A year ago on Christmas morning I attended the Eucharist at St Thomas’s Salisbury, which was then my parish church. There was a new vicar in post and he was celebrating his first Christmas. As is the way with new vicars (at least, some new vicars) he had Ideas, with a capital I. One of these was the expansion of the traditional nativity play. None of the exclusivism of a cast for him: every child present was invited to come in costume, as an angel, a shepherd or a wise man – whatever he or she fancied, or, more likely, whatever his or her harassed parents could rustle up amidst the mad rush of breakfast consumption, lunch preparation and stocking-opening . This being a parish with a lot of children in it, the effect was rather spectacular. There were choirs of angels, great flocks of shepherds, an embarrassment of wise men, and much lusty singing around the manger.
Like Christmas lights in shopping streets, nativity plays are one of this country’s seasonal Aunt Sallies. Someone somewhere will always be found arguing, or appearing to argue, for their inappropriateness to the modern age. I disagree, and rank the nativity play’s detractors alongside Ebenezer Scrooge and those joyless Protestants who tried to ban Christmas pudding over 300 years ago.
Mind you, I also disagree with those who think them merely a convenient vehicle for the channelling of school-age exuberance at this time of year. And I disagree with those who think them just a spectacle for proud parents and grandparents to watch and applaud. That’s quite a lot of disagreement for a festive morning, so let me try to make the case for tinsel and tea-towels, for stuffed sheep and Away in a Manger.
Those who participate in a nativity play do more than learn the words and sing the songs. They live the story, and so they set a pattern for us all. You see, secular traditions of present-giving, party-going and over-eating threaten to overwhelm the story of the angels and shepherds. But a far greater danger arises when that story stops being something that we live and becomes just another tradition, when it takes its place alongside the TV specials and the pantomime as something to be enjoyed at this time of year.
I’m not sure that my colleague in Salisbury went far enough. How much better it would have been if he’d insisted that everyone, whatever their age or status, had come equipped to take part in the nativity play. And be warned – this still-new vicar is capable of having ideas, too. Maybe in twelve months time I’ll be looking out at a crowd of extras from some old-fashioned Biblical television blockbuster. For I believe we are all called to be players in God’s great drama. We are all called to be shepherds and angels and wise men. Is that not the point of the birth we celebrate this morning?
If you are unconvinced allow me to approach this differently, from the perspective of the villains of the story, the perspective of the innkeepers of Bethlehem and of Herod the king. The innkeepers turn away the exhausted couple; they wash their hands of the pregnant teenager. Each of us has had some experience of closing the door on the needy. Herod seeks to destroy the thing that threatens his throne. Each of us has felt undermined by the new, the different, the unexpected. Each of us has sought to choke it at birth. The shadowy underside of the nativity story reflects the shadowy underside of our own stories.
Sadly, perhaps other parallels between the story and our stories are harder to find. The angels set the heaven alight with the joy of their praises. Are we full of joy this morning, or full of anxiety, anxiety at the state of the lunch, or the state of the church, or the state of our investments? The shepherd trusted the angels and left their flocks to the uncertainties of the hillside and the ravages of wolves. Are we full of trust this morning, or full of suspicion, suspicion of one another, or of the mass media and the banks, or of those of different faiths? The wise men persevered on a journey through mountain top and desert waste. Are we set to persevere this morning, set to follow the star wherever it may lead, until we discover the truth of Christ for ourselves? Or does sound as though it might interfere with our carefully manicured plans for the New Year?
So never mind charades: here’s a parlour game for this afternoon, when the nose has been cut off the Stilton, the chocolates have been opened and the port is flowing freely. In 2007 which nativity character did you most closely resemble? And in 2008 which will you seek to imitate? I may be merciful, and may not insist on a dress code of angels’ wings, sparkly crowns and rustic dressing gowns next Christmas. But I hope to see a lively company of players who have made the story real in their communities. Thus, only thus, will Christ be brought to birth for our city, in our time. Amen.
Saturday, 29 December 2007
The Eucharist of Christmas Night, 2007
Quietly she holds him, cradled in her arms,
rocking oh so gently, protecting him from harm.
Her tears are flowing freely, off her cheeks they race,
always heading downwards, then dripping from her face.
A mother holds her baby, as close as close can be
and as his eyes stare skyward there’s only her to see.
Tender lines on a mother’s love for her child: they might have been written for Christmas night. But in fact they have as their context not a stable in first century Bethlehem but an estate in twenty-first century Liverpool. They are the work of Stephen Jones, and were written for his son Rhys. And they do not end there, but continue:
Now fast forward eleven years, the scene is much the same.
A mother holds her baby, whispering his name,
ruffling his matted hair, his face covered in blood,
telling him to stay with her and wrapping him in love.
Eleven year old Rhys was murdered in August this year, shot dead as he returned from football. He is just one of the twenty-seven young people who have been killed with guns in this country in 2007, some of whom have lived their short lives, and lost them, only a few miles from this place.
These are uncomfortable truths to contemplate in the candle-lit warmth of Christmas night, hard truths about the life of this city: about its huge wealth and its grinding poverty, its limitless potential and its utter hopelessness, its overweening confidence and its cringing fearfulness. Yet if the birth we have gathered to celebrate has nothing to say to Rhys and the others, if it has nothing to say to our world city and to its bitter divisions, then I believe it has nothing to say.
Can the manger speak to Merseyside? Can the stable speak to Stockwell? What can this night offer a city that is so cynical and so weary?
John tells us that this night the Word is made flesh. This night the world becomes the place to which God is actually present, the place in which God becomes embodied. In other words this is not some forgotten planet in a far-flung corner of an isolated solar system. This is the very place in which God chooses to dwell and in which he chooses to reveal himself to humankind. So the deaths of Rhys and of all the others are of supreme significance. They are the deaths not only of God’s beloved children but also of his beloved brothers, whose human life he begins to share this night in Bethlehem. God’s is the first heart to break when a young life is taken, God’s are the first tears to fall and it is God’s revulsion we share when we contemplate such a crime, such a sin.
Yes, this night the Word is made flesh. But it is such vulnerable flesh, the flesh of a newborn baby, tiny, naked and utterly dependent. God comes not as a weapon-wielding hard-man, subduing the streets of Liverpool and Lambeth before him, but as a child. Thus does God show us what it is to love one another. It is not to bend one another to our own will; it is not to coerce one another into a pattern of behaving and thinking that is really our own. To love one another is to trust one another; it is to place ourselves in one another’s hands. So love needs allies in the world. If firearms are ever to take their place alongside slingshots in the museum of humankind; it poverty is ever to be driven from these shores; and if hope and opportunity are to flourish in place of drug use and gang violence then love needs spokesmen, advocates and activists. Love needs you and me. Tonight we reaffirm our adherence to love’s cause.
