Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

‘And Hogwarts…but he knew that his Horcrux there was safe, it would be impossible for Potter to enter Hogsmeade without detection, let alone the school. Nevertheless, it would be prudent to alert Snape to the fact that the boy might try to re-enter the castle…to tell Snape why the boy might return would be foolish, of course; it had been a great mistake to trust Bellatrix and Malfoy: didn’t their stupidity and carelessness prove how unwise it was, ever, to trust?’

Yes, the Vicar’s summer reading was, as this congregation would expect, irretrievably high-brow. I take comfort in the knowledge that I was not the first among you to devour Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (I am looking in the direction of two senior members of the PCC. They know who they are). In reading that particular passage to you I give nothing away, so if the book’s six hundred pages are a peak as yet unscaled you have nothing to fear. The seventh novel in the series reads as a three-cornered struggle between the hero, Harry, the arch-villain Lord Voldemort and the saintly but departed Albus Dumbledore. Yet in those few lines JK Rowling bares Voldemort’s very soul, uncovering both the originating root and the inexorable consequence of his malevolence. For Voldemort is utterly alone, consumed with a hideous vanity, and incapable of confidence in or reliance on any other living being.

Saint Paul’s letter to Philemon, one of the shortest books in the New Testament, also reads as a triangular human drama, although at that point the preacher ought to stop looking for similarities between it and the realm of Rubeus Hagrid and Luna Lovegood. The first player is Paul himself: at the time of writing an old man and a prisoner. The second is Philemon, Paul’s friend, to whom the letter is addressed; and the third is the subject of the letter and its probable bearer too, the slave Onesimus, whose Greek name means ‘useful’. Philemon has despatched his slave to care for Paul while he languishes in prison; the letter accompanies Onesimus as he returns to his master, his service of the apostle complete.

A momentous change has occurred during the time that Onesimus has spent with Paul. The slave, writes Paul, has become his child. He has become the slave’s father. Now, as Onesimus returns to Philemon, Paul urges his friend to receive him as a slave no longer, but instead as a beloved brother. Something radical has happened, something that has burst the ties of convention and habit and rendered them redundant. It is something that compels the elderly Paul to accept the pagan slave as his own child, and that compels him to ask his friend to treat Onesimus, hitherto his property, as his equal.

What has happened is spelt out by Paul in clever wordplay that no English translation can ever adequately explain. Before the change, he writes, the supposedly useful Onesimus had in fact been useless. Since the change he has begun to live up to his name by becoming truly useful. The Greek word for ‘useless’ is achristos. What is concealed from our ears is that achristos, useless, is also, a-christos, ‘without Christ’. When he was without Christ Onesimus was useless: now, writes Paul, he is truly useful. Onesimus has been baptized.

It is this that has wrought the transformation in his relations with Paul and with Philemon. His baptism means that he is no longer a heathen or a slave. He is the dear son of one; he is the brother of the other. Baptism has brought solidarity out of hierarchy. It is to this that Jesus is pointing when he addresses the multitudes in the stark terms that open this morning’s Gospel: ‘if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and bothers and sisters…he cannot be my disciple’. In Christ a whole new set of relationships is forged: in him the unthinkable becomes the reality.

No prison walls surround us but we come together as Paul and Onesimus must have done, to baptize with water, and to break bread. And today a transformation will take place just as it did in that far-off cell. It may be difficult to discern. There are miracles, after all, and miracles. The child we baptize this morning will return home the same bundle of mischief her family knows and loves. But although the water will dry and the oil will fade the change will be real. In a few moments she will take her place as a member of the body of Christ, one with every one of us who has been baptized, one with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, one with Philemon and Onesimus, one with Paul himself. And in a few years she will take her place at the altar, where the baptized recall their unity by feeding on the one bread and drinking from the one cup, those living symbols of the presence of Christ, the Christ who is the ground of their unity.

As with all good novelists, JK Rowling’s books tell us truths about ourselves and about the society we inhabit. Voldemort’s arrogant isolation spells disaster for the wizarding world, and our suspiciousness and refusal to trust, which he might applaud, spell disaster for ours, as the headlines from Liverpool and Basra and Praia da Luz attest every day. The choice before us is the choice that Moses puts to the Israelites: ‘I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live…’

In choosing the Christ we choose one another for we choose the unity and interdependence of baptism. In choosing the Christ we choose life. Amen.


Sunday 9 September 2007

Deuteronomy 30: 15-end;
Philemon 1-21;
Luke 14: 25-33