The Instant

L'Envoi

2010-06-27T13:37:00.000-07:00

There won't be any more posts on this non-blog, as the institutional church has finally made it abundantly clear that I am not wanted...and maybe, after all, it only gave me an extra push in the direction in which I was already going.

But I think I am happy with the "Quaker sermon", which also talks about my beloved St Paul and the thing we hope for above all, being the last one.

Don't listen to me, anyway. Listen to God...and what canst thou say?

What canst thou say?

2010-05-01T12:17:00.001-07:00

Last week I suggested some ways of approaching reading the Scriptures. The main drift of what I was saying was that people “in those days” were not different from us now, and – well, this is so obvious as not really to need saying – God was not different then from the way he is now. It is to us this is spoken, of us this is said.

I hope that in the years I have been standing up here I have not told you what to believe. I may have told you how I see things, I may have told you how the church, or a part of the church, or certain people of God, see things; but the things of God can only, fundamentally, be understood as part of my own, your own, relationship with God as we encounter God in the Scriptures and in our lives: the two elements of salvation history.

Margaret Fell quotes George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement, thus: “You will say Christ saith this, and the apostles say this, but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?” Now this is not to say that any old interpretation is fine and that all opinions are equal. We are not talking here about opinions. “Opinions”, if not worthless, are at the least a barrier to true understanding. Because opinions come from the surface, and understanding comes from deep within, whether deep within our brains, deep within our guts or deep within our souls. Gestalt therapy, which some of you may be aware of, relies on that. It relies on the fact that deep within, so deep sometimes as to be inaccessible under normal circumstances, we all hold our own answers, our own healing, our own inward godliness – as George Fox put it, “that of God” within each human being made in God’s image and likeness. And that deep place is where we find peace, understanding, our true selves as God sees them.

What matters when you read the Scriptures is the response the passage draws from “that of God” within you; the message that you hear from God. You do need to ask yourself Fox’s question, “what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?”, but if the passage has not evoked something from your depths, then you have not understood it, however much you know about it academically.

Since I cannot tell you what to believe, or what today’s Scriptures are saying to you, I can only tell you what they are saying to me. And what leaps to my mind as I hear them is St Paul’s phrase: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied”

Paul is our first role model, the first Christian we know anything much about to live like us, the first Christian we know anything much about ever to need to make this statement: If for this life only we hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. During Jesus’ lifetime, I doubt whether anyone even gave that a thought. Yes, there are a couple of references in the Old Testament to life beyond death, and it is a given that God is eternal. But I am pretty sure that the people who came to Jesus came to him for what he could give them in this life. Paul’s statement would probably have made no sense to them at all. It was for this life that they hoped in Jesus, and while some of them rather thought he might be the Christ, the word did not, at that time, have the resonances that it has had since the resurrection and, above all, since Paul’s meditations on the meaning of the resurrection. As for the people who had lived with Jesus and who had stayed the course until the resurrection, they would have been mystified by that statement too. It was patently obvious to them that Jesus Christ transcended death, and in a way quite different to mere raising from the dead back to this life. Jesus was alive and solid, but no longer of this world: his very presence spoke to them of a fuller life with God.

But Paul was the first Christian we know anything much about to have to live by faith as we do. He was the first one to whom that statement of faith, which is also a statement of at least the possibility of doubt, would have made sense, as it does to us. Paul had never seen Jesus in the flesh. His only direct experience of the Lord was in a vision; dramatic it may have been, but it was a vision only, and we do not really know what form it took. It is quite possible that the basic experience was not that different from the experiences of contact with the Lord that many or most of us have had. I can think of a few in my life that I could no more doubt than I could doubt my own existence, and I don’t think I’m unusual in that. But still, you can’t put your finger in the wounds of a vision, or your hand in its side. Jesus knew that very well, and told us that he knew it: Blessed, he said, are those who have not seen, and yet believe. That’s Paul, and you, and me; if indeed we are children of light, and have walked in the light.

We have not seen the Risen Christ. But it is the crucifixion, and the resurrection, that we pin our hopes on; and this is the Paschal season in which we particularly remember and celebrate the source of our hope, for this life and beyond.

So, back to today’s readings. First, the reading from the book of Daniel, and that long, long night he spent in silence, that of God within him so deeply one with the God who transcended him, that during that night earth and heaven touched, and the peace of God reigned in human and animal alike. Please don’t ask me whether “it really happened”. I do not know whether it really happened and I do not much care. At the very least, this story from Daniel is a parable…..an indication of the direction we might take towards the light. But I think that in the context of our second reading, it could also be the foreshadowing of another cave with a stone in front of it, and another early morning discovery.

So tell me, I hear you murmur, did this other early morning discovery “really happen”? I am sorry but I cannot tell you for certain that it did. And, you know, even if I told you with absolute certainty that it did, that would be of no use to you. Because this is a different sort of truth from the ones that we meet in our everyday lives. This is a truth that has to live in you; live in your depths, in the depths of your brain, your guts and your soul. It is a truth on which Christians stake their entire life, their entire hope of happiness, their entire hope of glory. If that early morning discovery did not really happen, our lives as Christians – my life as a Christian – have been a disaster, a bad joke. Because Christ’s resurrection, and our redemption, are so much part of our very identity as Christians, that if Christ is not risen, then the essential part of who I am simply ceases to be. “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied”. The only consolation is that, if it did not, we shall never know. But if it did…then, as that same Paul, our brother in faith and in doubt, put it, the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For the corruptible must clothe itself with the incorruptible, and the mortal with immortality. When the corruptible has been clothed with the incorruptible, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory”.

God's Postie

2010-04-24T11:18:00.001-07:00

You know what it feels like…you are waiting for the results of an exam, medical test or job interview. They will arrive in the post today & the postie is late. & the feet of the postie are what you are waiting for above all.

Now the postie is not necessarily wearing those fashionable strappy gladiator sandals on beautiful slender tanned feet which have just had a pedicure. It’s not the feet so much as the sound of the footsteps. You can hear them even though you are at the other end of the house, because you have been listening out for them. Here they come: the scruffy trainers with laces that don’t match, barely visible below overlong, frayed, dirty jeans. How beautiful are the feet! & then you hear the letterbox go, the letter drops on to the mat, you open it &…you have got a distinction, an all-clear, the dream job. How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation!

& now imagine that this is news that a whole nation has been waiting for, almost but not quite losing hope, battered by one disaster after another; Isaiah may mention watchmen, but there are no watchtowers: the Babylonians have seen to that. & the last people to come over those mountains were bearing anything but peace & good tidings. The postie, shall we say, had brought tidings of failure, disease & death; but now it is different. The future is no longer unmitigated destruction & oppression; the light at the end of the tunnel really is not, this time, the headlights of an oncoming train.
This is how to read tonight’s passage from Isaiah. People in Isaiah’s day were not different from us. This may be a historical document, but that’s not why we read it. I agree, of course, that we need to know some of the historical & social background of Scripture (I’ve given you some just now!) but there can be a temptation to concentrate too much on it. It is genuinely interesting; but above all, maybe, it is less threatening, less demanding; we can stay comfortably in our heads & discuss whether it was the Babylonians or the Assyrians that Isaiah was talking about &, if the latter, whether their cohorts really were gleaming in purple & gold. & what exactly John the Baptist ate &, if the locusts were insects, whether he cooked them first.

