment to separate the righteous from the reprobate, illuminating the righteous with His grace and leaving the reprobate in blindness as they deserve. But since it also happened that when they came to the Red Sea the children of Israel were delivered by the parting of the waves, but the waters returned upon the Egyptians and they were drowned along with their horses and chariots, is it not evident that the very stream of death that will come upon all mortal beings carries away the wicked to destruction while for the pious it opens up the way to salvation? And so far all the rest of the things that we read as having happened to that same company of God’s horsemen (that is, to the Israelite people) in the time of the Egyptian persecution, the more diligently they are examined the more clearly are they found to have anticipated in figure the holy Church of which this people was a portion. And since this verse teaches how the Lord protects the Church in the midst of misfortunes, it remains to be shown how much the Church herself preserves the love of the same Lord and Protector when misfortunes occur.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Our Lord teaches us today about the Sacrament of Matrimony. He says to the Pharisees: “From the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” Saint Paul, writing to the Ephesians, adds “This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” Why does God want man and woman joined? And what does it mean to say that this refers to Christ and the Church?

One thing we see in the Genesis creation story is that God has endowed human beings with a great deal of freedom. You may eat of the fruit of any tree in the garden, God told Adam, which in the literal interpretation means: have at it, enjoy yourself. This is not an unqualified or unlimited freedom, for there is one tree forbidden: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yet overall, freedom abounds. What is this freedom for? What is its purpose? What is more, male and female united in matrimony somehow express or make known what it means to exist in this world of God-given freedom. How does this work?

This country has a lot to say about freedom. It is part of our identity as a nation. Ingrained in us is the phrase, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In the Declaration of Independence these are called “unalienable Rights,” meaning impossible to take away. That is because these rights come from God: they are endowed by the Creator. That which comes from God mankind has no ability to remove. We the creatures live within the parameters of creation set forth by our creator God who is omnipotent (everywhere powerful), omniscient (everywhere knowing), and omnipresent (everywhere present).

All people, whether married or unmarried, are created to worship God. We are created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord. Fueled entirely by His grace, this is how we save our souls. And as an aid to that activity, an aid to our worship day in and day out, all of the other things on the face of the earth are created for mankind to help us in attaining the end of worship. “It is not good that man should be alone,” our Lord said, and it is as if He might have added, “amid all this freedom.”

And so out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air. They were formed of the same substance as Adam: the dust of the ground. So although humans and animals share an origin in earthly material and are both conceived in His mind, the primary difference between man and animal in Scripture is this: unlike the rest of animals, man has the ability to name the animals, that is, to reflect on their existence. Animals cannot do that. Men and women can. We can reflect on the creatures of the world, and name them. In the ancient world of Scripture, naming something is an action that comes only from understanding the true nature of that thing.

It seems as well that not only can we reflect on the true nature of our fellow creatures, but that it appears that we must. Again Saint Paul, to the Romans: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” Clearly perceiving things that God has made, that is His creatures, reveals God’s power and deity. We must have a constant awareness that everything around us is made by God, and this comes from deep, spiritual perception. The Devil, on the other hand, wants us to be oblivious to this fact; or, if not oblivious, then to have the attitude of “Yes, God man everything; so what, no big deal.” And yet, it is more than a big deal, and for this reason: God makes Himself known to us through creatures. How to worship the Lord—which means to know and love Him—is revealed by understanding the nature of human beings.

Freedom – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – summarizes how to live in God’s creation. As Saint Paul wrote to the Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free.” The fully Christian understanding of freedom is poetically expressed in the ninety-sixth Psalm—O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth stand in awe of Him. To be free means the freedom to fully experience holiness, which comes through worshiping the Holy Trinity. Through “holiness” we recognize God’s presence intimately—an intimate presence in the world, an intimate presence in another person, an intimate presence in each of us. And so, freedom is worshiping the Lord in the beauty of His intimate presence; let the whole earth stand in awe of Him. Awe and wonder—the technical term for which is “fear”—this is the beginning of wisdom. Awe and wonder is the beginning of discipleship. Our ongoing transformation into more mature Christian spirituality happens with awe and wonder at the sheer beauty of the maker of all that is, both seen and unseen—utterly transcendent in His power, knowledge and presence—impossibly close to our hearts and minds, closer to us ever than our own breath. What profound intimacy God has with us!

Man and woman united together in the Sacrament of Matrimony are able to know that kind of profound intimacy. And in knowing with such intimacy, they can experience Christ in each other in the most mysterious of ways. The man experiences Christ in his wife; the woman experiences Christ in her husband. They experience Christ together, for they are one flesh. The Sacrament of Matrimony makes the fundamental unit of humanity–male and female, united –into the fundamental unit of worship. Through each other, they worship the Creator present in His creatures. This is how Matrimony refers to Christ and His Church. The mystery of Christ in us, as Paul again writes: “the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” The mystery of man united with woman replicates the mystery of the Church because God seeks to be known intimately, and man and woman united in matrimony are able to know God intimately in each other, and constantly live deeper into that intimacy.

This is I think gets at, perhaps in the deepest sense, why God made them male and female. He created us male and female to properly be free, needing to be joined together to experience Christian freedom, which is freely choosing to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and love our neighbor (in this case, our spouse): choosing a life of holiness, which is a journey of understanding Christ in each other, and sharing this understanding with everyone around them: children, relatives, and neighbors. A man and a woman need each other to properly worship God, and the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony enshrines this truth. Matrimony is a true embodiment of the Church on earth: that through the man and woman united as one flesh sacramentally in matrimony, the grace of Christ can truly be known, for Matrimony is a channel God uses to pour upon the world the sacrificial grace of His Son. To put it simply: to be a Christian is to be in love with Jesus, even He Who lives and reigns for ever with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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There are two equal and opposite ways to devalue something. One way is to ignore it, which says that it is unimportant. The second way is to give it lots of exposure but in trivial ways, which teaches that it has no significant value. Angels have in recent times been devalued in both these ways.

Angels have been dismissed as religious fairy tales by those who consider themselves too intellectually sophisticated to believe such notions. On the other hand, angels have been trivialized in visual renderings (which almost always seem to be very bad art) as well as being the subject of non-theological myths and fantasies. For example, human beings do not, in fact, become angels when they get to Heaven. Angels are a completely different order of God’s creation. It is like saying oranges become apples when they die. We all know this is wrong: oranges become orange juice.

What is an angel? An angel is a spiritual creature and part of God’s great unseen world. The word angel means “messenger”: messenger of God and His will.

Why are angels important to us? Beyond being messengers of God they are guardians to human beings against danger and temptation, and they especially watch over children. They remind us that we are part of a great spiritual world that is bound up with our material world.

Is belief in angels scriptural? Yes, without question. Mention of angels is found frequently in both the Old and the New Testaments. The Bible refers to cherubim, seraphim, archangels, guardian angels, and more. Saint Paul lists nine kinds of angels, what are often called the nine orders of angels. Angels played a significant role in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.

The doctrine about Angels of the historic, sacramental traditions of Holy Church—that is, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriential Orthodox, Anglican, and Old Catholic—teaches that:

* Christ is the center of the angelic world. They are His angels. They belong to Him because they were created through and for Him. They belong to Him still more because He has made them messengers of His saving plan. They are present with Christ in heaven.

* In the Liturgy of the Church—both Mass and the daily Offices—we join in our worship with the worship of the angelic choir. This choir is ever singing Holy, Holy, Holy. Worship on earth that is holy and sacramental participates directly in the angelic singing: we singing with the Angels, and the Angels singing with us. The Liturgy is an immediate participation in the heavenly reality, which is why ancient Liturgy proclaims: “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and all the company of heaven [meaning the Saints], we laud and magnify Thy glorious Name; evermore praising Thee, and saying, “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

* Angels have been present since creation and throughout the history of salvation, announcing this salvation and serving the accomplishment of the divine plan. In the Gospel accounts, Angels are everywhere. From the Incarnation to the Ascension, the life of Jesus Christ is surrounded by the adoration and service of angels. They protect Jesus in His infancy, serve Him in the desert, strengthen Him in his agony in the garden. It is angels that proclaim the Good News of Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection.

* From its beginning, human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession. Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life. Everyone has a Guardian Angel.

* Angels are a real part of God’s creation. They are not physical; they do not have material bodies; but they are quite real. Like all of God’s gifts, however, we must cooperate with God’s will in order to receive the guidance and protection God promises us through their ministry.

In light of all this, let us hear the words Our Lord Jesus Christ told His disciples: "I say unto you that their angels ever behold the face of my Father who is in heaven." By these words it is shown that an angel is appointed for every believer as a guardian, who shields him against the devil’s plotting and supports him in holy virtues. As the Psalmist says of every righteous person: “God commanded his angels about you, that they should hold you and bear you in their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone.” It is a great honour for Christians that each person, from birth, has an angel assigned to him as a guardian. Just so it is written of the Apostle Peter that the angel led him out of prison and he came to his companions and asked for entrance, knocking, and the faithful ones said, "It is not Peter who is knocking, it is his angel."

Truly, the angels whom God has appointed as guardians for his chosen never leave his presence, because God is everywhere, and wherever the angels fly they are ever in his presence, and enjoy his glory. They take news of our words and deeds to the Almighty, although to Him nothing is hidden; as the Archangel Raphael said to the man of God, Tobias, "When you prayed, I offered your prayers before God."

The Old Testament tells us that archangels are set over every nation, above the other angels, so that they may protect the peoples, as Moses, in the fifth book of the Old Testament, reveals in these words: "When the high God separated and scattered the offspring of Adam, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the numbers of his angels". The prophet Daniel agrees with this in his prophecy: a certain angel of God spoke to Daniel concerning the archangel who guided the Persians, and said, "The archangel came to me, the leader of the Greek people, and none was my helper but Michael, leader of the Hebrews. Even now Michael, one of the foremost of the leaders, came to support me, and I remained there with the king of the Persians." With these words, when he said that Michael came to help him, it is shown what great care the archangels take in their authority over mankind.

The archangel Michael has care of Christian people, as he had for the Hebrew people of old while they believed in God. It is arranged by God’s dispensation that the glorious angel of heaven Michael is continually the helper of Christians on earth and their advocate in heaven before Almighty God, and His Son Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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I want today to unpack the doctrine taught by the Church Father S. John of Damascus, which is included on our service bulletin. S. John of Damascus says, “The day of the Nativity of the Theotokos [that’s the title of Mary, it means “bearer of God”] is the feast of joy for the whole world, because through the Theotokos the entire human race was renewed and the grief of the first mother Eve was changed into joy.” The Church rejoices at Mary’s nativity, in other words, for two reasons. The first is that through it the entire human race was renewed, and the second is that through it Eve’s grief was changed into joy.

I will start with the second reason. We rejoice because through the Nativity of Mary, the grief of the first mother Eve was changed into joy. Eve grieved because of her disobedience to God’s will. Her disobedience is her saying “No” to what God ordained for their food. Eve’s “no,” is a refusal of God’s plan of creation. In this, her “no” summarizes and embodies our sinfulness, for we are all sinners in a fallen world. And her “no” summarizes and embodies the entirety of the disobedience toward God seen throughout Old Testament Scripture; the Old Testament is an extensive elaboration of Eve’s refusal of God. Eve’s grief is heard in Moses and Joshua bemoaning the disobedience of the sons of Israel; Eve’s grief is heard in the prophets, rebuking Israel of their stiff-necked hardness of heart. Eve’s grief is the grief of a people lost and alienated from God. Mary changed all this. She counters Eve’s no with a holy and obedient “yes.” Her yes to God comes in her whole life and especially at the annunciation – Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to Thy Word – her yes, which cooperates with God’s plan of creation, redeems and transforms Eve’s no. Mary’s whole life was a yes to God, and yes which opens the doorway to Christ. Mary’s yes changes the grief of the people of God into joy.

That’s the second part of the teaching of S. John of Damascus. For the first part of S. John’s teaching, let us consider the Gospel passage from Matthew. There are two genealogies of Jesus in the New Testament. These are the genealogy in S. Matthew’s Gospel account, which we just heard, and also that in the Gospel account of S. Luke. Neither make for the most gripping narrative or story, yet there are details of Matthew’s genealogy to notice.

For one, Jesus is described both as the son of David and the son of Abraham. This identification of Jesus as the son of David echoes the words of the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary at the annunciation. To Mary, Gabriel says, “Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to Him the throne of His father David, and He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of His kingdom there will be no end.” In 2nd Samuel, chapter 7, God tells David, through Nathan, that “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for My Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever.” Jesus being the son of David, therefore, ratifies the testimony Christ Himself gave anonymously to David, and makes the physical lineage traced from David also sacred lineage. It is holy because it is physical: body to body, mother to mother.

The identification of Jesus as the son of Abraham creates a specifically spiritual lineage to go along with the physical lineage from David. Abraham expresses faith in God. Genesis 15:6: “And he [Abraham] believed the Lord; and he [God] reckoned it to him as righteousness.” Abraham is known as a father of our faith, because those that believe in the Holy Trinity share in Abraham’s faith, and are children of Abraham: spiritual children, sharing and participating in the Holy Spirit. As S. Paul said to the church in Corinth: “We are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will live in them and move among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people’” (2 Cor 6.16). As the Holy Spirit lives in us and moves among us, we are participating in the Kingdom, which is life in the Holy Spirit, the same life initiated in Abraham. S. Paul is even more specific in his Epistle to the Galatians, when Paul writes, “So you see that it is men of faith who are the sons of Abraham. . . . Those who are men of faith are blessed with Abraham who had faith.” Hence within the faith community of the Holy Spirit is Jesus Christ. He is part of that spiritual lineage.

Yet Jesus is more than a mere part or participant in the spiritual lineage of Abraham and the physical lineage of David. For the genealogy of S. Matthew concludes by acknowledging Blessed Mary, of whom Jesus was born, Who is called Christ. Jesus is the anointed one, which is what “Christ” means. He is the anointed King Who reigns over the kingdom. He reigns as King on the throne of David over the house of Jacob, and He is the anointed King of the historical faith community of Abraham. Thus the entirety of the revelation was made manifest in Christ; in the words of S. Paul, “when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law.”

We see clearly that Mary’s role in the economy of God’s plan of salvation is unmistakable. She is part of the physical lineage, and she is part of the spiritual lineage. While salvation history had been unfolding long before she was born, God’s plan of salvation began to come into clarity when the person of Mary herself was born. Without the birth of Mary, the King would not be known. Hence her birth is a feast of joy for the whole world, as S. John of Damascus teaches.

Because of Christ, through her the entire human race was renewed, he also teaches, not because she is the savior, but because He Who is the Saviour, the King, Christ Jesus, is known through her birth of Him, physically and spiritually. Physically, because He was actually born from her; and spiritually, because of Mary’s faith. Because all of the Church celebrates Mary’s acceptance, her cooperation with grace, her yes to God’s initiative to reveal through her the fullness of His plan for salvation, which is Jesus Christ, which came from her yes – because of all this the Church celebrates Mary’s nativity.

In Luke 11 we hear this: “A woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” But he said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” Blessed is Our Lady because of the physical (the womb that bore, the breasts he sucked), but even more so, Blessed is Our Lady because of the spiritual (hearing the word of God and keeping it); Mary recapitulating Abraham’s obedience and doing so on behalf of us all, changing the Eve’s grief into Gospel joy, for Christ redeems Eve’s disobedience and loss of paradise through the Gospel: the Gospel which is Christ, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede is a homily podcast. The episodes are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with the Venerable S. Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.8

If you do not know yourself, O fairest among women, go forth and follow the tracks of the flocks, and pasture your kids by the shepherds’ tents. I have compared you, my friend, to my company of horsemen among Pharaoh's chariots. Your cheeks are beautiful as turtledove’s; your neck as jewels; we will make you necklaces of gold, inlaid with silver.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

This same Bridegroom (that is, Christ the Eternal Word of God), continues by saying, “And pasture your kids beside the shepherds’ tents,” that is to say, “Feed the lost disciples who have abandoned the words that are given by the one Shepherd through the council of prudent teachers and followed after the doctrines of foolish teachers, for surely I have commanded you that if you love Me, you will indeed pasture, even feed, my sheep (that is, the souls who serve Me in simplicity and innocence) with the word of salvation, and it is My will that you should attend to this duty with so much care that you would prefer to suffer every misfortune and even to undergo the anguish of death rather than to leave off feeding them. How can you not know that you have been betrothed to me Me under the condition that you are to pasture your kids (that is, those who have associated with erring teachers) rather than to wait on the wanton and proud, who are rightly called both “kids” and “your kids,” namely those who are to be positioned on the left hand at the judgment, but they are yours since they have not been instructed according to the rule of my commandments but rather according to your errors (that is, the ones in which you were held fast before you were united with Me).” Now the Lord is not saying these things by way of commanding but rather by way of threatening and insinuating what would happen to those who separate themselves from the unity of ecclesiastical peace because they cannot bear the misfortune of trials, as in the Gospel when Our Lord says, “Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit” (Mt 12.33), He is not commanding us to do evil, but He is teaching what reward awaits those who do evil.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

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And so it was that when Jesus taught the truth of the Eucharist, many of His disciples drew back and no longer went about with Him. The Gospel both attracts, and it repels. The Gospel attracts those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who know they are in need of a Savior; the Gospel repels those who think themselves already righteous, not in need of a Savior. The specific teaching that repelled many disciples and caused them to not follow Him was the teaching on the Eucharist: that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” When they heard that Jesus is the living bread which came down from heaven, it threw these disciples over the edge. It was obvious to Jesus, not only in that they walked away, but before that they murmured amongst themselves. And, as S. John tells us, Our Lord knew from the first who those were that did not believe, and who it was that would betray Him. It makes one wonder if our Lord knows this about disciples in the Church today, that He likewise knows who those are today in the Church that do not believe, and who those are today in the Church that would betray Him, which must mean teach about Him falsely and in a way contrary to Church tradition?

Be that as it may, from this episode comes important teaching, for our Lord teaches that it is the Holy Spirit that gives life. Indeed, the importance of this teaching in John 6 is attested by the fact that it is part of the Nicene Creed. For we say about the Holy Spirit that He is the Lord and giver of Life. The Life is Christ; the giver of the Life is the Holy Spirit. The basis for the Church is the presence of the Holy Spirit in His power; likewise, the basis for a parish church is the presence of the Holy Spirit in His power. As our Collect reads, the Church is gathered in unity by the Holy Spirit. If God chooses to take away His Holy Spirit from a place, which is His prerogative being as He is God, then without the Holy Spirit, a parish church loses unity and shrivels up and dies. It may still exist as a social gathering, a social club, a community of like-minded individuals, but it is not part of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

If this sounds too drastic a statement, I present to you the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit as He who “will teach you all things, and bring to remembrance all that I have said to you.” Jesus also said that it is the Holy Spirit Who guides us into all truth. Without the Holy Spirit, we have no one to teach us, no one to bring to our remembrance the words of Christ, no one to guide us into truth. Without all that, of course there cannot be the Church. And so we must take our Lord’s teaching today with full seriousness: It is the Holy Spirit that gives Life.

And while many stopped following Jesus, some did stay, and we have a glorious account from Saint Peter, who responded to our Lord’s question “Do you also wish to go away?” by saying, “Lord, to Whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” This shows the Holy Spirit active in His power within S. Peter and the other disciples that agreed with Peter and stayed. For Peter spoke truth, and no one can speak truth about Christ without the power of the Holy Spirit working in him. Peter in this moment is seeing beyond mere flesh and blood, and into the divinity of Christ. S. Paul teaches that the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Peter was beholding Christ with the eyes of Spirit, eyes opened and illumined by the Holy Spirit. Peter was glimpsing how Christ is the icon, the image, of the invisible God the Father, that Christ is the Holy One of God. The Holy Spirit, Who is the Kingdom of God, bore witness to Christ among Peter and the disciples that did not draw back and instead continued with Jesus.

And so we see that the joy of the Gospel is life in the Holy Spirit. By the Holy Spirit, we recognize the presence of Christ, like Mary and Elisabeth at the Visitation. By the Holy Spirit, we accept our Lord’s teaching that the consecrated bread and wine in the Liturgy is transformed and changed into His most precious Body and Blood. Jesus said so, and the Holy Spirit lets us see these words about the Eucharist as the words of eternal life. And indeed, by the Holy Spirit we accept the Sacred Scriptures as Holy, as Inspired, as the Library about Christ. By the Holy Spirit we are united in the confession of one faith, with the power of serve Christ as a royal priesthood, even to preach the Gospel in our lives both in word and in deed: the Gospel of Him Who is the Eternal Word of God, Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede is a homily podcast. The episodes are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with the Venerable S. Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.8

If you do not know yourself, O fairest among women, go forth and follow the tracks of the flocks, and pasture your kids by the shepherds’ tents. I have compared you, my friend, to my company of horsemen among Pharaoh's chariots. Your cheeks are beautiful as turtledove’s; your neck as jewels; we will make you necklaces of gold, inlaid with silver.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

Because this same bride (that is, the Church of Christ), when she had sought the help of His presence in the midst of tribulations, had gone on to say in the persona of the fainthearted, “Lest I begin to wander after the flocks of Your companions,” He at once responded to her anxiety with kindly rebuke like that saying in the Gospel: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Mt 14.31). For there follows: “If you do not know yourself, O fairest among women, go forth and follow the tracks of the flocks.” He asks, “How can you talk as if I could on any account forsake you in the time of trial, and how can you complain that you have been blackened by too much heat as if from the noonday sun while you were keeping our vineyard? Through the washing of regeneration I have previously made you the fairest among women (that is, among the synagogues of other doctrines), but I have arranged for your beauty to be restored through the great ordeal of tribulation. But if by chance you neither know these things, nor remember that no one “is crowned without contending according to the rules” (2 Tim 2.5), then “go forth” from my company “and follow the tracks of the flocks” (that is, imitate the erratic deeds of those who go astray), although I myself have resolved that you are truly the keeper of my one flock, for which there is “one sheepfold and one shepherd” (Jn 10.16).

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

One of the mandatory steps within the process of being ordained to the Priesthood is to do an internship as a hospital chaplain. In my case, I spent twenty weeks in four hospitals in suburban Chicago, near where my family lived at the time (this was fall 2015). Although I spoke with priests who bemoaned and even regretted their chaplain internship experience (and I even heard some horror stories), many priests, including my then-Bishop, the Prelate who ordained me, assured me that hospital chaplaincy was for them meaningful, positive, and deeply, and permanently, life-changing.

And I must say, it was for me as well. Thanks be to God! It was never easy, and often unpredictable. My very first overnight duty on-call saw me assist an experienced chaplain whom I was shadowing as we ministered to a large family of over 25 relatives who that night suffered the loss of one of their family members to a kind of brain hemorrhage that, tragically, was inoperable. Talk about being thrown into the deep end of the pool and having to learn how to swim. Over the twenty weeks, in not only hospital patients and their families, but in the hospital staff, nurses, doctors, and my fellow chaplains, I witnessed so many instances of loss, of tragedy, of suffering and confusion, but also I witnessed joy, love, faith, and remarkable examples of God active in people’s lives, holding them up by His grace. These were exactly the kinds of experiences one should have in preparing for the sacrificial ministry of the sacred priesthood.

The ultimate example of sacrificial priestly life is Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. His example to us, being divine and human mingled together, is so profound that it is well past our ability to grasp it completely and finally. This is why we continually revisit the accounts of His life given to us by the Evangelists—that by hearing them, by which we read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them both literally and spiritually (both senses together always), we are drawn deeper into the mystery of Him, drawn into deeper encounter of Him and His presence, which as well reveals the mystery of Christ in us. This we do even as we read about many actions of Christ, and many of His sayings and words, that are hard to understand.

For example, Jesus says to us today in the Gospel: “Truly, truly, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” This was a teaching, a hard saying, that was so hard, it sifted and weeded out the true disciples from the larger group of Jesus followers. After hearing this, many followers drew back and no longer went about with him. Some of us, even today, might flinch a bit at this saying, at both its physicality (flesh and blood) and its bluntness. Jesus, often winsome and generous in His public ministry, was nonetheless never above teaching in a direct, confrontational, and even aggressive way. Perhaps this is because being poked awake from a cozy, care-free, spectator kind of discipleship into discipleship that is active, engaged, and inquiring is something disciples of Christ constantly need.

And yet the Church, in remembering the words of Jesus, and taking them to heart in prayer in the years and decades after the Ascension of Christ, began to discern within the hard sayings of Jesus a depth that echoed profoundly in the Scriptures. We hear an example of this in our passage from the Book of Proverbs. Wisdom, who we learn was God’s first creation, and who from the beginning rejoiced daily in God’s activities, uses maids (which represent apostles and preachers of the Gospel) to invite simple people (meaning those people, like Nathaniel, who are without guile but also yet to some extent naive about life) to into her house: “Come,” she says, “eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Leave simpleness, and live, and walk in the way of insight.” This elaborates upon our Lord’s hard saying, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” Jesus teaches us that His flesh is bread. Eating His bread and drinking His wine is precisely the nourishment we need to walk in the way of insight, to have the lamp of illumination lighting up our path, because our mind is more Christ-like.

In the Eucharist, our nourishment is Christ. Our nourishment is Him, which means His sacrificial life. To eat the consecrated bread is to receive into our body Christ’s sacrifice: in fact Him on the Cross. To drink the consecrated wine is to receive Christ’s life (blood in ancient understanding being the source of life). Eternal life is received through Christ’s sacrifice and Christ’s life. In receiving the Eucharist, we receive Christ’s sacrificial life, in which the entirety of His sacrificial life is really and truly present: abiding in us, and we in Him.

The Almighty God the Father has given His only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life. As we receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the source and summit of Christian life, we open heart to receive Christ, Who in S. Paul’s words is the power of God and the wisdom of God. This is our participation in the Eucharist. We enter Christ’s redemptive stream, His river of wisdom, the streams whereof make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle of the Most High. In the Eucharist, let us ever be still, and know in the Eucharist is God: even the very Christ Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God: world without end.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede is a homily podcast. The episodes are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with the Venerable S. Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.5

I am black but beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem. Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. Do not think to consider me, for I am swarthy because the sun has discolored me. My mother’s children have fought against me and made me keeper of the vineyards; my own vineyard I have not kept. Show me, You Whom my soul loves, where You pasture Your flock, where You lie down at midday; lest I begin to wander after the flocks of Your companions.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

After saying, “Show me, You Whom my soul loves, where You pasture Your flock, where You lie down at midday,” the Bride of Christ, who is Holy Church, then adds, “Lest I begin to wander after the flocks of Your companions,” as if she were to say openly, “Since persecution brings me a multitude of adversaries after the fashion of the noonday heat, I beseech You to declare to me, O my Redeemer and Protector, where I might find those who have been refreshed with the grace of Your presence, or which ones among all the dogmas are in harmony with the truth of Your gospel, so that I might not run into the assemblies of those who have been long separated from You and have chanced to stray from Your protection, where I would be without Your guidance and thus could by no means walk in the way of truth.” For even heretics cannot incongruously be called His “companions,” inasmuch as they carry around His Name or Creed or Sacraments. And did the Bride of Christ not do these things when the false apostles (namely, His companions) came from Antioch and proclaimed, “Unless you are circumcised according to the law of Moses, you cannot be saved” (Acts 15.1)? For after she had been wearied by no little heat of dissension and questioning she at last sent Paul and Barnabas to the apostles and elders in Jerusalem to discern with greater certainty what the truth of the Gospel might be, and when the debate was concluded it was determined that the Lord Christ was the Shepherd Who dwelt among those being instructed by James, Cephas (that is, Peter), John, and the other apostles, and that His Church should be kept in His sheepfold, free from the flocks of the companions (that is, the crowds of heretics). And has the Bride of Christ not also done these things often in subsequent times? For when her mother’s children fought against her (that is, when heresies grew up to oppose her from within), she was soon diligently gathering councils of the Fathers together in order to inquire what the truth of the faith might be.

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Over the recent Sundays I have been speaking about the five ways Christ taught the Church to know His presence among them. Firstly, in every baptized Christian; secondly, in Scripture opened and proclaimed in worship; thirdly, through Bishops, Priests, and Deacons validly ordained in the apostolic tradition; fourthly, in the Eucharist; which yields the fifth way, in the Tabernacle in the sanctuary of the church. Thus, as I said last Sunday, the Mass is a true abundance of Christ’s presence. It is a banquet of Christ’s presence. In the Mass, the heavenly reality of Christ meets our conditions of time and space. Therefore the Mass is not only a banquet but a heavenly banquet: a foretaste of heaven, a foretaste of life eternal. In all of human existence, there is nothing like the Mass, because of the abundance of Christ’s presence in it.

Today I will focus on Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, in His most precious Body and Blood. Over the course of the two thousand year life of the Church, there have been discussions, sometimes disagreements, sometimes arguments, about how the Bread and the Wine become Christ’s precious Body and Blood. I have often been asked a related question: which is, when in the Mass does this transformation happen? At what point during the Mass—is it during the Institution Narrative where we hear again the relevant moments of the Last Supper? Is it when the Celebrant of the Mass holds his hands outstretched over the Bread and Wine? Is it at the Epiclesis, with the grand gesture made by the Celebrant and the petition to the Father to send down the Holy Ghost upon the creatures of bread and wine, that these may be changed and transformed so that we may be partakers of Christ’s most blessed Body and Blood? Is it at the Great Amen before the Our Father? Even during the Our Father? Is it when the Celebrant holds up the Body and Blood and says, “Behold the Lamb of God; behold Him Who taketh away the sins of the world”? Or some other moment in the Mass? When is it that the transformation and change occurs?

On this question, the Anglican position on this is is the same as the Eastern Orthodox position: we do not know. We do not claim to know precisely when the change occurs, but we fully accept that the change and transformation does occur, without question. It is because of the transcendence of God. Because the Holy Trinity is transcendent, beyond time and space, we trust that what the Church has understood to happen ever since the first Eucharist at Emmaus with two disciples, indeed happens. The Bread becomes Christ’s Body; and likewise, the wine becomes Christ’s Blood. Ultimately, the Anglican position is as simple as this: the bread and wine become His Body and Blood because Jesus said so. And that is not surprising because we take Holy Scripture seriously, and take seriously as well that Jesus is both God and man.

If we believe Jesus to be God: to be the only-begotten Son of the Father, indeed that Jesus is the Eternal Word of the Father, and therefore God with the Father and the Holy Ghost, then we believe His life to be divine, and thus all His words and actions to be divine. If we believe Christ to be He through Whom all things are made by the Father, then certainly we believe that because He said the Bread is His Body, that the Bread is His Body; and likewise, then certainly we believe that because He said the wine is His Blood, that the Wine is His Blood. As Jesus said, “He who believes in Me has eternal life.” And He said, “I am the Bread of life.” And He said, “I am the living Bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this Bread, he will live for ever.” And He added, “And the Bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

All of this is direct teaching about the Eucharist. But it is also teaching about the Incarnation. John 1.14 famously reads: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” Often that is taken to mean as referring to His Nativity of Blessed Mary. Specifically “the Word became flesh” is often paraphrased into, “Jesus was born of Mary.” But in our Gospel passage today, Jesus is clear: “the Bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Thus according to Saint John, “the Word became flesh” is better paraphrased as: “Christ became Eucharist,” or “Christ became Sacrament.” His flesh is Bread which is Him given for the life of the world. He dwells among us as the Sacrament of the Eucharist; He dwells among us as we receive the Eucharist in Holy Communion which is Christ received into our body, hence dwelling with us; dwelling in us. So that we can say without guile or doubt: the joy of the Gospel is recognizing Christ’s incarnating presence: His eucharistic presence incarnating in us, in our body.

And in this way the reality of Mary and Elisabeth at the Visitation, where both know the presence of Christ inwardly (Mary because Jesus is in her womb; Elisabeth because her son John leaps at the presence of Christ known through Mary’s greeting), this reality of Mary and Elisabeth is our reality: in receiving Holy Communion, Christ is in us, dwelling in us, making His presence known inwardly, incarnating Himself in us. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, even He who is the Christ, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede is a homily podcast. The episodes are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with the Venerable S. Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.5

I am black but beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem. Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. Do not think to consider me, for I am swarthy because the sun has discolored me. My mother’s children have fought against me and made me keeper of the vineyards; my own vineyard I have not kept. Show me, You Whom my soul loves, where You pasture Your flock, where You lie down at midday; lest I begin to wander after the flocks of Your companions.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

As soon as Holy Church has lamented that her mother’s children have risen up against her, as soon as her own vine has been shaken by the assault, it is right for her to turn to the Lord with an anxious heart and invoke the memory of His promise, in which He said, “In the world you have distress, but have confidence; I have overcome the world” (Jn 16.33). Thus she says, “Show me, You Whom my soul loves, where You pasture Your flock, where You lie down at midday.” Now, it is appropriate for her to call Him Whose assistance she entreats “the one my soul loves,” because the graver the danger from which she desires to be delivered, the more does she love Him through Whom she knows that she will be delivered. Similar to this is that saying of the Psalmist: “I love you, O Lord, my strength” (Ps 18.1); which is to say openly, “The reason that I do not cease to love You with my whole heart is that I perceive that I can have no strength apart from Your grace.” She also signifies that He is a shepherd when she says: “where You pasture Your flock, where You lie down at midday,” in accordance with what He Himself testifies in the Gospel: “I am the Good Shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me” (Jn 10.14). He pastures His sheep and lies down among them at midday, because He refreshes the hearts of His faithful ones with the memory of His heavenly kindness lest they wither away on the inside from the heat of trials, and it has been His custom to abide graciously among them. For on this account the Psalmist says, “The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing. He shall feed me in a green pasture” (Ps 23); hence S. John says: “Those who abide in charity abide in God, and God in them” (1 Jn 4.16). Therefore, since “many false prophets” (Mt 24.11) arise in the world saying, “Look! Here is the Christ! Look there!” (Mt 24.23), it is always necessary for the Church of Christ to discern through careful examination who they are in whose profession and work He can be found, and to entreat Him with pious cries that He might deign to show Himself, saying “Show me, You Whom my soul loves, where You pasture Your flock, where you lie down in midday.”

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

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Recognizing Christ’s real and actual presence has been the cause of Christian joy from the beginning of creation—“as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.” Revealing to the Church this presence was also what Christ’s Resurrection was all about: revealing that Christ is present among us, that, because of His presence, He hears us, that because of His presence, He knows us. His presence is why S. Mary and S. Elisabeth were danced and embraced in joy at the Visitation, and that same joy through Christ’s presence is available to us in worship through the Liturgy, and the Christian life that flows personally from the Liturgy. By His presence we are able to put off our old nature that is corrupt through deceitful lusts (according to S. Paul). By His presence we are able to be renewed in our minds, and thus able to put on the new nature. Christ’s presence transforms those who conceive Him in their heart and bear Him in their mind. Conceiving Christ in our heart and bearing Him in our mind is what S. Paul means by “learning Christ.”

I spoke last Sunday about the five ways Christ taught the Church to know His presence among them. First, in every baptized Christian (by virtue of their Baptism); second, in Scripture opened and proclaimed in worship; third, through His apostles, which was transferred to Bishops, Priests, and Deacons following in the apostolic tradition; fourth, in the Eucharist; (which means that there is a fifth way, in the Tabernacle in a church sanctuary). Therefore we can see that the Mass is a true abundance of Christ’s presence, which is why there is nothing else like the Mass in all human existence. The Mass is a banquet of Christ’s presence; Christ’s presence is a heavenly presence amid the conditions of time and space; thus to speak truly, the Mass is a heavenly banquet, a foretaste of heaven, a foretaste of life eternal.

The joy of the Gospel is recognizing Christ’s presence. And so that we could share this joy throughout our life, in a way that is communal, within a Christian community, shared by all who are baptized, young and old: Christ gave us the Eucharist, which He instituted when He chose bread and wine to be the means by which through divine consecration, which happens during every valid Mass, these simple offerings of bread and wine become the Precious Body and Blood of Christ. These are changed and transformed by the Holy Ghost during the Mass, because the bread and wine on the Altar are taken up into God, taken up into the heavenly realm. The very nature of the bread and wine are taken into God, and that which is taken into God is transformed into His nature. That which is taken into God becomes, in the words of Jesus, “the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man gives to us.” He gives it to us, because the Father gives us the true bread from heaven, the bread that gives life to the world. The bread and wine become His Body and Blood because Jesus said so.

For good reason did those who remained with Christ say, “Lord, give us this bread always.” For good reason, indeed! This bread gives life to the world. And it is not life of a mortal, changing, temporal kind. Rather, it is eternal life. Nothing but eternal life can come from the true bread from heaven. Nothing but eternal life can come from receiving the Eucharist. This is why the Eucharist is important; this is why the Eucharist is vital and a necessity to Christian life: it is the food which endures to eternal life.

Because of the importance and necessity of the Eucharist to Christian life, the Eucharist was one of the first things Christ revealed in His Resurrection. As His presence was known to the two disciples at Emmaus, He revealed Himself in the breaking of bread. The Church has always seen the importance, centrality, and necessity of the Eucharist since then, for why else would Christ choose to reveal the Eucharist at Emmaus on the first day of His resurrection unless it is basic and fundamental to living the resurrected life within the Church; basic and fundamental to perceiving His presence? His choice to reveal the Eucharist on the Day of His Resurrection itself shows the Church without question that the Eucharist is a requirement to attain eternal life. Christ is the Bread of Life, He tells us; He who comes to Christ shall not hunger, and He who believes in Christ shall never thirst; for Christ is the Bread of Life, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede is a homily podcast. The episodes are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with the Venerable S. Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.5

I am black but beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem. Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. Do not think to consider me, for I am swarthy because the sun has discolored me. My mother’s children have fought against me and made me keeper of the vineyards; my own vineyard I have not kept. Show me, You Whom my soul loves, where You pasture your flock, where You lie down at midday; lest I begin to wander after the flocks of Your companions.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

Because holy Church has testified that she is indeed comely on the inside with respect to her faith and virtues, but made swarthy on the outside by persecutions, it then remains for her to show from whom she will suffer the fury of the first persecution. There follows: “My mother’s children have fought against me and made me keeper of the vineyards; my own vineyard I have not kept.” This is the voice of the early Church, which endured wards of tribulations from the very same synagogue from which she took her fleshly origin, as the Acts of the Apostles very thoroughly teaches. The first thing we should note in this verse is that the Bride of Christ justly declared herself to have been discoloured by the sun, as she was accustomed to work outdoors cultivating or keeping her own vineyard. Now there was in Jerusalem one vineyard of Christ, namely the early Church, which was consecrated by the coming of the Holy Ghost on the Day of Pentecost (that is, on the fiftieth day after the Lord’s Resurrection). At that time the apostles themselves were her keepers. And afterward, when persecution arose in the times of the blessed martyr Stephen and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria, it came to pass that there were more vineyards (that is, there were churches of Christ in more places) because those who were scattered here and there were preaching the word. Surely it was through the action of Divine Providence that the very scattering of the Jerusalem church was the occasion for the founding of more churches. For this reason it is appropriate that while our Latin codices (or manuscripts) say that they “were scattered,” in the Greek it says “diesparesan” (that is, “they were disseminated”) throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, and a little later, “Those who had been disseminated even about preaching the word of God” (Acts 8.4), because the persecutors were intended to drive the Church out of Judea, but unwittingly they were spreading the seedbed of the word more widely, and by persecuting one church in Jerusalem they were unwittingly causing many churches to come into existence in other places. Therefore, after it had been said that the early Church would be dark with afflictions because the children of her mother (that is, of the parricidal synagogue) were going to fight against her with hatred, it immediately went on to tell how much she was going to profit from the attacks of those same afflictions, adding in the persona of those to whom the office of preaching was entrusted: “They have made me keeper of the vineyards; my own vineyard I have not kept,” as if to say openly, “The harshness of the persecutions was beneficial and useful for me in that I became the keeper of many more vineyards (namely, the churches of Christ) after their tempest scattered the original vineyard (that is, the church that I at first undertook to plant and to keep in Jerusalem). Now, the statement that she had not kept the vineyard must be understood as referring not to her disposition, but to the place. For surely there was a considerable portion of the church that withdrew from Jerusalem at that time which nevertheless retained the full integrity of the faith in a heart firmly fixed, or even took up the office of preaching with a devoted voice, as we have already indicated.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

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As I preached last Sunday, the joy of the Gospel is recognizing Christ’s presence. I also added these words in the conclusion: “The disciples came to realize that no place is ever lonely unless Christ’s identity is forgotten. Jesus Christ is both true God and true man. Christ is present here, how can we not be joyful?” Recognizing Christ’s real and actual presence has been the cause of Christian joy from the beginning of creation – “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.” Revealing to the Church this presence was also what Christ’s Resurrection was all about: revealing that Christ is present among us, that, because of His presence, He hears us, that because of His presence, He knows us. The joy of the Gospel is recognizing Christ’s presence.

We see this as well in our Gospel passage. Jesus understood that the hearts of the disciples were hardened, but in His foreknowledge He also knew that after His Resurrection and the Coming of the Holy Ghost, the disciples would remember, because of the Holy Ghost acting in them, all of what Jesus did and said – and specifically here, that they would remember not only the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand but this episode in the lake. They would remember that He walked on the lake, but they did not recognize Him. They would remember they thought He was a ghost. They cried out, because they all saw Him and were terrified. When people’s hearts are hardened, they do not see Jesus for Who He is; they see Him as someone or something else, if they see Him at all. This was true then, and this remains true today. They were not full of joy at His presence out in the lake, but full of terror, and unholy fear.

But as Jesus did to S. Mary Magdalene outside the cave of S. Joseph of Arimathea, Jesus spoke perfectly. He spoke comforting words to the disciples. He said, “Take courage. It is I. Do not be afraid.” And He climbed into the boat with them, which made His presence intense and intimate. This was all to astonish the disciples. This was all to lift the hearts and mind of the disciples up into heavenly places. This was all to unharden their heart, for all God wants is the human heart. And this would happen after the Holy Ghost descended upon the Upper Room church in Jerusalem at Pentecost and in the nine days leading to Pentecost. The Holy Ghost brought to their remembrance all that Christ had said and done, and especially the significance of what Christ had said and done. And this was so that their joy would be full: so full that their proclamation of the Gospel would be confident, strong, unwavering, and rooted in their experience, and their scripturally mediated experiential memory. That in recognizing the amazement of the disciples, the Church would be drawn into this amazement, drawn into this astonishment, drawn into the fullness of the Gospel.

The key to it all is this: the joy of the Gospel is recognizing Christ’s presence. And let it be known the ways Christ is present here among us, at this moment. Number 1: Christ is present among the Baptized, for in being baptized, our bodies become temples of the Holy Spirit that we are able to abide in Christ’s word, which Our Lord said is the condition of Christ dwelling in us, with the Father. Number 2: Christ is present in the proclamation of Scripture. At the end of each reading is said “The Word of the Lord,” or “The Gospel of the Lord.” Christ is the Word, Christ is the Gospel. Number 3: Christ is present through the Bishop, Priest, and/or Deacon present in the Mass, as a grace of the Sacrament of Holy Orders. Number 4: Christ is present in the Tabernacle, in which the Blessed Sacrament is kept. Number 5: Christ is present in the Eucharist, because the bread and wine change into Christ’s most precious Body and Blood—why? because Jesus said so: sacramentally, really, and actually.

