‘You do not walk alone into the next life. With you walks your greatest friend, your guardian angel who was with you when you were born into the physical world and is with you now at the end of your earthly life’.
I quote from the homepage of the Psychics and Mediums Network, not because I am feeling the irresistible pull of the New Age but because the quote’s very existence is evidence for a hypothesis that I accept, that, in this irreligious age, angels are enjoying something of a renaissance.
They are to be found everywhere. Any Registry Office will tell you that among the most popular songs to which brides make their entrance is ‘Angels’, recorded by Robbie Williams in 1997. It has sold more than two million copies worldwide. And if musical popular culture does not convince you then perhaps visual popular culture will. Travel to Gateshead and you will see the country’s most famous and (to abuse a word) iconic piece of public art. It is Antony Gormley’s 1998 sculpture, ‘The Angel of the North’.
The sea of faith may have receded from our shores, but in its place the beating of angels’ wings resounds. Why? I will hazard three reasons for the popularity of angels and for the devotion they continue to inspire.
The first is that they bring a touch of mystery to a world which has a tendency to be information-laden, a tendency which has reached new heights in the last week. We are bombarded with data by countless media outlets: words, statistics, and images. The mention of angels brings blessed relief. They are other-worldly, ethereal, and transcendent.
The second is that they are highly personal. You can conceive of angels in any way you choose. Few will dare to correct you and tell you that your particular image of the angelic is misplaced or erroneous. So there is huge scope for the subjective imagination, for fantasy even. And the angel thus conceived will of course be your angel; your guardian indeed, your friend and your companion.
The third is that angels come doctrine-light. Conceiving of angels does not commit you to an institutional church, or to a church of any sort. It does not requite that you subscribe to any of the tiresome dogmas with which such churches have encumbered themselves – the Trinity, the Atonement, or the Ascension. Angels take their place on the pick-and-mix counter, along with crystals, copper bracelets and the Loch Ness Monster.
So what sort of response can or should we make to a culture apparently fascinated by angels, even if the angels by which it is fascinated are not recognizable to orthodox Christians?
One response, I suppose, would be to ignore the phenomenon and to concentrate on the Gospel we have received, leaving the psychic, Robbie Williams-humming, Antony Gormley-visiting hordes to stew in their ignorance. But you will have guessed that this would not be my preferred course. My preferred course would be to understand the longing for transcendence, for intimacy and for liberty that I believe the angel-fixation represents as nothing other than a contemporary version of the human longing for God, which is as old as history itself.
People yearn for mystery. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present God as roughly equivalent with someone you might meet in the pub, a wise soul who listens to our problems and looks kindly upon them. God is our friend, perpetually, to employ a modern cliché, ‘there for us’. Or, rather more traditionally, we present him still clinging to his cane and mortarboard, stern, disapproving, incapable of empathizing with our condition. God is the headmaster or, as Rowan Williams would have it, ‘the management’, perpetually out to trip us up and catch us out. Both presentations are useless. If God is the former, then we would be better off in the pub, where the beer is likely to be better; if God is the latter, then most of us already have to deal with tyrants domestic or professional, and don’t need to add more to the pantheon. Yet we are heirs of an apophatic tradition of spirituality, a tradition that insists that there is more that we cannot say about God than there is that we can say about him, a tradition that values silence rather than words and prayer rather than doctrine. We have something to offer those who look to angels for their dose of the transcendent, or we have nothing to offer at all.
People yearn for intimacy. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present God as blandly accepting, meeting us where we are, understanding our frailties and failings, weeping over them, and loving us in spite of them. Or we present him as judging us, ruling on those frailties and failings, holding us to an impossible standard, condemning us to disappoint him eternally and offering us cold, impersonal justice. Again, both presentations are useless. Warm affirmation of who we already are is not all we need; neither is everlasting censure of who we have been. Yet we are heirs of a tradition in which God was, God is and God is to come, a tradition in which God the Father loves us into being, God the Son shares our earthly life, and God the Holy Spirit promises to remake us in ways we cannot begin to imagine. We have something to offer those who look to angels for their moments of intimacy and self-knowledge, or we have nothing to offer at all.
People yearn for liberty. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present a faith of positions and propositions, of claims and creeds. We enact incomprehensible liturgy dressed up with esoteric language and inaccessible rites, and appear an introspective community concerned only with our own survival. Yet we are heirs of a tradition in which faith and liturgy, doctrine and worship have as their end the transformation of the world in which we are set. We seem to be prisoners of our faith; we are in fact the inheritors of a faith that may yet turn the world upside down; we serve a God whom to serve is perfect freedom. We indeed have something to offer those who look to angels for their liberty, or we have nothing to offer at all.
This is the God who I believe the angels still proclaim –a God of mystery, a God of intimacy and a God of liberty. This is the God we too must proclaim – or I fear that we in our way and our whole generation with us will be stuck, ‘loving angels instead’. Amen.
Tuesday, 30 September 2008
Monday, 21 July 2008
Ninth Sunday after Trinity, 20 July 2008
‘What are the symptoms, by which one may judge most fairly, whether or no a nation, as such, is becoming alienated from God and Christ? And what are the particular duties of sincere Christians, whose lot is cast by Divine Providence in a time of such dire calamity?’
I doubt that any sermon preached in England this morning will be remembered twelve months from now. Preachers’ words are rarely milestones or historic turning-points. Yet last week the Church of England’s Calendar remembered a sermon, a sermon preached 175 years ago. On July 14 1833 John Keble ascended the pulpit of St Mary’s, Oxford, to deliver the Assize Sermon. His words on the theme National Apostasy, with some of which I began, have generally been regarded as the launch-point of the Oxford Movement, and can fairly be said to have changed the face of the Church.
Keble’s world was self-evidently very different from our world, and it is hard for a liberal-minded citizen of our pluralist culture to sympathize with his outrage at some of the societal changes that prompted his sermon. These included moves towards Roman Catholic emancipation and towards the admission of non-conformists to Parliament. A creature of his time, Keble could detect in these only attacks on the Church he loved, the Church he believed to the successor of the Church of the Apostles. What he perceived as the State’s willingness to diminish and marginalize an institution of Apostolic foundation he diagnosed as symptomatic of national apostasy. England was becoming faithless.
Thus was conceived the principal cause of the Oxford Movement: the re-assertion of the Church’s fundamental independence from the State, and its re-awakening to its roots in ancient and undivided Christendom rather than in Reformation England. This re-assertion and re-awakening was timely and welcome and its effects thoroughgoing: they are still visible in this very building in the extension and adornment of the east end, carried out late in the nineteenth century, an attempt visibly to re-connect the Ecclesia Anglicana with the historic life-stream of the universal Church. The Oxford Movement was a moment of confident revival, of the sort that many would like to see in global Anglicanism today.
Yet there is a cost to such moments, to moments when the Church defines herself in opposition to the world. Whenever the Church believes she has uncovered her raison d’etre (whether in her apostolic heritage or in the words of Scripture) she turns her back on the community which she exists to serve. Her new-found confidence and freshly-discovered self-reliance breed a self-sufficient complacency that is ultimately destructive. Early enthusiasm turns to unthinking certainty and bold innovation to soulless repetition. The catholic ceremonial which once offered the worshipper a dramatic glimpse of the world to come becomes instead a tired ritual of this one; the word of God which once spoke liberation to its hearer becomes instead the dead letter of another age. Churches cling onto what once served them well, and they become refuges from the world rather than places of transformation for the world.
