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Sermon for the Third Sunday of Epiphany – 23 January 2022: Nehemiah 8, 1-3, 5-6, 8-10; 1Cor 12, 12-31; Luke 4, 14-21.

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

 

Each of us must have at some point said the phrase, ‘I would like to be a fly on the wall’. Maybe it refers to a difficult meeting between two people, or a Cabinet Meeting of Boris Johnson’s Government, or a momentous signing of diplomatic documents, or a decision to go to war. Just think about that for a moment – what would that moment or place be for you?

I would like to be a fly on the wall. Un-noticed but noticing everything; unheard but hearing everything; completely neutral but picking up all of what we call these days ‘vibes’ in a closed room.

I would love to be a fly on the wall. If we have all said this at some point – or its Greek equivalent – we most likely can express a similar feeling about a particular moment in the gospel narratives; maybe the moment when Jesus teaches his disciples gathered together in secret; the time when the risen Jesus shares his teaching about the law and prophets with the two companions over dinner on the way to Emmaus, but the words are nor recorded; or to be a witness to how many Magi there really were when they brought 3 gifts to present to Christ lying in his manger. Just for a moment stop and think which of the gospel events we know about is one where you would have loved to be a fly on the wall.

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Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany – 16th January 2022: Is 62, 1-5; 1 Cor 12, 1-11; John 2, 1-11 (Wedding Feast at Cana).`

Fr Leonard Doolan –  St Paul’s Athens

 

Anyone who has been fortunate enough, blessed enough, to make a pilgrimage to Israel, to the Holy Land, will have visited key places in the life of our Lord, and locations of wider biblical interest.

The normal itinerary will include, of course, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Bethany, Jerusalem, and the Sea of Galilee. As well there will be visits to Jericho, the oldest recorded city in the world, to Masada by the Dead Sea where, perched high up on a rock, Herod the Great built a summer palace, from whose walls thousands of Jews threw themselves to their deaths when the Romans had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. The historian Flavius Josephus narrates the details of this period.

Then there are one or two places that are perhaps less well trodden on the pilgrimage route – the birthplace of John the Baptizer, Ein Karem, and the little town where Jesus performed his first miracle according to St. John’s gospel; Cana in the region of Galilee. Visitors now will be encouraged by the shop owners to enter their premises to buy little clay water pots that can perform all sorts of optical illusions. I have one with me this morning. Due to the number of years I’ve had this item it no longer ‘performs the trick’.

So for this morning the gospel locates us in this small town of Cana, and we are invited to enter into the spirit of a wedding celebration.

I invite you to remain there in your minds – try to imagine it. However I am going to invite you to be in another place at the same time. Yes, I’m inviting you to bi-locate, in your minds at least.

One picture in your mind is therefore perhaps in a public square in a small town in Galilee, or perhaps in a large courtyard of a house. Tables are laden with traditional marriage feast foods and nuptial delicacies, wherever possible placed in the shade of the trees. The local wine has been flowing, and there will be music and dancing, dances that have been done in the community for hundreds of years.

The family of the bride or bridegroom know Jesus, so he is there with his mother and some of his disciples. Jesus is a guest. Yet, as this event unfolds with details that we are all too aware of – water is turned into wine – paradoxically the guest becomes the host, because he is the one who provides, the one who reveals his glory and the Gory of God the Father.

Hold that picture there.

The second picture that we contemplate is rather different. We are not in Cana, but in Bethlehem. We’re not at a wedding banquet, but at a birth. In the unorthodox setting of some sort of stable, maybe no more than a canopy overhanging the entrance of a cave, a new born baby is the centre of attention. The baby is a new guest, invited to join in the life of the world.

But shepherds come to where the babe is lying and in a complete infant-like way this baby holds court. Later, Eastern potentates seek out this new addition to the world, and present gifts as if they were ambassadors bringing gifts to the court of a monarch or an emperor. Hold this picture in your mind also.

The new arrival, the new guest, has become the host, just as we will see thirty years later the guest becomes the host at the wedding feast in Cana.

