‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel: for he hath visited and redeemed his people’
Generations of praying Christians have begun the day to the words of the Benedictus. They are immediately reminiscent of morning sunlight playing upon Gothic arches, of Choral Mattins at eleven o’clock, and of sherry before lunch.
Yet is the Benedictus an appropriate text for Christian prayer? Our familiarity with the words, and the beauty of the music to which they are set has stopped up our ears to its irony and to its authentic character as a song lamenting an opportunity missed, a dream shattered, and a moment wasted for ever.
The Benedictus is the spontaneous response of Zechariah to the birth of his son John, who will become the Baptist. In his birth, and in the imminent birth of John’s kinsman Jesus, Zechariah discerns the mighty hand of God, triumphantly fulfilling the promises faithfully spoken by the prophets since the dawn of time. In these two births Zechariah perceives God’s threefold action.
Zechariah the elderly Jew perceives God acting to free his chosen people. The song makes two references to Israel’s enemies and one to those that hate Israel. Zechariah looks back upon the long history of his people’s oppression at than hands of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Seleucids and the Romans. He looks back to the covenant made with Abraham. And he looks forward to Israel’s deliverance and salvation
Zechariah the priest of the Temple perceives God acting to restore Israel’s worship. Deliverance from her enemies means that Israel will be free to serve her God without fear, ‘serve’ here having a particular cultic resonance. Zechariah looks back on his people’s constant longing to live securely in their land, serving faithfully the God who has given it to them. And he looks forward to that longing’s imminent satisfaction.
Zechariah the restored penitent perceives God acting to forgive his people. When the angel tells Zechariah that his wife is to bear him a son he cannot believe it. Because of his unbelief he is struck dumb and his speech is only restored when in faithfulness to the angel’s message he names his son John. Zechariah looks back upon the long history of Israel’s doubts, betrayals and apostasies. And he looks forward to a new era of fidelity in which God’s forgiveness will descend everlastingly upon his people.
Yet within decades of the song’s utterance and within decades of the crucifixion the Judaea known to Zechariah, to John the Baptist and to Jesus of Nazareth had changed beyond recognition and had changed for ever. In the year 70 of the Common Era Roman forces overcame Jerusalem. They razed it to the ground and burned the Temple. Never again was the City of David the national capital of the people of David. Never again was sacrifice offered on the Temple mount. The consequences were incalculable.
And it was amidst these consequences and in this context that Luke wrote his Gospel. Among the material that is unique to Luke are the three canticles of the first two chapters, Mary’s Magnificat, Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis, and Zechariah’s Benedictus. When Luke’s audience first heard Zechariah’s words they must have grimaced. They knew that God’s people had not been freed – that the enemies of God’s people had triumphed. They knew that God’s worship had not been restored – that the Temple was a smoking ruin. They knew that God’s forgiveness had not descended – that the covenant sealed by the gift of the land had been rent asunder. They must have heard Zechariah’s words as irony. The dayspring from on high had visited God’s people, and God’s people had nailed the dayspring to a cross. Zechariah’s song laments an opportunity missed, a dream shattered, and a moment wasted for ever.
So how can we pray this lament?
In doing so we take the three promises that Zechariah discerned and make them our own. Yet we are not besieged by Rome; we are not alienated from the Temple; we have not seen our covenant with our God turn to dust and ashes.
The Benedictus, rooted as it is in the reality of Israel’s national tragedy, compels us to acknowledge that Scripture is always a distant land. It recalls us to the discipline of Biblical study. Zechariah’s words come down to us not Tardis-like, heat-sealed and shrink-wrapped, secure against the vagaries of time and circumstance. They come down to us as the product of a far-off age, an age that we cannot hope to recapture. When we read Zechariah’s words we must consider that distance; we must consider the wisdom of the church; and we must pray that the Holy Spirit will speak, and bring these ancient words to life.
When we do so we may discover that our enemies are more likely to have subtle advertising strategies than all-conquering siege-engines. Our enemies play upon our fear and our vanity, upon our insecurity and our pride. Our return to worship is more likely to involve our internal disposition rather than our physical presence in a sacred space. We are here, after all, but our day to day lived experience may not be the day to day lived experience of men and women set free to serve God without fear. And our forgiveness, or our acceptance of our forgiveness, will only be visible and plausible when we are ready to forgive others as generously as we know ourselves to have been forgiven.
Free, worshipping, forgiven: three adjectives for Zechariah’s descendants, three adjectives for the Advent people of God who look for their Lord’s return.
Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus. Amen.
Monday 7 December 2009
Monday 9 November 2009
Remembrance Sunday 2009
The Regimental Museum of the South Wales Borderers in Brecon is a neglected treasure trove of military history. Every inch of its four rooms is filled with the artefacts of an illustrious past: weaponry, insignia, and medals. In pride of place stand the Victoria Crosses won by the regiment, including six of the seven won at Rorke’s Drift on 22 January 1879.
The faces of the men who were decorated for their valour that day stare out from small gilt frames. They are separated from the viewer by a glass case, but not only by a glass case. They are also separated by the coloured tinting of Victorian photography, strange to citizens of the digital era. They are separated by the starched formality of the uniforms that they wear and by the style in which their hair and beards are cut. When we look at Harry Hook’s portrait we see not the recognizable and roguish hero of Cy Endfield’s 1964 film Zulu, but a man from another age. He is inaccessible to us; his life is inaccessible to us. It is impossible to re-enter his world imaginatively, to sense it, understand it and sympathize with it.
Imaginative re-entry characterizes the remembrance that has been customary at this time of year since the end of the Great War. Consciously or unconsciously we have been encouraged to re-enter and re-live the horror of the Western Front. Our re-entry has been eased by the poetry of Wilfred Owen and by grainy newsreel footage of the Somme. But it has been eased above all by the presence at our war memorials of the veterans of the First World War. We have seen with our own eyes, heard with our own ears and stood shoulder to shoulder in our market squares with the men who fought at Passchendaele and Jutland. Their survival has kept their great struggle from the clutches of the museum’s dusty shelves.
Yet that era is now past. In the last twelve months the last three British survivors of the conflict that gave birth to Remebrancetide have died, and the voice of that generation has fallen silent. For those growing up now, and for those yet unborn, Harry Patch will be as Harry Hook is to us, a stranger from that distant land called the past. Imaginative re-entry into the slime and squalor of the trenches will become more and more difficult. What then will happen to remembrance? How will we remember a time with which we have no living link?
When imaginative re-entry is no longer possible solemn recollection is. Solemn recollection is the deliberate calling to mind of events that our corporate consciousness might prefer to forget. Solemn recollection is our regular reminding ourselves that, in the words of the Kohima Epitaph, our today has been won at the cost of others’ tomorrow. It is the painstaking chronicling of their sacrifice even when they can no longer prompt us. It is the acknowledgement that such sacrifice continues in the heat of Helmand and in too many other theatres of conflict. It is the perpetual recognition that war, all war, is an abomination. Solemn recollection is a national task which should claim the allegiance of people of all faiths and of no faith. The vocation of Christians within the national task is to enable this solemn recollection, providing sacred space and sacred language for the purpose. It is a vocation which those who treat our Church’s establishment in cavalier fashion would do well to remember.
Yet the Christian contribution to Remembrance Sunday should not be limited to space and language. It should not even be limited to prayer for the victims of war and ethical reflection on the morality of war. The Church’s most profound contribution is a remembrance which is neither imaginative re-entering nor solemn recollection. This is the remembrance that is celebrated daily within these walls, the remembrance that Christ commended to his friends. We may be able to enter the scene created by Leonardo da Vinci, so firmly is it imprinted on the Western heart, but we cannot imaginatively re-enter the upper room. And although the solemn recollection of the Last Supper plays a part in Eucharistic celebration such celebration does not end with recollection.
For here we remember Christ; that is, we re-member Christ. We know what it means to dismember. It is, after all, the achievement of war to dismember communities, to dismember families, to dismember men and women, God’s unique and precious creation. We too easily overlook what it means to re-member. It means to make whole again, to restore again, to bring into the present again. Here we re-member Christ. In broken bread and wine outpoured the Holy Spirit makes Christ present, as real for us as he was for the company with who he reclined around the table.
And if we are in the presence of Christ then time and space mean nothing. If we are in the presence of Christ then we are in the presence of all who are in the presence of Christ. We are in the presence of the fallen, of all the victims of the folly and sin of war. We gather with Harry Hook, hero of Rorke’s Drift, with Harry Patch, the last fighting Tommy, and with Phillip Scott, killed in Sangin on Thursday last week.
Because Christ is we know that they are; because Christ is we know that love ultimately disarms violence; because Christ is we know that beyond death there is life, that beyond darkness there is light, that beyond despair there is hope. Ours is to remember them, and to remember this broken and suffering world. Amen.
The faces of the men who were decorated for their valour that day stare out from small gilt frames. They are separated from the viewer by a glass case, but not only by a glass case. They are also separated by the coloured tinting of Victorian photography, strange to citizens of the digital era. They are separated by the starched formality of the uniforms that they wear and by the style in which their hair and beards are cut. When we look at Harry Hook’s portrait we see not the recognizable and roguish hero of Cy Endfield’s 1964 film Zulu, but a man from another age. He is inaccessible to us; his life is inaccessible to us. It is impossible to re-enter his world imaginatively, to sense it, understand it and sympathize with it.
Imaginative re-entry characterizes the remembrance that has been customary at this time of year since the end of the Great War. Consciously or unconsciously we have been encouraged to re-enter and re-live the horror of the Western Front. Our re-entry has been eased by the poetry of Wilfred Owen and by grainy newsreel footage of the Somme. But it has been eased above all by the presence at our war memorials of the veterans of the First World War. We have seen with our own eyes, heard with our own ears and stood shoulder to shoulder in our market squares with the men who fought at Passchendaele and Jutland. Their survival has kept their great struggle from the clutches of the museum’s dusty shelves.
Yet that era is now past. In the last twelve months the last three British survivors of the conflict that gave birth to Remebrancetide have died, and the voice of that generation has fallen silent. For those growing up now, and for those yet unborn, Harry Patch will be as Harry Hook is to us, a stranger from that distant land called the past. Imaginative re-entry into the slime and squalor of the trenches will become more and more difficult. What then will happen to remembrance? How will we remember a time with which we have no living link?
When imaginative re-entry is no longer possible solemn recollection is. Solemn recollection is the deliberate calling to mind of events that our corporate consciousness might prefer to forget. Solemn recollection is our regular reminding ourselves that, in the words of the Kohima Epitaph, our today has been won at the cost of others’ tomorrow. It is the painstaking chronicling of their sacrifice even when they can no longer prompt us. It is the acknowledgement that such sacrifice continues in the heat of Helmand and in too many other theatres of conflict. It is the perpetual recognition that war, all war, is an abomination. Solemn recollection is a national task which should claim the allegiance of people of all faiths and of no faith. The vocation of Christians within the national task is to enable this solemn recollection, providing sacred space and sacred language for the purpose. It is a vocation which those who treat our Church’s establishment in cavalier fashion would do well to remember.
Yet the Christian contribution to Remembrance Sunday should not be limited to space and language. It should not even be limited to prayer for the victims of war and ethical reflection on the morality of war. The Church’s most profound contribution is a remembrance which is neither imaginative re-entering nor solemn recollection. This is the remembrance that is celebrated daily within these walls, the remembrance that Christ commended to his friends. We may be able to enter the scene created by Leonardo da Vinci, so firmly is it imprinted on the Western heart, but we cannot imaginatively re-enter the upper room. And although the solemn recollection of the Last Supper plays a part in Eucharistic celebration such celebration does not end with recollection.
For here we remember Christ; that is, we re-member Christ. We know what it means to dismember. It is, after all, the achievement of war to dismember communities, to dismember families, to dismember men and women, God’s unique and precious creation. We too easily overlook what it means to re-member. It means to make whole again, to restore again, to bring into the present again. Here we re-member Christ. In broken bread and wine outpoured the Holy Spirit makes Christ present, as real for us as he was for the company with who he reclined around the table.
And if we are in the presence of Christ then time and space mean nothing. If we are in the presence of Christ then we are in the presence of all who are in the presence of Christ. We are in the presence of the fallen, of all the victims of the folly and sin of war. We gather with Harry Hook, hero of Rorke’s Drift, with Harry Patch, the last fighting Tommy, and with Phillip Scott, killed in Sangin on Thursday last week.
Because Christ is we know that they are; because Christ is we know that love ultimately disarms violence; because Christ is we know that beyond death there is life, that beyond darkness there is light, that beyond despair there is hope. Ours is to remember them, and to remember this broken and suffering world. Amen.
Monday 7 September 2009
Sunday 6 September 2009, Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity
‘In the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, the black man is my equal and the equal of every living man’.
In her magisterial study of Abraham Lincoln’s political genius, Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes racism as ‘deeply embedded’ in mid-nineteenth century America. Lincoln voiced the egalitarian sentiments with which I began as he campaigned for a seat in the United States Senate in 1858, and he detested slavery. But he believed in white supremacy. The black man in America was not the equal of the white man in America. The black man was not capable of assimilation into American life.
Lincoln was a leader, an orator and a reformer of remarkable stature. Yet he held views that all of us find abhorrent. He was a creature of his time as well as being a creator of his time.
Much scholarly sweat has been expended on the first words spoken by Jesus to the Syrophoenician woman. It is easy to see why. A mother bows down at his feet and begs him to cast the demon out of her daughter. ‘Let the children be fed first,’ says Jesus ‘for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs’. No amount of scholarly sweat can diminish the offensive nature of those words. The food of his ministry is for the children of God; it is for Jesus’s own people; it is for the Jews. It is not for the people who the Jews frequently referred to as dogs; it is not for the Gentiles.
It has been suggested that Jesus was teasing the woman, that the word he used was a diminutive term of endearment, that it was said while a smile played across his lips. Those suggestions are born of a determination that the Redeemer of the World cannot possibly have uttered anything hurtful. That determination, however well-meaning, is surely misplaced. To picture the face of Jesus is the task of the poet, not the preacher. Jesus belonged to a race which believed itself uniquely chosen by God. God had freed them from bondage, given them a homeland, and driven out other nations before them. God’s purposes were for Israel; God’s prophets called for Israel’s renewal; God’s Messiah would restore Israel’s fortunes. Jesus’s mission, in obedience to God, was to Israel. It was to the children, not to the dogs. Like Lincoln, Jesus was a creature of his time.
The encounter with the Syrophoenician woman recalls us to the transience of human values. Just as Lincoln disliked the notion of black suffrage, Jesus drew a parallel between a desperate mother’s sick child and a despised dog. Abraham Lincoln and Jesus of Nazareth in these instances exemplify that transience, and that transience requires us to re-examine the values we hold. How might we assess what is eternal, and what is not?
The Letter of James makes a unique contribution to the Christian understanding of faith, and it makes it so clearly that Martin Luther was driven to condemn it as ‘a right strawy epistle’. ‘What good is it’ writes James ‘if you say you have faith but do not have works? Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’. Protestations of belief are not enough. They have no cash value; they cannot be assessed or analyzed. The quality of faith can be judged only by the action that it generates. Perhaps the quality of values can be judged only by the action that they generate.
Lincoln’s values may fall short of the standards of twenty-first century liberal thinkers. But Goodwin notes that a black contemporary who had met all the leading abolitionists of the day never felt with any of them, as he did with Lincoln, an ‘entire freedom from popular prejudice against the coloured race’. And the crowning achievement of his political career was the emancipation of the slaves of the United States. The Syrophoenician woman responds to Jesus’s words with faithful boldness. The child is healed; the dog under the table receives its scrap. And in the next miracle that is recorded reveals that the impact of her faith has stretched beyond the region of Tyre. The audience for whom Mark is writing three decades after the crucifixion is not an audience of Jews but of Gentiles, her successors in faith.
Isaiah writes of the actions that will identify the coming of Israel’s God. The eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame will leap and the speechless will sing. Water will flow in the wilderness and streams will run in the desert. These are the actions that were prompted by faith in Jesus, who opened the eyes of the blind, unstopped the ears of the deaf, walked across the seas and fed the hungry in the desert, whose Gospel was proclaimed to the ends of the earth. These are the actions that that were prompted by Lincoln’s values, values which prompted him to break the shackles of more than three million Americans and restore them to themselves, values for which he gave his life.
So what actions do our values unleash? What actions does our faith provoke? Do we set the prisoner free or do we drain away the vital water of life? Do we make the speechless shout for joy or do we place unconscionable burdens upon their shoulders?
If the latter then no matter how clear we are today, to the generation which worships here one hundred years hence we will appear ludicrous or downright wicked; if the former then we catch in them the echo of heaven’s eternal music.
In her magisterial study of Abraham Lincoln’s political genius, Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes racism as ‘deeply embedded’ in mid-nineteenth century America. Lincoln voiced the egalitarian sentiments with which I began as he campaigned for a seat in the United States Senate in 1858, and he detested slavery. But he believed in white supremacy. The black man in America was not the equal of the white man in America. The black man was not capable of assimilation into American life.
Lincoln was a leader, an orator and a reformer of remarkable stature. Yet he held views that all of us find abhorrent. He was a creature of his time as well as being a creator of his time.
Much scholarly sweat has been expended on the first words spoken by Jesus to the Syrophoenician woman. It is easy to see why. A mother bows down at his feet and begs him to cast the demon out of her daughter. ‘Let the children be fed first,’ says Jesus ‘for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs’. No amount of scholarly sweat can diminish the offensive nature of those words. The food of his ministry is for the children of God; it is for Jesus’s own people; it is for the Jews. It is not for the people who the Jews frequently referred to as dogs; it is not for the Gentiles.