So what is to be made of Keble’s sermon? He saw a nation losing faith in its Church; what your preacher sees today is a Church losing faith in its nation, a Church that is trapped in her own self-perpetuation, a Church that has become a refuge for those who do not like the nation, a Church that does not like what the modern word has brought. In no other place in twenty-first century Britain is it considered legitimate (indeed appropriate) to discriminate against people on the grounds of their gender or sexual orientation. We at last (thank God!) inhabit a culture in which such discrimination is as unacceptable as was that on grounds of race a generation ago. By colluding with it in the Church we reinforce our ghetto appearance and our ghetto mentality: it is us who are right; it is them out there who are not.
Keble argued that the Church must not follow slavishly the beliefs and behaviours of the apostate society in which it is set. He was right. But God’s saving action is not limited to (or by) his Church, however rooted it may be in the apostolic tradition or however wrapped up it may be in Scriptural authority. Truth makes herself known through the labours of theologians, yes, but also through every scholarly discipline; through public worship, yes but also through private prayer; through the debates of Synods and councils, yes, but also through public discourse and private conversation. Sometimes the Church needs to catch up to where society has already arrived. That may be a sobering reality, but it is one that is entirely consonant with a doctrine of a sovereign God of limitless creative freedom and boundless loving resourcefulness.
There is much in society of which the Church must be critical if she is to be faithful to her Lord: omnipresent pornography, rapacious greed, rampant inequality, universal commercialism, the naked exploitation and brutal oppression of God’s children. But when she shuts her eyes to the common values that unite the nation (and tolerance and equal treatment are among these) then she loses all credibility and denies herself a place at the table. When the Church discriminates in its ordered life which is apostate – Church or State? No one will listen to a self-sufficient sect, a ghetto church. It is time for us to re-assert our faith in the nation we serve as the place where God’s kingdom of justice and righteousness must be built.
‘I do not see’ said Keble ‘how any person can devote himself too entirely to the cause of the Apostolical Church in these realms’. Perhaps the Apostolical Church needs to give similar devotion to the cause of discovering what God is doing in the nation; perhaps she needs humbly to learn from what she discovers; so that then she can be the agent of its Godly transformation. Amen.
I doubt that any sermon preached in England this morning will be remembered twelve months from now. Preachers’ words are rarely milestones or historic turning-points. Yet last week the Church of England’s Calendar remembered a sermon, a sermon preached 175 years ago. On July 14 1833 John Keble ascended the pulpit of St Mary’s, Oxford, to deliver the Assize Sermon. His words on the theme National Apostasy, with some of which I began, have generally been regarded as the launch-point of the Oxford Movement, and can fairly be said to have changed the face of the Church.
Keble’s world was self-evidently very different from our world, and it is hard for a liberal-minded citizen of our pluralist culture to sympathize with his outrage at some of the societal changes that prompted his sermon. These included moves towards Roman Catholic emancipation and towards the admission of non-conformists to Parliament. A creature of his time, Keble could detect in these only attacks on the Church he loved, the Church he believed to the successor of the Church of the Apostles. What he perceived as the State’s willingness to diminish and marginalize an institution of Apostolic foundation he diagnosed as symptomatic of national apostasy. England was becoming faithless.
Thus was conceived the principal cause of the Oxford Movement: the re-assertion of the Church’s fundamental independence from the State, and its re-awakening to its roots in ancient and undivided Christendom rather than in Reformation England. This re-assertion and re-awakening was timely and welcome and its effects thoroughgoing: they are still visible in this very building in the extension and adornment of the east end, carried out late in the nineteenth century, an attempt visibly to re-connect the Ecclesia Anglicana with the historic life-stream of the universal Church. The Oxford Movement was a moment of confident revival, of the sort that many would like to see in global Anglicanism today.
Yet there is a cost to such moments, to moments when the Church defines herself in opposition to the world. Whenever the Church believes she has uncovered her raison d’etre (whether in her apostolic heritage or in the words of Scripture) she turns her back on the community which she exists to serve. Her new-found confidence and freshly-discovered self-reliance breed a self-sufficient complacency that is ultimately destructive. Early enthusiasm turns to unthinking certainty and bold innovation to soulless repetition. The catholic ceremonial which once offered the worshipper a dramatic glimpse of the world to come becomes instead a tired ritual of this one; the word of God which once spoke liberation to its hearer becomes instead the dead letter of another age. Churches cling onto what once served them well, and they become refuges from the world rather than places of transformation for the world.
So what is to be made of Keble’s sermon? He saw a nation losing faith in its Church; what your preacher sees today is a Church losing faith in its nation, a Church that is trapped in her own self-perpetuation, a Church that has become a refuge for those who do not like the nation, a Church that does not like what the modern word has brought. In no other place in twenty-first century Britain is it considered legitimate (indeed appropriate) to discriminate against people on the grounds of their gender or sexual orientation. We at last (thank God!) inhabit a culture in which such discrimination is as unacceptable as was that on grounds of race a generation ago. By colluding with it in the Church we reinforce our ghetto appearance and our ghetto mentality: it is us who are right; it is them out there who are not.
Keble argued that the Church must not follow slavishly the beliefs and behaviours of the apostate society in which it is set. He was right. But God’s saving action is not limited to (or by) his Church, however rooted it may be in the apostolic tradition or however wrapped up it may be in Scriptural authority. Truth makes herself known through the labours of theologians, yes, but also through every scholarly discipline; through public worship, yes but also through private prayer; through the debates of Synods and councils, yes, but also through public discourse and private conversation. Sometimes the Church needs to catch up to where society has already arrived. That may be a sobering reality, but it is one that is entirely consonant with a doctrine of a sovereign God of limitless creative freedom and boundless loving resourcefulness.
There is much in society of which the Church must be critical if she is to be faithful to her Lord: omnipresent pornography, rapacious greed, rampant inequality, universal commercialism, the naked exploitation and brutal oppression of God’s children. But when she shuts her eyes to the common values that unite the nation (and tolerance and equal treatment are among these) then she loses all credibility and denies herself a place at the table. When the Church discriminates in its ordered life which is apostate – Church or State? No one will listen to a self-sufficient sect, a ghetto church. It is time for us to re-assert our faith in the nation we serve as the place where God’s kingdom of justice and righteousness must be built.
‘I do not see’ said Keble ‘how any person can devote himself too entirely to the cause of the Apostolical Church in these realms’. Perhaps the Apostolical Church needs to give similar devotion to the cause of discovering what God is doing in the nation; perhaps she needs humbly to learn from what she discovers; so that then she can be the agent of its Godly transformation. Amen.
Monday, 7 July 2008
Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 6 July 2008
‘The bishop’s whole role as bishop makes no sense apart from his role as the one through whom all divisions are transcended. His primary function is always to make the catholicity of the Church reveal itself in a certain place’.
Those are the words of the Eastern theologian John Zizioulas, and they are a timely call to our Church.
For last weekend the Global Anglican Future Conference drew to a conclusion in Jerusalem. On its agenda was the ministry of bishops. This weekend the General Synod of the Church of England is meeting in York. On its agenda is the ministry of bishops. The GAFCON delegates debated what they describe as the ‘false Gospel’ of the North American bishops. The Synod representatives in York will debate the ordination of women as bishops in our own Church.