Knowing how Christ is present during the Liturgy, let our joy be that of Mary and Elisabeth at the Visitation; let our joy be that of Simeon and Anna in the Temple; let our joy be that of S. John the Baptist; let our joy be that of Peter, James and John at the Transfiguration; let our joy be that of the Upper Room Church at the Resurrection, at the Ascension, and at Pentecost. Let our joy be that of the three thousand souls baptized at Pentecost. Let our joy be that of the Saints, the heavenly company of Saint with whom we are one through Christ. For our Joy is Christ, present among us, present in us: He Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost; ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede is a homily podcast. The episodes are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with the Venerable S. Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.5

I am black but beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem. Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. Do not think to consider me, for I am swarthy because the sun has discolored me. My mother’s children have fought against me and made me keeper of the vineyards; my own vineyard I have not kept. Show me, You Whom my soul loves, where You pasture your flock, where You lie down at midday; lest I begin to wander after the flocks of Your companions.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

The Bride then says, “Do not think to consider me, for I am swarthy because the sun has discolored me,” which is to say openly, “O daughters of Jerusalem (that is, souls devoted to God), do not think that I who am despised should be admired by people, because the fiery trials that I do not hesitate to endure for the sake of my internal beauty have rendered me dark on the outside; nevertheless, heavenly grace has granted that I should be lovely on the inside.” This is similar to that saying of the apostle S. Peter: “Dearly beloved, do not think to marvel at the fiery heat which has come upon you to test you, as though some unusual thing were happening to you, but rejoice that you are sharing Christ’s sufferings” (1 Pet 4.12-13). And surely the Lord Himself is at times signified by the word “sun,” as it is said of His Ascension: “The sun arose, and the moon stood still in its order” (Hab 3.10-11), and at times His elect, as He Himself says, “The righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Mt 13.43). But in this place the heat of tribulations is more fittingly represented by the word “sun,” in accordance with what He Himself says concerning the seeds sown on rocky ground: “But when the sun rose they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away” (Mt 13.6), which He afterward explains in this way: “And when tribulation and persecution arise on account of the Word, that person is immediately tempted into evil” (Mt 13.21), clearly declaring that tribulation and persecution are represented by the word “sun.” Therefore, just as those who remain quietly in the house often after fairer limbs, but the members of those who are employed in this vineyard or garden or in any other kind of outdoor work are very frequently darkened by the sun, so also the more earnestly holy Church prepares herself for spiritual combat, the more hotly inflamed are the assaults that the ancient enemy resolves to mount against her. And as often as “sinners are praised in the desires of their soul and evildoers are blessed” (Ps 10.3), just as frequently are they reproached by the righteous in the virtues of their own soul, and those who do right are reviled, as S. Paul testifies when he says: “We are reviled, and we bless; we suffer persecution, and we bear it; we are blasphemed, and we entreat” (1 Cor 4.12-13). But he teaches that the faithful ought to disregard the darkening caused by this blasphemy, or rather they ought to rejoice in it on account of what the Lord came forth saying: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and speak all that is evil against you” (Mt 5.11), and so forth.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Our reflections during this liturgical season have gotten to a certain realization, and it is this: The joy of the Gospel is recognizing Christ’s presence. It was for Mary and Elisabeth at the Visitation as we have seen this liturgical season. It was for Simeon and Anna at the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple. It was for S. John Baptist and other disciples at the beginning of S. John’s Gospel account. It was for the disciples upon Our Lord’s Resurrection. It was for the apostles in the Upper Room after the Ascension and at Pentecost. It was for the three thousand on Pentecost who were baptized. It has been for Christians ever since. The joy of the Gospel is recognizing Christ’s presence.

With this fact in mind, one can notice that a particular detail in Saint Mark’s Gospel account today stands out like an out of tune instrument in a symphony orchestra. It is in the part of Mark’s account in which he writes, “As Jesus went ashore He saw a great throng, and He had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and He began to teach them many things. And when it grew late, His disciples came to Him and said, “This is a lonely place.” And that is the important detail: that the disciples thought the place was lonely.

Whether the great throng of five thousand people thought it was a lonely place, we do not know. Mark does not tell us; he only tells us the feeling of the disciples, how they interpreted this moment. Keep in mind that nearly all of the disciples at this point in their relationship with Jesus are not accurate interpreters. Nearly all of the disciples did not at this point understand Who Jesus really is, that He was both truly God and truly Man—nearly all of them, the only exceptions being Blessed Mary, the Mother of Jesus, perhaps a small group of other Holy Women, perhaps Saint John the Evangelist. But that is really it, and it is a small group, maybe half a dozen among seventy. Surely Jesus was to them a remarkable man, an especially holy man; He was to them a kind of miracle-worker, a prophet of God, perhaps the most powerful one ever; He was to them an uniquely charismatic, Spirit-filled preacher and teacher; and they saw in Him a presence unlike they had ever known, or even heard of in Jewish tradition.

But, and this is the key point, they did not at this point understand Who Jesus really is: did not recognize that He is the heavenly Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world, as Saint John the Baptist proclaims in the first chapter of Saint John’s Gospel. Over time, they certainly came to see Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world; they certainly came to see Jesus as the Son of God, the Eternal Word of the Father; they certainly came to see the divinity of Jesus which was previewed for three of them at the Transfiguration. But at this point, most of the Seventy did not have eyes to see and ears to hear. When we see Jesus as merely a man, and not divine, we will not experience the joy of the Gospel. The joy comes in recognizing that this man, Jesus, is our Lord and our God.

For the disciples in S. Mark’s account, their feeling of loneliness is almost comical, because they said this immediately after Jesus spent some time teaching the large throng; after He had compassion on them, which means pouring upon them His mercy through His teaching, His presence, His radiating sense of peace. He multiplied the loaves and the fishes, after all! This is almost comical because how could this place be lonely if God was present and active amongst them? How could anyone feel lonely in the presence of He Whose nature is love? How could anyone feel lonely if they were aware that He through Whom all is made was so close, and so loving in His presence?

Therefore the feeding of the five thousand is not an action by Jesus for the immediate benefit of the five thousand. Rather, it is an action by Jesus to immediately benefit the disciples, to teach them something they would not learn until after Christ’s resurrection: after that, they would remember this moment, the feeding miracle. They would have eyes to see how transformative and miraculous is the presence of Jesus to those with faith and who know how they are fed the heavenly food of angels. And Jesus did this so that, in remembering this moment, their remembering would transform their hearts that they would come to know that they are to bring the very same peace, the very same compassion, the very same loving presence that feeds the world with the Holy Spirit that the world feels poured upon with transforming love as the Church did at Pentecost. As the disciples took up the baskets of broken pieces of bread and fish, they came to realize—not immediately, but after the Cross and after Pentecost—that in picking up the bread they were gathering the presence of Jesus. In other words, they came to realize that no place is ever lonely unless Christ’s identity is forgotten. We must always remember Jesus Christ is both God and man. Christ is present here, how can we not be joyful. Among us, my brothers and sisters, is Christ, the Bridegroom, the King of Creation: the very Savior Who is the Son of God Almighty, Who with Him and the Holy Ghost lives and reigns, ever one God: world without end. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.5

I am black but beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem. Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. Do not think to consider me, for I am swarthy because the sun has discolored me. My mother’s children have fought against me and made me keeper of the vineyards; my own vineyard I have not kept. Show me, You Whom my soul loves, where You pasture your flock, where You lie down at midday; lest I begin to wander after the flocks of Your companions.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

After the Bride says, “I am black but beautiful,” she then goes on to say, “Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.” Kedar was the son of Ishmael, of whom it was said: “His hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him” (Gen 16.12). The truth of this prediction concerning him is proved by the fact that the nation of the Saracens who are descended from him is today hated by everyone, and it is also affirmed by the Psalmist besieged by vexations when he says: “With those who hate peace I am peaceable” (Ps 120). For we do not read that David endured any animosity from the Ishmaelites, but wishing to exaggerate the evils he was suffering from Saul or from his other adversaries, he complained that he was being harassed by the degradations of that nation that never took the trouble to be at peace with anyone at all. And contrary to them is Solomon, who was peaceable both in his name and in his life. According, as Scripture bears witness: “All the kings of the earth desired to see the face of Solomon, that they might bear the wisdom that God had put into his heart” (2 Chron 9.23). Therefore she says, “I am black but beautiful, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon,” in such a way as to distinguish between being black like the tents of Kedar, and being beautiful like the curtains of Solomon. For just as holy Church is quite often rendered dark by the torments of unbelievers, as if she were the whole world’s common enemy, in fulfillment of the word that the Lord speaks to her: “And you will be hated by all because of My Name” (Mt 10.22), just so is she always fair in the sight of her Redeemer as if she were truly worthy, whom the King of peace Himself deigns to look after. And we should note that Kedar, who by his very name already signifies “darkness,” designates either evil persons or unclean spirits, just as Solomon also, who is understood as being “peaceable” even by the mystery of his name, indicates him of Whom it was written: “His authority shall be multiplied, and there shall be no end of peace upon the throne of David, and upon His kingdom” (Is 9.7). And when the Church is said to be black like the tents of Kedar, this is asserted not as if it were really so, but according to the opinion of those fools who images that she furnishes in herself a dwelling place for vices and for evil spirits, but when she is called beautiful like the curtains of Solomon, this is asserted as if it really is the case, because just as Solomon was accustomed to make tents for himself out of the skins of dead animals, in the same way the Lord gathers the church together to himself from those souls who have learned to renounce carnal desires. Therefore He said to all: “If any want to come after Me, let them deny themselves and take up their Cross and follow Me” (Mt 16.24); and the Apostle Paul says, “Put to death your earthly members” (Col 3.5). Certain persons who read this verse as “I am black and beautiful” say that in her carnal and false members the Church is black like the tents of Kedar, but in those who are spiritual she is beautiful like the curtains of Solomon. But if we attend to what is written concerning the Lord: “We have seen Him, and He had no form nor comeliness” (Is 53.2), which was not said concerning His sin (for He had no sin at all), but of His suffering, surely it is obvious that the Church also is said to be black not on account of sins or the defects of sinners, but on account of her own trials and sufferings, with which she is continually vexed.

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Reflecting again this week on the episode of the Holy Visitation of Blessed Mary, Mother of God to Saint Elisabeth, as depicted in our icon, and in the light of our readings from Scripture, I am struck by the trust in God that Mary and Elisabeth felt as they met together. And why wouldn’t they trust God? God did what He said He would: He had made good on His promises. Both Mary and Elisabeth were pregnant, just as God had promised through the Archangel Gabriel. John the Baptist had leapt in the womb of Elisabeth, showing Him to be full of the Holy Spirit at Mary’s greeting which made the presence of Christ known to them, just as God relayed as well through Gabriel. Elisabeth herself felt full of the Holy Spirit, and recognized her kinswoman Mary as the Mother of God, and praised her belief and expressed her confidence that all that was told Mary from the Lord would be fulfilled. And Mary’s song, the Magnificat, expresses her trust in God as well, and does so strongly: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior,” and also “He Who is mighty has done great things for me.” Really every verse of the Magnificat expresses Mary’s trust in God, her trust in her Son our Savior, Jesus. Undoubtedly Elisabeth also trust what Gabriel foretold of her son’s adult ministry, that John “will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God.” And although Elisabeth did not live to see the day, that is precisely what John the Baptist did; what God said would happen, did.

We can see that the joy of the Gospel shared by these two Saints, these two Holy Mothers (and shown by them to us) stems from their trust in God. And we can see that their joyful hearts feed their trust in Christ. In Christianity, demonstrated by the Saints Mary and Elisabeth, trust and joy go hand in hand.

Another Saints, Saint Paul, teaches us about trust today in the Epistle, from beginning to end. The Father, he says, has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Therefore let us trust Him. The Father has chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world. Therefore let us trust Him. The Father has destined us in love to be His Sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will. He made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of His will. Therefore let us trust Him. And in Him, Paul says, we who have heard the word of truth, the Gospel of your salvation, and have believed in Him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. This is what Elisabeth and Mary heard, this is what we have heard through the Sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, with Scripture opened by the Holy Spirit. Therefore let us, with Mary and Elisabeth and Paul, trust Him through the Holy Spirit, Who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of our full salvation.

Likewise more Saints, the Twelve, were sent out two by two, with authority from Christ over the unclean spirits: see how our Lord Jesus bestowed upon them blessings of the heavenly places which built them up through trust in Christ. They took nothing for their journey except a covering of clothing and sandals. They pronounced peace upon those they met. The proclaimed that the Kingdom of God—the Holy Ghost—had come near. And the preached repentance, meaning that there is now available through the Holy Ghost a new way of seeing (which is what repentance, in the Greek metanoia, means at its root: to see differently, and by seeing differently, thinking and acting differently). Through Christ working in them, they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many that were sick and healed them. As Mary spread the joy of the Gospel to Elisabeth and John and Zechariah by traveling about 100 miles to bring to them the presence of Christ and the power of the Holy Ghost operating in her, so the disciples were to imitate Mary and travel to souls in need of saving (in need of spiritual health) and share the Gospel and bring healing to many souls.

Therefore let us with Mary and Elisabeth and Paul and the Twelve, indeed with all the Saints, the whole Company of Heaven: let us trust Him Who sends us out into the world to love and serve the world, to bless the world with the blessings we have received. Let us understand that we can love; let us love that we can understand. The Lord is high and to be feared; He is the great king upon all the earth. By His grace we can perceive and know what things we ought to do; and by Him we may have the grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same. Having heard the word of truth, let us share it! Having received the Bread of heaven, let us be it for the world, that by our peace they are fed with the peace which passes all understanding, yet which fills the soul with mercy and truth. Because of our trust in God, let us always seek to accomplish the purpose God the Father set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things, all people, in Him Who is Way, the Truth and the Life, and Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.5

I am black but beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem. Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon. Do not think to consider me, for I am swarthy because the sun has discolored me. My mother’s children have fought against me and made me keeper of the vineyards; my own vineyard I have not kept. Show me, You whom my soul loves, where You pasture your flock, where You lie down at midday; lest I begin to wander after the flocks of Your companions.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

After Holy Church has been led into Christ’s chambers through the knowledge and hope of celestial blessings, after she has learned to love Him with a righteous heart and to rejoice and exult in His grace alone, it remains to be shown what struggles she endures for the sake of that same love of Him, and what afflictions she bears for the sake of acquiring the blessings which she has tasted. There follows: “I am black but beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem.” She is undoubtedly “black” with respect to the misfortune of her afflictions, but “beautiful” in the comeliness of her virtues; or, rather, in the sight of the Judge Who sees within she is all the more beautiful the more often she is harassed and, as it were, disfigured by the afflictions of fools. Now she calls the souls to whom she is speaking “daughters of Jerusalem” because they have been initiated into the heavenly mysteries and are longing for their dwelling place in the heavenly homeland. For in order to console them in their tribulations the holy mother says, “I am black but beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem,” as if she were saying opening, “I do indeed appear exceedingly vile in the eyes of my persecutors, but before God I am shining brightly with a glorious confession of the truth, for which reason you ought to be less sorrowful amid the labors of this exile in which you remember that you are citizens of a heavenly homeland, and in which you hasten through the adversities of a collapsing world toward the vision of eternal peace.”

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

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Among the many things that can be said about the Visitation of Blessed Mary, Mother of God (Theotokos) to Saint Elisabeth is that it was an act of love. I mean by Mary. She made a many-day journey to the hill country, to share the joy of the Gospel with her relatives, both Saint Elisabeth and Saint Zechariah. And among what is startling about this moment is that Saint Luke does not share with us what Mary said. He relates that she greeted Elisabeth, but he does not relate what the specific greeting was. But we know the effect of her greeting: her greeting caused Saint John to leap in the womb of Elisabeth, and caused Elisabeth to be filled with the Holy Ghost. And so from Mary’s act of love, both John and Elisabeth were fill with the joy of the Gospel, which had already filled Mary. But because Luke leaves out her greeting, it is the act of love itself yield this joy, and yields the understanding by Elisabeth and John that their Saviour is present. It is Mary’s presence that sings and speaks praises of Christ.

In fact this is reflected in our Collect in the words “O God, Who hast taught us to keep all Thy commandments by loving Thee and our neighbor.” In this we see the doctrine of the Church: that knowledge and love are all the same—that, for Christians, love itself is understanding (William of St Thierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, 57.) To give love shows understanding, to receive love also shows understanding. This is why it is ancient doctrine of the Church Fathers that in the Liturgy, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we become what we have received—we have received the Sacrament of Eucharist, and so we become sacrament, dismissed at the conclusion of Mass and sent into the world to bless the Lord that in doing so we bless others—kept in God’s peace, that we become God’s peace for those in the world we encounter.

And yet, just because we are sent to be sacraments of peace and joy, sacraments of the Gospel for the world, sent to imitate Mary and proclaim the Gospel by our presence and words, does not mean the world will necessarily receive us in that way. We see this in Ezekiel, chapter 2, and recapitulated by Jesus when He returned to His own country and His own kin in the sixth chapter of Saint Mark. Ezekiel, entered into by the Spirit, was set on his feet by the Spirit. (This foreshadows how God entered Mary). Ezekiel was sent to preach about God to a people that had transgressed against Him. “Thus says the Lord God” is a prophecy of judgment against infidelity to God, uttered by the Holy Ghost through those filled by the Holy Ghost—spoken through people chosen by God, because God chooses to work through people to make His will known. There are hints in the text that Ezekiel’s prophetic status was in doubt—twice saying “whether they hear or refuse to hear.” The people, these rebellious souls who oppose God, would not refuse to hear if they recognized the prophetic utterances as God speaking through Ezekiel, indeed, recognizing him as a sacramental presence. But they cannot do so. They are unable.

Likewise the kin-folk of Jesus are unable. They cannot see Him, who is the icon of the invisible God the Father, as Himself the true sacrament of God’s presence. They see Him as something unusual, spectacular, perhaps magical. They see him as people today might see professional magicians who seem to accomplish astonishing mighty works. And yet, they miss the message. The deepest truth of the identity of Jesus—that He is the primordial sacrament of God’s presence, that He is God become man, the Eternal Word become flesh, that He dwells among us—was lost on them, went right over their heads.

We are dismissed at the end of Mass to imitate Mary, to go confidently in the world to proclaim the Gospel with joy. The people around us in Volusia County might also miss the message of who we are, and what we mean to say. They might not see us as agents of peace—agents of peace that passes all understanding, agents of Gospel Joy. Our identity as sacramental persons dismissed from the Mass to be the living bread for the world—that we do what Jesus told the disciples to do, to go to the people and give them something to eat—might go over the heads of our brothers and sisters in the world we encounter. Is this what we would prefer? Surely not, because Jesus marveled because of His kinsfolk unbelief. Yet notice that despite being mocked, ignored, and misunderstood, Jesus was not deterred from His mission—He laid His hands upon a few sick people, and healed them. Let us be emboldened by the example of our loving and most compassionate Lord Jesus: we do not need to reach the everyone in the world, we ourselves do not need to convert in large numbers within the town we live. We might prefer it, we might wish it, our pride might demand it. But to follow the example of Jesus, let us be pleased to receive even but a few.

Let us go with joy to the poor among us (whether materially, intellectually, or spiritually)—laying our hands upon them by being with them, accompanying them, loving them. Let us, filled with the Holy Spirit, be for the poor living bread, that they are fed attention, fed with our compassionate presence, fed with the peace which passes all understanding. Let our joy which we receive here during the divine Liturgy – joy because we are fed and loved by Christ Himself present among us – let this joy be shared world, that through us, the Church, the world may know the Gospel, even Jesus Christ, Himself, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.1

Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth: for Your breasts are better than wine, the glowing ardor of the best ointments. Your name is oil poured out: therefore the young maidens have loved You. Draw me: we will run after You. The King has brought me into His chambers: we will exult and rejoice in You, remembering Your breasts more than wine: the righteous love You.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede

The bride says that “The King has brought me into His chambers.” The chambers of the eternal King are the inner joys of the heavenly homeland into which holy Church has now been brought through faith and will in the future be brought more fully in reality. Now the bride is speaking to the young maidens–that is, the Church of Christ is saying to the faithful souls that are its own members recently reborn in Christ: “The reason that I am praying to the Bridegroom that He might help us with His hand lest we should grow faint as we are running after Him is that I have already had a foretaste of the sweetness of the heavenly kingdom, I have already tasted and have seen that the Lord is sweet (Ps 34), I have already become acquainted with the good things which He has revealed to have been prepared for me in heaven.” Soon afterward, turning to Him Who has revealed these things to her, she hastens to give thanks to her King and Lord for His benefits, saying: “We will exult and rejoice in You, remembering Your breasts more than wine,” which is to say openly, “We will by no means extol ourselves for the gifts we have received, but in everything that we enjoy we exult, or rather, we always will exult and rejoice in Your mercy, remembering in every respect how much You have deigned to restore us with kindness, how you have deigned to temper the austerity of the law with the grace of evangelical faith.” Which leads the Bride to say, “The righteous love You.” This is if to say, “The reason that we will exult and rejoice not in ourselves but in You, remembering your gifts, is that all those who are righteous in heart have learned that You are to be loved before all things and above all things, and that they could never become righteous if they put any love before You, from Whom alone they have every good thing they posses.” And we should consider what she says further above: “The young maidens love You,” but now she says, “The righteous love You.” These two verses should be put together, because she spoke of no other youthfulness than uprightness of heart, since those who have put off the impurity of the old self have put on the “new self which is created according to God in justice and holiness and truth” (Eph 4:22-24). Again, “the righteous love You” because none other can truly love the Lord unless they are righteous. For whoever will violate the rectitude of justice, whether by an action or a word or even a thought that is improper, in vain do they think that they love the Creator Whose admonitions they despise. “For the love of God is this, that we keep His commandments,” as S. John the Evangelist bears witness (1 Jn 5:3).

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Attention to language is often something that people gently ridicule in others. When a person is regarded as paying too close attention to words and their meaning, they are said to be “splitting hairs.” Or it is dismissed with “oh, that’s just being semantic,” meaning, it is not necessary to pay such close attention to words: the meaning is about the same either way. Six, or one half dozen of the other, is something I grew up hearing, a lot. A person claiming “I did not yell at you, instead I spoke firmly with my voice raised,” might be demonstrating this. To which the other person might respond: yes, and that’s splitting hairs, because you should not have done that. So sometimes, we use a strategy of being very attentive to language, perhaps overly so, as a way to protect or defend ourselves against the accusations of others, or to hide from our behavior we know was inappropriate, even unholy.

Attention to language with respect to Holy Scripture, on the other hand, is always demanded, always required. This is one reason why the famous Collect about the Holy Scriptures has taken a special place in Anglican spirituality, with its key line: “Grant us so to hear the Sacred Scriptures, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” To read and to mark, to learn and inwardly digest, means to be attentive to the words of a passage, even just one word—attentive through prayer, through silence that allows us to hear how the words echo in our mind, in our memories, in our soul, echoing from God.

The perfect example of the importance of attention to language in Scripture is the Eucharist. Of the bread and wine, Jesus said “Take, eat,” and “Take, drink,”—“Do this for the remembrance of e.” The word “remembrance” demands deep attention. Superficial attention might lead us to understand this word meaning a bare recollection of the past, like when we filled our car with gas and what we overpaid; and the bread and wine are mere reminding symbols of that simple memory. But closer attention to the word “remembrance” in the biblical Greek reveals something else entirely. “Remembrance” translates the Greek word “anamnesis,” which means “actually-making-present-again.” Therefore Jesus did not say, “Eat and drink as a symbol of me that you recollect.” Rather he commanded us to “Eat and drink for the actually-making-present-again of Me.” The ancient and catholic doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist derives from close attention to the actual word Jesus Himself used, and our devotion unfolds from that doctrine. And thus attention to language gives us Gospel Joy, our heart joyful through our assurance that the consecrated bread and wine are truly the precious Body and Blood of Jesus.

Close attention to language opens up a key moment in our Gospel passage today from S. Mark. Jairus, the leader, had come to Jesus and said, “My little daughter is at the point of death.” To him, Jesus says, “Do not fear, only believe.” In part Jesus said this because Jewish beliefs at the time maintained that bodies at the time of death rendered anyone who touched it ritually unclean and therefore shunned from the worshiping community. People were scared of the bodies of the dead as well as almost dead. For Jesus to say, “Do not fear, only believe,” relieves the fear Jairus has.

The key moment is when Jesus addresses the dying girl by saying, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.” This is embedded in the Aramaic phrase “Tal′itha cu′mi.” The word here for “arise” is the same word Mark uses to describe the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law in chapter 1, the healing of the paralytic in chapter 2, and, most importantly, in the resurrection of Jesus in chapter 16. Mark wants to teach us something important. Christ’s presence heals. Healing therefore is an important aspect of Christ’s Resurrection. Put the other way round, the Resurrection of Jesus heals us. His resurrection heals our brokenness, our disordered body, mind, and soul.

That His resurrection heals us is what it means to receive salvation and to be saved: both mean healing and health. And because we experience the Resurrection primarily through the Eucharist, Jesus gave us the Eucharist to heal us, because His presence heals. Without the Resurrected Jesus, proclaimed through the Gospel, there is no health in us. To be saved is to begin the process of healing that begins in this life and continues into the next. True health is entering heaven. Hence the holy words of our liturgy before receiving Holy Communion, “speak the word only, and my soul shall be healed.” Speak the word only, dear Lord, and my soul again is saved, is given health. To be saved is to be healthy: a joyful heart because of the Gospel.

It is important and necessary that we be spiritually healthy because as Christ spoke in Deuteronomy: “The poor will never cease out of the land . . . therefore I command you, you shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in the land.” The poor around us here in Volusia County suffer from a variety of kinds of poverty: from material poverty, to the poverty of loneliness, to the poverty from lack of relationship with Jesus Christ. But Christ expects us to serve the poor in this place. Christ expects us to imitate Him as best we are able, who did not avoid but rather sought out those suffering poverty of all kinds, and gave them His healing presence. Christ made Himself sacrifice that we might be filled with His Body and Blood, that we can bring His healing presence to those in poverty among us Indeed, that by the grace of God acting through us, they too might arise. Because He is actually present again in a real and true way in Holy Communion, we are filled with the joyful knowledge of our salvation, our health, that like Mary to Elisabeth, and we can share with all that we meet, and especially the poor, the presence of Christ Himself, Who lives and reigns with the Father and Holy Ghost, ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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I concluded my preaching last Sunday with these words: The key thing is this: what makes Christianity happen is gospel joy: it is the antidote to spiritual desolation, and through it we plant the seeds of good intentions in our heart, inward seeds to which God gives the growth. All that lays behind the teaching today from Saint Paul: that if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold the new has come. This teaching expresses Gospel joy, for by being in Christ through our baptism, and through keeping of the baptismal life through liturgy and works of sacrificial love, we are transformed (in Paul’s phrase, a new creation). The power of Christ is to transform us into the stature of Christ’s image in which we are created. The mark of a Christian life, a life following Christ through the Holy Spirit, is being transformed, changed, remade. In the words of the Church Father S. Irenaeus of Lyon, Jesus Christ, in His infinite love, has become what we are, in order that He may make us entirely what He is. The promise of being made by Christ into entirely what He is gives us an inexhaustibly joyful heart.

Saint Paul furthermore teaches us today that the love of Christ controls us. And he says why: because we are convinced that one has died for all. In teaching us this today, Saint Paul gives us more food for our reflection on what it means to celebrate the joy of the Gospel. The love of Christ controls us—or, put another way, Christ’s love is our control. Christ’s love is our norm—is the norm. Christ’s love is the measuring stick by which we measure all of reality, and all of who are are, and how we conduct ourselves in the world. Christ’s love is the pattern of being, the model of existence. The love of Christ—Christ’s love, His outpouring of Himself, His own Sacrifice—controls us.

And His love controls us because of our confession that Christ has died for all. It is not only that we are convinced that Christ died; we are even more convinced that Christ died for all. He gave Himself up for all, for the sins of all, giving Himself up for all persons, on behalf of all persons. On the Cross Jesus held all the sins of humanity in His most holy Heart.

Sin means separation between us and God. By taking on Himself all our sins, He took upon Himself all separation that is between us and God. On the Cross and through the Cross, through His Passion, Crucifixion, and Death, Jesus held in His most Holy Heart our relationship with God, distorted by sin, and as He offered Himself up to the Father on our behalf, He offered up for us our relationship with God. And because Jesus is the perfect offering for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world, God accepted Christ’s offering on our behalf, His vicarious offering of our relationship with God was accepted by God through Christ; and in accepting the offering of the Son, God took our distorted relationship with Him, transformed it, and gave it back to us, restored, transformed and made permanently holy through Christ. Just as God take the bread offered at the Altar into Himself, transforms it into His Son’s Body and Blood, and gives it back to us transformed and holy, God takes our sinful relationship with Him into Himself through Jesus, and gives it back to us transformed—that we might live no longer for ourselves but for Him who for our sake died and was raised.

When we live with the fact of Christ’s offering of Himself for us—this fact becomes what controls our life; this fact is another cause of a heart joyful in the Gospel. The love of Christ controls us, which is another way of saying that we have in remembrance Christ’s blessed Passion and precious Death; His mighty Resurrection and glorious Ascension. When we live within the fact of Christ’s love for us—an unfathomable love for us—we are truly in Christ, and through Him we are a new creation. Living with and within the great mystery of this all—living with it, recognizing it, reflecting upon it, making it a fundamental part of our daily thoughts: as we allow the love of Christ to control us, through the joy of the Gospel, we become by grace a new creation, because we live and move and have our being in Christ, Whom even wind and sea obey, and Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost is one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.1

Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth: for Your breasts are better than wine, the glowing ardor of the best ointments. Your name is oil poured out: therefore the young maidens have loved You. Draw me: we will run after You. The King has brought me into his chambers: we will exult and rejoice in You, remembering Your breasts more than wine: the righteous love You.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede (p. 41)

Thus far it has been the voice of the synagogue (that is, of that people who with devout faith preceded the nativity of the Savior) who in the beginning of the Song responds to the prophets who had been predicting Him for a long time: Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth—that is, “Let Him appear Himself, and speaking mouth to mouth (Num 12:8), let Him confer upon me examples of living and gifts.” In the short verses that follow thereafter, she (the synagogue) signified what manner of gifts of His these might be, and how much they ought to be loved by chaste souls. Here (when she says “Draw me, we will run after you”) she is joined by the voice of the Church, that is, of those who have come to faith after the time of His nativity. Earlier, the synagogue prayed that the Lord might come and give her the kiss of peace; now the Church, knowing that He has already come in the flesh and then returned to heave, no longer implores Him to come down to her in the same way, but desires rather that she might follow Him to heaven. But because she sees that she cannot do this by herself, rightly does she implore the aid of Him to Whom she wishes to come. Draw me, she says, we will run after You, as if she should say openly, “We were indeed desiring to run in Your ways, to follow in the footsteps of Your works which You marked out while You were living on the earth, to come to You as You are ruling in heaven; but because without You we can do nothing (Jn 15.5), we pray that You will deign to give us Your hand, that You will help us with Your support as we run toward you; for the only way we are able either to run rightly or to finish the course is if we run with You as our guide and helper.” Hence the Apostle Paul who properly boasts, saying “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:7), clearly teaches in another place whether he can direct his own way by himself and come to the Lord Who draws him, saying “But I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me (1 Cor 15:10). And when it is said in the singular number, Draw me, it is properly added, we will run, because the Church of Christ is one throughout the world, but it also consists of many faithful souls, which are in this passage called “young maidens” on account of the vitality of their new way of life.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

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I have chosen the theme of the “Joy of the Gospel” for my preaching this summer because gospel joy is something all Christians need to be constantly reminded about. Gospel joy—the joy of the Gospel Who is Jesus Christ our Savior—is the antidote to an ailment in the spiritual life found in many Christians, and perhaps in all Christians at various points in their baptized life.

Symptoms include feeling bogged down at times by the challenges of life in Christian community: things happen in a parish in ways we do not like; people in the parish say things that rub us the wrong way, or even hurt us, sometimes humiliate us; sometimes people leave a church for a different community, sometimes they move away; sometimes we feel that we do not get on socially that well with other parishioners. What’s more, the symptoms get worse when at times we inwardly feel sluggish spiritually. We do not feel the warming presence of the Holy Spirit. Our prayer seems empty, saying the same words and praying about the same things all the time, but nothing seems to change or improve. And because of this, we give into the temptation to allow our discipline of worship to slide into a monotony of worship, even just going through the motions robotically. This can lead to dissatisfaction with worship, which can lead to complaining about this, that, or the other thing in the life of a parish. It can lead as well to thoughts of leaving not only a church, but leaving the faith altogether.

All of this is well documented in the spiritual literature of the Holy Church. The root cause of these sorts of things I have just listed is a spiritual condition called “spiritual desolation.” Like we have different kinds of physical sickness, we can have kinds of spiritual sickness. Spiritual desolation covers many symptoms, and what it means is a state of spiritual dryness, feeling disconnected from God, and losing energy for spiritual activities. It means we do not feel God’s presence, and lose heart in being a disciple. Reactions in what we say and how we act vary according to personality, but the root cause is spiritual desolation, and it is very common. It has happened in every Christian church everywhere in the world for nearly two thousand years.

The antidote to this spiritual ailment is the joy of the Gospel. And here precisely is where knowing the story of the Visitation of the Virgin Mother to Saint Elisabeth, and meditating upon it, is spiritually medicinal. The joy shared by Mary and Elisabeth together is palpable: not only celebrating being a mother, but celebrating the revelation and taking flesh of their Lord and our Lord, their Savior and our Savior. Their joy is so powerful it fills us with joy when we meditate on their moment described by Saint Luke. The awe and wonder they had is exactly what the Church has come to call Holy Fear: awe, wonder, trembling. This is the fear that is the beginning of Wisdom, meaning the beginning of the Joy of the Gospel in our words and deeds, which illumines our hearts and purifies our mind. Sharing in the infectious joy of the Visitation, then, is the beginning of Wisdom.

With all of that said, let us hear again what our Lord Jesus says to us through Saint Mark: “The Kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how.” This is a parable about Gospel Joy, which when we have it, we scatter seed upon the ground, seed that grows by the power of the Holy Spirit. S. Gregory the Great, Church Father and one of the key voices in our ancient tradition, has this to say about this parable: “A person casts seed into the ground, when he places a good intention in his heart.” We are able to place a truly good intention in our heart when the joy of the Gospel, the joy of Christ, becomes our joy, as it is the joy of Mary and Elisabeth.

Living not as the Pharisee who judges and criticizes others, but rather living as the Publican who prays constantly knowing the joy of the Gospel, our heart belongs to Jesus. Placing our good intentions in our heart that loves Jesus, S. Gregory teaches, participates in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is life in the Holy Spirit. And when the seeds of our good intentions begin to grow in the world, while these may seem at first small as a mustard bush: small, ordinary, and nothing special, the Gospel tells us that when something of the Spirit is born in this world, what is small by worldly standards is immeasurable and inexhaustible by God’s, because its source is God Himself.

When we have a joyful heart, the power of the Holy Spirit flows through us, and also, we are able to follow the holy doctrine of S. Paul, who insists that we always aim to please God, whether we are at home or away, and especially in our community life: always seek to please Him. When our heart is full of the joy of the Gospel, our intention naturally is to want to please God. Not complain, not lose faith, but seek to please God in all we do and say.

The key thing is this: what makes Christianity happen is gospel joy: it is the antidote to spiritual desolation, and through it we plant seeds, good intentions in our heart, inward seeds to which God gives the growth: all because our heart finds joy in the Gospel, inexhaustible joy in Jesus Christ, a joy that fills us and inspires us to love Him Who is our Bridegroom, even Jesus Christ, Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost, is ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, and finally an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.1

Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth: for Your breasts are better than wine, the glowing ardor of the best ointments. Your name is oil poured out: therefore the young maidens have loved You. Draw me: we will run after You to the odour of thy ointments. The King has brought me into His storerooms: we will exult and rejoice in You, remembering Your breasts more than wine: the righteous love You.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede (p. 41)

“Therefore,” the synagogue says, “the young maidens have loved You.” Those the synagogue calls “young maidens” are the souls reborn in Christ who have cast off the uncleanness of the old self. The more they cling to the love of their Creator, the more they know it is only by His grace that they receive the remission of sins and the gifts of the Spirit by which they make progress in virtue. Hence they openly profess and say: “The love of God [namely, the source of all virtues] has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 3:5). Now we should not doubt that the Saints of old who loved the Lord with perfect charity and also the bands of their pious companions can mystically be called “young maidens,” who by faith in the truth scorned the examples of the ancient sinner and ran after the rewards of new life with undoubting hope. Hence one of them who was already certain of future blessings speaks of his own soul, saying: Your youth is renewed like the eagle’s (Ps 103). But even more aptly do these things apply to the heirs of the New Testament, who are properly said to be begotten by God through the washing of grace as children of adoption. The more they love Him, the more of His gifts do they obtain, so that as soon as their flesh has been dissolved, if they have lived rightly, they mount up to the joys of heaven.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

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“O God,” our Collect begins, “O God, from whom all good doth come.” How much we need to remember this! And not only what is good comes from God: Everything that is good, everything that is true, everything that is beautiful, comes from God, and has its origin in Him. He has given us every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; we shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, God has given every green plant for food. And when God saw everything that He had made, He beheld His creation, He venerated His creation, and He said, “It is very good.” The Greek there could also be translated: “It is very beautiful.” Recognizing that all of creation has been made through the words of Christ in Genesis—Let there be!—is itself part of the joy of the Gospel, part of the joy shared between the Virgin Mother Mary and Saint Elizabeth at the Visitation, and which caused Mary to sing, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.”

We can see that meditating on our Collect, even the first words of it, is a good and holy spiritual practice. All of our Collects are a source of Gospel joy. I encourage you all to take home with your our service bulletin and the propers insert, and to find time during each week, even each day, to set aside a period of prayer to pray with the Collect, along with the Readings, the various prayers, even the small bits of Scripture: all very wholesome. The Collect of the Day is assigned for daily prayer for the whole week long, Sunday through Saturday. These Collects are the same, year after year. They are theological, yet presented in an accessible way that summarizes the Bible, and puts us into a right relationship with God. Being well composed, the Collects remind us of the importance of dignity in our prayer life, of the value of the right words in the right order, indeed such right words in the right order reflecting the beauty of God’s creation.

The world, and all that is in it, from one end of the earth to the other, is beautiful, says God. It is full of the grace of Christ. God makes, loves, and keeps all things, and fills them with His blessing. He loves His creation, He loves all His creatures, and we are invited to do so—invited to participate in His beholding of His creation, and we do so by spiritual listening: listening for how God speaks through His creatures; listening for how God expresses His will and His glory through His creatures and how His creatures praise Him and magnify Him for ever. Through creatures, the goodness, truth, and beauty of the Father is known, and adored. This recognition is part of the joy of the Gospel, shared between Mary and Elisabeth.

The most profound gift Christ the Bridegroom gives us, His Bride the Church, is the relationship with the maker of all that is, visible and invisible: relationship, that is, with the Father Almighty. He is unseen; yet as S. Paul teaches: “Things that are unseen are eternal.” Through the Sacraments (Baptism, Eucharist, Confession, and the rest), and through our meditation with and through Scripture; through our corporate life ordered by the Liturgy, and through our personal devotion rooted in the prayer of our heart and corporal and spiritual acts of mercy toward others—through all of that, we more and more receive the gift of Christ, as revealed by the Holy Spirit: we more and more all the attributes of the Father revealed only in and through the Son.

This is why immediately following the Gospel lesson and the homily, we say together in the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” Having been taken up in the Mass again as Christ’s Body, and having been blessed as His Body through the transfiguring word of Scripture, we are able to approach the Father (in the power of the Holy Spirit and through Christ), to behold together the Father, Him Who is incomprehensible, the maker of all; yet He Who is made known through the Son, for His dwells in the Son, and the Son dwells in Him. And they dwell in us and abide in us together as we abide in Christ’s Word. This, again, is the joy of the gospel: the dwelling of God in us.

And so we see the tall order which is the expectation of the Gospel upon us, in order to live an authentic Christian life. And yet our Lord from the beginning was able to show His disciples that examples already existed; examples who showed how to live the Christian life; that is, how to live one’s life so as to be led by the Holy Spirit, to not merely be hearers of the Word, but doers of the Word. When disciples told Jesus, “Your mother and your brothers are outside,” Jesus taught his disciples to imitate His Mother Mary and the close disciples (which is what “brothers” means here). They are owed no special recognition merely because of biology (in the case of Mary) or mere proximity to Jesus. Rather, they are examples because they are following the will of God—they are first emergence of the Communion of the Saints. Anyone one who hears and does the will of God imitates Our Lord’s Mother, especially, as well as His brothers, and in some sense can be spoken of being like them, or even being them with respect to imitating their humility and obedience to God.

And so while the Christian life is a tall order (and it certainly has never demanded anything less than total conversion of one’s life), the Christian life is never one reserved only for the spiritual elite. It is a life the entrance to which is open to all who desire God, and through that desire, open oneself to participate in Christ’s sacred humanity. For Christ keeps His Humanity fully open, through its sacrificial state, to the divine infinity (which is the Father), and in the Church He communicates this state to us too as we open ourselves to the horizons in which His humanity was raised: He Who is the eternal Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, then an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.1

Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth: for Your breasts are better than wine, the glowing ardor of the best ointments. Your name is oil poured out: therefore young maidens have loved You. Draw me: we will run after You to the odour of thy ointments. The King has brought me into his storerooms: we will exult and rejoice in You, remembering Your breasts more than wine: the righteous love You.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede (page 38)

The synagogue describes the breasts as “the glowing ardor of the best ointments.” The best ointments are the gifts of the Holy Spirit with which the breasts of Christ are glowing, because the holy teachers – namely, the ministers of evangelical milk – excel in love of virtues through the anointing of the Spirit. And surely the ointments with which the prophets and priests were visibly anointed in the law were good, but the best ointments are those with which the apostles and the successors of the apostles are invisibly anointed, concerning whom S. Paul says, “And it is God who has anointed us and has also sealed us and given the pledge of the Spirit in our hearts” (2 Cor 1:21-22); and the apostle John: “And as for you, let the anointing that you received from Him abide in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you; but as His anointing teaches you about all things” (1 Jn 2:27), and so forth. Again, they are glowing with the best ointments when they pour forth far and wide the report of their good work or preaching, as they themselves say: “Now thanks be to God, who in Christ Jesus always makes us to triumph, and through us manifests every place the aroma that comes from knowing Him (2 Cor 2:14).

Now, she explains why His breasts are glowing with the best ointments when she adds: “Your Name is oil poured out.” For we should not marvel if the members of that ointment give off an odor, since He Himself took His Name from oil, as He was evidently called “Christ,” that is “anointed” – doubtless with that anointing of which Peter says: “How God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power” (Acts 10:38). Surely the Holy Spirit is accustomed to be understood by the name “oil,” as the prophet bears witness when he says in praise of the same Bridegroom: “God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions” (Ps 45). Therefore His Name is oil that is not just dripping but even poured out, because, as His own forerunner (S. John Baptist) says of Him: “God gives the Spirit without measure, for the Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand” (Jn 3:34-35). And not without cause can we consider those among His elect, upon whom He has most bountifully lavished the gifts of His Spirit, to have had oil poured out upon them, just as that grace which was previously kept hidden among the Jewish people alone has now flooded the ends of the whole world in broad daylight, thus fulfilling the prophecy that says: “I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17, Joel 2:28). The apostle Peter explains this when he says: “Being therefore exalted by the Right Hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured out this gift that you see and hear” (Acts 2:33). Therefore His Name is oil poured out, because it is rightly named after what it is, that is, the one Who is full of the Holy Spirit is rightly named after what He does, which is to anoint the hearts of the elect with the gift of the same Spirit.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

This past Friday was a great feast of the Church. The 31st of May on our Kalendar means the feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Saint Elisabeth. This the Virgin Mother did immediately after the Annunciation to her by the Archangel Gabriel, that she was to be the Mother of God, which in Greek is “Theotokos.” There is a great lesson in this: for what Mary heard was the Gospel itself, proclaimed so as to be known by the message of the Angel. Gabriel said to Mary: “You will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His Name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. And He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His Kingdom there will be no end.” This is the Gospel! Jesus is He Who saves His people from their sins. And the great lesson is this: Mary did not keep the Gospel to herself, but arose and went in haste to Elisabeth. And in her very greeting to her cousin, John the Baptist in utero leaped for joy, and Elisabeth herself was filled with the Holy Spirit. So infectious is the true Gospel.

This great lesson, in other words, is about the nature of the Gospel itself. The nature of Gospel is, one, that it is of the angels (it is angelic, that is, it is a heavenly and spiritual message aimed directly to the souls of human beings); two, that it is to be proclaimed by human beings to other human beings, not to be kept to oneself, but shared, always shared; and three, that the quality of the Gospel message itself is joy. In the Visitation, we see the joy of the Gospel expressed by Mary and Elisabeth: a joy that is infectious. This is a joy that is surprising. This is a joy that elevates the soul toward God. This is a joy that draws us into thankfulness. This is a joy that throws one into prayer. Mary’s greeting elicits a wonderful and holy response from Elisabeth (part of which forms the Hail Mary prayer), to which Mary responds with her song, called by the Church her Magnificat, the first words of which are: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour.” She is joyous and her life that magnifies God, that is, it is a life of worship, for worship magnifies the power of God and the power of Jesus Christ to reveal God. These two qualities of Mary—joy and worship—are the very same two characteristics that Saint Luke uses to describe the 120 apostles after Christ’s Ascension, entering the Upper Room. Luke says, they worshiped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, continually praising and blessing God. After the Ascension, the 120 apostles became like Mary, imitating her joy in the Gospel

The last two Sundays (Pentecost and its octave day, Trinity Sunday), I preached that the life of Christians is a continual initiation into the experience of Pentecost. It is a continual initiation into the boom of the Upper Room, into the fire that the Holy Ghost lit in the hearts of the men and women who followed Jesus, into the hope given to us by Jesus Christ which is a promise of freedom in our heart from the shackles of self-centered concupiscence, because through Christ only can our hearts learn to beat with the heart of Christ Jesus as members of His Body the Holy Church. The life of a Christian, in other words, that initiation into the experience of Pentecost, this happens specifically because of the joy of the Gospel.