So this night speaks to us of God’s love for humanity, and of the precariousness of that love’s endeavour. But can it possibly address the third, despairing stanza of Stephen Jones’s poem?
But the child will never answer, forever to stay young.
Dying in a car park, it’s not where he belongs.
A mother holds her baby, her child, her world, her son,
his life has been robbed from him, she can’t believe he’s gone.
The manger does not hold the Word made flesh for very long, for the Word grows to mature adulthood. Thirty-three years pass, and a day comes when another mother cradles her son’s lifeless body in her arms, wiping the blood and sweat from his face and weeping over him. And then, perhaps only then, do we discover the significance of this night for our broken lives and disturbed times. For we discover that just as the wood of the manger bears Christ’s life to the world so too does the wood of the cross bear Christ’s life to the world: glorious life, life unending, life in all its fullness, life as God had always intended that life should be. Because of the life that begins this night death has no ultimate power over the children of Croxteth Park or over the children of London. It has no power over the young soldiers of Congo or over the orphans of Baghdad, or over any child in any place.
For this night heaven is once more joined to earth, and God comes to dwell with his people and they with him, for all time and beyond all time, full of grace and truth. This night we gaze upon his glory, and we know it to be glory as of a Father’s only Son. Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
rocking oh so gently, protecting him from harm.
Her tears are flowing freely, off her cheeks they race,
always heading downwards, then dripping from her face.
A mother holds her baby, as close as close can be
and as his eyes stare skyward there’s only her to see.
Tender lines on a mother’s love for her child: they might have been written for Christmas night. But in fact they have as their context not a stable in first century Bethlehem but an estate in twenty-first century Liverpool. They are the work of Stephen Jones, and were written for his son Rhys. And they do not end there, but continue:
Now fast forward eleven years, the scene is much the same.
A mother holds her baby, whispering his name,
ruffling his matted hair, his face covered in blood,
telling him to stay with her and wrapping him in love.
Eleven year old Rhys was murdered in August this year, shot dead as he returned from football. He is just one of the twenty-seven young people who have been killed with guns in this country in 2007, some of whom have lived their short lives, and lost them, only a few miles from this place.
These are uncomfortable truths to contemplate in the candle-lit warmth of Christmas night, hard truths about the life of this city: about its huge wealth and its grinding poverty, its limitless potential and its utter hopelessness, its overweening confidence and its cringing fearfulness. Yet if the birth we have gathered to celebrate has nothing to say to Rhys and the others, if it has nothing to say to our world city and to its bitter divisions, then I believe it has nothing to say.
Can the manger speak to Merseyside? Can the stable speak to Stockwell? What can this night offer a city that is so cynical and so weary?
John tells us that this night the Word is made flesh. This night the world becomes the place to which God is actually present, the place in which God becomes embodied. In other words this is not some forgotten planet in a far-flung corner of an isolated solar system. This is the very place in which God chooses to dwell and in which he chooses to reveal himself to humankind. So the deaths of Rhys and of all the others are of supreme significance. They are the deaths not only of God’s beloved children but also of his beloved brothers, whose human life he begins to share this night in Bethlehem. God’s is the first heart to break when a young life is taken, God’s are the first tears to fall and it is God’s revulsion we share when we contemplate such a crime, such a sin.
Yes, this night the Word is made flesh. But it is such vulnerable flesh, the flesh of a newborn baby, tiny, naked and utterly dependent. God comes not as a weapon-wielding hard-man, subduing the streets of Liverpool and Lambeth before him, but as a child. Thus does God show us what it is to love one another. It is not to bend one another to our own will; it is not to coerce one another into a pattern of behaving and thinking that is really our own. To love one another is to trust one another; it is to place ourselves in one another’s hands. So love needs allies in the world. If firearms are ever to take their place alongside slingshots in the museum of humankind; it poverty is ever to be driven from these shores; and if hope and opportunity are to flourish in place of drug use and gang violence then love needs spokesmen, advocates and activists. Love needs you and me. Tonight we reaffirm our adherence to love’s cause.
So this night speaks to us of God’s love for humanity, and of the precariousness of that love’s endeavour. But can it possibly address the third, despairing stanza of Stephen Jones’s poem?
But the child will never answer, forever to stay young.
Dying in a car park, it’s not where he belongs.
A mother holds her baby, her child, her world, her son,
his life has been robbed from him, she can’t believe he’s gone.
The manger does not hold the Word made flesh for very long, for the Word grows to mature adulthood. Thirty-three years pass, and a day comes when another mother cradles her son’s lifeless body in her arms, wiping the blood and sweat from his face and weeping over him. And then, perhaps only then, do we discover the significance of this night for our broken lives and disturbed times. For we discover that just as the wood of the manger bears Christ’s life to the world so too does the wood of the cross bear Christ’s life to the world: glorious life, life unending, life in all its fullness, life as God had always intended that life should be. Because of the life that begins this night death has no ultimate power over the children of Croxteth Park or over the children of London. It has no power over the young soldiers of Congo or over the orphans of Baghdad, or over any child in any place.
For this night heaven is once more joined to earth, and God comes to dwell with his people and they with him, for all time and beyond all time, full of grace and truth. This night we gaze upon his glory, and we know it to be glory as of a Father’s only Son. Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
Monday, 3 December 2007
The First Sunday of Advent 2007
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
Those words conclude what Christians affirm to be true of Jesus Christ when they repeat the Nicene Creed. They sum up the doctrines of the End Times and the Second Coming, in Greek the Eschaton and the Parousia, the doctrines to which Advent points remorselessly, despite the lures of Christmas shopping and cocktail parties.
Perhaps those lures are welcome, not only for their innate attractiveness, but also for their capacity for distracting us from where the season would have us concentrate our gaze. The End Times and the Second Coming are difficult. On the one hand they conjure up images of harmless cranks on mountain tops, Beyond the Fringe-style; on the other they have about them a far from harmless whiff of religious fundamentalism.
Yet there is no avoiding the doctrines of sudden, universal and divinely-determined End Times. They run through our Scriptures like a deep seam. Isaiah’s prophecy evokes a coming era of universal peace and mutual trust. Paul’s epistles exhort their readers to keep awake and live as those on the threshold of a great and unimaginable change. And throughout all four Gospels Jesus speaks of the day of his return.
So the doctrines are genuinely catholic and of unimpeachable orthodoxy: yet for many of us they are far from being preoccupations of our lives of prayer and faith. ‘Jesus is Coming – Look Busy’ has become a comic staple of T-shirts and office plaques.
We are time-poor individuals for whom considering next week’s diary is a luxury, and for whom, to coin a phrase, eternity can wait. We are a pessimistic generation for whom the notion of change for the better is an article of unbelief, and for whom that other phrase, that things can only get better, once so famously coined, is faintly risible.