I will quote for the nth time the phrase that Kierkegaard muttered to himself before starting to read any Scripture: “It is of me this is spoken, to me this is said”. We must allow the Scripture to interrogate us, not as to what is in our brain (do we know what a locust tree is & where’s Assyria?) but as to what is in our soul.

I have noticed quite frequently at Bible study groups & even at Lent groups that there is an almost audible sigh of relief when the discussion moves to some piece of historical or social information; when that is not what the whole thing is about at all. We are not talking about academic questions but about human beings; & human beings in their nature as children of God & as subjects of salvation history; we are talking, indeed, about God’s action in his creation. Why do we read Scripture after all? Paul replies quite clearly: to Timothy he says: “All Scripture is…profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness” & to the Romans he explains that “whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction, so that through perseverance & the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope”. “How beautiful are the feet!”
& there’s that familiar verse from the epistle to the Hebrews “For the word of God is living & active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul & spirit, joints & marrow; it judges the thoughts & attitudes of the heart” . I’m not sure we really hear that verse or we might not quote it so much. It’s not comfortable to have our soul & spirit, joints & marrow, sliced apart without anaesthetic. & even in the context of Bible study or a Lent Group, it can be distinctly uncomfortable to have our thoughts & attitudes judged in public. It takes courage to say, as some evangelicals put it, “This piece of Scripture convicts me”.
Interestingly, Paul applies our passage to preachers; he says, in Romans ch 10: Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how can they call on one they have not believed in? & how can they believe in one of whom they have not heard? & how can they hear without someone preaching to them? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"

So, as always, I am the first person to be convicted by this passage, which speaks to me not only as a child of God, as a Christian, but as a preacher.

My job, the job of all of us who stand up here, is to be the postie I was talking about earlier. To bring from God the message that his people most dearly & deeply want to hear. To bring those who hear the word into the closest possible personal contact with it. Otherwise we might just as well not bother. If you want to know what a locust-tree looks like, look on google images. If you want to know the dates of the Babylonian captivity you can read a history of Israel.

What a preacher should do is what you see Mark do in our second reading: show you how the Scripture speaks not of ancient history but of today. Mark takes the anticipation, the surprise, the disbelieving joy, of Isaiah’s Israelites & plonks it straight down where it belongs in his own era: in the appearance of John the Baptist & Jesus, in the middle of the Roman occupation. Because this is how things are, this is how God is, this is what God does. Mark isn’t talking about five hundred years ago when he quotes Isaiah: he is talking about now. When we read the Scriptures here at Evensong, we are not talking about two thousand, two & a half thousand years ago: we are talking about now.

So read those passages again when you get home. Please, do. & ask yourself what they are saying to you. What does it mean to you that our God reigns, & that Isaiah was exploding with joy when he announced it? or that Mark is calling on you – yes, you – to prepare the way for the Lord?

Because now I’m going to turn the tables on you. I’m down there on the order of service as preacher for Evensong. But Jesus addresses his call to every single one of you when he says “Go into all the world & preach the good news to all creation” & “Therefore go & make disciples of all nations”. & unless the Scriptures, the history of God in this world, speak to your life, you will have nothing to tell them.

& so let us pray: O you who are the fulfilment of the law & the prophets, Christ our God, you have carried out the will of the Father in its entirety. Fill our minds with light & our hearts with love each time we take your holy Scriptures in our hands: for you live & reign with the Father & the Holy Spirit, now & for ever. Amen.

O quam metuendus est locus iste: vere non est hic aliud nisi domus Dei et porta caeli

2010-03-06T07:42:00.000-08:00

When I travel by train I look at all the windows flashing by and it makes me quite dizzy to think that behind each window there is a human being who is the centre of their own universe. And then I see a church. That unmistakable architecture. And I wonder what God thinks about it, and why we think it is at all helpful to put up these strange buildings.

There’s a special feel about churches. Some churches smell of incense. Some churches smell of wax polish or Mr Sheen. Some churches, where the priest or minister lives next door, smell of cabbage. But there is something about most of them; whether or not it is the prayers seeping into the walls I do not know. But when you enter a church, you know where you are. Architects are clever. They can do almost as much as magicians can with smoke and mirrors, and there is a reason why church buildings have evolved as they have: it’s rather like chemists imitating natural substances with artificial ones: orange flavour in chocolates, vanilla scent in perfumes; a building that evokes the numinous in imitation of the naturally numinous that comes upon us anywhere. The ancients were not so wrong when they believed that every tree and every spring had its own deity. But you need to bottle a scent to spray it on your wrists, and you need to wall in the numinous to be able to summon people to experience it Sunday by Sunday – and other days too.

That’s not all bad by any means. A church can be a refuge on a busy or sad day – it’s easily recognised and easily accessed. And it is a place for fellowship. But Jacob tells us something very important in today’s reading: that the house of God and the gate of heaven is everywhere – or rather, anywhere. There is no place on this earth where we might not see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending. And St Paul was not talking figuratively when he said that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit. I said I recognise the churches as I gaze at towns and cities from the train. But in fact, behind every one of those windows in every one of those houses is at least one temple of the Holy Spirit.

And the natural activity in a temple is prayer. It’s strange: nobody ever tells you the fact that prayer is easy. Prayer is the simplest and the most natural thing that there is: it is as natural as breathing; actually, it is as natural as being. There are countless books written about prayer and precious few of them tell you how it’s done; and those that do often give complicated techniques that only suit people like their authors. Many of the techniques are helpful; I have found the Jesus Prayer helpful, and I find lectio divina invaluable. But they aren’t prayer, just techniques; just preparation.

So here’s a suggestion. One of these days, take your guilt, and your gut feeling that God likes things to be tough for us, and leave them outside the room. Find a really comfortable armchair. Make sure you aren’t hungry or thirsty, too cold or too hot, and that you don’t need the loo. Set aside half an hour to do nothing, in comfort, in the presence of God. Or if you prefer, go for a walk, nowhere in particular, in the presence of God. And relax. And wait, or listen, or just do nothing. Breathe; be. Don’t worry about whether you will hear anything, whether you will fall asleep, whether you will be “distracted”. I don’t believe in distractions. If they’re not important, you can push them aside, or simply be aware of them as something that’s chattering away somewhere in the background. If they are important, then God’s interested in them too, and they’re not distractions.

Prayer is simply being with God – what you do with the time once you and God are sitting in companionable silence is your business. “But we’re always with God!” Are we indeed? Am I with you if we’re out somewhere and I have my nose in my mobile phone, texting someone else? Are you with me if you are reading Scotland on Sunday while I’m preaching? Honestly…it has happened to me…and that’s why, when you’re beginning to pray, you really do need to be somewhere without phones or computers, or whatever your equivalent is. With practice you can be with God anywhere; like Rabbi Lionel Blue I find busy railway stations and doctors’ waiting rooms ideal for prayer, but you do need to practise in quiet places first.