The Feast of the Visitation as I said makes this very clear: the Gospel elicits joy. This is also in the words of the Bride in the Song of Songs: a kiss from the Mouth of the Bridegroom, which is Christ, a kiss of joy. And we see this joy in Saint Paul’s epistle to us today: Let light shine out of darkness. The Holy Spirit shines in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, Paul teaches us. He calls this God’s “transcendent power.” And he insists while it comes from God completely, His transcendent power can be in our heart, in our soul, in our mind.

Paul says that Christians initiated into the joy of the Gospel carry in our body the death of Jesus—why?—so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. That the joy of the Gospel may be manifested in our bodies. That the Life of Christ may be in us, may fill us, may direct us, may fill us with the peace which passes all understanding—that like Blessed Mary Theotokos, our souls magnify the Lord, that our spirit rejoices in our Savior—that, in the words of blessed Jeremy Taylor, Anglican bishop of the 17th century, like Mary, our souls may be overshadowed, our spirit enlightened, that we may conceive Christ in our hearts, like Mary, and may bear Him in our mind, and may grow up the fullness of the stature of Christ, to be perfect in Christ Jesus—fed the whole journey long by the joy of the Gospel, that like Elisabeth we may be full of the Holy Spirit, and like her son John our heart might leap for joy, at the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom, Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost, lives and reigns, ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO is devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We will go verse by verse through the entirety of the Song of Songs.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, then an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.1

Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth: for Your breasts are better than wine, the glowing ardor of the best ointments. Your name is oil poured out: therefore young maidens have loved You. Draw me: we will run after You to the odour of thy ointments. The King has brought me into his storerooms: we will exult and rejoice in You, remembering Your breasts more than wine: the righteous love You.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede (page 38)

Now as soon as the synagogue who longs for the Lord to come has said to the prophets who are predicting Him: “Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth,” that is, Let Him impart to me the gifts of His teaching, she suddenly turns to Him for Whom her desire has been burning, and adds, “For your breasts are better than wine,” as if she were to say openly, “The reason that I long for you to come and renew me with Your kisses is that the sweetness of Your presence incomparably surpasses all those gifts that You have sent through the heralds of Your coming.” For she speaks of the fermentation of knowledge of the law as “wine,” but by “breasts” she means the first principles of evangelical faith, concerning which S. Paul says, “I fed you with milk, not solid food” (1 Cor 3:2); and again, “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). Therefore, the breasts of the Bridegroom are better than wine because all those whom the first principles of the New Testament regenerate “by water and the Spirit” (Jn 3:5) they afterward render fit for entrance into heavenly life, whereas prolonged observance of the law was never able to do this even among those who were so aroused by the taste of supernal sweetness that they could truthfully say “And your chalice which inebriates, how excellent it is!” (Ps 23.5), as the Apostle Paul confirms when he says “For the law brought nothing to perfection” (Heb 7:19). Now if the breasts of Christ (that is, the first beginnings of faith in the Lord) are better than the wine of the law, how much more does the wine of Christ (that is, the perfection of evangelical doctrine) surpass all the ceremonies of the law? If the Sacraments of His incarnation lead to life, how much does the knowledge of His divinity glorify? How much the vision of it? For the Bridegroom Himself signifies that He has not only milk but also wine when He says later in the Song of Songs: “I drink wine with my milk” (Sg 5:1). In the gospel He mystically signifies how much His own wine excels the wine of the law when the old wine was running out at the wedding feast that typified the church, and from water He made new wine that was truly quite deserving of greater praise (Jn 2:1-10). And justly does she refer to the “breasts” of the Bridegroom, which is a part of the female body, in order at the very beginning of the Song she might clearly show that she is speaking figuratively, just as in the Apocalypse (the Book of Revelation, which is itself also a typological book) when S. John says of Him: “I saw in the midst of the seven lampstands one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe,” he adds, “and girded with a golden sash across the paps” (Rev 1:12-13). But even the Bridegroom Himself (that is, our Lord) does not shrink from applying to himself a figure of the feminine sex, when through Isaiah He says, “Shall I who make others to bear children not bear children myself? says the Lord; shall I, Who gives the power of generation to others, be barren?” (Is 66:9). And again, “As a mother caresses her child, so will I comfort you” (Is 66:13). And in the Gospel, to the unbelieving city: “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!” (Mt 23.37).

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The predominant character of the Coming of the Holy Ghost on the Day Pentecost is one of explosive spiritual energy coming upon the 120 disciples in the Upper Room in Jerusalem through their abiding in the words of Jesus in their hearts as He revealed Himself to them through the opening of Scripture and the breaking of bread. This is the birth of the life of the Church, celebrated last Sunday and in terms of Liturgy completed today on Trinity Sunday, the Octave Day (that is, eighth day) of Pentecost. The womb of the Upper Room went boom, and the boom of the explosive spiritual energy of the Coming of the Holy Ghost is so strong that nearly two thousand years later in an area of the world over ten thousand miles away from Jerusalem the religious life in our parish is lit by the same explosive energy as the Upper Room.

We, as the 120 disciples were two thousand years ago, seek a personal relationship with Jesus in our hearts, recognize His presence in Scripture proclaimed, receive Him in Holy Communion, and seek to order our lives around the Mystery of Christ—ordering our lives personally and domestically, and also ordering around Him our interpretation of the world, our relations with the world and the people and creatures in it. There is no fundamental difference between what we do in our parish and what the Upper Room church did in Jerusalem. They are our contemporaries in the Christian life, as we all live as one Body in Christ on the Day of the Lord. The life of Christians is a continually initiation into the experience of Pentecost.

The Coming of the Holy Ghost lit a fire in the hearts of men and women, and the fire in their hearts is the fire in our hearts. And this fire is love for God, a burning heat for Jesus Christ. The Coming of the Holy Ghost causes the hearts of people to seek God, to look for Him, to yearn for Him. And all of this amounts to living life in such a way so as, in the words of Saint Paul the Apostle, to be led by the Spirit of God. In all things, Christians seek to be led by the Spirit of God, because His very nature is to lead into Truth, Who is Christ. Human beings are by our nature drawn toward what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful; and all that is good, all that is true, and all that is beautiful is of God.

Where we go wrong, and where humans have always gone wrong, is we often have the habit of defining what constitutes the good, the true, and the beautiful in selfish and self-centered ways, because of concupiscence. This is what Saint Paul refers to in his epistle to the Romans by the technical and scriptural phrase “living according to the flesh.” To live selfishly, to live self-centeredly, to live pridefully is to live according to the flesh. This way of living leads to spiritual decay, spiritual death—and many of us know firsthand what living according to the flesh means, and the dead-ends, depression, and confusion that ensues. It very much feels like slavery, to use Saint Paul’s term: bondage, to our own frailties, our own temptations, our own stupidity.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of hope; the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a promise of freedom whereby the chains of self-centered concupiscence are unshackled from our heart, and because of being freed from what enslaves us, our hearts learn to beat with the heart of Christ in His Church. This is very much an experience of being born anew, and reborn in the Holy Spirit of God the Father through Jesus Christ, by Whom we reinterpret our lives, reinterpret our priorities, reinterpret the situations in which we make choices.

And the practical aspect of it all can be found in two questions: What does it mean to be led by the Spirit of God? And, in light of that, what shall we do?—meaning, what practical bearing on our life should that have? How do we arrange our life so that our life can be a life that is led by the Spirit of God? These two questions about being led by the Spirit of God—what does it mean? and what shall we do?—are the only two questions necessary to Christian discipleship. They not only speak to the importance of Pentecost and Trinity Sunday which completes it, but all the Sundays and weeks from now until the beginning of Advent in several months’ time, and the whole of Christian living hinges on these two questions, asked in faith.

After all, in the words of Our Lord Jesus, God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. Being led by the Spirit of God is how we come to believe in Christ—believing in Him not in superficial ways, but believing in Him that our heart is transformed, illumined, and on fire for Him that the fire that warms us, we can share with others in the world, that they might share in the transforming heat of Jesus Christ, who is the Light of the world, and Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, the blessed and most glorious Trinity, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector.

SEASON TWO will be devoted to understanding the Song of Songs with Bede as teacher, and yours truly as interpreter. We are going through the entirety of the Song of Songs, verse by verse.

The format is a short passage from the Song of Songs, then comes commentary from the Bede, then an interpretive homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Song of Songs, 1.1

Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth: for thy breasts are better than wine, Smelling sweet of the best ointments. Thy name is as oil poured out: therefore young maidens have loved thee. Draw me: we will run after thee to the odour of thy ointments. The king hath brought me into his storerooms: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, remembering thy breasts more than wine: the righteous love thee.

A Lesson from a Treatise by the Venerable S. Bede (page 38)

Whoever desires to read the Song of Songs, in which that wisest of kings, Solomon, describes the mysteries of Christ and the church (that is, of the Eternal King and His city) under the figure of the Bridegroom and a bride, should remember first of all that the whole congregation of the elect in general is called “the church,” and yet now, for the sake of distinction, that portion of the faithful which preceded the time of the Lord’s incarnation is particularly named “the synagogue” and that which followed it “the church.” … Now the name that is “synagogue” in Greek means “gathering together” in latin, and “ecclesia” means “calling together”--with which name it seemed for fitting for the faithful of this time to be called because of their greater comprehension of spiritual knowledge. For it is appropriate for those who know how to hear and discern to be called together, but even stones or any other insensible things can be gathered together. Now these two portions of the righteous are sharers in the one and the same faith and love of Christ, although they have different sacraments in accordance with their times, as the apostle Peter testifies when he says: “Why are you putting God to the test by placing on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will. For just as we hope and also believe that we will be saved by the Lord’s incarnation, passion, and resurrection, which have already been accomplished, so also did that former part of the Church, which expected the same incarnation, passion, and resurrection of the Lord and Redeemer as things yet to come, believe that she was going to be saved through the grace of Him whose coming she so earnestly desired. Therefore, it is her voice that resounds at the very beginning in a song of love to him, after the holy prophets have both shown her the way to live and foretold the coming of Him who, as a Bridegroom coming forth from His wedding chamber” (Ps 19), would endow the whole world with the grace of a new blessing. Going beyond the voices of the heralds, she began to desire rather the presence of her King and Savior Himself, saying: “Let Him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth,” which is to say openly, “I earnestly request that he would not always appoint angels and prophets to teach me; now at last, let the One who has been promised for so long come Himself and instruct me with the light of His own presence, and comfort me by speaking to me with His own mouth, as if he were bestowing a kiss. But let Him also patiently receive the touch of my mouth–that is, let Him not disdain to listen to me and to educate me when I inquire about the way of salvation.” Truly, this desire for Him was evidently fulfilled at that time when, as we read in the Gospel, after Jesus had sat down His disciples came to Him and he opened His mouth, saying ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ For He who at that time opened His mouth and proclaimed to the world the unheard-of joys of the heavenly kingdom was the One who had so often opened the mouth of the prophets, through Whom He announced His coming to the world.

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And so the womb of the Upper Room went boom. To those that believe in Christ, to those who abide in Him, to those who keep His commandments, Jesus said “Out of [their hearts] shall flow rivers of living water.” The hearts of the Upper Room apostles were full of the Holy Spirit. They had all become like Blessed Mary at the Annunciation: full of grace because their souls were overshadowed, their hearts illumined by the Holy Spirit, because in their time in the Upper Room with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, they had conceived the holy Jesus in their hearts, they had bore Christ in their mind. Having been told by Jesus to wait in the Upper Room to receive the Holy Spirit, on Pentecost He came in all power: in staggeringly explosive energy: the womb of the Upper Room had done gone boom.

The Holy Spirit is the promise of the Father, and proceeds from the Father: proceeds, that is, from the He Who is the maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. The Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life at Pentecost comes and gives life to the Church. Without the Holy Spirit, we can never be the Bride, for not in light do we walk, but in darkness, confusion, and alienation. As S. Paul says, it all depends on what our mind is set: to set the mind on the flesh is death, Paul says; but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. Because with the Holy Spirit, through His life and peace, we can see Christ, see Who He is, see the Father in Him, see His Victory over Satan, proclaim His Holy Name, be saved Him because we are remade into His image.

This is all an incredible marvel, and absolutely astounding. With the Holy Spirit, the Church is revealed publicly, and this Church is not some mere social assembly of persons who share common social interests, but rather is the Body of Christ: the mystical Body of Christ in mystical, holy fellowship: the Bride of the Bridegroom. This Body: already of many members, all members of One Body, and all inspired by one and the same Holy Spirit. And this Body it is that Christ ordained to continue what began in Him: He ordained them to continue to do the works that Christ does, His ministry of reconciliation; to continue His ministry of transformation through repentance and illumination; to continue His ministry of drawing all people to Himself. This Body: the 120 apostles of the Upper Room Church, which, through the nine days together in one accord in prayer, were born into the world. And this Body proclaims, as Saint Peter did in his Pentecost preaching, that Jesus Christ the Crucified One is also Jesus Christ the Resurrected One, and that this Jesus is Lord and Christ, the one revealed through the opening of Scripture and the breaking of bread.

Pentecost is described in the 110th Psalm: “In the day of Thy power shall Thy people offer themselves willingly with a holy worship: Thy young men come to Thee as dew from the womb of the morning.” That womb of the morning is the Upper Room, endued with the anointing oil of the Holy Spirit, the 120 apostles and then the 3,000 souls baptized that day given the power of the Holy Spirit to offer themselves willingly with a holy worship to Christ. To find Pentecost itself described in the Old Testament itself is a great wonder that unwinds chronological time. Finding Christ in the Old Testament (in Scripture) is what the Church does because Jesus taught His Church this very thing; it is an action that fundamentally defines and delineates the Christian Church, and gives the Church its identity, that along with finding Christ in the breaking of bread.

Stating these as necessary fundamentals is no overstatement: it is seen in the New Testament directly from Saint Luke’s hand. That at Pentecost, the life of the Church was revealed, and that life is continuing in what began in the Upper Room: continuing, that is, steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers. Christianity is this. Christianity is Pentecost, and Jesus Christ, Who is the Bridegroom, Who in giving His life for us trampled down death by death and upon those in the tomb bestowed life, expects of His Bride to continue in His abundant, pentecostal life through the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.

The life of a Christian is a continual initiation into the reality of Pentecost which is the Church. The Day of Pentecost is the Day in which we live and move and have our being within the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit constitutes the Church as the Body of Christ, and thereby bears witness to and makes known through the opening of Scriptures and breaking of bread Jesus Christ the Crucified and Resurrected One; so that the Father can be revealed through Christ and only through Christ. And so to receive the Holy Spirit is to be continually inspired by His power shown through the Upper Room Saints, to our all our worship as joining into theirs, and through communion with them (by their guidance and example) growing in holy fear which is the beginning of wisdom, embracing the religion revealed on Pentecost as the means by which we yearn for the spiritual milk of the Word – to receive the Holy Spirit happens as we allow our hearts to dwell always in the Upper Room: to receive the Holy Spirit and be filled ever-more by Him; that our sense of Christ’s ascended presence is real, unmistakable, and joyfully convicting. That as we receive the gift of the power of the Holy Spirit, we seek to pass Him on to others, that the Holy Spirit Who flows through our hearts may flow through the hearts of all people: that as members of the local New Smyrna Beach chapter of the Upper Room Church, the womb of this here Upper Room may ever be booming; always and only through the same Jesus Christ our Bridegroom, Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost, lives and reigns: ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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Keeping in our Liturgy the Vigil of Pentecost, as distinct from the feast day of Pentecost itself, means we are in this Mass participating in the fermenting prayer of the 120 apostles in the Upper Room on the ninth day, us with them who are awaiting the Promise of the Father. Let us put ourselves into the 120 apostles; let us put ourselves with the Upper Room Church of Jerusalem. What would it be like to be in the room, there with the Twelve (including Saint Mathias) and with Blessed Mary, with Saint Mary Magdalene, Saint Martha, Saint Mary Cleophas, and other of the Holy Women; with Saint Mark, Saint Luke, Saint James the first bishop of Jerusalem, and others.

That leaves about 100 disciples not named. Let us make ourselves one of them, so to speak. Let us, as they undoubtedly did, look around, and see all the holy men and women in the Upper Room. Let us, as they undoubtedly had, have hearts lit up by the presence of Christ Ascended to the Right Hand of the Father: His presence known to them transparently, but really and actually known to them through the opening of Scripture and the breaking of bread. Can we doubt that in the very room where Christ in His Resurrected and Glorious Body taught the apostles how to read Scripture so as to open it to Him, and where He commanded them to Take, Eat, and Take, Drink at the Last Supper, and demonstrated it unmistakably at the house in Emmaus—can we doubt that these 120 religious sheep spent the nine days opening Scripture and Breaking Bread, and can we doubt they sensed and knew Christ’s Presence? That they felt Christ’s Presence? That He Who is the I-Am was abundant in His I-Am-ness amongst such faithful disciples who were over the whole of the nine days together with one accord devoted to prayer, and devoted completely?

What would it be like to be in the Upper Room having already witnessed Christ’s Ascension? Would they even have words for this unfathomable mystery? My thinking is, they would not have many words, because their hearts were so drawn into Christ, so filled by the presence Holy Spirit, so infused by awe, wonder, adoration, and trembling—that is, infused by Holy Fear: that because they felt protected, fed, healed, guided (all of which means they felt loved)—their fellowship was a holy fellowship, their identity that of members incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ—that is was a room that took everyone’s breath away, only to be filled with the Holy breath of the Holy Ghost who was remaking them and restoring their likeness.

We know their hearts were on fire through Christ known through the opening of Scripture. Peter’s sermon on Pentecost included a long quote from the Prophet Joel, which we heard. Joel articulated what he heard by the Holy Spirit from Christ, that I, Christ, will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Joel heard Christ say that sons and daughters will prophesy – which means, be able to speak about how the Holy Spirit is present in their lives. Male and female servants, young men and old men, all will be given the Holy Spirit poured over them. And can we doubt that in reading this Scripture together—for it is fitting to understand that being gathered together with one accord devoted to prayer would read Scripture aloud as a whole community—can we doubt that, knowing Who was speaking, that is, knowing Christ was speaking through Joel, that the message of the Holy Spirit out-poured upon all needed to be proclaimed aloud to all Jerusalem, even all the nations of the world?

And we know they were finding Christ in the Psalms, for Peter again in his Pentecost sermon quoted from Psalm 16, which means they read together this Psalm, where Christ, addressing the Father, said “Thou shalt not leave my soul in hell; neither shall Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption.” Christ, being the Holy One of Israel proclaimed by the Prophets but not yet revealed in the flesh until His Nativity of Blessed Mary, showed the Upper Room apostles the very basis for Christian Hope: that the Resurrection itself is clearly seen in this verse from Psalm 16, attesting to Christ’s very teaching that everything about Him can be found in the Old Testament.

My dear brothers and sisters, by the ninth day, we can say that the living water within the Upper Room was ready to burst—the womb of the Upper Room ready to go boom. Christ said, He who believes in me, as the Scripture had said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ The hearts of the Upper Room apostles were full of the Holy Spirit—emulating Blessed Mary, emulating Saint Elizabeth, emulating Saint John Baptist, Simeon, and many others. They were ready to proclaim publicly “Abba! Father!” aloud to all Jerusalem and aloud to the whole world: knowing that through them the Holy Spirit would bear witness to Christ and His Gospel. In Liturgy our hearts dwell in the Upper Room: we dwell in the Upper Room to receive the Holy Spirit and be filled ever-more by Him; that our sense of Christ’s ascended presence is transparent, real, unmistakable, and convicting. And that we not merely say, but truly know, ourselves to be led by the Spirit of God, and hence truly Sons of God, who yearn for the spiritual milk of Christ, that our illumined hearts may truly be on fire. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector. The format is a Scripture passage, then a passage of commentary from the Venerable S. Bede, then a short homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Gospel according to S. John 15.26

Jesus taught the disciples in the Upper Room, saying “When the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me; and you also are witnesses, because you have been with me from the beginning. I have said all this to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues; indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do this because they have not known the Father, nor me. But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you of them.”

A Lesson from a Homily by the Venerable S. Bede (Homily II.16)

The Holy Spirit, upon His coming, bore witness concerning the Lord. Breathing into the hearts of the disciples, He revealed to them by His bright light everything about which mortals were to have knowledge concerning the Lord, namely, that He was equal and of the same substance with the Father before the ages; that He became of the same substance as we at the end of the ages; that He was born of a virgin and lived in the world without sin; that He went forth from the world when He wished and by the kind of death that He wished; that by rising from the dead He truly destroyed death and raised up the true flesh in which He had suffered, and at His Ascension took it up into heaven, and established it at the Right Hand of His Father’s glory; that all the writings of the prophets bear witness to Him; that the confession of His Name was to be extended even to the ends of the earth, and that the rest of the mysteries of His Father were unlocked for His disciples by the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Nor was whatever they correctly discerned conceded to them alone by the gift of the Spirit, but also to all who believe in the Lord through their word. And Jesus says, “He will bear witness to me; and you also are witnesses.” Once they had put aside their initial fear, they ministered outwardly by telling others what they had received inwardly by the Spirit’s teaching. The Spirit Himself both illumined their hearts by knowledge of the truth, and by the preeminence of His power roused them to teach what they knew. Hence in Isaiah the Spirit is rightly called “of strength and knowledge.” He is indeed the Spirit of knowledge, since it is by His help that we rightly acknowledge what we must do and even think; He is also the Spirit of strength, since it is by His help that we receive the strength to carry out what we know well that we should do, lest we be driven away by some adversity from the good deeds we have begun.

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Having passed into the season of Ascensiontide, and on this Sunday after the Ascension fittingly called “Upper Room Sunday,” for we are with the 120 apostles in the Upper Room, and having therefore reached the end of the Eastertide mystagogical preaching I have done—on what it means for Jesus Christ to be the Bridegroom who at the coming in the middle of the night admits those rich with the oil of mercy in their hearts to the marriage banquet which is the Church Triumphant in heaven, and refuses those empty of the oil of mercy—I think the question I repeatedly asked throughout Eastertide is the most important one: How can we not love the Bridegroom? For all Christ has done for us, how can we not love the Bridegroom? This is the question, because if we are to be the Bride of Christ, that is, the Church, there must be mutual love between Christ and us (for that is what constitutes marriage: mutual love).

We know He loves us, because He gave Himself for us, laid down His life, and in so doing, gave the Word of God which is Himself to us that we can abide in Him through His words (His teaching, His actions, His love) and by abiding in Him, the Father and the Son abide in us, the Church. How can we not love the Bridegroom is the ever-present question as a Christian, because His love for us is boundless, and so there is always more about Christ’s love for us to experience, to learn, to know about, and to celebrate and adore.

At the end of his Gospel account, Saint Luke says of the 120 apostles that they “returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God.” With great joy they were in the Upper Room awaiting the Promise of the Father, which is the Holy Spirit and His power among them. And they were continually blessing God in their hearts: why? because their bodies were the temple of the Holy Spirit, Whose presence was already among them so that they could perceive the truth of Jesus: that He is the Christ, the One spoken of by the Prophets and Who spoke to the patriarchs, the prophets and the holy men and women of Scripture in times of old: that He is the Savior and that He has ascended to return to that which He always has inhabited: to Heaven, at the Right Hand of the Father Almighty.

He had completely inhabited as well the hearts of the 120 apostles, that is, the heaven that is in each one of them, in which Christ dwells on High. There hearts were completely given over to Christ, Who for their sakes died, was buried, rose again and showed Himself in His resurrected and glorious Body, all for their sakes so as to consecrate the apostles in His truth, that is, to consecrate the apostles in Him. He had sanctified them in truth; He had given them the Word of the Father which is Himself, all that they may know that they have eternal life. They believed in Him, believed Him to be the Son of God, and so became themselves testimony to the fact that God has given eternal life in His Son.

And so the question, “How can we not love the Bridegroom?” became a statement of joy and adoration of God. The 120 apostles knew and proclaimed to all, and proclaim to the Church for all her days, that He out of His love creates us, keeps us, and guards us. He laid down His life for us. he took away all power death has over us, and all need of fear of death He took away. He died that He might continually give Himself as our daily Bread as He is known in the opening of Scripture and breaking of Bread. The 120 apostles, in other words, understood themselves as One Body, partaking in One Bread. They understood themselves as The Church, which means joyously worshiping Christ as His Bride. Each apostle looked at the apostles around them, and in them saw the face of Christ, for was present among them, and thus He showed Himself through them: through their remembrances of Christ, through their stories.

And most of all through their prayer, for they were with one accord devoted to prayer: in the Liturgy of their worship, and in the community life of their worship. They joyously prayed together in Liturgy through Breaking of Bread, through Psalms and hymns and Scripture; they joyous prayed together in sharing apostolic fellowship: Mary, who Jesus named as Mother of the Church, shared stories of her Son, and each listened and shared their own stories of their experience of Christ. They all sang praises unto our King, for Christ is King of all the earth: how can we not sing praises with the understanding we have of Jesus Christ the Bridegroom? How can we not be joyful in our adoration of the Bridegroom? Let us always know that their life in community is the same as we have: ours is in theirs, theirs in ours. For we joyously adore one Christ: even Jesus Who reigns over the nations, Who sits upon His holy seat; Who has given us the Word of the Father, which is Him, that we might be sanctified in Truth, consecrated in Truth, and enter in the mansion that the Bridegroom has prepared for us, His Bride, that there we might also be: with Him Who is our Light and our Salvation, even Jesus Christ, Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost, lives and reigns, ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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As we have heard this Eastertide the prayer of the Bridegroom, let us hear two portions of it again. Firstly: Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching. And we know what it means to be found watching by Our Lord. It means as He taught us in the Farewell Discourse of S. John’s Gospel: it means to abide in Christ’s love. “If you keep my commandments,” Jesus says, “you will abide in my love.” And the first commandment is to love Him and Him in other people. The first commandment is to love Him as He lives in each of us, and to love Him as He lives in others. To love Christ is all the ways we are able to love Him is what it means to watch.

And there are so many ways to love Him! First and foremost, we love Him by worshiping Him, by attending Liturgy and participating with fervent desire for Him and focused attention. When Liturgy is being celebrated and we choose not to attend when we could, we are not loving Christ, simple as that. We love Him by faithfully receiving the Sacraments, which are extensions of His Life and Love. We love Him by reading Scripture and meditating and contemplating Scripture, for Christ is found in Scripture, and makes His presence available in Scripture. We love Him by prayer; prayer which is our relationship with Him: a prayer of thanksgiving to Christ is like giving Him a kiss on His cheek, even a kiss on His hand. We love Him by remembering Him every day: every day as much as we can: remembering Him Who laid down His life for us; remembering Him Who is risen from the dead; remembering Him Who trampled down death by death; remembering Him Who sacrificed Himself for us, and Whose suffering was for our freedom in Him; remembering Him Who bestows life abundant upon us; remembering Him in Whose image we are made to grow up into; remembering Him through Whom everything is made, including you and me; remembering Him Who is Alpha and Omega; remembering Him Who is the Bridegroom, for He made us to be His bride; remembering Him Whom God sent into the world, His only Son, so that we might live through Him, indeed, so that we would marry Him so as to partake in the Marriage Feast, the heavenly banquet.

And the second part of the Bridegroom prayer: Beware, O my soul, do not be weighed down with sleep, lest you be given up to death and lest you be shut out of the Kingdom. We will not be shut out of the kingdom if our flasks are full of oil. We will not be shut out of the kingdom if our flasks are filled with the mercy given us by Christ as we do acts of mercy: to Him as He lives in us, and to Him as He lives in others. For if our flasks are full, it is because we day by day confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and thus God abides in us; and with God abiding in us, we do works of mercy, for God acts through us, for as God abides in us, we abide in Him. And doing acts of mercy, we love; and through loving we know God, for God is love. Through loving we are born of God.

And through this, we can have confidence for the day of judgment, when the Bridegroom comes at midnight, because He will know us. He knows those who love. He knows those who love in His Name. He knows those who suffer for loving His Name. He knows us because He sees our hearts aflame with light from the mercy He has given us. He knows us because He sees our hearts aflame with knowledge of Him Who is the Bridegroom, Whose very nature is love. He knows us because in us He sees Himself, because He sees love.

How can we not love the Bridegroom? How can we not love Him Who out of His love creates us, loves us, and keeps us? How can we not love Him Who laid down His life for us? How can we not love Him Who took away all power death might have over us? How can we not love Him Who died that He might continually give Himself as our Bread: in Scripture and in Blessed Sacrament? Let us ask God to pour mercy into our hearts that they are hearts full of grace and love for Christ: O God, Who hast prepared for those who love Thee such good things as pass man’s understanding: pour into our hearts such love toward Thee that we, loving Thee in all things and above all things, may obtain Thy promises, indeed the very Wedding Banquet, which exceed all that we can desire; through the same Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with Thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector. The format is a Scripture passage, then a passage of commentary from the Venerable S. Bede, then a short homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Gospel according to S. John 16.23

Jesus taught the disciples in the Upper Room, saying “In that day you will ask nothing of me. Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask anything aof the Father, he will give it to you in my name. Hitherto you have asked nothing in my name; ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full. I have said this to you in figures; the hour is coming when I shall no longer speak to you in figures but tell you plainly of the Father. In that day you will ask in my name; and I do not say to you that I shall pray the Father for you; for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from the Father. I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father.”

A Lesson from a Homily by the Venerable S. Bede (Homily II.12)

Our Lord Jesus said, “I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father.” He came forth from the Father and came into the world, because He made Himself visible to the world in His humanity, Who in His divinity was invisible along with the Father. He came forth from the Father, because He appeared, not in that form in which He is equal to the Father, but in the lesser one of a created being, which He took on Himself. And He came into the world because, in the form of a servant which He accepted, He offered Himself to be seen even by those who love this world. Again, He left the world behind and returned to the Father because He removed from the sight of those who love the world what they had seen, and He taught to those who love Him that He should be believed to be equal to the Father. He left the world behind and returned to the Father because by His Ascension He brought the humanity which He had put on to the place of invisible realities. . . . We ought to keep watch meticulously, so that we may render not only our words and works, but also the very secrets of our hearts, worthy of divine inspection. Let not the blight of hatred or of envy remain in the temple of our breast; let not the beginning of any base or slanderous utterance arise from there. Let us be mindful of the Lord’s threat wherein He says, “I am coming to gather their works and their thoughts” (Is 66.18). When the traces of chaotic vices have been driven out of our heart, let us prepare a dwelling wherein He, Who is its inescapable examiner and judge, may deign to abide.

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To begin today I will again read the prayer that was used during Holy Week Liturgy on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. It is this:

Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching; and again, unworthy is the servant whom He shall find heedless. Beware, therefore, O my soul, do not be weighed down with sleep, lest you be given up to death and lest you be shut out of the Kingdom. But rouse yourself crying: Holy, holy, holy, art Thou, O God. Through Blessed Mary Theotokos, have mercy on us.

Because the Bridegroom comes after slumber and sleep (that is, after death) this prayer provides an image of the Second Coming of Christ. And to reflect upon the Second Coming is to reflect now upon our life from the point of view of having died, and looking back at the way we led our life. It is like an exercise wherein we are asked to write our obituary. I was asked to do this exercise twice during seminary, once for each of my seminaries. Immediately, the question became How do I want people to remember me? (at least in an obituary); what kind of life do I want to have lived? what is most important to me? In our case as Christians, the question becomes: do we want the Bridegroom, when He comes, to find us having lived a life of watching? having lived a life of loving God above all else, and loving God in our neighbor? having lived a life whereby we live and act mercifully, and thus received mercy (“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy”), that is, received the oil of mercy which fills our flasks as we wait for the call of the Bridegroom?

There is a phrase in that prayer that I want to particularly focus on today: “unworthy is the servant whom He shall find heedless.” I want to reflect on this because this servant does not enter into the marriage feast. It is to this servant that the Bridegroom says, “I do not know you.” Being heedless means, in short, not entering heaven. The way we live our Christian lives matters: one way enters into life everlasting in the Marriage Feast, and one way does not.

Again: “unworthy is the servant whom the Bridegroom shall find heedless.” Heedless is a bit of an old-fashioned sort of word. To be heedless is to pay no attention. It is to be careless, inattentive, and to have no regard. It is the opposite of being watchful, which Our Lord in many places commands His disciples to be. Watch and pray, He said to the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, that you may not enter into temptation. And what is this temptation for us? It refers to many things, but preeminently the temptation to not pray, the temptation to not attend Liturgy, the temptation to not study Holy Scripture, the temptation to make things more important than God (that is, the temptation to idolatry), and the temptation to judge people, which is the opposite of loving God in them, the opposite of being merciful to them in deed and in truth. To be heedless summarizes all of this. To be heedless is to be unloving, both to God and to fellow Christian and to fellow human. Saint John has strong words for the heedless, for he says “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?” The implication being, it does not.

To live godly lives requires we know about God’s love. We Christians have no excuse for not knowing about God’s love. Saint John says of the Bridegroom’s teaching on love, “By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us.” God’s love is sacrificial. Saint Paul says more: “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” This is the love we are to imitate if we want to enter the Marriage Feast at the end of days.

At the Second Coming at the end of days, Christ will come again as the Bridegroom, at midnight after we have slumbered and slept the sleep of death. The Bridegroom will show Himself in His glory as wounded: nail holes in His hands; a tear in His side, His woundedness permanent in Him. He will come again and show His suffering, for His Passion on the Cross recapitulates all the suffering He endured in Scripture as His people forgot time and again the innumerable benefits given by Him. All the Bridegroom has done is for our salvation: His sacrifice entirely that we might be redeemed, and be gathered by Him our Bridegroom into the Marriage Feast: entirely that we might love Him.

Let us this Easter season be roused to shake off whatever sleep remains in us. We too often are like the foolish virgins wandering aimlessly when the call of the bell to prayer, sacrifice, and all that is merciful is ever-ringing. May we be led by the Holy Spirit with the wise virgins to do ceaseless acts of mercy day in and day out. Let us not remain outside the bridal chamber of Christ, but have our flasks full of oil by keeping our Lord’s commandments, that He abides in us. Let our hearts be given to God, because we so desire to join the angels singing around the heavenly throne, Holy, Holy, Holy! all of us united with the Bridegroom in heavenly matrimony, even the same Jesus Christ, Son of Man and Son of God, Who lives and reigns with the Father Almighty in the unity of the Holy Ghost: ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector. The format is a Scripture passage, then a passage of commentary from the Venerable S. Bede, then a short homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Gospel according to S. Luke 24.1

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the Holy Myrrh-bearing Women went to the tomb, carrying spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel; and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise.” And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.

A Lesson from a Homily by the Venerable S. Bede (Homily II.10)

“Carrying spices which they had prepared” is well said. In our case the earlier preparation of the spices we carry to perform our service to the Lord is the purging of our hearts from pointless thoughts before the time of prayer, so that at the time of prayer we are able to admit nothing unclean in our minds, and to think of nothing that concerns transitory matter beyond what we are praying for, and to remember Who it is Whom we are praying to, according to the example of the Psalmist who said, “My heart is prepared, O Lord, my heart is prepared; I will sing and say my psalm to the Lord.” One who enters a church to pray, and neglects to drive away from his mind its usual superfluous thoughts while he pours forth his words of entreaty, is like a person seeking the Lord without bringing with him the spices he has prepared. Saint Luke tells us “The women found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.” According to the historical sense, we know from what the evangelist Matthew tells us that an angel came down from heaven and rolled the stone away from the mouth of the tomb. This was not done so that the angel might make a way for the Lord to go out, but so that the open and empty space of the tomb might divulge to human beings that He had risen again. Mystically, the rolling away of the stone implies the disclosure of the divine sacraments, which were formerly hidden and closed up by the letter of the law. The law was written on stone. Indeed in the case of each of us, when we acknowledge our faith in the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection, His Tomb, which had been closed, is opened up. We enter the tomb, but we do not find the body of the Lord, when in our hearts we carefully think back over the order of events in His Incarnation and Passion, and recall that He has risen from the dead and is no longer to be seen in His mortal flesh.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

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The Eastertide reflections are on the Holy Week services of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. And the dominant image of the Liturgy on those days was Our Lord Jesus Christ as the Bridegroom. Holding those services together was a prayer, said serveral times each service. And the prayer was this:

Behold, the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching; and again, unworthy is the servant whom He shall find heedless. Beware, therefore, O my soul, do not be weighed down with sleep, lest you be given up to death and lest you be shut out of the Kingdom. But rouse yourself crying: Holy, holy, holy, art Thou, O God. Through Blessed Mary Theotokos, have mercy on us.

It is a rich prayer because it calls us to reflect upon our life from the point of view of having died, and looking back at the way we led our life. In my life have I watched? In my life have I desired Christ above all else? O my soul, the prayer reads, do not be weighed down with sleep, lest you be given up to death and lest you be shut out of the kingdom. The five unwise virgins were shut out of the Kingdom after they had died, whereas the five wise virgins, after their death, were admitted to the marriage feast. To be weighed down with sleep is to be weighed down with sin. As Saint John teaches today “Every one who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness.” To commit sins means we do not receive the mercy of Christ. It is Christ’s mercy which is the oil that keeps aflame the light of our life in the Holy Spirit. We receive the oil of mercy by being merciful, through lives of virtue and faith, our heart given to God. To not be merciful means not receiving oil, which leads to the death of our spiritual life, an obscuring of God in our life, which leads to being weighed down with sleep. And if we are weighed down by sin, we will not be able to be lifted up.

All Christians must know that Jesus Christ appeared in order to take away sins. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. And at the Second Coming at the end of days, He will come again as the Bridegroom, at midnight after we have slumbered and slept the sleep of death. The Bridegroom will show Himself in His glory as wounded; with nail holes in His hands; in His glory He has a tear in His side. These wounds are a permanent part of the Bridegroom, a permanent marking of His love for us. He will come again and show His suffering, for His Passion on the Cross recapitulates all the suffering He endured in Scripture as His people forgot time and again the innumerable benefits procured unto us by Him. All the Bridegroom has done is for our salvation: His sacrifice entirely that we might be redeemed, and be gathered by Him our Bridegroom into the Marriage Feast.

Our Bridegroom is the Good Shepherd. He has laid down His life for His sheep. That is, for us, for we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Our Bridegroom is He who leads us to feed in green pastures: to feed on Him Who is our daily bread, found in Scripture and in Holy Communion. Our Bridegroom brings us forth in the paths of righteousness, and He leads us to dwell with Him in the house of the Lord forever. He is known by His voice when He calls us by our name. And our Bridegroom seeks after his sheep when they go astray, seeking them so as to be found by Him, that all of the angels rejoice in His finding of us. And our Bridegroom is He who by His death destroyed death: that is by His death He destroyed the power death has over us. Our Bridegroom is He who shows that death is an illusion, for death leads to life. Perhaps it is this very reason why He carries us on His shoulders (why Him our Shepherd carries us the sheep): because He has trampled down death by death, and this trampling carries us over the gate of death into new and yet more abundant life after death. Thus Saint John teaches, “See what love the Father has given us.” He has given us the love our Shepherd has for us, love which tramples down the power Satan has over death, and does so through His death on the Cross.

The Bridegroom, as God, grants unto all who watch with flasks full of oil an incorruptible crown. He adorns in wisdom all with full flasks from having done good works. How can we not love the Bridegroom? How can we not love Him Who wounded Himself for us, wounds which heal us? How can we not love Him Who suffered for us, suffered even that He had no form or comeliness that we should look at Him, no beauty that we should desire Him. But how can we not desire Him Who emptied Himself for us? How can we not desire Him Who through Himself made us?

Let us not remain outside the bridal chamber of Christ. Let us keep our lamps aflame with virtues and true faith. Let us watch and let our days be days spent in prayer and service. Let our hearts be given to God, and let our mind be led by wonder into the greatness and majesty of our Lord: the greatness and majesty of Him Who is the Bridegroom, even the same Jesus Christ, Son of Man and Son of God, Who lives and reigns with the Father Almighty in the unity of the Holy Ghost: ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector. The format is a Scripture passage, then a passage of commentary from the Venerable S. Bede, then a short homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Gospel according to S. Luke 24.44

After His resurrection, Jesus spoke to the disciples in the Upper Room and said to them, “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.” And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures. Then He said to them, “Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And you are witnesses of these things.

A Lesson from a Homily by the Venerable S. Bede (Homily II.9)

It was necessary for the Christ to suffer and rise from the dead for this reason: that it was impossible for the world to be saved unless God came as a human being, appearing in the form of a human being; and unless He instructed human beings in divine things; and by undergoing death as a human being, He vanquished death by His divine power, and thus enkindled in those who believed in Him a contempt of the death they had to undergo, and enlivened them by the certainty of the resurrection and eternal life they were to hope for. By what other example could human beings more fittingly be aroused to faith in the glory in which they were to share, and in the immortal life which they were to merit, than by their acknowledging that God Himself had been made a sharer in their humanity and mortality? But what means might they be more effectively stirred up to tolerate adversities of every kind for their salvation, than by their learning that their Maker had been subject to countless kinds of abuses at the hands of the wicked, and even to the sentence of death, for their salvation? For what other reason might they more fittingly receive the hope of their own resurrection, than by their remembering that through His sacraments they had been cleansed and sanctified, and united to the Body of Him Who, when He had tasted death for them, presented an example of a speedy rising from death?

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

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As I explained last Sunday, again this Easter season the preaching will be mystagogical on an aspect of Holy Week just past. To preach that way means to look back at Holy Week so as to be drawn by the Holy Spirit more deeply into the mystery of Our Lord’s Passover. The aspect of Holy Week I want us to reflect upon is Our Lord Jesus Christ as the Bridegroom. That was the dominant image during the Liturgy on Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, and Holy Wednesday. The very same Icon on our service bulletin this week was venerated on Holy Monday and Holy Tuesday.

As the Bridegroom is how Jesus said He would come to those who woke up after slumbering and sleeping. This Our Lord said in His Parable of the Ten Virgins, five wise and five foolish. At midnight there was a cry, “Behold, the Bridegroom! Come out to meet Him.” And those who were ready with full flasks of oil went in with Him to the marriage feast. For He knew them, and they were known by Him. They entered into the heavenly banquet, where Jesus was thirsty to eat and drink new with them in the Father’s Kingdom. And His advice to the disciples was to watch, for you know neither the day nor the hour. And it was the same commandment He gave the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane upon finding them asleep: “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.”

In the Bible, “to watch” means to be awake and knowing, and “to have a flask full of oil” means having done works of mercy, both works of devotion in prayer to Christ and works loving Christ in others. So it is by watching and having oil that the Bridegroom grants entrance to the heavenly banquet; entrance to the Marriage Feast of Bridegroom and Bride, which is holy Church.

Where we got to last Sunday is remembering by the help of Saint Thomas that the Bridegroom is His glory is wounded; that the Bridegroom in His glory has nail holes in His hands; that the Bridegroom in His glory has a tear in His side. These wounds are a permanent part of the Bridegroom, a permanent marking of His love for us. He through Whom all things are made came to accept the Cross, the afflictions, the beatings, and the judgment by Pilate. A servant strikes the Bridegroom on the head, but He endures all things that He may save mankind.

It was to help the disciples remember this that our Lord spoke in the Upper Room in our Gospel account. He said, “These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then Saint Luke tells us that He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. This opening is itself mystagogy: Jesus leading them by means of the Holy Spirit more deeply into the mystery of His Passover, His passing from death into life.

And then Jesus says, “Thus it is written: that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead.” He wanted them to know firmly that He comes of His goodness to suffer. He wanted them to know that how they will always know Him and be known by Him is through suffering, is through dying to self as a sacrifice to God. He knows us through our suffering, and through our dying to self as sacrifice; and we know Him through His suffering, and through His dying to self as sacrifice to God for all mankind. Our God is He Who died on the Cross, for Christ shows us what it is to be God in the way that He dies as a human being. And we will find Him as the Bridegroom with woundedness, the Bridegroom in His suffering is how we find Him.