So what are bishops – those hapless individuals whose ministry is at the heart of such fierce debate – what are bishops actually for? Their role has been interpreted and reinterpreted many times and can barely resemble that exercised by those who first bore the title in cities around the Eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago. We expect a contemporary English bishop to be a manager of staff, a tribunal chair, an ambassador for a brand, a master of communication, a mediator, a strategist and diplomat. We expect him to be as at ease with schoolchildren as he is with captains of industry; we expect him to pastor his clergy and to appear on radio phone-ins. We expect him to be a person of profound faith and prayer, and at the same time to be prepared to put on his Wellington boots and baptize in the village duck-pond without so much as a grimace.
Ours is not the first generation to create its own expectations of the ministry of the bishop, and it will not be the last. Yet we must recognize that much of this is culturally-conditioned and transient: a few years hence we will doubtless look for different qualities in our bishops. What will not change is their ministry’s essence: episkope, or oversight, which has two vital dimensions.
First, our bishops occupy a historic office that has its origins in the earliest days of the Christian Church. Only the bishop ordains priests and deacons. Only the bishops ordain other bishops. Through this ordered pattern of episkope the bishop links us to our ancient roots in Canterbury, Rome and Jerusalem and is thus the touchstone of our ecclesial authenticity. Without the bishop we might well be a Christian church meeting in Eaton Square in 2008; because of the bishop we believe ourselves to be a local manifestation of the church, the church of Jesus Christ, the church of Peter and Thomas, the church of Gregory and Augustine, the church of Laud and Cranmer, the church of Richard Hooker and Michael Ramsey.
Secondly, the bishop oversees not only the Church’s ordered life but also the deposit of faith which is entrusted to it in every generation. He teaches and upholds the historic gospel: both the Scriptures and the doctrines of the Creeds to which, vitally for Anglicans, the pages of Scripture bear witness. This inheritance of faith and order the bishop hands on to those who come after him.
And the genius of episcopacy is that locally this inheritance always rests not with a committee or a handbook but with the bishop of the diocese. As we believe God to be one and undivided so we believe Christ to be one and undivided; as we believe his Church to be one and undivided so we Episcopal Churches have vested our life and our faith in one ordained to receive our life and our faith and to preserve and proclaim them.
It is only when we recall the responsibilities of episkope and where we place them that we can consider the debates of this week.
So what of Synod and the women bishops’ debate? The Church has already affirmed that there can be no theological objection to a Church which ordains women as priests proceeding to ordain them as bishops. The question is what provision should be made for those who cannot in conscience accept their oversight. My view is that any such provision must fall short of legislative provision. We simply cannot create a situation in which the life and faith of the Church is vested in a bishop whose Episcopal ordination can be ignored or disbelieved by some. If we do that then we destroy our catholicity; we destroy the claim we make that Christ’s Church is fully realized locally in the office and presence of the diocesan bishop.
And what of GAFCON and its Jerusalem Declaration? This first sets out some principles for which its members wish to campaign within the Communion. Some of us may find these principles disagreeable, but there is no shortage in history of groups publishing manifestoes: this parish has signed up to one or two in its lifetime. But it also sets out a methodology for action in pursuit of its principles. It has created a Primates Council which will presume to classify some churches or congregations as doctrinally sound and ideologically acceptable, and some as not, and it reserves to itself the right to intervene in the life of provinces and dioceses on behalf of those churches or congregations of which it approves.
This I find scandalous, as scandalous as continuing with an episcopate which is the preserve of men only or in which legislation is passed enabling some bishops to be regarded as less than bishops by some of the faithful. Subvert a local bishop’s oversight; introduce bishops from elsewhere to pronounce on the authenticity of his actions and to recruit an opposing following, and again we destroy our catholicity. We are no longer one church, under the oversight of one bishop.
The great irony in all this is that Jesus Christ chose to entrust his legacy to a group of twelve men who were, on the face of it, not up to the task. To this unreliable bunch he trusted everything: yet we are utterly unable to trust one another. We must have laws to protect our consciences because we cannot trust our fellow believers to do so; we must bring bishops from across the globe to care for us because we cannot trust our diocesans to do so. In our inability to trust I believe we betray Christ and hand him over to his enemies all over again.
‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-place and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn’.
Children calling to one another in the market place. Christ’s words echo down the centuries, and are spoken to us as surely and as sharply as they were to his first hearers. Amen.
Matthew 11: 16-19; 25-end.
Those are the words of the Eastern theologian John Zizioulas, and they are a timely call to our Church.
For last weekend the Global Anglican Future Conference drew to a conclusion in Jerusalem. On its agenda was the ministry of bishops. This weekend the General Synod of the Church of England is meeting in York. On its agenda is the ministry of bishops. The GAFCON delegates debated what they describe as the ‘false Gospel’ of the North American bishops. The Synod representatives in York will debate the ordination of women as bishops in our own Church.
So what are bishops – those hapless individuals whose ministry is at the heart of such fierce debate – what are bishops actually for? Their role has been interpreted and reinterpreted many times and can barely resemble that exercised by those who first bore the title in cities around the Eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago. We expect a contemporary English bishop to be a manager of staff, a tribunal chair, an ambassador for a brand, a master of communication, a mediator, a strategist and diplomat. We expect him to be as at ease with schoolchildren as he is with captains of industry; we expect him to pastor his clergy and to appear on radio phone-ins. We expect him to be a person of profound faith and prayer, and at the same time to be prepared to put on his Wellington boots and baptize in the village duck-pond without so much as a grimace.
Ours is not the first generation to create its own expectations of the ministry of the bishop, and it will not be the last. Yet we must recognize that much of this is culturally-conditioned and transient: a few years hence we will doubtless look for different qualities in our bishops. What will not change is their ministry’s essence: episkope, or oversight, which has two vital dimensions.
First, our bishops occupy a historic office that has its origins in the earliest days of the Christian Church. Only the bishop ordains priests and deacons. Only the bishops ordain other bishops. Through this ordered pattern of episkope the bishop links us to our ancient roots in Canterbury, Rome and Jerusalem and is thus the touchstone of our ecclesial authenticity. Without the bishop we might well be a Christian church meeting in Eaton Square in 2008; because of the bishop we believe ourselves to be a local manifestation of the church, the church of Jesus Christ, the church of Peter and Thomas, the church of Gregory and Augustine, the church of Laud and Cranmer, the church of Richard Hooker and Michael Ramsey.
Secondly, the bishop oversees not only the Church’s ordered life but also the deposit of faith which is entrusted to it in every generation. He teaches and upholds the historic gospel: both the Scriptures and the doctrines of the Creeds to which, vitally for Anglicans, the pages of Scripture bear witness. This inheritance of faith and order the bishop hands on to those who come after him.
And the genius of episcopacy is that locally this inheritance always rests not with a committee or a handbook but with the bishop of the diocese. As we believe God to be one and undivided so we believe Christ to be one and undivided; as we believe his Church to be one and undivided so we Episcopal Churches have vested our life and our faith in one ordained to receive our life and our faith and to preserve and proclaim them.
It is only when we recall the responsibilities of episkope and where we place them that we can consider the debates of this week.