So what’s this got to do with Lent? Well now, what is Lent for? Would any of you like to give me a suggestion? No, seriously, go on…
OK. Lent is the preparation for the resurrection. Lent is the run-up to the leap into eternal life. The point of Lent is to accompany Jesus on his journey towards Easter, and at the same time practise for the journey towards our own Easter. We do this through reading the story of his journey (the Gospels), and also reading the background to it (the rest of the Scriptures). And above all, by being with God.

Giving things up for Lent, making ourselves uncomfortable, hungry, tired, cold – is totally neutral. It can be useless, it can be damaging, or it can be immensely valuable; everything hangs on why you do it. And for that you need self-knowledge. Self-discovery can be painful, but it is always worthwhile, because unless you know who you are, your inclinations, your strengths and weaknesses, your style, you can’t become the person God had in mind when he started you off on your journey towards resurrection. We do indeed see Jesus in the Gospels, but the other place we meet him is in our lives. When we sit in silence, just listening, just waiting, not talking, we meet him. And, like Nathanael, in his presence we meet ourselves.

I do wonder whether silence is a frightening idea to many of us because in silence we’re faced with our own undiluted selves, and none of us is as perfect as we would like to be and, perhaps, would like to kid ourselves we are. But the thing about silence is that God’s there. And he has told us over and over and over again that in his presence we are totally safe: a safe environment to practise being ourselves; nobody’s watching except the one who knows us better than we do.

I’ve often heard people saying they wished they had been the two disciples who spent the whole day with Jesus. Or simply wished they had lived at the same time as Jesus. Well, I’m quite glad I didn’t, as I am not sure that I would have spotted the difference between him and all the other wandering teachers, prophets and what-have-you; and I am not sure at all that, with all the religious authorities telling me that he was a wrong ’un, I would have had the discernment to spot that they were wrong. The first Lent wouldn’t have been a comfortable time or place to be.

So maybe there is something that’s worth giving up in Lent: our comfort zone, the place where we hide from God and from ourselves. I don’t know what yours is – perhaps you could sit down with God sometime and let him tell you? And don’t forget: just because you don’t see the angels ascending and descending – that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there.

Sub pennas eius sperabis

2010-02-27T07:49:00.001-08:00

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! 35Look, your house is left to you desolate.

I am sure that most of you have read, or at least are aware of, Gerry Hughes’ book called “God of Surprises”. It has been a huge success, and although it is an exceptional book, I rather think that its success is partly due to its title. That title will strike a chord with almost everyone – no, I think absolutely everyone – who has any relationship to speak of with God. God is surprising, has surprised everyone, angel or human, he has had anything to do with. There is a persistent tradition that when the angels heard that God was going to be made human in the incarnation, some of them were so horrified that they rebelled. We can’t possibly know whether or not that is true, but it is not unlike our shocking God to be too much even for angels to cope with. God has a habit of choosing shockingly unlikely people: the wrong brother; loose women (including a prostitute or two); the people who are far too old to have children but are chosen to do precisely that; the cowards; the stammering prophets; the smallest, weakest nation…and that rather confusing tradition is proudly continued by Jesus. His (alleged) father? A joiner who wasn’t even married to his mother when she became pregnant. His apostles? A bunch of probably illiterate fishermen plus the odd tax-collector and fundamentalist terrorist. The first to see him after his resurrection? A woman who might have been a sinner and had definitely been possessed by seven demons.

There are two fundamental things that we need to remember about Jesus, this person we meet in the Gospels. They seem to contradict each other but they are equally important. He was God; and he was human. We are so used to that phrase used of him in the Creed “true God of true God”, “very God of very God” , and most of us would agree that yes, Jesus was more than just a man. Some of us believe very definitely that he was true God, just as true God as the Father and the Holy Spirit. Some of us aren’t so sure. But we do proclaim it weekly, and I think we must accept that, if we are to call ourselves Christians, we have to face its implications, rather than repeating it but shying away from its meaning. And there’s no doubt that he was human; very human. I know that we are told God never asks anything of us without giving us the grace to do it, but still…how sane, how “together”, how well-balanced Jesus must have been to cope with his contradictory identity, whether he could have verbalised his oddity or not. You need to remember both sides, or you won’t come anywhere near understanding this doubly complex character.

So when you get a heartfelt cry like the one we have in today’s Gospel, you have to hear it on two levels. Jesus said this as a man, but he also said it as God, and this means that it has far-reaching connotations and resonances. He is a man, approaching the end of a mission that has, so far as he can see, been a near-total failure. He’s pretty clear by now that his days are numbered and that the future is looking very frightening. And that the very people who should have been at the centre of that mission, who should have received him with great joy and been closest to him are just the people who are rejecting him. And what is possibly worse is that he sees that if they continue on the route he sees them taking their fate will be hardly less tragic than his own. “Behold, your house is left to you…desolate.” And he loves them more than he loves himself. Christian art has depicted him as a pelican, feeding his young with his heart’s blood; the bird he himself chose was much more homely and much less dignified: a mother hen, clucking and flapping while her chicks scatter around the farmyard. One thing Jesus did not do was stand on his dignity; he preferred a small donkey to a high horse. His spirit may have had wings, but when he looked at himself the wings he saw were not an eagle’s but a hen’s.

And yet, just as the donkey on Palm Sunday was the sign both of humility and of kingship, the reference to the bird was not made just by a man; it was made by God. There is no indication in the Gospel up to this point that Jesus the man had made any particular efforts to gather the people of Jerusalem. Jerusalem of course stands for the whole people of Israel, the whole people of God. And that “how many times” refers not to the last three years but to the last three thousand…and more. I am sure that Jesus God remembered what the psalmist had said about him: He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; and Isaiah: Like birds hovering overhead, the Lord Almighty will shield Jerusalem; he will shield it and deliver it, he will 'pass over' it and will rescue it. And the author of Deuteronomy describes God’s care for Jacob like this: He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye, like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions. I like to imagine Jesus thinking of these texts, knowing that they referred to himself, but, in his humility and, in a way, his refusal to take himself too seriously, choosing to be a hen and not an eagle.

He was, as he said, meek and lowly of heart, but there was also a strength and authority about him that came from somewhere other than his human nature. You can see it in the way he simply brushed aside the power of Herod, as he later brushed aside the power of Pilate. And that was not because they did not have power. Pilate certainly did. Jesus’ life and death were indeed in his hands. It was because it did not matter. I have heard it put this way: It’s not so much what the future holds as Who holds the future. And Jesus knew who held the future, and in some fuzzy way he knew that he held it himself. When he said “I must” and “it cannot be” it was no outside agency that was compelling him. Our lots are in God’s hands, and his were in his own. It can have been no joke for a man to be God – and we can never, in a whole lifetime of thanksgiving, express even a fraction of the gratitude that he is due for going through with it.