And we find Him, by His own commandment, in Scripture–that is, the Law (the five books of Moses), the Prophets, the Psalms, and all the writings which are called today (someone erroneously) the Old Testament. I say somewhat erroneously, because how can the place where the living Christ is found today be called Old? The better name is that which the Evangelists use, as well as Saint Paul: simply, the Scriptures. And we find Christ suffering all throughout Scripture: Christ suffering with Adam and Eve after their transgression; Christ suffering with Cain, after he murdered Abel; Christ suffering with Noah and his family, as Christ bemoaned the wicked ways of everyone else in the world; Christ suffering with Moses, because of the continual disobedience of the sons of Israel; Christ suffering with the Prophets, as the sons of Israel became unholy and arrogant. Our Lord’s suffering of His Passion on the Cross is the highest, most profound moment in all human history; it is the recapitulation of all the suffering He endured in Scripture as His people forgot time and again the inestimable and innumerable benefits procured unto us by Him; forgot that of His goodness He chose to suffer.

All of what the Bridegroom has done is for our salvation: His sacrifice entirely that we might be redeemed, and be gather by Him our Bridegroom into the Marriage Feast: the Bride which is the Church, forever entwined with the Bridegroom, Jesus Christ; Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Get full access to Fr Matthew C. Dallman's Substack at frmcdallman.substack.com/subscribe

Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where I am Rector. The format is a Scripture passage, then a passage of commentary from the Venerable S. Bede, then a short homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Gospel according to S. Luke 1.26

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.” And Mary said to the angel, “How shall this be, since I have no husband?” And the angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For with God nothing will be impossible.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.

A Lesson from a Homily by the Venerable S. Bede (Homily I.3)

The angel entered as said to Mary, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.” As unheard of as this greeting was in human custom, so fitting was it to the dignity of blessed Mary. And indeed, truly full of grace was she upon whom it was conferred by divine favor that, first among women, she should offer God the most glorious gift of her virginity. Hence she who strove to imitate the life of an angel was rightfully worthy to enjoy the experience of seeing and speaking with an angel. Truly full of grace was she to whom it was granted to give birth to Jesus Christ, the very One through Whom grace and truth came. And so the Lord was truly with her whom He first raised up from earthly to heavenly desires, in an unheard of love of chastity, and afterwards sanctified, by means of His human nature, with all the fullness of His divinity. Truly blessed among women was she who without precedent in the womanly state rejoiced in having the honor of parenthood along with the beauty of virginity, inasmuch as it was fitting that a virgin mother bring forth God the Son. Later on she is told “of His kingdom there will be no end.” In it, indeed, he reigns in the present life when He rules the hearts of the elect, inhabiting them through faith and through His love, and He governs them by His continual protection so that the gifts of heavenly reward may be attained. He reigns in the future life when He introduces these same elect, their state of temporal exile ended, into the dwelling of the heavenly fatherland, where, ever prompted by His visible presence, they rejoice to do nothing else than give themselves to His praises.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

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Saint John tells that we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey His commandments. And John goes on to say, “This is the love of God: that we keep His commandments.” Keeping our Lord’s commandments is how we love God. And fittingly, what it means to keep Our Lord’s commandments is a rich subject. Jesus Christ in many places speaks to this. He says “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love”; “Abide in Me, and I in you…he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing”; “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples,” and there are many more such instances. Such as the Psalmist who says “The Words of the Lord are pure words.” And who can say it better than Saint Peter says to Jesus: “You have the words of life.” To keep Our Lord’s commandments is to treasure Our Lord’s words, all of the wonderful, challenging, provocative, loving, mysterious, and holy words of Jesus as recorded by the New Testament writers.

Yet we are not merely to be aware of our Lord’s holy words, or to merely recite them mechanically, but we are, in the words of Anglican liturgy, to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them. We are to read deeply in them, and pray. We are to ruminate upon them, and pray. We are to savor them, and pray. We are to allow the holy words of Christ to prayerfully purify our minds and illumine our hearts. We are to live with them, and make them our daily bread: our Lord’s words like the furniture and appliances of our home, indeed like our home itself, indeed even like a very breathing, the beating of our heart. What else could it mean to “abide” in Our Lord’s words, to keep His words, than this?

This deep and prayerful engagement with Scripture is an example of approach to devotion that is called “mystagogy.” Mystagogy is part of the Christian vocabulary, and it means “being led into the mystery of Christ.” To abide in Our Lord’s words, to ruminate, inwardly digest, and live with His words so as to be transformed is to treat His words mystagogically, that is, to treat His words as invitations to be led by the Holy Spirit deeper into the mystery of Christ. Mystagogy is something the Church does as a deep form of prayer. But it is not only done by persons on their own, but also by groups of Christians and even whole congregations. In small groups of Christians, mystagogy is done as a form of Christian formation (in fact, our Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program is based upon mystagogy as an approach to childhood catechesis). For whole congregations, mystagogy happens through preaching, particularly preaching over a liturgical season. It is an ancient practice of the Church for the preaching in the Easter season to be mystagogical, looking back at the events of Holy Week so as to be drawn by the Holy Spirit more deeply into the mystery of Our Lord’s Passover.

So I will be doing this over the coming Sundays, perhaps all the way to Trinity Sunday. And the particular point of departure for this Eastertide’s mystagogy is reflecting upon our Our Lord Jesus Christ as the Bridegroom. The Bridegroom was the dominant image during this past Holy Week’s liturgy on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and I want to expand upon those experiences Sunday by Sunday that all of us may partake.

To begin, we remember Saint Thomas, one of the twelve (although at this point in the narrative, in fact one of the eleven). Let us consider what held him back from believing the account of the Resurrection from the other Ten, as well as the Holy Myrrh-bearing Women. One reason he held back, perhaps the primary one, is based on what he said: “Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in His side, I will not believe.” Thomas wanted to perceive himself the wounds of Jesus; even, to put it a different way, Christ’s woundedness. “We have seen the Lord,” he was told. But had they seen His woundedness? Without the wounds, how could they be sure it was really Him, and not a fallen, unholy angel pretending to be Him, Thomas may have wondered. And if it is not in fact Christ, then Thomas would be quite right to wait for the real thing, to wait for He Who named Himself “the Bridegroom.” Jesus clearly taught “Truly, I say to you, watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour, and He was referring to the coming of the Bridegroom.

He did this by means of the Parable of the Ten Virgins, five who were wise with their oil (that is in doing works of mercy) and five who were foolish (doing no works of mercy). Jesus said that at midnight there would be a cry, “Behold, the Bridegroom! Come out to meet Him.” And this was the message Thomas heard from the Ten and the Holy Women: “We have seen the Lord.” Yes, it seems Thomas thought to himself, but is it He who was wounded for our transgressions, He Who was bruised for our iniquities; upon Whom was the chastisement that made us whole, for with His stripes we are healed? These are wounds, bruises, chastisements, and stripes that are the marks of the true Bridegroom. The true Bridegroom, if He has come, has no form or comeliness that we should look at Him, no beauty that we should desire Him.

Hence Thomas was doing was Jesus told His disciples to do: keep His commandments, abide in His words, treat what He has said as treasure. And thus our Lord Jesus, eight days later, when His disciples were again in the Upper Room, this time Thomas with them, with the doors shut, came and stood among them. In sharing again His heavenly peace, what did He say to Thomas but “put your finger here, and see My hands; put out your hand, and place it is My side; do not be faithless, but believing”—that you would know Me.

Our Lord said to the foolish virgins, “Truly, I do not know you.” Yet let Him know us by our knowing of Him. Christ the Bridegroom is His glory is wounded; Christ the Bridegroom in His glory has nail holes in His hands; Christ the Bridegroom in His glory has a tear in His side. All of this, for us, and for our salvation: His sacrifice entirely that we might be redeemed, and be gathered by Christ our Bridegroom into the Marriage Feast: the Bride which is the Church, forever entwined with the Bridegroom, Jesus Christ; Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., for which I am Rector. The format is a Scripture passage, then a passage of commentary from the Venerable S. Bede, then a short homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Gospel according to S. Matthew 28.16

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

A Lesson from a Homily by the Venerable S. Bede (Homily II.8)

The gospel reading which we have just now heard, dearly beloved brethren, shines out full of joy even in its literal sense, because it describes in precise words the triumph of our Redeemer, and at the same time the gifts of our redemption. And if we choose to treat of it by going more to the heart of the matter, we will learn the more pleasing fruit of the spiritual meaning contained in its literal sense. God’s word is indeed like spices—the more finely it is crushed by handling and sifting, the greater is the fragrance of its inner power that it gives forth. Now it is clear and delightful for the holy to hear that the disciples went into Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had directed them, and upon seeing Him, the adored Him. It is not lacking in mystery that after His resurrection our Lord appeared to His disciples on a mountain, and that it was in Galilee. This was to make known that the body which at His birth He had assumed from the earth common to the rest of the human race He had now, at his resurrection, clothed with heavenly power after it had been raised above everything earthly. He appeared on a mountain to remind His faithful ones that if they wished to see the loftiness of His resurrection in heaven, they should pass over below from their lowly cravings to heavenly desires. What the name “Galilee” connotes in relation to the salvation-bearing mystery is well known: Galilee means “a crossing over accomplished” or “revelation.”

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“I will stand on my watch, mounted upon the rock,” says the wondrous prophet Habakkuk, and I also will stand with you this today, by the authority and vision given me by the Holy Spirit, and I will look steadily and observe what will be seen and what will be spoken to me. I have stood and looked steadily, and behold a man mounted upon the clouds, and he was very exalted; and his appearance was like the appearance of an angel, and his raiment was like the brightness of lightning; and he was lifting up his hand toward the east and shouting in a great voice. His voice was like the voice of a trumpet; and those surrounding him were as a multitude of the heavenly hosts. And he said, “Today salvation has come to the world, to things visible and to things invisible. Christ is risen from the dead; rise with Him. Christ was returned to Himself; so return. Christ is freed from the tomb; be freed from the bonds of sin. The gates of Hades are opened, and death is destroyed, and the old man is put aside, and the new is fulfilled. If anyone in Christ is a new creation, be made new.”

Our Lord’s Easter, our Lord’s Passover, our Lord’s Pascha, is to us the feast of feasts and festival of festivals, as far exalted above all – not only those that are merely human and crawl on the ground but also those that are of Christ Himself and are celebrated for Him – as the sun is above the stars. Beautiful indeed last night were our splendid array and procession of light, in which we were united both privately and publicly, lighting up the night with plentiful fires. The spreading of light from the Paschal Candle to everyone’s personal candle is a symbol of the great light, both the heavenly light that makes signals from above, shining on the whole world in its own beauty, and equally the light above the heavens, in the angels (the first nature illumined after the First and springing from it) – and equally in the Trinity, by which every light has been produced, divided off from the undivided light and honoured. It is the great light that seeks to enlighten the eyes of our hearts, that we may always know that Christ is Risen.

Yet our Liturgy today is in a sense more beautiful, inasmuch as yesterday’s light was a forerunner of the great light’s rising, and as it were a kind of pre-festal gladness. Today we celebrate the Resurrection itself, not as still hoped for but as having already occurred and gathering the whole world to itself. Let different persons therefore bring forth different fruits for this occasion either small or great, of things spiritual and dear to God, as far as each has the power.

And if all one has is their heart, give your heart. If you are a Simon of Cyrene, take up the Cross and follow. If you are crucified with Christ as a thief, come to know God as kind-hearted; if He was counted among the lawless because of you and your sin, become law-abiding because of Him. Worship the one hanged for you even if you are hanging; gain something even from the evil, purchase salvation by death. Come into paradise with Jesus so as to learn from what you have fallen. Contemplate the beauties there. . . . And if you are Joseph of Arimathea, ask for the body from the crucifier; let that which cleanses the world become yours. And if you are Nicodemus, the nocturnal worshiper of God, bury Him with scented ointments. And if you are a certain Mary or another Mary or Salome and Joanna, weep at daybreak. Be first to see the stone removed, and perhaps the angels and Jesus Himself. Saying something, hear His voice. If you hear, “Do not touch me,” stand far off, have reverence for the Word, but do not be sorrowful. For He knows those by whom He was seen first. Keep the feast of the resurrection; help Eve, the first who fell, and Mary Magdalene who first greeted Christ and made Him known to the disciples. Become Peter or John: hasten to the tomb, running against each other, running together, competing in the good competition. And if you are beaten with speed, win in zeal, not just peeping into the tomb but going inside. And if you are like Thomas are left behind when the disciples have assembled to whom Christ manifests Himself, when you see do not disbelieve; and if you disbelieve, believe those who tell you. If you cannot believe then either, believe the prints of the nails. And if He descends into Hades, go down with Him. Know also the incomprehensible mysteries of Christ harrowing Hell.

And if He ascends into heaven, go up with Him. Join with the angels escorting Him or those receiving Him. Give orders that the gates be lifted up or become higher, that they may receive Him, lifted high from His Passion. To those in doubt because of the body and the identifying marks of the Passion, with which He did not descend but did ascend, who because of this inquire, “Who is this King of glory?” answer that He is “the Lord strong and mighty,” both in everything that He has done and is doing in the present battle and triumph of His humanity.

Many indeed are the wonders of this most glorious Day: God crucified, the sun darkened and again rekindled, for created things also had to suffer with the Creator; the veil split; blood and water pouring from His side, the first as human, and second as above the human; the earth shaken, rocks broken in piece for the sake of the Rock; dead people raised to bring faith in the completion of the general resurrection; the signs at the tomb and after the tomb. Who can adequately sing their praise? Yet none is like the wonder of our salvation, mine and yours: a few drops of blood recreate the whole world and become for all human being like a curdling agent for milk, binding and drawing us together into one: all of us in Christ, our life in Christ, through Whom all things are made and remade, and Who lives and reigns with the Father Almighty in the unity of the Holy Ghost; ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

This sermon is adapted from portions of Oration 45, “On Holy Pascha,” by S. Gregory Nazianzus

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Are there any who are devout lovers of God? Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival! Are there any who are grateful servants? Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord! Are there any weary with fasting? Let them now receive their wages!

If any have toiled from the first hour, let them receive their due reward; If any have come after the third hour, let him with gratitude join in the Feast! And he that arrived after the sixth hour, let him not doubt; for he too shall sustain no loss. And if any delayed until the ninth hour, let him not hesitate; but let him come too. And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour, let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour, as well as to him that toiled from the first.

To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows. He accepts the works as He greets the endeavor. The deed He honors and the intention He commends.

Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord!

First and last alike receive your reward; rich and poor, rejoice together! Sober and slothful, celebrate the day! You that have kept the fast, and you that have not, rejoice today for the Table is richly laden!

Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one. Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith. Enjoy all the riches of His goodness! Let no one grieve at his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed. Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again; for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free. He has destroyed it by enduring it. He destroyed Hell when He descended into it. He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh.

Isaiah foretold this when he said, "You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below." Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with. It was in an uproar because it is mocked. It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed. It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated. It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive. Hell took a body, and discovered God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.

O death, where is thy sting? O Hell, where is thy victory?

Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated! Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down! Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is Risen, and life is liberated! Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead; for Christ having risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!

The Paschal (Easter) sermon of Saint John Chrysostom (d. 407).

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When Saint John the Evangelist was going to write about the mystery of our Lord, in which He deigned to wash the feet of His disciples at the Passover meal before He went forth to His Passion, John first took care to make clear what the name “Passover” mystically expressed. Passover means passing over. It derives its ancient name from the Lord’s passing over on this day through Egypt, striking the first-born of the Egyptians and freeing the children of Israel, and from the children of Israel’s passing over on that night from their slavery in Egypt, in order that they might come to the land which had once been promised to their heirs. Mystically it signifies that on this day our Lord would pass over from this world to His Father; and that, following His example, the faithful, having cast off the temptations of the flesh, the world, and the Devil by their continual practice of the virtues, should pass over to their promised heavenly fatherland.

How Jesus passed over from this world to His Father, the evangelist designates when he says, “Since He had loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end”; that is, He loved them so much that by that very love He would end His bodily life from a time, and He would soon pass from death to life, from this world to His Father. Saint John then says, “And during supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper, laid aside his garments.” When S. John was about to speak of the greatest act of humility of the humanity that Christ had taken upon Himself, he first recalled the eternity of His divine power. This was again to teach us that Jesus is both true God and true man, and to admonish us by Christ’s commands that the greater we are, the more we should humble ourselves in everything. He was truly human because He could touch and wash the feet of other human beings, be handed over by another human being, and be crucified by human beings; He was truly God because into His hands the Father had given everything; He had come from from God, and He was returning to God.

Our Lord knew that the Devil had now put it into the heart of Judas to hand Him over. He knew that His Father had given all things into His hand – among these being the betrayer himself and those to whom He would be handed over, and the death which He was about to suffer after He had been handed over – so that He could do as He willed concerning them all, and by His power turn their wickedness into good. He knew that through the humility of his fleshly incarnation He had come forth from God, and that through the victory of His resurrection He was going to return to God, neither abandoning God when He came from from Him, nor abandoning us when He returned to Him. Jesus knew all these things. Yet as an indication of His great benevolence toward us, and as an example of His great humility for us to follow, He rose from the table, put aside His garments, and washed His disciples’ feet, fulfilling the office not of the Lord God but that of a human being, a servant. He even humbly washed the feet of the one whose hands He knew were to be shamefully polluted by His betrayal.

Let us as well take delight in investigating this most humble mystery of our Saviour at a more profound level, the sacred meal at which our Lord reclined with His disciples represents the entire time in which He remained bodily in the Church. He Himself fed everyone far and wide with the banquet of His saving words and the sweetness of His miracles, and was Himself fed by the faith and love of those who heard Him. By converting to the grace of the truth all those who make up His Body, which is the Church, He caused an increase in it, as if in the manner of those who partake of food. He rose from the table and put aside His garments when, ceasing the fuller sharing of His life in time with human beings, He put aside on the Cross the bodily members which He had assumed. He took up a linen towel, with which He girded Himself, when, after having taken up for us the mandate of suffering which He had received from His Father, He covered His body with the torment of His Passion. A linen towel on our Lord is taken to symbolize the pain of suffering. When our Lord had laid aside His garments, He girded Himself with a linen towel to signify that He was putting aside the clothing of His body which He had put on, and that He was doing this not without the distress of sorrow, but with the prolonged anguish of the Cross. He poured water into a basin, and began to wash His disciples’ feet and to dry them with the linen cloth with which He was girded, when, after He was dead on the Cross, He forth onto the ground water along with blood from His side. With these He would cleanse the works of believers, and He deigned not only to sanctify these works by the sacramental mystery of His Passion, but also to strengthen them by the example of His own passion.

And, our Lord said, “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” We should take this statement both in its literal sense and in its spiritual sense, and we ought to devoutly carry it out. Its literal sense is that we should serve each other in charity, not only by washing the feet of our brothers and sisters, but also by aiding them in any of their needs. The spiritual sense is that, just as our Lord will forgive the sins of those who repent, so also should we hasten to forgive our brothers and sisters when they sin against us. Just as Jesus washes us from our sins by interceding to the Father on our behalf, so also should we, if we know that our brother or sisters is committing a sin, ask that life be given to whom is sinning. And as the Apostle James advises, we should confess our sins to one another, and pray for each other, that we may be saved. Just as Christ laid down His life for us, so we also, if the occasion arises, should lay down our life for our brothers and sisters. After we have kept His commandments and imitated His humility and service, may He bring us to the blessedness of the everlasting sight of Him, Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost throughout all ages of ages. Amen.

This sermon is adapted from a homily by the Ven. S. Bede.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., of which I am Rector. The format is two readings (a Scripture passage and passage of the Venerable S. Bede’s commentary), then a short homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two readings is found below.

A Lesson from the Gospel according to S. Matthew 21.1

When Jesus and His disciples drew near to Jerusalem and came to Beth′phage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village opposite you, and immediately you will find an ass tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If any one says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord has need of them,’ and he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet, saying, “Tell the daughter of Zion, Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass.” The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the ass and the foal, and put their garments on them, and he sat thereon. Most of the crowd spread their garments on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that followed him shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

A Lesson from a Homily by the Venerable S. Bede (Homily II.3)

The ass and the foal on which Jesus sat when He came to Jerusalem represent those with a guileless heart from among each of the two peoples, namely the Jews and the gentiles. Directing them and restraining them from harmful freedom of action by His rule, He leads them to the vision of heavenly peace. (“Jerusalem” is interpreted “vision of peace.”) . . . Saint Matthew tells us that the disciples “brought the ass and the foal, and put their garments on them, and Jesus sat thereon.” The garments of the disciples are the works of righteousness, as the Psalmist testifies when he says “Your priests will clothe themselves with righteousness.” The donkeys which the disciples found uncovered they covered with garments, and so placed our Lord thereon. When holy preachers find any persons at all without the clothing of holiness they imbue them with examples of their own virtues so that they gain faith in and love for their Maker. For our Lord did not wish to get on an uncovered donkey, nor did He wish to get on an uncovered foal, because whether Jew or Gentile, unless one be adorned with the sayings and deeds of the saints, he cannot have our Lord as his guide, but instead sin reigns in his mortal body to make him obey its concupiscences.

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Today we have gathered to meet Christ on the Mount of Olives. Today He returns from Bethany and proceeds of His own free will toward His holy and blessed Passion, to consummate the mystery of our salvation. He who came down from heaven to raise us from the depths of sin, to raise us with Himself, we are told in Scripture, above every sovereignty, authority and power, and every other name that can be named, now comes of His own free will to make His journey to Jerusalem. He comes without pomp or ostentation. As Isaiah says: He will not cry or lift up His voice, or make it heard in the street. In His incomprehensible power, Our Lord is meek and humble; He makes His entry in simplicity.

Let us run to accompany Him as He hastens toward His passion, and imitate those who met Him then, not by covering His path with garments, olive branches or palms, but by doing all we can to prostrate ourselves before Him by being humble and by trying to live as he would wish. Then we shall be able to receive the Word at His coming, and God, Whom no limits can contain, will be within us.

In His humility Christ entered the dark regions of our fallen world and He is glad that He became so humble for our sake, glad that He came and lived among us and shared in our nature in order to raise us up again to himself. And even though we are told that He has now ascended above the highest heavens – the proof, surely, of His power and godhead – His love for man will never rest until He has raised our earthbound nature from glory to glory, and made it one with His own in heaven.

So let us spread before His feet, not garments or soulless olive branches, which delight the eye for a few hours and then wither, but ourselves, clothed in his grace, or rather, clothed completely in Him. We who have been baptized into Christ must ourselves be the garments that we spread before Him. Now that the crimson stains of our sins have been washed away in the saving waters of baptism and we have become white as pure wool, let us present the conqueror of death, not with mere branches of palms but with the real rewards of His victory: our selves, our souls and bodies, spread before Him as reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto Him. Let our souls take the place of the welcoming branches as we join today in the children’s holy song: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the king of Israel.

Let us say to Christ: "Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord, the king of Israel." Let us hold before Him like palm branches those final words inscribed above the Cross. Let us show Him honor, not with olive branches but with the splendor of merciful deeds to one another. Let us spread the thoughts and desires of our hearts under His feet like garments, so that entering us with the whole of His being, He may draw the whole of our being into Himself and place the whole of His in us. Let us say to Zion in the words of the prophet: "Have courage, daughter of Zion, do not be afraid. Behold, your king comes to you, humble and mounted on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden."

He is coming Who is everywhere present and pervades all things; He is coming to achieve in you His work of salvation. He is coming who came to call to repentance not the righteous but sinners, coming to recall those who have strayed into sin. Do not be afraid, then: "God is in the midst of you, and you shall not be shaken."

Receive Him with open, outstretched hands, for it was on His own hands that He sketched you. Receive Him who laid your foundations on the palms of His hands. Receive Him, for He took upon Himself all that belongs to us except sin, to consume what is ours in what is His. Be glad, city of Zion, our mother, and fear not. "Celebrate your feasts." Glorify Him for His mercy, Who has come to us in you. Rejoice exceedingly, daughter of Jerusalem, sing and leap for joy. "Be enlightened, be enlightened," we cry to you, as holy Isaiah trumpeted, for the light has come to you and the glory of the Lord has risen over you.

What kind of light is this? It is that which "enlightens every man coming into the world." It is the everlasting light, the timeless light revealed in time, the light manifested in the flesh although hidden by nature, the light that shone round the shepherds and guided the Magi. It is the light that was in the world from the beginning, through which the world was made, yet the world did not know it. It is that light which came to its own, and its own people did not receive it.

And what is this "glory of the Lord?" Clearly it is the cross on which Christ was glorified, He, the radiance of the Father’s glory, even as He said when he faced his passion: "Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him, and will glorify him at once." The glory of which He speaks here is His lifting up on the cross, for Christ’s glory is His cross and His exultation upon it, as he plainly says: "When I have been lifted up, I will draw all men to myself." He Who through the Cross lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

This sermon has been adapted from a homily by S. Andrew of Crete (d. 740).

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Note: It is an ancient liturgical tradition to celebrate on the day before Palm Sunday our Lord’s raising of Lazarus from the dead. My parish celebrates this liturgy as a “votive mass,” or Mass for particular occasion and intention. The propers for the Mass (Collect, Readings) derive from standard liturgy of the Orthodox Church, which has long celebrated this day.

We hear in this carefully crafted Gospel account from S. John how Jesus Christ, six days before His own death, and with particular awareness of the people “standing by, that they may believe that Thou didst send me,” went to His dead friend Lazarus at Bethany outside of Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives. He was aware of the approaching death of Lazarus but deliberately delayed His coming, saying to His disciples at the news of His friend’s death: “For your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe.” Everything Christ does is for us, for our belief.

When Jesus arrived at Bethany, Lazarus was already dead for four days. This fact is emphasized by the Gospel narrative. The four days underscores the horrible reality of death. Man, created by God in His own image and likeness, is a spiritual-material being, a unity of soul and body. Death is destruction; it is the separation of soul and body. The soul without the body is a ghost, as one theologian puts it, and the body without the soul is a decaying corpse. A great voice of the Church, Saint John of Damascus, wrote: “I weep and I wail, when I think upon death, and behold our beauty, fashioned after the image of God, lying in the tomb dishonored, disfigured, bereft of form.” The mystery of death is quite real, quite difficult, and quite awful. Death is always a tragedy.

With dramatic simplicity the Gospel records that, on coming to the scene of the horrible end of His friend, “Jesus wept.” At this moment Lazarus, the friend of Christ, stands for all men, and Bethany on the Mount of Olives is the mystical center of the world. Jesus wept as He saw the “very good” creation and its king, man, who was made through Him, to be filled with joy, life and light, now a burial ground in which man is sealed up in a tomb outside the city, removed from the fullness of life for which he was created, and decomposing in darkness, despair and death. Again as the Gospel says, the people were hesitant to open the tomb, for “by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.”

When the stone was removed from the tomb, Jesus prayed to His Father and then cried with a loud voice: “Lazarus, come out.” The sacred imagery of the feast shows the particular moment when Lazarus appears at the entrance to the tomb. He is still wrapped in his grave clothes and his friends, who are holding their noses because of the stench of his decaying body, must unwrap him. In everything stress is laid on the audible, the visible, and the tangible. Christ presents the world with this observable fact: on the eve of His own suffering and death He raises a man dead four days! The people were astonished. Many immediately believed on Jesus and a great crowd began to assemble around Him as the news of the raising of Lazarus spread. The regal entry into Jerusalem followed. This was the miracle of miracles.

Let us understand and contemplate how Jesus through His voice created all things in heaven and earth, beginning with the light and ending with the creation of animals and human beings. And that Jesus through His voice raised Lazarus back to life. As He says, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.” Lazarus heard Christ’s voice. This happened on the fourth day of Lazarus’s death, and the Church has found important symbolism in that it was the fourth day. Our Lord’s resurrection is on the third day. This is His resurrection to teach all of creation that He is the Lord of lords and King of kings; it is to reveal to the Church that it is because of Christ’s resurrection that our resurrection to eternal life is possible, and that it is because of Him that the power of death upon the disciples of Christ has been removed. And so Lazarus, representing all men as Adam represents all men in Genesis, is resurrected on the fourth day, one day after Our Lord’s resurrection. Because of Our Lord Jesus, we can have the assurance of our resurrection and the comfort of a reasonable and holy hope in the joyful expectation of eternal life in the heavenly kingdom.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today and for ever. What He has done, is what He will do, is what He is doing. To be a follower of Christ is always to be invited into the most holy ground of His being. We enter into Holy Week with the benefit of knowing how this divine narrative unfolds. This knowledge is grace, and by this grace we can engage the way of the Cross ever more intimately, ever more closely, ever more attentively, with the such knowledge of Our Savior’s sacrifice for us and for our salvation that demands our love for Him, demands our commitment to Him, and demands our adoration of Him and His power. With S. Martha, let us say, “Yes Lord: I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, Who is coming into the world.” This Christ, Who died for us and for our sins, and for our salvation, Who with the Father and the Holy Ghost, lives and reigns, ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services of Saint Paul’s, New Smyrna Beach, Fla., for which I am Rector. The format is a Scripture passage, then a passage of commentary from the Venerable S. Bede, then a short homily by yours truly expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

A Lesson from the Gospel according to S. John 6.5

Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a multitude was coming to him, Jesus said to Philip, “How are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” This he said to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what are they among so many?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place; so the men sat down, in number about five thousand. Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten. When the people saw the sign which he had done, they said, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!”

A Lesson from a Homily by the Venerable S. Bede (Homily II.2)

As to our Lord’s asking Philip, in order to test him, “Where shall we buy bread that these may eat?” this He doubtless did by His provident dispensation, not to learn something that He did not know, but so that Philip might reocgnize the sluggishness of his faith. His master knew of this, but Philip did not. Having been tested, he can recognize the truth, and, the miracle done, he can amend. . . . The five loaves of bread with which He satisfied the multitude of people are the five books of Moses. If they are opened up by spiritual understanding, and multiplied by penetration of their deeper meaning, they daily refresh the hearts of the believer who hear them. . . . The two fishes which He added not inappropriately signify the writings of the psalmists and prophets. One of these by chanting, and the other by talking, to those who listen, tell of the future sacramental mysteries of Christ and the Church. . . . And as for His ordering the disciples, after the crowd had been satisfied, to gather up whatever fragments were left over, so that they might not perish, this unquestionably signifies that there are many hidden mysteries of the divine tidings that the minds of ordinary people do not grasp. There are some that those less learned are unable to assimilate on their own, but which they are able to understand once they are explained by teachers. Those more able, then, should, by probing them more diligently, gather these mysteries up, and, by their speaking or writing, make them a guide for the less learned, so that the nourishment of the Word may not perish because of their inertia and be kept from the people by those who, through God’s gift, know how to gather these mysteries up by interpreting them.

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You hear sometimes about the sin of Satan, the sin of the Devil. And with that sometimes is spoken the pride of Satan, the pride of the Devil. One might think, on that, how to do we know about the sin and pride of the Devil? The very fact that Satan thrice attempted to tempt Jesus in the desert bespeaks Satan’s pride. No angel with humility and fear of God would act that way. The prophet Isaiah attests to Satan’s pride when he says to Satan, “You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.’” Satan thought himself like the Most High, that is, like God. Hence the very name of the Archangel Michael means “Who is like God?” and in battle Michael through down Satan who was the Day Star, even the prince of Angels, down to the earth to move from Star of the Day to Star of the darkness, from the prince of angels to the prince of this fallen world. All because of the sin of the Devil: exalting himself.

Saint Paul begins the passage of our Epistle today by attesting to the fact that Jesus Christ, in His ministry, did not exalt Himself. Paul writes, “Christ did not exalt Himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by Him Who said to Him, “Thou art my Son, today I have begotten Thee.” Paul goes on to write that “In the days of His flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to Him Who was able to save Him from death, and He was heard for His godly fear. We have this contrast of exalting Himself (which Jesus did not do) and humbling Himself through genuine, heartfelt prayer (which Jesus did do).

This contrast perfectly matches with the Parable of the Pharisee and Tax Collector. To act like the Pharisee is to exalt oneself; it is to do things for reasons having to do with the ego, so as to receive praise, adulation, and recognition. To act like the Tax Collector is the opposite of that; the opposite of the Pharisee’s swagger: it is to humbly and without guile, in complete sincerity, ask for God’s mercy knowing one is a sinner. To know one is a sinner is to know of one’s ever-present inclination to sin; that is, one’s wretchedness, one’s concupiscence. To know one is a sinner is to know oneself honestly.

In preaching about concupiscence in this season of Lent, we have been guided by the First Epistle of S. John, 2:15-17, which reads “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides for ever.” That word “lust” is synonymous with concupiscence. We have reflected on two of the three kinds of concupiscence thus far: that of the flesh, and that of the eyes. The third and final kind, as described in the spiritual literature of the Church and S. John, is “pride of life.” This pride of life, along with concupiscence of the flesh and of the eyes, is what drives us towards sin. Hence the importance for us to understand it and acknowledge it in our lives, against the desire of the Devil for us to ignore it or think concupiscence is nothing.

Pride of life is that empty swagger by which we try to deceive ourselves and others into the belief that we are just such a fine fellow. But it is worse than that. This form of concupiscence seeks to put self in the place of God. By it, we forget that God alone is the source of whatever good is in us. We take all our good qualities to ourselves and so become self-complacent. This is a kind of narcotic in that this blunts our sense of sin and distorts our spiritual vision; it leads immediately to vanity, that inordinate self-satisfaction founded on emptiness. And to feed that, we then desire to do and obtain those things which appeal to self without regard to the will of God; thus it is a primary source of sin and essentially an assertion of independence.

Jonah, despite knowing God’s will, went rogue. He was self-deluded by a sense of his independence which has in it a kind of obliviousness: on the boat, even in the whale, and even as he proclaimed to the Ninevites that they must repent. All of this was done with little more than passing regard for the will of God, to say nothing of humility. The long, florid speech Jonah makes while in the belly of the whale is a perfect match to the florid words of the Pharisee spoken to God: showy, seeking attention and recognition for its impressive composition, full of self-regard about just how much he is full of thanksgiving–and basically verbose, wordy. All Jonah had to say, whether in the whale or on the boat or on land in the heat, was “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” the words of the Tax Collector. All he had to say was the Jesus Prayer, the Prayer of the Heart: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me, a sinner. Simple prayer, not ornate and showy prayer, is what God wants, because He already knows everything about us and everything we have done. He wants to see our humility and genuine desire for His mercy, which He Himself yearns to give.

Let us not be deceived into thinking a course of action, because it is pleasing to us, is automatically pleasing to God. Let us recognize in ourselves the inclination toward this pride of life, that swagger of complacently seeking praise and recognition, the self-deception of our own awesomeness. Let us acknowledge that by pride of life we imitate the sin of the Satan, the ancient enemy of all that is good; yet whose dastardly and subtle power has been dismantled and destroyed forever by Christ Jesus our Lord, by His Cross and Precious Blood, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God in glory, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede are taken from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services in my parish. The format is simple: first is a Scripture passage, second is a passage from S. Bede in which he comments on the Scripture passage, and third is my short homily expounding upon both. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

A Lesson from the Gospel according to S. John 8.7

Jesus raised Himself up and said to the Scribes and Pharisees, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”

A Lesson from a Homily by the Venerable S. Bede (Homily 1.25)

After Jesus had fended off the villainy of His tempters and removed the sinful woman’s guilt, He again spoke to them saying, “I am the light of the world. One who follows Me does not walk in darkness, but he will have the light of life.” Here he clearly taught, not only by what authority He had forgiven the woman’s sins, but also what He Himself had expressed figuratively by making His way to the Mount of Olives, by coming again at daybreak to the temple, and by writing with His finger on the ground: that He Himself is the summit of mercies and the God of all consolation, the herald as well as the bestower of unfaltering light, the source of the law as well as grace. “I am the light of the world,” He said, and it is as if He were to say clearly: “I am the true light which enlightens every human being coming into the world; I am the Sun of justice Who rises for those who fear God, even though for a time I seem to be covered over by the cloud of my flesh. I am covered by a cloud of flesh that I may be less bright for the sake of the weak. Let them heal the eyes of their minds, let them purify their ears, with faith, so that they may be worthy to look upon me. For blessed are the pure of heart since they will see God.

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In the Rector forum sessions this Lent, we have been reflecting on the beginning verses of the Gospel according to St John. These comprise what is called John’s Prologue, the first eighteen verses. Within John’s Prologue, which is something of a summary of his Gospel account from beginning to end, there comes verse 14: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” It is commonly thought that this verse refers to Our Lord’s Nativity, the taking of human flesh from His mother, Blessed Mary, and dwelling among us, which is taken to His coming to human life.

Yet this interpretation runs aground upon reflecting that four verses earlier in verse 10, we hear “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” Christ is already in the world. And then verse 11 “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” He was in the world and walking around, coming to His people who did not receive Him. And even before that, the Evangelist describes Saint John the Baptist in his adult maturity, verses 6-8: “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.”

So given all these verses, the famous verse 14 would not logically be about Our Lord’s Nativity, at all (John simply presumes it in his account, not describing it). But then, what is verse 14 about? “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” This is a fitting Sunday to reflect on this, both because of our Collect, which speaks of Jesus Christ coming down from heaven to be the true bread, and because of the teaching about “gift” which we hear today from Saint Paul.

Saint Pauls tells us today we have been saved by grace through faith, and that this faith is a gift from God. God has given us faith. This is His gift to us who are His people. The gift of God for the people of God. Paul says that out of God’s great love with which He loves us, He has made us alive with Christ. God has raised us up with Christ, and even made us sit with Christ in the heavenly places in Christ. This is all the gift of God: the gift of Faith, given by God.

Paul reminds us that God’s gift raises us up with Christ. Because the gift of faith is the gift of Christ. God’s gift of His Son saves us. God’s gift of His Son gives us life. This reminder we need to hear, given that we have been reflecting on our concupiscence. We see our concupiscence, our wretchedness, our inclination to sin, but holding ourselves up to Christ, Who is like us in all ways, except for sin. God indeed does want us to hold our life up to the Light of Light Who is Jesus, He whose nature is uncreated Light that is brighter than any light visible. He wants us to hold ourselves up to Him, that the shadows of our inclination to sin become evident to us that we may truly acknowledge our wretchedness before God.

This acknowledgement of our wretchedness, the acknowledgement of our concupiscence, the acknowledgement (in another image from Paul) of the darkness of the old man still present with us which is our fleshly desire – acknowledging this along with lamenting our sins has a very clear purpose according to our Prayer Book liturgy: that we may obtain of the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness. All God wants is a human heart that understands itself in honesty and sobriety, and through the lamenting of sin and acknowledgement of concupiscence by which the sober truth about us is uncovered, therefore is a heart that understands itself as always in need of the gift God in His love has given us: a heart that knows it is always in need of a Savior is a heart in which the immeasurable riches of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ are known, and thus truly received. Because Christ is the gift that gives us Faith.

In the beautiful liturgy our parish uses for Stations of the Cross, at the first Station, when we reflect on Jesus condemned to die, we ask our Lord Jesus to grant us true repentance – that is, a true turning of our mind to God, a true opening of our heart to God – that, being washed in that stream which flows from Calvary through the Sacraments of Thy Holy Church to the end of time, we may evermore serve Him with pure hearts and minds. All this is part of the gift of Faith given by God. The gift of Faith is the gift of Christ. And the gift of Christ is the gift of His sacrifice for us and for our salvation. And the gift of His sacrifice is what He chose to do for us: that for us and for our salvation, He was born of Blessed Mary, taking her human flesh and ours upon Him; that He lived a human life that heals, teaches, guides, strengthens, chastens, and loves; that He willingly entered into His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, all that the Holy Ghost Who proceeds from the Father could be sent by Christ, through Him upon His apostles and through them upon all people; and that we would be daily washed in that stream which flows from Calvary through the Sacraments of Thy Holy Church; specifically the Sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist. Baptism incorporates us into His Body, and Eucharist is the way Christ feeds His Body. He is the Bread of life. Saint John tells us our Lord said these words: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

And here is revealed the true meaning of John 1.14: And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. Christ who is the Eternal Word of the Father, His Only-begotten Son, begotten of His Father before all worlds: Christ through His incarnation which first began when He said “Let there be light” and continued as He made Himself evident to the patriarchs and prophets of old; an Incarnation which continued through His nativity, and then through His death, resurrection, and ascension: this Incarnation of Christ, always happening through all of chronological time, reached its climax as Christ truly became flesh – that is, in His own words, truly became the living Bread which came down from heaven, the Bread which He gives for the life of the world: the Bread which is His flesh. Christ became flesh and dwelt among us; Christ became Bread and dwelt among us; Christ became Eucharist that He can dwelt among us, as we receive Him Who is our food, the spiritual medicine of love for our soul, that through Him as Eucharist we might be raised up with Him to sit in the heavenly places, through Him Who is the Bread of Life, given as a gift to those lamenting their sins and acknowledging their wretchedness; and Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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Evenings With Bede come from the Sunday solemn Plainsong Evensong services in my parish. It is a simple format: first is the Scripture passage, second is the passage from S. Bede, and third is my short homily. The audio for all three is found above. The text of the two passages is found below.

If you find this edifying, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

A Lesson from the Gospel according to S. John 8.1

Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Now early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people came to Him; and He sat down and taught them. Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?” This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear. So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”

A Lesson from a Homily by the Venerable S. Bede, English monk and scholar who fell asleep in the Lord in the year 735 (Homily 1.25)

The fact the both before and after Jesus gave His opinion He bent and wrote on the ground admonishes us that both before we rebuke a sinning neighbor and after we have rendered to him the ministry of due correction, we should subject ourselves to a suitably humble examination, lest perhaps we be entangled in the same things that we censure in our neighbors, or in any other sort of misdeeds. For it often comes about, for example, that people who publicly judge a murderer to be a sinner may not perceive the worse evil of the hatred with which they themselves despoil someone in secret; people who bring an accusation against a fornicator may ignore the plague of the pride with which they congratulate themselves for their own chastity; people who condemn a drunkard may not see the venom of envy with which they themselves are eaten away. In dangers of this sort, what saving remedy is left for us except that, when we look at some other sinner, we immediately bend down – that is, we humbly observe how we would be cast down by our frail condition if divine benevolence did not keep us from falling? Let us write with a finger on the ground – that is, let us meticulously ponder with discrimination whether we can say with blessed Job, “My heart shall not condemn me as long as I live,” and let us painstakingly remember that if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart and He knows all things.

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I will continue today to reflect on the topic of concupiscence. This has become a low-key sermon series, it seems. To begin let us marvel that Saint Paul writes to us today with a rich and difficult teaching about the faith and about understanding ourselves in light of Jesus Christ Our Saviour. He writes: “I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.” And then he adds: “Wretched man that I am!” What he is getting at is the human condition truly understood by Our Savior Jesus Christ, for in becoming Man and taking our human nature upon Himself, Jesus Christ not only reveals the invisible God the Father but also reveals what we really are, and what each of us really is.

And what are we, according to Paul—we are wretched. Our wretchedness is a significant aspect of the human condition, a fundamental dimension of what it means to be a human being—whether baptized or not baptized. Despite our best intentions, we are captive, Paul says, to doing things we do not want to do, even doing things that we hate—and even when we are not in the act of doing things we do not want to do, not in the act of doing things we hate—we know we are capable of doing them. We are captive within a world of temptations and our mind that could give in at any moment.

Wretchedness means concupiscence, about which I have previously spoken: it means excessive and mis-ordered desire and eagerness for personal satisfaction, which is why we, as human beings, are inclined toward sin. And where we have come thus far is speaking of fleshly desire. We have seen that the pleasurable use for the glory of God of the things of the flesh with our God-given senses according to His will is right and can even be holy. Eating, drinking, and sex rightly ordered give God glory. Whereas the desire for fleshly pleasure for itself without relationship God, without any desire to give Him glory, is wrong and sinful. To eat, drink, and engage in sex, in keeping with those example, are often desire for merely personal and fleshly gratification, and nothing else. The specific name for this kind of concupiscence is “concupiscence of the flesh.”

There are other kinds; a total of three, in fact. Saint John speaks of this in his First Epistle: “If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust [concupiscence] of the flesh and the lust [concupiscence] of the eyes and the pride [concupiscence] of life, is not of the Father but is of the world.” Concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, and pride of life are the three kinds of concupiscence, three expressions of of wretchedness. Having spoken of concupiscence of the flesh, let us turn to the second kind: concupiscence of the eyes.

To speak of the eyes is both to speak of things we see physically as well as things we see intellectually. One thing people feel eager to do is amass physical goods. These things look good. They are easy on the eyes, nice to own. We desire to possess such things, large and small. We desire as well to possess standing in society, accolades from achieving successes in life, and creature comforts that go along with that. Because they look good. And this is enabled often by the love of money. Yet as St Paul says, love of money, is the root of all kinds of evil. Money allows us to acquire goods and social advancement. Yet never far away from this is selfishness and greed.