If we do think about the End Times at all it may be to think of them in terms of the approaching certainty of our own deaths. Many sermons have been preached encouraging us to cultivate familiarity with our mortality. I know. I’ve preached some of them. Yet a distinctive line of liberal theological thought goes farther and identifies (or confuses) our own death with the End Times. They are something we will face when we die, rather than something that will happen once and for all.
Or it may be that we prefer to mythologize the doctrines. We assume that the words can never have been meant to be taken seriously. We infer from them that the return of Jesus and the earthly idyll of Isaiah are metaphors for the self-realization and transformation of the soul. We thus push the doctrines into the safe arena of the spiritual.
These are strategies of avoidance, and strategies to be avoided. They offer an illusory security that Christ never offers.
The first, conflating the universal End Times with our personal end time, seems to offer us some control of our destinies. If we appear before the throne one by one, if we are processed individually, as it were, then we may think we have a much better chance of manipulating the system. There will be less chance of the critical voices of the neighbours we’ve never got on with being heard. We will be held to account for those things for which we ought to be held to account, those that are our personal responsibility, and not for those which are not. We will face God alone and be judged by him alone. There’s something rather appealing in that. We have our own lawyers, our own doctors, sometimes our own priests. Why not our own ultimate hearing before our own personal God?
The answer is that this belies the Baptismal covenant into which we have entered and which binds us inexorably to every other baptized person. In this of all weeks we might reflect on the words of England’s greatest poet of faith, William Blake:
Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief.
Surely as the baptized we live together, die together, and are judged together: as another poet of Anglicanism puts it, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’.
The second, mythologizing the doctrines, enrols us alongside those early Gnostic Christians for whom the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation was so threatening that they felt compelled to explain it by slashing the world in two: the gross, corrupt physical, and the pure, noble spiritual. At death, said the Gnostics, we are liberated from our mortal bodies and are freed at last from the world and its evil temptations. There’s something rather appealing in this, too. Our age is keen on the spirit. Doctrines labelled ‘spiritual’ have some cachet and are generally regarded as not needing too much explanation.
Yet orthodox faith has never allowed such division. We are created as persons, not as more or less happy coincidences of mind, body and spirit. It is in the embodied person of Jesus that God comes among us, and it is the embodied person of Jesus that is transfigured, raised and glorified. We have no licence for believing that the created world is destined for the eternal scrap-heap; we have every possible licence for believing that God’s purposes embrace the world and intend its redemption.
Faith in the End Times as either purely personal or purely spiritual is not the faith of our tradition. We believe that he will come again in glory. We believe that he will judge the living and the dead. We believe that his kingdom will have no end. We believe in an end that is universal; that is salvific; and that is God’s.
That belief offers those who do not share it an explanation for our lives. Doesn’t it?
Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.
and his kingdom will have no end.
Those words conclude what Christians affirm to be true of Jesus Christ when they repeat the Nicene Creed. They sum up the doctrines of the End Times and the Second Coming, in Greek the Eschaton and the Parousia, the doctrines to which Advent points remorselessly, despite the lures of Christmas shopping and cocktail parties.
Perhaps those lures are welcome, not only for their innate attractiveness, but also for their capacity for distracting us from where the season would have us concentrate our gaze. The End Times and the Second Coming are difficult. On the one hand they conjure up images of harmless cranks on mountain tops, Beyond the Fringe-style; on the other they have about them a far from harmless whiff of religious fundamentalism.
Yet there is no avoiding the doctrines of sudden, universal and divinely-determined End Times. They run through our Scriptures like a deep seam. Isaiah’s prophecy evokes a coming era of universal peace and mutual trust. Paul’s epistles exhort their readers to keep awake and live as those on the threshold of a great and unimaginable change. And throughout all four Gospels Jesus speaks of the day of his return.
So the doctrines are genuinely catholic and of unimpeachable orthodoxy: yet for many of us they are far from being preoccupations of our lives of prayer and faith. ‘Jesus is Coming – Look Busy’ has become a comic staple of T-shirts and office plaques.
We are time-poor individuals for whom considering next week’s diary is a luxury, and for whom, to coin a phrase, eternity can wait. We are a pessimistic generation for whom the notion of change for the better is an article of unbelief, and for whom that other phrase, that things can only get better, once so famously coined, is faintly risible.
If we do think about the End Times at all it may be to think of them in terms of the approaching certainty of our own deaths. Many sermons have been preached encouraging us to cultivate familiarity with our mortality. I know. I’ve preached some of them. Yet a distinctive line of liberal theological thought goes farther and identifies (or confuses) our own death with the End Times. They are something we will face when we die, rather than something that will happen once and for all.
Or it may be that we prefer to mythologize the doctrines. We assume that the words can never have been meant to be taken seriously. We infer from them that the return of Jesus and the earthly idyll of Isaiah are metaphors for the self-realization and transformation of the soul. We thus push the doctrines into the safe arena of the spiritual.
These are strategies of avoidance, and strategies to be avoided. They offer an illusory security that Christ never offers.
The first, conflating the universal End Times with our personal end time, seems to offer us some control of our destinies. If we appear before the throne one by one, if we are processed individually, as it were, then we may think we have a much better chance of manipulating the system. There will be less chance of the critical voices of the neighbours we’ve never got on with being heard. We will be held to account for those things for which we ought to be held to account, those that are our personal responsibility, and not for those which are not. We will face God alone and be judged by him alone. There’s something rather appealing in that. We have our own lawyers, our own doctors, sometimes our own priests. Why not our own ultimate hearing before our own personal God?
The answer is that this belies the Baptismal covenant into which we have entered and which binds us inexorably to every other baptized person. In this of all weeks we might reflect on the words of England’s greatest poet of faith, William Blake:
Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief.
Surely as the baptized we live together, die together, and are judged together: as another poet of Anglicanism puts it, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’.
The second, mythologizing the doctrines, enrols us alongside those early Gnostic Christians for whom the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation was so threatening that they felt compelled to explain it by slashing the world in two: the gross, corrupt physical, and the pure, noble spiritual. At death, said the Gnostics, we are liberated from our mortal bodies and are freed at last from the world and its evil temptations. There’s something rather appealing in this, too. Our age is keen on the spirit. Doctrines labelled ‘spiritual’ have some cachet and are generally regarded as not needing too much explanation.
Yet orthodox faith has never allowed such division. We are created as persons, not as more or less happy coincidences of mind, body and spirit. It is in the embodied person of Jesus that God comes among us, and it is the embodied person of Jesus that is transfigured, raised and glorified. We have no licence for believing that the created world is destined for the eternal scrap-heap; we have every possible licence for believing that God’s purposes embrace the world and intend its redemption.