So what of Synod and the women bishops’ debate? The Church has already affirmed that there can be no theological objection to a Church which ordains women as priests proceeding to ordain them as bishops. The question is what provision should be made for those who cannot in conscience accept their oversight. My view is that any such provision must fall short of legislative provision. We simply cannot create a situation in which the life and faith of the Church is vested in a bishop whose Episcopal ordination can be ignored or disbelieved by some. If we do that then we destroy our catholicity; we destroy the claim we make that Christ’s Church is fully realized locally in the office and presence of the diocesan bishop.
And what of GAFCON and its Jerusalem Declaration? This first sets out some principles for which its members wish to campaign within the Communion. Some of us may find these principles disagreeable, but there is no shortage in history of groups publishing manifestoes: this parish has signed up to one or two in its lifetime. But it also sets out a methodology for action in pursuit of its principles. It has created a Primates Council which will presume to classify some churches or congregations as doctrinally sound and ideologically acceptable, and some as not, and it reserves to itself the right to intervene in the life of provinces and dioceses on behalf of those churches or congregations of which it approves.
This I find scandalous, as scandalous as continuing with an episcopate which is the preserve of men only or in which legislation is passed enabling some bishops to be regarded as less than bishops by some of the faithful. Subvert a local bishop’s oversight; introduce bishops from elsewhere to pronounce on the authenticity of his actions and to recruit an opposing following, and again we destroy our catholicity. We are no longer one church, under the oversight of one bishop.
The great irony in all this is that Jesus Christ chose to entrust his legacy to a group of twelve men who were, on the face of it, not up to the task. To this unreliable bunch he trusted everything: yet we are utterly unable to trust one another. We must have laws to protect our consciences because we cannot trust our fellow believers to do so; we must bring bishops from across the globe to care for us because we cannot trust our diocesans to do so. In our inability to trust I believe we betray Christ and hand him over to his enemies all over again.
‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-place and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn’.
Children calling to one another in the market place. Christ’s words echo down the centuries, and are spoken to us as surely and as sharply as they were to his first hearers. Amen.
Matthew 11: 16-19; 25-end.
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 22 June 2008
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,silence the pianos and with muffled drumbring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
The moment when Auden’s lines are read aloud in the packed church is for many the most poignant in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. The gang of scatty, reckless, beautiful friends gathered around Hugh Grant have not realized that two of their number, Gareth and Matthew, have been in love for many years. The secrecy of their love, constant, but hidden amidst the gaudy glitz of the English wedding scene is what makes Matthew’s poetic mourning at Gareth’s unexpected funeral so unbearably sad.
The film was made in 1994, and, even in fourteen years, times have changed. Today a script could not conceive of so sophisticated and worldly a group overlooking such a relationship blossoming in their midst. The age of enforced secrecy is passing. And if public perception has changed then the law has, too. The film’s title might now read Four Weddings, a Funeral and a Civil Partnership. Such changes must surely be welcomed by all who prize honesty and justice, and by all who abhor prejudice and persecution.
How ironic it is that one of the churches in which one of the Four Weddings was celebrated should have been the venue for a service which has scarcely been out of the news this week. There have been comments from many quarters, and many of them have been unhelpful. But perhaps the sound and fury require us to think hard about what we do in church, and that, at least, is never a pointless exercise.
As you know, the Greek root of the word liturgy is leitourgeia, and leitourgeia means ‘public work’. Liturgy is the church’s public work, and remembering the root reinforces for us that the church’s liturgy can never be private. What happens within the church’s doors is essentially public: ours are made of glass, so we of all parishes have no excuse for forgetting. A service may have the appearance of a baby’s Christening, celebrated at a refined time of day in a quintessentially English village; it may have the appearance of a state funeral with the great and the good in black-suited attendance; or it may have the appearance of a hasty wedding, with only a priest, the couple and their witnesses present. Whatever its appearance, it is always the Church’s worship of God, and all are always welcome to participate in it. That’s one of the reasons I was cross at last year’s suggestion in the press that the Archbishop was coming here to preside at a private Eucharist. Private liturgy is a contradiction in terms.
And the public nature of liturgy is particularly important for Anglicans, particularly for those of us who value its historic breadth and generosity. We don’t have a confessional statement of the doctrine we hold and, please God, we never will. We have the Scriptures, the Creeds, and our liturgies, and that is all. If you want to know what Anglicans believe then don’t look for a form with a dotted line at the bottom, go and watch them worship. Every word we use here is carefully weighted and replete with meaning. This is the case when the words are starkly clear: ‘We believe in one God’, leaving the worshipper in no doubt but that ours is a monotheistic faith. It is also the case when they are studiedly nuanced: ‘let these gifts be to us the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ’, allowing both the Catholic believer in the Real Presence and the Protestant exponent of receptionism to take Holy Communion with integrity.
Liturgy is public, and liturgy expounds the articles of our faith, enabling all who call themselves Anglicans to find a worshipful space that is theirs. The issue at stake is whether the service held at St Bartholomew the Great held true to these two fundamental principles. I wan not there, and I have not seen the liturgy used, so I will refrain from commenting. It seems to me that the habit of uninformed people making specious pronouncements on the matters about which they are uninformed is a habit that the Church would do well to lose. But to these principles I want to add a third which, it seems to me, is of critical importance to the other two and indeed to the whole of our common life in Christ. If liturgy must reflect doctrine then life must reflect liturgy. More particularly: the public work in which we are engaged this morning must reflect the faith of the Church. But if our lives, those lives that have participated in the public work in this place and in every corner of the globe, do not reflect the liturgy in which we have participated, then this is a meaningless charade and you and I are the most miserable of hypocrites.
We have heard the words of absolution. We are therefore called to live as sinners who know themselves freely forgiven, forgiven at enormous cost; we must forgive others even as we are forgiven. We will take our places around the holy table without rank or status. We are therefore called to believe ourselves equal before the throne of grace, one with Christians of every age and race; we must not judge. And we will hold in our hands the very body of God incarnate, believing that he lives within us, within every one of us. We must remember that, as we look into the eyes of those with whom we disagree, the eyes of those of whom we disapprove, the eyes of those whom we dislike. Liturgy is no one’s plaything. Like the faith which it sets forth, it makes demands of us all. Amen.
The moment when Auden’s lines are read aloud in the packed church is for many the most poignant in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. The gang of scatty, reckless, beautiful friends gathered around Hugh Grant have not realized that two of their number, Gareth and Matthew, have been in love for many years. The secrecy of their love, constant, but hidden amidst the gaudy glitz of the English wedding scene is what makes Matthew’s poetic mourning at Gareth’s unexpected funeral so unbearably sad.
The film was made in 1994, and, even in fourteen years, times have changed. Today a script could not conceive of so sophisticated and worldly a group overlooking such a relationship blossoming in their midst. The age of enforced secrecy is passing. And if public perception has changed then the law has, too. The film’s title might now read Four Weddings, a Funeral and a Civil Partnership. Such changes must surely be welcomed by all who prize honesty and justice, and by all who abhor prejudice and persecution.
How ironic it is that one of the churches in which one of the Four Weddings was celebrated should have been the venue for a service which has scarcely been out of the news this week. There have been comments from many quarters, and many of them have been unhelpful. But perhaps the sound and fury require us to think hard about what we do in church, and that, at least, is never a pointless exercise.