Another thing people like to do is amass knowledge. This too looks good to have. Knowledge about people, both historical and contemporary, knowledge about politics and the news in general, knowledge that allows one to argue and be opinionated, knowledge about the weather, knowledge about the specific intellectual areas, knowledge about how things work, how to fix things, knowledge about music, art, and so on. And because all things made by God are good, and have a use for us, curiosity itself is not contrary to God’s will.

Yet at the same time, curiosity, our desire for knowledge, can run amok. This happens when desire for knowledge is made an end for itself, that is, desired for its own sake. It leads to intellectual pride, which is the opposite of the primary Christian virtue of humility. If one is restless without a cell phone, or tablet, or television for news and feeds, then one might be dealing with concupiscence. It is right to know rightly and correctly, but merely to know is the satisfaction of personal gratification, and a degradation of knowledge. The Christian should desire to seek God in all his knowing. To the Christian, any fact about anything in the universe is sacred because the universe is the work of God. Yet the knowledge we desire and seek out should be used in the fulfillment of the will of God: recognizing that genuine curiosity is anchored in the Holy Spirit, Who always seeks to guide us into all truth.

Dear brothers and sisters, acknowledging our wretchedness (our concupiscence), is crucial for transforming a life according to the flesh to a life according to the Holy Spirit. The Kingdom of Heaven, which is the Holy Spirit, dwells within (that is, within our heart), and remembering that illustrates the deepest meaning of our Our Saviour Jesus to overturning the tables in the Temple. Each of us upon Baptism becomes a temple of the Holy Ghost. He overturned the tables to teach us that misuse of our desires, whether of the flesh or of the eyes, sinfully embodies the example of the Pharisee, and that we are to imitate not the Pharisee in our lives but the Tax Collector, in his constant humility and constant asking for mercy. All God wants is the human heart. And He wants our heart to be a house of humble and loving prayer, a heart of mercy; that in it may live the Light of light, even Jesus Christ, Who with the Father and Holy Ghost live and reign unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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Introducing a new weekly feature here on the Orthodox-Catholic Anglican. It is called: Evenings With Bede.

These will come from the Sunday Evensong services in my parish. For these weekly plainsong services, I select a passage from the writing of the Venerable S. Bede, English monk and scholar who fell asleep in the Lord in the year 735 and who is depicted above in the icon by Aidan Hart. The passage I select is appropriate for where we are in the Liturgical Kalendar, and then that is paired with whatever Scripture passage Bede happens to be interpreting.

The format here is simple. First is the Scripture passage. Second is the passage from S. Bede. And third is my short homily. Each of those is recorded and edited into one audio track, which is found above. The two passages are also found below.

My Evensong preaching tends to have a different mood than my Mass preaching. The mood is more reflective, mellow, and free-wheeling. Perhaps that is because this preaching is extemporaneous, whereas I prepare a manuscript for Sunday Mass. It could also be that I am a bit weary from the long day!

I hope you find this edifying. If you do, please consider (if you haven’t already) becoming a paid subscriber. Your support goes directly to supporting the ministry of Akenside Institute for English Spirituality, a project I started 12 years ago.

A Lesson from the Gospel according to S. Matthew 5.1

There was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had. Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered Him, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another steps down before me.” Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your pallet and walk.” And immediately the man was made well, took up his pallet, and walked.

A Lesson from a Homily by the Venerable S. Bede (Homily 1.23)

The Lord taught mystically as He healed the weak man, when He said, “Rise, take up your pallet, and walk.” “Rise” means: shake off the sluggishness of the vices in which you have been ailing for a long time, and rouse yourself to the practice of virtues, by which you will be eternally saved. “Take up your pallet” means: lovingly carry your neighbor, patiently tolerating his weaknesses, since he patiently put up with you for a long time when you were still weighed down by the burden of temptations. As Paul says, “Bear one another’s burdens, and thus you will fulfill the law of Chfist,” and as he says elsewhere, “bearing with one another in charity, being solicitous to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace.” “Walk” means: love God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength, so that you may be worthy to reach the vision of Him; go forward by making daily strides of good works from virtue to virtue. Do not desert a brother whom by your support you are directing on account of the love of the One toward Whom you are proceeding, nor turn aside from the right direction of your path, on account of the love of a brother, away from your quest for the One with Whom you desire to abide. But so to be perfectly saved, Rise, take up your pallet and walk, that is, Leave behind your earlier sins, and come to the aid of your brother’s needs. In everything you do, see to it that you do not fix your mind upon this world, but that you hurry to see the face of your Redeemer. Rise, by doing good works. Carry your pallet, by loving your neighbor. And walk, by awaiting the blessed hope and coming of the glory of the great God.

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I want to continue the Lenten reflection about concupiscence, what the Prayer Book calls “wretchedness.” Before getting into that, I find it such a poignant question that Saint Paul asks, in his Epistle to the Romans. He asks, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” When we think of the trajectory of Paul’s life, the poignancy of his question particularly stands out. The greatest persecutor of Christ, turned to His greatest public advocate. It is the love of Christ which is responsible for this dramatic shift: specifically, Christ’s love of Paul. Because Jesus Christ loved Paul, Paul came to love Jesus. By the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Paul then learned how to cooperate with grace and through the grace of Christ be transformed.

It was rooted in the love Christ had for Paul through Paul’s study of the Scriptures (and despite his misinterpretation of them until Paul’s conversion); it was rooted in the love Christ had for Paul as he was consenting to the stoning of S. Stephen the holy deacon and martyr, for it was Christ’s love for Paul that allowed Paul to see in Stephen’s face the face of an angel, it was Christ’s love for Paul which allowed Paul to hear Stephen’s confession (the testimony in which Stephen showed Jesus revealed in the Old Testament); it was Christ’s love for Paul which allowed him to perceive Stephen being full of the Holy Ghost, and in looking up steadfastly into heaven, that Stephen saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God; and it was Christ’s love for Paul that allowed him to hear Stephen say “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.” It was because of the quiet and enduring love Jesus had for Paul that waited through the years of rejecting Christ’s call upon him until the time was right for Paul to receive the Gospel, that the seed of Stephen’s blood was planted in the soil of Paul’s heart. Thus Paul, after he embraced Jesus, could never imagine being separated from the love Christ showed him.

In a very real sense, it is impossible for a serious Christian to imagine not being baptized. This is what Paul means when he writes to us saying that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. Baptism is God’s permanent action upon us—action of the heavenly upon the earthly. In Baptism we are given heavenly citizenship. It is impossible to imagine not being baptized because it is impossible to undo God’s action; it is impossible to return the unspeakable gift to its sender.

But it is possible to not fully receive the gift. For that, consider two scenarios. In the first scenario, someone gives you clothing as a gift that upon opening you realize you might never wear (or wear just once and never again). You certainly can be thankful to the person for the gift as you put that clothing somewhere in the deep reaches of our closet or drawer (that place where clothes go, never to return). This is one way of receiving the gift. Compare this to a second scenario, where a person gives a gift of some other piece of clothing, only this time in opening the gift you realize you will not just try it on but probably wear it regularly, and regularly for some time, even often—in other words, rather than being put into the deepest part of the closet, the clothing enters into the regular rhythm of your attire. Given these two scenarios, which is truly receiving it? It is obviously the second scenario, where the gift is not merely opened but actually used.

It is in this way Paul is teaching us about Baptism. Nothing can separate us from the true gift of Baptism, except our not using the gift. Paul says “nothing”—it is best to understand him as saying, “nothing real.” The gift of baptism, as offered by God, is completely offered by God, in no way earned by its recipient. But then why is it so often the case that Christians do not wear their baptism? Why is it Christians treat baptism in that first scenario, receiving the gift but putting it into the far corner of their closet, never (or at best rarely) to wear? Why, in other words, are so many baptized Christian indistinguishable in how they act from non-baptized persons?

To answer this we continue with our look at concupiscence, our inclination to sin. More specifically, it is the excessive and inordinate desire for personal satisfaction: desiring the things of the world rather than the things of the spirit. It is often seen as craving of the flesh for that which is merely fleshly. Basic examples are eating, drinking, sex, and money. When used, these provide pleasures, but their effects do not stop short with the physical. The desire for these can be disordered, and what happens when desire for food, drink, sex, and money is disordered is that these are craved by the flesh for what is merely fleshly: taste, intoxication, gratification, and profligate and extravagant living. Yet, each of these can be ordered rightly by Christian expression: eating and drinking are means not only for human fellowship, but spiritual fellowship; sex, rightly used in Christian marriage, can lead not only to procreation of children but that complete union of man and woman which perfects the Sacrament of Matrimony; and money can be used to support the Church, to help people through acts of mercy, and to increase beauty and goodness in the world. Our desires rightly ordered lives into and receives the gift of Baptism. Desires disordered by concupiscence act without reference to the higher ends for which man was made.

The remedy for concupiscence, then, is to live baptismally, to put on Christ, to live in Christ, even as Our Lord taught directly; for He said “If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” To wear the gift of Baptism means denial of our fleshly desires, thus bearing our cross, and with our desires reordered we follow Christ with the not with the swagger of the Pharisee but the humility and simplicity of the Publican. Self-denial (also called dying to self) is our cooperation with baptismal grace by which God prunes away the unreal from our lives, our minds, our heart. It is the unreality of sin which separates us from the love of God. But Jesus Christ is He who pierces all illusions to reveal to us the Way, the Life, and the Truth, which is Him who is the Light of the world of darkness and unreality, and Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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I want to reflect today on the meaning of “wretchedness” which is part of the Collect for all of Lent. Before I do, let us hear again that “the Spirit” drove Jesus out into the wilderness. And He was n the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, and He was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to Him.” Two common misconceptions about this pivotal episode in the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, must be cleared away. We are at the beginning of Lent, and the Church’s season of prayer during Lent is directly modeled on the 40 days of Jesus in the wilderness. This is a powerful moment, a truly pregnant paradigm—Our Lord in the wilderness fighting Satan, fighting his wild beasts (which represent the devil’s army), surrounded by angels—let us see how our Lenten prayer ought be guided and led.

The first misconception is that “the Spirit” and Jesus are not one. That is wrong. Jesus is being unwilling to enter into the wilderness, needing something to prod Him like a cattle rancher drives his cows into a field for grazing. There is no separation between the Spirit and Jesus. The two, along with the Father, are one God. Going to the wilderness was a positive choice by Jesus to enter into battle, and specifically, to enter into a battle that is spiritual. The Church in the season of Lent invites her members to do the exact same. We are invited to enter into a spiritual battle, to wage unseen warfare, which is the battle waged by spiritual forces for control of our heart. For as S. Paul teaches us in his epistle to the Ephesians, we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers ( of this present darkness, against the spiritual host of wickedness in the heavenly places. It is unseen warfare waged—as I often say, all God wants is the human heart.

The second misconception is that Jesus is some sense needed to enter into the wilderness for His own pureness of heart—that He Himself was not clean and therefore needed spiritual purging. Let this be known clearly: Jesus needed no spiritual purging. As Saint Paul wrote to the Hebrews, Jesus was “in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” Entering into the wilderness was not for Jesus as if going to college to find Himself. Again, Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and He always was so: for through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made. No, His choice to enter into spiritual combat with Satan was not for His benefit, but entirely for ours. Everything Jesus did was not for Him, but for His servants, was for those who would deny themselves, take up the Cross, and follow Him. Jesus in this episode in the wilderness offers preeminent spiritual direction through demonstration—a deeper relationship with Him is gained by imitating His choice to confront the demons, to confront manifold temptations. It is by doing so, Jesus teaches, that our conscience can gain clarity, that our knowledge of Christ’s presence in our hearts may be stronger, that our hearts thereby might be illumined, and our lives more filled by love, peace, and living faith in stronger relationship with Christ.

The prayer of all Lent is the Collect for Ash Wednesday; it is traditionally said every day in Lent, and traditionally it is the second Collect at Mass. It articulates important doctrine for our devotion in Lent. God, in the prayer, is acknowledged as He Who hates nothing that He has made, and does forgive the sins of all those who are penitent. Our loving God seeks to offer His forgiveness if we move towards Him. We ask, in the prayer, for God to create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of Him, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness. In other words, there is not just value in becoming aware of and lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness transforms us.

And now, “wretchedness.” It is a word that is somewhat out of fashion. Some of us might have no problem with that label, while others might be repelled by it. The more traditional term for wretchedness is “concupiscence.” And what concupiscence means is excessive and inordinate desire for personal satisfaction, and desire for the things of the world, instead of the things of the spirit. We see concupiscence is the story of Jonah, when, despite being saved by God from the belly of the fish, and despite witnessing God’s message for Ninevah so readily and successfully received, Jonah is angry and show strange, and inordinate, desire for the plant God gave him for shade. This is misplaced desire: seeing the plant as the source of shelter and protection rather than God, on top of the fact that Jonah seems not to want to please God, another example of concupiscence. We see this also in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. The Pharisee in the parable demonstrates concupiscence in the swagger he seems to have as he desires to be seen as special in the eyes of God, and superior to others, especially the tax collector. There is a certain “pride of life” shown by the Pharisee which is a mark of concupiscence, a mark of his “wretchedness.”

All in all, concupiscence (or “wretchedness”) names our inclination to sin, and it is part of the human condition, something we all suffer from and are tempted to give into. Concupiscence shows up in blunt and obvious ways, as well as subtle and hidden ways. Our responsibility in Lent is to acknowledge it our concupiscence, our wretchedness, and do so before God—that we may obtain of Him, the God of all mercy, perfection remission and forgiveness, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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As our prayer moves into the season of Lent, Saint Peter wants us and all the Church to know that the experience of Christ transfigured was for him, James and John truly first-hand. They were eyewitnesses to the majesty of Jesus Christ. Just as during the Eucharist, the priest holds up the consecrated Body and Blood of Jesus and says, “Behold the Lamb of God,” the Father held up His Son Jesus to these three apostles and said, behold, “This is My beloved Son.” And then to make clear what the Church is always to do, the Father adds, “Listen to Him.” And we must always listen to Him, for we know that Our Jesus has such power, that He need only speak a word, and our soul shall be healed.

Just as Peter writes of having a prophetic word made more sure, we have that same prophetic word: and the word is, “Lord Jesus Christ, O Son of God, have mercy on us.” This word is our rock; this word is our castle; this word is our guide; this word leads us; this word is our defense against the temptations of the world. As Saint Paul teaches, the Father has “bestowed on His Son the Name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Saint Peter continues his teaching to us by saying, “You will do well to pay attention to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” He means this as to our daily personal devotion, our prayer in private. In our personal prayer, Peter with all apostolic authority advises us that we will do well to pay attention. How often our attention is not on Jesus, Who is Light beyond all light, indeed through Whom all physical light comes into being? Jesus is a lamp, Peter says—a lamp shining in a dark place. Imagine being in a dark place and not using a lamp to make your way? But this is exactly what we do when in going about our lives our attention is not on Jesus and His ineffable glory. When our attention is elsewhere, when we are distracted by the countless things that distract us, we are like a person in a dark place, who turns away from the very light that guides them and gives direction to their journey. When we choose to put our attention elsewhere than on Jesus, we are choosing confusion, we are choosing our suffering—we are choosing to be lost.

Our Lord knows our temptations. He knows the human condition, having Himself become human for our sakes and to truly reveal Himself to us. He knows there is a war in our hearts for our awareness—awareness of God’s presence, and the Devil who uses any means necessary to keep us from looking at the uncreated Light of Christ by means of the Holy Spirit. The Tempter turns anything he can into enticement to give up our attention to Christ and turn not towards God but away from God. Food, which we need for nourishment and fellowship, can be turned by the Tempter into temptation; means of communication (especially smart phones) which often are necessary means to exchange information that needs to be exchanged with others, can be turned into an endless source of distraction, and even means to give into hate, anger, and lust (which we all know can also come from the television; a smart phone being really a miniature television, computer, and so many things besides being just a phone).

Again, Our Lord knows we face temptations; He allows temptations to exist because overcoming them with the help of His grace makes us stronger in faith, makes us more aware of how totally dependent upon God we are, and how lost we can be without Him, when in our dark place we turn away from the Light. But just as after the overshadowing cloud and the voice of the Father, all that remained for the three apostles on the holy mountain was Jesus only, so also all that remains for us on day to day is the Holy Name of Jesus.

Let us this Lent, brothers and sisters, renew our commitment to the Holy Name of Jesus. Let us say His Holy Name every day, more and more following the Apostle Paul’s teaching to pray unceasingly. For with His Holy Name comes His Light and Salvation; with His Holy Name comes His strength; comes His fair beauty; comes His protection; and with His Holy Name comes comfort for our heart—that our heart is not hardened and arrogant, but open and receptive to the Light we need every moment of our life, and in every breath. Lord Jesus Christ, O Son of God, have mercy on us. Amen.

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The healing of Saint Peter’s mother-in-law must have been a pretty big deal to warrant its coming down through the decades of oral tradition after the Passion of Christ all the way to Saint Mark. Many biblical scholars suggest Mark’s gospel dates from the early 60s; some even as late as the year 70. Even at the earlier date, we are talking about 30 years of oral preaching and teaching about the healing of a fever. It seems like a rather mundane problem to have—which is not to diminish how serious a high fever can be from a physical perspective, of course. Yet this episode is among the first healing miracles of Jesus, and it is a healing of a woman, which is significant for a reason I will mention in a moment.

It is a fairly iron-clad rule of the New Testament that what is included in the four Gospel accounts is not mundane or unremarkable, but rather what is included is included for a very specific purpose: that is conveys not merely knowledge, but spiritual knowledge, about Jesus Christ and how He is the Messiah and Eternal Word of the Father; and on a practical level this means that what is included in the Gospel accounts of Jesus has spiritual meaning for us that feeds our desire to be transformed by the Holy Spirit—transformed heart, and thereby a transformed life. The Gospel details from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are included to proclaim the Gospel’s power to set us free from the bondage of our sins, that we might receive the liberty of that abundant life which the Father manifested in His Son Jesus, our Lord and Saviour.

So, we must ask, given this iron-clad rule, might it be the case that the fever described by Saint Mark might indicate something more than Peter’s wife’s mother having a temperature higher than 98.6 degrees—that the image of her having a fever represents not a physical condition, but one spiritual?

It turns out there is plenty of support for just that interpretation, and it shows up early in the life of the Church (the early Church meaning the patristic Church). S. Jerome, for example, interpreted the fever as intemperance. In traditional moral theology, “intemperance” refers to lack of moderation or restraint, and an excessive indulgence of any passion or appetite. More recently, the term is used to refer to an addiction to intoxicating beverage (that is, to alcohol), but in the Church it means an addiction to anything at all. The Venerable S. Bede, another Church Father, interpreted “fever” in the same way, and also included under its category addiction to sexual gratification. Many other Church Fathers could be cited here, all seeing fever as representing a spiritual, not merely physical, condition.

Now, we do not know (because Mark does not specify) which particular form of spiritual malady Peter’s mother-in-law possessed. Unable to exercise restraint over some sort of addiction is something every human being suffers from, at least from time to time. Addiction to television, addiction to cell phones, addiction to gossip, addiction to control, addiction to victimhood, addiction obviously to food, as well as addiction to things we normally speak of as addictive (drugs, alcohol)—these are part of the human condition, and the Church generally calls these “passions” and what is named in our Psalm as “prison.”

And what spurs forth our giving into our passions (our addictions) is, in the vocabulary of the Church, of course, demons. We should note in this passage that Mark speaks of demons three times in this passage. Within the Christian faith, being sick has everything to do with our inability to exercise restraint against our common human impulses and human addictions: that is, unable to resist temptation dangled before our eyes like the serpent dangled the fruit of the paradise Tree in front of Adam and Eve. According to Scripture, being sick, in short, means giving into our passions.

And yet, it is to provide healing from our human weakness that Christ came as the Light that lighteth all human beings. Again we marvel at the power of Jesus Christ. We see this even right at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel: Jesus healing, and in our passage today, Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law. And again, Mark means “spiritual healing,” and that is indicated by the fact that as the fever left her, she served them. It is easy to overlook the significance of this act of serving, but in the Greek the word is of the same root as the term we today use for an ordained Deacon. Older English translations often use, “the fever left her, and she ministered unto them,” which is closer. Ministering is the activity, of course, of Jesus: and the significance I mentioned earlier of this episode involving a woman is that this woman, Peter’s mother in law, after being healed of her spiritual fever, of her spiritual “passion” (meaning addiction), is the first person in Mark’s gospel to imitate Jesus. To be healed, which is what salvation means, is not just to receive relief (or absolution) from Jesus from our sinful temptations, but it is to lead a different way of life thereafter—to walk from henceforth in Christ’s holy ways. It is to lead a transformed life with an illumined heart, illumined by the power of Jesus Christ.

Brothers and sisters, as we continue to approach and prepare for Lent having the knowledge of the new light of Christ shining in our hearts, let us bring our desire to be healed by God to Him — that we can know the power of His healing, His love. And let us as well take to heart the doctrine of S. John: that if we say we have no sin (that is, no passions), we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins and passions, the Father is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness — that being healed, we can serve Him Who is Jesus Christ, Our Lord, Who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost: ever one God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

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There can be no question that Saint Paul the Apostle is among the group of Saints whose life and intercession for us is most fundamental to Christian life. Alive in Christ’s resurrection along with the all the company of heaven, Saint Paul’s witness and martyrdom—which are two words that say the same thing, because the word “martyr” means in Greek “witness”—is a perpetual image of what it means to be a disciple of Christ, of following Our Jesus’ teaching to be sent out as sheep in the midst of wolves, wise as serpents and innocent as doves. His writings are inexhaustible, the significance of his life for us is inexhaustible, and of course being a Saint in heaven, in the Church Triumphant, his daily intercession and prayer for us and on our behalf is inexhaustible. Paul prays for us daily that we would know Christ, and be known by Him.

To be a Saint means that one’s whole existence is full of the Holy Spirit and resonates or mediates the Holy Spirit to others. To be a Saint is to be so taken up into Christ that all one’s words and deeds—everything about them—is Christ and leads others to Christ. As I have said, it is not theologians or clergy who are the most reliable interpreters of scripture, but rather the Saints: because their lives live-out the Gospel, and the Spirit Who proceeds from the Father speaks through them.

In the Collect for our Liturgy today we ask God that we, having Paul’s wonderful conversion in remembrance, may show forth our thankfulness unto God for his conversion by following the holy doctrine he taught. And if we set out to consider all the holy doctrine he taught, we would have a long list indeed. The familiar doctrine of being a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto God comes from Paul and is derived from his doctrine of the Cross. He is known as well for doctrine about the Sacraments especially Baptism and Eucharist (the first eucharistic doctrine traces from Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians), for justification, predestination, and others. From Paul we even what might be called “doctrine of the parish,” of what it means theologically to be a parish (not merely a community but a godly organism in Christ), and what being part of a parish demands of us. And Paul is the articulator of yet more holy doctrine I have not mentioned. He is a mystical teacher of glory beyond words, after all.

It was in reflecting upon the speech captured by Saint Luke that Paul made to King Agrippa that I was struck by yet another doctrine taught by Paul, although not taught through his words themselves but implicitly in his speech as well as Paul’s overall life. It is his doctrine of holy Scripture (meaning the Old Testament). We hear Paul say to the king, “I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things in opposing the name of Jesus of Nazareth.” What convinced him before his conversion was the interpretation of Scripture that he had come to have and live-out through the education he received from the rabbi Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the law of his fathers, being, Paul also tells us, himself extremely zealous for the tradition of his fathers.

According to the interpretation of Scripture that he had, in looking upon the man Jesus of Nazareth, Paul saw not savior but blasphemer. According to his scriptural interpretation of what is commonly called the Old Testament, in Jesus Paul saw not Son of God but Son of Satan. And because of this, Paul not only shut up many of the saints (that is, shut up many of the baptized Christians) in prison, but when they were put to death Paul cast his vote against them. He had a raging fury against Christians, and he persecuted them even in foreign cities. He was infamous for this, and feared by all Christians.

It was having set out to do so in the foreign city of Damascus that the direction of Paul’s life changed. Like the Magi who after their encounter with Jesus Christ through Mary His Mother set out for home by a different direction than by which they came—the direction of Paul’s life was permanently altered when he encountered Christ on the road to Damascus. Christ shown through a bright light from heaven, brighter than the sun because Christ is the icon of the invisible God, and He spoke to Paul the words, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Speaking to Paul was Christ Crucified and Resurrected, persecuted by Saul and so we might reasonably picture the encounter as Christ speaking to Paul from His Cross, still nailed to the Cross upon which Christ was persecuted.

And it was from this moment that Paul’s whole interpretation of Scripture began to change, although the transformation took three years to begin to fully mature. Before the change, Jesus was just a man, Paul was not fallen through original sin, and a great many of the words of the Prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the rest—had holes of incomprehensibilty, because the person to whom the words applied was unknown and not revealed. But now, through Paul’s conversation, with the eyes of his heart enlightened, the truth of Scripture broke open like never before, because the person to Whom the words applied was now revealed. The Scriptures now opened, and soon the bread broken, everything central to the interpretation of Scripture is changed. Jesus is a man, sure; but with the eyes of scriptural faith even more so He is the image of the invisible God, the Eternal Word of the Father. Jesus is Lord of all. And even more: in a wonder to him and all the apostles of the early Church, the strange and confusing words of the prophets become clear windows to heaven, for the prophets describe Christ and His presence among the prophets and among us, starting with the words of Isaiah 7:14: “the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” These words were a useless mystery to Jewish rabbis, but with the scriptures opened and the bread broken, these words perfectly speak of Christ—and show that Christ Himself was present to Isaiah, and always present to us as we pray upon this verse at Christmas with our eyes of faith.

Christ changed Paul’s self-understanding. Now Paul himself is not only fallen from sin, but all his flesh is corrupt and disordered except insofar as Christ lives in him. According to the old interpretation, Paul could not live with himself without the death of Christ’s followers; now, with eyes of scriptural faith, he cannot live at all without being incorporated into Christ’s body along with the rest of His followers. And this is the power of Jesus Christ in our lives: we can think of ourselves differently than if we did not have the Gospel. We are God’s chosen, foreknown and predestined by God for a life of mercy in the Holy Spirit Who works through us upon the world. We can no longer live to gratify ourselves, but to please God. What gift!

And so may we always seek to follow the holy doctrine taught by this great Saint, our patron, and to celebrate it. For to celebrate the doctrine of Paul is to celebrate the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is through the Cross that the Scriptures are opened. It is through the Cross that the bread is broken. Let us glory in what Paul gloried in, and all the Church: it is in the Scriptures that we find Christ. It is in the scriptures that Christ is described. With the scriptures finally opened, the bread can be broken: and for Paul, and for us, Christ is truly and really present among us. Saint Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, pray for us. Saint Paul, teacher of the real presence of Jesus Christ in Scripture and in the Eucharist, pray for us. Saint Paul, patron of this holy house of God, pray for us — that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Amen.

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How each Evangelist begins his account of the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Saviour is something to study. In Mark’s account, after his description of S. John Baptist fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah, Jesus immediately comes on the scene: first to be baptized by John, and then immediately to speak. And Christ’s first words in Mark’s account are a calling. He is calling us to repent. For Mark, then, this is the character of all of Christ’s preaching: the call to repent and believe in the Gospel, because the Holy Spirit is at hand. Christ calls us to repeat, and I want to reflect on His calling of us, because Christ calls His people to Him not once, in history nearly two thousand years ago, that is, this moment in Mark and never again. Rather, we are always being called by Jesus, throughout our whole life.

Let us marvel in wonder at this: because the fact that Jesus Christ calls us is truly an incredible thing. I am not sure, but I wonder, if that is something taken for granted by Christians; and I wonder if that is something Christians truly believe happens to them. Christians in the historic-sacramental traditions, such as our Anglican/Episcopal tradition, perhaps tend to think of being called as applying to mainly to clergy – thinking along the lines of “yes, I imagine our priest felt he was called by God to this ministry; but to be called is something for the deacons, priests, and bishops of the Church. God calling lay people, God calling me, God calling members of my family or my friends. Oh, maybe – but I do not really understand how that works.” Such perhaps goes the common thinking on God calling people, and if that is the case, it would not be their fault, but rather the fault of priests not teaching about how Christ calls regular people.

Yet our Collect is unambiguous on this issue. We pray today to God: “Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Saviour Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of His salvation, that we and all the whole world may perceive the glory of His marvelous works.” Our Collect expresses the doctrine that all Christians are called by Jesus Christ. And this is an ancient doctrine of the Church, for we see it already in our Epistle today, where Saint Paul writes to us saying, “Let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him, and in which God has called him.” It could not be clearer: all Christians should lead the life God called them to lead. Even that God has assigned to us a particular life, and this life which is assigned is His calling upon us.

Notice again how this teaching emphasizes the power of Jesus Christ: His power of calling us, across all conditions of time and space: Christ Who is ascended to the Right Hand of God in heaven, from beyond all conditions of time and space calls us: He reaches out to us, and calls us each by name, as He called S. Mary Magdalene at the tomb on Easter morning. And, as we have been reflecting upon this Epiphany season, His calling of S. Mary Magdalene is part of a whole sequence of calling disciples in the New Testament. Our Gospel passage relates S. Mark’s account of the calling of S. Peter, A. Andrew, and the brothers S. John and S. James. And the power of Jesus Christ in these moments recorded in the New Testament invites us to marvel today at Our Lord’s charisma to turn each of the disciples lives toward a new direction: that new direction being toward Him.

Our understanding of what it means to be called by Jesus begins of that same sort of dynamic: of being called to a new direction in life, that new direction being toward Christ. This is what the word “repent” means. Repent means to turn toward Christ by means of the Holy Spirit. It means to turn toward God in the beginning of our life of discipleship; it means to turn toward God in the middle of our life of discipleship; it means to turn toward God at the end of our life of discipleship in this world, when we die and begin the next leg of our journey. To turn toward Christ is to turn away from something: to turn away from the Devil, the world under the control of the Devil, and from our selfish desire (what Paul calls the flesh). Christ’s call upon us to repentance is therefore a very practical thing. We are called to turn toward Him, and away from what is not of God, in the choices we make day by day. We are called to choose not the power of the flesh, the power of the word and the power of the Devil, but to choose the power of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Saviour.

This is how we can see that the whole of being a Christian man or woman is a life of repentance. The whole of being a Christian man or woman is a life of turning toward Jesus Christ – a life of recognizing the supreme power of Jesus Christ and accepting His invitation to turn toward Him; and in so doing be changed, be transformed, be enlightened by the Light of the world, that we may conceive the holy Jesus in our hearts, and may bear Him in our mind, and may grow up to the fullness, of the stature of Christ, to be finally perfect in Christ Jesus.

My dear brothers and sisters, repentance is the character of Christianity. This is the deepest meaning, perhaps, of S. Mark beginning His Gospel account with these words from Jesus Himself: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the Gospel.” Mark wants us to know that living a Gospel-based life day in and day out, month by month, year by year, decade by decade, is always repentance: is always choosing to turn toward Jesus Christ. The Devil and his minions fight to tempt us toward a different choice: of turning not to God, but to self-gratification, of making choices that do not give the honor and obedience due to Christ, but instead give honor and obedience to the base desires of the flesh. Let us recognize and celebrate the teaching of our patron S. Paul that to follow Christ’s call is true freedom, and to be free in Christ is to be His servant, even slave of Jesus. Yet to be in Christ is to be a new creation, transformed more and more to be like Him. Let us marvel in wonder and gratitude and astonishment: He who took our flesh entirely for our sake, calls us to Him, that we may always recognize Him as our Master: Who together with His Father without beginning and the life-giving Spirit, reigns now and for ever and unto unending ages. Amen.

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We prayed in our Collect that our Savior Jesus Christ is the light of the world. This is because in His light only are we able to perceive the uncreated light of the Father, Who is revealed through Christ. After affirming that Jesus is the light of the world, we ask God that we, illumined by His Word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that through us, the whole world to the ends of the earth may know, worship, and obey Jesus Christ. All of this is exactly what the Epiphany season is all about.

Epiphany, as the word itself indicates, is all about manifestation, the showing forth of the divine glory in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God the Father Almighty. "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." Epiphany is about that showing, that manifestation, and that beholding of glory; and it is also about the effects of that beholding: so that "we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed from glory into the same image from glory to glory, even by the Spirit of the Lord." All God wants is the human heart, and the means that He seeks our heart is by revealing Himself in and through Jesus Christ the Messiah, so that in in our beholding of the glory, we may thereby be transformed: our heart more filled with God.

Behold in our Gospel lesson from S. John the power of Jesus Christ! Our Jesus Christ has such power that words as pithy as “Follow me” He gains followers who become not mere followers, but His ardent disciples and, later, glorious apostles. In this part of John’s Gospel, the charisma and power of Jesus gained Him Andrew, Peter, Philip, Nathanael, and John. And we see the same power of Christ shown in other Gospel accounts as well. Jesus speaks and beckons in simple words, men drop what they are doing, and in an instant follow Him. How the power of Christ shines in the hearts of men and women!

What grace that God gives of heaven to human beings, that He manifests Himself in such a way that the direction of one’s life changes! What clearer illustration of this could there be than the Magi, who upon following the angel disguised as a star (as many say) were led to their Savior, and upon meeting the Holy Family (Christ and Mary and Joseph) and hearing God speak to them in a dream, return to their home by a different way than they had come.

And God does this to all of His followers. Think on your life, and how God has changed the direction of it, many more than once in your life. Each such moment where God has changed the direction of our life is a moment to treasure, ponder in your heart, and in which to anchor your spiritual life, for God has shown Himself to you personally and intentionally. These are moments to behold the glory of God, as the disciples did when they were first called; as the shepherds did when they were tending their field by night; as the rabbis and scholars did in the Temple when Jesus was 12 years old; as the Bridegroom, Bride, and wedding guests at the marriage at Cana, as Nathanael did as Jesus told him that He has seen Nathanael under the fig tree, which drew him into awe and wonder.

Dear brothers and sisters, our hearts have again been opened in the beholding of glory of the Holy Child being born, how Christ shared in our humanity, how He who was uncontainable was first contained in the womb of Blessed Mary, and then in the flesh she gave Him: He through Whom all things are made was made human through her by the Holy Spirit. And beholding His power in the Epiphany of His Nativity, we sang as we always do at Christmas: What can I give Him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb. If I were a wise man, I would do my part. Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart. I quote the last verse to the beautiful hymn because it captures the second aspect of the logic of Epiphany: beholding Christ’s glory as He has shown Himself to Saints in the New Testament and to us is the first part. The second aspect is being transformed by Christ’s power. As Saint Paul says, we do this by shunning immorality, which is part of Paul’s whole program for living a holy life of sacrifice. And to inspire us, Paul ever reminds the Church that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within. As we behold His glory to the disciples, the shepherds, the magi and the rest, Paul exhorts us to behold the majesty of the Holy Spirit in our body. And this is the glory of our Baptism, to constantly remember each and every day of our life. For each time we remember the glory of our Baptism, of being a member of the Body of Christ Who is the Light of the world, each time we remember our baptism, our heart shines, our mind shines, and our souls shines all the more with the radiance of Christ’s glory. Amen.

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Such a brief bit of Scripture accounts for this Feast of the Baptism of Jesus Christ. Yet all four Evangelists testify to this event, and for Matthew, Mark, and Luke, do so in much the same way. Jesus coming out of the waters of the Jordan, the perception of the opening of the heavens, the Spirit descending upon Jesus as like a dove, and the voice of the Father, Who names Jesus as His Beloved Son. I am going to reflect on the shortest bit of this, in terms of words: the Spirit descending upon Him like as dove. But first to speak generally about this feast.

The Baptism of Jesus, celebrates as a feast, is relatively new to the Anglican scene. While this is not the case for me, as I have been an Anglican for only 14 short years, for those of you who precede the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, who cut your teeth on the generally much loved 1928 Prayer Book, this was a Feast brand new. But the newness of this Feast to the Prayer Book tradition is deceptive, in that this is actually a very old feast, one of the most ancient feasts of the Church, probably predating any celebration of Christ’s Nativity (and iconic artwork of Christ’s baptism dates all the way back to AD 220).

Originally, this feast brought together many of the early scriptural events of Christ’s life into celebration of His baptism: the beginning of His public ministry, the manifestation and revelation of God as Trinity, His nativity, the visit of the Magi, even the miracle at the wedding of Cana, all in one grand liturgical celebration. All of these events derive from the one radical change that had come upon the world: God had united Himself to mankind to overcome the dominion of evil and death and to give the Holy Spirit. Evidence of the early idea that all of Christ’s ministry begins with His baptism by the hand of S. John Baptist is seen in the fact that S. Mark’s Gospel account in effect begins with the Baptism, is the first earthly event described in S. John in his Gospel, and is part of the criteria declared by S. Peter in the Upper Room for consideration to replace Judas in the ministry of the Twelve Apostles, that of needing to have witnessed and experienced Christ’s baptism by S. John.

This event is named “the Theophany” historically because it is the first public revelation of God as Trinity. Jesus of Nazareth, proclaimed by the Father (through the Holy Spirit) to be His beloved Son, with the Holy Spirit alighting upon Christ as a dove and anointing Him, all before the eyes of the ever-enlightening heart of S. John the Baptist. Hence the ministry of John Baptist includes being the bearer of the truth of the most holy Trinity, and the confessor of this truth, probably the first.

Now to my focus on the descending of the Holy Spirit as like a dove. The description here of the Holy Spirit as a whole carries with it much significance. For one, it is affirmation that Jesus is in fact the Christ, the prophesied Messiah. Anointing in the Old Testament brought about the descent of the Spirit of the Lord to consecrate someone as a prophet, priest, or king. In 1 Samuel 16.13, Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed David in the presence of his brothers, and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.

Secondly, descending upon Christ like a dove. A dove is a gentle, soft, tender bird. In the Song of Solomon the lover associates her beloved with the dove, as beautiful, lovely, perfect, flawless. The dove is also associated with innocence; it is guileless. In Christ’s own words: “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as a dove.” Thus to associate the Holy Spirit’s descent with a dove at Christ’s baptism says much about the nature of His coming messianic ministry. It can be seen to describe the tone of Christ’s whole ministry upon earth. He will not be a military commander, conquering the occupying Romans with force as so many contemporary Jews expected the Messiah to do. Instead, Christ is being anointed to conquer with love, and ultimately, with His own sacrifice on the Cross.

Another aspect of the dove is that it was one of the creatures that Jews were allowed to offer for sacrifice at the Temple. Thus the descent of the Holy Spirit like a dove hints at the future sacrifice of the Messiah, though not for Himself, nor only for the Jewish people, but for all.

Another is that a dove brought to Noah the olive branch as evidence that the waters of the great flood were subsiding and therefore that salvation and a new world were at hand. This tells us that Christ’s coming was to usher in a new life, a new creation, like it was for Noah exiting the ark: a new way of being.

Lastly the Spirit remained upon Christ. John the Baptist says that it had been revealed to him that he could identify Christ as the one upon whom he would see the Spirit not only descend but also remain: in John 1.33: “The one who sent me, to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” In the Old Testament, the Spirit would descend upon the prophets to inspire them temporarily, but in the New Covenant, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell permanently upon Christ, which means permanently within Christians, and permanently upon us.

Let us therefore, dear brothers and sisters, celebrate this great event of revelation, the advent of Christ, the Theophany of God, and the descent of the Holy Ghost, in Whom we live and move and have our being, all in praise of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, to Whom belongs glory unto the ages. Amen.

[Much of the material in this sermon is taken from Aidan Hart’s book Festal Icons and the chapter in it devoted to the Theophany.]

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Now that we have acknowledged and celebrated in our Divine Liturgy the birth of time of the Mediator between God the Father and human beings, the man Jesus Christ, born of woman, born of Mary under the Law, and done so through the words of the holy Evangelist Saint Luke (whom we heard on Christmas Eve and Day), we are now drawn to reflect upon the words of the blessed evangelist John concerning the eternity of the Word, that is, concerning the eternity of Christ’s divinity, in which He remained always equal to the Father. As a privilege, I think, of John’s singular focus on Christ, S. John grasped the hidden mysteries of Christ’s divinity at a more profound level and, thanks be to God, he was able to disclose these hidden mysteries to others. For it was not mentioned without reason that at the Last Supper John leaned upon the breast of the Jesus, for through this we are taught in figurative language that John drank the draught of heavenly wisdom from the most holy font of Jesus’s breast, and did so in a more outstanding way that the other evangelists.

Hence, in the symbolic representation of the four animals, John is rightly matched with the flying eagle. The eagle, indeed, is said to fly higher than all other birds, and is said to direct its sight toward the rays of the sun more piercingly than all other living things. The other evangelists (Ss Matthew, Mark, and Luke), as though they were walking with the Lord on the earth, explained brilliant Christ’s emergence in time, along with His deeds in time; but they said relatively little concerning His divinity. John, however, as though he were flying to heaven with the Lord, expounded relatively few things concerning Christ’s acts in time, but recognized the eternal power of Christ’s divinity, through which all things come into being, and he handed this on in writing for us to learn. Whereas the other evangelists bear witness that Christ was born in time, John bears witness that this same Christ was in the beginning, saying, “In the beginning was the Word.” The others record His sudden appearance among human beings; John declares that He was always with God, saying, “and the Word was with God.” The others confirm that He is a true human being; John confirms that He is true God, saying, “and the Word was God.” And the others testify to the wonders which Christ did as a human being; John teaches that God the Father made every creature, visible and invisible, through Christ, saying, “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made.”

And to a remarkable extent blessed John, at this the beginning of his Gospel account, properly imbues us with the faith of orthodox belief concerning the divinity of the Savior, even anticipating false doctrine taught in the later centuries of the Church. For example, false doctrine taught by the 4th century bishop Arius (called the Arianism heresy), who said, “If Christ was born, there was a time when He did not exist.” John refutes this beforehand with his first utterance when he says, “In the beginning was the Word.” He does not say, In the beginning the Word began to be, because he wrote in order to point out that Christ’s coming into being was not from time, but that He existed at the emergence of time, and so that through this wording he might point out that Christ was born of the Father without any beginning in time.

In the same way there was the 3rd century priest and theologian named Sabellius (with the heretical doctrine called Sabellianism or “modalism”), which denied that the Holy Trinity is three Persons, and said, “The same God is Father when He wants to be, Son when He wants to be, Holy Spirit when He wants to be; nevertheless, He Himself is one,” that is, one Person and not three. Rebuking this error, John says, “And the Word was with God.” For if the One was with the Other, unquestionably the Father and the Son are two, and not one as if He Himself were now Father, and now Son, and now also Holy Ghost. And likewise against other heretics did John speak and, by the grace of God, condemn.

In a profound way, the evangelist describes Christ’s two natures, namely the divine nature (in which He always and everywhere remains complete) and the human nature (by means of which He appeared to be contained by place when He was born in time), saying He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world knew Him not. He came into His own home, and His own people received Him not. (The evangelist says “the world” to mean human beings deceived by love of the world, and by being attached to creatures have turned away from acknowledging the majesty of their Creator.) Indeed, Christ was in the world and the world was made through Him because He was God, because He was complete everywhere, because by the presence of His majesty He ruled without labor, and without burden He held together what He had made. He came into His own because when He was born He appeared through His humanity in the world which He had made through His divinity. He came to His own home because Christ deigned to become incarnate in the nation of Judaea, which He had united to Himself beyond other countries by a special grace. He was in the world and He came into the world. He was in the world through His divinity; He came into the world through His nativity.

Dear brothers and sisters, we who today on this seventh Day of Christmastide recall in yearly devotion this glorious human nativity of our Redeemer, must always embrace His divine nature as well as His human nature with a love that is not yearly, but continual – we must continually embrace His divine nature, through which we were created when we did not exist, and His human nature, through which we were recreated when we were lost. Certainly our Maker’s divine power was adequate to recreate us with His assuming humanity; the human weakness of this Redeemer of ours, however, was unable to recreate us with divinity assuming our humanity and inhabiting our humanity and working through it.

And so, for this reason, the Word became flesh, that is, the Word became bread, that is, became Sacrament and dwelt among us, so that by keeping company with us in His human being become bread become Sacrament, He would be able to unite with us; by speaking to us He would be able to instruct us and present to us a way of living; by dying He would be able to struggle for us against the enemy; by rising He would be able to destroy our death – and so that through a divinity coeternal with the Father’s, He might raise us to divine things by bringing us back to life interiorly through the Sacrament, that in feeding us with Himself He might grant us forgiveness of sins and at the same time the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and that through the seven Sacraments He might not only lead us to see the glory of His glorified and sacramental humanity, but also show us the unchangeable essence of His divine majesty, in which He lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit unto the ages of ages. Amen.