And that’s why, sometimes, although it is of the utmost importance, especially as we move through Lent towards Easter, to remember that Jesus Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, I have trouble with pictures like that one Because, when I think of that well-known phrase “And in my flesh shall I see God” I want to add “And in His flesh shall I see God”. And when I see a depiction of the Son of God, I want to see at least some trace of that Son of Man who sat on a dusty hillside overlooking Jerusalem, spotted a frantic hen chasing her chicks and recognised himself in her.

Gloria Dei vivens homo

2010-01-23T09:44:00.000-08:00

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now – choose life!

Elsewhere in the Scriptures – and annoyingly I can’t locate the place – it says: If you wish, you can keep the commandments: to behave faithfully is within your power. He has set fire and water before you; put out your hand to whichever you prefer. Man has life and death before him; whichever a man likes best will be given to him.” Very much in tune with today’s reading. We are being told uncompromisingly that we need not sin. That if we do sin, it will be our choice. And that is perfectly good theology. There has only ever been one person living on this earth who was unable to sin - though somehow, mysteriously, still maintaining complete freedom: Jesus Christ. But since he died to cancel out the sin of Adam (whatever that was) we are no longer somehow predisposed to sin, as so many of us were taught when we were young.

This is old-fashioned stuff, isn’t it, all this talk of sin. But while I would now probably disagree with almost everything I was taught about sin when I was young, I think we lose sight of its reality at our peril. We are responsible for our actions; that is the bad news. We are responsible for our actions: that is the good news. Jesus told us that without him we could do nothing – implying, at least, nothing good. True. But the point is that we are not without him. By and of myself my attempts at virtue are pretty feeble. But we do not have to act by and of ourselves. His grace is always there first; and if we think that the remnant of the fallenness in our nature, in league with the devil, is so strong as to make any free choice impossible, we are rather underestimating the power of that grace.

These passages of Scripture are about personal responsibility before God and the choice to take the grace he is offering. There have been times, and there still are places, where it has been considered that in order to please God all you need is to be a member of a particular group and to carry out certain ritual or liturgical practices. You must be a Muslim and you must pray a certain number of times a day facing Mecca. You must be a Roman Catholic and you must go to Mass every Sunday, refrain from eating meat on Fridays, and using contraception. You must be a Jew and you must keep the Sabbath strictly and ensure that you do not become ritually unclean. Well, you can’t be all these things, and which of them you are is largely dictated by where and when you were born. I remember a conversation a couple of years ago with a fellow St John’s Pisky in which we agreed that we were “woolly Anglicans” by choice and that we would go further than that: we were “passionately woolly”. It is so difficult, in an environment – whether work or political party or religion – where a particular set of beliefs and attitudes is expected or assumed, not to allow that environment to dictate one’s thought and behaviour. Hence “passionately woolly”, hence the positive choice of a way of seeking God that dictates as little as possible; and hence responsibility. If, for example, your environment is racist or sexist, you are tempted to abdicate responsibility as an individual and act in a racist or sexist way. We see that sort of thing in the gospel, though it’s not racism but a sort of frenzy caused by prescriptive institutional religion, whereby priorities are turned upside down and the rights of God and humankind are ignored. In that frenzy it seems perfectly reasonable to tithe mint and cumin, and leave the other, more important but less precise, commandments undone. I am sure that the priest and levite who passed by on the other side were moved by pressing religious commitments. The Samaritan didn’t happen to have that sort of religion, so he was free – to choose life. At this point I should say that the Jewish religion does not have that kind of wrong priority built into the system, although it does lend itself to it through the sheer number of its commandments. The Rabbis have always insisted that the saving of human life (whether Jewish or Gentile) comes before any of the commandments. But that wasn’t the climate in Jesus’ time, and it is so easily not the climate at any time in any religion.

Freedom is a problematic thing. I remember a song containing the lines: “Freedom is a word I rarely use without thinking of the time when I’m in love”. I’m not sure what that means in the context of the song, but what it means to me is that while we desire, or think we desire, freedom, there is something else far more precious and far more desirable, which is not compatible with complete freedom, and that is love. When we say we want freedom from these binding institutions (whether it’s a racist workplace or a crazed religious system) and when we say we want freedom to choose, what we are after is not exactly freedom: we want freedom to love, to act according to our love. It is a freedom to know that you must always put the object of your love first, and as St Thomas teaches, only God can be loved legitimately with such an unconditional love. So the freedom we want and need is precisely the freedom not to sin, the freedom to choose life. Paul knew only too well that law cannot give that freedom; all it can tell us is whether or not an action is a sin. The law cannot bring us to assume true responsibility. Only love can do that. When we love we are free to choose – always – the good of the loved one; we are bound; and we are responsible.

Paul was only echoing the Lord when he said that we were no longer under the Law. God forbid, as he said, that we should think that we are thereby free to sin. No: but we are free not to sin. And only in the context of that peculiar kind of freedom does it make sense to tell us that we are able to behave faithfully, that it is within our power to choose good, to choose life; that all we need do is stretch out our hand to the alternative we prefer. Our passage does not talk about conforming to a complicated and rigid set of rules. It talks about listening to the voice of God, and holding fast to him. To God, to him, to a person. To a person we love, a person we are in a relationship with. “The word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.” Moses said this, and he did not even realise that the word was God; certainly he never dreamt that the word would be made flesh.

As a default position we should keep the “rules” of whichever method we have chosen to serve God. However, it doesn’t do any harm to question them, and we should sit lightly enough to them to know that if it becomes clear that they are better abandoned, we are free to do so. We need to be free to choose life. It was true for the Jews, the first people of the word, to whom the word was a book. It is far more true for us, to whom the word is a person.

It is not easy. He never said it would be easy. But it is possible. With his grace it is possible. Freedom, responsibility, love – none of those things is easy. And the thing is, the lighter you sit to the rules, the less they will protect you, the less you can wrap yourself around with limits. Rules can be tough, but it is freedom, refusal to set limits, absolute readiness to move with the Spirit – that is what it really means to follow Christ and to become so like him that we become worthy of bearing his name.

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Oldie but goodie

2010-01-09T11:36:00.001-08:00

I see I forgot to do a sermon for Epiphany last week, so here's one I made earlier:

In dulci iubilo Now sing with hearts aglow
Our delight and pleasure Lies in praesepio:
Like sunshine is our treasure Matris in gremio:
Alpha es et O; Alpha es et O.

I’ve chosen that carol rather than the more obvious “We three Kings” or “Three Kings from Persian lands afar” not because I have doubts about the royalty, origins or number of the Magi (none of which matter in the least) but because this year I am struck more by Christ’s response than by our gifts, by the reality more than the appearance.