As you know, the Greek root of the word liturgy is leitourgeia, and leitourgeia means ‘public work’. Liturgy is the church’s public work, and remembering the root reinforces for us that the church’s liturgy can never be private. What happens within the church’s doors is essentially public: ours are made of glass, so we of all parishes have no excuse for forgetting. A service may have the appearance of a baby’s Christening, celebrated at a refined time of day in a quintessentially English village; it may have the appearance of a state funeral with the great and the good in black-suited attendance; or it may have the appearance of a hasty wedding, with only a priest, the couple and their witnesses present. Whatever its appearance, it is always the Church’s worship of God, and all are always welcome to participate in it. That’s one of the reasons I was cross at last year’s suggestion in the press that the Archbishop was coming here to preside at a private Eucharist. Private liturgy is a contradiction in terms.
And the public nature of liturgy is particularly important for Anglicans, particularly for those of us who value its historic breadth and generosity. We don’t have a confessional statement of the doctrine we hold and, please God, we never will. We have the Scriptures, the Creeds, and our liturgies, and that is all. If you want to know what Anglicans believe then don’t look for a form with a dotted line at the bottom, go and watch them worship. Every word we use here is carefully weighted and replete with meaning. This is the case when the words are starkly clear: ‘We believe in one God’, leaving the worshipper in no doubt but that ours is a monotheistic faith. It is also the case when they are studiedly nuanced: ‘let these gifts be to us the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ’, allowing both the Catholic believer in the Real Presence and the Protestant exponent of receptionism to take Holy Communion with integrity.
Liturgy is public, and liturgy expounds the articles of our faith, enabling all who call themselves Anglicans to find a worshipful space that is theirs. The issue at stake is whether the service held at St Bartholomew the Great held true to these two fundamental principles. I wan not there, and I have not seen the liturgy used, so I will refrain from commenting. It seems to me that the habit of uninformed people making specious pronouncements on the matters about which they are uninformed is a habit that the Church would do well to lose. But to these principles I want to add a third which, it seems to me, is of critical importance to the other two and indeed to the whole of our common life in Christ. If liturgy must reflect doctrine then life must reflect liturgy. More particularly: the public work in which we are engaged this morning must reflect the faith of the Church. But if our lives, those lives that have participated in the public work in this place and in every corner of the globe, do not reflect the liturgy in which we have participated, then this is a meaningless charade and you and I are the most miserable of hypocrites.
We have heard the words of absolution. We are therefore called to live as sinners who know themselves freely forgiven, forgiven at enormous cost; we must forgive others even as we are forgiven. We will take our places around the holy table without rank or status. We are therefore called to believe ourselves equal before the throne of grace, one with Christians of every age and race; we must not judge. And we will hold in our hands the very body of God incarnate, believing that he lives within us, within every one of us. We must remember that, as we look into the eyes of those with whom we disagree, the eyes of those of whom we disapprove, the eyes of those whom we dislike. Liturgy is no one’s plaything. Like the faith which it sets forth, it makes demands of us all. Amen.
Monday, 16 June 2008
Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 15 June 2008
Five Christians are on an aeroplane flying over the Pacific Ocean. It crashes on a desert island. All five survive and indeed flourish. The island is verdant and fertile and in no time shelters have been built and a meal prepared. However it is also remote, and there is no prospect of rescue. Days turn into weeks which turn into months. The five Christians pray and read the Bible together (for a copy has miraculously survived the crash).Yet what they long to do is celebrate the Eucharist and thus experience the sacramental mystery of God’s presence with them. But none of them is ordained. Will they ever share the Eucharist again?
Petertide is approaching, the season not only of our patron saint, but also of the sacrament of ordination. Over the next few weeks in cathedrals and churches across the world men and women will have Episcopal hands laid upon them, and will thereafter be addressed differently, will in particular circumstances behave differently, and, often, will dress differently. We inhabit a democratic and populist age in which this rite and its consequences can seem seriously outmoded, for it appears to create a species of religious expert or professional, and the very notion of experts or professionals is under attack. With a decent search engine and a self-help manual or two most of us can discover whatever we need to know about any subject whatsoever, and lawyers, or accountants or indeed priests appear to be self-interested gatekeepers concerned only to preserve their own status.
So why does the Church continue to ordain men and women as deacons, priests and bishops? Many reasons that might appear compelling have fallen away. The ordained are not the sole theological scholars of the Church. The highly-regarded Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London, for example, now has only one ordained member of staff: all its systematic theologians and church historians are lay people, and so are all but one of its Biblical studies’ experts. The ordained are not the sole spiritual giants of the Church. There are of course men and women of profound and luminous holiness among them, but I have met as many or more among the laity. The ordained are not the sole pastors of the Church. We are surrounded by a wealth of caring agencies and, thankfully, many communities still boast strong social networks for picking up the fallen and binding up their wounds.
In these circumstances I ask again: why does the Church continue to ordain men and women as deacons, priests and bishops? At James’s licensing in April the Archdeacon of Charing Cross offered us an answer. We have ordained ministry, he said, because we have sacraments, and because without ordained ministry we could not have them. His answer does not hold out much hope for that group of five Christians marooned in perpetuity on the desert island. They have no priest; so they have no Eucharist. The moral may be always to ask a priest to accompany you on your exotic foreign holidays. But you would find that inconvenient and, with due respect to the Archdeacon, I am not sure that I agree with him.
The view of ordination that he espoused, and that denies the five the sacraments, is purely functional. Its essence inheres in its capacity to confect a particular consequence: consecrated bread and wine, reconciled penitents, authentically blessed congregations. It turns the ordained into specialist operatives in an ecclesial process, chosen managers of unique powers to effect certain results. There is no such priest on the island, no functionary with divinely-given authority, secret words and special gestures, and there can therefore be no ritual or rite. The priest is – and I don’t think this is a caricature – a witch doctor or magic man.
Today’s readings hint at a rather different view of ordination, one that allows the five to celebrate the sacraments, and it is this that I invite you to consider as we approach Petertide and prepare to receive one of the newly-ordained among us. The readings suggest that the effect of ordination is the creation not of empowered individuals but of a representative focus for God’s liberating action. In the wilderness of Sinai God speaks through Moses to the children of Israel. He has delivered them from slavery in Egypt, bringing them out of the land of oppression. Now, he says, ‘if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’. Priesthood in the desert years of exile belongs not to a priestly class but to a whole people. In the wilderness it’s not that priests are to mediate the liberating power and presence of God, to manage it on his behalf and jealously guard its boundaries. It’s that a whole people are to bear that liberating power and presence to the world; that a whole people are to take responsibility for God in the world that is his. Israel will be the representative focus of God’s liberating work.
And if Israel is God’s representative to the world then the twelve apostles, the account of whose sending-out we hear in Matthew’s Gospel, are his representatives to the representative. Like the exiles in the desert before them they are to bear God’s liberating power and presence to the lost sheep of Israel. Their task is priestly, as Israel’s is priestly. The Twelve are to be the representative focus of God’s liberating work.
Ordination is never principally about the individual ordained (even if some of the ordained are among the most precious of individuals!). It is about God, God who cannot but involve himself in the world, who works perpetually for the world’s redemption, and who calls his people to work with him. Ordination never sets up the few against the many; it never divides or stratifies God’s people. It belongs to God and to the whole people of God. As he calls Israel to be a priestly people so he calls you, my brothers and sisters - us - the baptized, to be a priestly people, for we are, as Paul writes to the Romans, the ones into whose hearts God’s love has been poured through the Holy Spirit. We are the representative focus of God’s liberating work.