Faith in the End Times as either purely personal or purely spiritual is not the faith of our tradition. We believe that he will come again in glory. We believe that he will judge the living and the dead. We believe that his kingdom will have no end. We believe in an end that is universal; that is salvific; and that is God’s.
That belief offers those who do not share it an explanation for our lives. Doesn’t it?
Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.
Monday, 12 November 2007
Remembrance Sunday 2007
Sponsored by the Peace Pledge Union, and symbolizing pacifism and non-violence, the White Poppy became enormously controversial about twenty years ago. I remember impassioned debates about its alleged lack of respect for the fallen, and the casting of sharp aspersions upon its wearers’ patriotism. So I was surprised to see one being worn in the parish this week. Surprised, because in the last decade there has been a palpable upsurge in the observance of Remembrance Sunday.
The two minutes silence has returned on Armistice Day, whenever it falls, as well as on the Sunday nearest to it; red poppies decorate the mastheads of certain newspapers as well as the lapels of politicians of all persuasions; and for the first time in its history the Church of England has authorized liturgy for the day. The climate is even less favourable to the white poppy movement today than it was in the mid-80s. Had it ever been thought to have gone away, Remembrancetide is back.
Why is that? Allow me to attribute it to three phenomena. The first is the passage of years and the simple but unimaginable fact that a few years from now no veterans of the Great War will be living. The Great War, of course, gave birth to the Remembrance movement, and its themes and images have dominated it ever since. The particular horrors of the trenches and the poetry that they prompted have held the public imagination captive for nearly a century. Yet soon there will be no living link with that generation.
Then there is the age in which we live. Once again the armed forces of the Crown are serving overseas in difficult and dangerous conditions. Once again we hear of casualties every week and live with the grief and anger of suffering families. Once again, to a greater or lesser extent, we believe our cities at risk of armed violence.
Lastly - and please don’t think me cynical - I suspect that Remembrancetide is growing because it is, or can be, safely secular. Society is multi-cultural, multi-faith, and suspicious of organized religion. Our leaders, or at least their subordinates, have less and less contact with the Churches and consequently less and less understanding of them. They increasingly perceive the symbols and expressions of religious faith as inappropriate focuses around which to gather people. Yet there is precious little other language or ritual available. In these circumstances Remembrancetide meets a number of needs admirably. It brings people together to honour the fallen and to pay tribute to their surviving comrades, causes with which few could disagree. It has its own rites – Binyon’s lines, the silence and the Last Post. And it has no need at all of God, of any God. Of course, the Bishop of London will be at the Cenotaph this morning, but the occasion could proceed perfectly smoothly without the Episcopal veneer he will bring to it. Remembrancetide offers the rare possibility of a unifying and secular liturgy.
If I am right about this then another question is unavoidable. Why do we observe it in Church at all, when civic observances around the country’s plentiful war memorials might seem more appropriate? Are we not colluding with a movement which has its own momentum and is at best agnostic in its approach to the Christian Gospel? Various shades of Church opinion favour a divorce. There are the Christian pacifists, white poppy wearers, who dislike today’s alleged militaristic undertones. At the other end of the scale there are liturgically purist Catholics, who resent today’s interruption of the worship of God, worship which can only be carried out in the prescribed fashion and cannot admit of silences and bugle calls.
Well, I will have none of it. Neither of these opinions is mine. I am glad to be here; I am glad that we are here.
First, I think, because for the Church to retreat from Remembrancetide would be for the Church to do what it has done throughout its history, and always to disastrous effect. To retreat from Remembrancetide would be to retreat from real people and real life. There is a popular desire to honour the dead and show support for those who suffer. The Church can choose to be with people as they do that, or it can choose not to be. It can take flags, drums and the Royal British Legion in its stride, or it can withdraw yet again into its increasingly little ecclesial shell, isolating itself as it has done on so many other issues, and so betraying the radical openness to humanity’s need to which we are called by Jesus Christ.
Secondly, I think, because the Church brings something to Remembrancetide, something of which I hope it is not ashamed. That is prayer. Remembrance here is not an intellectual activity or sentimental self-indulgence. Remembrance here is a part of our vocation as disciples of Jesus Christ, who calls us to pray for his world. We cannot refuse to pray for the fallen in war; or for those who still suffer as a result of war; or for those who are in peril today. We can scarcely refuse to pray for the peace of the world or refuse to pledge ourselves to work for its realization.
Lastly, I think, we are here because there is nowhere else that we can be. War is a failure and a sin, whatever the motives with which it is begun. It has been the cause of unspeakable cruelty and limitless pain; it has been the cause too of the best of which men and women are capable in heroism, forgiveness and sacrifice. Where can we go with the unwieldy mass that is war, the unwieldy mass that is raw human emotion and dire human need, that is filthiest dirt and brightest glory, that is life and death – where can we go but the altar of God? ‘To whom shall we go?’ says Peter, patron of theis Parish, to Jesus ‘You have the words of eternal life’. Here, in the Word made flesh among us, there is hope, dare we say the only hope, for warring humanity. Amen.
Remembrance Sunday,
11 November 2007
The two minutes silence has returned on Armistice Day, whenever it falls, as well as on the Sunday nearest to it; red poppies decorate the mastheads of certain newspapers as well as the lapels of politicians of all persuasions; and for the first time in its history the Church of England has authorized liturgy for the day. The climate is even less favourable to the white poppy movement today than it was in the mid-80s. Had it ever been thought to have gone away, Remembrancetide is back.
Why is that? Allow me to attribute it to three phenomena. The first is the passage of years and the simple but unimaginable fact that a few years from now no veterans of the Great War will be living. The Great War, of course, gave birth to the Remembrance movement, and its themes and images have dominated it ever since. The particular horrors of the trenches and the poetry that they prompted have held the public imagination captive for nearly a century. Yet soon there will be no living link with that generation.
Then there is the age in which we live. Once again the armed forces of the Crown are serving overseas in difficult and dangerous conditions. Once again we hear of casualties every week and live with the grief and anger of suffering families. Once again, to a greater or lesser extent, we believe our cities at risk of armed violence.
Lastly - and please don’t think me cynical - I suspect that Remembrancetide is growing because it is, or can be, safely secular. Society is multi-cultural, multi-faith, and suspicious of organized religion. Our leaders, or at least their subordinates, have less and less contact with the Churches and consequently less and less understanding of them. They increasingly perceive the symbols and expressions of religious faith as inappropriate focuses around which to gather people. Yet there is precious little other language or ritual available. In these circumstances Remembrancetide meets a number of needs admirably. It brings people together to honour the fallen and to pay tribute to their surviving comrades, causes with which few could disagree. It has its own rites – Binyon’s lines, the silence and the Last Post. And it has no need at all of God, of any God. Of course, the Bishop of London will be at the Cenotaph this morning, but the occasion could proceed perfectly smoothly without the Episcopal veneer he will bring to it. Remembrancetide offers the rare possibility of a unifying and secular liturgy.
