‘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.
Thursday, 23 April 2009
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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