Of course, it’s not really accurate to speak of Christ’s response to our gifts, since our gifts are themselves a response. As the Preface has it, “You do not need our praise, but our desire to praise you is itself your gift”. That reminds me of Chesterton’s answer to the question “Why did God make us?”: “Because he thought we would like it”. Christ, God, does not do anything for the sake of a response. he does everything for its own sake – or rather, ultimately for his own sake – because what he does is by definition good in itself. But when we see what he does, and far more when we get a glimpse of what he is, it is impossible not to respond; and that response evokes a response in its turn. “For our praise does not add anything to you, but works for our salvation”. All the same, perhaps I should have said not “Christ’s response to our gifts” but “Christ’s Being, which is at once the inspiration and the reward of our gifts”. I’ve always regretted discovering that “Ego Deus tuus and merces tua magna nimis” is not correctly rendered by the Douay’s “I am thy God and thy reward exceeding great”. Because, mistranslation or not, it is eminently true. The only reward that really is exceeding great is, after all, God himself.

“Like sunshine is our treasure, Matris in gremio”. The Magi knew they were travelling towards the real treasure; their instinct to bring gifts, their own best treasure, to give when they found him, was a sound one. Like calls to like: the divine treasure called for the human treasure. how could it be otherwise?

Like sunshine is our treasure: the nations shall walk in his light and kings in the brightness of his rising. All they from Saba shall come, bringing gold and frankincense: and showing forth praise to the Lord. This is not quite what it looks like. It is in fact an exchange of gifts between God and humankind; it is one example of the wonderful exchange whereby God made himself like us so that we might become like him. “To him that shall overcome I will give power over the nations, as I also have received of my Father; and I will give him the morning star. Behold I stand at the door and knock; if anyone shall hear my voice, and open to me the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, ad he with me. To him that shall overcome, I will give to sit with me on my throne, as I also have overcome, and am sat down with my Father on his throne.” The Magi knew quite well that the initiative had not been theirs: the root and stock of David, the bright and morning star, had done the knocking. They had simply answered the call.

They had simply answered the call: and it was clear to them, when they arrived at where the star stopped, that they had arrived at the gate of heaven. “O Patris caritas! O Nati lenitas! Deeply were we stained per nostra crimina; but thou for us hast gained caelorum gaudia. O that we were there!

I said that I was more struck this year by the reality than by the appearance; I think that the reality of this episode in the earthly life of Christ is told – as so often when John does not relate an episode in his gospel – in Revelations. What the Magi saw with their physical eyes was rather an unimpressive sight; but I think their inner eye might well recognise this description:

“After these things I looked, and behold, a door was opened in heaven…immediately I was in the Spirit: and behold there was a throne set in heaven, and upon the throne one sitting, and he that sat was to the sight like the jasper and the sardine stone, and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.” “Like sunshine is our treasure, Matris in gremio!”

We don’t know who else was visibly in that house, but there were certainly angels singing nova cantica, and all the bells were ringing in caeli curia. The Magi were just a small fraction of the vast multitude worshipping Christ. “The living creatures rested not day and night, saying: Holy, holy, holy Lord, God Almighty, who was, and who is, and who is to come. And when those living creatures gave glory, and honour, and benediction to him that sitteth on the throne, and adored him that liveth for ever and ever; the four and twenty ancients fell down before him that sitteth on the throne, and adored him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying: Thou art worthy, O Lord our God, to receive glory, and honour and power: because thou hast created all things: and for thy will they were, and have been created.”

This is not just a visit of a few Magi to a child in Bethlehem. It is not even just the first visit of the Gentiles to the Christ. It is the start of the consummation of the age, the turning of humankind to God; the reconciliation of heaven and earth, the marriage of God and humankind. It is what John describes thus: “And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of great thunders, saying: Alleluia: for the Lord our God the Almighty hath reigned. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give glory; for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath prepared herself…and he said to me: Write: Blessed are they that are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb”. the Magi knew they were blessed. I’ve always been fond of Matthew’s phrase: “they rejoiced with exceeding great joy”. Nothing so strong is found anywhere else in the gospels, not even after the resurrection. Because here in the stable is the dawn of the new dispensation, in which God is with us. This stable is the new Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adored for her husband…Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them. And they shall be his people, and God himself with them shall be their God. The Lord God Almighty is the temple thereof, and the Lamb…and the city hath no need of the sun, nor of the moon, to shine in it. For the glory of God hath enlightened it, and the Lamb is the lamp thereof…and he that sat on the throne said: Behold, I make all things new…Write, for these words are most faithful and true…I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.” Rightly did the Magi rejoice with exceeding great joy!

O Jesu, parvule: For thee I long alway;
Hear me, I beseech thee, O puer optime;
And let my pleading reach thee, O princeps gloriae.
Trahe me post te; trahe me post te.

Amen! Even so come, Lord Jesus!

Sapientia Dei, cum sit una, omnia potest

2010-01-03T13:50:00.000-08:00

Ecclus 24:1-4;12-16; Eph 1:3-6; 15-18; Jn 1:1-18

I find it interesting – not to say exciting – to find the Son of God spoken of in the feminine gender. We are used to applying texts about Wisdom to Mary, and that is certainly generally appropriate. But there can be no real doubt that in the case of our first reading today we are hearing Sirach, unknown to himself, speaking about Jesus Christ. There may have been a slight temptation among those who put together the readings for today to fight shy of retaining the feminine pronoun found in the original text – after all, wisdom is a neuter noun in English – but one must be grateful that they did decide to do so. Unfortunately, the response to the Psalm which we are offered is not so bold, arguably even producing a mistranslation in its trepidation. For Verbum caro factum est the English has “”The Word of God became man”. Well, yes, the Word did become man, but that is not what St John is saying; the Word became man simply because the Word, in becoming flesh, had to become a man or a woman if the assumed humanity was to be a true one.

While I am not exactly a feminist theologian (I am neither a feminist nor a theologian), I think it is important to realise that when we speak of the Word of God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity (and note, both “person” and “Trinity” are feminine nouns in most languages) gender-words are irrelevant; and if we speak of the “Son” of God, and “he” for convenience, as we do of the “Father”, we are not in fact speaking accurately and we are certainly not giving any information as to the nature of those Persons. We’re a little more cautious about the Holy Spirit, who is referred to by whatever gender of pronoun agrees with “Spirit” in the relevant language; in English “It” is quite often heard, and increasingly “she”. I use “she” myself, but I should say that I am only doing it to redress the balance; while it does say something very fundamental about the Spirit, it would also become misleading if overstressed.

I would even be inclined to say that even when we are speaking about the Incarnate Word, gender-words are only used for convenience. Jesus was indeed a man; as Ezra Pound rightly said, “No capon priest was the Goodly Fere, but a man o’ men was he”, but I would venture to say that all the same his gender on earth does not tell us anything fundamental about him. Had he been a woman – impossible at that time and in that culture – he (or rather she) would have been a woman o’ women – the perfection of woman, as he was in fact the perfection of man. St John makes this pretty clear in today’s Gospel. Verbum caro factum est contrasts with the description of John the Baptist: Fuit homo missus a Deo. Homo isn’t the specifically masculine vir, which we find later, but it does have a masculine slant which is not at all present in caro. John is just saying “The Word of God became one of us”.

