A selection of sermons, 1959 - 2000
by the Rev. John Herbert Gill
Lenten Series: Ecce
Lignum Crucis (Behold the Wood of the Cross)
Lent 1: The Word in the Desert
Lent II: Dogs At The Master's Table
Lent III: The King of Unclean Spirits
Lent IV: Bread in the Wildreness
ST. MARY THE VIRGIN
August 14, 1994 St. Ignatius of Antioch
Over the centuries, Christians have celebrated the blessed Mother of our blessed Lord by adorning her with a rich variety of names: She is the Star of the Sea, the Queen of Angels, the Queen of Heaven, the Help of Christians, she is the Lady of Good Counsel and the Lady of Sorrows.
On this the solemnity of her feast, let us take from her own words a humbler, less elegant title: Mary the magnifier, she who responded to God's message of life and hope with words of joy: "My soul doth magnify the Lord."
The soul of Mary magnifies her Lord. The soul of Mary is a magnifier, a lens, a lens as it were of the purest crystal. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures this word "magnify" is used most often of the mighty men of valor, the heroes who are made larger than life in their battles against the purported enemies of God.
But Mary does not magnify herself -- even the great Cranmer was wrong in rendering another part of this Magnificat "he that is mighty hath magnified me" when what Mary said --and every other translation recognizes this -- was simply that the mighty God had done great things in her.
Mary, the magnifier of God.
We know what in ordinary speech it means to "magnify" something. Any magnifier, any single lens or combination of lenses, has the property not just of making things larger but of bringing them closer. And by bringing them closer we are given knowledge of things we could only guess at because before the revelation of magnification, they were to us.
One of my treasured possessions is the 2-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. If you know it, you know that the print is too small to read. But all I need to do is magnify the words, and the invisible, incomprehensible words become flesh and find their dwelling place in my mind.
Before mankind learned how to make lenses, and then learned how to combine and arrange them, we could only look upward in ignorance and superstition and fear. We had to invent explanations for the patterns and movements of nature and the planets and the stars. But once we learned magnify our world, once we learned to make cosmic reality larger and so make it come closer, our ignorance and superstition were replaced by knowledge.
There are always those who think that to magnify the creation leads men to diminish the creator. But knowledge does not lessen our wonder at God's creation but magnifies it, allowing us to see that God's universe is larger and older and more wonderful and mysterious than we ever imagined before. When we magnify the Lord's creation we magnify the Lord.
You know what happens when you take an ordinary magnifying glass: move it slowly away from your eye: soon everything you see gets smaller and smaller, and you see it upside-down. And I am sure that each of us remembers a time in childhood when we first got hold of a telescope or a microscope or a pair of binoculars. It didn't take us long to try them backwards, to look in the wrong end. And you discovered that the thing that was meant to magnify diminishes, and what you see looks very small and very far away.
What we are really talking about is the lens of the soul. Too many of us still like to look at the world through the wrong end of the telescope, to diminish mankind and the works of men even as we diminish God and his creation.
Something -- maybe it is original sin, maybe it is leftover Puritanism -- makes us wants to diminish rather than magnify, to see things smaller than they are, rather than wonder at their greatness. We imagine we can serve God better if we diminish, rather than magnify and glorify and rejoice in all that is made.
But it was not so with Mary. Mary magnified and glorified and rejoiced, at the very moment when she found herself in perfect focus and perfect union with the ground of all being and the creator of the universe. Like Mary we should always let our faith and our hope and our love be the eye of our souls, the lens God gives us to see and know him and one another as we really are, rightside up and clear and true.
We all know people whose religion is the jumping-off place for all their gripes and grievances against the world, and even against the church. We should look to Mary, and let our religion always magnify our vision of God and his world, and magnify our perception of the image of God in our neighbors magnify in ourselves.
You don't magnify the Lord by putting down your neighbor or by dumbing down your faith.