If I am right about this then another question is unavoidable. Why do we observe it in Church at all, when civic observances around the country’s plentiful war memorials might seem more appropriate? Are we not colluding with a movement which has its own momentum and is at best agnostic in its approach to the Christian Gospel? Various shades of Church opinion favour a divorce. There are the Christian pacifists, white poppy wearers, who dislike today’s alleged militaristic undertones. At the other end of the scale there are liturgically purist Catholics, who resent today’s interruption of the worship of God, worship which can only be carried out in the prescribed fashion and cannot admit of silences and bugle calls.
Well, I will have none of it. Neither of these opinions is mine. I am glad to be here; I am glad that we are here.
First, I think, because for the Church to retreat from Remembrancetide would be for the Church to do what it has done throughout its history, and always to disastrous effect. To retreat from Remembrancetide would be to retreat from real people and real life. There is a popular desire to honour the dead and show support for those who suffer. The Church can choose to be with people as they do that, or it can choose not to be. It can take flags, drums and the Royal British Legion in its stride, or it can withdraw yet again into its increasingly little ecclesial shell, isolating itself as it has done on so many other issues, and so betraying the radical openness to humanity’s need to which we are called by Jesus Christ.
Secondly, I think, because the Church brings something to Remembrancetide, something of which I hope it is not ashamed. That is prayer. Remembrance here is not an intellectual activity or sentimental self-indulgence. Remembrance here is a part of our vocation as disciples of Jesus Christ, who calls us to pray for his world. We cannot refuse to pray for the fallen in war; or for those who still suffer as a result of war; or for those who are in peril today. We can scarcely refuse to pray for the peace of the world or refuse to pledge ourselves to work for its realization.
Lastly, I think, we are here because there is nowhere else that we can be. War is a failure and a sin, whatever the motives with which it is begun. It has been the cause of unspeakable cruelty and limitless pain; it has been the cause too of the best of which men and women are capable in heroism, forgiveness and sacrifice. Where can we go with the unwieldy mass that is war, the unwieldy mass that is raw human emotion and dire human need, that is filthiest dirt and brightest glory, that is life and death – where can we go but the altar of God? ‘To whom shall we go?’ says Peter, patron of theis Parish, to Jesus ‘You have the words of eternal life’. Here, in the Word made flesh among us, there is hope, dare we say the only hope, for warring humanity. Amen.
Remembrance Sunday,
11 November 2007
All Souls 2007
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,
gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.
In England it’s almost impossible to walk to an All Souls night service without sniffing woodsmoke in the air and without hearing the crackle of fireworks far away (or not so far away). Up and down the country people are gathering around bonfires in remembrance of the great conspiracy of 1605.
At the heart of the celebrations are the fireworks, the wonderful combinations of light and sound that entrance both young and old. Their colours light up the night sky; their warmth drives away the seasonal chill; their fizz and sparkle thrill our hearts. And yet, when morning comes, all that is left are the empty cases and cartridges, their bright colours charred and their purpose spent.
Remember, remember. That is why we are here, of course, and as we remember those we love but see no longer the image of fireworks is powerful. The lives of the departed once lit up our skies; the warmth of their company banished our loneliness; the fact of their presence brought joy and meaning to our days. For we who are left behind it is difficult to avoid the sense that this and every day is the morning after Bonfire Night, when the colours of the night before have faded, the rapturous excitement has been banished, and all seems quiet and somehow empty.
Remember, remember. Around the bonfires we remember the story of Guy Fawke. Around the altar we remember the story of Jesus Christ. Around the bonfires we enjoy hot-dogs and baked potatoes. Around the altar we break bread and pour out wine, and around the altar there is never an empty and joyless morning after, for we take bread and wine in the faith that they will bear for us Christ’s living presence.
The remembering we do around the altar is a different sort of remembering, for the one we remember is not trapped by the chains of history. He is here in our midst, and when we gather around his altar we gather with all who have sought him and served him in every age and place. Around his altar heaven and earth are one, and we are one with those we love, because they are one with him.
Remember, remember. Ten years after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot Richard Baxter was born. His are the words with which I will close. The rhyme with which I began urges us to remember. Baxter tells us how.
As for my friends, they are not lost;The several vessels of thy fleet,Though parted now, by tempests tost,Shall safely in the haven meet.Still we are centred all in thee,Members, though distant, of one head;In the same family we be,By the same faith and spirit led.Before thy throne we daily meetAs joint-petitioners to thee;In spirit we each other greet,And shall again each other see.The heavenly hosts, world without end,Shall be my company above;And thou, my best and surest friend,Who shall divide me from thy love?
Amen.
The Eucharist of All Souls, Friday 2 November 2007
gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.
In England it’s almost impossible to walk to an All Souls night service without sniffing woodsmoke in the air and without hearing the crackle of fireworks far away (or not so far away). Up and down the country people are gathering around bonfires in remembrance of the great conspiracy of 1605.
At the heart of the celebrations are the fireworks, the wonderful combinations of light and sound that entrance both young and old. Their colours light up the night sky; their warmth drives away the seasonal chill; their fizz and sparkle thrill our hearts. And yet, when morning comes, all that is left are the empty cases and cartridges, their bright colours charred and their purpose spent.
Remember, remember. That is why we are here, of course, and as we remember those we love but see no longer the image of fireworks is powerful. The lives of the departed once lit up our skies; the warmth of their company banished our loneliness; the fact of their presence brought joy and meaning to our days. For we who are left behind it is difficult to avoid the sense that this and every day is the morning after Bonfire Night, when the colours of the night before have faded, the rapturous excitement has been banished, and all seems quiet and somehow empty.
Remember, remember. Around the bonfires we remember the story of Guy Fawke. Around the altar we remember the story of Jesus Christ. Around the bonfires we enjoy hot-dogs and baked potatoes. Around the altar we break bread and pour out wine, and around the altar there is never an empty and joyless morning after, for we take bread and wine in the faith that they will bear for us Christ’s living presence.
The remembering we do around the altar is a different sort of remembering, for the one we remember is not trapped by the chains of history. He is here in our midst, and when we gather around his altar we gather with all who have sought him and served him in every age and place. Around his altar heaven and earth are one, and we are one with those we love, because they are one with him.
Remember, remember. Ten years after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot Richard Baxter was born. His are the words with which I will close. The rhyme with which I began urges us to remember. Baxter tells us how.