It has been suggested that Jesus was teasing the woman, that the word he used was a diminutive term of endearment, that it was said while a smile played across his lips. Those suggestions are born of a determination that the Redeemer of the World cannot possibly have uttered anything hurtful. That determination, however well-meaning, is surely misplaced. To picture the face of Jesus is the task of the poet, not the preacher. Jesus belonged to a race which believed itself uniquely chosen by God. God had freed them from bondage, given them a homeland, and driven out other nations before them. God’s purposes were for Israel; God’s prophets called for Israel’s renewal; God’s Messiah would restore Israel’s fortunes. Jesus’s mission, in obedience to God, was to Israel. It was to the children, not to the dogs. Like Lincoln, Jesus was a creature of his time.
The encounter with the Syrophoenician woman recalls us to the transience of human values. Just as Lincoln disliked the notion of black suffrage, Jesus drew a parallel between a desperate mother’s sick child and a despised dog. Abraham Lincoln and Jesus of Nazareth in these instances exemplify that transience, and that transience requires us to re-examine the values we hold. How might we assess what is eternal, and what is not?
The Letter of James makes a unique contribution to the Christian understanding of faith, and it makes it so clearly that Martin Luther was driven to condemn it as ‘a right strawy epistle’. ‘What good is it’ writes James ‘if you say you have faith but do not have works? Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’. Protestations of belief are not enough. They have no cash value; they cannot be assessed or analyzed. The quality of faith can be judged only by the action that it generates. Perhaps the quality of values can be judged only by the action that they generate.
Lincoln’s values may fall short of the standards of twenty-first century liberal thinkers. But Goodwin notes that a black contemporary who had met all the leading abolitionists of the day never felt with any of them, as he did with Lincoln, an ‘entire freedom from popular prejudice against the coloured race’. And the crowning achievement of his political career was the emancipation of the slaves of the United States. The Syrophoenician woman responds to Jesus’s words with faithful boldness. The child is healed; the dog under the table receives its scrap. And in the next miracle that is recorded reveals that the impact of her faith has stretched beyond the region of Tyre. The audience for whom Mark is writing three decades after the crucifixion is not an audience of Jews but of Gentiles, her successors in faith.
Isaiah writes of the actions that will identify the coming of Israel’s God. The eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame will leap and the speechless will sing. Water will flow in the wilderness and streams will run in the desert. These are the actions that were prompted by faith in Jesus, who opened the eyes of the blind, unstopped the ears of the deaf, walked across the seas and fed the hungry in the desert, whose Gospel was proclaimed to the ends of the earth. These are the actions that that were prompted by Lincoln’s values, values which prompted him to break the shackles of more than three million Americans and restore them to themselves, values for which he gave his life.
So what actions do our values unleash? What actions does our faith provoke? Do we set the prisoner free or do we drain away the vital water of life? Do we make the speechless shout for joy or do we place unconscionable burdens upon their shoulders?
If the latter then no matter how clear we are today, to the generation which worships here one hundred years hence we will appear ludicrous or downright wicked; if the former then we catch in them the echo of heaven’s eternal music.
Sunday 19 July 2009, Sixth Sunday after Trinity
‘Magnificent desolation’ said Buzz Aldrin as he looked across the Sea of Tranquility forty years ago.
‘Come away to a deserted place’ said Jesus Christ as he looked across the Sea of Galilee two thousand years ago.
Astronauts and apostles share a common destiny. They are called to the wilderness.
The mission of Apollo 11 was a journey with a purpose. It had its roots in the Cold War rivalry of two global superpowers, but it had a rationale that was greater than that rivalry. It will always have its critics and its sceptics, not to mention the conspiracy theorists for whom the term ‘lunatic’ is uniquely apt. It expanded the boundaries of human knowledge. It enlarged human experience. And in its triumph it strengthened the human family, albeit briefly. The apostles’ sojourn in the deserted place had a purpose. They had just returned from the first solo mission upon which Jesus had sent them. They had much to say, much to recount, much to learn. The crowd was pressing in. There was little space to take a breath, little chance step back, little time to reflect.
Christ has a purpose for those who follow him. It is to send us out as the twelve were sent out. It is to shepherd the flock as he shepherds the flock. It is to be his presence in this place: to be his feet to go about, to be his hands to bless, to be the fringe of his cloak, bringing wholeness to those who touch it.
The mission of Apollo 11 was a test of human ingenuity. It had less computer power behind it than does the average BlackBerry. The ground crew at Houston used slide rules to calculate the optimum angles for its’ re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere. And the spindly legs of the lunar module made it look like a child’s junk model. The apostles’ sojourn in the deserted place tested human endurance. They were newly-returned missionaries. Yet they were taken far from home and family. They were removed from the acclamation of the crowds, and they had only one another for company and for sustenance.
Christ tests those who follow him. In sending us out he offers us not the security of paths we have already taken but a new journey in an unforeseen direction. For our rest he offers us not luxury but a deserted place. To comfort us he offers not the adulation of the mob but his presence among us.
The mission of Apollo 11 was a voyage into silence. We remember the words that enveloped the mission: ‘The Eagle has landed’ said Neil Armstrong; ‘…all the people on this earth are truly one’ said Richard Nixon. What we don’t remember is the silence that envelops the Moon. No breath of wind stirs the lunar dust. The astronauts’ footprints are as clear today as the day they were made. Nothing has disturbed the Sea of Serenity since Apollo 17 departed in 1972. The apostles’ sojourn in the deserted place was a sojourn in silence. All we know about the place is that it was empty. Jesus took the apostles away from the cities and away from the villages of the region.
Christ leads those who follow him into silence. We are to be sent out. There is a mission to accomplish. But there is always teaching to give. There is always healing to perform. There are always people to care for. The task of Christ in the world is endless; the task of those who follow Christ in the world is endless. Christ leads us away from teaching and away from healing and away from caring. He leads us into silence. For he knows that in silence will we meet his Father; in silence will we be replenished; in silence will we discover who we are rather than what we do.
Astronauts and apostles share a common destiny. They are called to the wilderness.
They are called to a task, tested to the utmost, and drawn into silence. They steps they take may be small, but their small steps are towards One whose giant leap is eternally towards the cosmos that he has made and has in love redeemed. Amen.
‘Come away to a deserted place’ said Jesus Christ as he looked across the Sea of Galilee two thousand years ago.
Astronauts and apostles share a common destiny. They are called to the wilderness.
The mission of Apollo 11 was a journey with a purpose. It had its roots in the Cold War rivalry of two global superpowers, but it had a rationale that was greater than that rivalry. It will always have its critics and its sceptics, not to mention the conspiracy theorists for whom the term ‘lunatic’ is uniquely apt. It expanded the boundaries of human knowledge. It enlarged human experience. And in its triumph it strengthened the human family, albeit briefly. The apostles’ sojourn in the deserted place had a purpose. They had just returned from the first solo mission upon which Jesus had sent them. They had much to say, much to recount, much to learn. The crowd was pressing in. There was little space to take a breath, little chance step back, little time to reflect.
Christ has a purpose for those who follow him. It is to send us out as the twelve were sent out. It is to shepherd the flock as he shepherds the flock. It is to be his presence in this place: to be his feet to go about, to be his hands to bless, to be the fringe of his cloak, bringing wholeness to those who touch it.
The mission of Apollo 11 was a test of human ingenuity. It had less computer power behind it than does the average BlackBerry. The ground crew at Houston used slide rules to calculate the optimum angles for its’ re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere. And the spindly legs of the lunar module made it look like a child’s junk model. The apostles’ sojourn in the deserted place tested human endurance. They were newly-returned missionaries. Yet they were taken far from home and family. They were removed from the acclamation of the crowds, and they had only one another for company and for sustenance.
Christ tests those who follow him. In sending us out he offers us not the security of paths we have already taken but a new journey in an unforeseen direction. For our rest he offers us not luxury but a deserted place. To comfort us he offers not the adulation of the mob but his presence among us.
The mission of Apollo 11 was a voyage into silence. We remember the words that enveloped the mission: ‘The Eagle has landed’ said Neil Armstrong; ‘…all the people on this earth are truly one’ said Richard Nixon. What we don’t remember is the silence that envelops the Moon. No breath of wind stirs the lunar dust. The astronauts’ footprints are as clear today as the day they were made. Nothing has disturbed the Sea of Serenity since Apollo 17 departed in 1972. The apostles’ sojourn in the deserted place was a sojourn in silence. All we know about the place is that it was empty. Jesus took the apostles away from the cities and away from the villages of the region.
Christ leads those who follow him into silence. We are to be sent out. There is a mission to accomplish. But there is always teaching to give. There is always healing to perform. There are always people to care for. The task of Christ in the world is endless; the task of those who follow Christ in the world is endless. Christ leads us away from teaching and away from healing and away from caring. He leads us into silence. For he knows that in silence will we meet his Father; in silence will we be replenished; in silence will we discover who we are rather than what we do.
Astronauts and apostles share a common destiny. They are called to the wilderness.
They are called to a task, tested to the utmost, and drawn into silence. They steps they take may be small, but their small steps are towards One whose giant leap is eternally towards the cosmos that he has made and has in love redeemed. Amen.
Sunday 14 June 2009, First Sunday after Trinity
'Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten…Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller’
It is sixty years since George Orwell published his novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, a prophetic depiction of a world still recognizable to the reader yet submerged in a totalitarian nightmare. Its three super-states are locked in unceasing war; its brutal governance is in the hands of the anonymous Party; and its people are kept under constant and total surveillance.
Chief among the instruments of oppression is the manipulation of language, as is explained to the novel’s hero Winston Smith in the passage with which I began. In 1984 Oldspeak, the language of Milton and Shakespeare, of Coleridge and Shelley, the language with which you and I are familiar, is being replaced by Newspeak, which is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. Its purpose, Orwell writes, is to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of the governing Party’s ideology. It is also to make all other modes of thought impossible. The Newspeak dictionary introduces new words and eliminates undesirable words; those undesirable words that remain it strips of undesirable meanings. Political freedom and intellectual freedom have been abolished so the word ‘freedom’ can retain little of its original sense. The word ‘freedom’ still exists but only to describe the freedom of a dog from fleas.
The Party uses language to achieve certain ends; so too does Jesus. ‘With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples’. Saint Mark believes that Jesus gives an explanation to those closest to him, but that in public he chooses to speak differently. His subject is the kingdom of God: that kingdom, he says, ‘is as if someone would scatter seed upon the ground…it is like a mustard seed’. Jesus denies the crowd the interpretation he gives to the disciples, and offers instead sketches and stories. George Orwell warns us that language can be deployed to oppress. We are surely entitled to ask why Jesus deploys language as he does. And Orwell may help us find an answer.
In his 1946 essay ‘The Prevention of Literature he ponders what journalism and imaginative writing have in common. It is commonly acknowledged that the former is likely to suffer in societies that are not free. The authorities will clamp down on reporting that dissents from their ideological line. But Orwell argues that creative writing is just as likely to suffer. ‘The journalist is unfree’ he writes ‘when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news: the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts’. Authentic history and enquiring journalism: these are the mark of the free; but so too is imaginative writing, poetry and story-telling.
Newspeak strips away all nuance, colour and interpretative possibility, denying the hearer space to imagine, question or speculate. Story is steeped in nuance, colour and interpretative possibility. It encourages the hearer to imagine, question and speculate. The language of totalitarianism is Newspeak. The language of freedom is story.
So Jesus Christ speaks to men and women in the language of freedom, a language that recognizes our need to think for ourselves, question for ourselves and speculate for ourselves. Jesus Christ speaks to men and women in the language of the kingdom, the kingdom that grows like a mustard seed as we think, question and speculate. Jesus Christ speaks to men and women in the language of freedom because freedom is what men and women have been created to enjoy, because in growing up and exercising our freedom we can become God-like.
Slavery and oppression still stalk our planet. Slavery and oppression are the antithesis of the kingdom that Jesus Christ proclaims. Twenty years ago this week thousands of protestors were swept from Tiananmen Square in an operation that China’s rulers can barely acknowledge took place. ‘If you want a picture of the future’ says O’Brien, Winston Smith’s torturer, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’. In too many places there is no need to imagine. Wherever the liberty of God’s children is abused the seed of the kingdom is trampled underfoot; the face of Jesus Christ is bruised and bloodied.
‘From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view’ Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians. We cannot understand any human face simply as a human face, for in every human face we see the face of the One who gave up himself for the sake of us all. Their suffering and their struggle are ours. So let us speak the language of freedom; let us speak it boldly; let us tell the story. Amen.
It is sixty years since George Orwell published his novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, a prophetic depiction of a world still recognizable to the reader yet submerged in a totalitarian nightmare. Its three super-states are locked in unceasing war; its brutal governance is in the hands of the anonymous Party; and its people are kept under constant and total surveillance.
Chief among the instruments of oppression is the manipulation of language, as is explained to the novel’s hero Winston Smith in the passage with which I began. In 1984 Oldspeak, the language of Milton and Shakespeare, of Coleridge and Shelley, the language with which you and I are familiar, is being replaced by Newspeak, which is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. Its purpose, Orwell writes, is to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of the governing Party’s ideology. It is also to make all other modes of thought impossible. The Newspeak dictionary introduces new words and eliminates undesirable words; those undesirable words that remain it strips of undesirable meanings. Political freedom and intellectual freedom have been abolished so the word ‘freedom’ can retain little of its original sense. The word ‘freedom’ still exists but only to describe the freedom of a dog from fleas.
The Party uses language to achieve certain ends; so too does Jesus. ‘With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples’. Saint Mark believes that Jesus gives an explanation to those closest to him, but that in public he chooses to speak differently. His subject is the kingdom of God: that kingdom, he says, ‘is as if someone would scatter seed upon the ground…it is like a mustard seed’. Jesus denies the crowd the interpretation he gives to the disciples, and offers instead sketches and stories. George Orwell warns us that language can be deployed to oppress. We are surely entitled to ask why Jesus deploys language as he does. And Orwell may help us find an answer.
In his 1946 essay ‘The Prevention of Literature he ponders what journalism and imaginative writing have in common. It is commonly acknowledged that the former is likely to suffer in societies that are not free. The authorities will clamp down on reporting that dissents from their ideological line. But Orwell argues that creative writing is just as likely to suffer. ‘The journalist is unfree’ he writes ‘when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news: the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts’. Authentic history and enquiring journalism: these are the mark of the free; but so too is imaginative writing, poetry and story-telling.
Newspeak strips away all nuance, colour and interpretative possibility, denying the hearer space to imagine, question or speculate. Story is steeped in nuance, colour and interpretative possibility. It encourages the hearer to imagine, question and speculate. The language of totalitarianism is Newspeak. The language of freedom is story.
So Jesus Christ speaks to men and women in the language of freedom, a language that recognizes our need to think for ourselves, question for ourselves and speculate for ourselves. Jesus Christ speaks to men and women in the language of the kingdom, the kingdom that grows like a mustard seed as we think, question and speculate. Jesus Christ speaks to men and women in the language of freedom because freedom is what men and women have been created to enjoy, because in growing up and exercising our freedom we can become God-like.
Slavery and oppression still stalk our planet. Slavery and oppression are the antithesis of the kingdom that Jesus Christ proclaims. Twenty years ago this week thousands of protestors were swept from Tiananmen Square in an operation that China’s rulers can barely acknowledge took place. ‘If you want a picture of the future’ says O’Brien, Winston Smith’s torturer, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’. In too many places there is no need to imagine. Wherever the liberty of God’s children is abused the seed of the kingdom is trampled underfoot; the face of Jesus Christ is bruised and bloodied.
‘From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view’ Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians. We cannot understand any human face simply as a human face, for in every human face we see the face of the One who gave up himself for the sake of us all. Their suffering and their struggle are ours. So let us speak the language of freedom; let us speak it boldly; let us tell the story. Amen.
Monday 8 June 2009
In George Orwell’s clear, strong voice we hear a warning. Because we, too, live in a time when truth is disappearing from the world, and doing so in just the way Orwell worried it would: through language. We move through the world by naming things in it, and we explain the world through sentences and stories. The lesson of Orwell’s essays is clear: Look around you.
Describe what you see as an ordinary observer – for you are one, you know – would see them. Take things seriously.
And tell the truth. Tell the truth’.
In his recent essay marking the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four Keith Gessen recalls the novel’s philologist Syme telling its hero Winston Smith ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? . . . Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness is smaller’.
All doctrine, whether economic, political or religious, has the potential to be Newspeak. It has the potential to control thought through the control of language. We are aware of this potential, and it explains why we are suspicious of doctrine.
This makes life difficult for the preacher on Trinity Sunday, when the Church celebrates its faith and celebrates what is perhaps the most ambitious doctrine of them all, the doctrine that articulates the Christian understanding of God. At least - it would make life difficult if that doctrine did not have its roots in the one source of authority that our suspicious, cynical age respects. That is the personal, authentic experience of individual men and women.
For Dan Brown cannot be allowed to have it all his own way. The doctrine of the Trinity was not cooked up by a conclave of male hierarchs and imposed on a Church which had hitherto revelled in blissful diversity. We forget at our peril that the doctrine of the Trinity was born out of the prayerful reflection of the Church upon the events that shaped its early life.
So let us rehearse them and let us recall: that early life was nurtured in Jerusalem, a city which contained only one Temple. That made it unusual for the Empire in which it was a far-flung outpost. That one Temple bore witness to the conviction of the Jewish people that there was only one God.
That one God had no more devoted worshipper than a man called Jesus, from Nazareth. He visited the temple, prayed in the synagogues, and quoted the Scriptures. Yet the followers he gathered were forced to think hard about who their friend was. He was a teacher, yes; and a prophet, certainly: thus far he did not stand out from a great Jewish tradition of holy men, and his crucifixion only confirmed him in it. Many like him had been cruelly put to death, most recently his cousin John. But unlike John, and unlike the ancient men of God put to the sword by the Jewish kings, Jesus had been raised. His followers had seen him, walked with him, eaten with him. His touch had brought healing; his presence had calmed the raging storm; he had spoken words of forgiveness.