I accept that it would be difficult for most of us – yes, myself included – to cope with a new version of the bible in which for God the Father we would read “Mother”; for “God the Son” (not, obviously, referring to the Incarnate Son) “Daughter” and so on. I am certainly not advocating that, because that would simply be making the same mistake in the opposite direction. What I do say is that we should become more aware of those occasions when the unexpected feminine is found; and at the same time – paradoxically – of the inadequacy of both masculine and feminine in speaking of God. Both must be used, and used naturally, to give the complete picture. As we know, although Jesus did call the disciples “children”, he does not seem to have thought of himself as a father; as he laments over Jerusalem he depicts himself not as the father but as the mother of his people Israel.

Actually, this “feminist” point is not the point I want to make, though I is part of that point. If it seems shocking to think of God as feminine – or even as neither masculine or feminine, which is the truth, but a truth which can’t, I think, be grasped unless the balance is, so to speak, over-redressed – that’s excellent. Because sometimes only shock can awake; as Haydn knew! Excellent – yes; but also very sad. Because this is part of our blindness as regards God. We cannot see God, that is true; that isn’t the problem: the problem is that we don’t realise it. It w accepted we are blind we would not have sin; but now we think we see, our sin remains. We were, as I say in season and out of season, created in the image and likeness of God, but that phrase can also mislead and mesmerise. We don’t listen. We have our own idea of God, and we don’t listen. This first reading could do as an antidote to that. I wonder whether that is intentional, on this second Sunday after Christmas when our attention is so much focused on the Child who is so like us. It’s even more effective if one includes the verses that the lectionary omits, as I intend to do.

As we look at that Child, let us not form God in the image and likeness of what we can see. Just for once, let’s look from the opposite angle, as St John does when he presents his view of the origins of the Child: the angle which all three readings offer us today. let’s try to throw off our inadequate conceptions of God, not by trying to create new ones ourselves, since they would probably be as crude an attempt as replacing “God the Father” with “God the Mother”, but by listening to what God tells us about himself through the mouth of the inspired writers.

This Child – what is so important about him? Listen to him speaking of himself in the person of Wisdom, in the verses the lectionary omits: “I came out of the mouth of the Most High, the firstborn before all creatures; I made that in the heavens there should rise light that never faileth, and as a cloud I covered all the earth. I dwelt in the highest places, and my throne is in a pillar of a cloud. I alone have compassed the circuit of heaven, and have penetrated into the bottom of the deep, and have walked the waves of the sea. And have stood in all the earth, and in every people, and in every nation I have had the chief rule.” His dwelling was in Jacob, his inheritance in Israel, but he could not be circumscribed by them, nor by his human condition. From the beginning and before the world was he begotten, and until the world to come he will not cease to be. What you see is the dwelling place of the Word. Truly human, but transcending the human.

And it is not above us to transcend the human in this way; for if he was before the world was made, so, truly, were we: before the world was made God chose us, chose us in Christ, to be holy and spotless, and to live through love in his presence. If we believe in him, we too, while remaining fully human, are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Perhaps if we could free ourselves from the shackles of habit, and see God as God would have us see him, then we could see ourselves and each other in that image, as chosen in Christ before the world was made. It might require a few shocks, and it might give us a few surprises. but that way we may attain to the purity of heart which will allow us to see God, to the praise of his glorious grace with which he has graced us in the Beloved.

May he enlighten the eyes of our mind, that we may know what the hope is of our calling, and what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints.

Santa Lucia, ora pro nobis!

2009-12-12T05:27:00.000-08:00

Today is the third Sunday of Advent: Gaudete or Rejoice Sunday; it is also St Lucy’s Day. One of the things I like best about the church as institution (and there's plenty I don't like about it!) is the way its liturgical year makes every day special. I'm aware that some Christian denominations don’t follow any liturgical calendar, and some observe only the big feasts. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but how much one misses! Stick a pin in a liturgical calendar and find an obscure saint, and then look that saint up. There will be something in their life that strikes a chord with you, and if you look up the saint of the day every day for a year you will be astonished at the variety of them. Saint Lucy was one of the many early virgin martyrs, and very little is definitely known about her; but take even the little we know and compare her with (for example) Alphonsus Liguori, the lawyer and founder of the Redemptorists, or Jane Frances de Chantal, wife and mother, the illiterate and disabled shepherdess Germaine Cousin, the scholar John Henry Newman…and indeed John the Baptist and Jesus, so different that John began to have his doubts about Jesus’ own credentials, and you realise just how catholic (with a lower or upper-case C, as you prefer) this church of ours is, how inclusive, how able to see the beauty of holiness wherever it is to be found.

I was brought up as a fairly traditional Catholic, and remember being quite shocked when a hippy friend of my mother’s told me firmly that holy water was nonsense, not because it was a sacramental but because “All water is holy”. These words come back to me now after a lifetime’s thinking and praying and battling with the question (among others) of what is, and what is not, holy. And I find that I have come to agree with Biddy. My route is very unlike hers, but here we are in the same place. The Church of Scotland used to be very hesitant about celebrating Christmas, because the one great feast is Easter, which is echoed each Sunday. The Quakers do not celebrate any day in preference to any other, because all days are holy. I entirely agree that all days are holy, but my conclusion, for the moment at least, is the Catholic one that a good way of expressing the holiness of each day is to assign a saint or a Biblical event to each one and celebrate them with all our might.

I am aware that there are some, especially in the Reformed tradition, who feel that venerating the saints detracts from our worship of God; they point out that we do not need any mediator between ourselves and God, neither priest nor saint nor angel, but can with confidence approach the throne of grace, not in our own righteousness but because Christ has died for us. This is absolutely true and so I can understand that point of view. However, another point of view is that celebrating the saints positively adds to our worship of God. Those of you who have heard me preach more than once will be heartily sick of hearing that we are made in the image and likeness of God. But I don’t say it because it is something that one says. I say it because it is wonderful, in its true sense of wonder-full, that there is visibly “that of God” in me, visibly that of God in you, in you…in everyone. God has left his traces everywhere, to be seen by anyone who will look. And that’s what the saints, this great cloud of witnesses, shows us.

And there’s something else. Those of you who go to the 9.45 service will have noticed that some of the texts change during Advent. In the introduction to the service there is this phrase: “In Advent we dare to see the world through God’s eyes”. I think that is a mind-blowing phrase. We dare to see the world through God’s eyes. We know what the world looks like through God’s eyes: God looked on it, and behold it was very good. Yes, there was the small matter of the Fall, however you interpret that, but Christ has cancelled that out. In God’s eyes the world is ineffably beautiful. You can see that in the passage from Isaiah that we have just heard. That is what the world will look like when all things are completed in Christ and God’s image shines out from it undimmed; and we will see it as God sees it, as it truly is. There is infinite variety because God is infinite, and he will never run out of new ways to reflect his own beauty in his created images. Looking at the saints is also seeing the world through God’s eyes. We admire God in them, yes, but also we see humankind as God sees it. You are as beautiful as Francis, as Lucy, as Thomas Aquinas, as Peter and Paul.