[Note: this sermon is an adaptation of Sermon 1.8 (Christmas) on Jn 1:1-14 by the Venerable S. Bede]

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My dear brothers and sisters, our Saviour is born this day. With the angels, let us rejoice! Sadness should find no place on this the birth day of Life Itself; on the birth day of Life Himself. With the fear of death removed by His Life, let us be filled with gladness, because of our own promised immortality. No one is left out or excluded from sharing in this cheerfulness, for the reason of our joy is common to all people. Our Lord, the Conquerer of sin and death, came that He might bring deliverance to all.

Let the sinner rejoice, for he is invited to grace. Let the Gentiles exult, for they are called to life. For the Son of God, in the fullness of time, born of woman, has taken upon Himself the nature of our humanity, as the unsearchable depths of the divine counsel hath decreed, in order that the inventor of death, the Devil, by that very nature which he defeated in the Garden, would be himself overcome.

And in this contest that was undertaken for us, the battle was waged in accordance with a great and wondrous law of justice. For the all-powerful God engaged in combat with His most bitter enemy, not in the strength of His own divine Majesty, but in our human infirmity; confronting him with our very form and nature, and sharing likewise in our mortality; like us all in thing, except for sin.

As we know and celebrate, a royal Virgin of the house of David is chosen as the Theotokos, the bearer of the Sacred Fruit, who had conceived her divine and human Offspring in her soul, before she conceived Him in her body. And knowing not the divine purpose, and lest she be fearful at such unheard of and outrageous tidings, she learns from the angelic colloquy of what which was to be wrought in her by the Holy Ghost; and, miracle of miracles, she who was about to become the Mother of God did not believe that her conception meant the loss of her virginity! To her is promised the fruitfulness of the power of the Most High. The faith of the believer is confirmed by the witness of the miracle that went before, when to Elizabeth was given unlooked-for fruitfulness; so that it might not be doubted, that He Who had given to the barren to conceive, would give it likewise to Mary.

The Word of God, therefore, God, the Son of God, Who in the beginning was with God, by Whom all things were made, and without Whom was made nothing that was made, became Man, that He might free us from eternal death. He bent down to the taking of our lowliness, losing nothing of His own Majesty, so that remaining what He was, and taking upon Himself what He was not, He might join the form of a true servant to that form in which He is equal to God the Father; and by this bond so link both natures, that this exaltation might not shallow up the human, not adoption lessen the divine.

Preserving in Himself the fullness of both natures, human and divine, and uniting them in One Person, lowliness is assumed and taken up by Majesty; infirmity, by Power; mortality, by immortality. And to pay the debt humanity owed to God, this inviolable nature is united to our suffering one; and true God and true man are welded into the unity of One Lord. So that, as was needed for our healing, one and the same Mediator of God and men, might by the one, suffer death, and by the Other, rise again from the dead.

Such a birth, dearly beloved, befits Christ, the Power of God, and the Wisdom of God; whereby He would be both joined to our lowliness, yet remain far above us in His divinity. For unless He were true God, He could bring us no aid; and were He not true man, He could offer us no example. The exulting angels, therefore, sing to the new-born Lord, Glory to God in the Highest, and they announce unto us, peace on earth to men of good will. For the Angels see the heavenly Jerusalem made up from all peoples of the earth. With what joy may not the lowliness of mankind rejoice in this unspeakable work of diving compassion, when the angels in their glory so greatly rejoice.

Let us, therefore, give thanks, my dear brothers and sisters, to God the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit; Who, because of the exceeding great love, wherein He has loved us, has had compassion on us. And even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together in Christ, that in Him we might be a new creature, and a new clay. Let us strip ourselves of the old man with his deeds; for being made partakers of the Birth of Christ, let us renounce the deeds of the flesh.

Let us Christians acknowledge the dignity that is now ours. Being made a partaker of the divine nature, let us not by an unworthy manner of living fall back into our former lowliness. Let us be mindful of Whose Head, and of Whose Body, we are member. Remember, that wrested from the powers of darkness, we are now translated into the Light and the Kingdom of God. By the Sacrament of Baptism we have become the temple of the Holy Spirit. Do not, by evil deeds, put a veil over the One dwelling with thee, and thereby submit again yourself to the bondage of the Devil. Because our price was the Blood of Christ; because in strictness He shall judge us Who in his wondrous mercy has redeemed us; Who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, livest and reignest, world without end. Amen.

[Note: this sermon is an adaptation of Sermon 21 by S. Leo the Great]

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My dear brothers and sisters, Christ is born; let us give glory. Christ is from the heavens, let us go to meet Him. Christ is on the earth, let us be lifted up. Sing to the Lord, the whole earth. Let the heavens be glad and let the earth rejoice, for the heavenly One is now earthly. Christ is in the flesh, exult my dear brothers and sisters with trembling and with joy. Exult with trembling, because of sin. Exult with joy, because of hope. Christ comes from a Virgin; let us all practice virginity, which is humility of a heart that loves God above all else, that Christ being born in our heart, can be born in the hearts of others through our love and adoration of Him. Who would not love and adore He Who is Alpha? And who would not love and adore He Who is also Omega?

Again, this night, Christ is born, Christ is born this day. And again, the darkness is dissolved, again the Light is established. Let the people sitting in the darkness of ignorance see a great light of knowledge. “The old things have passed; behold, all things have become new.” The letter of the law withdraws; the spirit of the Law advances; the shadows have been surpassed, for Truth Himself has entered after them. The world above must be filled. Christ commands, let us not resist. All nations, clap your hands, He told David in the Psalm. For to us a Child is born, and to us a Son is born, the power is on His shoulder. For He is lifted up along with the Cross, and He is called by the name “angel of great counsel,” and that of the Father.

Let John Baptist yet proclaim, Prepare the way of the Lord. Let us all proclaim the power of this day. The fleshless One takes flesh; the Word is made coarse, the invisible One is seen, the impalpable One is touched, the timeless One makes a beginning, the Son of God becomes Son of Man. Jesus, Christ, the same yesterday and today and for the ages. As Paul says, He is stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. In all things He becomes a human being, except sin. He was conceived by the Virgin, who was purified in both soul and flesh by the Holy Spirit. He comes forth, God with what He has assumed (which is the flesh of His mother). O, the new mixture of Spirit and flesh! O the blending in paradox! He Who Is (as He named Himself to Moses) has come into being, and the uncreated is created, the uncontained is contained.

The One who enriches becomes poor, He is made poor in our flesh, that we might be enriched through His divinity. The Full One empties Himself; for He empties Himself of His own glory for a short time, that we may participate in His fullness. What is the wealth of His goodness? What is this mystery concerning us? We were born to participate in the likeness, made so by God, we humans did not keep that likeness, for it was defaced and disordered through our disobedience and sin. Christ participates in our flesh both to save the likeness with the image and to make flesh immortal.

Let us welcome His nativity and leap for joy, if not indeed like John Baptist in the womb, and then like David danced when the ark came to rest in Jerusalem. Let us revere the birth through which we have been released from the bonds of birth. Let us honor little Bethlehem, which has brought us back to paradise, and bow before the manger through which we who were without true knowledge have been fed by the Word. Let us like the Ox know our owner, and like the donkey know our master’s crib. And let us run after the Star, and bring gifts with the magi: gold, frankincense, and myrrh, as to a king and to a God and to one dead for our sake. Let us with the shepherds give glory, with the angels sing hymns, with the archangels dance. Let there be a common celebration of the heavenly and earthly powers. They rejoice and celebrate with us today, if indeed they love mankind and love God.

Your Nativity, O Christ our God, has shone to the world the Light of knowledge; for by it, those who worshiped the stars were taught by a star to adore You, the Sun of Righteousness, and to know You, the Dayspring from on High. O Lord, glory to You! Christ is born today, Whom even now we pray to be manifest to us as clearly as is possible to prisoners of the flesh, in Christ Jesus our Lord, to Whom be glory and sovereignty unto the ages of ages. Amen.

[Note: this sermon is an adaptation of a portion of Oration 38 by S. Gregory Nazianzus “On the Nativity of Christ”, and includes the Troparion prayer used by the Eastern Orthodox tradition.]

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“Most highly favored, Lady,” was part of the refrain we sang in the praise of Mary in the hymn preceding the Holy Gospel. We did so, in the words of the hymn, as “Christian folk through the world will ever say.” This moment has been so taken up by the church in the hymnography, iconography, and artwork in all mediums. The Annunciation is an event in human history of inexhaustible meaning and implication. And so I want to reflect upon it, and especially upon Gabriel’s first words to Mary. And I do so in light of my recent preaching on how S. John Baptist embodies Advent because through him is seen clearly the emphasis Advent has: to watch, to be in expectation, to prepare one’s heart for Christ Who is The Coming One. Mary is another Saint who, like John, embodies Advent, and teaches us about Christ.

“Most highly favored lady” paraphrases the angelic greeting of the archangel Gabriel to Mary, “Hail, Mary, full of grace” which can be translated “Hail, O favored one.” The difference between those two translations attest to the difficulty scripture translators have had with this greeting, and how to properly translate the original Greek of the angelic greeting in a way that captures what it is really saying: to capture its fullness and nuance. The first thing to observe is that this greeting is far more than a “sup, girl!” or “hey, how’s your golf game, my sister?” or “Mary, wonderful quiche last week!” Rather, these are heavenly words from God delivered by an angel, because angels are messengers of the heavenly word of Our Lord. Because it is in this moment of the Annunciation that we first encounter Mary in Scripture, how she is described is how to properly understand the entirety of her place in the economy of grace, her place in God’s plan of salvation, and who she is according to God.

The word for “Hail” in Greek is “chaire.” This word directly means “rejoice,” and as scripture scholars point out, it is a gesture of greeting that would have been highly unbecoming within Jewish rabbical culture. That is because it is a very reverent and courteous greeting, such as a queen would receive. In ancient custom it corresponds as well to the Hebrew greeting of shalom, which means peace. A fuller sense of “Hail” would be something like, “Rejoice in peace my queen!” or even, “Be at peace my queen!” And this is fitting because there is no one else in the Bible who is addressed in the same way as Mary is addressed: never a man, and never a woman, save one: Mary. It is also worth noting that the word “chaire” is the root of the English words chair and throne, and cathedral, itself based on the word “cathedra” which means throne upon which the bishop sits. Already we have a sense of the high honor and dignity of the angelic greeting, and a sense of who Mary is: someone the highest angels deeply respect. And as bishops sit upon the cathedra, so does Jesus sit upon the lap of His Mother.

After this, Gabriel addresses Mary as “kecharitomene,” which is “O favored one,” or “full of grace.” I say addresses because biblical scholars point out that the way Gabriel speaks is as one would say a person’s name. The word “O” indicates that. In other words, Gabriel utters not a quality of Mary, as an adjective—a quality or attribute such as beautiful, glorious, or radiant. The Church certainly sees Mary in all those ways, but Gabriel does something different in his greeting: he is saying her name. Mary is “she who is the fullness of grace,” or “she who is the fullness of God’s favor.” Or to use more words, Mary is “she who is completely, perfectly, enduringly has always been endowed with the fullness of grace and heavenly benediction.” And the grammar says the same: the word “kecharitomene” is a past perfect participle, which indicates that Mary has always been the fullness of grace and favor, and was created by God in that way. Some people interpret this as a moment when Mary is transformed, changed, from a state of less grace to a state of more grace. But that is contrary to what Gabriel, the messenger of heaven, is saying. Completely, perfectly, enduringly endowed with grace is Mary’s identity, and she has never been less than that, even in her mother’s womb, even her conception. I want to stress this is simply the meaning of the biblical words “chaire kecharitomene,”—“Hail, full of grace,” or in the longer, clumsier rendering, “Be at peace, my queen, you who are completely, perfectly, and enduringly endowed with the fullness of God’s grace.” This is the scriptural way to understand Mary.

There is a bit more to say about “grace.” In Greek the word is charis, and its stem is part of “kecharitomene” in the angelic greeting, as well as the word “eucharist,” which means “thanksgiving.” The beginning of the definition of “grace” is that it is God’s favor towards us, and that is part of the reason our hymn addresses Mary as “most highly favored lady.” But there is more to the definition. To fill it out the scriptural meaning we recognize that God’s favor is always His gift. And His gift is the Holy Spirit. And so Mary is the fullness of God’s favor, the fullness of God’s gift: she who is full of the Holy Spirit. And yet we know that the Holy Spirit bears witness to Christ, bears witness to Jesus Who Himself offered on the Cross and that His gift of Himself on the Cross passes into the Sacred Humanity of the sacramental life which we receive through the Seven Sacraments. And we also know that God’s gift of Himself is love, for His nature is love; and His gift is true peace, the heavenly peace which passes all understanding made aware to the apostles in the Upper Room on the first Easter Sunday evening and through them to us. Ultimately, grace, which is the Holy Spirit Who reveals Christ, is the source of Christian life and is participation in the divine life. Grace is the heavenly reality, and Mary is full of grace: so she is full of the heavenly reality, and has always been so. The heavenly reality of grace, of peace, of love, of eucharist, of giving thanks. And all of the gift of God fills us, and so she, in that sense, is God’s gift to the Church, that gift that bears the Eternal Word of the Father, her Son and His, Jesus Christ. It is by understanding Mary scripturally that she becomes known in the Church as the Queen of Heaven, Queen of the Angels, the Mother of the Church, and the Theotokos, which means “bearer of God.”

This is why Christians can praise Mary without reservation, and should, with “all generations [that] laud and honor her.” To do so is to think and act scripturally. The fullness of heavenly reality of grace, of peace, of love, of eucharist is who she is, entirely by the initiative of God, who made this wonderful creature gloriously, mysteriously, and joyfully. Her whole life within the Holy Spirit was lived to be an example to others of how to love and follow her Son Jesus Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. She is an example of watching in expectation, and perhaps a better one than John Baptist, because for Mary it was over 30 years of watching in expectation, for Her Son to reveal Himself to His disciples as Gabriel had reveal Christ to her. There is so much of Mary we can imitate: her humility, her obedient listening with an open and faithful heart, and her Yes to God, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to Thy Word. Because when God seeks to lead us and we accept His invitation, our Yes echoes Mary’s yes, and proclaims with Mary the greatness of the Lord; that because of our living relationship with her, the Holy Spirit Who filled her fills us.

Today we ask the intercession of Blessed Mary, Ever-Virgin; that she is who is the Mother of God pray for us; that we, like her, may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

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There is an axiom in the Church about the Saints. And that axiom is: the Saints are always to be admired, and when possible, imitated. This applies to all Saints, whether those of the New Testament, the apostolic era, and up to today. And so that includes S. John the Baptist. His importance is non-debatable, because all four Evangelists describe his role in God’s plan of salvation through Jesus Christ. Yet imitating John seems difficult, for a number of reasons. He lived two thousand years ago, in a different culture, in a different society, spoke a different language, and so forth. And that he ate different things, for goodness sake. Locusts and wild honey! Wild honey, ok, maybe, I think (except for perhaps all the bees). But locusts, or eating any bug, is a bridge too far. Also, I mean, his clothes are a little (what shall we say?) . . . austere: the leather belt around his waist sounds dapper enough, but being clothed with camel’s hair? Like, everywhere camel’s hair? And then, look at this family. Not only was John a Saint, but John had a Saint for his mother, a Saint for his father, the Queen of Heaven for his “auntie,” and the Eternal Word of the Father as a “cousin.” Not easy to relate with John the Baptist based on his diet, clothing, and family relations!

Let me say that the diet is not what it seems to be. Scripture shows this. In Ezekiel chapter 3, the prophet Ezekiel hears Christ speak to him. He hears Him say: “‘Eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.’ So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. And he said to me, ‘Son of man, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.’ Then I ate it; and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.” So when we are told that John the Baptist eats honey, it is a reference made by the Evangelists to Ezekiel, and this reference serves to describe John the Baptist as a student of Scripture, even one that tastes the sweetness of Scripture, which means a profound reading of Scripture where the Holy Spirit reveals truths hidden from all eternity. And as far as the locusts, we look at the Book of Exodus, the 10th chapter, which reads “Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand over the land of Egypt for the locusts, that they may come upon the land of Egypt.’ The locusts, along with all of the plagues, represent God’s judgment upon Pharaoh which is announced by Moses, even prepare Pharaoh for God’s judgment which God will accomplish in the Red Sea. And so here, because John the Baptist is described as eating locusts, this is to tell us that he understands God’s judgment, and has experienced it so as to be able to proclaim about it to others. Like Moses, John has received power to proclaim God’s coming judgment, which is exactly what it means to bear the witness that John bears as the voice of one crying in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make His paths straight.”

Yet with that said, is it even possible to imitate John, at all? And to that I say, yes, it is, if one understands how. And that understanding is found by remembering that Saint John the Evangelist, in his Gospel account, tells us that that there was a man sent from God, who came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that through Him people might believe in the Light – the Light who is Christ. John is that man, sent to bear witness to the Light that people believe in the light. Despite being so different from John, in this way we are exactly like him; his mission is our mission, and ours is like his. We are to bear witness to the Light who is Christ. Indeed we are to imitate John in this work.

And there is another way. And here we must realize that John almost certainly had known about Jesus all his life, hearing we can assume from his mother Elizabeth, and even from Mary herself, about the message Gabriel brought Mary, that Christ is the Savior spoken of in Scripture. And are we not like John in this way, also? Most if not all of us are like this: we have grown up knowing parts of the story of Jesus, even those parts. For many of us, there is not a time we remember when we did not know at least a little bit about Christ. John is living with the knowledge of Jesus, as we live with knowledge of Jesus. John understood Jesus to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, as we do. Yet as this is the case for John and for us, at the same time, there is so much of Christ yet to be revealed to him and us. For example, what about the Second Coming? Or even, what happens after we die? On these important matters, John knew nothing more than we do. The Coming of Christ is full glory to judge the quick and the dead, and to judge us, was as much a mysterious doctrine to him as it is for us. And the same with the doctrine of Christian death. We walk in hope, in trust, in faith: John walked in hope, in trust in faith. Christ, the Lamb of God, walked among him, and Christ the Lamb of God walks among us, and feeds us.

So to imitate John the Baptist, ultimately, is to realize the immense power of Jesus Christ, and that His immense power is wrapped in mystery and expectation. If Advent emphasizes having an attitude of watching, and an attitude of recognizing Christ as the Coming One, John the Baptist shows a person who watches and waits from the Coming One. John embodies the attitude of Advent, embodies Advent itself, and not only in what John thinks but what he says. And this attitude we can have, and do have. That although we do not know precisely what is coming when Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead, and even when we are judged, or what happens after we did; what we know now is what John proclaimed: make straight the way of the Lord, and do so now. We can actually say that with John the Baptist, and understand it in much the same way, even the exact way, he did. To make straight the way of the Lord is to seek God’s grace, grace which delivers us from our sins, grace which purify us from our iniquities. So that when Christ shall come again in power and great triumph to judge the world, He may find a room in us prepared for Him, and that we may without shame or fear rejoice to behold His appearing. Amen.

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We hear holy words from our Lord Jesus today. He is speaking to Peter, James, John, and Andrew, and it is from these four Saints that His teaching has come down to us. They had asked him about the Temple, and Jesus had foretold to them the destruction of the Temple. And in speaking about the destruction of the Temple, our Lord spoke as well about the chaos that would ensue. This chaos would include false prophets and teachers supposing to speak in Christ’s Name. It would include wars and rumours of wars. It would include earthquakes and famines in various places. And all this would, Jesus said to the four Saints, be but the beginning of the sufferings.

And about those our Lord surely meant the persecutions that He foretold, that as the disciples would bear testimony in synagogues and preach the Gospel to all nations, that they would also be brought to trial. Jesus instructed them not to be anxious about what they are to say. He assured them that the Holy Spirit would give them utterance, as He gave Moses the words to say before Pharaoh and the children of Israel. And yet He warned them that they would be hated for His Name’s sake. But that through it all, Jesus said, He who endures to the end will be saved, thereby teaching that the virtue of Fortitude is necessary to the Christian life.

It was then that our Gospel passage picks up the narrative from Saint Mark. In speaking about the days after Jesus is crucified and resurrected – that is, in speaking about the life of the Church – Jesus said that the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers (that is, the angels) in the heavens will be shaken. All of this is symbolic, figurative description of the life of the Church Militant that fights against the Prince of this world (I am speaking of the Devil and his unholy army of fallen angels). While the Church in heaven is triumphant and at rest, the Church on earth (the Church Militant) is fighting against the Devil who is ever luring people on earth to works of darkness.

And this happens in several ways: We the Church are the people of Light, and it is the Church that fights against the darkness which is people walking in the darkness which is the state of spiritual deadness. Another way this happens is within the Church, for the Church Militant on earth is sometimes caught up in heresy and schism, most famously perhaps in the fourth century when most of the bishops of the Church accepted the teaching of a bishop named Arius, which was a heretical teaching that came to be known as Arianism: that Jesus, while unique and prophetic unlike any human being, was not co-eternal with the Father, but was a creature and not God the Son. It was only a small minority of Bishops who believed what we do today: that Christ is God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, being of one substance with the Father. We owe so much to those fourth Century Church Fathers who fought back the heresy – Church Fathers such as Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Athanasius the Great, as well as Saint Nicholas of Myra, and Saint Anthony the Monk.

And of course fighting the Devil’s constant enticements to works of darkness happens in the heart of every person, in the heart of every Christian. We are all awaiting the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory, to judge both the quick and the dead. Jesus assures us that no matter what of the world dies and passes away, but His words will never pass away. And when He tells us to “watch,” He surely means in the sense that He taught His disciples to abide in His words, to love His words, and to keep His words. But He in emphasizing twice the necessity to watch – because we do not know when the master of the house will come, that is, when Christ will come in His glory at the end of days – lest He come suddenly and find us asleep, He says to us as He said to Peter, James, John, and Andrew: Watch.

What are we to watch? We are to watch our heart. Watch what catches our heart. Watch what our heart follows and is enamored by. Is it Christ? Or is it an idol we put before Christ? We say we believe in Christ, but does our heart agree with our words? We have, as Saint Paul affirms, all speech and knowledge that we need to be enriched and fed by Christ. Paul says the Church and her members are not lacking any spiritual gift. And Paul also assures us that God is faithful. All God wants is our heart. Let us, my dear brothers and sisters, again get our hearts right, that in His coming to us, we have made room in our hearts to receive Him – that our heart not made to sleep by worship of idols, but is ever awake to Christ and rejoices at His coming. Amen.

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Continuing our reflections on Stewardship given the season, we turn our focus today entirely to our Gospel passage. S. Matthew presents us with the Parable of the Ten Maidens. The first things to say is that many of our Lord’s parables are short, and therefore open-ended, by design; this one is, on the other hand, is long, and therefore has been seen by the Church as less-opended and more specific in its meaning; but at the same time, fairly cryptic. So let us go through it.

We are told by Christ that the ten maidens possessed lamps, and that five were wise, and five were foolish. The five wise maidens were wise because they had flasks of oil with them; whereas the five foolish maidens were foolish because they had no flasks of oil. All ten sought to meet the Bridegroom, who came to them after they slumbered and slept. Finally, the Bridegroom came in at midnight, and a cry was heard to come out to meet him. The five with the oil were welcomed to the marriage feasts; the five without the oil were shut out from the marriage feast, even by the Bridegroom who said, “I do not know you.” And at the end of the parable, Jesus says, “Watch, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

This entire parable is symbolic at every turn and in every detail. Firstly, we notice that this is a parable which describes, according to Jesus, the kingdom of heaven. So this is a parable about the Holy Spirit: how He is experienced and how the Holy Spirit works in our lives. In the last detail provided by Jesus, He tells us to watch; that is Our Lord’s way of exhorting us to prayer, to love His Holy teaching, to keep His words – basically, our Lord commanding us a life of devotion to Him. So the Holy Spirit works us in through our devotion to Christ, is the first thing to say about what the parable means.

Yet what about the oil? Having oil, or not having oil, is crucial to being welcomed by Christ into the marriage feast. And what is the marriage feast? Let’s take that first. The marriage feast come after a cry, “Behold the bridegroom! Come out to meet Him.” And this cry comes after the maidens and slumbered and slept. That symbolizes death, for in death we slumber and sleep. And the cry at midnight, which is the invitation to fellowship with Christ, represents the Second Coming of Christ when, as the Creed says, “He shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead.” (‘Quick’ is an older expression for living.) And so another level of meaning is added: the Holy Spirit works through our devotion to Christ, and doing so prepares us, or not, for the final judgment. And those who possess oil, enter into the kingdom which shall have no end, according to the Creed: the marriage feast is endless life in the Holy Spirit, the consummation of our marriage to God through Christ in Whose Body we live.

Then what does it mean to possess oil? And for this is it necessary to know that in Greek, “oil” and “mercy” are closely related words with the same root. Thus to have flasks of oil is to possess God’s mercy. But then how does one receive God’s mercy? We receive mercy from God. Saint Paul teaches that “God has mercy on whom He wants to have mercy.” Who does God want to have mercy upon? Jesus teaches clearly on this in His sermon on the mount: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” And so the symbol of possessing oil means those who are merciful in their lives. And to be merciful, what does that mean? The Church understands that in two groups: corporal works of mercy, and spiritual works of mercy.

Corporal works of mercy tend to the bodily needs of creatures. There are seven: Feed the hungry; give water to the thirsty; clothe the naked; shelter the homeless; visit the sick; visit the imprisoned; bury the dead.

With the spiritual works of mercy, there are seven as well, and seek to relieve spiritual suffering: instruct the ignorant; counsel the doubtful; admonish the sinners; bear patiently those who wrong us; forgive offenses; comfort the afflicted; pray for the living and the dead.

Thus the wise maidens—wise disciples, in other words—are those are merciful, and in being merciful, receive mercy, the oil of God’s gladness. The foolish maidens—foolish disciples—are those who do not practice works of mercy, and therefore possess no oil of God’s gladness, which is given to the merciful.

My dear brothers and sisters, mercy is love set in motion. Because our Lord Jesus showed unfathomable mercy in taking our sufferings on Himself in order to grant us His Kingdom (the Holy Spirit) which sets us free from captivity to the Evil one, and in view of God’s mercy to all, we in turn are to be merciful to all, whether tending to bodily needs of others or to spiritual needs of others. It is about the giving of our selves in sacrifice, of being a living sacrifice as Paul teaches, as the widow who gave but a small coin but her whole heart, knowing she is God’s coin, giving therefore of all herself to God; the giving of our time, talent, along with treasure (time in prayer, talent in service, treasure in giving), to receive God’s mercy. That in being filled with mercy, our flasks are full of oil, that we may we enter into the heavenly marriage feast.

Just as before we are forgiven we must forgive, before we know and enjoy the love in the heavenly realm in eternity we must love others within the earthly realm of time and space. Let us in asking for Christ’s mercy (as we does throughout the Liturgy), know that we are asking for the grace to be merciful in our lives, to practice works of mercy whether corporal or spiritual, the mercy by which and with which we perform true Christian stewardship; that at the last day we might be caught up together in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air—and in meeting Him, seen by Him: seen by Him as full of mercy, that is, full of Him, because we have given completely of ourselves as living sacrifices, completely of our time, talent, and treasure. That being full of Him, in us He sees Himself, and says: “I know you; enter into the marriage feast—I have been waiting for you.” Amen.

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Our understanding of the doctrine of the Saints comes from a single verse from S. Jude’s Epistle. He wrote of the importance of preserving the fullness of the faith, once delivered to the Saints. The Saints preserve the fullness of the faith. And so today we celebrate the Saints, for the Lord is glorious in His Saints.

That Saints are loved by the whole Church in all of its eras over time is obvious. Just look around at the Christian world: everywhere we see parish churches, cathedrals, monasteries, hospitals, fellowship groups, and more that have a Saint as their patron. Our church under the patronage of Saint Paul the Apostle; our cathedral in Orlando under the patronage of Saint Luke the Evangelist and Physician (also the patron of the Order of S. Luke, of which this parish has a chapter). The oldest parish church in the English-speaking world is in Canterbury, under the patronage of S. Martin of Tours (whose day on the Kalendar is this Saturday, 11 Nov.). York Minster in England is dedicated to S. Peter. Canterbury Cathedral in England has something of a patronage under S. Augustine of Canterbury, who led the re-evangelization of England in the 6th century. In the Vatican in Rome, of course, is the Basilica of S. Peter.

I could go on and on because the role of the Saints in the life of Christianity is undeniably important. We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, Saint Paul teaches. We are surrounded by them because they are our fellow-servants; we are one with all the Saints through Jesus Christ, all of us members of His Body, and members one with another. A person being named after a Saint remains a common practice, as well as knowing if one’s birthday falls on a Saints’ day on the liturgical kalendar.

S. Paul has more to say about the Saints in our Epistle reading today. He prays that God may give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him (as the Saints have, he implies), having the eyes of our hearts enlightened (as the Saints have), that we may know what is the hope to which He has called us (which the Saints have), what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the Saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power in us who believe (which the Saints enjoy). The Saints are the primary examples we have about what it means for the power of the Holy Spirit to work immeasurable greatness in and through us.

They are the primary examples of what it means to love Jesus Christ. They are primary examples of what it means to be His disciple: meaning, examples of denying oneself, taking up one’s cross, and following Christ. The Saints are primary examples to us that all temptations brought before us by the Devil and our frailty can be overcome and rejected, having a heart right and steadfast, a heart that cleaves to Christ through life’s trials and turbulence. The Saints are the primary examples of what it means to make our ways straight (as S. John Baptist taught) and to have hope in Christ, to fear the Lord, trust in Him, and participate in Christ’s salvation in all times of consolation as well as all times of affliction and desolation.

It is sometimes taught that we can understand the Saints as “true friends.” We call a person a “true friend” when we have a living relationship with that person in which both people want the best for each other. The same goes for the Saints. We are truly participating in the Communion of the Saints, as the Apostles’ Creed has it, when the Saints are for us more than names attached to church and cathedrals, more than icons or stained glass images we see in holy places, when they are more than characters in the Gospel story. The Saints are truly for us a great cloud of witnesses that surround us – when we have a living relationship with the Saints, as we do with a true friend.

And to support this is a whole area of Christian literature known as Lives of the Saints, the catalog of reading which began to form very early in the life of the Church. From Saint Luke, in fact, we have the first efforts toward a life of a Saint in what Luke tells us about Saint Paul, and his journey from persecutor of Christians to pastor of Christians. While few if any of us have quite the dramatic story of Saint Paul in our coming to follow Christ as His disciple, many of us can find ourselves even in Paul’s story if we went through a period of our mature, adult life actively turned away from God, only to have repented and turned to Him, even to have some of Paul’s zeal.

And this is the case with the Saints in general: while the diversity of the Saints baffles analysis, we can always admire the lives of the Saints. Why? Because in simple terms: Saints are transparent to Christ. Saints are transparent to Christ in their thoughts, their actions, their feelings. Saints have put on the mind of Christ, in S. Paul’s phrase. And this is because they have allowed the Holy Spirit and His power to act in them: Saints teach us what happens when we cooperate with grace. Thought of in this way, there is so much to admire and imitate in the Saints: a true abundance.

For starters, we admire the Saints for their perseverance in the love of Christ and of the Holy Spirit working in and through them. We can imitate the Saint in their love of Christ, their commitment to Holy Scripture, their humility, their hunger and thirst for righteousness, for their ability to love their enemies (and pray for their enemies), and their teaching of Christian stewardship: of their generosity of time, talent, and treasure given to the Church. Saints exemplify what it means to be a “living sacrifice.”

Because of the incredible and inspiring witness the Saints offered in their own lives, the Church has always held up the Saints, that in recognizing our fellowship with them, our living communion with them through Christ, the Saints radiate and resonate God’s presence and power to us: the Holy Spirit Who filled them with grace and heavenly benediction flows from their witness and life to us. And hence, knowing that the Lord is glorious in His Saints; that the Saints are transparent to Christ; that the fullness of the faith is preserved in the Saints; and that they resonate the Holy Spirit to other members of Christ’s Body–with confidence in Christ our Saviour, we today ask the Holy Saints of the Church to pray for us, that we made be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Amen.

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This is for the parishioners of my parish, as a reference of how to chant the Our Father prayer, which we will begin to do during the 10 am Mass this Sunday, 5 November.

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One of the images of Stewardship that I shared last Sunday was to see ourselves as a coin. It comes from a parable Our Lord Jesus told of the kingdom of heaven, in which a woman has ten coins. She loses one – and when it is found, the coin is a cause for rejoicing by her and the angels. As far as the significance and interpretation of this parable, an important and influential voice is that of the 7th century Church Father, S. Gregory the Great, who is a huge influence upon all of western Christianity. Gregory the Great saw the woman as representing Holy Church, the nine coins being the nine orders of Holy Angels, and the tenth coin, the one lost, being humanity, all human beings; lost because of sin. In essence, S. Gregory taught us to understand ourselves as a coin: God’s coin, of immense value because the coin is His; of immense value because He made the coin; of immense value because when it is found, Angels rejoice, and Holy Church rejoices as well.

This is all in the context of Our Lord’s teaching to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; and to render unto God that which is God’s. Because Caesar’s image is on the coin the Pharisee’s showed Jesus, the coin goes to Caesar. Yet because God’s image is upon the woman’s tenth coin, and that coin is us, part of what it means to be found is to recognize that we are God’s, and thus we are to give ourselves to God because we are His coin. His image is upon us; we are made in His image.

Being made in the image of God is something we hear a lot; and for good reason, for the most part I think. Yet because we hear it so much, its meaning might be obscured. We might then ask: what does it in fact mean to be made in God’s image? And here is where the famous teaching about God being love comes to its primary teaching value. That teaching from Saint John comes in the fourth chapter of his first epistle, verses 7 - 11. John writes, “He who does not love does not know God; for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” Because we know that God so loves us, that He sent His only Son into the world, that we might live through Him: because of this, therefore we know God’s nature is love. Just as it takes one to know one; if we do not love, then we cannot know God; but if we do love, then, John teaches, then and only then are we truly able to know God, and to know that God is love; that is His nature, at least as it has been revealed to us.

This is why our Lord Jesus summarizes the Law in the way He does. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” He is asked. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And the second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The great commandment, being as it about love, and love in the sense of self-offering, or better, “self-sacrifice,” because when we love with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, this is a complete love, a love of surrendering ourselves to God, a love of holding nothing back, but of giving completely, which is what self-sacrifice means – being as the great commandment is about sacrificial love, we see that it expresses our nature, because in this is our God-given image. We are made, by our nature, with the capacity to love God, in the sense of giving to Him our time, our talent, our treasure. We no more have to be taught how to love God than a newborn has to be taught how to love his or her mother and father; it is innate, it is part of the fabric of the newborn baby; but it is something that the baby, when it grows through the phases of maturation, can forget. So we know how to love God, in the sense that we are made in God’s image which reflects God’s nature which is to love; yet we forget through our lives which become enmeshed in patterns of sin that we know how to love, and in that sense need to be reminded of our original nature, what is called by theologians “original righteousness.” Only Christ reminds us of who we truly are. And to be reminded of who we are comes from loving Christ, who said, “If a man love Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”

My dear brothers and sisters, let us remember that the image of love in which we are made is not love as it shows up in films, romance novels, or the endless pop songs on permanent shuffle on the playlists of this fallen world. Rather, the image of love in which we are made is that of the Face of Jesus Christ, especially the Face of Christ on the Cross in sacrifice; He who is the Son of David, Whom David addresses as Lord, because the Son of David is the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds. His Face is our original righteousness, the identity at our origin. And what this means is that somewhere buried in us is the Face of Christ, Who is the invisible image of the Father. And how is this Face unburied? How do we regain the likeness to the Face which we lose amid sin? How is this Face known and seen by others? It is by being a living sacrifice in our lives; it is by giving of our whole selves (heart, soul, mind); it is by giving our time, talent, and treasure to God, because to do so is to live up to the highest, most holy version of our self: the image and likeness of Whom we were created to become. Amen.

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On this Stewardship Sunday, I want not only to reflect on Christian Stewardship, but to see ourselves as a coin. In a parable, Our Lord Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like a woman with ten coins, who lost one – which when found was a cause for rejoicing by her and the angels. What is the significance of this, you might wonder. It comes from teaching from the 7th century Church Father, S. Gregory the Great, who is a huge influence upon all of western Christianity. He gave his immense voice and interpretation to the Parable of the Lost Coin, seeing the woman as representing Holy Church, the nine coins being the nine orders of Holy Angels, and the tenth coin, the one lost, being humanity, all human beings. In essence, S. Gregory taught to understand ourselves as a coin: God’s coin, of immense value because the coin is His.

Yet before I go further with this, let us consider our Gospel passage today. Jesus asks for and is given a coin by the Pharisees. He then asks, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They were trying to entangle Jesus, so that they would have grounds to arrest Jesus, who was a very popular figure in and around Jerusalem. If they could get Jesus to say, “Don’t pay taxes,” then they would have the grounds they were looking for. By this time, Our Lord is quite used to the Pharisees trying to trick Him. And He often responded to their question with another, deeper question, His question undermining their question and disabling it, showing it to be superficial, showing it to be a red herring, a distraction from their real purpose, which was to arrest Him. Jesus asking, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” forced them to answer. Jesus, as they say, put the ball back into their court. Something, unto itself, that can be a teaching to us: when we feel someone is asking what on the surface is an innocuous question, but that we suspect malevolent intent, respond not by answering but by asking a question.

What is notable about the particular question our Lord asked was that, for us, it has a deeper significance. In effect, Jesus is asking, “Whose image and writing is this?” The answer to that question, of course, is Caesar’s image and Caesar’s inscription, making it to be a product of the Roman empire. And because of that, the coin goes to Caesar. But, whose image and inscription is written upon us? Are we not in God’s image, and His image in us? Did not God write His law upon us, made in His image? Jeremiah 31:33 records God as declaring: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” So if things are to be given to those whose image is on the thing, then, yes, render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. This is why they marveled: the Pharisees were outdone by the Word of God. And so this idea that human beings are like to a coin lost, searched for, and when found, rejoiced over becomes a key to stewardship in the Christian understanding.

We are a coin, made by God. We are God’s coin. God made us so that we would of our free will choose to offer ourselves back to Him, the Maker of all creatures great and small, the maker of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen. It was what our patron Saint Paul means by being a living sacrifice: and what our Liturgy speaks of, and here we offer and present unto Thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice. To offer to God our time, our talent, and our treasure is simply “our selves, our souls and bodies” put into different words. It is why Saint Luke recorded in the Acts of the Apostles the account of Ananias and his wife Sapphira, who sold a piece of property. They kept back some of the proceeds, and Saint Peter regarded this was Satan filling the heart to lie to the Holy Spirit. We are told by Saint Luke that both fell dead, because of their greed and as well as deception with Holy Church. It is a dramatic story, which comes in the fifth chapter of Acts. It is a dramatic story, but the very least it should teach us is that knowing holding back of our time, talent, and treasure from the Church is something God sees, for God is He unto Whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from Whom no secrets are hid – holding back from the Church that which God knows we have available to offer, but choose not to, God regards negatively, and pulls His active presence away, so as to cause at least spiritual death, which is what we call the way of life in which God pulls His presence away, leaving us cold in our spiritual life.

My dear brothers and sisters, as I have said before, and will say undoubtedly many times: All God wants is our heart. When we know that God made us so that we would of our free will choose to offer ourselves back to Him – to offer whatever time, talent, and treasure we have available back to God becomes an expression of who we truly are. And what’s more, to know that we all must one day give account to God, as to whether we have been faithful stewards of the bounty of time, talent, and treasure God has given to us, attests to our true identity. We are God’s coin. Hence, we honor God by our stewardship. We honor the Church by our stewardship. We honor the unfathomable gift of eternal life given to us by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ in His Incarnation as well as in His Crucifixion by our stewardship. We are made in God’s image, His image is upon us, and His Holy Spirit is written upon our hearts. We are God’s, that as poor as we might be, we are always able to give Him our heart. Amen.

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I want to reflect today on the first verse from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Church in Philippi. He writes, “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” What Paul is talking about is his own devotion to Christ. His devotion to Christ has an intentionality to it—his choosing to “press on”—that is, with effort, a choice to work in the vineyard to harvest fruit, so as to cooperate with the grace given him by the Holy Spirit.

Yet we must remember that in reading Paul’s epistles, we are reading his teaching, meant to teach the Church in Philipp, and to teach us: so that others are inspired by him and that they imitate him. By giving examples from his own devotion, he is showing disciples how to follow Our Lord’s commandment to deny oneself, take up one’s cross, and follow Jesus. Paul’s epistles are often him sharing his own technique as to how to follow Jesus, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Paul, like all the Saints, is to be both admired and, when possible, imitated.

So what is it that Paul is sharing that we can imitate? His own devotion, by his words, is marked by the characteristic of pressing on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. But specifically, what is Paul describing? He is describing what the Holy Tradition of the Church has often called “Personal Devotion.” Paul’s guidance is to seek a robust Personal Devotion which is our life in the Holy Spirit, day to day. We are called as Paul was called: according to our unique personal characteristics, temperament, life situation, background, and gifts; the Holy Spirit calls us according to our whole personality. We are all members of Christ’s Body, members one of another in Him, but yet united as we are in Christ, we never lose our personality, our uniqueness, our story—we do not lose our identity, but what is transformed is not our identity as much as the horizon of our identity. In our baptism, our commonwealth, our citizenship, is stretched to heaven. This is what Paul is describing when he says “the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” He is describing our heavenly citizenship, how he is living into his new horizons as a baptized Christian, and the work it takes to claim for ourselves the gift given to us in Baptism, the work it takes to cooperate with grace.

Week by week, we come to the Holy Altar, the summit of our Christian experience. We are fed, we are restored, and most of all, we are loved. And in being dismissed at the end of Mass, we are sent out into the world to continue our service to God in the world. In other words, flowing out of our liturgical experience is our Personal Devotion: our loving of God and neighbor in our day to day, seeking and serving Him in all people and doing so according to the Crucified and Risen Christ revealed in Scripture. Personal Devotion is anything we do that is done for the greater glory of God, and for greater intimacy with Him. Studying Scripture, studying the Saints, and giving to the poor are the classic expressions of personal devotion, but it also includes an innumerable spectrum of activities that bring beauty and goodness into the world: a spectrum ranging from tending a garden to being a responsible citizen; Personal Devotion includes all the ways we donate time, talent and treasure to God, through a charitable cause, through serving the lonely, to being a good listener, a good husband, a good wife, a good parent, a good grandparent, a good teacher, a good person when that adjective “good” always means “loves God” before it means anything else.

“Personal devotion” is described in the New Testament, in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, as “continuing in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship.” That is Personal Devotion: the ways each of us lead our lives according to the proclamation of the Apostles and according to the Holy Spirit amid our fellowship in our parish. It is anything we do as we walk in God’s ways: as our life is led by God. Personal Devotion, our pressing on toward the upward call of God in Christ Jesus, means such good works as God has prepared for us to walk in.

True Christian spirituality, true Christian devotion, is based on our heavenly citizenship through Baptism. And in our Personal Devotion based on being baptized, we fulfill another of Paul’s teachings: we become stewards of the mysteries of Christ. By our Personal Devotion, we live in the vineyard of God prepared for us. When our devotion to God flows forth from liturgical prayer, we are living by the Holy Spirit in the Kingdom of God given to us—given to us to be stewards of Christ’s mysteries, stewards of Christ’s sacrificial gift, stewards in the vineyard that bears the fruit of eternal and everlasting life; fruit that comes of our works, fruit that comes of our hands, God ever working through our works, and through our hands, through our words, through our deeds—fruit of beauty and goodness, that others may taste and see the goodness of the Lord, and through us, know God is present. Amen.

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It has become cliché in our days for preachers to observe that among the myriad aspects of the Christian faith and religion, that the angels are among the most misunderstood of all, if not the most misunderstood. And while there are many superficial reasons for that (such as how angels are depicted in motion pictures, television, gift shops, lawn and garden stores – depicted, of course, incorrectly), the ultimate reason for the misunderstanding that surrounds the angels is that human beings and angels are different orders of creation. Creation is a hierarchy, the three orders of which are the visible, the invisible, and the heavenly.

In the visible order, human beings are the highest of God’s visible creatures, the most sophisticated and most self-conscious (meaning “conscious of self;” with certain exceptions, we do not understand other animals to possess a great deal of what we call self-consciousness, and this is a great distinction between humans and other animals). And within visible creation, from the stars to animals and vegetation, land and sea, as well as to the microscopic, we humans can see these things, and therefore can begin to try to understand them with precision (or, think we do).