Now: only Israel’s God could not be destroyed by death; only Israel’s God was the source of life and health; only Israel’s God was the creator of sea and wind; only Israel’s God was the judge who could forgive. It was as if in Jesus Israel’s God had become human and had lived on earth. In fact, the followers of Jesus came to believe, that’s what had happened. Nothing else would explain it. In Jesus the one God had become united with the things of the earth.
And despite the withdrawal of Jesus from their sight his followers sensed that God was not absent. God was around them and among them, opening their eyes and their hearts, deepening their understanding, equipping them to speak, strengthening them to suffer.
Theology (doctrine, if you will) is faith seeking understanding, wrote Saint Anselm. The Church’s faith is that God is one; yet Jesus has united God to earth; and the divine Spirit will not allow the earth to forget God’s continuing engagement with it. We seek to understand this faith, and what we understand above all is that God reveals Godself to us: to Abraham the patriarch, Moses the lawgiver, David the King and Isaiah the prophet. God reveals Godself and the Church, reflecting on what the revelation of Jesus means for the revelation of God, is drawn ineluctably to the revelation of the Trinity.
‘We move through the world by naming things in it, and we explain the world through sentences and stories. The lesson of Orwell’s essays is clear: Look around you.
Describe what you see as an ordinary observer would see them. Take things seriously.
And tell the truth. Tell the truth’.
Doctrine becomes Newspeak when it stifles thought. The Church arrives at the greatest truths entrusted to it when it looks at its experience and reflects upon it. I am with Keith Gessen. Look around you. Describe what you see. Take things seriously. And tell the truth. Tell the truth. Amen.
Describe what you see as an ordinary observer – for you are one, you know – would see them. Take things seriously.
And tell the truth. Tell the truth’.
In his recent essay marking the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four Keith Gessen recalls the novel’s philologist Syme telling its hero Winston Smith ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? . . . Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness is smaller’.
All doctrine, whether economic, political or religious, has the potential to be Newspeak. It has the potential to control thought through the control of language. We are aware of this potential, and it explains why we are suspicious of doctrine.
This makes life difficult for the preacher on Trinity Sunday, when the Church celebrates its faith and celebrates what is perhaps the most ambitious doctrine of them all, the doctrine that articulates the Christian understanding of God. At least - it would make life difficult if that doctrine did not have its roots in the one source of authority that our suspicious, cynical age respects. That is the personal, authentic experience of individual men and women.
For Dan Brown cannot be allowed to have it all his own way. The doctrine of the Trinity was not cooked up by a conclave of male hierarchs and imposed on a Church which had hitherto revelled in blissful diversity. We forget at our peril that the doctrine of the Trinity was born out of the prayerful reflection of the Church upon the events that shaped its early life.
So let us rehearse them and let us recall: that early life was nurtured in Jerusalem, a city which contained only one Temple. That made it unusual for the Empire in which it was a far-flung outpost. That one Temple bore witness to the conviction of the Jewish people that there was only one God.
That one God had no more devoted worshipper than a man called Jesus, from Nazareth. He visited the temple, prayed in the synagogues, and quoted the Scriptures. Yet the followers he gathered were forced to think hard about who their friend was. He was a teacher, yes; and a prophet, certainly: thus far he did not stand out from a great Jewish tradition of holy men, and his crucifixion only confirmed him in it. Many like him had been cruelly put to death, most recently his cousin John. But unlike John, and unlike the ancient men of God put to the sword by the Jewish kings, Jesus had been raised. His followers had seen him, walked with him, eaten with him. His touch had brought healing; his presence had calmed the raging storm; he had spoken words of forgiveness.
Now: only Israel’s God could not be destroyed by death; only Israel’s God was the source of life and health; only Israel’s God was the creator of sea and wind; only Israel’s God was the judge who could forgive. It was as if in Jesus Israel’s God had become human and had lived on earth. In fact, the followers of Jesus came to believe, that’s what had happened. Nothing else would explain it. In Jesus the one God had become united with the things of the earth.
And despite the withdrawal of Jesus from their sight his followers sensed that God was not absent. God was around them and among them, opening their eyes and their hearts, deepening their understanding, equipping them to speak, strengthening them to suffer.
Theology (doctrine, if you will) is faith seeking understanding, wrote Saint Anselm. The Church’s faith is that God is one; yet Jesus has united God to earth; and the divine Spirit will not allow the earth to forget God’s continuing engagement with it. We seek to understand this faith, and what we understand above all is that God reveals Godself to us: to Abraham the patriarch, Moses the lawgiver, David the King and Isaiah the prophet. God reveals Godself and the Church, reflecting on what the revelation of Jesus means for the revelation of God, is drawn ineluctably to the revelation of the Trinity.
‘We move through the world by naming things in it, and we explain the world through sentences and stories. The lesson of Orwell’s essays is clear: Look around you.
Describe what you see as an ordinary observer would see them. Take things seriously.
And tell the truth. Tell the truth’.
Doctrine becomes Newspeak when it stifles thought. The Church arrives at the greatest truths entrusted to it when it looks at its experience and reflects upon it. I am with Keith Gessen. Look around you. Describe what you see. Take things seriously. And tell the truth. Tell the truth. Amen.
Pentecost 2009, Sunday 31 May
‘The money-changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization’.
President FD Roosevelt’s first inaugural address was delivered in 1933, as the Great Depression gripped the planet. In it he challenged his nation to restore that temple to the ancient truths. ‘The measure of the restoration’ he said ‘lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit’. His words have a double resonance for our age.
First, depression is a reality once more. Secondly, we have entered the fourth week of the parliamentary expenses scandal. It’s easier to debate floating duck palaces than the morality of global capitalism. Through red-faced repayments, heartfelt apologies and piecemeal resignations, the money-changers are fleeing, if not from the City of London then from the Palace of Westminster.
The Daily Telegraph’s revelations have, of course, prompted calls for reform of the expenses system, as well as for retribution against those Members most blatantly at fault. The plea that the claims were all ‘within the rules’ sounds increasingly plaintive, and the relationship between individuals and the systems and structures within which they live and work is under the spotlight.
That relationship is a timely one for the Church to consider at Pentecost.
We claim our descent not from Magna Carta or from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 but from those chaotic happenings in a Jerusalem street two millennia ago, when the Spirit of God galvanized eleven timid men and turned them into world missionaries. Yet it must be admitted that our gathering today doesn’t look much like that; our structure and system don’t look much like theirs; the fact that we have a structure and system at all seems to flout the wild gift of the Spirit who quite literally blew into their lives as they waited in an upstairs room. They spoke in different tongues – we sing polyphony; they were thought drunk – we are sedate and Anglican; they waited on the Spirit – our liturgy appears to command her.
So Pentecost is a good moment to ask whether the Church as she has evolved can claim any real kinship with the tumultuous days that she celebrates at Easter. It is a good moment to ask whether the money-changers have clambered into the high seats in this temple; to ask whether, like the parliamentary expenses system, the Church is in need of root and branch reform.
Organizational analysis turns on the determination of the key tasks of the organization. If today’s Church shares these with her ancient Middle Eastern forebears then she can stake some claim to being their rightful heir. So what might those key tasks be? Some possibilities must fall straightaway. The Church cannot exist to read the Scriptures and promote their study, for she predates their recording, or that of the New Testament at the very least. She cannot exist to defend the doctrines of the catholic creeds, for she predates their composition. Scripture and creeds are the offspring of the Church, not her ancestors.
No, the key tasks were two, and they remain two. The Church exists to baptize in water and to break bread. All else is accretion, frequently valuable, vital accretion, but accretion nonetheless. In these two key tasks, these two key acts, the Church sets before the world her vision of God and God’s vision for the world.
Through the water of baptism God displays the forgiving love that is his essential disposition towards his creation. In baptism God looks upon humankind, whether infant or octogenarian, and washes away all that might ever separate him from them. Baptism is the enacted seal of welcome; baptism is the sign that the recipient is a permanent guest in God’s roomy house; baptism is the symbol of God’s eternal hospitality towards his creation.
Through the broken bread of the Eucharist God gives himself to his people, and, as in Baptism, shows himself eternally turned towards the world and eternally surrendering himself for love of it. The Eucharist is the enacted self-sacrifice of God for all; the Eucharist is God’s gift of himself to all who seek him; the Eucharist is God’s giving his own self in bread and wine to be his people’s sustenance and support.
The church of the apostles baptized and broke bread; the church of today baptizes and breaks bread. It is a pattern of behaviour that stretches unbroken across two thousand years of human history and it enables, indeed compels us, to find our roots in the events we celebrate today.
But if the structure of the Church is ordered to allow these key tasks to be performed, and if the system is to that extent still fit for purpose, then there remains the question of the individuals who live within it, whether godparents taking on a new role, or daily communicants who live and breathe Eucharistic worship. Are they, are we, surreptitiously erecting tables for money-changing within the sacred precincts? Are they, are we, expecting someone else to clean our moats or fund our expensive manure habits? The system of faith – God’s system – is broad and spacious; it is the unfailing offer of unconditional love. The life of faith is the life lived in response to the offer, and all too often, individually and corporately, our response is mean at best and downright wicked at worst.
In baptism we are forgiven. In response to our baptism we are called to live as those who have been forgiven, as those who refuse to condemn, as those who see in others what God has seen in us, something or someone worth forgiving. In the Eucharist we share as equals at the table of God. In response to our Eucharistic participation we are called to live as those who have shared as equals, as those who understand that there is not a man or woman alive or dead who God does not invite on the terms he has invited us.
Today’s Church, like the House of Commons and every other human institution, is fallible and failing. It remains an agent of oppression and injustice; it orders its priorities wrongly; and too often it refuses to side with the radical transformation that Pentecost promises. But it is also God’s institution and God’s agent, and in the great symbols, the effective symbols of Baptism and Eucharist, it is at one with the Church of the apostles and the Church of every age. It is a temple, as FDR would have said ‘of ancient truths’. Here we meet God, endlessly loving from all eternity; here we meet God, endlessly giving himself to us and for us; here we meet God, as equals, fellow citizens, neighbours, and friends. Here, and here only, do we find hope for ourselves and so for all the world. Amen.
President FD Roosevelt’s first inaugural address was delivered in 1933, as the Great Depression gripped the planet. In it he challenged his nation to restore that temple to the ancient truths. ‘The measure of the restoration’ he said ‘lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit’. His words have a double resonance for our age.
First, depression is a reality once more. Secondly, we have entered the fourth week of the parliamentary expenses scandal. It’s easier to debate floating duck palaces than the morality of global capitalism. Through red-faced repayments, heartfelt apologies and piecemeal resignations, the money-changers are fleeing, if not from the City of London then from the Palace of Westminster.
The Daily Telegraph’s revelations have, of course, prompted calls for reform of the expenses system, as well as for retribution against those Members most blatantly at fault. The plea that the claims were all ‘within the rules’ sounds increasingly plaintive, and the relationship between individuals and the systems and structures within which they live and work is under the spotlight.
That relationship is a timely one for the Church to consider at Pentecost.
We claim our descent not from Magna Carta or from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 but from those chaotic happenings in a Jerusalem street two millennia ago, when the Spirit of God galvanized eleven timid men and turned them into world missionaries. Yet it must be admitted that our gathering today doesn’t look much like that; our structure and system don’t look much like theirs; the fact that we have a structure and system at all seems to flout the wild gift of the Spirit who quite literally blew into their lives as they waited in an upstairs room. They spoke in different tongues – we sing polyphony; they were thought drunk – we are sedate and Anglican; they waited on the Spirit – our liturgy appears to command her.
So Pentecost is a good moment to ask whether the Church as she has evolved can claim any real kinship with the tumultuous days that she celebrates at Easter. It is a good moment to ask whether the money-changers have clambered into the high seats in this temple; to ask whether, like the parliamentary expenses system, the Church is in need of root and branch reform.
Organizational analysis turns on the determination of the key tasks of the organization. If today’s Church shares these with her ancient Middle Eastern forebears then she can stake some claim to being their rightful heir. So what might those key tasks be? Some possibilities must fall straightaway. The Church cannot exist to read the Scriptures and promote their study, for she predates their recording, or that of the New Testament at the very least. She cannot exist to defend the doctrines of the catholic creeds, for she predates their composition. Scripture and creeds are the offspring of the Church, not her ancestors.
No, the key tasks were two, and they remain two. The Church exists to baptize in water and to break bread. All else is accretion, frequently valuable, vital accretion, but accretion nonetheless. In these two key tasks, these two key acts, the Church sets before the world her vision of God and God’s vision for the world.
Through the water of baptism God displays the forgiving love that is his essential disposition towards his creation. In baptism God looks upon humankind, whether infant or octogenarian, and washes away all that might ever separate him from them. Baptism is the enacted seal of welcome; baptism is the sign that the recipient is a permanent guest in God’s roomy house; baptism is the symbol of God’s eternal hospitality towards his creation.
Through the broken bread of the Eucharist God gives himself to his people, and, as in Baptism, shows himself eternally turned towards the world and eternally surrendering himself for love of it. The Eucharist is the enacted self-sacrifice of God for all; the Eucharist is God’s gift of himself to all who seek him; the Eucharist is God’s giving his own self in bread and wine to be his people’s sustenance and support.
The church of the apostles baptized and broke bread; the church of today baptizes and breaks bread. It is a pattern of behaviour that stretches unbroken across two thousand years of human history and it enables, indeed compels us, to find our roots in the events we celebrate today.
But if the structure of the Church is ordered to allow these key tasks to be performed, and if the system is to that extent still fit for purpose, then there remains the question of the individuals who live within it, whether godparents taking on a new role, or daily communicants who live and breathe Eucharistic worship. Are they, are we, surreptitiously erecting tables for money-changing within the sacred precincts? Are they, are we, expecting someone else to clean our moats or fund our expensive manure habits? The system of faith – God’s system – is broad and spacious; it is the unfailing offer of unconditional love. The life of faith is the life lived in response to the offer, and all too often, individually and corporately, our response is mean at best and downright wicked at worst.
In baptism we are forgiven. In response to our baptism we are called to live as those who have been forgiven, as those who refuse to condemn, as those who see in others what God has seen in us, something or someone worth forgiving. In the Eucharist we share as equals at the table of God. In response to our Eucharistic participation we are called to live as those who have shared as equals, as those who understand that there is not a man or woman alive or dead who God does not invite on the terms he has invited us.
Today’s Church, like the House of Commons and every other human institution, is fallible and failing. It remains an agent of oppression and injustice; it orders its priorities wrongly; and too often it refuses to side with the radical transformation that Pentecost promises. But it is also God’s institution and God’s agent, and in the great symbols, the effective symbols of Baptism and Eucharist, it is at one with the Church of the apostles and the Church of every age. It is a temple, as FDR would have said ‘of ancient truths’. Here we meet God, endlessly loving from all eternity; here we meet God, endlessly giving himself to us and for us; here we meet God, as equals, fellow citizens, neighbours, and friends. Here, and here only, do we find hope for ourselves and so for all the world. Amen.
Thursday 30 April 2009
Report to the APCM, 29 April 2009
St Peter’s Eaton Square
The Vicar’s Report to the Annual Parochial Church Meeting,
Wednesday 29 April 2009
The Revd Nicholas Papadopulos
In the sermon he preached here on Passiontide Sunday the Archbishop of Canterbury asked how the death of Christ might be represented; not how a crucified man might be represented, for enough is known about the Romans’ vicious methods to allow us to do that with ease; rather, how the encounter between the living God and desolate death might be adequately represented.
He drew our attention to three truths disclosed by Silvia Dimitrova’s numinous icon. The first is the hands of Christ which are open and uplifted in prayer. In death, even in death, Christ prays, offering all that he is to his Father. The second is that radiating from Christ’s body, twisted in agony, is the unearthly light of God. In death, even in death, Christ makes visible the light of his Father. So when the Son of God encounters the ‘no’ of death he entrusts himself to his Father in prayer, and in so trusting he reveals heaven’s light. Yet the third truth is that the truest representation of Christ’s death and resurrection is composed not in oils or even in tempera on wood but in us: in our living, or rather in our dying to self and living anew, remade and recreated, by heaven’s light burning within us.
Prayer, light, and embodied change have characterized our priorities here since 2007. We are a community; we are one community, not a number of parallel and occasionally colliding communities. We are a community which prays and offers itself to God in worship, believing that in worship we encounter God and that that encounter inspires change. We are community which is growing in discipleship of Jesus Christ, trying to become more like the one who shows us what God is like and to shine with his light. We are a community set in the world, a community which, believing itself remade by God, longs to remake the world around it so that it is more God-like. Worship, discipleship, transformation; if you will, prayer, light, embodied change: this is what I believe the priorities of our mission continue to be.
Allow me to sketch for you not an exhaustive and exhausting list of all we have done in the last twelve months. The Annual Report does that. Instead allow me to sketch for you a few examples of what a community which takes seriously its worship, its discipleship, and its world actually looks like.
Worship
On the last Sunday of Advent our church became an unruly cattle-shed located in Bethlehem some two millennia ago. The sidesmen were dressed as shepherds, the deacon as a donkey, and at least two former churchwardens as sheep. Alisa and Claire’s nativity play drew us together and asked us not to look in on the charming story of Christmas but to live it for ourselves. On the night the Archbishop was with us no one who was here will forget Andrew Smith’s brilliant setting of St Anselm’s Ave Crux, sublime music which combined with Silvia’s icon and a drama of lights and incense to bring heaven close to earth. ‘There’s glory for you’ as Humpty Dumpty said to Alice. In Advent and in Passiontide, all through the year, worship changes us.