I can hear some of you thinking: This is all very nice. It is all very easy. Possibly a bit too easy. We have been taught that following Jesus is difficult. And isn’t Advent a time for repentance? Indeed Advent is a time for repentance, even if today, the third Sunday, is traditionally a day off. But the kind of repentance that Jesus looks for is not sitting in sackcloth and ashes, which is not always very constructive, but metanoia: a change of mind, a change of attitude, a turning away from evil and towards God. Meditating on our sins, while it may be a salutary exercise, is not a useful or healthy condition to remain in. And not only is the carrot more effective than the stick, but also, if you don’t look at what you are aiming at, you are unlikely to hit the mark. Given the choice of dwelling on sin, even in order to become thoroughly disgusted by mine, or dwelling on the beauty of God and of God’s image in me, I am pretty sure which one will bring me closer to God and what God intended me to be.

Oh, and is it so easy for most of us to believe in our heart: I am greatly loved, God thinks I am special and beautiful and I remind him of Jesus. Is it? Try it. Really try it. If I were a betting woman I’d say a million to one it makes you feel guilty. But on the contrary, the more we believe that and act on it, the more likely we are to be following Jesus, and the more like him we will become.

Adrian Plass comments in connection with John the Baptist: “God gave John the best possible start for the tough times that were to come, didn’t he? It is hard to imagine a son ever having been wanted more than this one. Being loved and wanted was the best possible launching pad for the rest of John’s life. Indeed being valued and appreciated is rocket fuel for the future of any child. We must be very tender with those who have not had this kind of start. It’s all very well to say how fellow believers should behave, but if you’ve never been loved it really is ever so hard to be good.”

There’s the clue. It’s hard to be good if your eyes are focused on evil, even the evil of your own sins. I would even dare to say that that is the devil’s view of the world. The devil looks at sin and ugliness. That’s his job. The more the better. Do we want to see the world through the devil’s eyes? St Paul gives us this instruction for “being good”, not to dwell on our sins or (much less) the sins of others, but rather: “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. And the God of peace will be with you”.

And so let us pray to today’s saint: Saint Lucy, your name means light. By the light of faith which God gave you, increase and preserve this light in our souls so that we may avoid evil, hold fast to what is good, and hate nothing so much as the blindness and darkness of evil and sin. By your intercession with God, obtain for us clear vision and the grace to use it for God's glory and the salvation of all humankind.

Rorate, caeli desuper, et nubes pluant iustum

2009-11-29T12:27:00.000-08:00

Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the Just One.

According to a group of bishops (who shall be nameless) Advent is not, except chronologically, a preparation for Christmas. This comment, as Hercule Poirot might have said, gave me furiously to think. Unfortunately the bishops did not go on to unpack this paradox of truly Chestertonian proportions, and so I was left with my thoughts. Of course Advent is a preparation for Christmas; and yet I do see what their Lordships might have been getting at, and I am inclined to agree. If Christmas is the celebration of a past event, even one a momentous as the irruption of God into our world, it hardly makes sense to prepare for it. What are we preparing for? A celebration of an anniversary of a past event does not warrant four weeks of preparation, though you might be forgiven for believing that it needs it, from the material point of view at least, if you venture into any town larger than Bonchester Bridge.

Christmas is not the commemoration of a past event, any more than Easter is. In the case of Ester, that is perhaps a little more obvious. Christ, who rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, still lives his resurrection life; if we have been baptised, we have been baptised into his death; we have died with him and we will rise with him. Christ’s death and resurrection are taking place every day, which is why it is so appropriate to have baptisms at the Paschal Vigil.

What we should be doing during Lent is coming to our senses and trying – before Easter dawns – to cleanse our souls so that they are worthy to join our Lord in that event which is ceaselessly happening. It happens every Sunday, every day, and every instant in the timeless dynamic of God; but we cannot live at such a pitch all the time. So once a year we prepare properly for what we do not prepare for during the rest of our lives. Apparently Dr Johnson used to spend the entire year in preparation for his single yearly reception of the eucharist. I’m not suggesting that we should restrict ourselves to that extent (though it might do us no harm, occasionally, to wait until we are actually hungry for it and realise what it is and what it is to be deprived of it), but that is the right attitude. It is also the right attitude to Lent, and to Advent, which have more in common with each other, and with the now almost vanished tradition of fasting before receiving the eucharist, than we usually realise.

Christmas, Easter, and the eucharist: all three are occasions when our life of time slips into God’s life of eternity, where the earthly event of a moment is inserted into the perennial event of heaven; they are, as I remember once saying of the post-Resurrection appearances, heaven “where-ing” itself on earth. I argued that in the case of the post-Resurrection appearances, Jesus did not so much “come down” to earth. He is, always, everywhere, and in some mysterious way (mysterious only to us, not to God; we must never lose sight of the fact that what seems mysterious, crazy, impossible, contradictory to us, especially while we are still on our journey, is perfectly clear and straightforward to God). It was simply that by a special dispensation his apostles became able to see him where he was anyway. I think something of the sort is true of Christmas. Not – most certainly not – that something did not happen – and on earth – at Christmas. the second Person of the Blessed Trinity was genuinely born of the Virgin Mary according to the flesh. But at every subsequent Christmas something equally real happens, but to us, not to him. We have the possibility of becoming present to the Event which, according to our chronology, took place 2000-odd years ago. Genuinely present, as present as the shepherds. We are not commemorating something past at Christmas, we are present at something present.

And that is why I do, and do not, agree with their Lordships the Bishops. If you see Christmas as a commemoration of a past event, then Advent cannot and must not be seen as a preparation for it. Advent is a liturgical season of great importance, second perhaps only to Lent. It cannot end in an anti-climax; then it would be better to regard it as the preparation for the coming of Christ to each of us: at every moment, and at the hour of our death. That is certainly on of the functions of Advent, though I believe it to be a very secondary one; as a liturgical season at a specific time of the year, it must primarily lead to an event also at a specific time of the year, as does Lent: both are liturgical seasons leading to a liturgical event which springs from a moment when our string of events slips into the perennial event of heaven. But if we see Christmas as one of those two moments, that moment when we are inserted into the eternal moment of the Incarnation, then Advent is precisely a preparation for that.

I am told – don’t quote me on this – that the Orthodox, on the feast of the Annunciation, pray that the Blessed Virgin will say “yes” to the angel. Does that sound absurd? It seems to me to be eminently sensible. Each time we come to the Annunciation, the event is truly happening. Mary has said yes; but by praying that she should do so we join ourselves to those generations of the just who prayed for the coming of the Christ through the long centuries of the Old Dispensation. Not only does our prayer express more perfectly than anything else our complete conformity with, and our complete joy in the plan of salvation as it has turned out, but it has weight with God, who transcends time. I greatly regret the disappearance of the feast of the Expectancy of Our Lady towards the end of Advent. I believe that Mary herself in heaven is in a state of expectancy every year, not of the physical birth of Christ but of that moment when we are at one with her, present at the Incarnation, the coming of the Messiah, when the dews of heaven fall on the earth. It is up to us to show him how much we desire that moment, a moment not of commemoration but of heaven becoming – briefly – one with earth.