Yet if creation is a hierarchy, this visible order for all its wonder, splendor and complexity, is the lowest. Next up the hierarchy is the invisible, and above that is the heavenly order; it is in both these orders that the angels reside. Our burial liturgy affirms our belief that angels take the souls of the faithful departed through the gate of death and into the next phase of life in Christ. Scripture also tells us that certain angels are eternally surrounding the throne of heaven singing “Holy, holy, holy.” Angels are bodiless beings; Scripture tells us that certain angels it seems can temporarily take on the characteristics of human beings, at least in terms of bodily manifestation. Jacob wrestled with an angel; angels appeared to Abraham and Sarah; and depictions of the Annunciation to Our Lady, Blessed Mary, always give Archangel Gabriel a human form. But this is not their true nature, which is bodiless, and moving between the invisible and heavenly orders of creation, and invisibly interacting with the visible order in which we reside.

All that said, while angels are not completely ungraspable to us, angels are for the most part quite obscure. The bit we can understand about angels in fact entirely comes from Scripture. And that is a point worth not overlooking. Whatever truth we grasp about Angels only comes through thinking scripturally. And Scripture provides us ample food for thinking about angels. Angels are in the first pages of the first chapters of the first book of the Bible, and in the last pages of the last chapters of the book of the Bible. To celebrate Michael and the Holy Angels today is really to celebrate Scripture, because in Scripture angels are everywhere. In the words of Saint Augustine of Hippo, Church Father who died in the year of our Lord 430, “Holy Scripture descended to us through the ministry of Angels.”

And what angels are doing throughout Scripture can be summarized this way: Angels are charged by God with the responsibility of conveying to human beings the certitude in the personal reality of God with Whom a relationship can be established. This is what the angel was doing with Abraham and Sarah; this is what the angel was doing with Jacob; this is what the angel was doing with Blessed Mary; and furthermore, this is what angels were doing with the women at the Tomb early morning on the first Easter Sunday. Each of those episodes have differing content; but what is consistent throughout is that Angels were trying to give those people certitude in the personal reality of God with Whom a relationship can be established. It was an angel, I think we can say, that allowed Nathanael to recognize Jesus as the Son of God, the King of Israel: and so Jesus was led to say, Angels will show you even more than that – much more: angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man!

And so, brothers and sisters, the significance of angels is undeniable. It is because of angels that we can come to know, can come to believe, can come to rest in the truth that we can have a personal relationship with God; angels help us to understand that such a thing is even possible: that we can have an intimate relationship with God; that we can come to our Lord with everything, and He will listen. It is because of Angels that we can truly know that all God wants is the human heart; that our hearts can truly be open to God. It is because of Angels that we can truly know that Communion with God is possible: communion with God in our every day lives through prayer and attention, and of course Holy Communion, which is why, as the Liturgy of the Eucharist begins, we say: Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; everything praising Thee, and saying: Holy, holy, holy. Amen.

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“Get behind me Satan” is a heck of a thing for Jesus to say. It is a heck of a thing for Our Lord to say to anyone, I think; but especially shocking for Him to say to Peter, the disciple whose glorious confession Jesus had just praised and responded by proclaiming upon that rock – the rock of Peter’s confession—Christ would build His Church. But now, just a few short verses later in Matthew 16, after Peter said, “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you”—referring to Jesus teaching that He would suffer many things, be killed, and on the third day be raised – Jesus said, “Get behind me Satan!” and adding, “You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” If we were with Jesus and the disciples, hearing all this, would not our heads spin, disoriented as to what is going on?

There are two ways I think to understand what Jesus said to Peter (Get behind me Satan). The first is that anyone who gets between Jesus and the Cross is Satan; or put another way, Satan is always trying to get between Jesus and the Cross. Why? So that we do not associate Jesus with the Cross, but instead think of Him in other ways, as a different kind of Messiah that He is: such as a teacher of wisdom; or as someone who speaks truth to power; or a someone one wrongs social injustice; as someone who votes for a particular political party or candidate; and on and on. To take the Cross out of the life of Christ is to remove His identity as the Crucified One, He who offered Himself for us, He Whose strength is perfected in weakness, as Jesus told Saint Paul.

Another way to understand what Jesus said to Peter is that Jesus wanted to call his disciples’ attention to the teaching which followed. Our Lord said, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” And Jesus added, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life?” Certainly the disciples remembered this teaching, for it was recorded by Saint Matthew. Certainly they themselves ruminated on its meaning.

What is our Lord after with this teaching? He is certainly aiming to describe what it means to follow Him; therefore what it means to be a disciple, to truly be a Christian person. A great voice of the early centuries of Christianity, the church father Saint Basil the Great who lived in the 300s and was the most prominent voice as the Church became legal under Emperor Constantine, summarized what our Lord desires Christians to be. His teaching included: as disciples of Christ, who pattern themselves on what they see and hear from Jesus; as sheep of Christ, who hearken only to the voice of their shepherd and follow Him; as cuttings grafted onto Christ; as a bride of Christ, being content with the desires of the Bridegroom alone; as holy temples of God, filled only with was is conducive to worship, and, lastly for now, as a sacrifice to God, blameless and unblemished, preserving in all our limbs and members the health of godly piety.

That last one really tells the whole story: Christ desires Christians to be as a sacrifice to God. Hence Saint Paul’s teaching to the Church in Rome: “I appeal to you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” The importance of Paul’s teaching is seen both that it takes up over three chapters of his epistle to the Romans, and that it found an important place in Anglican liturgy, during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, when the Priest says on behalf of all gathered: “And here we offer and present unto Thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto Thee.” To offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, even to live sacrificially, is at the beating heart of Christianity.

Christ draws us to His state, because He is the perpetual sacrifice and the one who perpetually sacrifices. He does not sacrifice us as objects; rather, He draws us as subjects to self-sacrifice, to an active and lasting self-offering, which makes us share in His sacrificial state, His sacrificial existence. By sharing in His sacrifice, we partake not only of the sacrifice but also we partake of Him Who offers it. We thereby become not just sacrifices but also part of Him who sacrifices. All so that our very person is in a sacrifical state, a state of voluntary self-offering, of active surrendering to God and to God in our fellow human beings—that in all things we may living exclusively according to His will.

Dear brothers and sisters, to speak bluntly but truthfully: to not seek to live this way blocks the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in our parish. Yet on the other hand, to seek to live this way, to yearn to life this way—to seek to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice which participates in Christ’s full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice which He is always offering—to seek to live this way is the true Christian desire, because through it we become by grace a new creation, able to walk in the newness of life. In this is our spiritual worship; by this comes the transformation by the renewal of our mind; and because of this the Holy Spirit can His appeal to the world, we becoming true agents of grace upon a world that so badly needs the light of Christ. Amen.

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[Note: the audio recording above will vary in places from the prepared text below.]

Saint Peter’s confession is what we hear today in the Gospel, and I will endeavor in my preaching to also discuss the Christian doctrine of justification by faith.

First to Peter’s confession and our Gospel passage. Jesus asks all the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” And it is Peter who speaks up. Peter says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” These are words taken up in the ancient prayer of the Church called the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me.” Yet it is worth asking, what kind of words are these, as said by Peter? Does he mean them sincerely? Are these words just words, that he happened to come upon? Is Peter repeating words he heard someone else say, some other disciple? Does Peter really believe them? What is going on here?

Our Lord tells us what is going on here, in His response to Peter. Jesus says, “Blessed are you, Simon. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father Who is in heaven.” And so it is our Lord Who affirms for us that Peter’s words are glorious. They are glorious, meaning his words are not accidental, not pretending, not insincere or counterfeit. Peter is not trying to please the Teacher so as to be in the teacher’s good graces and be recognized as the best student. Peter really believes them, even if Peter himself does not know how he came to this view of Jesus.

What is going on is that Peter at this moment has received the power of the Holy Spirit, and received Him in such a way to perceive Christ in His divinity, as the Son of the Living God, that is, the Son of the Father. Peter’s words are so glorious, so full of grace, that Jesus in fact renames him, and gives him the name Peter, which in Greek is “Cephus,” a word that means rock. And Jesus goes on to say “On this rock I will build My Church.” Faith in Christ is what the Church is founded upon. And because we also know that the Holy Spirit establishes the Church, we therefore can consider that to speak about Faith, is another way of speaking about possessing the Holy Spirit in His power. And this makes the matter of Faith a very exciting one.

To have faith or to not have faith, is not a matter of saying or not saying certain words, nor is faith about feeling one way and not another. As Saint Paul teaches, “Faith comes from what is heard” (Rom 10:17). And Paul is referring to what we hear in the proclamation of the Gospel. And what we hear in the Gospel are the words of life–indeed, words that reveal life, the true life, which is Jesus Christ and life in Him. When we truly hear the Gospel proclaimed, the words become full of grace by the Holy Spirit working upon us and bearing Christ to us. This is why Paul teaches, “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6). And so, what we hear, when it is of God, is life made life by the Holy Spirit, and such life gives faith and builds faith, and this faith is faith entirely because of the Holy Spirit acting upon us.

This points to an important topic in Christian doctrine, but one often misunderstood: justification by faith. Again, Saint Paul teaches us on this. In Romans Paul writes, “We conclude that a man is justified by faith.” To be justified in the vocabulary of the New Testament is to be declared as righteous in the eyes of God. And to be righteous means to be able to be free from sin. The capacity to be free from sin (righteousness) we receive by faith. And faith, as we have seen, means possessing the power of the Holy Spirit. And so the capacity to be free from sin we receive as we possess the power of the Holy Spirit in our heart and in our mind.

By Faith–which justifies us, that is, makes us capable of being free from sin which is righteousness–we are truly able to live in wonder of God, live in awe of God, live in trembling of God.

And this is what the Church is founded upon. By this the Church is established: Faith–the Holy Spirit active in human hearts and minds; Faith–which justifies us, which declares us in the eyes of God to be righteous, which declares us in the eyes of God to be given the capacity to be free from sin. The capacity to be free from sin means the capacity to become more and more like Christ; the capacity to conceive the holy Jesus in our heart; the capacity to bear Him in our mind, and the capacity by grace to grow up to the fullness of the stature of Christ, even to be perfect in Christ Jesus. This is why Saint Peter’s words are so glorious: they show the power of faith, and they show that to say we have faith, means the Holy Spirit is working His power upon us, in us, and through us.

Dear brothers and sisters, let us understand the importance of faith. Faith–because through it we are justified because we are given the capacity to be free from sin; faith means we are able to become Saints, which is the only true goal of Christian life. Faith means the power of the Holy Spirit is filling us, forming us, purging us of our sins, releasing us from our passions (our bad habits, our spiritual addictions), illuminating our heart and purifying our mind. Faith means we are able more and more to say with Saint Paul, “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways!” By Faith–which justifies us, that is, makes us capable of being free from sin which is righteousness–we are truly able to live in wonder of God, live in awe of God, live in trembling of God. And we are able to say with Peter and countless saintly Christians: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy upon me.” Able to give thanks to God with our whole heart, saying the Jesus Prayer of the Heart: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy upon me” knowing that Saint Peter from heaven smiles at each recitation of the Jesus Prayer, knowing that through Christ’s mercy, we are being transformed as he was: made able by grace to behold the Christ no longer dimly as through a dark glass, but face to face: transfigured, and unspeakably glorious. Amen.

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It is a common approach to preaching to begin the sermon with a joke. Share something of humor, the thinking goes, to break down the wall between preacher and listeners. And there is biblical precedence for doing so. Saint Peter, in really what is the first Christian sermon, on the Day of Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Ghost to the 120 apostles and all Jerusalem, apparently fairly early in the day, got up, grabbed the mic, and in response to criticisms he heard from the crowd, that the disciples, apparently having become full of the Holy Spirit, seem full of something else, namely new wine, responded to the crowd by saying, “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. For these men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day – meaning it was nine o’clock in the morning – they are not drunk, he said, because it is only 9 am. “But give them some time,” he seemed to be saying by way of a joke, “perhaps by 3 this afternoon, you may have a point!” he seemed to say.

Well, I do not have a joke like that. But I am going to begin my preaching with something that is a joke. But I mean “joke” in a different sense, the sense of “that is pathetic, that is a joke.” And what this joke is has to do with our Gospel passage. I mentioned several Sundays ago that when preaching on the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds that there are weed parishes within the Anglican communion, and we are, if you talk our Lord’s parable in this way and His teaching seriously, to not try to pull up any weeds, but to leave that to the angels at the end of days. This I bring up because there is a way of interpreting today’s Gospel passage about the Canaanite woman that holds this moment captured by both Saint Matthew and Saint Mark whereby Jesus is sexist and prejudiced against non Jews and is taught by the Canaanite woman to be more inclusive in his thinking, more equitable towards women, and less prejudiced against foreigners.

To call that sort of interpretation a joke is in fact being quite charitable. To be clear, that interpretation is wrong, and it is so wrong as to be heretical; that is, it reflects heresy. Calling Jesus a big fan of the Chicago Bears is wrong because everyone knows Jesus roots for the Green Bay Packers; but that is just wrong, not heresy. Saying Jesus, Our Lord, Our Saviour, the Eternal Word of the Father, Who sits at the Right Hand of God someone who needed to be taught not to be sexist, not to be prejudiced, even not to be racist, is heresy, in no uncertain terms. Christ is fully God, fully man; like us in His humanity in all ways save for sin, and through Him all things are made. So, something else entirely is going on than such a heretical, pathetic interpretation would imply.

What is going on, then? It is that Jesus is using this encounter with a gentile woman to reveal to His disciples about the universality of the Gospel. Jewish tradition held that Israel was God’s chosen people, which is true. Yet while Israel was God’s chosen people, part of their being chosen is that through Israel the Savior, the Christ would be revealed. This Christ, Jesus, would be the glory of God’s people Israel, but also the Light to lighten the Gentiles.

How does this work, in our Gospel passage? Notice the faith on the part of the Canaanite woman: she said, “Have mercy of me, O Lord, Son of David.” That is quite a confession of belief in who Jesus is. Jesus acknowledged how extraordinary her faith was: “O woman, great is your faith!” What then with the ways Jesus spoke to her? Jesus saw a teaching moment, to teach his disciples, who wanted Jesus to send her away. Why would then want her to do so? Because their view that only the children of Israel would enjoy the fruits of the Messiah, and that the Messiah would not be a spiritual savior but a military savior. When Jesus says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” He is parroting back to His disciples their view of the Messiah, their inaccurate view of being a military savior. Jesus continues to see the simple faith of the Canaanite woman, undeterred, for she says, “Lord, help me.” Again, such great faith! And our Lord’s response is of the same variety as His previous statement: “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” again, not the view of Jesus, but in effect the view of the children of Israel, and probably lingering at least in the minds of the disciples.

All throughout this encounter, Jesus wanted to celebrate faith in Him as a Savior of souls. And He wants our faith in Him to be clear, to be strong, to be solid, and to be simple. And so let us be inspired by the Canaanite woman and her faith. Let us say with her “Have mercy on me,” which is a form of the Jesus Prayer of the Heart: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” Let us ask Our Lord for His help, which is the same as His mercy. Let us be persistent even if those around us mock us for our simple, solid, strong, and clear faith in Christ. And let us always know, and always remember, that Jesus is the same Lord Whose property is always to have mercy. And ask Him to give what He most earnestly desires to share: Himself. Amen.

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In the Sundays prior to the Transfiguration, we heard a number of Our Lord Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of heaven. Being that the Kingdom of Heaven (or Kingdom of God) is our Lord’s way of referring to the Holy Spirit, the parables of Jesus about the Kingdom of Heaven or Kingdom of God are poetic narratives that describe what it is like to experience the Holy Spirit and to know how He works in the world. Now, in our Gospel passage today, we do not hear our Lord describe a parable, in the way we heard the parable of the sower, the parable of the wheat and weeds, the parable of the treasure in a field, the parable of the pearl of great price, and the rest. But what we do hear in S. Matthew’s gospel account, wherein the raging winds are against the disciples on a boat, our Lord’s walking on the sea, and the ceasing of the winds, is a parable of a different sort. In order to explain how Matthew’s story is a different sort of parable, let me first say something about parables in general, and specifically, the word parable in scripture.

Parables are simple stories used by Jesus to make a comparison between something heavenly and something earthly and material. The kingdom of heaven is heavenly; the sowing of seeds is earthly. The sowing of seeds is used in comparison to the Kingdom of Heaven, or as I said, the experience of the Holy Spirit and how He works in the world. And the same goes for all the parables of the Kingdom. Earthly and materials things or episodes are used in comparison as a simile to convey deeper, spiritual truth.

The word “parable” comes from the Greek translation of a Hebrew word, mâshâl, and it means “likeness”. And the first instance of mâshâl in Scripture comes in the Book of Genesis, the first chapter, verse 26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’.” And so human beings, male and female, are created in the image of God after God’s likeness. After God’s mâshâl. We are made to be parables of God, each man or woman every created. Human beings are created to be, in other words, living parables. In our material existence, indeed made of earth (of dust), we are as living parables to convey deeper, spiritual truth, and to do so poetically, as parables are poetic. We are all created to be embodied parables.

We are made to be parables of God, each man or woman every created. Human beings are created to be, in other words, living parables.

And so if we return to considering the Gospel passage, our Lord is using the waters of the sea, the wind, and a boat to convey the spiritual truth of His power and His mighty. He has put Himself into a parable of the raging waters. He is embodying a parable in His desire to convey why our faith in Him should be strong. And not only is our Lord Jesus using earthly, material things in this parable He is embodying, but He is also using scripture. I say that because this episode has direct reference to the Psalms. In the tenth verse of the 89th Psalm, we read, “Thou rulest the raging of the sea; thou stillest the waves thereof when they arise.” And in the 107th Psalm, we have a longer passage, verses 25-29: “For at his word the stormy wind ariseth, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep; their soul melteth away because of the trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end. So when they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, he delivereth them out of their distress. For he maketh the storm to cease, * so that the waves thereof are still.” Those verses summarize most if not all of our Gospel passage today from S. Matthew!

And that fact points to why Jesus chose this specific place to reveal His power: meaning, why Jesus chose a sea with raging waves because of high winds. By telling them to “Take heart, it is I; have no fear” and by pulling Saint Peter up as he was beginning to sink – another moment which refers to the Psalms, here the 69th Psalm, verse 1: “Save me, O God; * for the waters are come in, even unto my soul” – Our Lord can even more effectively teach of His power to save, His power to comfort, and thus the necessity of having faith in Him, because now He has shown that the Psalms themselves are a likeness to Him; that the Psalms themselves are parables of Jesus, are poetic narratives about life in the Holy Spirit and intimacy with Christ, is what the Psalms are.

Christ wants us to read the Psalms; He wants us to dig by prayer into them, and drink deeply of their healing mercy. He knows life can be tough, life can be a challenge, life sometimes puts us on our belly, as if we were in the belly of a whale. He wants us to read the Psalms that we are equipped to handle life’s challenges; so that when the waters are come in, even unto our soul, even up to our neck, we will know that Christ is there for us and with us, to pull us up. As we say with S. Peter, “Lord, save me,” we know in the Psalms we can always find Christ who hears us, Christ who loves us, Christ who saves us. That when we call to Him in distress, sinking in the waters, we know that Jesus sits above the water-flood; and by calling to Him, He shall give strength unto us, and give us the blessing of peace. Amen.

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[Note: the audio recording above will vary in places from the prepared text below. Also, much of the substance of this homily in indebted to Aidan Hart and his insights on the Transfiguration from his book, FESTAL ICONS.]

The Transfiguration of Jesus was certainly an event that left an indelible mark upon Ss Peter, James, and John. With respect to S. Peter, in addition to what we heard in our Epistle reading, he wrote about the Transfiguration later in his Second Epistle. He wrote: “Christ’s divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence, by which He has granted to us His precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passions, and become partakers of the divine Nature.”

Peter teaches the Church that as we are able to escape from the corruption in our heart which happens because of “passions” (this a technical, biblical word which means bad spiritual habits, and our ungodly addictions) – that as we are able to escape from our bad spiritual habits and addictions, we are able to become partakers of the divine Nature: we are able to participate in the fullness of Jesus Christ, the fullness of both His humanity and His divinity. Peter knows this because He along with James and John were eyewitnesses of Christ’s majesty, in prayer with Christ as they climbed the mountain, in prayer with Christ as they beheld His appearance revealed as dazzling white and accompanied now by Moses and Elijah, in prayer with Christ as they heard the voice of Majestic Glory name Christ as the Father’s Son, and in prayer with Christ in the descent down the mountain. When we are able to overcome our passions, partaking of the divine nature becomes our reality as it became reality for these three Saints.

And what is transfigured, is us: our eyes transfigured to behold the truth. The blinding light of Christ was always part of Christ’s nature, always of Him. During most of His time in human flesh, Christ’s blinding divine light was hidden within His humanity. Christ instead wanted His words to speak for themselves and for people to follow the truth because it was the truth. Instead of blinding light, Jesus used other means to draw people to Himself: acts of love, miracles of healing, the wisdom of His words and teaching, His forgiveness and forbearance that released people from bondage. Yet underneath it all, and always underneath it all, from His Conception and Nativity through His Resurrection and Ascension, is His blinding light, the light that shone upon the face of Moses on another holy mountain, this light is part of the essence of Christ, His essence which is divine: invisible to the eyes of the flesh, gloriously illuminating to the eyes of the heart.

While I have preached previously about how the four parts of the Transfiguration (the ascent, the dazzling light, Christ alone, and descent) are recapitulated in the four parts of the Mass (Entrance Rite, Liturgy of the Word, Liturgy of the Eucharist, and Concluding Rite), I want to reflect today on the mountain specifically the climbing of the mountain by the three disciples with Christ. What is the theological significance of this? Christ could have revealed Himself anywhere; but He chose a mountain for His transfiguration. And He made the disciples climb the mountain, rather than putting them on some kind of “divine elevator” to whoosh them to the top in a moment. He did not do that; rather, He made them climb up and climb down. Why?

I see three intentions. Firstly, to teach the importance of human effort in the Christian life. As revelation was given to Moses after his effort in climbing the mountain, and likewise to Peter, James, and John, participation in the fullness of Christ requires each individual’s active effort in his or her relationship with God. The Father has already accomplished in Christ what all people are invited to become. Fulfillment only awaits each person’s “Amen,” that is, their freely willed participation: freely willing effort. We say our Amen through the sacramental and communal life of the Church, including what the Church calls “asceticism;” the effort to overcome our passions (bad habits and addictions) and thereby regain the likeness of God given to Adam and Eve but which is defaced through sin. We say our Amen as our lives become more of a cooperation with grace, and cooperation with the life of virtue given in Christ. We work on ourselves, to replace passions with virtues so as to cleanse our heart and allow us to see.

Secondly, to teach that following Christ must be what is most important in our life. If we are trying to climb a mountain, and we are not focused on the mountain, we will not make it to the top; likewise, if we desire to partake of the divine nature, but we do not make Christ our number one in life, a full partaking of the divine nature will not happen. This also bespeaks the very personal nature of true knowledge of Christ. The fullness of Him is only experienced in the heart; this is why all God wants is the human heart. As when a mountain is climbed, all else tends to disappear, so it must be with God if we seek true relationship with Him through Christ; through offering our heart as living sacrifice.

Finally, Christ’s intention with the mountain is to emphasize that in this life, we cannot remain on the mountain forever. In this life, the mountain must be descended. Partaking of the fullness of Christ demands returning to the world of darkness and sin – descending just as we are dismissed from Mass to God and blessed the Lord through our words and deeds. We are to return full of light. Our faces are to shine with the glory of God as we are in the world, that the Holy Spirit may shine through us and light up the world of darkness and sin with the glory of Jesus Christ. But unlike Moses, who veiled his face when he was among the crowd, we are to live with our faces unveiled, our faces being faces of love, of compassion, of humility, of attention: faces of increasing virtue that not only allow the Holy Spirit to robustly dwell in us, but accept God’s invitation to be ambassadors for Christ: that God makes His appeal through us to the world: that we in this parish church may each Sunday descend the mountain after Mass to bless the Lord in our words and deeds so that we, being ourselves eyewitnesses as well of Christ’s majesty mighty boldly and authentically proclaim unto the world that Jesus Christ is truly the brightness of the Father. Amen.

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[Note: the audio recording above will vary in places from the prepared text below.]

How the Holy Spirit actually works upon the Church and upon disciples of Christ is a major question. It is a point of disagreement, for example, between wheat and weed parishes; that is, between orthodox and heterodox Christian communities. It is a common thing to hear from those advocating changes to doctrine that “The Holy Spirit is doing a new thing.” But is He? What seems clear is that in order to receive the power of the Holy Spirit, we need to know how the Holy Spirit gives His power, so that we are able to distinguish His power from the power of the Devil, within the Christian life.

I will be continuing with the line of interpretation I have been following for the previous two Sundays: interpreting the parable of the sower and the parable of the wheat and tares from the perspective of a parish. They are usually interpreted as applying to individual souls; yet as I have pointed out, Scripture gives us license to interpret the one as signifying the many: for we are one body in Christ, and in this parish, and any parish in the sacramental tradition of Christianity, we are all one. And, so, the Holy Spirit seeks to give HIs power upon the heart of a parish.

Today’s preaching begins by sharing with you a key. A key opens a lock; a key opens a door; a key gets you into a house, into a mansion; a key gets you into a private field or property that, without the key, you would never know about. And the key is this: when Jesus is speaking about the Kingdom of Heaven and about the Kingdom of God, He is speaking about the Holy Spirit. And the correspondence really is that one to one.

We get this from teaching from Our Lord Jesus and from the Apostle Paul. Jesus teaches (in Luke 17:21) that “The kingdom of God is within you.” And Saint Paul teaches (in 1 Cor 6:19) that “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God.” Putting these teachings together, we have the Kingdom of God (of heaven) is within you, and this Kingdom is the Holy Spirit. This is attested elsewhere Scripture, such as in Job 33:4 “The spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life”; in Psalm 104: “When thou lettest Thy breath (Thy Spirit) go forth, they shall be made.” Many other verses could be cited; but what we have from Jesus and Paul are plenty.

And so this is a key to understanding what all of these parables are fundamentally about. We have the parables of the mustard seed, of leaven, of the treasure in a field, of the pearl of great price, and of a net. These five parables appear to be about five different things. But that is not the case. Note how Our Lord Jesus introduces each of the parables: He says, “The kingdom of heaven is like …” And so with the key, we know that the five parables are all descriptions or images of the Holy Spirit: descriptions about what life in the Holy Spirit is like; images of what it means to experience the Holy Spirit, and how we can have a sense of His presence and His activity.

Firstly we have the experience of the Holy Spirit as like a grain of mustard seed. The Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father through the Son, Who fills all things with His blessing, Who is beyond time and space, makes Himself known as like a mustard seed: personal, small-scale, almost private, almost our very own: and at the scale of any parish: whether a parish consecrated yesterday or one centuries old, and no matter how large or small their average Sunday attendance. And as a mustard seed slowly grows into a tree, the Holy Spirit slowly grows in a parish such that within the heart of a parish grows the Tree of Life, which bears fruit of ever-lasting life: namely, the Sacraments, which feed us with heavenly grace.

We have the experience of the Holy Spirit as leaven. And so, again, the Holy Spirit works slowly, almost invisibly in a parish, to bring forth life. As leaven transforms a bowl of water, salt, and flour into dough ready to become bread, the Holy Spirit transforms a group of people into the Body of Christ, into He Who calls Himself the Heavenly Bread, for as Saint Paul wrote to the Ephesians, we are being transformed “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” – the fullness of Bread.

What is more, the experience of life in the Holy Spirit is true treasure. The Holy Spirit is treasure found in a field when we are not looking for it, not searching for it, but the treasure finds us. And the Holy Spirit is treasure as a pearl that can be found by those looking for Him, those who are searching for truth. In either case, we are to treat what we have of the Holy Spirit as treasure more valuable than anything in the world.

Finally, our Lord Jesus tells us that the life of the Holy Spirit is as a net thrown into the sea to gather fish of every kind. The Holy Spirit, in other words, is for all people. God shows no partiality, and the Holy Spirit does not discriminate between persons based on social, economic status, origin of birth, old, young, man, woman, skin color, or level of intelligence. A parish truly in possession of the Holy Spirit is group of people that could come together in no other way except by God, except by the Holy Spirit drawing people in from diverse backgrounds, that by common prayer and the grace of God, we can understand each other beyond any differences born of flesh, that is, born of the world — because we are born of the Spirit.

My dear brothers and sisters, all parables are intended by our Lord for deeply thinking about, and for prayer. Parables are for contemplation, that the mysteries hidden since the foundation of the world may be revealed through them. And these parables He gives that we know what the experience of the Holy Spirit is like, and how He works: in small, personal ways of growth and transformation, as a treasure that we find and which finds us, and that His power is available to all members of a parish. He gives us these parables of the Holy Spirit, that we know how to discern the power of the Holy Spirit from that of the Devil: all to draw us into wonder, into awe, into trembling – in other words, into Holy Fear. Knowing the key to these parables, may God’s Kingdom come, and continue to come upon his parish richly. Amen.

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[Note: the audio recording above will vary in places from the prepared text below.]

Last Sunday I offered up a reading of the Parable of the Sower in which the various surfaces upon which seed was sowed were interpreted as four different kinds of parishes, or more specifically, four kinds of commitments a parish can have. I spoke of path parishes, rocky ground parishes, thorn parishes, and good soil parishes. As I explained last week, the basis for this way of thinking can be found for example in Isaiah 29, in which the Lord speaks and says, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” So, one heart for all the people; one heart for many souls, understood together; or, in short, one heart for a parish. Another example is that “Israel” refers to both one man (Jacob, renamed by an Angel to Israel) as well as to a whole nation at once. We are, in S. Paul’s words, one body.

Where this all got to in my preaching was this, taken from my conclusion: “Let us ask God for His help to do the work He wants us to do: work that bears fruit. Let us ask God to assist this parish to be good soil. Let us ask God to turn the presence of the Holy Spirit in our parish into His power in us, and through us into the world. Let us ask God to help us be the good soil that hears the Word and understands it. Let us be the good soil which bears spiritual fruit – thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold. Let us continually ask God to bestow upon our parish church of Saint Paul the manifold gifts of the Holy Spirit, that our heart being illumined by Christ’s truth, and our mind purified by Christ’s presence, this parish may day by day be strengthened with the power of the Holy Spirit inwardly in our souls.”

Let me emphasize that I very much believe this parish to be good soil. I believe God called me and my family to this parish in part for that reason. I also think every good soil parish – ours or any other – must have constant vigilance to prevent falling back into a thorn parish; which, as I defined last Sunday is usually an older parish, that despite its commitment to Jesus Christ the Eternal Word of God, does tend to give disproportionate emphasis in the parish to finances and being not too far away from the norms of regular society, such as being too close to a Christian social club. Every good soil parish faces these sorts of temptations, so constant vigilance on the part of the Rector and ministerial leaders of the church are required, so that the soil of the parish remains a bed for deepening spirituality on the part of the church members, that such a parish always is focused on God, and seeks deeper relationship with Him through the Holy Spirit.

All of this carries forth into our Lord’s parable today, in which the kingdom of heaven is compared to a man (that is, Jesus Christ) who sows good seeds (that is, sons of the Kingdom) in His field, but while the men were sleeping (that is, not having constant vigilance) the Devil sowed weeds in the field. Again I want us to consider this from the perspective of parishes, and thus let us interpret “wheat” as orthodox parishes, and the weeds sown by the Devil as heterodox parishes (in which “orthodox” means right belief and right worship in doctrine and life; and “heterodox” means parish’s theology, doctrine, and values being at odds with, and often quite different from, historical Christian witness held everywhere and in all places).

And here is where I will say that my sermon might get spicy. For those who pay attention even to the Episcopal Church, as well as the Church of England, it is not hard to see the battles about doctrine that have been raging in the Anglican world for the last fifty or sixty years: battles about the doctrine of Holy Orders, of Matrimony, of human sexuality, of the nature of when human life begins, and of late, intersections of sexuality and ideas about gender. Speaking as one of the Episcopal priests who is decidedly orthodox on all those issues (and I am hardly a lone voice, I am happy to say), we very much look at the Anglican world and see the Anglican field of Christ’s sowing to be one mixed with wheat and weeds: that is, wheat parishes and weed parishes. Why the Anglican field has been so vulnerable to the devil and his weedy seed is a very good question, but one to reflect upon another time. I will say that in seminary we often heard professors say, about the Anglican world, “We are living in tension,” that is, the tension between wheat and weed, between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and while it grew tiresome to hear so often, it does speak to our current situation decently well.

The question therefore that servants ask the Sower is one topical for orthodox Anglicans: “Do you want us to go and gather the weeds?” And Our Lord’s answer is: “No; lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat with them.” The wheat and the weeds are too bound up together for it to be prudent to try to separate them too soon. Christ says, leave it to the reapers, meaning the angels, who will gather up the weeds at the end of the age. Put another way, Jesus is saying: what is of God, will endure; what is not of God will not endure. Parishes that are wheat and in good soil** [see note below] such parishes are truly of God, and will endure because God is empowering its every breath.

Let us, dear brothers and sisters, be chastened by our Lord’s teaching that parishes that are heterodox in their life, and who do not turn their ship around (which can sometimes happen!), so to speak, will endure weeping and gnashing their teeth, in Christ’s words (and it sounds much worse than that, even). Let us be chastened in our constant vigilance to stay in all things Holy Spirit-centered, Christ-centered, and Almighty Father-centered — rooted, to quote from the Epistle of S. Jude, to the faith once for all delivered to the Saints. Let us hold fast to our orthodox foundation amid the mixed field of the Anglican world. Let us here at the Church of Saint Paul in New Smyrna Beach, be an example to the Anglican world of robust Christian life, that through our obedience, commitment, and focus on Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit might use our parish as a light to other parishes, and encouragement to them to be strong and faithful: to be wheat ever shining like the sun in the Kingdom of the Father. Amen.

** “Wheat in good soil” summarizes the following characteristics and habits happening in the totality of a parish: God-centered, orthodox in theology, a prayerful community of intercessory prayer, prayer with Psalms and Scripture, regular examination of conscience to detect sinful patterns of life, a robust devotion to the Saints and their witness to Jesus Christ in their lives, a parish able to sit quietly and focus on Christ, and prayer through the full liturgy of the Church, both Mass and Office: a parish in which the Holy Spirit lives and moves and has His being.

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In Isaiah 29, thus says the Lord: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” This again teaches us something fundamental about Christianity: All God wants is the human heart. He wants the hearts of individuals, and He wants the heart of a whole people, a whole community. God also wants, in other words, the heart of a parish. And it is in this sense of the heart of a parish that I will use to reflect upon the Parable of the Sower.

God sends His Holy Spirit to transform heart of a parish, to make it into good soil. It takes time for the heart to be transformed from life in the flesh to life in the Spirit; it takes time to transform even regular soil, so how much more so the human heart? Back in our former parish, we befriended a farmer, and he told me it takes at least seven years to make regular, industrial-farmed soil into the kind of soil that produces organic vegetables. Putting that time in is what it means to be a farmer, he told me. It is work, but the best kind: for it yields fruit.

The Parable of the Sower is all about this. It is all about the transformation of barren ground into soil; that is, into a true heart. The Parable of the Sower presents Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, and us as a parish cryptically. Neither Persons of God are named in the parable, and neither are we, but to make the connections is not that difficult. The sower that went out to sow is Jesus Christ; and what the sower sowed is the Holy Spirit. This matches with what Saint John recorded our Lord teaching in John 15:26: “When the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness to me.” The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, through Christ Who sends the Holy Spirit upon human souls. The Holy Spirit bears witness to Christ – His power is the means by which we are able to hear the Word of God who is Christ.

As to us, we as a parish are named numerously in the Parable. We are named in the sense of what our parish might be, given our faith, and given how much this parish embraces Baptism, which gives us the presence of the Holy Spirit, and the potential for His power.

A parish might be the path. What is the path? Those parishes that are the path have at most a vague understanding of Jesus Christ at all, and ideas they have may be false ideas. The actual Jesus Christ is He who is known only through the opening of Scripture and Breaking of Bread. And so a “path parish” knowing hardly anything of the true Christ, the birds (that is the Devil and his minions) snatches away the seed – that is, snatch away the Holy Spirit, Who fills and blesses all things – so that a parish will not come upon these holy seeds and become enlightened.

If a parish is not the path, then a parish might be rocky ground. What is a rocky ground parish? It is a parish which is at the beginning of true discipleship of Christ. The sword of the Spirit has begun to pierce what was mere path and break open the path into rocks, so as to receive the Holy Spirit. Such parishes do receive feelings of joy and consolation upon hearing the Word proclaimed and perhaps in the Eucharist. They have Mass and are quite happy for the fellowship. But because, as our Lord taught, that parish has no root (meaning, no discipline of prayer, no habit of prayer, and no habit of fostering a quiet mind, which I will return to below) and when society, the world of the flesh, presses its values upon the rocky path parish, the parish chooses worldly values instead of godly ones. This may be a real parish but there is as of yet no deep Christian identity. Much work remains to do.

If not rocky ground, a parish might be thorns. What is a thorn parish? A thorn parish is one that does have deeper experience in church life and perhaps has been around a long time. The Sword of the Spirit has broken open this parish’s heart (perhaps a decade or two ago perhaps through the work of a rector long ago), and in the parish are disciplines of devout attendance of church as well as Christian service and giving, and intercessory prayer for others. But what has not developed in the parish are thoroughly Christian disciplines which I alluded to above: disciplines of regular prayer with the psalms, daily reading of Scripture, of examination of conscience, of devotion to the Saints, the daily Offices: and all with a quiet mind whereby the whole parish can sit in silent adoration of God: silent awe and wonder of God, that takes one’s breath away. Thorn parishes have a life ordered by the Eternal Word of God; but also tend to give disproportionate emphasis in the parish to finances and being in tune with society. Money and society are inevitable aspects of Christian life; but disproportionate focus on them will crowd out deeper engagement and participation in the grace Christ freely offers to those parishes that yearn for Him above all else; those parishes that are unapologetically God-centered.

And this takes us to good soil parishes. Those parishes that are good soil make the Cross the center of their existence, are seeking to be better disciples (that is, students) of Christ, and have taken up Christian disciplines mentioned above out of their love of God and desire for ever-deeper relationship with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Regularly praying with Psalms; sacred reading of Scripture, regularly examination of conscience to detect sinful patterns of life, a deep devotion to the Saints and their witness to Jesus Christ in their lives, the desire to sit quietly and focus on Christ, praying the full liturgy of the Church which means Matins and Evensong: Good soil is a parish alike in every way possible to the Upper Room Church of Jerusalem.

Dear brothers and sisters, let us ask God for His help to do the work He wants us to do: work that bears fruit. Let us ask God to assist us to become good soil. Let us ask God to turn the presence of the Holy Spirit in our parish into His power in and through us. Let us ask God to help us be the good soil that hears the Word and understands it. Let us ask God to help be the good soil which bears spiritual fruit – thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold. The Holy Spirit dwells in each one of us, through Baptism. Let us continually ask God to bestow upon our parish church of Saint Paul the manifold gifts of the Holy Spirit, that our hearts being illumined by Christ’s truth, and our minds purified by Christ’s presence, this parish may day by day be strengthened with the power of the Holy Spirit inwardly in our souls, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Our Lord’s invitation to us today is so compelling and inviting to hear. He says, “Come to Me, all you labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” And He says, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” These words have echoed within the Church since the beginning, in sermon by bishop and priests for nearly 2,000 years. It was these words that famously led Saint Augustine in his spiritual autobiography The Confessions to address God and write: “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in You.”

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I think that we can be assured that we are receiving the power of the Holy Spirit when we are able to rest in Christ, and in His loving arms. I think that we are receiving the power of the Holy Spirit when, in knowing that Christ is alive and that He loves us, we are able to sink into Him, sink into His being, as we might sink into our favorite piece of furniture. Our Lord is loving unto every person, and His mercy is over all His works, especially we who are His works, for as we grow in relationship with Christ through the Holy Spirit, His is working His transformation upon the eyes of our heart, away from the darkness of sin and beholding the radiance of Christ’s presence and love.

In the Book of Proverbs (15:3) we are taught that “The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good.” The Lord is ever watching us, His eyes ever upon us. There is nothing we say, do, or even think without the Lord’s knowledge. His eyes see all; His ears hear all; His mind knows all. This I think is why Our Lord invites us to rest in Christ. Doing so is the only solution to the human condition; resting in Christ is the only solution to the fact of the disordered world of human sinfulness. We are all sinners; we are all people in need of a Savior. And we know Who our Savior is, and we know His Name: Our Savior is the Son of God Who sits at His Right Hand, and His Name is Jesus. He knows we must rest in Him.

When Jesus says, “My yoke is easy, and My burden is light,” He means this in contrast to that of the world. He means this in contrast to the life of the flesh, with which Paul is wrestling in our Epistle reading. “Wretched man that I am!” says the Apostle. This recognition leads him to ask: “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” He means the body in which the body’s mind is set on things of the flesh; the body’s mind which is set on worldly things, worldly concerns, worldly goals. A mind set on the world, that is on the flesh, is death, and this is the primary (not only) definition of death in Scripture: a person who is alive physically by dead spiritually. People are dead spiritually because the main priority in their life is living according to the values of the world. This is the death that was introduced to humanity by the eating of the forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve: spiritual death, spiritual hell, which is where humanity is headed when it does not heed the commandments of God.

Compared to this — compared with spiritual death and spiritual hell — the yoke and burden of Jesus Christ is light. Or, lighter, because His yoke and burden together are a demand upon us. Christ does place demand upon His people. What is this demand?

His demand in one part is His summary of the Law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” And His demand in the other part is to repent as a way of life: that is, the way of life in which we constantly lift our heart and mind to God, turning to Him and to His light. This is the yoke: to love God with all that we are, and love God in our neighbor, and to habitually repent, habitually lift our heart and mind to God; and this the burden, the bear our Cross, to suffer for what is right, to witness in public to Christ, that He is the Savior of all.

This yoke and this burden, these are not nothing; both do make a demand upon us. But in comparison with a life spiritually dead? In comparison with a life of spiritual hell? Is there any question which we should choose? Can there be any hesitation?

And so let us, dear brothers and sisters, continue to work to set our minds not on worldly values, but on what is of God. Let us strive to live according to the Holy Spirit, in all we do, in all we say, in all we choose. Yes, Christ places a demand on us, and it is an absolute one. But from it comes abundance of life, and from it comes an abundance of peace. This is what it means, in the fullest sense, to rest in Christ: to be activated by His abundant life and peace, to show in our lives the glory of God’s kingdom and to talk of His power, that His power, His glory, and the mightiness of His kingdom, the Holy Spirit, may be known through us to all people around us. Amen.

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We hear today our Lord giving us a hard saying, and so I will spend this time reflecting on how to properly understand it. The hard saying comes at the very beginning of our Gospel passage: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” This is a difficult teaching to immediately understand; in fact it falls into the category of verses in Scripture that is called “hard sentences.” I will endeavor to explore and interpret rightly this hard sentence. And to do so, I want to bring to mind something I preached last Sunday, so as to establish the proper context to understand today’s hard sentence.

Last Sunday’s preaching focused on what it means to be a martyr. Martyr as a word is taken up from Greek into the Church vocabulary, and it means to give public witness that Jesus Christ is the only Saviour of the world. Jesus trained the Twelve to be able to give public witness that the only Saviour is Christ, that in so doing, their apostolic preaching would draw souls into deeper relationship with Christ, that they, too, would feel called to be martyrs – called to give public witness that Jesus Christ is the only Saviour. And this is the same invitation people today received from the Christian Church and the Christian proclamation: to become martyrs, to become public witnesses to Christ, and how God is present in our lives, and available to all those who call in faith upon His most Holy Name.

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Before it means anything else, martyr means witness. Of course the term has come to also mean “to give one’s lift for the cause of Christ,” and for perhaps the vast majority of Christians at least in the west, that second meaning is the only working meaning they have of “martyr.” It means both, and it means witness before it means dying.

Yet it does mean dying. So much so that the faithful formulated a doctrine early the life of the Church: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. The faith is built upon martyrs, both in terms of witness and offering of their life. Our faith can only be strengthened by learning of the many martyr stories of the Church, especially those of the early Church, in the first four centuries before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Emperor Constantine.

And we have martyrs even today: numerically, more than ever. The world still reacts strongly to the proclamation of Christ, and public confession of Him. This makes sense when we understand the world to be a fallen world, even a world under the illusory rule of the Prince of Darkness, also known as the Devil and his minions. This is also why the visible Church today, of human beings living and breathing today, is historically called the “Church Militant.” That terms reflects the battle Christians have in overcoming temptations, overcoming ungodly habits (which are called “passions”), overcoming the capital or deadly sins: pride, envy, greed, gluttony, lust, sloth, and anger. It is a battle. This life as a Christian is spiritual warfare. To the Ephesians, Saint Paul wrote that “we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

All of that is behind our Lord’s hard sentence, and is the context for understanding it. Again we heard Jesus say: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” The sword Christ brings is a heavenly sword, greater than the swords angels are said to have in Scripture; His sword is to fight the battles and war within the fallen world. He tell us He brings a sword so that we will not be troubled when we see the earth amid spiritual war. Christ has come with His sword that this battle would be won.