From the moment of her Annunciation, Mary knew the greatness of God because she had seen him in the microscopic presence of God's Son within her body, magnified by the lens her soul. So can it be with us, because first it was so with her.
"God himself is with us. Let us all adore him. Let thy light shine through me. Come abide within me. Let my soul, like Mary, Be thine earthly sanctuary."
NOVEMBER 13, 1994 (being the Sunday following the mid-term Congressional elections.)
St. Ignatius of Antioch in the City of New York
Jesus said that "when you see the abomination of desolation that standeth where it ought not," you know a time of tribulation is at hand.
Approximately three hundred years earlier, the Prophet Daniel used the same term in the second part of today's First Lesson (the part which we are allowed to omit). Daniel uses the term to identify the ultimate outrage that crowns the many tribulations of his time: indeed, in St. Matthew's Gospel, Jesus credits Daniel with the term.
Newer translations call it "the desolating sacrilege" or "the abomination that makes desolate." I am familiar with the term from the authorized version: "The abomination of desolation:" it is accurate, for one thing, and its very oddness adds, I think, to its power. "The abomination of desolation."
Now, if there are any Democrats among you, you may be thinking that this phrase refers to Newt Gingrich.
There is absolutely no scholarly evidence that is true.
On the other hand, neither is there any evidence that it isn't.
And I am only half joking. Because all this strange, apocalyptic literature from the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament, which is always read this time of year as we lead up to the end of the Season of Pentecost and look toward a new beginning of a new Christian Year in Advent just ahead -- all this strange literature has led people to read their own meanings into it, like they do with the oracles of Nostradamus or Tarot cards.
People like to take whatever it is that worries them or frightens them or fills them with hatred and fear and say "Yes, there it is, right in the Bible, God said it, I believe it, and that ends it."
But this is a very dangerous and a very unsound approach to reading any part of God's revelation in the Bible. Our collect today tells us that holy scriptures are written for our learning, not for our ignorance; that we should derive patience and comfort from God's holy Word, not confusion and division; that this patience and this comfort should lead us to embrace and hold fast not to fear or anger but to hope, the blessed hope of everlasting life which God has given us in Jesus Christ our Lord.
What was the "abomination of desolation"? When Daniel uses the term and when Jesus uses it, it comes out of a period of our common religious history when the people of God suffered repeated and continual persecution from outsiders in the promised land.
Like tyrants and oppressors in very place and in every period of history, the persecutors of God's people were not content with conquering their land, they wanted to destroy their spirit as well, so they attacked the thing that God's people held most precious above all else: the place of meeting between God and his people, the Temple in Jerusalem.
The first abomination, the one Daniel spoke of, was apparently a scheme of that great multicultural ethnarch Antiochus the Fourth "Epiphanes." in the third century before the Christian era. He decided to place a statue of the Greek God Zeus smack dab in the middle of the Temple and have sacrifices offered to it. And having desecrated the temple of God, there was nothing left for him to do but destroy it completely. And the people rose up and destroyed him.
Two centuries later the Roman emperor Crazy Caligula decided to go Antiochus one better and have a statue not of Zeus but of himself erected in God's Temple, so that people might offer sacrifice to him as the divine embodiment of the Roman state. He was talked out of this at the last minute, but it was not many years later that the Temple was again destroyed as it had been in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes., and that Temple has never been rebuilt to this day.
What was so wrong about these acts, that they should earn for all eternity this ultimate term of outrage?
What was wrong was not what they were but where they were. I am the most broad-minded of men, and if Antiochus or anyone else wants to make a statue of Zeus or Elvis or Rocky Balboa and put it on the mantle or in the back yard, it's all right with me. They can even worship it if they want to, there are lots dumber things done all the time by people who try to make up their own religion.
And if some latter-day Caligula wants to surprise Mrs. Caligula on her birthday, with a bronze portrait of himself, he's got no one but himself to blame when the little woman is underwhelmed.