And yes, from among our number he calls some, some whom he probably can’t trust to be lay people, to be the representatives to the representatives, some whose task it is to set before our eyes our common calling, and whose task it is to hold us all to it. But ordination is, because God is in Christ, and because we are God in Christ’s people. Amen.
Exodus: 19: 2-8a;
Romans 5: 1-8;
Matthew 9: 38 – 10: 23.
Petertide is approaching, the season not only of our patron saint, but also of the sacrament of ordination. Over the next few weeks in cathedrals and churches across the world men and women will have Episcopal hands laid upon them, and will thereafter be addressed differently, will in particular circumstances behave differently, and, often, will dress differently. We inhabit a democratic and populist age in which this rite and its consequences can seem seriously outmoded, for it appears to create a species of religious expert or professional, and the very notion of experts or professionals is under attack. With a decent search engine and a self-help manual or two most of us can discover whatever we need to know about any subject whatsoever, and lawyers, or accountants or indeed priests appear to be self-interested gatekeepers concerned only to preserve their own status.
So why does the Church continue to ordain men and women as deacons, priests and bishops? Many reasons that might appear compelling have fallen away. The ordained are not the sole theological scholars of the Church. The highly-regarded Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London, for example, now has only one ordained member of staff: all its systematic theologians and church historians are lay people, and so are all but one of its Biblical studies’ experts. The ordained are not the sole spiritual giants of the Church. There are of course men and women of profound and luminous holiness among them, but I have met as many or more among the laity. The ordained are not the sole pastors of the Church. We are surrounded by a wealth of caring agencies and, thankfully, many communities still boast strong social networks for picking up the fallen and binding up their wounds.
In these circumstances I ask again: why does the Church continue to ordain men and women as deacons, priests and bishops? At James’s licensing in April the Archdeacon of Charing Cross offered us an answer. We have ordained ministry, he said, because we have sacraments, and because without ordained ministry we could not have them. His answer does not hold out much hope for that group of five Christians marooned in perpetuity on the desert island. They have no priest; so they have no Eucharist. The moral may be always to ask a priest to accompany you on your exotic foreign holidays. But you would find that inconvenient and, with due respect to the Archdeacon, I am not sure that I agree with him.
The view of ordination that he espoused, and that denies the five the sacraments, is purely functional. Its essence inheres in its capacity to confect a particular consequence: consecrated bread and wine, reconciled penitents, authentically blessed congregations. It turns the ordained into specialist operatives in an ecclesial process, chosen managers of unique powers to effect certain results. There is no such priest on the island, no functionary with divinely-given authority, secret words and special gestures, and there can therefore be no ritual or rite. The priest is – and I don’t think this is a caricature – a witch doctor or magic man.
Today’s readings hint at a rather different view of ordination, one that allows the five to celebrate the sacraments, and it is this that I invite you to consider as we approach Petertide and prepare to receive one of the newly-ordained among us. The readings suggest that the effect of ordination is the creation not of empowered individuals but of a representative focus for God’s liberating action. In the wilderness of Sinai God speaks through Moses to the children of Israel. He has delivered them from slavery in Egypt, bringing them out of the land of oppression. Now, he says, ‘if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’. Priesthood in the desert years of exile belongs not to a priestly class but to a whole people. In the wilderness it’s not that priests are to mediate the liberating power and presence of God, to manage it on his behalf and jealously guard its boundaries. It’s that a whole people are to bear that liberating power and presence to the world; that a whole people are to take responsibility for God in the world that is his. Israel will be the representative focus of God’s liberating work.
And if Israel is God’s representative to the world then the twelve apostles, the account of whose sending-out we hear in Matthew’s Gospel, are his representatives to the representative. Like the exiles in the desert before them they are to bear God’s liberating power and presence to the lost sheep of Israel. Their task is priestly, as Israel’s is priestly. The Twelve are to be the representative focus of God’s liberating work.
Ordination is never principally about the individual ordained (even if some of the ordained are among the most precious of individuals!). It is about God, God who cannot but involve himself in the world, who works perpetually for the world’s redemption, and who calls his people to work with him. Ordination never sets up the few against the many; it never divides or stratifies God’s people. It belongs to God and to the whole people of God. As he calls Israel to be a priestly people so he calls you, my brothers and sisters - us - the baptized, to be a priestly people, for we are, as Paul writes to the Romans, the ones into whose hearts God’s love has been poured through the Holy Spirit. We are the representative focus of God’s liberating work.
And yes, from among our number he calls some, some whom he probably can’t trust to be lay people, to be the representatives to the representatives, some whose task it is to set before our eyes our common calling, and whose task it is to hold us all to it. But ordination is, because God is in Christ, and because we are God in Christ’s people. Amen.
Exodus: 19: 2-8a;
Romans 5: 1-8;
Matthew 9: 38 – 10: 23.
Monday, 19 May 2008
Trinity Sunday 2008
These are dark days for the Vicar of St Stephen’s Ambridge. His engagement to a local solicitor who just happens to be a devout Hindu has been the subject of lurid speculation in the local press. It has prompted a display of prudery on the part of one of his churchwardens that has taken even diehard Archers fans by surprise, and has inspired the publication on the internet of a ditty cataloguing the peaks and troughs of his ministry among the simple country folk of Borsetshire. It’s to be sung to a well-known Gilbert and Sullivan tune (not that I’ll inflict that on you), and it goes like this:
I've taken up each trendy cause, I've filled the manse with down-and-outsI'm very good at counselling (I say "It's swings and roundabouts")It won't be long till I've removed all pews from the vicinity But please don't press me hard about the meaning of the Trinity.
Please don't press me hard about the meaning of the Trinity…this is the day that the preacher fears above all others, of course. It is the day when he or she has to stand before the faithful and find something to say (preferably something new and full of insight) about the central mystery of orthodox Christian doctrine, the mystery that appals our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters and remains the surest way of really upsetting a Jehovah’s Witness, the mystery of God the Holy Trinity..
I’ve never had the benefit of hearing the Vicar of Ambridge preach on the meaning of the Trinity, but my guess would be that he is a devotee of what has become known as its ‘social’ meaning. Put simply, if that is not a contradiction it terms, belief in the Trinity means belief in one God, but in one God who is three Persons. Any attempt to explain that further, and there have been many, must inevitably emphasize the One God at the expense of the Three Persons, or the Three Persons at the expense of the One God. The social understanding definitely does the latter, and in so doing it draws extensively on the tradition of the Eastern Churches, and, alongside the vogue for all things Orthodox, such as John Taverner’s music and Andrei Rublev’s famous icon, it has been hugely fashionable and influential in recent years.
God, say social Trinitarians, is a perfect community. Father, Son and Spirit are locked in an eternal embrace that is characterized by their giving to one another and receiving from one another mutual and reciprocal love. The internal life of the Trinity models a pattern of unity amidst diversity, and so God is in Godself an exemplar for human behaviour and human belonging. We are called to live in perfect love just as the divine family lives in perfect love.
This is infinitely preferable, in my view, to the classical Western understanding of the Trinity. Ever influenced by Platonic thought this has constantly emphasized the essential unity of God and his utter changelessness and impassibility. But although I owe a personal debt to the social Trinitarians I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with their understanding of God, or at least with some of its more casual and sloppy manifestations. The reason is that I can’t help thinking it a little smug. It may be very reassuring to conceive of God’s interior life as being a life of love given and received in perfect proportions, but I find myself asking, (and feeling rather churlish as I do so), well, what about us?