As for my friends, they are not lost;The several vessels of thy fleet,Though parted now, by tempests tost,Shall safely in the haven meet.Still we are centred all in thee,Members, though distant, of one head;In the same family we be,By the same faith and spirit led.Before thy throne we daily meetAs joint-petitioners to thee;In spirit we each other greet,And shall again each other see.The heavenly hosts, world without end,Shall be my company above;And thou, my best and surest friend,Who shall divide me from thy love?
Amen.
The Eucharist of All Souls, Friday 2 November 2007
Monday, 29 October 2007
Simon and Jude, Apostles, 2007
‘So I draw a veil over Mr Ramesh who once, on the feast of St Simon and St Jude (Choral Evensong at six, daily services at the customary hour), put make-up on his eyes and bells on his ankles, and naked except for his little belt danced in the back room of the shop with a tambourine’.
Alan Bennett’s Bed Among the Lentils tells the story of Susan, a Yorkshire vicar’s wife who, caught between her husband’s appallingly glib piety and his parishioners’ fervent self-righteousness, turns quietly to drink. She disgraces herself over lunch with the Bishop, collapses while arranging flowers in the chancel, and only finds redemption, rather unpredictably, in the arms of the young Asian shopkeeper, Mr Ramesh, whose sad wonder at her perpetual inebriation steers her towards sobriety.
Why Alan Bennett chooses today’s feast as the date of a particularly memorable encounter between the vicar’s wife and the obliging shopkeeper is unclear. Bennett well remembers the eccentricities of his Anglican upbringing, of course, and it may be that Simon and Jude are simply names he recalls from some far-off Sunday evening spent flicking through the Prayer Book during a dull sermon. Or it may be that he relishes the sonorous resonance of the double celebration’s title, and the delicious contrast that is inexorably drawn between the solemnity of its Choral Evensong and the unlikely liaison that is taking place simultaneously in the upstairs storeroom of a little shop behind the Leeds Infirmary.
However I am enough of a fan of his to suspect that something else is at work. Alan Bennett has a sublime gift for taking the ordinary and making of it something extraordinary: the trams of his boyhood, his father’s butcher’s shop, the hellfire and damnation of his Sunday School, the genteel pretensions of his aunties. In the looking glass of his writing these become the narratives of our own lives and in his words we see ourselves as this remorseless observer of humanity sees us. As we shall see, he could not have chosen a more appropriate feast than today’s. Perhaps it’s a coincidence. Well, perhaps.
It is customary that the Collect for a Saint’s Day should at least name the saint who it honours. It is customary for the lectionary readings for a Saint’s Day to present some edifying glimpse of the said saint’s life and work. Yet cast your eyes over the Collect for today; scan the readings set, and you will find no trace at all of Simon and Jude. There are paeans to saintly virtues, and exhortations to us to imitate them, but the guests of honour are, as it were, absent from their own party.
This may have something to do with the uncertainty of those guests’ identity. They are honoured as Apostles, and both are probably both among the Twelve. Matthew and Mark list Simon ‘the Cananean’ and Luke ‘Simon the Zealot’, which tells us something about Simon’s Israelite nationalism. Jude is listed by Luke as the son of James. Matthew and Mark do not list him: they both name Thaddaeus, or Lebbaeus, instead. Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, never fond of untidiness, honour a conglomeration of the two: St Jude Thaddaeus, a compromise of which Anglicans ought to be proud.
What seems beyond controversy is that both Simon and Jude had namesakes among their fellow apostles who were destined for greater fame - or greater infamy - than were they. Simon the Zealot, of course, was to languish in the shadow cast by Simon the Rock; Judas son of James in that cast by Judas Iscariot. The result is that today we honour third-tier apostles, bargain basement apostles, apostles of whom we know nothing but their names. In fact the Church’s nervousness about Judas Iscariot’s sin was such that it robbed the other Judas of even that small dignity, shortening his name and labelling him Jude for all eternity. It is little wonder that the poor man has ended up appearing in the columns of the Daily Telegraph as the patron saint of lost causes.
So why are we here? We have so little to go on, such tiny biographical detail, such tangled historical roots. Does celebrating unknown saints really matter? Ought we not be proclaiming the Gospel instead?
The reason that the saints survived in the Church of England through the rigours of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that the Reformers saw in them useful role models for the instruction of the faithful. According to this standard, Simon and Jude are less than fit for purpose. We can point to no feats of endurance, no words of wise counsel, no selfless example that might shape our lives of faith. Yet if we honour only those who are of use to us; if we respect only those who give to us; if we celebrate only those who add value to our existence, then we do not see humanity as God sees it. We celebrate Simon and Jude because they are Simon and Jude, our distant and unseen forebears in faith. We need no other reason than that. Perhaps our celebrating them will affect our view of countless others around us, whose names we know, whose names we do not know, yet with whom we share this planet, this city, and this building, who appear to give us nothing.
Perhaps it will also transform our view of what we need to know about one another. We would all want to resist the notion that life in the West in 2007 is cheap, yet I wonder whether our resistance would withstand much examination. The voracious appetite for scandal is such that popular culture parades the lives of its celebrities in stomach-churning detail; the voracious appetite for gratification is such that poor women from Eastern Europe are trafficked in huge numbers to fill London’s brothels; the voracious appetite for global power is such that the blood spilt in its pursuit is fast losing its power to shock us. We constantly presume to know one another, to possess one another, to buy and sell one another. Perhaps our celebrating two names will recall us to the sanctity and the mystery of life; perhaps it will recall us to the holy ground upon which we tread when we approach another human being.
And lastly, perhaps it will also reawaken us to the extraordinary vision of the God served by Simon and Jude, the alchemical God whose touch turns the basest material into the purest gold. It is this God who chooses Simon Zealotes as well as Simon Peter; who chooses Judas of Lost Causes alongside Paul of many Epistles; it is this God who chooses us today; this God, whose choice knows no limits and whose imagination knows no bounds.
‘That’s the thing nobody ever says about God’ says Susan, vicar’s wife and reformed alcoholic ‘…he has no taste at all.’ She means it critically, and after her experience of his church, few would blame her. But in God’s tastelessness is our, and the world’s, salvation.
Amen.
Sunday 28 October 2007,
Isaiah 28: 14-16;
John 15: 17-end.
Alan Bennett’s Bed Among the Lentils tells the story of Susan, a Yorkshire vicar’s wife who, caught between her husband’s appallingly glib piety and his parishioners’ fervent self-righteousness, turns quietly to drink. She disgraces herself over lunch with the Bishop, collapses while arranging flowers in the chancel, and only finds redemption, rather unpredictably, in the arms of the young Asian shopkeeper, Mr Ramesh, whose sad wonder at her perpetual inebriation steers her towards sobriety.