But the problem with both of these abominations -- the thing that made them abominations -- was not what they were but where they stood. The works of man, symbols of wealth, of power, of the absolute state, when these things are put in the place of God, the whole order of things is turned upside down, and desolation follows.
And not these things only. Today we profane our temples with gentler abominations. In those days it was the power of the state that feared the power of God and sought to destroy that power by desecrating the place where that power was most awesomely felt, the temple of God.
Today we Christians are busily doing that to ourselves. No Antiochus or Caligula in our time has anything at all to fear from the pettifogging people of God. Our idols are not marble statues of pagan gods, but the trivial pursuits of trendiness and self-indulgence and sentimentality and mediocrity. "Thou shalt do whatever feels right for thee" has become our first and great Commandment, and the second is like unto it, "thou shalt feel good about thyself."
Our moral authority as Christians has become so eroded that -- I don't know if you all know this -- at this very moment your priests and other church leaders are being rounded up and required to take instruction in ethics and morality, instruction which is being given by -- an insurance company.
It is indeed a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the Church Pension Fund.
The trendiness of our world is sometimes only silly, but sometimes very serious. Our society is in cultural crisis, and a lot of our nation's unhappy retreat into bigotry and fear is an angry reaction to this crisis. More and more people truly believe that eliminating from the education of our children the great traditions of Western Civilization -- not the only civilization in the world by a long shot, but our civilization -- its books and music and art and above all its civilities -- is a necessary step in some imagined process of liberation.
And for nearly half a century, the Christian Churches have taken the lead in this self-destructive process of de-civilizing our religion and our society. The temple of God is not a meeting-place for the exchange of opinions about the latest trends in toying with the supernatural. It is the heart and soul of a civilization as well as a religion.
Our doctrine, discipline, and worship, our language and our music, our morality and rituals, these are things entrusted to us by our past to keep alive for the future. But this is not a blind trust. In our generation we have thrown open the windows of the house of God to let in the light and fresh air which we need to stay alive.
And this is good. But when through those open windows we throw out the rich treasure of centuries of our heritage and redecorate with the plastic and tinsel of a slavish contemporaneity, it is not too strong a thing to say, that once again the abomination which makes desolate stands where it ought not.
And the house of God, once defiled, falls, as in the days of Antiochus and the mad emperors of Rome.
CANDLEMASS
St. Ignatius of Antioch, 1996
A couple of sermons ago I was told by someone who is in a position to know these things that I was probably the only priest in the Episcopal Church who had read Leviticus. Certainly the only one who ever mentioned it. And now I'm at it again.
We Anglicans rarely read Leviticus, and when we do we don't mention it. There are hordes of Christian people out there who seem to read nothing else. There are self-styled Christian politicos who suddenly become mighty advocates of God's will as it is revealed in Leviticus when there is an issue on the legislative agenda which makes them nervous (i.e. which is about sex, which makes them nervous). But even then, they only look at a few verses of a few chapters of a single section of Holy Scripture which, if you read it, you will find has more to say about the abomination of eating owls and other hapless birds than about whom one climbs into bed with.None the less, to understand the mighty and mysterious events recalled on this Candlemas day in our calendar, we have to go back to that terrible book of the Bible and see what Mary and Joseph were doing on this day in theirs. Leviticus tells us that when a woman bears a child she remains unclean for seven days. To tell the truth, Leviticus tells us that almost everything a woman experiences in the natural process simply of being a woman renders her unclean. People who make a religion out of Leviticus spend so much time worrying about uncleanness, especially the uncleanness of women, not because they care about women but because they want to protect themselves against all the nameless defilements of life in our confused and confusing world.
Leviticus says that childbirth renders a woman unclean for seven days, after which her male child is brought to be circumcised. Then she must remain confined for thirty-three more days, after which she must take her child, if it is a first-born son, and sacrifice it to God. That's how it works out that seven days after Christmas, January 1, is the feast of our Lord's circumcision, and 33 days after that -- February 2nd -- is the feast of his being offered in the Temple. For Leviticus tells us that everything, man or beast, which "openeth the womb" belongs to God.
