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.

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.

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.