Why Alan Bennett chooses today’s feast as the date of a particularly memorable encounter between the vicar’s wife and the obliging shopkeeper is unclear. Bennett well remembers the eccentricities of his Anglican upbringing, of course, and it may be that Simon and Jude are simply names he recalls from some far-off Sunday evening spent flicking through the Prayer Book during a dull sermon. Or it may be that he relishes the sonorous resonance of the double celebration’s title, and the delicious contrast that is inexorably drawn between the solemnity of its Choral Evensong and the unlikely liaison that is taking place simultaneously in the upstairs storeroom of a little shop behind the Leeds Infirmary.
However I am enough of a fan of his to suspect that something else is at work. Alan Bennett has a sublime gift for taking the ordinary and making of it something extraordinary: the trams of his boyhood, his father’s butcher’s shop, the hellfire and damnation of his Sunday School, the genteel pretensions of his aunties. In the looking glass of his writing these become the narratives of our own lives and in his words we see ourselves as this remorseless observer of humanity sees us. As we shall see, he could not have chosen a more appropriate feast than today’s. Perhaps it’s a coincidence. Well, perhaps.
It is customary that the Collect for a Saint’s Day should at least name the saint who it honours. It is customary for the lectionary readings for a Saint’s Day to present some edifying glimpse of the said saint’s life and work. Yet cast your eyes over the Collect for today; scan the readings set, and you will find no trace at all of Simon and Jude. There are paeans to saintly virtues, and exhortations to us to imitate them, but the guests of honour are, as it were, absent from their own party.
This may have something to do with the uncertainty of those guests’ identity. They are honoured as Apostles, and both are probably both among the Twelve. Matthew and Mark list Simon ‘the Cananean’ and Luke ‘Simon the Zealot’, which tells us something about Simon’s Israelite nationalism. Jude is listed by Luke as the son of James. Matthew and Mark do not list him: they both name Thaddaeus, or Lebbaeus, instead. Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, never fond of untidiness, honour a conglomeration of the two: St Jude Thaddaeus, a compromise of which Anglicans ought to be proud.
What seems beyond controversy is that both Simon and Jude had namesakes among their fellow apostles who were destined for greater fame - or greater infamy - than were they. Simon the Zealot, of course, was to languish in the shadow cast by Simon the Rock; Judas son of James in that cast by Judas Iscariot. The result is that today we honour third-tier apostles, bargain basement apostles, apostles of whom we know nothing but their names. In fact the Church’s nervousness about Judas Iscariot’s sin was such that it robbed the other Judas of even that small dignity, shortening his name and labelling him Jude for all eternity. It is little wonder that the poor man has ended up appearing in the columns of the Daily Telegraph as the patron saint of lost causes.
So why are we here? We have so little to go on, such tiny biographical detail, such tangled historical roots. Does celebrating unknown saints really matter? Ought we not be proclaiming the Gospel instead?
The reason that the saints survived in the Church of England through the rigours of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that the Reformers saw in them useful role models for the instruction of the faithful. According to this standard, Simon and Jude are less than fit for purpose. We can point to no feats of endurance, no words of wise counsel, no selfless example that might shape our lives of faith. Yet if we honour only those who are of use to us; if we respect only those who give to us; if we celebrate only those who add value to our existence, then we do not see humanity as God sees it. We celebrate Simon and Jude because they are Simon and Jude, our distant and unseen forebears in faith. We need no other reason than that. Perhaps our celebrating them will affect our view of countless others around us, whose names we know, whose names we do not know, yet with whom we share this planet, this city, and this building, who appear to give us nothing.
Perhaps it will also transform our view of what we need to know about one another. We would all want to resist the notion that life in the West in 2007 is cheap, yet I wonder whether our resistance would withstand much examination. The voracious appetite for scandal is such that popular culture parades the lives of its celebrities in stomach-churning detail; the voracious appetite for gratification is such that poor women from Eastern Europe are trafficked in huge numbers to fill London’s brothels; the voracious appetite for global power is such that the blood spilt in its pursuit is fast losing its power to shock us. We constantly presume to know one another, to possess one another, to buy and sell one another. Perhaps our celebrating two names will recall us to the sanctity and the mystery of life; perhaps it will recall us to the holy ground upon which we tread when we approach another human being.
And lastly, perhaps it will also reawaken us to the extraordinary vision of the God served by Simon and Jude, the alchemical God whose touch turns the basest material into the purest gold. It is this God who chooses Simon Zealotes as well as Simon Peter; who chooses Judas of Lost Causes alongside Paul of many Epistles; it is this God who chooses us today; this God, whose choice knows no limits and whose imagination knows no bounds.
‘That’s the thing nobody ever says about God’ says Susan, vicar’s wife and reformed alcoholic ‘…he has no taste at all.’ She means it critically, and after her experience of his church, few would blame her. But in God’s tastelessness is our, and the world’s, salvation.
Amen.
Sunday 28 October 2007,
Isaiah 28: 14-16;
John 15: 17-end.
Sunday, 21 October 2007
The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity
Direct references to organized sport are few and far between in the Bible. On the morning after the trauma of England’s defeat it is difficult for the preacher who wishes to mark the occasion appropriately to derive either inspiration or authority from the pages of Holy Scripture. Or so you might think. As you know, I enjoy a challenge.
The exhausted players and the commiserating supporters might in fact find painful echoes of their recent experience in not one but two passages from this morning’s readings. That from the Old Testament features one of the most famous wrestling matches in history: Jacob’s epic struggle by the Jabbok. This clash of the titans might serve as a metaphor for yesterday’s heroic efforts, but it’s the story’s ending, which has the victor limping past Penuel rubbing his dislocated hip that will bring a rueful smile to the face of rugby fans everywhere.
The Gospel, on the other hand, seems at first a much less promising seam for us to quarry, concentrating as it does upon a dry legal dispute, many miles away from the Stade de France. Pay attention to the language, though, and the kaleidoscope of interpretation shifts. When the unjust judge utters his frustrated cry ‘because this widow bothers me, I will vindicate her’ he actually uses the language of the boxing ring rather than the language of the law-court. Translated strictly the judge exclaims ‘because this widow keeps blacking my eye, I will vindicate her’. I’ll wager there were a few black eyes on the Eurostar last night.
Perhaps I have just established that with a little ingenuity Scripture can be made to say whatever its reader would like it to say. Yet Paul insists to Timothy that it is all inspired by God and therefore profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training. What are we to make of his stricture, when a text is so obviously open to exploitation and abuse?
I don’t believe it will do simply to abandon the stricture, and with it the texts to which Paul applies it. As catholic Christians we revere the written word of God, the Bible, as we revere the living Word of God, Jesus Christ. The twin foci of the liturgy are the proclamation of the Gospel from among you and the sharing of the sacrament among you. In the Eucharist we expect to meet the living Word in broken bread and wine outpoured, but we expect to do so only after we have met him in the written word, broken and shared just as the Eucharistic bread will be broken and shared.