We do not generally admit it, but these words in their origins mean exactly what they say. Somewhere in the dark pre-history of our religious ancestors is this dark notion common to so much ancient religion, the notion of an angry god demanding human sacrifice.
It was obedience to this ancient demand that made Abraham willing to take his first and only child Isaac, the child of his old age, and sacrifice it on the altar to God. And the great thing about the story of Abraham and Isaac was that by providing a lamb for the sacrifice God ended for ever this barbarous ritual. Mary and Joseph were required by the law to bring their firstborn child Jesus to the temple to offer him to the Lord, but they were allowed to substitute an offering of turtle doves or whatever to meet the dreadful requirements of Israel's God.
We will remember this as Good Friday is approaching, when Jesus returns thirty-some years later to the Temple where his mother had bought the birds and animals for the required ceremonies, and flies into a rage, making a whip of cords, overturning the tables of those who sold those pitiful tokens of the terrible price about to be exacted of the self-emptying Love of the Lamb of God.
For as he came to the end of his life among us, the Son of God was not settling for the easy way out which centuries of ritual and ceremony offered to the sons of men in their infancy. The firstborn Son of God had a destiny of sacrifice, a destiny that his body be broken and his blood shared, a destiny that could not be compromised by all the religion in the world.
But to return to the beginning, the Presentation in the Temple. The Gospel according to Luke is the one that tells us of the events of that day in Jerusalem. Luke is said to have been an artist as well as a physician -- indeed, many years ago I was privileged to see on Mount Athos in Greece a portrait from life of the Blessed Virgin Mary painted by St. Luke himself. [See the ikon pages at the beginning of this web site]
Most of our great scripturally based liturgical poetry we have from Luke's gospel: Magnificat, Benedictus, and here, the Nunc Dimittis. And much of the best Christian art is inspired from images peculiar to Luke, and we often read back into the Gospel imagery which has become traditional. For example, we always imagine three Magi, three wise men although the Gospels are silent about their number. Likewise we imagine Symeon in today's Gospel as being a very old man, although nothing is said about his age. The great Anglican poet T. S. Eliot pinpointed Symeon's age as 80 in his great poem "A Song for Symeon" -- but then, from his youth up Mr. Eliot was always happiest speaking with the voices of old men, from Prufrock to Tiresias.
The novelist Anthony Burgess wrote a novel about the life of our Lord and at the same time the screenplay for one of the best films ever made on the subject, Zeferelli's Jesus of Nazareth. In both, the story of Symeon and his song is set at the moment of our Lord's circumcision. Symeon is portrayed not only as old but as blind as well. In the film we see the great English actor Ralph Richardson waiting in the temple precincts. Suddenly, as the rabbi wields his knife on the baby Jesus, the old man makes his way by the sound of the baby's squeals and crying, lifts the tiny infant high in his trembling hands and says "Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word."
All the Gospel says is that "it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ." Death is the destiny that confronts everyone born into this world, young or old.
By portraying Symeon as blind, the film intensified our understanding that it is with the eyes of faith that every promise of God is seen to be fulfilled. One baby looks very much like another -- sorry, all you mothers, but it's true -- and one baby's squeals are very much like another's. But the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen opened the eyes of Symeon's faith. And he knew that he had indeed seen the Lord's Christ, and that young or old he could depart in peace, for the eyes of faith had seen God's salvation: perhaps not the salvation he was expecting, the vindication of a particular people: but something bigger and better, the salvation which God had prepared before the face of all people.
In this child was light, this child was light, the light which at the beginning of creation shined in the darkness and which no darkness, no blindness, could overcome, and this light was a light to lighten the gentiles, the nations, all the nations and races and culture of people, as well as to be the glory of God's people Israel.
God does not merely keep his promises and answer our prayers. As it was with Symeon so it is with us: God gives more than he has promised, and more than we can desire or pray for.
Symeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, "Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed."