These two pictures are not two disconnected events, separated by 30 years. In both the guest in the midst of the normal everyday activity is central stage – Jesus becomes the host, and he manifests his glory whether he is lying in straw in a manger, or changing water into wine at a marriage feast.

 

The ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary; normality is transfigured into a powerful gospel or sacramental moment where God reveals himself decisively in and through his Son, the Word that has become flesh and dwells among us (John 1, 14); he pitches his tent in the middle of our community (which is how the verb in St. John’s gospel literally translates from Greek); and in doing so, whether in the crib or by the wine pots, glory is revealed and people believe in Jesus, and their lives are changed for ever.

So it is that Christ transforms our lives just as the child in the manger reveals to us the glory that is to be found in our flesh, ‘incarnation’ is what we call it, and as plain water metamorphosizes into the fine wine of God’s kingdom. These are about you and me – about our lives changed by Christ.

In the words of Isaiah, ‘You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.’ (Isaiah 62, 3). The key is for us both to know it, and to perceive it, humanity and all creation are shot through with God’s glory as God transforms us constantly, doing his work of holy and sacred alchemy.

As he reflects on the episode of the Wedding Feast at Cana, St. Augustine, in one of his Homilies (9th Homily, quoted from Homilies on the Gospel of John, trans Edmund Hill OP, published by New City Press, p183) speaks of the sacred signs that we read in the gospel narratives; he says “This is the God, after all, who performs daily miracles through the whole of creation. These, though, have grown cheap in people’s eyes, not because they are easy, but because they happen all the time…”.

The signs in the gospels should remind us that God’s miracles happen all the time and all around us. It is to our own impoverishment that God’s glory has grown cheap in our own lives and hearts, and we are moved only by very extraordinary events that take us by surprise. As Augustine once again says, “…one dead man rose again, and people were struck dumb with amazement, while nobody marvels at those…being born every day. In the same way, who is not astonished at water being turned into wine, while God is doing the same thing every year in the vines.” (ibid.)

As we go around in our daily business, handling the everyday things of everyday life, meeting the ordinary people in a fairly ordinary day, doing the tasks of the household, or working away to earn a crust, or mixing among people who have gathered for special celebrations in life, or even in death – here too is to be found the glory of God.

All of this we bring to God in the Divine Liturgy – the everyday work of humans, the leitourgia (Greek for work and the word Liturgy for the eucharist), and we offer it all for transformation – ‘all things come from you O lord, and of your own do we give you’. The priest presides for those who have gathered for this offering and we set a place for Christ to be with us as ‘guest of honour’, but it is none other than Christ himself who is the host, and we are the guests at his marriage feast, the marriage of heaven and earth, the marriage of humanity and divinity, the marriage of the ordinary and the glorious.

“Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest;

Nay, let us be thy guests; the feast is thine;

Thyself at thine own board make manifest,

In thine own sacrament of bread and wine.”

(NEH 279)

 

Amen.

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Sermon for the Baptism of Christ – 9th January 2022: Isaiah 43, 1-7; Acts 8, 14-17; Luke 3, 15-17, 21-22)

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

 

During these few weeks we are required to have a degree of -and maybe a degree in – liturgical dexterity. What do I mean? The feast days we celebrate over the 40 days from the time of the Nativity of Our Lord, jump backwards and forwards, and don’t follow the chronology of Christ’s life, which I am sure we would all feel more comfortable with.

Two weeks ago we were in the cave with its stable canopy, with a new-born baby Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes. This was an ‘earthy’ event, surrounded by animal noise and smell, straw and a complete lack of dignity and glory as we normally understand it. The birth of a king would normally be in a different location, and with different more luminary circumstances. This is more what we would expect.

St. Gregory Palamas says, ‘However great the heaven of heavens may be may be or the upper waters which form a roof over the celestial regions, or any heavenly place, state or order, they are no more marvelous or honourable than the cave, the manger, the water sprinkled on the infant and His swaddling clothes. For nothing done by God from the beginning of time was more beneficial to all or more divine than Christ’s nativity.’ (Homily 58).