And the battle involves those dearest to us, even those extremely dearest to us. Of course it is a sacred duty to render to parents (and to children and siblings and relatives) honor due in terms of their human dignity. But living in a fallen world, when our parents or children or siblings or relatives demand more than what is due, not only are we not to obey, Jesus teaches; but we must hate specifically such a demand in them, because in effect such a demand is to be an idol, that is, demanding to be higher than God.

My dear brothers and sisters, in the Gospel last Sunday, Jesus said, “When they deliver you up, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” Knowing this, we are to bear our Cross in public; that is to be public witnesses to Christ in a fallen world which is the battlefield of spiritual warfare. We must put ourselves into the battle, knowing that the ultimate battle has already been won by Jesus on the Cross. Knowing that if our faith in Christ is strong, the Holy Spirit will not only give us the words to say, but the Holy Spirit will give us the strength to stand, and that He will take away our anxiety or worry. So that when we attempt to be public in our Christian belief and profession, we might be truly compelling. And that we might truly be able to affirm, the Lord is the strength of my life. And when the Lord is the strength of our life, we already know the answer to the question, of whom then shall I be afraid? If the Lord is the strength of our life, then to the question, of whom then shall I be afraid? the answer is “no one.” Amen.

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We hear today our Lord Jesus giving instruction to the Twelve about Mission. His instruction to them, here and elsewhere in the Gospel accounts, is always for a particular purpose. He has called them to the unique vocation to proclaim in words the Gospel, to proclaim in words that the One spoken of in the Scriptures (spoken of but not named) is Jesus of Nazareth: that Jesus is the suffering servant described by the prophet Isaiah; that Jesus is the Lord David was referring to in the Psalms as the Holy One of God; that this Jesus, through the foreknowledge of the Father, was delivered up to the Jews, was crucified, died, and was buried, and rose on the third day according to the Scriptures; and that this Jesus is the Messiah, the Chosen and Anointed One, that He is alive and known through the Holy Spirit, which has been poured out for all peoples, that everyone who calls upon the Name of Jesus will be saved, for in so doing they acknowledge that they are sinners in need of the Savior, whose Name is Jesus and only Jesus. It was for this purpose alone that Jesus called the Twelve and trained them.

In all of the rich teaching we hear today, I think the central point around which the rest revolves is found in three words: “Have no fear.” Have no fear, Jesus teaches, of the world that has not received the Holy Spirit and therefore does not acknowledge Jesus as the Savior. Have no fear, Jesus teaches, of the world that is as a pack of wolves. Have no fear, Jesus teaches, of these wolves flogging you in public places, of those who will hate you for the sake of Christ. Have no fear of those who seek to kill your body. Have no fear, is what is behind all of Our Lord’s words to the Twelve as captured by S. Matthew.

What Jesus is training them to be is Martyrs. And they all did become martyrs, although only 11 of them were put to death. The one that was not was Saint John the Evangelist, the beloved disciple. Yet despite not being put to death (through beheading, through being nailed to a cross like Jesus, and so forth), John is a martyr. How is that?

To explain that is to also explain the real meaning of the term “martyr.” John is a martyr like the rest because the word martyr comes from a Greek term taken up into the vocabulary of the Church, and it means to witness. It means to give public testimony of belief in Christ Crucified and Risen who is the only Savior of the human race. John gave public testimony to His belief that Christ is the Crucified and Resurrected Lord, at the Right Hand of the Father Almighty through his preaching and writing. Many of the others did the same, and many more beyond only the Twelve. To be a Christian martyr is to proclaim publicly in word and deed the Truth Who is Jesus Christ. It is to give full-hearted testimony in clear terms. It is not to have a private, personal belief in Christ only, but one that spills out into the whole of our life, into the whole of our words, actions, and the whole of our relationships.

To be a person who gives such testimony is to be a person who speaks of truth which convicts the world. To be a person who gives such testimony is to be a person who is not ashamed of the Gospel, not ashamed of Jesus Christ; but rather to be a person who understands him or her self to be a sinner – that is, a person who acknowledges oneself to need a Savior, and who knows that Savior is Jesus Christ, and that there is no other Savior, no other Mediator or Advocate to God but Jesus Christ. The Twelve were being trained to be such people, such witnesses, such martyrs: people for whom the Gospel is joy, freedom, inexhaustible inspiration, and true rest.

A fundamental part of Our Lord’s teaching to the Twelve was to assure them that they need not prepare beforehand any script or any particular words to speak. Jesus said that the Spirit of the Father would speak through them, and give them the words to say. And so we have in this another teaching how we receive the power of the Holy Spirit. Not the presence of the Holy Spirit (which comes in baptism and is generally known within all creation), but the power or fire of the Holy Spirit. To receive the power or fire of the Holy Spirit such that He gives the words to say, even to those poised on the knife-edge between life and death, comes from the strength of one’s belief that Jesus indeed is the Christ. To believe Jesus is the Christ with all our heart, all our mind, all our soul — thoroughly, without reservation, without hesitation — and to acknowledge this before people, without qualification; and to do so in a simple way, speaking about a simple Faith, not complicated with philosophical ideas or odd, mysterious secretive knowledge – but simply, joyfully, and soberly proclaiming that Jesus is the Christ. This activates the power of the Holy Spirit in us, that all we do proclaims Jesus is Lord, Jesus is alive, Jesus is the only Savior for the world. This activates the fire embodied as the words God gives us to say.

It is the gift of the apostles and their proclamation that we too can have a simple faith in God. The apostles are witnesses of the majesty of Christ; that is, martyrs of the majesty of Christ. The rest we find in Christ through the Holy Spirit comes through their teaching, their proclamation, their witness, their martyrdom. With the feast this week of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, let us give thanksgiving to God for the gift of the apostles, the gift of their apostolic witness, the gift of the apostolic martyrdom (from the Twelve and the 120 apostles) from whom we have the foundation of the apostolic Church: the New Testament writings, which along with Scripture, is the well of eternal life, from which living water flows. Saint Peter and Saint Paul, along with all the New Testament apostles: pray for us. Amen.

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Offered on the Memorial of Saint Romuald (19 June, 2019) in the Lady Chapel of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the campus of the University of Notre Dame during solemn Evensong, a service I was asked by Dr Timothy O’Malley of the McGrath Institute for Church Life to plan and lead as Cantor, as part of one of their annual summer conferences.

Romuald is a true saint for the domestic church. He was a Benedictine monk who fell asleep on this day in the year AD 1027. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, we find at one point Saint Benedict himself indicating to the pilgrim the presence of contemplatives, who are named “fires,” and these included Macarius (a desert father) and Romuald. His devotion to Christ was fueled by his many mystical experiences of God’s presence in solitude while praying the Psalms. So much so that he felt driven out of a strictly coenobitic life in Benedictine community and rather devoutly experiment with the eremitic life, so as that between the life of community and the life of a hermit in solitude and what he saw as inherent tension between the two, there might be forged a new kind of harmony. His biography was written by none other than Saint Peter Damien, holy doctor of the Church, he is the founder of the Camaldolese Order (an outgrowth of the Order of Saint Benedict), and Romuald left us a Brief Rule that I think might be seen as a “How to Get Started” chapter in as yet unwritten, but probably never to be written, “Operations Manual” for the domestic church. But to explain that, I first need to back up.

It was at last summer liturgy conferences that Dr O’Malley asked me to put together a plainsong Evensong in the Anglican tradition for this year’s conference. It had become known (because I use social media more than the average person) that I had been conducting an experiment in my home, based in plainsong and the daily Offices (the Anglican equivalent to the Liturgy of the Hours) – that my family (my wife and our then four daughters whom we were homeschooling) might be ready to make the leap from the short, ten-minute form of daily chant developed from my study of Anglican pastoral theologian and priest Martin Thornton that we had used for four years, into chanting Matins and Evensong (Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer) everyday. Sufficed to say, the experiment has taken. Two years in, and it has become the anchors of our family’s life, both in terms of routine but more importantly, in terms of our devotion to the Most Holy Trinity, it has spread within our parish, where we have daily Matins and Evensong in our chapel and have formed a plainsong choir in our parish (now 14 people strong) that has had three solemn Evensong services within the liturgical calendar (Eve of Michaelmas, Eve of Presentation, and Eve of Pentecost), and, we are here.

Let me report that it is mind-blowingly wild that the waves of a homeschooling experiment in Pekin, Illinois might come to shore in the Lady Chapel of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. The Providence of God is real and active, and grace has been bestowed in two ways: one, to hear His invitation to give this experiment in domestic church a try, and two, to be steady during the ups and downs of its implementation which were adventurous as most things in a family often are.

I arrived at this prayer of thanksgiving, not to boast in anything I have done, but to boast in what our loving Lord has done; and my gratitude was clarified by our two lessons of sacred scripture, as well as the example of Saint Romuald – all three of which present to the question of the domestic church the Light of Christ.

The account of Samuel’s encounter with the Lord draws our attention to the domestic environment, the unique culture of our homes. We want the environment, the ecology, of our homes to be such wherein the space of our home, and the pattern of our life in it, is one where God can be heard: like Samuel heard God, even where God calls our name, like he called Samuel’s name. Also, our passage helps us t o dispense with the need for our home life to be a perfect haven of pure devotion by all members of the family. God called Samuel despite the word of the Lord being rare in those days and no frequent vision. The only concrete description was that Samuel was sleeping in relative proximity to the Ark of God, which for us is a prefigurement of Our Lady. In his introduction to Redemptoris Mater, Joseph Ratzinger wrote that Mary’s faith means trust in God and obedience, even when one walks in darkness. Perhaps in terms of concrete practice, devotion to Our Lady within the domestic church, even one that may seem far from a space that realizes the sacred, is a sure foundation for an environment to emerge and grow in the home in which we can hear God, and is the way to begin to develop one, that our response to God’s call of us is not slothfully ignored but rather that of Samuel, “Here I am!”

It is to the characteristic of adventure in prayer that Saint Luke’s account of the parents of Jesus finding Him in the Temple when He was twelve years old draws us towards. Let us assume that the domestic church life of the Holy Family was the ideal model of sanctity, fellowship, prayer – and really, the type of the eucharistic life realized in the home. All the more reason for us to be encouraged in our family lives by the fact that even for Mary and Joseph, whose intimacy and closeness with Jesus are a permanent and inexhaustible catechesis for the Church, even for them there were moments when Jesus felt far away. This is all part of the ebb and flow of the Christian life – between consolation and desolation, between presence and absence, between real communion and desire for communion. This is the Christian adventure, and it demands heroism on the part often of parents, who are uniquely empowered by God by the grace of their marriage to help the whole family find Jesus again; and it demands native heroism on the part of children, who through their curiosity and wonder show new ways to find Jesus, to echo Samuel’s “Here I am.”

All of this would be “Saint Romuald approved,” and here I circle back to my assertion that Romuald is a true saint for the domestic church, with particular emphasis on the helpfulness of something he wrote, called his Brief Rule. First of all let us recognize that the patterns of day to day life today compared with 150 years ago are dramatically different, a primary reason for which is the technology of the automobile dramatically transforming cities, so much so that life for many of us in our homes is more like the life of Christian hermits than we might be comfortable admitting. Although we gather in social spaces of our cities and towns (I don’t think Bowling Alone is quite right as whenever I bowl, the lanes are filled with large groups of people) and of course although we gather in our parish churches, we often do not know our neighbors, or many of them, or see our fellow parishioner but once a week, if not less often. Home life, even with large families, is often analogous to the hermit’s cell – we are not divorced from wider society, but we often encounter them in in strikingly anti-incarnational ways on social media and even the telephone, and families often “do their own thing.”

And so the first sentence of Romuald’s Brief Rule is topical. It reads, “Sit in your cell as in paradise.” We would translate, “Be in your home as in paradise,” not because we falsely think our homes are the Church Triumphant itself in microcosm, but rather “paradise” as Jesus described it to the confessing thief next to Him on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Our homes are this kind of paradise: where we work by grace through the process of everyday purification and purgation knowing that Jesus is very close with us, and has chosen to come close to us and walk with us. And that process of everyday purification – the home as paradise – is the arranging of our lives in and through the pattern of home life so as to be like Samuel, sleeping by the Ark of God, or for us, with a daily family devotion to Our Lady in the home, thereby able to hear God calling his name. That parents and children can hear God calling to them and guiding them.

Later in his Brief Rule, Romuald teaches us to “take every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart and to understand them with your mind.” He continues, “And, if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up; hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.” So yet, let us pray the Psalms in our homes. Yet there is another insight here: Just as if our mind wanders, hurry and apply it to the words again, if we lose our sense of the presence of Christ amid the ebb and flow of religious life like Mary and Joseph lost track of Jesus, let us not beat ourselves up, but go immediately and passionately to find Him. In doing so, we let ourselves be found by Him. Mary and Joseph passionately sought Jesus; let us persevere to find Him in the Psalms, or even as he taught one Psalm, because as he taught, “It is better to pray one psalm with devotion and compunction than a hundred with distraction.”

Romuald finishes his Brief Rule with these words: “Realize above all that you are in God’s presence, and stand there with the attitude of one who stands before the emperor. Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him.” Mary brings us Jesus, and so in that sense, the traditional image of the mama pelican who pecks at her breast to feel her children is also an image of Our Lady, whose own soul was also pierced with a sword, the sword of the Spirit, that her sorrow and eucharistic glory at the foot of the Cross might guide us and feed us.

Blessed Mary, Mother of God, and Saint Romuald, pray for us.

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A week before Palm Sunday, and Holy Week, we are again approaching our encounter with the Cross. We are again approaching our close encounter with the Cross of Our Lord Jesus, Him being nailed to it. As the Epistle to the Hebrews (which we heard on Ash Wednesday) continues to teach us in Lent: we are ever to look to Jesus as the pioneer and perfector of our faith; to look upon Him as He endures the Cross.

It is in this way that the purpose of Lent becomes clear: we are to understand ourselves as always in need of a Savior. Thus the purpose of Lent is to reject any way of thinking that thinks we do not need a Savior; that is, to reject any way of thinking that we are righteous. And in rejecting the temptation to think oneself as righteous (like the Pharisee), we more and more accept and joyfully celebrate that we are sinners (that is, we are people who know that we need a Savior, and know that Saviour to be Jesus Christ, and only Him). Jonah barely realized he needed a savior, and he suffered as a result; the Samaritan woman realized this decently well, and was joyous. Yet it was the Tax Collector who realized it fully, for he not only understood himself as needing a Savior who is Jesus Christ, the Tax Collector asked for God’s mercy. Thus Christ proclaimed him justified and exalted.

And so the invitation is to fall on our knees in honest and sober recognition that we are sinners, because we are completely in need of Jesus as our Savior, and in need of His mercy; and in so doing accept Our Lord’s invitation to deeper relationship with Him. This is how we run the race, and we feel the urgency of the race in the fervency of our prayer, the fervency of our asking Jesus Christ for His mercy upon us. The Gospel of Christ is that He yearns to heal us, yearns to transform us, yearns to feed us, yearns to quench our thirst. He yearns, in other words, to love us, that we feel loved by Him. It is a race of falling in love.

It is in this way that Christians become slaves of God, in the terms of Saint Paul. Because we are able to know Jesus Christ, and know Him to be our loving, merciful Savior, and because we know that He hears our prayers, that He hears our requests, that He knows our hearts, we therefore are assured that we can ask Christ for mercy anytime, and in so doing, He loves us and makes His presence known to us in that very moment: because mercy received is mercy known, and mercy known reveals mercy’s Source, Who is Christ. When Christians ask Christ for mercy, we are not speaking to empty air: Christ is present to those who ask Him for what He yearns to give in abundance. All this is our freedom, the great and awesome freedom in Christ, the free gift found by those who seek Him; opened to those who knock; received by those who ask. This is what we are given for being Christ’s servants, for being Christ’s disciples, for being members of His Body. We are given Him!

In his second epistle to the Church in Corinth, chapter 4, Saint Paul writes that Christians are to be “always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.” This too is how we are Christ’s slaves who participate in Christ’s freedom. And as we approach Holy Week in seven days’ time, it is time for us to gird our loins, for we are going to be grappling once more with the dying and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. Christ very much wants us to have His death close to our heart, which is what Paul means when he speaks of carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus. Not only His death, but the very manner of His death, is entirely for us. As Saint John records Jesus saying, “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour.” Christ willingly and completely of His obedience to the Father chose to be the grain of wheat that falls to the earth. For in His falling to the earth, the fruit of His Body which is the Church may flower, ripen, and become sweet.

As we approach Holy Week, we approach the fact that to see Jesus begins by seeing Him on the Cross. This is what He is teaching the Church in today’s Gospel passage. Let us, my dear brothers and sisters, prepare to firmly fix our hearts on our Savior nailed to the Cross, for this is where true joys are to be found; this is where freedom is found; Christ shows us what it is to be God in the way he dies as a human being. May our entering into Holy Week rest in this very truth: that Christ shows us what it is to be God in the way he dies as a human being. Amen.

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Homily offered by Father Matthew C. Dallman, Obl.S.B., for the Parish of Tazewell County on the Sunday after the Ascension, 2021.
We are taught today by Saint John the Evangelist (also known Saint John the Theologian) that God hath given us eternal life. And, he adds, this life is in His Son. This is to what Saint Paul is referring when he spoke of seeing God face to face. This is also what was described in the three synoptic Gospel accounts (Matthew, Mark, Luke) in the Transfiguration of Jesus: the three disciples on the mountain with Jesus saw Him transfigured, which is a heavenly vision of His true reality and identity (both fully man, and fully God; or put another way, completely within our conditions of time and space, and at the same time completely beyond and outside time and space conditions).
Jesus in Saint John’s gospel account so often spoke of Himself using the phrase “I am”—I am the vine; I am the good shepherd; I am way, the truth and the life; I am the bread of life, and so on; in Scripture God also is recorded to have spoken this way, such as when Moses learned that God’s name is “I am whom I am.” The gift of eternal life through Christ, the goal of which is to behold God face to face, transfigured along with Him, our own being within God’s transfigured self: the vision of God is a participation in His I Am-ness, a participation that begins really and actually in this life through the Sacraments liturgically celebrated, and continues into the next, whereby we are invited to continually grow in God’s love and service. Each eucharist we celebrate is like another rung up the ladder to our goal, the divine reality in community with the triune God. Each Eucharist we receive allows us to become what we receive more and more, that we say with Saint Paul, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live.” “Yet,” he adds, “not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
This is the mystery that the Upper Room church of 120 souls began to live into as they prayed with one accord in the sacred space Jesus appointed them to after His glorious Ascension. We are told that they prayed together with one accord—meaning, with one heart, with one central purpose, with one liturgy—and we are told that they were full of joy, indeed full of grace, for they had all taken on the heart of Mary, and begun to make her heart their heart, her heart becoming the heart of the Church: for Our Lady, Blessed Mary was with the Church in the Upper Room. And as the other 119 began to share together with Mary in the joyful recognition that Jesus is their light, Jesus is their salvation, and that the I Am-ness of Jesus is with them in the Upper Room, with them wherever two or three are gathered, with them in their heart whenever they call upon His most holy Name for mercy, with them in Holy Communion, with them through Scripture and the preaching of their brother and sister apostles (preeminently in the preaching of the Twelve)—as they began to share together in the joyful knowledge that Jesus is the Way, is the Truth, is the Life, every word of Mary (the bearer of God, or in Greek: the Theotokos) that she shared about her Son, especially the profoundly mysterious moments early in the life (the Annunciation, her Visitation with Elizabeth, the Nativity, the Presentation, and the losing and then finding of Jesus in Temple) had transfiguring power—Christ speaking through Mary—because the disciples in the Upper Room had experienced His blessed Passion and precious Death, His mighty Resurrection and glorious Ascension. The key for them to eternal life is the key for us: having in daily remembrance of the Paschal Mystery of Christ, and ordering our lives—ordering our every day—around Jesus and His most holy Name, for this is how the Church renders unto Jesus most hearty thanks for the innumerably benefits procured unto us by Him.
This unfathomable recognition, indeed the true Mystery of Christ, is summarized by Our Lord’s words in our Gospel account today: “For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.” For us, Christ showed Himself holy, that we might become holy through Him. All of what He revealed to the world during his three or four decades of human life was, and is, for our sakes—that we might be transformed, our hearts illumined and on fire, with true knowledge of Christ’s presence everywhere and in all places that, as Saint Paul taught the Church in Thessalonica, we may rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, and in every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning us.

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With the major exception of none other than Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, Who is the Eternal Word of God, and Whose Name—Jesus—is the Name above all other names, can there be any doubt that the most significant words ever spoken by a human being in the history of human existence have come from the utterance of Our Lady, Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin? Most blessed Mary is the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of the Church, and Our Lady of the Upper Room—her words, although some may say we have so few of them recorded by the Evangelists, drip with greatness, with sanctity, with humility, with wisdom. She herself who is the beginning in time of Our Lord’s works, was brought forth before mountains were settled, before the hills were made, even when Christ prepared the heavens, she was there—blessed Mary, Our Lady, is the soul of every Christian.
Mary is the soul of every Christian because her greatness consists in her absolute selfless devotion to Jesus her Son and Lord. To her cousin Saint Elizabeth at the Visitation, after her greeting (which made John Baptist in utero leap for joy, along with the heart of his mother, Elizabeth), Mary sang: “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” She was wholly devoted to the Lord. To the place of poverty she willingly went at Our Lord’s Nativity; to the place of shame she willingly went at our Lord’s Crucifixion and death; and to the place of promise in the Upper Room she willing went as one of the 120 disciples in the first Christian parish for the Coming of the Holy Spirit of her Son and Lord.
Mary is the soul of every Christian because unto a seemingly impossible vocation, she said “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word.” Facing the incomprehensible, she said Yes, according to thy will; facing the utterly paradoxical, she said Yes, according to thy will; facing the most tremendous mystery (the mystery of reality Himself), she said, “Be it unto me according to thy word.” To the opportunity to be given to the Temple at age three, as her parents Anna and Joachim had promised God, she danced (which is a Yes if there ever was a Yes); to the prospect of leaving the Temple (in which she grew up into her teenage years) into marriage to Joseph the carpenter, she said “Yes.” As she heard announced to her by Simeon at Our Lord’s Presentation “And a sword shall pierce through your own soul also,” in wonderment and courage, she said “Yes.” And to the final words of her Son on the Cross, Jesus telling her to behold her Son—words she heard from her Son, words now about her Son in a radically new way—she said “Be it unto me according to thy word,” and behold in the beloved disciple John not a resemblance to her Son, not a mere likeness to her Son, not a kinship to her Son: indeed, in John, Mary behold Jesus, her Son.
Should it surprise us at all that Mary is the soul of every Christian when within her heart from the first was her Son’s Name; within her heart from the first was the Name Jesus, the Name above all names, the Name which is a fortified tower to which the righteous run and are safe; the Name we will walk in for ever and ever; the Name which saves everyone who calls on it? Just as among the first things known to Blessed Joseph about Mary’s Son was His Name, so was it for Mary: the Angel Gabriel giving both Joseph and Mary not merely knowledge of the Son of God, but the true knowledge of Him which is His Name. Can we doubt that Mary would say His most Holy Name all the days following her most holy Annunciation? Can we doubt that each time she said His holy Name Jesus, her heart pondered the Mystery of all Mysteries, and was filled with the awe from which comes true wisdom? Can we doubt the joy she shared with Blessed Joseph, her most chaste spouse, in the Name of their Son—a joy in His Name they knew was not only theirs, but the whole of creation?
Brothers and sisters, let us be strengthened by the Name of Jesus like Mary and Joseph; let us be emboldened by the Name of Jesus like Mary and Joseph; and let us be obedient and humble to the Name of Jesus, like Mary and Joseph—that with them, we might learn to ponder and watch and keep long silences, thinking of the deep, tender things of Jesus.

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Homily offered by Father Matthew C. Dallman, Obl.S.B., for the Parish of Tazewell County on the Feast of All Saints, 2019.
If the Saints were not central to the Christian faith, and if active and living communion with them not obligatory upon all Christians, then we would not, in the baptismal creed of the Church called the “Apostles’ Creed,” proclaim a belief in the Communion of the Saints. But the fact of the matter is that we do proclaim our belief in the Communion of the Saints at our baptism. And the Church professes her belief in the Communion of the Saints every morning in Matins and every evening in Evensong. Any feast day that shows up in the creeds of the Church, or can be found by thinking about the creeds, is by definition a major feast. In the creeds, for example, we can easily find Christmas, Holy Week and Easter, Ascension, Christ the King, Pentecost—and in the Apostles' Creed we find All Saints.
This should not be surprising, because it was through a communion of Saints that the Church of Jesus Christ was born. One hundred and twenty Saints were gathered in the Upper Room, told to go there by Jesus Christ to await the promise of the Father, the Coming of the Holy Ghost. This was the first Church. Gathered in the Upper Room for nine days were Blessed Mary, whom the Church quickly saw as Mother of the Church, along with other holy women, Mary Magdalene, her sister Martha, Mary the wife of Cleopas, perhaps Peter’s mother-in-law; along of course with the Eleven men singled out by Jesus for a particular task, soon joined by Matthias taking over for Judas.
It was from and through this communion of Saints, this gathering of Saints, this fellowship of Saints—all of whom were apostles because “apostle” means someone sent and each Saint in the Upper Room was sent there by Christ to wait for the Holy Ghost, and in a more general sense sent by Christ to proclaim to the nations the Truth that can only be found in Him; it was through this all-star communion of Saints: their daily prayer, their breaking of bread, and their fellowship and teaching, that the Church came to be by God’s action through them. God acts through His Saints. God reveals Himself through His Saints. God brings about that which is new through His Saints. God transforms the world through His Saints.
How does this happen? It happens because the Saints are those people who, in the words of Saint Paul, have the eyes of their hearts enlightened by God. “The eyes of their hearts enlightened”—Paul teaches—so that persons who receive such grace know what is the hope to which God has called us, according to His great might which He accomplished in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and made Him sit at His Right Hand in the heavenly places. It starts with the enlightenment of the eyes of the heart. God accomplishes His mission through those whose heart has enlightened eyes. Not eyes that do not see God in the world, but rather eyes that see God in the world through all things good, beautiful, and true. Not eyes that are impatient with the world, but eyes of patience and humility that look for Him even when He might be hard to find. Not eyes that do nothing but judge others for their sins and inadequacies, but eyes that see Jesus in the face of every person they meet. Not eyes of suspicious, but eyes of love—indeed, enlightened eyes of the heart means the eyes of Jesus, the eyes of His sacred humanity. Eyes of compassion and mercy, eyes that forgive—eyes through which grace in its fullness can be found, because such eyes of the heart is Christ in us.
Brothers and sisters, all of this is biblical Christianity, and this is why churches such as ours who seek to participate in historic, sacramental Christianity usually take a Saint as a patron of the parish—in our case, Saint Paul, and in our sister congregation, all the Saints. And, likewise, this is why God has led our Parish to see Saint Teresa of Calcutta as our patron of our Mission in Tazewell County. She is a powerful example for us of how to embody the Gospel as we encounter others in our day to day lives. “We are to be Christ to the world, and to every person we meet,” she teaches us. “The greatest disease in the West today is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for,” she teaches us. “Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you,” she teaches us. That teaching is the Gospel. Through that teaching, Christ acts. Through that teaching by this Saint, God reveals Himself. Through that teaching God brings about that which is new. And through that teaching by this Saint, who in her words captures what’s fundamental about Christ’s teaching to His Church, through that teaching God transforms the world. Let us be led, brothers and sisters, by this teaching—led in our mission in Tazewell County.
Icon by the hand of Aidan Hart.

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Father Matthew C. Dallman, Obl.S.B. preaching on the Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin and Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Assumption/Dormition) for the Parish of Tazewell County.
“Most highly favored, Lady,” is how we shared in the praise of Mary at the beginning of Mass. We did so, in the words of the hymn, as "Christian folk through the world will ever say." These words refer to the angelic greeting of the archangel Gabriel to Mary, “Hail, Mary, full of grace.” Biblical experts have struggled for centuries as to how to properly translate the original Greek of the angelic greeting in a way that captures the its fullness and nuance. And so perhaps it is necessary to underscore this point: this greeting is far more than a “hey, how’s your golf game, Mary?” or “Mary, wonderful quiche last week!” These are words from God delivered by an angel, because that is what angels are: messengers of the heavenly word of Our Lord. And because it is in this moment of the Annunciation that we first encounter Mary, how she is described at the first is how to properly understand the entirely of her place in the economy of grace, her place in God’s plan of salvation.
The word for “Hail” in Greek is “chaire.” This word directly means “rejoice,” and as biblical scholars point out, it is a gesture of greeting that would have been highly unbecoming within Jewish rabbical culture addressed to anordinarwoman. It is a very reverent and courteous greeting as a queen would receive, and in custom it corresponds as well to the Hebrew greeting of shalom, which means peace. A fuller sense of “Hail” would be something like, “Be at peace my queen!”
Andthis is fitting because there is no one else in the Bible who is addressed in the same way as Mary is addressed: never a man, and never a woman save one: Mary. This in itself confers a theological dignity upon Mary, and by extension all women, simply as human persons, independent of the roles of wife or mother. It is also worth noting that the word “chaire” is the root of the English words chair and throne, and cathedral, itself based on the word “cathedra” which means throne upon which the bishop sits. Already we have a sense of the high honor and dignity of the angelic greeting, and a sense of who Mary is: someone the highest angels deeply respect.
After this, Gabriel addresses Mary as “kecharitomene,” or “full of grace.” I say addresses because biblical scholars point out that the way Gabriel speaks is as one would say a person’s name. In other words, it is not a quality of Mary that Gabriel utters—a quality or attribute such as beautiful, friendly, or intelligent. The Church has certainly seen Mary in all those ways, but Gabriel does something different in his greeting: he names her. Mary is “she who is the fullness of grace.” Mary is “she who is completely, perfectly, enduringly and has always been endowed with grace.” The word is a past perfect participle, which indicates that Mary has not been transformed by the angelic greeting and presence from lesser grace to full grace. Rather, it indicates Mary has always been the fullness of grace, and was created in that way by God. Completely, perfectly, enduringly endowed with grace is Mary’s identity, and she has never been less than that, even in her mother’s womb, even her conception.
I want to stress this is simply the meaning of the biblical words “chaire kecharitomene,”—“Hail, full of grace,” or in the longer, clumsier rendering, “Be at peace, my queen, you who are completely, perfectly, and enduringly endowed with grace.” It is clumsier, but richer and accurate, and therefore necessary to understand Mary in the biblical sense.
Almost. There remains one word in the English translation to unpack, and that is the word, “grace” which in Greek is charis, and within both “kecharitomene” in the angelic greeting, as well as the word “eucharist.” The beginning of the definition of “grace” is that it is God’s favor towards us, and that is part of the reason our hymn addresses Mary as “most highly favored lady.”
But “God’s favor” is only the beginning. To fill it out we recognize that God’s favor is always His gift. And so Mary is the fullness of God’s favor, the fullness of God’s gift. And yet we know that God’s gift is Himself offered on the Cross and that His gift of Himself on the Cross passes into the Sacred Humanity of the sacramental life which we receive through the Seven Sacraments. And we also know that God’s gift of Himself is love, for His nature is love; and His gift is true peace, the heavenly peace which passes all understanding made aware to the apostles in the Upper Room on the first Easter Sunday evening and through them to us. Ultimately, grace is the source of Christian life and is participation in the divine life. Grace is the heavenly reality, and Mary is full of grace, so she is full of the heavenly reality, and has been from her conception: the heavenly reality of grace, of peace, of love, of eucharist.
This is why Christians can praise Mary without reservation—because of her name as seen in the biblical account by Saint Luke. Anglicans traditionally and rightly have placed a high value on tracing all doctrines of the Faith to the Bible. Yet we can rest assured that not only a mere devotion to Mary, but in fact a high devotion to her, is biblically based, even from the first words spoken to her we know of: the fullness of heavenly reality of grace, of peace, of love, of eucharist is who she is, entirely by the initiative of God, who made this wonderful creature gloriously, mysteriously, and joyfully. Her whole life was lived to be an example to others of how to love God, how to love her Son, Jesus and follow He Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life—that her way of being would be able to be imitated by others through humility, through obedience which is listening with an open heart, and after understanding arises, to say Yes to God. Because when we say Yes to God, we proclaim with Mary the greatness of the Lord.
Holy Mary, Mother of God. Pray for us.
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Father Matthew C. Dallman, Obl.S.B. preaching on Fourth Sunday after Trinity (Proper 10) at Saint Paul's Church in Pekin, Illinois in the Parish of Tazewell County. His prepared text:
As I have said many times before, the Christian life is a life on mission. Our life as Christians is a mission of love. Now from the practical perspective, what is meant by "mission of love" is seen through five dimensions of total mission: firstly through the daily Liturgy of the Church, then through catechesis (faith formation), and then pastoral care of our parishioners, as well as pastoral care through our outreach, and finally with the evangelizing harmony of presence we find with and within the wider locality (for us, Tazewell County).
And these five dimensions of mission are but a continuance and extension of the sacred life and sacred humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. He came to save the world by teaching the right way to love—that was His mission. And through the Cross, He emptied Himself of His Sacred Humanity, giving it all us to—that we would receive the gift of His Sacred Humanity, that through receiving, embracing, and embodying His Sacred Humanity, we learn to love the creatures of the world as He loved them: so much so that our loving of the creatures of the world is Jesus loving through us. This is one significance of Jesus first appearing to Saint Mary Magdalene as a gardener—that as we grow in the life of the spirit, our disposition toward the world is that of a gardener: to be loving, watchful stewards of God’s holy Spirit growing in the world, growing in the hearts of people.
The message of Moses to the people of Israel is that despite the appearances that loving God is impossible, and something we cannot do, in fact we can do this. We can obey the voice of the Lord our God; we can keep His commandments at statutes. We now know how: through Jesus, Who has made the Kingdom of God known to the world, and for those called, He has opened up His Sacred Humanity for us to enter in and embody, our lives transformed into His. As Christians, we need not concern ourselves with being successful, but rather, as Saint Teresa of Calcutta reminds us, with being faithful. We need not worry about accomplishing some outrageous feat, such as climbing up into heaven ourselves or going beyond the sea and coming back. These are the stuff of heroism as might be depicted in science fiction films or comic books. Our heroism is first and foremost a domestic heroism, an everyday heroism of turning to God every day with all our heart and our soul, to obey the voice of the Lord our God.
The lawyer asked the pertinent question: “And who is my neighbor?” This is the question for us to ask, as well. And the reason to ask it is because we have been seeking to understand how God is present in our lives. And it is true that He is present through all that is good and true and beautiful in the world; furthermore it is true that He is present in our peak, mountaintop moments as well as our low, valley moments. He is present through the generosity people show to one another. Yet the question, “Who is my neighbor?” invites perhaps the most adventurous way to discover God’s presence in the world: adventurous, and difficult.
Before it means anything else, “Loving our neighbor” means that God is as present in our neighbor as it is present in a Saint (and is likewise as present in our great enemies as He is in a Saint). This is the deepest interpretation of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Yes, we are to not ignore people suffering; we are not to ignore those who need help; we are not to ignore those who are lonely and feel abandoned. But why? It is because in the suffering, in those that need help, in those lonely: it is Jesus suffering, Jesus needing help, Jesus lonely. Our relationship with our neighbors is our surest test of our Faith in Christ. As Saint Catherine of Siena wrote, “You test the virtue of patience in yourself when your neighbors insult you. Your humility is tested by the proud, your faith by the unfaithful, your hope by the person who has no hope. Your justice is tried by the unjust, your compassion by the cruel, and your gentleness and kindness by the wrathful. Your neighbors are the channel through which all your virtues are tested and come to birth, just as the evil give birth to all their vices through their neighbors."
Brothers and sisters, let us admit with the children of Israel that we all sometimes feel that truly loving our God Who is beyond time and space does seem impossible, and yet, as Catherine of Siena taught, this is why God has put us among our neighbors: so that we can do for them what we cannot do for Him—that is, love them without any concern for thanks and without looking for any profit for yourself. And the teaching of Jesus is that whatever we do for them He will consider done for Him. Our mission is always a mission of love.

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Father Matthew C. Dallman, Obl.S.B. preaching on the Memorial of Saint Romuald (2019) in the Lady Chapel of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the campus of the University of Notre Dame during solemn Evensong, a service he was also asked to plan.
Romuald is a true saint for the domestic church. He was a Benedictine monk who fell asleep on this day in the year AD 1027. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, we find at one point Saint Benedict himself indicating to the pilgrim the presence of contemplatives, who are named “fires,” and these included Macarius (a desert father) and Romuald. His devotion to Christ was fueled by his many mystical experiences of God’s presence in solitude while praying the Psalms. So much so that he felt driven out of a strictly coenobitic life in Benedictine community and rather devoutly experiment with the eremitic life, so as that between the life of community and the life of a hermit in solitude and what he saw as inherent tension between the two, there might be forged a new kind of harmony. His biography was written by none other than Saint Peter Damien, holy doctor of the Church, he is the founder of the Camaldolese Order (an outgrowth of the Order of Saint Benedict), and Romuald left us a Brief Rule that I think might be seen as a “How to Get Started” chapter in as yet unwritten, but probably never to be written, “Operations Manual” for the domestic church. But to explain that, I first need to back up.
http://akensideinstitute.org/images/romuald_preaching.jpgIt was at last summer liturgy conferences that Dr O’Malley asked me to put together a plainsong Evensong in the Anglican tradition for this year’s conference. It had become known (because I use social media more than the average person) that I had been conducting an experiment in my home, based in plainsong and the daily Offices (the Anglican equivalent to the Liturgy of the Hours) – that my family (my wife and our then four daughters whom we were homeschooling) might be ready to make the leap from the short, ten-minute form of daily chant developed from my study of Anglican pastoral theologian and priest Martin Thornton that we had used for four years, into chanting Matins and Evensong (Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer) everyday. Sufficed to say, the experiment has taken. Two years in, and it has become the anchors of our family’s life, both in terms of routine but more importantly, in terms of our devotion to the Most Holy Trinity, it has spread within our parish, where we have daily Matins and Evensong in our chapel and have formed a plainsong choir in our parish (now 14 people strong) that has had three solemn Evensong services within the liturgical calendar (Eve of Michaelmas, Eve of Presentation, and Eve of Pentecost), and, we are here.
Let me report that it is mind-blowingly wild that the waves of a homeschooling experiment in Pekin, Illinois might come to shore in the Lady Chapel of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. The Providence of God is real and active, and grace has been bestowed in two ways: one, to hear His invitation to give this experiment in domestic church a try, and two, to be steady during the ups and downs of its implementation which were adventurous as most things in a family often are.
I arrived at this prayer of thanksgiving, not to boast in anything I have done, but to boast in what our loving Lord has done; and my gratitude was clarified by our two lessons of sacred scripture, as well as the example of Saint Romuald – all three of which present to the question of the domestic church the Light of Christ.
The account of Samuel’s encounter with the Lord draws our attention to the domestic environment, the unique culture of our homes. We want the environment, the ecology, of our homes to be such wherein the space of our home, and the pattern of our life in it, is one where God can be heard: like Samuel heard God, even where God calls our name, like he called Samuel’s name. Also, our passage helps us t o dispense with the need for our home life to be a perfect haven of pure devotion by all members of the family. God called Samuel despite the word of the Lord being rare in those days and no frequent vision. The only concrete description was that Samuel was sleeping in relative proximity to the Ark of God, which for us is a prefigurement of Our Lady. In his introduction to Redemptoris Mater, Joseph Ratzinger wrote that Mary’s faith means trust in God and obedience, even
when one walks in darkness. Perhaps in terms of concrete practice, devotion to Our Lady within the domestic church, even one that may seem far from a space that realizes the sacred, is a sure foundation for an environment to emerge and grow in the home in which we can hear God, and is the way to begin to develop one, that our response to God’s call of us is not slothfully ignored but rather that of Samuel, “Here I am!”
It is to the characteristic of adventure in prayer that Saint Luke’s account of the parents of Jesus finding Him in the Temple when He was twelve years old draws us towards. Let us assume that the domestic church life of the Holy Family was the ideal model of sanctity, fellowship, prayer – and really, the type of the eucharistic life realized in the home. All the more reason for us to be encouraged in our family lives by the fact that even for Mary and Joseph, whose intimacy and closeness with Jesus are a permanent and inexhaustible catechesis for the Church, even for them there were moments when Jesus felt far away. This is all part of the ebb and flow of the Christian life – between consolation and desolation, between presence and absence, between real communion and desire for communion. This is the Christian adventure, and it demands heroism on the part often of parents, who are uniquely empowered by God by the grace of their marriage to help the whole family find Jesus again; and it demands native heroism on the part of children, who through their curiosity and wonder show new ways to find Jesus, to echo Samuel’s “Here I am.”
http://akensideinstitute.org/images/romuald_ladychapel2.jpgAll of this would be “Saint Romuald approved,” and here I circle back to my assertion that Romuald is a true saint for the domestic church, with particular emphasis on the helpfulness of something he wrote, called his Brief Rule. First of all let us recognize that the patterns of day to day life today compared with 150 years ago are dramatically different, a primary reason for which is the technology of the automobile dramatically transforming cities, so much so that life for many of us in our
homes is more like the life of Christian hermits than we might be comfortable admitting. Although we gather in social spaces of our cities and towns (I don’t think Bowling Alone is quite right as whenever I bowl, the lanes are filled with large groups of people) and of course although we gather in our parish churches, we often do not know our neighbors, or many of them, or see our fellow parishioner but once a week, if not less often. Home life, even with large families, is often analogous to the hermit’s cell – we are not divorced from wider society, but we often encounter them in in strikingly anti-incarnational ways on social media and even the telephone, and families often “do their own thing.”
And so the first sentence of Romuald’s Brief Rule is topical. It reads, “Sit in your cell as in paradise.” We would translate, “Be in your home as in paradise,” not because we falsely think our homes are the Church Triumphant itself in microcosm, but rather “paradise” as Jesus described it to the confessing thief next to Him on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Our homes are this kind of paradise: where we work by grace through the process of everyday purification and purgation knowing that Jesus is very close with us, and has chosen to come close to us and walk with us. And that process of everyday purification – the home as paradise – is the arranging of our lives in and through the pattern of home life so as to be like Samuel, sleeping by the Ark of God, or for us, with a daily family devotion to Our Lady in the home, thereby able to hear God calling his name. That parents and children can hear God calling to them and guiding them.
Later in his Brief Rule, Romuald teaches us to “take every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart and to understand them with your mind.” He continues, “And, if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up; hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.” So yet, let us pray the Psalms in our homes. Yet there is another insight here: Just as if our mind wanders, hurry and apply it to the words again, if we lose our sense of the presence of Christ amid the ebb and flow of religious life like Mary and Joseph lost track of Jesus, let us not beat ourselves up, but go immediately and passionately to find Him. In doing so, we let ourselves be found by Him. Mary and Joseph passionately sought Jesus; let us persevere to find Him in the Psalms, or even as he taught one Psalm, because as he taught, “It is better to pray one psalm with devotion and compunction than a hundred with distraction.”
Romuald finishes his Brief Rule with these words: “Realize above all that you are in God’s presence, and stand there with the attitude of one who stands before the emperor. Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him.” Mary brings us Jesus, and so in that sense, the traditional image of the mama pelican who pecks at her breast to feel her children is also an image of Our Lady, whose own soul was also pierced with a sword, the sword of the Spirit, that her sorrow and eucharistic glory at the foot of the Cross might guide us and feed us.
Blessed Mary, Mother of God, and Saint Romuald, pray for us.

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Father Dallman preaches at Saint Paul's Church in Pekin, Illinois during their service for the First Evensong of Pentecost. He seeks to explain the experience of the early Church as one of "mystagogy," that is, "being led into the mystery of our participation in Christ." The Eastertide mystagogy of "How is Jesus alive?" has after the Ascension of Jesus shifted to a mystagogy of ecclesiology: "How are we the Church?" And this mystery was encountered in its fullness in the Upper Room during the nine days the 120 members of the first parish church "with one accord devoted themselves to prayer": the Eleven then Twelve along with "the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren" (Acts 1:14). This sermon, then, is a presentation of what Father Dallman has come to call "Upper Room Mystagogy."

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