Sermon to the Parish: Michaelmas 2025
This last week I had the privilege of preaching on the occasion of our great parish celebration of Michaelmas. The following remarks are excerpted from that Sermon:
“Romantic, but also cynical; …bitter as well as ecstatic; astringent as well as lyrical. He casts himself in the role of playboy, yet at the playboy he incessantly mocks.
He is vain, a little malicious, of quick intelligence and wit, and has the… gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising.”
I am sure we can all think of someone of whom something faintly similar could be said who is a Bostonian and even more likely a denizen of Beacon Hill, —given its reputation for worldly sophistication – a reputation that –we should admit it rather enjoys ! But these words were actually used of someone who was very much NOT a Bostonian –since he was born in St Paul Minnesota and lived most of his life on the West Coast, namely F. Scott Fitzgerald –as described by his friend and fellow writer, Edmund Wilson, in The Shores of Light.
Scott Fitzgerald comes to mind, because of a notable feature of his books which is a recurring imagery contrasting all that is grey, cloudy, dreamlike, and hazy, on the one hand, with an imagery of light, brightness and all that is shining on the other. The one set of imagery suggests delusion and uncertainty in the characters for whom it is employed, while the other represents, in the words of John Ditsky “the grail-like object of their quests, …” in pursuit of which “they spend themselves or scorch their wings”.
But beyond all this there is a yet further motif which bridges the polarities between the worlds of shadow and light. This is a kind of ladder of social advancement that is ultimately never quite what it first seems.
In the opening of The Beautiful and Damned (1922), the character of Anthony Patch emerges as a curiously inconsequential shadow of his grandfather “Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as ‘Cross Patch,’ [who] had left his father’s farm in Tarrytown [and[ … came home from the war a major, charged into Wall Street, and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill will…gathered to himself some seventy-five million dollars.” All of which set the scene for Anthony in New York where he moves, after passing through Harvard largely without trace, to Manhattan. There, we are told:
Fifth and Sixth Avenues, it seemed to Anthony, were the uprights of a gigantic ladder stretching from Washington Square to Central Park. Coming up-town on top of a bus toward Fifty-second Street invariably gave him the sensation of hoisting himself hand by hand on a series of treacherous rungs, and when the bus jolted to a stop at his own rung he found something akin to relief as he descended the reckless metal steps to the sidewalk.
Thus is an implicit image presented of a horizontal geography intersecting the vertical axis of social ambition into which the book’s Anthony steps with “as his driving expectation” only “the vague purpose of making something of his personal capital preferably, without labor or application”. But it is that imagery of rungs and a ladder that brings us to something powerful, with long and deep historic roots, namely that other ladder, the ladder of Jacob’s dream thousands of years before, which was presented to us in the first reading. In that story, Jacob lay in the open air with a stone for a pillow and in his dream:
“behold a ladder was set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and he beheld the angels of god ascending and descending on it (KJV Genesis 28:12)
Yet the use of the ladder imagery here is very different from that of Scott Fitzgerald. In the case of Jacob there is an upward spiritual striving, and then a grace is bestowed in exchange to the point of making Jacob a figure of destiny to his people. And in that there is a message for us too.
In the case of Anthony Patch there is no securing of land for posterity or anything of lasting consequence at all and no real advance up the ladder itself. As so often in Scott Fitzgerald, the light that pulls Patch onward always turns out in the end to be a trick of perspective or other way always illusory and false.
But perhaps it is the “little green light” episode of the Great Gatsby that speaks most directly to this point when:
One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. …The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars.
Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees —he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. (The Great Gatsby, New York, 1925, p. 182.)
Yet, Gatsby does not in fact climb the ladder. Instead he destroys his dream in his very pursuit of it. All of which invites us to generalize Fitzgerald’s insight into the nature of the then contemporary American experience, where he sees Americans as (mis)taking a horizontal progress for a climbing upward to the stars). In the manner of hopelessly misguided Magi in an attempting to follow stars they instead follow lights of self-delusion as they seek the rungs of ladders that do not exist.
All of which brings us to Nathaniel in the Gospel, of whom Jesus said rather startlingly on seeing him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!”. Nathaniel replies by asking “How do you know me?” to which Jesus responds, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” whereupon Nathaniel in the key moment of transformation gives a declaration of profound recognition. Thus we hear that he recognizes not merely Jesus as a person, but rather as a transcendent reality, using language which we would now understand to anticipate the Trinity in speaking of Jesus as divine and as participating in the reality of the Triune God. Thus Nathaniel replies “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”
Jesus responds with an element of irony, first in asking, is it “Because I said to you, I saw you under the fig tree, do you believe”? And then adding without waiting for any reply, “You shall see greater things than these” and “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” Once again the imagery of the angels ascending and descending takes us strait back to Jacob’s ladder and motif that is also uniquely fitting the Feast of St Michael and All Angels.
All of this then leaves us with wonderfully vivid sets of contrasting imagery, that stretch all the way through time from Jacob in the Old Testament and Nathaniel in the New, through to us today. While in terms of place, matters stretch from here all the way to the ancient Negev, where Jacob was travelling on his way far to the north of Palestine, in what is now Southern Turkey (Harran). While in the light of F Scott Fitzgerald, we journey too, all the way from the upper East Side of Manhattan and Gatsby’s dream and illusory ladder, to the Boston and the Beacon Hill of today.
In all of this there is the hard reality to which the imagery and literary references point us —which is as true for us now as it was for all the characters referenced.
For we too are –in our contemporary culture– constantly confronted with bright lights and the illusory social ladders of this world, about which the characters of Scott Fitzgerald should serve as an awful warning.