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LOGOS LANGUAGE OF LOVE SECOND SUNDAY OF CHRISTMAS 2/01/22: READINGS: Ephesians 1:3-14, John 1 1-18.

Deacon Chris Saccali – St Paul’s. Athens

 

May I speak in the name of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit  AMEN

HAPPY NEW YEAR kali chronia IN A SECULAR SENSE for we celebrated the church’s new year with the start of Advent back in November. Today’s gospel reading takes us back to the reading set for Carol services and Christmas – for we are still in the liturgical Christmas season before we move into Epiphany this week.

So today we are thinking about beginnings and endings and the advent book by Maggi Dawn I followed this year has just this as its title. I probably do not have to repeat the beginning of St John’s gospel, ‘In the beginning was the Word and how that very first verse takes us back to Genesis 1. If you were to begin your story how would you start? Where does a storyteller begin?

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Sermon for the feast of St Stephen – 26th December 2021:ACTS 7: 51-60, MATTHEW 23:34-39,Galatians 2 16b- 20

Deacon Chris Saccali – St Paul’s Athens

 

STICKS AND STONES

Today is Boxing Day right?  When just to confuse things we don’t do any boxing but traditionally things were boxed up to be distributed to the poor. Today we celebrate Emmanuel in the Orthodox calendar and St Stephanos is celebrated tomorrow. For us, this the first Sunday of Christmas falls on St Stephen’s day this year. The famous carol Good King Wenceslas, that we sang at the beginning of this service, is sometimes only thing people know or remember on this festival. I have been fortunate enough to visit Prague and Wenceslas Square .And no I won’t start singing.

As a deacon this feast is close to my heart. Stephen is a role model for all deacons – a protipo. Let us remind ourselves on St Stephen’s day of his story and how he became the first Christian martyr- μαρτυρας –literally witness, we still use it in Modern Greek legal language.  We remember Stephen’s death as a witness to Christ, the Way, Truth and Life not on a cross but under a storm of stones and rocks( ελιθοβολουν).As we remember and relearn from Stephen’s story for our times, let us also consider it in light of the Christ child, whose birth we celebrated yesterday and the crucified Μessiah and in the context of the early church. Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York comments on the juxtaposition of these two great days and how they look forward to the cross.

In the early life of the Christian church all the followers of Jesus, not yet called Christians, attend the Temple. They are taught by the twelve Apostles, break bread and pray together. Those who own property and possessions sell what they have and everything is held for the good of all people according to their need. But it isn’t long before a dispute arises over the distribution of food. There were two groups of Jews in Jerusalem at the time those who had been born and raised there and spoke Aramaic and those who were known as Hellenists who spoke Greek as their first or second language and who were immigrants from neighbouring countries.

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Sermon preached at St Paul’s Athens on Christmas Day 2021: Isaiah 9, 2-7; Luke 2, 1-14

Fr Leonard Doolan

 

‘He is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’. (Is 9, 2-6).  ‘To you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, who is the messiah, the Lord’. (Luke 2, 11)

Both the prophet Isiah and St. Luke the Evangelist present to us what we might expect. The language, the vision, the expectation fits with the sort of power and authority that religious people want to see in and from God.

Then unexpectedly, ‘You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ (Luke 2, 11). The contrast is stark and should take us by complete surprise were it not all so familiar in the annual Christmas story.

The paradox at the heart of our faith is that God becomes flesh and face in a baby – Jesus, born in Bethlehem. ‘Holy God, holy and strong, holy and immortal, have mercy upon us’ we say in the prayer called the Trisagion.

It is one enormous risk that God takes – perhaps even greater than the risk of creating man and woman. God’s glory has the setting of straw and smell; God’s eternity has time and place and person; God’s mightiness cries in the night and needs the love and care of a mum and dad. God’s immortality is moving immediately, relentlessly towards the mystery of the cross.

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