Discipleship
One Sunday evening in Lent nearly twenty of our young people shared crisps, pizza, ice cream and even salad with James and I in this very room. They wanted to be there; they wanted to come again; they knew that in some way they belonged together and belonged here, in a Church. Last September we gave over four Sundays of the Family Eucharist to a series on the liturgy of the Eucharist, remembering together how we gather with God, listen to God, share with God and are sent out by God. Person after person told us how they had appreciated the teaching, how it had reminded them of long-lost Confirmation lessons and of Confirmation lessons they’d never had. In Lent and in the late summer we took hold of our Baptism and explored together what it means.
The World
In February on successive Sundays we heard from preachers representing the two causes upon which the PCC has decided to concentrate its support. Neither is a fashionable or easy charity. Angola is a far away African state whose bitter civil war has been eclipsed in our memories by those in Rwanda and Sudan. Yet it is desperately poor and has an urgent need of civil infrastructure. We have a partner in the parish of St Matthew Kimvuenga; we will build them a school and walk with them as partners in prayer and mission. Zacchaeus 2000 is a Christian trust whose call is to create an inclusive society. We are fond of the adjective ‘inclusive’: Z2K exists to remind us that the greatest barrier to inclusion in Britain in 2009 is poverty and the ill-health and educational underachievement that accompany it. In adopting St Matthew’s and Z2K we are acting to transform God’s world.
In all these ways we have taken forward our mission priorities since we last met, and along the way we have welcomed a new priest in James and a new deacon in Mark; we have almost completed work on the organ, launched a new website, and installed a new PA system; we have seen nearly twenty candidates confirmed by the Bishop; we have hosted the Diocesan Synod, the Conference of the Church of England’s liturgical officers, and the induction day for Back to Church Sunday nationwide. James made a guest appearance on the Vanessa Feltz show while I recorded ten episodes of Pause for Thought for BBC Radio 2. We have not stood still.
That we have not stood still is due in large part to the very hard work of a very considerable number of people. I have already thanked the parochial officers and the members of the PCC. I would like now to sing a few of the unsung heroes (or rather heroines) whose efforts all too often go unnoticed. Deborah Hulett, for example, whose green-fingered magic keeps our garden looking beautiful in every season that God sends; Mary Drummond, who has spent hours this year removing wax from hassocks and washing and ironing the choir’s surplices; Carl and Cressida Eatson-Lloyd, whose artistic gifts underpinned the Giving Campaign and brought it to life; Elizabeth Parker, who has given years of service as Mrs Tiggywinkle laundering the sanctuary linen and has even found in Saskia Sissons a willing successor. I could go on, but that St Peter’s flourishes as it does is thanks to hours that are given freely and willingly.
We are as ever hugely fortunate in our staff. Douglas the verger, Olivia the administrator and Susan the book-keeper all work longer hours than they should and do so with infinite grace and good humour. Each of them is dedicated to what they do, and I am glad to reassure them of just how grateful I am to each of them on behalf of us all.
Our Director of Music Andrew Smith has surpassed himself this year. He is a consummate professional with exactingly high standards, but even he ought to be pleased with a year that has seen the release of not one but two discs and an unflinchingly high standard in liturgical music. He and Dan Moult make a wonderful team, and it was a delight to see them presiding over the national Organ Day which drew organists from all over the country to St Peter’s in March.
Stephen Brown, organist at the Family Eucharist since my arrival in 2007, left us at Easter and will even now be tearing into the keyboard part of a German musical resembling Blazing Saddles in Berlin. We miss his spirited playing and his empathetic leadership of the Family Eucharist choir. And Maurice Mantle, employed by the St Peter’s Eaton Square Charity as parish Groundsman since 2002 has retired. We wish him and Carol good health and every happiness in the months ahead. Processes are underway to replace both Stephen and Maurice.
I have already alluded to what is probably the most significant change that has occurred in the parish in the last year so far as I am concerned. It is that this year I address you as a member of a clergy team, and words do not do justice to my pleasure at being able to do so. Clergy throughout the Diocese and beyond decry their ordained colleagues as the crosses which they have to bear. I rejoice in my ordained colleagues; I count myself blessed in having them and cannot imagine having any finer. James, Claire and Mark bring me (and hence you) huge gifts of pastoral care, prophetic wisdom, sharp wit and sheer hard work. I am deeply grateful to them all.
And that is an appropriate point at which to remind you of my last report to the APCM. Twelve months ago I ended by summarizing my priorities for the year ahead, and there would have been little point in doing that unless I had been prepared to revisit those priorities twelve months later. The first of these was the nurture of an effective clergy team, and while I am content that this priority is in hand my colleagues will remain a priority. Thankfully, the biggest change to the team that we can envisage at present is a very happy one, namely Mark’s ordination as priest at Petertide.
My second priority was the introduction of new initiatives on discipleship. I have given examples of these; the forthcoming Life course will be a further significant development; my instincts are that two further tasks under the discipleship priority beckon urgently. One is building on that Lenten pizza evening and refounding a parish youth club for the twenty-first century; the second is developing our ministry of hospitality and welcome. This will sound brutal, but all too often a first-time worshipper at the Family Eucharist is confronted by our intimidatingly crowded portico, some mashed-up polystyrene cups and two empty coffee jugs.
My third priority was that I hoped we might be able to judge our success not just by the numbers coming through our doors but by the impact we have on the community we serve. This is the Church in the World priority and here I believe we still have work to do. We are St Peter’s Eaton Square, the parish church responsible for a slice of central London. The great challenge for us is how we relate to that slice, how we are transforming it and making it more God-like. Beyond our excellent links with our school our impact on this place is still limited. The Bishop of London told Sunday’s Confirmation candidates that the Church could never be risk-averse. Perhaps this is the year when we will take some risks. Here’s a thought. It might cost £5,000 to hire the SW1 Gallery in Cardinal Place for a week. But just suppose we did. Just suppose that that was our Church. If it was, how might we make use of it – what opportunities for play, refreshment, artistic creation and spiritual exploration might we offer to the transient community that throngs around it? Do we have a story to tell between Wagamama and Marks and Spencer?
My last priority was that I hoped we might take a more mature approach to our finances. We have – as Peter Wild has already said, the Giving Campaign has made a good start. But it falls far short of the sum we set out to raise, and this year we will face a very stiff test. The five-yearly inspection of our building last year generated a heavy schedule of works that are necessary, particularly to our roofs. But I don’t want the work done to be purely maintenance; I want to take the opportunity to reimagine and refurbish the public spaces in our building, those rooms we currently let out and some we currently don’t, so that we can better serve the city and make this place a seven-day hub of activity where community is built and need is met. If you have not joined the Giving scheme then please do so tonight: if you have but your friends and neighbours have not then please speak to them.
Perhaps it seems odd to conclude an annual report by talking about money, but money is not an optional add-on to those three priorities of worship, discipleship and the world. Without funding there is no building to worship in; without proper consideration of funding there is no growth in discipleship; without a commitment to sustained funding there is no long-term resource for Angola or anywhere else. In this parish this ought not be an obstruction to the mission God has given us.
I have said this before and I will say it again: this remains an exciting place in which to be a priest and many of you have shown me great support and kindness in the year that is now behind us. I am very grateful, and look forward to the worship, discipleship, transformation (and parties) of the next twelve months.
The Vicar’s Report to the Annual Parochial Church Meeting,
Wednesday 29 April 2009
The Revd Nicholas Papadopulos
In the sermon he preached here on Passiontide Sunday the Archbishop of Canterbury asked how the death of Christ might be represented; not how a crucified man might be represented, for enough is known about the Romans’ vicious methods to allow us to do that with ease; rather, how the encounter between the living God and desolate death might be adequately represented.
He drew our attention to three truths disclosed by Silvia Dimitrova’s numinous icon. The first is the hands of Christ which are open and uplifted in prayer. In death, even in death, Christ prays, offering all that he is to his Father. The second is that radiating from Christ’s body, twisted in agony, is the unearthly light of God. In death, even in death, Christ makes visible the light of his Father. So when the Son of God encounters the ‘no’ of death he entrusts himself to his Father in prayer, and in so trusting he reveals heaven’s light. Yet the third truth is that the truest representation of Christ’s death and resurrection is composed not in oils or even in tempera on wood but in us: in our living, or rather in our dying to self and living anew, remade and recreated, by heaven’s light burning within us.
Prayer, light, and embodied change have characterized our priorities here since 2007. We are a community; we are one community, not a number of parallel and occasionally colliding communities. We are a community which prays and offers itself to God in worship, believing that in worship we encounter God and that that encounter inspires change. We are community which is growing in discipleship of Jesus Christ, trying to become more like the one who shows us what God is like and to shine with his light. We are a community set in the world, a community which, believing itself remade by God, longs to remake the world around it so that it is more God-like. Worship, discipleship, transformation; if you will, prayer, light, embodied change: this is what I believe the priorities of our mission continue to be.
Allow me to sketch for you not an exhaustive and exhausting list of all we have done in the last twelve months. The Annual Report does that. Instead allow me to sketch for you a few examples of what a community which takes seriously its worship, its discipleship, and its world actually looks like.
Worship
On the last Sunday of Advent our church became an unruly cattle-shed located in Bethlehem some two millennia ago. The sidesmen were dressed as shepherds, the deacon as a donkey, and at least two former churchwardens as sheep. Alisa and Claire’s nativity play drew us together and asked us not to look in on the charming story of Christmas but to live it for ourselves. On the night the Archbishop was with us no one who was here will forget Andrew Smith’s brilliant setting of St Anselm’s Ave Crux, sublime music which combined with Silvia’s icon and a drama of lights and incense to bring heaven close to earth. ‘There’s glory for you’ as Humpty Dumpty said to Alice. In Advent and in Passiontide, all through the year, worship changes us.
Discipleship
One Sunday evening in Lent nearly twenty of our young people shared crisps, pizza, ice cream and even salad with James and I in this very room. They wanted to be there; they wanted to come again; they knew that in some way they belonged together and belonged here, in a Church. Last September we gave over four Sundays of the Family Eucharist to a series on the liturgy of the Eucharist, remembering together how we gather with God, listen to God, share with God and are sent out by God. Person after person told us how they had appreciated the teaching, how it had reminded them of long-lost Confirmation lessons and of Confirmation lessons they’d never had. In Lent and in the late summer we took hold of our Baptism and explored together what it means.
The World
In February on successive Sundays we heard from preachers representing the two causes upon which the PCC has decided to concentrate its support. Neither is a fashionable or easy charity. Angola is a far away African state whose bitter civil war has been eclipsed in our memories by those in Rwanda and Sudan. Yet it is desperately poor and has an urgent need of civil infrastructure. We have a partner in the parish of St Matthew Kimvuenga; we will build them a school and walk with them as partners in prayer and mission. Zacchaeus 2000 is a Christian trust whose call is to create an inclusive society. We are fond of the adjective ‘inclusive’: Z2K exists to remind us that the greatest barrier to inclusion in Britain in 2009 is poverty and the ill-health and educational underachievement that accompany it. In adopting St Matthew’s and Z2K we are acting to transform God’s world.
In all these ways we have taken forward our mission priorities since we last met, and along the way we have welcomed a new priest in James and a new deacon in Mark; we have almost completed work on the organ, launched a new website, and installed a new PA system; we have seen nearly twenty candidates confirmed by the Bishop; we have hosted the Diocesan Synod, the Conference of the Church of England’s liturgical officers, and the induction day for Back to Church Sunday nationwide. James made a guest appearance on the Vanessa Feltz show while I recorded ten episodes of Pause for Thought for BBC Radio 2. We have not stood still.
That we have not stood still is due in large part to the very hard work of a very considerable number of people. I have already thanked the parochial officers and the members of the PCC. I would like now to sing a few of the unsung heroes (or rather heroines) whose efforts all too often go unnoticed. Deborah Hulett, for example, whose green-fingered magic keeps our garden looking beautiful in every season that God sends; Mary Drummond, who has spent hours this year removing wax from hassocks and washing and ironing the choir’s surplices; Carl and Cressida Eatson-Lloyd, whose artistic gifts underpinned the Giving Campaign and brought it to life; Elizabeth Parker, who has given years of service as Mrs Tiggywinkle laundering the sanctuary linen and has even found in Saskia Sissons a willing successor. I could go on, but that St Peter’s flourishes as it does is thanks to hours that are given freely and willingly.
We are as ever hugely fortunate in our staff. Douglas the verger, Olivia the administrator and Susan the book-keeper all work longer hours than they should and do so with infinite grace and good humour. Each of them is dedicated to what they do, and I am glad to reassure them of just how grateful I am to each of them on behalf of us all.
Our Director of Music Andrew Smith has surpassed himself this year. He is a consummate professional with exactingly high standards, but even he ought to be pleased with a year that has seen the release of not one but two discs and an unflinchingly high standard in liturgical music. He and Dan Moult make a wonderful team, and it was a delight to see them presiding over the national Organ Day which drew organists from all over the country to St Peter’s in March.
Stephen Brown, organist at the Family Eucharist since my arrival in 2007, left us at Easter and will even now be tearing into the keyboard part of a German musical resembling Blazing Saddles in Berlin. We miss his spirited playing and his empathetic leadership of the Family Eucharist choir. And Maurice Mantle, employed by the St Peter’s Eaton Square Charity as parish Groundsman since 2002 has retired. We wish him and Carol good health and every happiness in the months ahead. Processes are underway to replace both Stephen and Maurice.
I have already alluded to what is probably the most significant change that has occurred in the parish in the last year so far as I am concerned. It is that this year I address you as a member of a clergy team, and words do not do justice to my pleasure at being able to do so. Clergy throughout the Diocese and beyond decry their ordained colleagues as the crosses which they have to bear. I rejoice in my ordained colleagues; I count myself blessed in having them and cannot imagine having any finer. James, Claire and Mark bring me (and hence you) huge gifts of pastoral care, prophetic wisdom, sharp wit and sheer hard work. I am deeply grateful to them all.
And that is an appropriate point at which to remind you of my last report to the APCM. Twelve months ago I ended by summarizing my priorities for the year ahead, and there would have been little point in doing that unless I had been prepared to revisit those priorities twelve months later. The first of these was the nurture of an effective clergy team, and while I am content that this priority is in hand my colleagues will remain a priority. Thankfully, the biggest change to the team that we can envisage at present is a very happy one, namely Mark’s ordination as priest at Petertide.
My second priority was the introduction of new initiatives on discipleship. I have given examples of these; the forthcoming Life course will be a further significant development; my instincts are that two further tasks under the discipleship priority beckon urgently. One is building on that Lenten pizza evening and refounding a parish youth club for the twenty-first century; the second is developing our ministry of hospitality and welcome. This will sound brutal, but all too often a first-time worshipper at the Family Eucharist is confronted by our intimidatingly crowded portico, some mashed-up polystyrene cups and two empty coffee jugs.
My third priority was that I hoped we might be able to judge our success not just by the numbers coming through our doors but by the impact we have on the community we serve. This is the Church in the World priority and here I believe we still have work to do. We are St Peter’s Eaton Square, the parish church responsible for a slice of central London. The great challenge for us is how we relate to that slice, how we are transforming it and making it more God-like. Beyond our excellent links with our school our impact on this place is still limited. The Bishop of London told Sunday’s Confirmation candidates that the Church could never be risk-averse. Perhaps this is the year when we will take some risks. Here’s a thought. It might cost £5,000 to hire the SW1 Gallery in Cardinal Place for a week. But just suppose we did. Just suppose that that was our Church. If it was, how might we make use of it – what opportunities for play, refreshment, artistic creation and spiritual exploration might we offer to the transient community that throngs around it? Do we have a story to tell between Wagamama and Marks and Spencer?
My last priority was that I hoped we might take a more mature approach to our finances. We have – as Peter Wild has already said, the Giving Campaign has made a good start. But it falls far short of the sum we set out to raise, and this year we will face a very stiff test. The five-yearly inspection of our building last year generated a heavy schedule of works that are necessary, particularly to our roofs. But I don’t want the work done to be purely maintenance; I want to take the opportunity to reimagine and refurbish the public spaces in our building, those rooms we currently let out and some we currently don’t, so that we can better serve the city and make this place a seven-day hub of activity where community is built and need is met. If you have not joined the Giving scheme then please do so tonight: if you have but your friends and neighbours have not then please speak to them.
Perhaps it seems odd to conclude an annual report by talking about money, but money is not an optional add-on to those three priorities of worship, discipleship and the world. Without funding there is no building to worship in; without proper consideration of funding there is no growth in discipleship; without a commitment to sustained funding there is no long-term resource for Angola or anywhere else. In this parish this ought not be an obstruction to the mission God has given us.
I have said this before and I will say it again: this remains an exciting place in which to be a priest and many of you have shown me great support and kindness in the year that is now behind us. I am very grateful, and look forward to the worship, discipleship, transformation (and parties) of the next twelve months.
Thursday 23 April 2009
Easter Day 2009
‘All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die’.
One of the many privileges of serving my curacy in Portsmouth’s North End was the proximity of the church to Cliffdale Primary, a non-denominational school for children with special needs. I used to come away from taking assembly there with my heart singing at the warmth with which the children greeted their visitors and at the strength of the school community. At Cliffdale children who would elsewhere be treated as different and difficult were treated as unique and wonderful, and teachers and pupils demonstrated compassion for each and nurtured the welfare of all.
Every term they came to church to put on a seasonal performance. One Easter offering featured a young man called Edward playing Jesus. He was deposited unceremoniously in a cardboard tomb; there was a brief pause; and then the teacher continued her narrative: ‘Three days later Jesus came back to life’. Edward got up, climbed out of the tomb, and went to meet his tea-towel-headed disciples.