To embark on a quest that bases one’s success upon the esteem of others is to embark upon a hollow venture indeed. It is to embark upon a journey where one will be always travelling –and doing so in perpetual anxiety– yet also never actually arrive. For no amount of such worldly esteem will ever be quite enough to satisfy the fatal yet insatiable demand that drives it, made rapacious by the insatiable worm of self-doubt.
More deeply still, the things of this world can never satisfy in the deep sense
that the calling and vocation to which we are led in Christ alone can do. That calling invites us to find our vocation in that which God wills for us which by definition can only be that in which we are most fully and authentically ourselves—which is ultimately the life of heaven and the beatific vision of the life to come in union with God.
But here and now we are called both love God and our fellow man in the service of Jesus Christ. And that brings us to the community of the faithful which is the people of God and the mystical body of Christ’s church.
In far less abstract terms that means for us this church in this place which is part of the one true church of God which is his universal which is to say Catholic church.
Today as we mark once more the feast of Michaelmas, we mark too each year the return in all its fulness of the choir and the tradition of music and excellence in worship for which this church is known worldwide.
In doing this we renew a tradition that goes back a long way for as early as in 1893 a writer whose name is now lost wrote:
The writer of this personally knows of many
–whom the services of the Advent have drawn into the Church from sectarianism and from unbelief.
–who, already in the church, have been led, at the Advent, to realize the beauty, the fitness and the necessity of Catholic observances.
–who go there…but once, perhaps, but unquestionably they have received some-thing, even in that one visit, that will eventually bear fruit.
Above all else, the Catholic faith is kept and preached at the Advent in its purity … proclaimed … in its services, from the pulpit, and in its life.
Again – just after the second world war one of my august predecessors wrote in 1948 with (characteristically humble) wonderment
It is an amazing thing how deeply God touched the lives of people in and through this parish. Many of them may live in different places, still grateful.
And have attributed this influence to the ordered beauty of worship, which impresses the newcomer with the sense of the Holy even when he understands it very little; and more especially, to the faith for which the parish has always stood:
… the faith of the individual church, definite, inclusive, time-test-ed, and yet at home with, indeed the mother of freedom and democracy.
The faith of Anglo-Catholicism (which) neither starves the soul nor outrages the intellect, a faith which, with its Catholic liturgy and sacramental life, has helped the major Protestant Communions to rediscover the historic continuity of Christianity.
It is to this, let us remind ourselves, that we are all at the Advent committed.
It is this which should be the focus our unity together for, united in this commitment to the faith of the ages in the Anglo-Catholic form that we uphold, and in our shared acceptance of the call to mission and outreach to all who will hear, we have bonds of faith which should surely transcend such lesser differences as we may from time to time experience.
Our greater call to love and serve God and all those around us in this place must always come first.
In saying this and reaffirming this –despite the challenges of our ever more secular contemporary culture (and let us be honest and admit, parts of the church which have come to define Christianity too much in terms of this world and certain rather limited concepts of social change) we do well to remember that in this parish of all places we are heirs to astonishing and grace filled past success
As another distinguished past rector has observed (Andrew C. Mead):
A look through the current Book of Common Prayer, not to mention a look into the average Episcopal Church, demonstrates the prevalence of the catholic and sacramental principles for which the Advent was founded.
In the Prayer Book you will find Sacramental Confession, the Seven Sacraments taught in the Catechism, the ancient creeds of Catholicism and the title deeds of classic Anglicanism, the centrality of the Paschal Mystery in the liturgy and the full rites of Holy Week, full prayers for the faithful departed, a developing Mariology, an enlarged cult of the saints, provision for the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, and ceremonial mention of lights, the mixed chalice, vestments and incense.
…Go into the average Episcopal Church, even in Massachusetts, and you will see crosses and candles on altars (and the altar will be central), liturgical colours, symbols and pictures and occasionally icons and statues.
You will as likely as not see a light burning to indicate the presence of the Reserved Sacrament….
Much of this would have been unfamiliar to the wider Episcopal church in the last century when this parish was founded.
The lesson of all that history is that while this parish was at times treated in the past as a veritable pariah – spurned even by a bishop of Massachusetts at the time (Manton Eastburn) – it is because it remained faithful and committed to its Anglo-Catholic tradition that this parish did not merely survive itself, but instead transformed the wider Episcopal Church around it —of which it was –as this parish remains today — a determinedly committed part.
It may be a surprise now to hear of a former rector of the venerable Anglo-Catholic Church of St. Mary the Virgin in New York City, the Reverend Donald Garfield, that in the light of all this Anglo-Catholic success he wrote an academic article entitled
“What Do We Do When We’ve Won?”
And to that I have a simple answer –keep going!
And I say that because his declaration has about it an air that must now seem to be one of hubris.
We should know and remember that in matters of faith and spirituality, belief and truth – the war is never in this life won — there will always be new challenges.
To adapt a well worn phrase from Samuel Huntington, the end of history will only come at the eschaton and never in the here and now.
We must be ready at all times to press on but do so in the confidence that is it is by God’s grace that we can and will endure and succeed
Our task remains the same as it ever has been since 1844. The witness of history and the lessons of our past impact and success should help us to go forward once more in the fulness of faith and trust — to the task of renewing and expanding the Anglo-Catholic heritage that is ours.
Remembering in the words of Father Hale again
Only God knows what a beacon of light this parish has been and is in the lives of how many people in how many places. The Reverend S. Whitney Hale
As if that was not enough we have to too the words from Genesis that followed the dream given to Jacob and that ladder with all the angels whom we too commemorate today at this feast:
And, behold, the Lord stood beside him, and said: ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac. The land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. And in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest,…for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.’
And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place;….and said: ‘How full of awe is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’
Those last words you will find most fittingly at the great West Doors as we go out into the mission field to which we are all at the Advent now called.