Like most of the great Gospels of the Epiphany season the Candlemas story is a Gospel of Light: the Star that led the Magi to Bethlehem is the light that Symeon knew to be a light lightens the Gentiles and all the people of the darkened world.The candles that we bless and light on this day carry that light into the dark places of our lives and of our world, because the baby of Bethlehem, the Man of Calvary, is our salvation, prepared before the face of you and me and everyone around us. Light and life and peace do not come easy and do not come cheap. These are sword-piercing, heartrending realities for us as for the mother of the savior. For these are things beyond mere immortality.
Let me tell you a secret about those candles you are holding in your hand. I know how you can make them last forever, give them immortality, pass them on to you children and your children's children.
How? It's easy. Wrap them tightly in aluminum foil, put them in the freezer, take them out on birthdays and holidays and show them the nice candle you got one day at St. Ignatius' Church.But never light them.
Because the moment you light a candle, the moment a candle begins to live, it begins to die.
Light always costs something, only darkness is free. Only in suffering are we saved. Only in dying do we live. We can hide our candles and they will last forever in the darkness of their own uselessness. Or we can let them be consumed in the fulfillment of the only purpose for which they were ever made.
And as it is with our candles, so it is with our selves. We have to choose between the darkness and the light.
A digression on Saint Genesius, assembled and edited by John H. Gill, From The Lives of the Saints by the Rev. Alban Butler. Not really a sermon at all.SAINT GENESIUS
Comedian & Martyr, circa 303 a.d.
Day: August 25
Genesius, Patron of Actors, who wondrously anticipated by more than a millennium and a half, the art of "Method Acting." According to theater scholar Antonio Ramirez, he was also the first performer whose performance earned him The Hook.
Christ who, to show the power of his grace, and the extent of his mercy, called a publican to the apostleship, honored with the glory of martyrdom this saint, drawn from the stage, the most infamous school of vice and the passions, and the just abhorrence of the holy fathers of the Church, of all zealous pastors, and all sincere lovers of virtue.The emperor Diocletian, coming to Rome, was received with great rejoicings. Among other entertainments prepared for him, those of the stage were not neglected. In a comedy which was acted in his presence, one of the players took it into his head to represent, in a ludicrous manner, the ceremonies of the Christian baptism, which could not fail to divert the assembly, who held this religion, and its mysteries, in the utmost contempt and derision.
This player therefore, whose name was Genesius, and who had learned some things concerning the Christian rites from certain friends who zealously professed that religion, laid himself down on the stage, feigning himself sick, and said, "Ah! My friends, I find a great weight upon me, and would gladly be eased."
The others answered, "What shall we do to give thee ease? Wouldst thou have us plane thee, to make thee lighter?"
"Ye senseless creatures," said he, "I am resolved to die a Christian, that God may receive me on this day of my death, as one who seeks salvation by dying from idolatry and superstition."
Then a priest and exorcist were called, that is to say, two players, who personated these characters. These sitting down by his bedside said, "Well, my child, why did you send for us?" Here Genesius, being suddenly converted by a divine inspiration, replied, not in jest, but seriously, "Because I desire to receive the grace of Jesus Christ and to be born again, that I may be delivered from my sins."
The other players, proceeding mimically, went through the whole ceremony of baptism with him; but he in earnest answered the usual interrogatories, and on being baptized was clothed with a white garment. After this other players, habited like soldiers, to carry on the jest, seized him, and presented him to the emperor, to be examined, as the martyrs were wont to be.
Genesius then declared himself openly, and said aloud standing upon the stage, "Hear, O emperor, and all that are here present, officers of the army, philosophers, senators, and people, what I am going to say. I never yet heard so much as the name of a Christian but I was struck with horror, and I detested my very relations because they professed that religion.