I was no more present in the tomb on Easter morning than was that Cliffdale teacher, or any other human observer; and dramatists must be allowed to flex their creative muscles. But I have never forgotten that script: ‘Three days later Jesus came back to life’. I have never forgotten it because it cut right across the mutual, collegial atmosphere of the school in which every person was valued and, I believe, misrepresented what happened in the tomb. Had I been asked to write the script I would have written ‘Three days later God raised Jesus from the dead’.
Well, isn’t that just typical? You make the effort to get to church on Easter morning, only to hear the vicar quibbling over the precise deployment of one or two words. It’s no wonder that the institution is dying on its feet.
I’m not about to apologize for my pedantry. To construe the resurrection of Jesus as Jesus coming back to life is misconstrue it absolutely. Jesus coming back to life is Jesus as a species of super-human, Jesus resuscitated by his own latent power or by some anonymous mystical force; whereas Jesus raised by God is the Son raised by the Father.
This is the Christian faith. The resurrection is not the reawakening of a dead god; it is the vindication of a relationship of faith, trust and hope. ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’ says Jesus from the cross. ‘It is finished’ he adds. Jesus goes to his death confident that in so doing he is placing himself wholly at God’s mercy and trusting that at his life’s end he could not have done so more completely. Even in the cry of abandonment ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ he is quoting the psalmist whose despair is heard and answered. On the cross Jesus surrenders himself to God; on the third day God raises him up. Easter is about trust and hope; it is about a relationship.
This Easter faith is not just Gospel for the minority of us who remember it and celebrate it today. In 2009 Easter comes at a time of global crisis. Sharper minds and quicker tongues than mine have piled diagnosis upon diagnosis, digest upon digest, detailing the economic recession in which we live; the international terrorism which continues to threaten; the unfinished wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the world’s failure to address the consequences of calamitous climate change.
Is it rash or naive to suggest that each of these crises has its roots in the intellectual tradition which has dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century, the Enlightenment tradition which places the individual, the individual’s reason, and the individual’s needs at the centre of everything. The road from ‘I think, therefore I am’ via ‘I consume, therefore I am’ to ‘I dominate, therefore I am’ is a very short road, and it’s a road that has led us to financial ruin, environmental catastrophe and geopolitical turmoil.
Yet a crisis is an ideal time for fresh thinking and bold speaking. If the Easter faith has nothing to say to the crises then it has nothing to say. If it can mount no intellectual challenge to the tradition which has allowed (indeed endorsed) the reckless speculation of untrammelled capitalism, the unfettered squandering of the earth’s reserves and the morality of expediency in international relations then it has run its course and it deserves to die.
But the Easter faith does have something to say to this tradition. Here I set myself the modest task of undoing three hundred years of thought in one sermon; but this is Easter Day, when anything is possible, so let me try. Easter happens not because of a Master of the Universe armed with red braces, machine gun and oil prospecting machine whose bold endeavours trickle down in benefits for those around him; Easter happens because of a relationship; it could not have happened had Jesus not placed his faith and trust in God. It is a relationship that destroys death; it is a relationship that takes captivity captive; it is the same relationship that gives us hope. God raises Jesus from the dead; God raises us from the dead; we are because God is. We are; you and I are; you and I are only because God is. ‘Do not be afraid’ says the risen Jesus to his friends: in our very essence, at the very core of our being, we are not alone. We dare not behave as though we are.
The poets have long known this. John Donne wrote ‘no man is an island entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me’ only a few short years before Rene Descartes got to work. WH Auden wrote the lines with which I began at the outbreak of war in 1939. Yet Christian faith, perhaps in the West dogged for too long by too-narrow notions of individual accountability and salvation, has too often failed to work at ontology, at the theology of being. Had it done so it might have recalled that community and relationship define human identity. That was the joy of Cliffdale Primary School. Community and relationship must define human identity, for we are created beings, created beings created by a God who is in Godself a community in relationship, a community never more plainly displayed than on Easter morning when the Father raises the Son in the power of the Spirit.
Let the world hear that; let the world hear our joyful proclamation that this day God raises Jesus from the dead; that we are never alone; that we need not be afraid; and that therefore we have hope. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die’.
One of the many privileges of serving my curacy in Portsmouth’s North End was the proximity of the church to Cliffdale Primary, a non-denominational school for children with special needs. I used to come away from taking assembly there with my heart singing at the warmth with which the children greeted their visitors and at the strength of the school community. At Cliffdale children who would elsewhere be treated as different and difficult were treated as unique and wonderful, and teachers and pupils demonstrated compassion for each and nurtured the welfare of all.
Every term they came to church to put on a seasonal performance. One Easter offering featured a young man called Edward playing Jesus. He was deposited unceremoniously in a cardboard tomb; there was a brief pause; and then the teacher continued her narrative: ‘Three days later Jesus came back to life’. Edward got up, climbed out of the tomb, and went to meet his tea-towel-headed disciples.
I was no more present in the tomb on Easter morning than was that Cliffdale teacher, or any other human observer; and dramatists must be allowed to flex their creative muscles. But I have never forgotten that script: ‘Three days later Jesus came back to life’. I have never forgotten it because it cut right across the mutual, collegial atmosphere of the school in which every person was valued and, I believe, misrepresented what happened in the tomb. Had I been asked to write the script I would have written ‘Three days later God raised Jesus from the dead’.
Well, isn’t that just typical? You make the effort to get to church on Easter morning, only to hear the vicar quibbling over the precise deployment of one or two words. It’s no wonder that the institution is dying on its feet.
I’m not about to apologize for my pedantry. To construe the resurrection of Jesus as Jesus coming back to life is misconstrue it absolutely. Jesus coming back to life is Jesus as a species of super-human, Jesus resuscitated by his own latent power or by some anonymous mystical force; whereas Jesus raised by God is the Son raised by the Father.
This is the Christian faith. The resurrection is not the reawakening of a dead god; it is the vindication of a relationship of faith, trust and hope. ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’ says Jesus from the cross. ‘It is finished’ he adds. Jesus goes to his death confident that in so doing he is placing himself wholly at God’s mercy and trusting that at his life’s end he could not have done so more completely. Even in the cry of abandonment ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ he is quoting the psalmist whose despair is heard and answered. On the cross Jesus surrenders himself to God; on the third day God raises him up. Easter is about trust and hope; it is about a relationship.
This Easter faith is not just Gospel for the minority of us who remember it and celebrate it today. In 2009 Easter comes at a time of global crisis. Sharper minds and quicker tongues than mine have piled diagnosis upon diagnosis, digest upon digest, detailing the economic recession in which we live; the international terrorism which continues to threaten; the unfinished wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the world’s failure to address the consequences of calamitous climate change.
Is it rash or naive to suggest that each of these crises has its roots in the intellectual tradition which has dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century, the Enlightenment tradition which places the individual, the individual’s reason, and the individual’s needs at the centre of everything. The road from ‘I think, therefore I am’ via ‘I consume, therefore I am’ to ‘I dominate, therefore I am’ is a very short road, and it’s a road that has led us to financial ruin, environmental catastrophe and geopolitical turmoil.
Yet a crisis is an ideal time for fresh thinking and bold speaking. If the Easter faith has nothing to say to the crises then it has nothing to say. If it can mount no intellectual challenge to the tradition which has allowed (indeed endorsed) the reckless speculation of untrammelled capitalism, the unfettered squandering of the earth’s reserves and the morality of expediency in international relations then it has run its course and it deserves to die.
But the Easter faith does have something to say to this tradition. Here I set myself the modest task of undoing three hundred years of thought in one sermon; but this is Easter Day, when anything is possible, so let me try. Easter happens not because of a Master of the Universe armed with red braces, machine gun and oil prospecting machine whose bold endeavours trickle down in benefits for those around him; Easter happens because of a relationship; it could not have happened had Jesus not placed his faith and trust in God. It is a relationship that destroys death; it is a relationship that takes captivity captive; it is the same relationship that gives us hope. God raises Jesus from the dead; God raises us from the dead; we are because God is. We are; you and I are; you and I are only because God is. ‘Do not be afraid’ says the risen Jesus to his friends: in our very essence, at the very core of our being, we are not alone. We dare not behave as though we are.
The poets have long known this. John Donne wrote ‘no man is an island entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me’ only a few short years before Rene Descartes got to work. WH Auden wrote the lines with which I began at the outbreak of war in 1939. Yet Christian faith, perhaps in the West dogged for too long by too-narrow notions of individual accountability and salvation, has too often failed to work at ontology, at the theology of being. Had it done so it might have recalled that community and relationship define human identity. That was the joy of Cliffdale Primary School. Community and relationship must define human identity, for we are created beings, created beings created by a God who is in Godself a community in relationship, a community never more plainly displayed than on Easter morning when the Father raises the Son in the power of the Spirit.
Let the world hear that; let the world hear our joyful proclamation that this day God raises Jesus from the dead; that we are never alone; that we need not be afraid; and that therefore we have hope. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
Thursday 9 April 2009
How To Behave in the Presence of God: three addresses for Holy Week 2009
Monday in Holy Week: Earth
It’s fashionable for booksellers to pile their counters high with small, well-presented volumes with winsome titles such as ‘Forty Hints for Husbands’ or ‘Surviving your Children’. Inspired by such bijou publications, and conscious that I am preaching before the Icon of the Crucifixion for the first time, I have entitled this series of three addresses for Holy Week ‘How to Behave in the Presence of God.
Let me explain. Most of us observe some sort of bodily ritual on entering a sacred space, from nodding our heads to prostrating ourselves headlong. In these three addresses I will consider the three gestures associated by Orthodox Christians with the presence of icons.
This is Chapter One of my slim, hard-back volume: Earth.
When President Obama travelled to London last week a number of bags of his own blood travelled with him. When an Orthodox Christian approaches an icon he stoops down and touches the ground before it. If the President ever ponders that particular element of his travel arrangements then it may remind him of the ever-present possibility of his death. If the Orthodox Christian ever ponders the custom he has known all his life then it may have a similar effect. In touching the ground he is acknowledging the dust of which he is made, and to which he will return.
‘The dust of which he is made, and to which he will return’. That is a phrase with which we began the journey into Lent. It acknowledges our relationship with the dust upon which we stand, and it assumes three quite distinct stages in that relationship. We begin as dust; we live; we dissolve into dust. The Orthodox gesture of touching the ground suggests that the three stages are not nearly so distinct as we might like to think.
This is clear as we contemplate the stories of the Passion of Jesus, which is not only a story of people. It is a story of dust, a story of the dust upon which people walk. On Palm Sunday the crowds rejoice at the coming of their King. According to St Luke the Pharisees tell Jesus to tell them to be quiet. He answers that if the crowd was silent the very stones would shout out. On Good Friday Jesus dies upon the cross. According to St Matthew he cries aloud and breathes his last. At that very moment the earth shakes and the rocks split.
So what lies beneath the feet of Holy Week’s protagonists is not inanimate stuff, the passive backdrop to the drama enacted upon it. The earth is instead a responsive, empathetic player in the drama.
This is a motif that recurs throughout the Scriptures. Isaiah speaks of the hills bursting into song and of the trees of the fields clapping their hands at the return of God’s people to Zion. St Paul writes of the whole creation groaning with the pains of labour.
We are of dust and we will return to dust. The salvation for which we wait must also be the salvation of dust. The whole earth cries out for redemption, for re-creation, for renewal. This is not trendy environmentalism but orthodox faith. What turns upon the events of this week is not the purification of our interior lives; it is the purification of all that is. The earth is not God. But God has created the earth out of nothing; God sustains it in being every second of every hour; it is beloved of God and in need of God’s work of re-creation.
We touch the ground in the presence of God not to emphasize our separation from the earth or our elevation above it, but to recall our creatureliness, our utter dependence in solidarity with all that is, on God’s loving attention.
Tuesday in Holy Week: Flesh
This is the second in a three-chapter work entitled ‘How to Behave in the Presence of God’, a rumination on the three gestures Orthodox Christians associate with the presence of the divine in icons.
In Chapter One I considered the first of these, stooping to touch the ground, and I pondered how in Holy Week this identifies the worshipper with the dust of the earth, the dust that cries out for redemption just as the worshipper cries out for redemption.
Now to Chapter Two: Flesh.
After touching the ground and making the sign of the cross the Orthodox Christian approaches the icon and plants a kiss upon it. I say upon it; she will often in fact kiss the small replica of the icon which is positioned below the icon itself, sparing the often ancient and venerable gold leaf of the original.
A kiss.
When my colleagues and I were considering how we might raise the general standard of conduct at Sunday worship here (at both 10 o’clock and at 11.15, I should say) one proposal was that we might introduce a poster of the sort that some of us remember from the swimming pools of the 1970s. A series of cartoons might warn the faithful in simple terms: ‘no running; no smoking; no pushing’. However the proposal foundered on our recollection of the injunction ‘no petting’ and its picture of a couple entwined, the man looking down lasciviously on his bikini-clad paramour who gazes up at him adoringly. For we actually do rather a lot of kissing in church.
At the Eucharist the first ritual act of the president is to kiss the altar, acknowledging on behalf of the people the divine presence in the lives of the saints, whose relics were originally embedded within the table. Then once the Gospel has been proclaimed the president kisses the book, acknowledging on behalf of the people the divine presence in the written Word. Then, before the gifts are brought to the table, we acknowledge the divine presence in one another at the Peace. It’s true that being British and Anglican we normally shake hands, but when we do so we are echoing St Paul’s command that we should greet one another with a holy kiss.
So a kiss is for us a familiar way of acknowledging the divine presence, and kissing a sacred image ought not present us with any difficulty. This is Holy Week, however, and in Holy Week we remember only one kiss.
‘Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?’ The gesture is so terrible that the evangelists are divided over whether it actually happened. John cannot bear to contemplate it, and has Jesus identifying himself to the guards; in Luke Jesus forestalls the act with his question; only in Matthew and Mark does Judas actually make contact with Jesus, greeting him as ‘Rabbi!’
It was an acknowledgement of presence, just as our kisses are; it was perhaps even an acknowledgement of divine presence, a last roll of the dice for Judas, desperate to goad his God into action. But it was also the betrayal of a friend.
We dare not turn Judas into a scapegoat. For our kisses betray; our protestations of loyalty ring hollow; our vows of friendship deceive. We bring our lips to the cup of Christ’s presence and yet crucify him in our hearts and minds.
We kiss the sacred image; we acknowledge the divine presence; we recall that in so doing we worship one who will never fail, never betray, never deceive.
Wednesday in Holy Week: Fire
This is the third and last chapter in a volume entitled ‘How to Behave in the Presence of God’. In it I have offered some reflections on the three gestures that Orthodox Christians associate with the presence of God in holy icons.
In the first of these I considered the custom of touching the ground upon which the icon stands, a recognition that the worshipper is formed of the dust of the earth and will return to the dust of the earth, and so is a part of the entirety of creation that longs for God’s redeeming work. In the second I considered the custom of kissing the icon, a recognition of the divine presence that the icon mediates, a recognition which perhaps dawned dimly on Judas Iscariot when he kissed the Rabbi in the garden.
So to the third chapter: Fire.
After touching the ground and kissing the image the Orthodox Christian lights a candle before it, a candle which will burn long after he has left the place where the icon stands.
Of all three gestures this is the one with which we are most familiar. It’s not just that lighting candles is a popular activity in this parish; it is a popular activity throughout the length and breadth of our culture. Votive candles, so called, can be bought in Ikea as easily as in ecclesiastical outfitters, and they adorn not only the roadside shrines which have become a commonplace of contemporary life but also suburban dining tables and fireplaces. The lighting of candles is an acceptable secular liturgical act to which none now object. It’s strange to think that it caused such controversy in our church in the late nineteenth century.
Candles vary, of course, from ordinary tea-lights to extravagantly coloured and exotically perfumed confections that are scarcely recognizable as candles. What they all have in common is that they are made for a common end: their own destruction. That’s their point. Burn a candle and you’ll be left with nothing but a waxy pool, a lingering scent, and a memory of beauty, warmth and light.
Perhaps that is where the disciples of Jesus found themselves as night fell on Good Friday. Their dear friend had been destroyed as surely as are the candles lit here daily. His life had burned so brightly, shedding warming rays and dispelling gloomy shadow. But as the shades lengthened around the rock-hewn tomb the disciples had to adjust to a new reality. He was dead. It was finished. And all that was left was a beautiful memory.
Here we run out of gestures, metaphors and illustrations. A spent candle is a spent candle. It cannot be re-lit.
So let me suggest this. A candle is created for its own destruction. That is a common hallmark of human creation: rubber tyres are made for wearing out, steak and kidney pies for eating, and atomic weapons for detonation.
Perhaps God’s creation is different. He hates nothing he has made, as the Lenten Collect reminds us. Perhaps God’s creation is never for its own destruction. Perhaps it is only ever for its own transformation, for its transformation from glory to glory. Perhaps the dust and ash of the earth awaits such transformation; perhaps the denial of Peter and the betrayal of Iscariot await such transformation. And perhaps we await it, too.
Christ stands in the garden of Easter, his wounded hands outstretched towards us.
It’s fashionable for booksellers to pile their counters high with small, well-presented volumes with winsome titles such as ‘Forty Hints for Husbands’ or ‘Surviving your Children’. Inspired by such bijou publications, and conscious that I am preaching before the Icon of the Crucifixion for the first time, I have entitled this series of three addresses for Holy Week ‘How to Behave in the Presence of God.
Let me explain. Most of us observe some sort of bodily ritual on entering a sacred space, from nodding our heads to prostrating ourselves headlong. In these three addresses I will consider the three gestures associated by Orthodox Christians with the presence of icons.