We inhabit a world whose internal dynamics are not those of perfect love, a world whose internal dynamics are rather different. We need look no further than the streets of this city, in which young men are stabbed or shot every week, or so it seems. The eternal dance of love that is the social Trinity’s reality is all very well, but what difference can it make to Lambeth or Stockwell’ internal reality? Our exhortation that God’s life is different to ours and that we had better change ours to match his echoes mockingly around the car-parks and estates that are the backdrop to so much of this city’s life.
It seems to me that we are in need of a theology which more robustly links the Trinity to earth, air, fire and water; to bubbling magma and shifting tectonic plates; to asphalt, glass and concrete; to flesh and blood; to a poisoned atmosphere and a changing climate. We are in need of a theology that does not detach God from our lived reality and lock him up in a realm we label ‘spiritual’; we are in need of a theology that only the Trinity can provide.
We need to learn to speak more confidently of God the Father: of God the creative energy that blew the universe into being and that crackles at the heart of all matter. This is God who cradles creation in his arms, sustaining it at every second, ceaselessly pouring himself out into it, giving himself as our life-blood and beating heart.
We need to learn to speak more confidently of God the Son: of God the enfleshed reality in our midst. This is the incarnate God, incarnation not being something God gave up on the first Ascension Day. It is something as fundamental to God’s nature as is creation. God the Son is among us as surely as he was when Jesus of Nazareth walked the byways of Galilee and sought out the poor and the despised. Look under the fallen buildings of Chengdu or into the heart of the Burmese cyclone, look at those places where God’s people are suffering, and there you will see divine footprints, there you will place your fingers into the eternal wounds of Jesus Christ.
And we need to learn to speak more confidently of God the Spirit: of God the bringer of truth and unity. This is the God who burns in our hearts and who today reaches out to embrace us, God whose impetus is always towards our unity and never towards our division, God whose leading is always into truth and never into suspicion and fear.
To to this God, the Triune Majesty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be all honour, glory and praise, today and always. Amen.
I've taken up each trendy cause, I've filled the manse with down-and-outsI'm very good at counselling (I say "It's swings and roundabouts")It won't be long till I've removed all pews from the vicinity But please don't press me hard about the meaning of the Trinity.
Please don't press me hard about the meaning of the Trinity…this is the day that the preacher fears above all others, of course. It is the day when he or she has to stand before the faithful and find something to say (preferably something new and full of insight) about the central mystery of orthodox Christian doctrine, the mystery that appals our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters and remains the surest way of really upsetting a Jehovah’s Witness, the mystery of God the Holy Trinity..
I’ve never had the benefit of hearing the Vicar of Ambridge preach on the meaning of the Trinity, but my guess would be that he is a devotee of what has become known as its ‘social’ meaning. Put simply, if that is not a contradiction it terms, belief in the Trinity means belief in one God, but in one God who is three Persons. Any attempt to explain that further, and there have been many, must inevitably emphasize the One God at the expense of the Three Persons, or the Three Persons at the expense of the One God. The social understanding definitely does the latter, and in so doing it draws extensively on the tradition of the Eastern Churches, and, alongside the vogue for all things Orthodox, such as John Taverner’s music and Andrei Rublev’s famous icon, it has been hugely fashionable and influential in recent years.
God, say social Trinitarians, is a perfect community. Father, Son and Spirit are locked in an eternal embrace that is characterized by their giving to one another and receiving from one another mutual and reciprocal love. The internal life of the Trinity models a pattern of unity amidst diversity, and so God is in Godself an exemplar for human behaviour and human belonging. We are called to live in perfect love just as the divine family lives in perfect love.
This is infinitely preferable, in my view, to the classical Western understanding of the Trinity. Ever influenced by Platonic thought this has constantly emphasized the essential unity of God and his utter changelessness and impassibility. But although I owe a personal debt to the social Trinitarians I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with their understanding of God, or at least with some of its more casual and sloppy manifestations. The reason is that I can’t help thinking it a little smug. It may be very reassuring to conceive of God’s interior life as being a life of love given and received in perfect proportions, but I find myself asking, (and feeling rather churlish as I do so), well, what about us?
We inhabit a world whose internal dynamics are not those of perfect love, a world whose internal dynamics are rather different. We need look no further than the streets of this city, in which young men are stabbed or shot every week, or so it seems. The eternal dance of love that is the social Trinity’s reality is all very well, but what difference can it make to Lambeth or Stockwell’ internal reality? Our exhortation that God’s life is different to ours and that we had better change ours to match his echoes mockingly around the car-parks and estates that are the backdrop to so much of this city’s life.
It seems to me that we are in need of a theology which more robustly links the Trinity to earth, air, fire and water; to bubbling magma and shifting tectonic plates; to asphalt, glass and concrete; to flesh and blood; to a poisoned atmosphere and a changing climate. We are in need of a theology that does not detach God from our lived reality and lock him up in a realm we label ‘spiritual’; we are in need of a theology that only the Trinity can provide.
We need to learn to speak more confidently of God the Father: of God the creative energy that blew the universe into being and that crackles at the heart of all matter. This is God who cradles creation in his arms, sustaining it at every second, ceaselessly pouring himself out into it, giving himself as our life-blood and beating heart.
We need to learn to speak more confidently of God the Son: of God the enfleshed reality in our midst. This is the incarnate God, incarnation not being something God gave up on the first Ascension Day. It is something as fundamental to God’s nature as is creation. God the Son is among us as surely as he was when Jesus of Nazareth walked the byways of Galilee and sought out the poor and the despised. Look under the fallen buildings of Chengdu or into the heart of the Burmese cyclone, look at those places where God’s people are suffering, and there you will see divine footprints, there you will place your fingers into the eternal wounds of Jesus Christ.
And we need to learn to speak more confidently of God the Spirit: of God the bringer of truth and unity. This is the God who burns in our hearts and who today reaches out to embrace us, God whose impetus is always towards our unity and never towards our division, God whose leading is always into truth and never into suspicion and fear.
To to this God, the Triune Majesty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be all honour, glory and praise, today and always. Amen.
Friday, 9 May 2008
Sunday after Ascension Day 2008
We inhabit in-between times. An election has taken place, and our city has chosen a new Mayor. The outgoing incumbent has said his farewells. The analysis of his failure has begun. The new Mayor has yet to receive the seals of office, and he will not do so until midnight. Today, popular authority has passed to him; actual power is rather harder to locate. So today absence and anticipation haunt London’s body politic.
It’s a scenario not entirely dissimilar to the one that confronts us liturgically. This Sunday is surely one of the strangest in the church’s year. For weeks now we have tuned our Alleluias, rejoicing in the resurrection of out Lord Jesus Christ. For weeks now we have heard the promise that the Holy Spirit will come as our guide and strength. Then on Thursday we celebrated the glorious Ascension with hymns of triumph. The Son has returned to the right hand of the Father.
So today we inhabit in-between times. Absence and anticipation haunts the body ecclesiastic. We can ask legitimately: where is God? Not enfleshed in the world, for the Son has ascended. Not burning in our hearts, for the Spirit has not yet come. Where is God?
Some would answer that question very quickly, surprised that, in its apparent faithlessness, it should even be put. Yet surely our tradition demands it. Our tradition’s history is not an unending demonstration of God’s omniscient power. ‘Leave us not comfortless’ we have prayed in the Collect. The implication is that today, we are comfortless. Despite the miracle of Easter God is somehow absent and we are somehow alone, just as we were when we waited with the blessed Virgin, with Mary of Magdala, and with the disciples in the dark of Easter Eve for the spark of resurrection life. We forget that at our peril, for we minister in a world in which divine absence often seems more plausible than divine presence.