"I informed myself exactly concerning its rites and mysteries only that I might the more heartily despise it, and inspire you with the utmost contempt for the same; but whilst I was washed with the water, and examined, I had no sooner answered sincerely that I believed, than I saw a company of bright angels over my head, who recited out of a book all the sins I had committed from my childhood: and having afterward plunged the book into the water which had been poured upon me in your presence, they showed me the book whiter than snow.
"Wherefore I advise you, O great and mighty emperor, and all ye people here present, who have ridiculed these mysteries, to believe, with me, that Jesus Christ is the true Lord; that he is the light and the truth; and it is through him you may receive forgiveness of your sins."
Diocletian, highly enraged at these words, ordered him to be most inhumanly beaten with clubs, and afterwards to be put into the hand of Plautian, the prefect of the pretorium, that he might compel him to sacrifice. Plautian commanded him to be put upon the rack, where he was torn with iron hooks for a considerable time, and then burnt with torches.
The martyr endured these torments with constancy, and persisted crying out, "There is no other Lord of the universe besides him whom I have seen. Him I adore and serve, and to him I will adhere, though I should suffer a thousand deaths for his sake. No torments shall remove Jesus Christ from my heart or mouth. I regret exceedingly my former errors, and that I detested his holy name, and came so late to his service." At length his head was struck off.
Butler notes: "The baptism which he received on the stage was no more than a representation of that sacrament, for want of a serious intention of performing the Christian rite; but St. Genesius was baptized in desire, with true contrition, and also in his own blood."
Ash Wednesday
St. Ignatius of Antioch 1996In just a few minutes, as soon as I have left off speaking, the church will exhort us to the keeping of a holy Lent.
The observance to which this exhortation will exhort us falls into three categories: self-examination and repentance; prayer, fasting and self-denial; and reading and meditating upon God's holy Word.
To start at the end of the list, it is clear what it means to read God's Holy Word. But it is not always clear what we should actually do once we sit down with a Bible in our hands, feel a weight greater than War and Peace or Moby Dick, and say to ourselves "this time I'm gonna get thorough the whole damn book," knowing perfectly well we won't.
And the fact is we shouldn't try, unless we are among those rare and hardy souls we hear about who read the Bible through from Genesis to Revelation once a year. Better we should look for guidance in the readings appointed in the Book of Common Prayer for each day of Lent. There's an Old Testament, a New Testament, and a Gospel reading for each day of every year. We can use them as guidelines for planning and plan a reasonable course of reading: reading - and meditating. And this means not taking on too much. Perhaps one of the three each day, plus one of the psalms appointed.
For these readings are intended in the first instance as part of the daily office - office meaning "duty," the "opus dei" which, oddly enough, can performed with edification even when done quickly and in what seems to those not accustomed to that kind of prayer a perfunctory manner. But that is when it is done every day, in season and out of season. The kind of reading and meditating which the Lenten exhortation speaks of is an extraordinary act and exercise of devotion, done without hurry and in a quiet time and place, when we can reflect in silence on the words we read, and in that silence let God speak is word anew, directly, not though our eyes or ears only, but to our minds and hearts.
And we are exhorted to "prayer, fasting, and self-denial. " It doesn't say "prayer, plus your choice of fasting or self-denial." We're supposed to do both. Fasting has to do with food and drink, and there is no getting around the fact that for most of us a reduction in some favored intake will have an edifying spiritual value in itself. It will also in enhance our other "extraordinary acts and exercises of devotion."
The word "fasting" really means going without food entirely, and Anglicanism has generally recognized just two days of this kind of fasting in the year: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. There is a partial fast call "abstinence" which means eliminating some significant element in our diet for the entire period of Lent.
Then, on top of fasting and abstinence, comes self-denial, which generally means the reduction of the time and attention given to ordinarily harmless activities -- like watching television or playing blackjack -- so that there is extra space and time in our daily lives during Lent for -- for what? For the first of this group of things to which the church exhorts us: prayer.