This is Chapter One of my slim, hard-back volume: Earth.
When President Obama travelled to London last week a number of bags of his own blood travelled with him. When an Orthodox Christian approaches an icon he stoops down and touches the ground before it. If the President ever ponders that particular element of his travel arrangements then it may remind him of the ever-present possibility of his death. If the Orthodox Christian ever ponders the custom he has known all his life then it may have a similar effect. In touching the ground he is acknowledging the dust of which he is made, and to which he will return.
‘The dust of which he is made, and to which he will return’. That is a phrase with which we began the journey into Lent. It acknowledges our relationship with the dust upon which we stand, and it assumes three quite distinct stages in that relationship. We begin as dust; we live; we dissolve into dust. The Orthodox gesture of touching the ground suggests that the three stages are not nearly so distinct as we might like to think.
This is clear as we contemplate the stories of the Passion of Jesus, which is not only a story of people. It is a story of dust, a story of the dust upon which people walk. On Palm Sunday the crowds rejoice at the coming of their King. According to St Luke the Pharisees tell Jesus to tell them to be quiet. He answers that if the crowd was silent the very stones would shout out. On Good Friday Jesus dies upon the cross. According to St Matthew he cries aloud and breathes his last. At that very moment the earth shakes and the rocks split.
So what lies beneath the feet of Holy Week’s protagonists is not inanimate stuff, the passive backdrop to the drama enacted upon it. The earth is instead a responsive, empathetic player in the drama.
This is a motif that recurs throughout the Scriptures. Isaiah speaks of the hills bursting into song and of the trees of the fields clapping their hands at the return of God’s people to Zion. St Paul writes of the whole creation groaning with the pains of labour.
We are of dust and we will return to dust. The salvation for which we wait must also be the salvation of dust. The whole earth cries out for redemption, for re-creation, for renewal. This is not trendy environmentalism but orthodox faith. What turns upon the events of this week is not the purification of our interior lives; it is the purification of all that is. The earth is not God. But God has created the earth out of nothing; God sustains it in being every second of every hour; it is beloved of God and in need of God’s work of re-creation.
We touch the ground in the presence of God not to emphasize our separation from the earth or our elevation above it, but to recall our creatureliness, our utter dependence in solidarity with all that is, on God’s loving attention.
Tuesday in Holy Week: Flesh
This is the second in a three-chapter work entitled ‘How to Behave in the Presence of God’, a rumination on the three gestures Orthodox Christians associate with the presence of the divine in icons.
In Chapter One I considered the first of these, stooping to touch the ground, and I pondered how in Holy Week this identifies the worshipper with the dust of the earth, the dust that cries out for redemption just as the worshipper cries out for redemption.
Now to Chapter Two: Flesh.
After touching the ground and making the sign of the cross the Orthodox Christian approaches the icon and plants a kiss upon it. I say upon it; she will often in fact kiss the small replica of the icon which is positioned below the icon itself, sparing the often ancient and venerable gold leaf of the original.
A kiss.
When my colleagues and I were considering how we might raise the general standard of conduct at Sunday worship here (at both 10 o’clock and at 11.15, I should say) one proposal was that we might introduce a poster of the sort that some of us remember from the swimming pools of the 1970s. A series of cartoons might warn the faithful in simple terms: ‘no running; no smoking; no pushing’. However the proposal foundered on our recollection of the injunction ‘no petting’ and its picture of a couple entwined, the man looking down lasciviously on his bikini-clad paramour who gazes up at him adoringly. For we actually do rather a lot of kissing in church.
At the Eucharist the first ritual act of the president is to kiss the altar, acknowledging on behalf of the people the divine presence in the lives of the saints, whose relics were originally embedded within the table. Then once the Gospel has been proclaimed the president kisses the book, acknowledging on behalf of the people the divine presence in the written Word. Then, before the gifts are brought to the table, we acknowledge the divine presence in one another at the Peace. It’s true that being British and Anglican we normally shake hands, but when we do so we are echoing St Paul’s command that we should greet one another with a holy kiss.
So a kiss is for us a familiar way of acknowledging the divine presence, and kissing a sacred image ought not present us with any difficulty. This is Holy Week, however, and in Holy Week we remember only one kiss.
‘Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?’ The gesture is so terrible that the evangelists are divided over whether it actually happened. John cannot bear to contemplate it, and has Jesus identifying himself to the guards; in Luke Jesus forestalls the act with his question; only in Matthew and Mark does Judas actually make contact with Jesus, greeting him as ‘Rabbi!’
It was an acknowledgement of presence, just as our kisses are; it was perhaps even an acknowledgement of divine presence, a last roll of the dice for Judas, desperate to goad his God into action. But it was also the betrayal of a friend.
We dare not turn Judas into a scapegoat. For our kisses betray; our protestations of loyalty ring hollow; our vows of friendship deceive. We bring our lips to the cup of Christ’s presence and yet crucify him in our hearts and minds.
We kiss the sacred image; we acknowledge the divine presence; we recall that in so doing we worship one who will never fail, never betray, never deceive.
Wednesday in Holy Week: Fire
This is the third and last chapter in a volume entitled ‘How to Behave in the Presence of God’. In it I have offered some reflections on the three gestures that Orthodox Christians associate with the presence of God in holy icons.
In the first of these I considered the custom of touching the ground upon which the icon stands, a recognition that the worshipper is formed of the dust of the earth and will return to the dust of the earth, and so is a part of the entirety of creation that longs for God’s redeeming work. In the second I considered the custom of kissing the icon, a recognition of the divine presence that the icon mediates, a recognition which perhaps dawned dimly on Judas Iscariot when he kissed the Rabbi in the garden.
So to the third chapter: Fire.
After touching the ground and kissing the image the Orthodox Christian lights a candle before it, a candle which will burn long after he has left the place where the icon stands.
Of all three gestures this is the one with which we are most familiar. It’s not just that lighting candles is a popular activity in this parish; it is a popular activity throughout the length and breadth of our culture. Votive candles, so called, can be bought in Ikea as easily as in ecclesiastical outfitters, and they adorn not only the roadside shrines which have become a commonplace of contemporary life but also suburban dining tables and fireplaces. The lighting of candles is an acceptable secular liturgical act to which none now object. It’s strange to think that it caused such controversy in our church in the late nineteenth century.
Candles vary, of course, from ordinary tea-lights to extravagantly coloured and exotically perfumed confections that are scarcely recognizable as candles. What they all have in common is that they are made for a common end: their own destruction. That’s their point. Burn a candle and you’ll be left with nothing but a waxy pool, a lingering scent, and a memory of beauty, warmth and light.
Perhaps that is where the disciples of Jesus found themselves as night fell on Good Friday. Their dear friend had been destroyed as surely as are the candles lit here daily. His life had burned so brightly, shedding warming rays and dispelling gloomy shadow. But as the shades lengthened around the rock-hewn tomb the disciples had to adjust to a new reality. He was dead. It was finished. And all that was left was a beautiful memory.
Here we run out of gestures, metaphors and illustrations. A spent candle is a spent candle. It cannot be re-lit.
So let me suggest this. A candle is created for its own destruction. That is a common hallmark of human creation: rubber tyres are made for wearing out, steak and kidney pies for eating, and atomic weapons for detonation.
Perhaps God’s creation is different. He hates nothing he has made, as the Lenten Collect reminds us. Perhaps God’s creation is never for its own destruction. Perhaps it is only ever for its own transformation, for its transformation from glory to glory. Perhaps the dust and ash of the earth awaits such transformation; perhaps the denial of Peter and the betrayal of Iscariot await such transformation. And perhaps we await it, too.
Christ stands in the garden of Easter, his wounded hands outstretched towards us.
Wednesday 1 April 2009
Cross of Sacrifice, Sunday 29 March 2009, Fifth of Lent
She has emerald green skin. She has a pointy black hat and a demented cackle. She strikes fear into the hearts of all who encounter her. She is, of course, the Wicked Witch of the West, famously vanquished by the little girl from Kansas who proves herself a deft hand with a pail of water. Ding, dong, the witch is dead, the Munchkins rejoice, the land is liberated, and Dorothy returns to Aunt Em.
So runs L. Frank Baum’s marvellous story, published in 1900, turned into an unforgettable film in 1939, a story that might have endured for ever as a testament to the power of innocent goodness over malevolent evil. Might have so endured - had it not been for Gregory Maguire.
In his novel, and in Wicked, the show that it inspired, Maguire gives the Witch a name. She is Elphaba, and she is born with a physical abnormality. She is green, and so she is repellent to her family, indeed to all who see her. Intellectual, awkward, and prickly, she is sent away to college, where she becomes a passionate advocate for others who, like her, cannot conform. The animals of Oz have always walked on their hind legs and talked as humans talk; they have even lectured and taught in college. Change is in the air, however, and these freedoms are under attack. Before her very eyes her beloved Professor Dillamond, a historian, aesthete, and goat, is dragged away and, bleating piteously, banned from teaching and condemned to walk on all fours.
Elphaba is confident that the wonderful Wizard of Oz will share her horror. Yet when she finally meets him she discovers that he has in fact orchestrated the pogrom. The great Oz is utterly corrupt. Spotting Elphaba’s intellect and innate gift of magic, he invites her to join him. She declines and declares war on him, but with enviable spin-doctoring skill he points to her greenness, brands her the Wicked Witch of the West, and condemns her as the enemy of Oz. The stage is set for the twister that brings the little wooden house crashing down into the land of the Munchkins. The yellow brick road beckons…
Many parallels have ben drawn in our tradition between the sacrifices offered on the altars of Jerusalem and the sacrifice offered by Jesus on a hill outside Jerusalem. These parallels are at first compelling and not unhelpful. In both, precious lives are given and precious blood is spilt in the belief that what is offered will be acceptable, indeed pleasing to God. Yet to push the analogy too far is to ignore the prophetic witness of the Hebrew Bible to the effect that, whatever cultic requirements ancient Israelite society may have, her God is not interested in the blood of goats and pigeons. ‘I hate, I despise your festivals,’ he says to Amos, ‘and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings, I will not accept them, and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’. The God of Israel, into whose hands Jesus entrusts his spirit, does not need blood. The community that sends Jesus to the cross does. The Roman state, the Jewish hierarchs, the baying mob, the human race, you and I, do.
Wicked turns the story of little Dorothy’s valour into a story people caught up in furious wrath against a small group and against an individual. The weak Wizard of Oz is revealed to Elphaba as distinctly un-wonderful. He cowers behind a pyrotechnic display calculated to impress the gullible. He unites his people and props up his authority by finding enemies for them to hate: first the animals, and, when she refuses to join him, the Wicked Witch. Thus Maguire exposes for us a seam that runs through every human civilization that has ever existed. Time and again, we define ourselves in opposition to others, over against others, distinct from others. Time and again those others are to be feared and hated. The Pope has recently written to his fellow bishops in rather rueful terms, ‘At times one gets the impression that our society needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may be shown; which one can easily attack and hate. And should someone dare to approach them – in this case the Pope – he too loses any right to tolerance; he too can be treated hatefully, without misgiving’. This very week demonstrators in our streets will burn effigies of the high-earning bankers who they demonize; this very week those of us who are too polite to burn anything will demonize those same demonstrators.
The book of Leviticus sets out for ancient Israel a formal mechanism for containing this wrath and hate, for ridding the people of it, a mechanism that has given its name to us in perpetuity. The priest lays his hands on the head of a goat chosen by lot, and confesses over it all the people’s transgressions, putting them onto the unfortunate beast, which is then despatched into the wilderness. Israel’s sin is borne away by the scapegoat and the community is temporarily cleansed of its anger. Elphaba becomes a scapegoat for the insecure wrath of Oz; Sir Fred Goodwin for the generation which believes itself unfairly treated. And on the cross we see the ultimate scapegoat, the one who is despised and rejected, the one against whom the fickle crowds turns, the one who positions himself in the path of humankind’s wrathful, fearful, hateful juggernaut, the one takes upon himself the whole weight of human anger, human failure and human sin. In going to the cross Jesus reveals sacrifice as killing; in going to the cross Jesus reveals the sentence passed upon him for what it is: not a holy and righteous act but the judicial murder of an innocent; in going to the cross Jesus reveals our rage against the other and contempt for the other for what it is: not justified indignation or enlightened self-interest but rage and contempt. Yet in going to the cross Jesus disarms rage and contempt. He lays aside his life as he lays aside his robes in the upper room, and in bread and wine he gives his life away as a gift to be shared.
David Ford and Daniel Hardy some years ago identified the Church’s big problem as its inability to cope with the abundance of God. They were right. Too often we behave as though the grace of God was like Lego bricks, something that we have to scrabble after in the dirt, something that comes only in tiny pieces. If I grab some of it then you can’t finish your house; if you do, I can’t finish my tractor. You become my scapegoat, or I become yours: ordained women, gay people, lone parents, conservative evangelicals, Forward in Faith, paedophiles, noisy children, 10 o’clockers: all are still in some quarter the subject of Christian rage and Christian contempt masquerading as Christian principle. Yet as Desmond Tutu reminds us, Jesus does not say ‘when I am lifted up I will draw some people to myself’ He says ‘when I am lifted up I will draw all people to myself’. All, all, all’.
There can be no us and them in the Church; there can only be us. I am because you are; not, I am because I am not you. We are one people, redeemed and set free, eyes opened to the terrible power of wrath and hate, one people sharing the life that was laid down and was raised, the life of Christ, the last sacrifice of them all. Ding, dong, the Witch is dead. In a few moments a bell will ring here, calling us not to exult in a death but to share in a life, a life freely given, a life that is for all eternity. For ‘as many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’. To him be the glory, now and for ever. Amen.
So runs L. Frank Baum’s marvellous story, published in 1900, turned into an unforgettable film in 1939, a story that might have endured for ever as a testament to the power of innocent goodness over malevolent evil. Might have so endured - had it not been for Gregory Maguire.
In his novel, and in Wicked, the show that it inspired, Maguire gives the Witch a name. She is Elphaba, and she is born with a physical abnormality. She is green, and so she is repellent to her family, indeed to all who see her. Intellectual, awkward, and prickly, she is sent away to college, where she becomes a passionate advocate for others who, like her, cannot conform. The animals of Oz have always walked on their hind legs and talked as humans talk; they have even lectured and taught in college. Change is in the air, however, and these freedoms are under attack. Before her very eyes her beloved Professor Dillamond, a historian, aesthete, and goat, is dragged away and, bleating piteously, banned from teaching and condemned to walk on all fours.
Elphaba is confident that the wonderful Wizard of Oz will share her horror. Yet when she finally meets him she discovers that he has in fact orchestrated the pogrom. The great Oz is utterly corrupt. Spotting Elphaba’s intellect and innate gift of magic, he invites her to join him. She declines and declares war on him, but with enviable spin-doctoring skill he points to her greenness, brands her the Wicked Witch of the West, and condemns her as the enemy of Oz. The stage is set for the twister that brings the little wooden house crashing down into the land of the Munchkins. The yellow brick road beckons…
Many parallels have ben drawn in our tradition between the sacrifices offered on the altars of Jerusalem and the sacrifice offered by Jesus on a hill outside Jerusalem. These parallels are at first compelling and not unhelpful. In both, precious lives are given and precious blood is spilt in the belief that what is offered will be acceptable, indeed pleasing to God. Yet to push the analogy too far is to ignore the prophetic witness of the Hebrew Bible to the effect that, whatever cultic requirements ancient Israelite society may have, her God is not interested in the blood of goats and pigeons. ‘I hate, I despise your festivals,’ he says to Amos, ‘and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings, I will not accept them, and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’. The God of Israel, into whose hands Jesus entrusts his spirit, does not need blood. The community that sends Jesus to the cross does. The Roman state, the Jewish hierarchs, the baying mob, the human race, you and I, do.
Wicked turns the story of little Dorothy’s valour into a story people caught up in furious wrath against a small group and against an individual. The weak Wizard of Oz is revealed to Elphaba as distinctly un-wonderful. He cowers behind a pyrotechnic display calculated to impress the gullible. He unites his people and props up his authority by finding enemies for them to hate: first the animals, and, when she refuses to join him, the Wicked Witch. Thus Maguire exposes for us a seam that runs through every human civilization that has ever existed. Time and again, we define ourselves in opposition to others, over against others, distinct from others. Time and again those others are to be feared and hated. The Pope has recently written to his fellow bishops in rather rueful terms, ‘At times one gets the impression that our society needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may be shown; which one can easily attack and hate. And should someone dare to approach them – in this case the Pope – he too loses any right to tolerance; he too can be treated hatefully, without misgiving’. This very week demonstrators in our streets will burn effigies of the high-earning bankers who they demonize; this very week those of us who are too polite to burn anything will demonize those same demonstrators.
The book of Leviticus sets out for ancient Israel a formal mechanism for containing this wrath and hate, for ridding the people of it, a mechanism that has given its name to us in perpetuity. The priest lays his hands on the head of a goat chosen by lot, and confesses over it all the people’s transgressions, putting them onto the unfortunate beast, which is then despatched into the wilderness. Israel’s sin is borne away by the scapegoat and the community is temporarily cleansed of its anger. Elphaba becomes a scapegoat for the insecure wrath of Oz; Sir Fred Goodwin for the generation which believes itself unfairly treated. And on the cross we see the ultimate scapegoat, the one who is despised and rejected, the one against whom the fickle crowds turns, the one who positions himself in the path of humankind’s wrathful, fearful, hateful juggernaut, the one takes upon himself the whole weight of human anger, human failure and human sin. In going to the cross Jesus reveals sacrifice as killing; in going to the cross Jesus reveals the sentence passed upon him for what it is: not a holy and righteous act but the judicial murder of an innocent; in going to the cross Jesus reveals our rage against the other and contempt for the other for what it is: not justified indignation or enlightened self-interest but rage and contempt. Yet in going to the cross Jesus disarms rage and contempt. He lays aside his life as he lays aside his robes in the upper room, and in bread and wine he gives his life away as a gift to be shared.