Scripture cannot be set aside and replaced by our habits and convictions. But if we are to read it well then we need to recall that its reading is primarily a communal activity. It is not something that we do alone. The writings that we regard as holy were created in an era when literacy was limited. Paul’s letters were written to be read aloud when Christians gathered to worship in Corinth, or Rome, or Thessaly. The Gospels were anthologies, collections of sayings and stories of Jesus that were remembered and retold when Christians met. None of them were originally designed for private study, for an individual to pore over in the hope that God’s meaning might thereby be revealed to him or her. And although one of the great achievements of the various Reformations was to make Scripture accessible for exactly that kind of study we need always to be cautious when engaging in it, using a commentary, or notes, or the fellowship of a reading group: anything that links our individual reading into the corporate reading of the Church.
Secondly, it is to be read as a whole. There is a huge danger in doing what I did when I began: in other words, of hiving off little bits here and there and inflating their importance. This is proof-texting. It means our approaching the Bible with a fixed idea and looking for something that will back the idea up. That may be an honest and proper use for the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, but in relation to Scripture it is neither honest not proper, however benign our intentions. In the parable we’ve heard this morning Jesus apparently speaks approvingly of an unjust judge, and even draws a parallel between him and God. I suppose it could be turned into a story that is supportive of corrupt and venal officers of the law. It has to be read alongside the overwhelming testimony of the Bible to God’s identification with the causes of justice and truth.
And thirdly it is to be read – and then read again, and again, and again. ‘When the Son of Man comes’ asks Jesus ‘will he find faith on earth?’ Yet the image of faith that today’s readings creates is very distinct. There is the faith of Jacob, who clings to God throughout the livelong night, Jacob who will not let God go so convinced is he that his unknown assailant is the one who has authority to bless him. There is the faith of Paul, who urges young Timothy to be unfailing in his patience and to teach and preach with urgency both in and out of season. And there is the faith of the widow, who returns to the judge day in, day out, clamouring for her rights and refusing to fall silent when they are denied her.
Faith, in other words, does not look neat and tidy. If it were meant to be so then perhaps God would not have sent us his Son at all; perhaps he would have sent us a tract containing a few lines of neat instruction, rather a young man to whom the startling language and unimaginable stories, the mystery and the glory of the holy book around which we gather bear witness.
Faith is a journey, an unfolding relationship. Faith can be hard work. Perhaps the God in whom we have faith knows us rather better than we do ourselves.
Sunday 21 October 2007,
Genesis 32: 22-31;
2 Timothy 3: 14-4:5;
Luke 18: 1-8
The exhausted players and the commiserating supporters might in fact find painful echoes of their recent experience in not one but two passages from this morning’s readings. That from the Old Testament features one of the most famous wrestling matches in history: Jacob’s epic struggle by the Jabbok. This clash of the titans might serve as a metaphor for yesterday’s heroic efforts, but it’s the story’s ending, which has the victor limping past Penuel rubbing his dislocated hip that will bring a rueful smile to the face of rugby fans everywhere.
The Gospel, on the other hand, seems at first a much less promising seam for us to quarry, concentrating as it does upon a dry legal dispute, many miles away from the Stade de France. Pay attention to the language, though, and the kaleidoscope of interpretation shifts. When the unjust judge utters his frustrated cry ‘because this widow bothers me, I will vindicate her’ he actually uses the language of the boxing ring rather than the language of the law-court. Translated strictly the judge exclaims ‘because this widow keeps blacking my eye, I will vindicate her’. I’ll wager there were a few black eyes on the Eurostar last night.
Perhaps I have just established that with a little ingenuity Scripture can be made to say whatever its reader would like it to say. Yet Paul insists to Timothy that it is all inspired by God and therefore profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training. What are we to make of his stricture, when a text is so obviously open to exploitation and abuse?
I don’t believe it will do simply to abandon the stricture, and with it the texts to which Paul applies it. As catholic Christians we revere the written word of God, the Bible, as we revere the living Word of God, Jesus Christ. The twin foci of the liturgy are the proclamation of the Gospel from among you and the sharing of the sacrament among you. In the Eucharist we expect to meet the living Word in broken bread and wine outpoured, but we expect to do so only after we have met him in the written word, broken and shared just as the Eucharistic bread will be broken and shared.
Scripture cannot be set aside and replaced by our habits and convictions. But if we are to read it well then we need to recall that its reading is primarily a communal activity. It is not something that we do alone. The writings that we regard as holy were created in an era when literacy was limited. Paul’s letters were written to be read aloud when Christians gathered to worship in Corinth, or Rome, or Thessaly. The Gospels were anthologies, collections of sayings and stories of Jesus that were remembered and retold when Christians met. None of them were originally designed for private study, for an individual to pore over in the hope that God’s meaning might thereby be revealed to him or her. And although one of the great achievements of the various Reformations was to make Scripture accessible for exactly that kind of study we need always to be cautious when engaging in it, using a commentary, or notes, or the fellowship of a reading group: anything that links our individual reading into the corporate reading of the Church.
Secondly, it is to be read as a whole. There is a huge danger in doing what I did when I began: in other words, of hiving off little bits here and there and inflating their importance. This is proof-texting. It means our approaching the Bible with a fixed idea and looking for something that will back the idea up. That may be an honest and proper use for the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, but in relation to Scripture it is neither honest not proper, however benign our intentions. In the parable we’ve heard this morning Jesus apparently speaks approvingly of an unjust judge, and even draws a parallel between him and God. I suppose it could be turned into a story that is supportive of corrupt and venal officers of the law. It has to be read alongside the overwhelming testimony of the Bible to God’s identification with the causes of justice and truth.
And thirdly it is to be read – and then read again, and again, and again. ‘When the Son of Man comes’ asks Jesus ‘will he find faith on earth?’ Yet the image of faith that today’s readings creates is very distinct. There is the faith of Jacob, who clings to God throughout the livelong night, Jacob who will not let God go so convinced is he that his unknown assailant is the one who has authority to bless him. There is the faith of Paul, who urges young Timothy to be unfailing in his patience and to teach and preach with urgency both in and out of season. And there is the faith of the widow, who returns to the judge day in, day out, clamouring for her rights and refusing to fall silent when they are denied her.
Faith, in other words, does not look neat and tidy. If it were meant to be so then perhaps God would not have sent us his Son at all; perhaps he would have sent us a tract containing a few lines of neat instruction, rather a young man to whom the startling language and unimaginable stories, the mystery and the glory of the holy book around which we gather bear witness.
Faith is a journey, an unfolding relationship. Faith can be hard work. Perhaps the God in whom we have faith knows us rather better than we do ourselves.
Sunday 21 October 2007,
Genesis 32: 22-31;
2 Timothy 3: 14-4:5;
Luke 18: 1-8
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