Of course, it’s the job of the visiting preacher to seek to convince the congregation that this is not so; he should produce cogent arguments for God’s inexhaustible vitality; he should face down any counter-suggestion with irrefutable logic. I think it more honest instead to attempt to remain constant to the tradition, to the absence of God, to the experience of the Virgin and the disciples, to that which continues to be the experience of many. I offer in place of proofs a survival kit for times like this, times when God is distant, difficult to locate and difficult to discern.
The first hardly needs mentioning in these surroundings, for is the celebration of the sacraments, those tactile symbols, vehicles of God’s presence, that the Church has proclaimed in generation after generation. Today, in these in-between times, and in common with Christians of every age and in every place, we will still break bread and share wine together. The Eucharist we believe to be the gift of Christ to his Church, commended and instituted as a means of his being with us. In these in-between time we can still take broken fragments in our hands; we can still raise the chalice to our lips. Perhaps we will not see God coming with power today, but perhaps we will trace his fingerprints, the marks of where he has been; perhaps we will touch and taste the things that he has left behind. These are the iron rations of a desert people, whose guiding star has been obscured by the treacherous mist. They are for us the mantle of Elijah, bearing divine presence and heavenly authority across the years and equipping us to minister in Christ’s name.
The second is prayer. By this I do not mean petitions offered up in expectation of early reward. I mean prayer as Michael Mayne understands it when he writes of it as ‘…a disciplined taking of time to remind ourselves of who we are and whose we are, in which the one necessary element is stillness’. I mean the prayer commended by Peter to his readers, prayer that is watchful and sober, expectant and anticipatory. I mean the prayer that we may imagine to have been the Virgin’s as she awaited the unfolding of the angel’s promises to her.
The third is this gathering, the people round about us, the worshipping community. Of course human company is a good thing in itself, and of course human relationships are vital to human flourishing, but for Christians there is a particular and unique importance to our being together. It is that we believe that God becomes incarnate as one of us and that he thus shares and makes holy the life the life of human beings. If we believe, as I think we must, that God cannot change, then this incarnation cannot have been a phase God went through, a phase that, after Easter, he thought better of. God cannot be like a rebellious teenager shrugging off one fashion and adopting another. The incarnation must still be true; it must be happening today. Jesus Christ must be in our midst as surely as he was in the disciples’ midst when he promised them the Spirit’s gift. His Ascension means that the nature of the incarnation changed, but the Son of God who was present with his Father ‘before the foundation of the world’ is still in that world today, and still calling us to follow him.
So today let us pray for our new Mayor and his colleagues and for an end to these in-between times. Let us commit ourselves afresh to sacrament, prayer and common worship: to doing, praying and being. For my guess is that if we can remain faithful to these then despite our apparent distance and estrangement from the divine we will find ourselves stumbling over St Augustine’s great discovery and the most profound truth of our existence, that ‘God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves’. Amen.
The Sunday after Ascension Day,
4 May 2008,
St Mary's Bourne Street
It’s a scenario not entirely dissimilar to the one that confronts us liturgically. This Sunday is surely one of the strangest in the church’s year. For weeks now we have tuned our Alleluias, rejoicing in the resurrection of out Lord Jesus Christ. For weeks now we have heard the promise that the Holy Spirit will come as our guide and strength. Then on Thursday we celebrated the glorious Ascension with hymns of triumph. The Son has returned to the right hand of the Father.
So today we inhabit in-between times. Absence and anticipation haunts the body ecclesiastic. We can ask legitimately: where is God? Not enfleshed in the world, for the Son has ascended. Not burning in our hearts, for the Spirit has not yet come. Where is God?
Some would answer that question very quickly, surprised that, in its apparent faithlessness, it should even be put. Yet surely our tradition demands it. Our tradition’s history is not an unending demonstration of God’s omniscient power. ‘Leave us not comfortless’ we have prayed in the Collect. The implication is that today, we are comfortless. Despite the miracle of Easter God is somehow absent and we are somehow alone, just as we were when we waited with the blessed Virgin, with Mary of Magdala, and with the disciples in the dark of Easter Eve for the spark of resurrection life. We forget that at our peril, for we minister in a world in which divine absence often seems more plausible than divine presence.
Of course, it’s the job of the visiting preacher to seek to convince the congregation that this is not so; he should produce cogent arguments for God’s inexhaustible vitality; he should face down any counter-suggestion with irrefutable logic. I think it more honest instead to attempt to remain constant to the tradition, to the absence of God, to the experience of the Virgin and the disciples, to that which continues to be the experience of many. I offer in place of proofs a survival kit for times like this, times when God is distant, difficult to locate and difficult to discern.
The first hardly needs mentioning in these surroundings, for is the celebration of the sacraments, those tactile symbols, vehicles of God’s presence, that the Church has proclaimed in generation after generation. Today, in these in-between times, and in common with Christians of every age and in every place, we will still break bread and share wine together. The Eucharist we believe to be the gift of Christ to his Church, commended and instituted as a means of his being with us. In these in-between time we can still take broken fragments in our hands; we can still raise the chalice to our lips. Perhaps we will not see God coming with power today, but perhaps we will trace his fingerprints, the marks of where he has been; perhaps we will touch and taste the things that he has left behind. These are the iron rations of a desert people, whose guiding star has been obscured by the treacherous mist. They are for us the mantle of Elijah, bearing divine presence and heavenly authority across the years and equipping us to minister in Christ’s name.
The second is prayer. By this I do not mean petitions offered up in expectation of early reward. I mean prayer as Michael Mayne understands it when he writes of it as ‘…a disciplined taking of time to remind ourselves of who we are and whose we are, in which the one necessary element is stillness’. I mean the prayer commended by Peter to his readers, prayer that is watchful and sober, expectant and anticipatory. I mean the prayer that we may imagine to have been the Virgin’s as she awaited the unfolding of the angel’s promises to her.
The third is this gathering, the people round about us, the worshipping community. Of course human company is a good thing in itself, and of course human relationships are vital to human flourishing, but for Christians there is a particular and unique importance to our being together. It is that we believe that God becomes incarnate as one of us and that he thus shares and makes holy the life the life of human beings. If we believe, as I think we must, that God cannot change, then this incarnation cannot have been a phase God went through, a phase that, after Easter, he thought better of. God cannot be like a rebellious teenager shrugging off one fashion and adopting another. The incarnation must still be true; it must be happening today. Jesus Christ must be in our midst as surely as he was in the disciples’ midst when he promised them the Spirit’s gift. His Ascension means that the nature of the incarnation changed, but the Son of God who was present with his Father ‘before the foundation of the world’ is still in that world today, and still calling us to follow him.
So today let us pray for our new Mayor and his colleagues and for an end to these in-between times. Let us commit ourselves afresh to sacrament, prayer and common worship: to doing, praying and being. For my guess is that if we can remain faithful to these then despite our apparent distance and estrangement from the divine we will find ourselves stumbling over St Augustine’s great discovery and the most profound truth of our existence, that ‘God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves’. Amen.
The Sunday after Ascension Day,
4 May 2008,
St Mary's Bourne Street
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