David Ford and Daniel Hardy some years ago identified the Church’s big problem as its inability to cope with the abundance of God. They were right. Too often we behave as though the grace of God was like Lego bricks, something that we have to scrabble after in the dirt, something that comes only in tiny pieces. If I grab some of it then you can’t finish your house; if you do, I can’t finish my tractor. You become my scapegoat, or I become yours: ordained women, gay people, lone parents, conservative evangelicals, Forward in Faith, paedophiles, noisy children, 10 o’clockers: all are still in some quarter the subject of Christian rage and Christian contempt masquerading as Christian principle. Yet as Desmond Tutu reminds us, Jesus does not say ‘when I am lifted up I will draw some people to myself’ He says ‘when I am lifted up I will draw all people to myself’. All, all, all’.
There can be no us and them in the Church; there can only be us. I am because you are; not, I am because I am not you. We are one people, redeemed and set free, eyes opened to the terrible power of wrath and hate, one people sharing the life that was laid down and was raised, the life of Christ, the last sacrifice of them all. Ding, dong, the Witch is dead. In a few moments a bell will ring here, calling us not to exult in a death but to share in a life, a life freely given, a life that is for all eternity. For ‘as many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’. To him be the glory, now and for ever. Amen.
Monday 2 March 2009
1 March 200, First Sunday of Lent, 'The Wondrous Cross'
‘Many people today go around with a cross on their earrings, bracelet or necklace. We are so used to seeing this that we are not shocked by it. We might be if we saw someone wearing a gallows or an electric chair on a chain; but the cross was just as much a form of execution. Indeed, it was one of the cruellest forms of execution known to mankind. It was abolished in AD 315 because even the Romans considered it too inhumane.’
With those words, taken from the opening paragraph of the third session of Holy Trinity Brompton’s Alpha Course, the curtain is raised on our Lent programme. Isaac Watts calls the Cross ‘Wondrous’ and we have named our programme after his verse; yet our colleagues in SW7 remind us that there is little that is wondrous about the historical cross or the historical crucifixion. The curtain is raised upon an instrument of torture; in the centre of the stage there is a killing; for through these days of Lent we will study in word, art and music a judicial murder, the judicial murder of the man Christian faith claims is the Son of God.
You’ll have heard this before. The simple fact of the cross - and it’s one of the Biblical events that we can confidently call a simple fact, for who would have invented it? - the simple fact of the cross is an insurmountable stumbling-block to many. The cross is a fate so scandalous and so demeaning that our Muslim brothers and sisters, for example, do not accept that God can have allowed his blessed prophet Jesus to suffer it. The Holy Qu’ran insists that there is no blood-soaked death upon Calvary’s hill, that God raises Jesus up to himself. The transcendent God cannot suffer as we suffer, and he will not suffer his prophets to suffer either. That sense of horror at the mere idea of a Son of God suffering ought to send tremors rippling through our veins too. A few years ago a BBC series on twentieth century art was famously entitled ‘The Shock of the New’. Contemplating the cross we too experience the shock of the new, or we ought to. We experience it not in piles of bricks or splurges of colour but in remembering and recognizing the shocking gash that rips through the fabric of eternity when Jesus Christ hangs upon the cross. In accepting the wretchedness and agony of Calvary God does something startlingly, shockingly new.
Perhaps this is unhealthy and morbid. We are a resurrection people, and ‘alleluia’ is our song. Our deacon Mark posed the question on Ash Wednesday: in the light of the empty tomb, why focus upon the cross? His answer was that without the cross there can be no resurrection. He was quite right. Without the cross there can be no resurrection; indeed, without the cross there can be no incarnation. Our proclamation is that in Christ God becomes a human and lives a human life. Death is a part of life. If God lives a human life then God must die a human death. If Christ does not risk the pain and misery that are the lot of so many men and women, of so many of his brothers and sisters; if Christ does not die, then Christ can in no real sense live. Without the empty tomb the cross has no meaning, true; without the years spent healing the sick and proclaiming God’s kingdom the cross has no meaning, equally true. Yet without the cross the life and the empty tomb have no reality. Christ’s death matters because Christ’s life matters, because it is in his life, in the whole of his life, that earth is rejoined to heaven and that our salvation is somehow wrought.
Somehow wrought: as we confront the shock of this new thing that God does through the blood and tears of Calvary, we cannot avoid the question of our salvation. What does this death achieve? The claim that God’s Son dies upon the cross is distinctive, as we have seen. What claims do we make for this distinctive claim? How does that death then affect our lives now? Our ancestors in faith, who compiled the catholic Creeds as defences against encroaching heresy, were reticent. The Creed does not spell out how the cross works. It confines itself, as we shall say shortly, to stating that it was ‘for our sake’ that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. God comes among us in Jesus. Jesus dies among us and at our hands. His death is for our sake. The fathers of the Church would go no further than that. Perhaps they sensed that to go farther would be to stray into the realm of the unknowable, to second-guess the mind and purposes of God, and to sow seeds of dissension in the Church.
For as long as there has been a Church there has been dissension about this crucial - an adjective used properly for once - about this crucial article of faith. Successive generations have produced successive accounts of what the cross achieved and why, and it is these that we are to explore in the weeks ahead. Was the cross an atoning sacrifice? Was it a decisive victory? Was it the payment of a debt? Was it an act of love? These are the theologies of the cross that the Church has generated over the centuries. All are compatible with the doctrine of the Creed; by pondering them all (and only by pondering them all) we will perhaps have a chance of comprehending the mystery.
Over the next few weeks a number of speakers will address us on the theology and use of icons, and their words will be an important part of our preparation for Passiontide. Yet it is an icon of the crucifixion that we are to receive, not an account of the crucifixion or a theology of the crucifixion. And fundamentally an icon is not to be understood; it is to be gazed upon. An icon is a participation in wood and paint in the reality that it depicts; it is sacramental; it bears the one who gazes upon it into the realm that its images represent. We will find our interior lives profoundly enriched by contemplation of Silvia Dimitrova’s work. What applies to the icon of the crucifixion applies to the crucifixion too. Ultimately it is not something to understand, to gut and fillet, to appropriate and fix with a pin beneath a glass screen. It is something to gaze upon, to fall silent before, to be still before, to know our need of God before; for revealed on the Cross as nowhere else we see God as God most truly is.
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
Amen.
With those words, taken from the opening paragraph of the third session of Holy Trinity Brompton’s Alpha Course, the curtain is raised on our Lent programme. Isaac Watts calls the Cross ‘Wondrous’ and we have named our programme after his verse; yet our colleagues in SW7 remind us that there is little that is wondrous about the historical cross or the historical crucifixion. The curtain is raised upon an instrument of torture; in the centre of the stage there is a killing; for through these days of Lent we will study in word, art and music a judicial murder, the judicial murder of the man Christian faith claims is the Son of God.
You’ll have heard this before. The simple fact of the cross - and it’s one of the Biblical events that we can confidently call a simple fact, for who would have invented it? - the simple fact of the cross is an insurmountable stumbling-block to many. The cross is a fate so scandalous and so demeaning that our Muslim brothers and sisters, for example, do not accept that God can have allowed his blessed prophet Jesus to suffer it. The Holy Qu’ran insists that there is no blood-soaked death upon Calvary’s hill, that God raises Jesus up to himself. The transcendent God cannot suffer as we suffer, and he will not suffer his prophets to suffer either. That sense of horror at the mere idea of a Son of God suffering ought to send tremors rippling through our veins too. A few years ago a BBC series on twentieth century art was famously entitled ‘The Shock of the New’. Contemplating the cross we too experience the shock of the new, or we ought to. We experience it not in piles of bricks or splurges of colour but in remembering and recognizing the shocking gash that rips through the fabric of eternity when Jesus Christ hangs upon the cross. In accepting the wretchedness and agony of Calvary God does something startlingly, shockingly new.
Perhaps this is unhealthy and morbid. We are a resurrection people, and ‘alleluia’ is our song. Our deacon Mark posed the question on Ash Wednesday: in the light of the empty tomb, why focus upon the cross? His answer was that without the cross there can be no resurrection. He was quite right. Without the cross there can be no resurrection; indeed, without the cross there can be no incarnation. Our proclamation is that in Christ God becomes a human and lives a human life. Death is a part of life. If God lives a human life then God must die a human death. If Christ does not risk the pain and misery that are the lot of so many men and women, of so many of his brothers and sisters; if Christ does not die, then Christ can in no real sense live. Without the empty tomb the cross has no meaning, true; without the years spent healing the sick and proclaiming God’s kingdom the cross has no meaning, equally true. Yet without the cross the life and the empty tomb have no reality. Christ’s death matters because Christ’s life matters, because it is in his life, in the whole of his life, that earth is rejoined to heaven and that our salvation is somehow wrought.
Somehow wrought: as we confront the shock of this new thing that God does through the blood and tears of Calvary, we cannot avoid the question of our salvation. What does this death achieve? The claim that God’s Son dies upon the cross is distinctive, as we have seen. What claims do we make for this distinctive claim? How does that death then affect our lives now? Our ancestors in faith, who compiled the catholic Creeds as defences against encroaching heresy, were reticent. The Creed does not spell out how the cross works. It confines itself, as we shall say shortly, to stating that it was ‘for our sake’ that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. God comes among us in Jesus. Jesus dies among us and at our hands. His death is for our sake. The fathers of the Church would go no further than that. Perhaps they sensed that to go farther would be to stray into the realm of the unknowable, to second-guess the mind and purposes of God, and to sow seeds of dissension in the Church.
For as long as there has been a Church there has been dissension about this crucial - an adjective used properly for once - about this crucial article of faith. Successive generations have produced successive accounts of what the cross achieved and why, and it is these that we are to explore in the weeks ahead. Was the cross an atoning sacrifice? Was it a decisive victory? Was it the payment of a debt? Was it an act of love? These are the theologies of the cross that the Church has generated over the centuries. All are compatible with the doctrine of the Creed; by pondering them all (and only by pondering them all) we will perhaps have a chance of comprehending the mystery.
Over the next few weeks a number of speakers will address us on the theology and use of icons, and their words will be an important part of our preparation for Passiontide. Yet it is an icon of the crucifixion that we are to receive, not an account of the crucifixion or a theology of the crucifixion. And fundamentally an icon is not to be understood; it is to be gazed upon. An icon is a participation in wood and paint in the reality that it depicts; it is sacramental; it bears the one who gazes upon it into the realm that its images represent. We will find our interior lives profoundly enriched by contemplation of Silvia Dimitrova’s work. What applies to the icon of the crucifixion applies to the crucifixion too. Ultimately it is not something to understand, to gut and fillet, to appropriate and fix with a pin beneath a glass screen. It is something to gaze upon, to fall silent before, to be still before, to know our need of God before; for revealed on the Cross as nowhere else we see God as God most truly is.
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
Amen.
Monday 2 February 2009
The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Sunday 1 February 2009
To understand the drama that we celebrate today it is necessary to understand the context of the drama. The context is Jerusalem’s great Temple, a building understood by those who went to it as the place of sacrifice and the place of divine presence.
The Temple’s daily routine was shaped around the offering of sacrifice. The air was full of the cries of frightened animals (critics of the noise levels at the Family Eucharist should take note), and thick with the scent of incense burned to take away the stench (a brutal truth that those who are in love with the aesthetic of incense forget at their peril). The Temple’s very building was designed to accommodate the divine presence. At its heart stood the Holy of Holies, the inner chamber where YHWH, the God of Israel, was believed to dwell.
Joseph and Mary visit the Temple forty days after their son’s birth to offer sacrifice and to seek the divine presence; they come for Mary’s purification and for her son’s presentation. Jewish law required that mothers be formally restored to the community’s fellowship after the trauma of childbirth. Through the offering of a sacrifice was a new mother purified. And Luke obviously believed that the law also required that first-born sons be brought into God’s presence, presented to God (whether it did in fact make that requirement is a matter of scholarly debate).
So the drama that we celebrate today has been known by both those names. For us, it is the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. For generations of Anglicans raised on the Book of Common Prayer, it is the Purification of the St Mary the Virgin. Since the Middle Ages it has been known as Candlemas, in honour of the candles carried by the faithful in procession, themselves honouring Simeon’s acclamation of the infant Jesus as the light to lighten the Gentiles. Yet the themes of purification and presentation are not just themes for today; they are not abandoned once the candles of Candlemas have been extinguished.
Today we began the liturgy outside on the Portico and entered the building together. In so doing we were recalling the holy family’s entry into the Temple precincts to offer their turtle doves or pigeons, the sacrifice prescribed for the poorest of the poor. A few weeks from now we will begin our liturgy outside again. That will be on Palm Sunday. Today we trace the footsteps of Christ’s first entry to Jerusalem; on Palm Sunday we will trace the steps of his last. Today Mary goes to the Temple to be purified, and we honour her cleansing, the cleansing of the one who has born the Son of God to the world. On Palm Sunday Christ goes to the Temple and purifies it, casting out the money-changers. We honour his cleansing of the place that has born God to the world for generations.
Today we will end the liturgy by removing from the altar the crib figures which have been in place since Christmas Eve. In so doing we will recall Mary’s presentation of her son to God. He is brought to his people’s sacred space. He is acknowledged as the Temple’s rightful heir. Thus the days of infancy are put away, and our worship turns to his Passion, the culmination of his earthly life. A few weeks from now we will again remove the adornments of the altar. That will be on Maundy Thursday. Today we strip away the trappings of babyhood, for Christ is presented to his Father. On Maundy Thursday we strip away the candles and altar cloths. In so doing we recall Christ’s presentation of himself to his Father, stripped of his friends, stripped of his garments, left alone, presenting himself for the world in the garden of Gethsemane.
In the drama of Candlemas we see foreshadowed the drama of Holy Week. The place where sacrifice is offered is purified by the one who himself becomes the sacrificial lamb. The place where presentation is made to the divine presence gives way to the one who presents himself to the Father, the one who is himself the new Temple, the place where earth and heaven meet.
Purification and presentation: we honour today the drama that unfolds in the Temple; we honour too the portents seen in that drama for what was to be Christ’s life and mission. And we are brought to the realization that purification and presentation, our purification and our presentation, are the reasons why we are here today.
We have gathered in our own Temple - not this building, magnificent though it may be and dear to us though it is. We have gathered in the name of Christ, who is our Temple and our sacrifice. In our listening together to his word; in our sharing together in the sacrament of his body and blood; in our common life in him we are restored to ourselves, purified, and made ready to bear his presence to the world. And as bearers of his presence and lights of the world we pray that he will present us, the fruits of his sacrifice, to his Father. To Christ be glory in the Church, now and for ever. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
The Temple’s daily routine was shaped around the offering of sacrifice. The air was full of the cries of frightened animals (critics of the noise levels at the Family Eucharist should take note), and thick with the scent of incense burned to take away the stench (a brutal truth that those who are in love with the aesthetic of incense forget at their peril). The Temple’s very building was designed to accommodate the divine presence. At its heart stood the Holy of Holies, the inner chamber where YHWH, the God of Israel, was believed to dwell.
Joseph and Mary visit the Temple forty days after their son’s birth to offer sacrifice and to seek the divine presence; they come for Mary’s purification and for her son’s presentation. Jewish law required that mothers be formally restored to the community’s fellowship after the trauma of childbirth. Through the offering of a sacrifice was a new mother purified. And Luke obviously believed that the law also required that first-born sons be brought into God’s presence, presented to God (whether it did in fact make that requirement is a matter of scholarly debate).
So the drama that we celebrate today has been known by both those names. For us, it is the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. For generations of Anglicans raised on the Book of Common Prayer, it is the Purification of the St Mary the Virgin. Since the Middle Ages it has been known as Candlemas, in honour of the candles carried by the faithful in procession, themselves honouring Simeon’s acclamation of the infant Jesus as the light to lighten the Gentiles. Yet the themes of purification and presentation are not just themes for today; they are not abandoned once the candles of Candlemas have been extinguished.
Today we began the liturgy outside on the Portico and entered the building together. In so doing we were recalling the holy family’s entry into the Temple precincts to offer their turtle doves or pigeons, the sacrifice prescribed for the poorest of the poor. A few weeks from now we will begin our liturgy outside again. That will be on Palm Sunday. Today we trace the footsteps of Christ’s first entry to Jerusalem; on Palm Sunday we will trace the steps of his last. Today Mary goes to the Temple to be purified, and we honour her cleansing, the cleansing of the one who has born the Son of God to the world. On Palm Sunday Christ goes to the Temple and purifies it, casting out the money-changers. We honour his cleansing of the place that has born God to the world for generations.
Today we will end the liturgy by removing from the altar the crib figures which have been in place since Christmas Eve. In so doing we will recall Mary’s presentation of her son to God. He is brought to his people’s sacred space. He is acknowledged as the Temple’s rightful heir. Thus the days of infancy are put away, and our worship turns to his Passion, the culmination of his earthly life. A few weeks from now we will again remove the adornments of the altar. That will be on Maundy Thursday. Today we strip away the trappings of babyhood, for Christ is presented to his Father. On Maundy Thursday we strip away the candles and altar cloths. In so doing we recall Christ’s presentation of himself to his Father, stripped of his friends, stripped of his garments, left alone, presenting himself for the world in the garden of Gethsemane.