What is prayer? That is such a vast subject that I would not presume to enter into it as a subdivision of a single sermon. Let me just say that I am pretty sure that what the Church means in exhorting us to prayer in Lent is private, individual prayer, the kind of one-on-one with God of which Jesus speaks in this Gospel when he tells us to go into our room and close the door and just be with God.
Fasting, abstinence and self-denial are necessary pre-conditions to this, because this kind of praying requires us to break our routines of frantic absorption in ourselves or in work or in play or in other people, in daydreaming, in goofing off; or in material things. Praying requires us to make a time, not just find a time, when God is the only other, and the totally other, in our lives.
Finally we come to the beginning of that exhortation, when we are bidden to keep a holy Lent by self-examination and repentance. And that's the tough one. In a ministry which has run from the fifties into the nineties, I have come more and more to the point of wanting to exhort just the opposite. It's that word self. I feel like suggesting that the best thing you could do for your immortal soul in this Lenten season is to give up being so self-absorbed altogether. I'd put self-examination down in the self-denial category, group it with desserts and TV watching as things to cut out for a while.
Because I sometimes think that nothing has been more destructive to the spiritual health of Christians and non-Christians alike in the second half of the twentieth century than this accursed preoccupation with self. So let my give my own spin to this exhortation: spend forty days and forty nights without doing a psychological or astrological inventory on yourself or anybody else. Spend forty days and forty nights without once getting in touch with your feelings. Put your inner child away in a kennel or a camp until after Easter. Forget what Mr. Rogers has been telling you all your life, that you're wonderful just the way you are because, beloved, you are not. Rend your hearts and maybe your overpriced garments too and turn unto the Lord your God.
If understanding the dynamics of human behavior makes us more compassionate and forgiving of others, then such understanding can serve a useful moral purpose. "To understand all is to forgive all," as Madame de Stael is said to have said. Quite often. But I think we would do well, if only in Lent, to have a double standard in this matter. Let us be understanding toward others if understanding leads us to forgive. But toward ourselves, let us put aside the endless self-analysis which can so often lead to self-justification. Before God, let us stop acting like accused felons trying to dredge up for our lawyers forgotten psychological traumas to get ourselves off the hook of responsibility for our own actions. Let us stop saying, "It's not my fault" and learn to say peccavi, I have sinned.
For a short while here, and now, let us kneel where prayer has been valid. Where forgiveness heals. Where self-accusation, not self-justification, leads to repentance; where repentance leads to amendment of life, and where forgiveness is the only reward worth having because forgiveness alone can heal.
For only with forgiveness comes the wonderful liberating grace to begin anew with a clean slate before God: We rise from our knees knowing that in Jesus every score has been settled for us, every fine been paid, every sentence served, even the sentence of death itself. and we are free to turn again -- for that is all that repentance in the Bible means, a turning in a new direction -- to turn again, liberated, ransomed, healed and forgiven.
Ecce Lignum Crucis
("Behold the Wood of the Cross")
A 1975 Lenten series of sermons on the Atonement, based upon the lectionary in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, given at St. Ignatius Episcopal Church in the City of New York.
Reilly: A delusion is something we must return from.
There are other states of mind, which we take to be delusion;
But which we have to accept and go on from.
And the second symptom?Celia: That's stranger still.
It sounds ridiculous -- but the only word for it that I can find, is a sense of sin.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Well, my bringing up was pretty conventional --
I had always been taught to disbelieve in sin.
Oh, I don't mean that it was ever mentioned!
But anything wrong, from our point of view,
Was either bad form, or was psychological.
And bad form always led to disaster
Because the people one knew disapproved of it.
I don't worry much about form, myself --
But when everything's bad form, or mental kinks,
You either become bad form, and cease to care1
Or else, if you care, you must be kinky.
Reilly: What is more real than anything you believed in?
Celia: It's not the feeling of anything I've ever done,
Which I might get away from, or of anything in me
I could get rid of -- but of emptiness, of failure
Towards someone, or something, outside of myself;
And I feel I must . . . atone -- Is that the word?
Can you treat a patient for such a state of mind?