In the drama of Candlemas we see foreshadowed the drama of Holy Week. The place where sacrifice is offered is purified by the one who himself becomes the sacrificial lamb. The place where presentation is made to the divine presence gives way to the one who presents himself to the Father, the one who is himself the new Temple, the place where earth and heaven meet.
Purification and presentation: we honour today the drama that unfolds in the Temple; we honour too the portents seen in that drama for what was to be Christ’s life and mission. And we are brought to the realization that purification and presentation, our purification and our presentation, are the reasons why we are here today.
We have gathered in our own Temple - not this building, magnificent though it may be and dear to us though it is. We have gathered in the name of Christ, who is our Temple and our sacrifice. In our listening together to his word; in our sharing together in the sacrament of his body and blood; in our common life in him we are restored to ourselves, purified, and made ready to bear his presence to the world. And as bearers of his presence and lights of the world we pray that he will present us, the fruits of his sacrifice, to his Father. To Christ be glory in the Church, now and for ever. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
Monday 19 January 2009
The Second Sunday of Epiphany, 18 January 2009
‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’
It is tempting to sketch one or both of two portraits of Jesus on the strength of his exchange with Nathanael. It is a temptation to which both armchair theologians and commentators who ought to know better often succumb. One of these portraits is Jesus as headhunter. It is the beginning of his ministry. He is assembling his team. The former disciples of his cousin John have already proved fertile ground for recruitment. He has taken on Peter and Andrew; he has called their fellow native of Bethsaida, Philip. Now Nathanael comes along. ‘Here’ says Jesus ‘is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.’ Nathanael has passed the test. Jesus has spotted his upstanding character and that makes him worthy of inclusion in the new company.
The other portrait is Jesus as Gypsy Rose-Lee, a mystic armed with a crystal ball. Nathanael is perhaps underwhelmed by the rabbi’s assessment and the prospects he offers. He needs to be persuaded to throw in his lot with the emerging group. There could be no better way to convince him than a little magic. ‘I saw you under the fig tree’ says Jesus. It works. Nathanael is convinced. A man with such amazing second sight must be a man worth following.
Of course, both portraits are crude and erroneous caricatures. The briefest consideration of the motley crew that surrounds Jesus should be enough to convince us that character plays no part in his considerations. When Jesus makes the remark he makes about Nathanael he is not weighing him up and deciding to take a punt. He is articulating what he sees in him, both actually and potentially; he is calling the man who stands before him; he is choosing Nathanael for a task, just as he has chosen Simon who he calls Cephas. The latter is the rock; the former is an Israelite without deceit. Jesus calls Nathanael.
So the line about the fig-tree is no gimmick. It illustrates Nathanel’s calling to be an Israelite in whom there is no deceit. The leisure to tend one’s own vineyard and the freedom to sit under one’s own fig-tree are the scriptural hallmarks of ancient Israelite bliss. ‘I saw you under the fig tree’ says Jesus: I call you to be an Israelite, says Jesus, I call you to be the representative among my followers of your nation, of God’s historic people.
And the particular task to which Nathanael is called is very clear. ‘You are the Son of God’ he cries, ‘you are the King of Israel’. For an Israelite to make the first declaration is surprising. ‘Son of God’, Yios tou Theou, is not an expression unheard of in Jewish literature, but it is more intimately connected to Greek thought and Greek theology. Nathanael is the first Jew to use of Jesus the title that John the Evangelist will use throughout his Gospel. Jesus, says Nathanael, is son of God, and this only seconds after his friend Philip has introduced Jesus to him as son of Joseph.
Yet if his hearers are taken aback at his turn of phrase they are surely taken even further aback by what follows. ‘King of Israel’ is the title reserved for the Messiah, the great liberator who will restore the nation’s fortunes. In a few seconds Nathanael the Israelite has confessed the carpenter’s son to be the son of the transcendent God, and confessed this same carpenter’s son to be the one on whom his country’s hopes are pinned. Jesus calls; Nathanael answers; truth is revealed.
This is God’s pattern, repeated to countless men and countless women across the years. Look at the narrative of Samuel. God calls. Samuel answers. Truth is revealed. For those so called, those who answer, discover in the call and their response to it what or who it is that they are called to be. So Samuel is the sovereign-anointing prophet of the new kingdom of Israel. Nathanael is a son of the son of God and a subject of the new king of Israel.
Nathanael’s journey is a journey of breathtaking speed and distance. Yet it has barely begun. ‘You will see greater things than these’ promises Jesus. Professions of newfound faith, however remarkable, are not all that disciples of Jesus are called to. There are greater things: greater than the cerebral definitions of Greek philosophy (Son of God), greater than the utopian hopes of Israel’s dream (King of Israel). The coming of Jesus means more than an exercise in intellectual re-positioning, and more than a political settlement for an enslaved people. The coming of Jesus means the breaking open of the sealed scroll that no one in heaven or earth or under the earth has been deemed worthy to break open. The coming of Jesus means the joining of heaven and earth by the one who is Son of God and who is King of Israel; by the one who is both but who is also, crucially, Son of Man. Upon him will the angels ascend and descend as upon a ladder.
It is with this that Nathanael is brought face to face by the friend who invites him to come and see, with this reality that in the coming of Jesus the world has changed for ever, that in the coming of Jesus his perceptions have changed for ever, that in the coming of Jesus he has changed for ever. No longer will this Israelite sit under his fig tree and tend his vineyard; instead he will bear witness to the one who called him and knew him, to the one whose coming has wrought change for all creation.
‘You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’
We too are invited, called even, to come, and see. Amen.
It is tempting to sketch one or both of two portraits of Jesus on the strength of his exchange with Nathanael. It is a temptation to which both armchair theologians and commentators who ought to know better often succumb. One of these portraits is Jesus as headhunter. It is the beginning of his ministry. He is assembling his team. The former disciples of his cousin John have already proved fertile ground for recruitment. He has taken on Peter and Andrew; he has called their fellow native of Bethsaida, Philip. Now Nathanael comes along. ‘Here’ says Jesus ‘is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.’ Nathanael has passed the test. Jesus has spotted his upstanding character and that makes him worthy of inclusion in the new company.
The other portrait is Jesus as Gypsy Rose-Lee, a mystic armed with a crystal ball. Nathanael is perhaps underwhelmed by the rabbi’s assessment and the prospects he offers. He needs to be persuaded to throw in his lot with the emerging group. There could be no better way to convince him than a little magic. ‘I saw you under the fig tree’ says Jesus. It works. Nathanael is convinced. A man with such amazing second sight must be a man worth following.
Of course, both portraits are crude and erroneous caricatures. The briefest consideration of the motley crew that surrounds Jesus should be enough to convince us that character plays no part in his considerations. When Jesus makes the remark he makes about Nathanael he is not weighing him up and deciding to take a punt. He is articulating what he sees in him, both actually and potentially; he is calling the man who stands before him; he is choosing Nathanael for a task, just as he has chosen Simon who he calls Cephas. The latter is the rock; the former is an Israelite without deceit. Jesus calls Nathanael.
So the line about the fig-tree is no gimmick. It illustrates Nathanel’s calling to be an Israelite in whom there is no deceit. The leisure to tend one’s own vineyard and the freedom to sit under one’s own fig-tree are the scriptural hallmarks of ancient Israelite bliss. ‘I saw you under the fig tree’ says Jesus: I call you to be an Israelite, says Jesus, I call you to be the representative among my followers of your nation, of God’s historic people.
And the particular task to which Nathanael is called is very clear. ‘You are the Son of God’ he cries, ‘you are the King of Israel’. For an Israelite to make the first declaration is surprising. ‘Son of God’, Yios tou Theou, is not an expression unheard of in Jewish literature, but it is more intimately connected to Greek thought and Greek theology. Nathanael is the first Jew to use of Jesus the title that John the Evangelist will use throughout his Gospel. Jesus, says Nathanael, is son of God, and this only seconds after his friend Philip has introduced Jesus to him as son of Joseph.
Yet if his hearers are taken aback at his turn of phrase they are surely taken even further aback by what follows. ‘King of Israel’ is the title reserved for the Messiah, the great liberator who will restore the nation’s fortunes. In a few seconds Nathanael the Israelite has confessed the carpenter’s son to be the son of the transcendent God, and confessed this same carpenter’s son to be the one on whom his country’s hopes are pinned. Jesus calls; Nathanael answers; truth is revealed.
This is God’s pattern, repeated to countless men and countless women across the years. Look at the narrative of Samuel. God calls. Samuel answers. Truth is revealed. For those so called, those who answer, discover in the call and their response to it what or who it is that they are called to be. So Samuel is the sovereign-anointing prophet of the new kingdom of Israel. Nathanael is a son of the son of God and a subject of the new king of Israel.
Nathanael’s journey is a journey of breathtaking speed and distance. Yet it has barely begun. ‘You will see greater things than these’ promises Jesus. Professions of newfound faith, however remarkable, are not all that disciples of Jesus are called to. There are greater things: greater than the cerebral definitions of Greek philosophy (Son of God), greater than the utopian hopes of Israel’s dream (King of Israel). The coming of Jesus means more than an exercise in intellectual re-positioning, and more than a political settlement for an enslaved people. The coming of Jesus means the breaking open of the sealed scroll that no one in heaven or earth or under the earth has been deemed worthy to break open. The coming of Jesus means the joining of heaven and earth by the one who is Son of God and who is King of Israel; by the one who is both but who is also, crucially, Son of Man. Upon him will the angels ascend and descend as upon a ladder.
It is with this that Nathanael is brought face to face by the friend who invites him to come and see, with this reality that in the coming of Jesus the world has changed for ever, that in the coming of Jesus his perceptions have changed for ever, that in the coming of Jesus he has changed for ever. No longer will this Israelite sit under his fig tree and tend his vineyard; instead he will bear witness to the one who called him and knew him, to the one whose coming has wrought change for all creation.
‘You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’
We too are invited, called even, to come, and see. Amen.
1 Samuel 3: 1-10;
Revelation 5: 1-10;
John 1: 43-end.
Revelation 5: 1-10;
John 1: 43-end.
Monday 5 January 2009
The Eucharist of Christmas Night, 24 December 2008, 11.30 pm
'Of mans first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse'.
Don’t look so worried. I’m not going to read all twelve books of Paradise Lost .We’d be here until Epiphany, and in any case Radio 3 is making a much better job of it than I ever would.
On the four hundredth anniversary of John Milton’s birth many commentators have pondered why the work of England’s greatest epic poet has slipped so far from the public gaze. Theories abound. Its great length means that it’s not easily digestible. It could never feature as a Poem on the Underground. Its complex language means that it’s inaccessible to many. ‘Him the Almighty Power hurled headlong flaming from th’ethereal sky’ is forbidding to a generation that has just learned to text.
But more profound that either of these hurdles to popularity is its sheer ambition. For Milton sets out to tell in verse the story of humanity’s creation, fall and restoration. Grand narratives come no grander than this. His setting stretches beyond the farthest limits of the universe; his timescale is eternity; his players are the omnipotent God and his heavenly courtiers. The scope is breathtaking, and it is that very scope that makes Milton so difficult for modern readers.
For we no longer trust grand narratives. Poets, philosophers and prophets could once upon a time articulate over-arching stories for the world with utter confidence. That confidence was dealt a body blow on the battlefields of Western Europe more than ninety years ago. Civilization, progress, liberal values: those great totems that the educated citizens of the European empires treasured and celebrated as their common story when they entered the first decade of the last century - those were left bleeding in the trenches, their humane pretensions revealed as paper-thin veneers. And in their place other ideologies appeared and in their turn these too have gone to their fate, very often deservedly: fascism perished in the rubble of Berlin; statist Marxism in the wastes of the Gulag. Unregulated consumer capitalism may have done the same in the credit crunch of 2008.
The effect of the last hundred years’ history is that we disbelieve grand attempts to interpret history. We are suspicious of authority and we are cynical about the claims made by those who wield authority. We prefer our politicians to be technocrats rather than ideologues; we worry more about solutions than visions. What matters is what will work– not what might be. Our soap opera culture, and celebrity addiction respond to this preference. They give us manageable stories about people like us, or people almost like us, and don’t pose the awkward, eternal questions that drove Milton to write. What were the national obsessions of this year? Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, Heather Mills McCartney and Strictly Come Dancing.
‘Milton! Thou should’st be living at the hour: England hath need of thee.’ Wordsworth’s lines have never seemed more prescient.
Yet if she is true to her vocation then at Christmas the Church does the thing that some of her most vocal critics long for her to do. She takes a stand; she refuses to collude with the national trend; she rows against the tide instead of meekly swimming with it. For at Christmas the Church defiantly offers an interpretation of human history and proclaims a grand narrative. But this is not a narrative which seeks to diminish or enslave people as did the discredited ideologies of the last century. It is not a narrative which absolves its hearers of their responsibilities for one another or for the world. It is not a narrative which aims to overthrow all other narratives by force of arms. For this is the narrative of God’s love for his world, a love which compels him to become a part of his world, a love which, ultimately, drives him to suffer at the hands of his world. This is the narrative of God becoming one of us so that we might become like him. This is the narrative we celebrate tonight, the narrative of Bethlehem, the narrative that tells us that human time and earthly space matter to Almighty God, this time and this place matter to Almighty God, that this time and this place are the time and the place in which God acts, that in this time, this place and these people God is present among us.
So let us proclaim that narrative with confidence, with joy. Tonight earth and heaven are one; tonight love eternal lies in a manger; tonight we learn our place in the grand narrative of God.
Let John Milton, poet, prophet, seeker after truth, have the last word:
‘…at his birth a star
Unseen before in heav’n proclaims him come,
And guides the eastern sages, who inquire
His place, to offer incense, myrrh, and gold;
His place of birth a solemn angel tells
To simple shepherds, keeping watch by night;
They gladly thither haste, and by a choir
Of squadroned angels hear his carol sung.
A virgin is his mother, but his sire
The power of the Most High; he shall ascend
The throne hereditary, and bound his reign
With earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the Heav’ns’.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse'.
Don’t look so worried. I’m not going to read all twelve books of Paradise Lost .We’d be here until Epiphany, and in any case Radio 3 is making a much better job of it than I ever would.
On the four hundredth anniversary of John Milton’s birth many commentators have pondered why the work of England’s greatest epic poet has slipped so far from the public gaze. Theories abound. Its great length means that it’s not easily digestible. It could never feature as a Poem on the Underground. Its complex language means that it’s inaccessible to many. ‘Him the Almighty Power hurled headlong flaming from th’ethereal sky’ is forbidding to a generation that has just learned to text.
But more profound that either of these hurdles to popularity is its sheer ambition. For Milton sets out to tell in verse the story of humanity’s creation, fall and restoration. Grand narratives come no grander than this. His setting stretches beyond the farthest limits of the universe; his timescale is eternity; his players are the omnipotent God and his heavenly courtiers. The scope is breathtaking, and it is that very scope that makes Milton so difficult for modern readers.
For we no longer trust grand narratives. Poets, philosophers and prophets could once upon a time articulate over-arching stories for the world with utter confidence. That confidence was dealt a body blow on the battlefields of Western Europe more than ninety years ago. Civilization, progress, liberal values: those great totems that the educated citizens of the European empires treasured and celebrated as their common story when they entered the first decade of the last century - those were left bleeding in the trenches, their humane pretensions revealed as paper-thin veneers. And in their place other ideologies appeared and in their turn these too have gone to their fate, very often deservedly: fascism perished in the rubble of Berlin; statist Marxism in the wastes of the Gulag. Unregulated consumer capitalism may have done the same in the credit crunch of 2008.
The effect of the last hundred years’ history is that we disbelieve grand attempts to interpret history. We are suspicious of authority and we are cynical about the claims made by those who wield authority. We prefer our politicians to be technocrats rather than ideologues; we worry more about solutions than visions. What matters is what will work– not what might be. Our soap opera culture, and celebrity addiction respond to this preference. They give us manageable stories about people like us, or people almost like us, and don’t pose the awkward, eternal questions that drove Milton to write. What were the national obsessions of this year? Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, Heather Mills McCartney and Strictly Come Dancing.
‘Milton! Thou should’st be living at the hour: England hath need of thee.’ Wordsworth’s lines have never seemed more prescient.
Yet if she is true to her vocation then at Christmas the Church does the thing that some of her most vocal critics long for her to do. She takes a stand; she refuses to collude with the national trend; she rows against the tide instead of meekly swimming with it. For at Christmas the Church defiantly offers an interpretation of human history and proclaims a grand narrative. But this is not a narrative which seeks to diminish or enslave people as did the discredited ideologies of the last century. It is not a narrative which absolves its hearers of their responsibilities for one another or for the world. It is not a narrative which aims to overthrow all other narratives by force of arms. For this is the narrative of God’s love for his world, a love which compels him to become a part of his world, a love which, ultimately, drives him to suffer at the hands of his world. This is the narrative of God becoming one of us so that we might become like him. This is the narrative we celebrate tonight, the narrative of Bethlehem, the narrative that tells us that human time and earthly space matter to Almighty God, this time and this place matter to Almighty God, that this time and this place are the time and the place in which God acts, that in this time, this place and these people God is present among us.
So let us proclaim that narrative with confidence, with joy. Tonight earth and heaven are one; tonight love eternal lies in a manger; tonight we learn our place in the grand narrative of God.
Let John Milton, poet, prophet, seeker after truth, have the last word:
‘…at his birth a star
Unseen before in heav’n proclaims him come,
And guides the eastern sages, who inquire
His place, to offer incense, myrrh, and gold;
His place of birth a solemn angel tells
To simple shepherds, keeping watch by night;
They gladly thither haste, and by a choir
Of squadroned angels hear his carol sung.
A virgin is his mother, but his sire
The power of the Most High; he shall ascend
The throne hereditary, and bound his reign
With earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the Heav’ns’.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
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