See, O Lord, the affliction of thy people, and send him whom thou hast promised to send!

Christ the King

2009-11-21T07:36:00.000-08:00

The feast of Christ the King is a funny one. A funny one in that it is a bit difficult to know how to take it. On the face of it it’s fairly clear what Pope Pius XI intended when he instituted it in 1925. Empires and kingdoms were crumbling all over the place, including the splendid and apparently invulnerable Empire of Russia – remember that 1925 is just eight years after 1917. To quote the psalmist, “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.” Pius was pointing out that, dramatic as they were, these happenings were no surprise; nothing human, not the Athenian Empire, not the Roman, not the Ottoman, not the Russian, can last forever. But there is one kingship, empire, call it what you will, that does last forever, and that “forever” lasts beyond the existence of this little planet, beyond the existence of the universe, for all mind-dizzying eternity. This, perhaps, is a point that we could usefully remember now. The British Empire is a memory; the terrifying Third Reich even more so. The Soviet Empire has fallen, though the fall-out from the fall is still with us. America is becoming dwarfed by the looming bulk of China, and, yes, even Al-Qaida will fall. The Christians chased the Moslems out of Jerusalem, and the Moslems chased the Christians out of Al-Andaluz – Spain – only to be chased out in their turn. This has been the reality of our planet since history began.

Oddly, in his attempt to counter all this turmoil and fear by pointing to the one true king, Pius XI fell into very much the same trap, by regarding Communism as the one great threat, the one human institution that would overrun and destroy everything, as if this human movement alone had more than human powers and capacity for survival. This piece of blindness, incidentally, goes a long way towards explaining the Catholic church’s ambivalent response to Nazism: it was some time before they realised that the attitude “Anything but Communism” was a terrible mistake. I think Pius would have been surprised and incredulous to hear that this terrifying new force, apparently bent on destroying Christian civilisation and all he held dear, would itself fall after seventy years; barely a human lifetime, killed no less by that strange hybrid “Christian Socialism” (which in the main is neither Christian nor Socialism) than by active opposition.

I think one of the important lessons of this feast, of the idea of calling Jesus Christ a king (which he never did himself, except once in a parable and once, with his back against the wall, to Pontius Pilate) is that there is no one great threat, no human institution that will overrun and destroy “everything”. Because “everything” – as in Life, the Universe and Everything – is beyond human power to destroy.
It’s something we need to hang on to. To me that first reading was so topical. Everything (political) in this world is such an appalling mess. Our whole being is screaming out “This is not right!”, screaming for confirmation that it is not right. Whether it is the bankers throughout the world, whether it is the MPs wrongly claiming tens and even hundreds of thousands in expenses, whether it is two thousand people who cannot afford healthcare crammed into a stadium in America – not a third-world country, by the way, unless you are poor – where doctors, nurses and dentists work for nothing, whether it is simply the way the little people are going under with scarcely a ripple left on the surface…the whole world, everything, seems to be tilting, slipping into one huge injustice, and They (oh, but who are They?) are getting away with it.

There is one book that shouts out in chorus with our own voices: “This is not right!” and has been doing so for thousands of years. Our God, our God from the very beginning, our God who has lived among us, shouts in chorus with our voices: “This is not right!”

It sometimes seems as if our monarchs and heads of state live, by definition, in a different world from the rest of us. And that is one of the ways in which Christ the King is different. He made a point, an almost excessive point, of being like us in every possible way. And that is why there is something odd about this Feast: Christ the King made every effort to be as unkinglike as he could. The only time he looked remotely like a king was when his kingship was parodied, with the crown of thorns and the reed sceptre.

I am not talking politically at all here, but I wonder whether you share with me the instinctive admiration for rulers who, when their subjects are in danger, have joined them: have led armies, have stood on the ramparts, have died for their people. I am not saying that Henry V or Alexander the Great were necessarily nice people or good at governing. I am saying that somehow that sort of kingship chimes with something deep within us. Why else was there such an outcry when it was discovered that an American president had been a draft-dodger; why was that phrase “they will fight to the last drop of other people’s blood” so current; and why, even to a pacifist like me, did it seem so right when the son of the heir to our throne saw active service in Iraq?
I think it is because we have an inborn (should I say God-given?) instinct to want a leader who leads from within, a leader who risks their own life when their subjects do, who endures all that they do. And again, it is our God who has done this, who has responded to our desires.

The feast of Christ the King is very cleverly placed at the turning point of the liturgical year. It looks back at the long and sometimes grey period of Ordinary Time, the Sundays after Trinity, and forward to Advent and Christmas. It finishes the year off on a high - you could say it crowns the year; and it prepares for the beginning of the astonishing kingship that is Christ’s.
The pictures of Christ as emperor, Christ in power, Christ enthroned, leave me completely cold. This is not the Jesus I know, not the Jesus I find in the Gospels. The Jesus I know was born in poverty, lived in poverty, lived as the common man, was at the service of the common man and died a horrible death by execution. In the tradition of the Old Testament God - who is the same as the New Testament God, the same as our God - Jesus made it quite clear that the behaviour of the occupying force, the religious fundamentalists, the uncaring rich, the violent, the prejudiced, was not right. And he did it without ever becoming political in the wrong sense. He did it by living it.

And when he likened the kingdom of heaven to the workings of leaven in dough, he was explaining his kingship to us. Since the son of God was born as one of us, everything is different. Different from without, because the God who has been on our side from the beginning is now one of us. But also from within. Christ did not become a king on the Cross, or at the resurrection. And I guess, strictly speaking, he did not become a king at Christmas, or at the Annunciation. He has always been king. But that was when the leaven was slipped into the dough of creation, and when everything changed. Our king leads from within, from within creation, from within humankind, from within each one of us. Since then, if the world is charged with the grandeur of God, so are you, so am I - from within. There is that of God in everyone. And nothing can ever be the same again; and evil, and death, terrifying as they are, can have no dominion.

O Flower of Scotland...

2009-11-09T14:41:00.000-08:00

Those days are passed now, and in the past they must remain;
but we can still rise now and be the nation again
that stood against him, proud Edward’s army, and sent him homewards to think again.

Don’t tell me there’s a Scot among you, pacifist or not, who doesn’t feel some sort of thrill when you hear these words sung. I don’t doubt that our heads tell us that no one country is as such more important or better or worthy of love than any other, that borders are only lines on a map, that no-one has any right to build up one country to the detriment of another, and so on…still, our hearts know that there is another truth which must somehow be accommodated, because it is so universally and instinctively known that in trying to deny or suppress it we risk denying something fundamental about our very human nature.

Today’s celebration – because it is a celebration as well as a remembering, a celebration of courage, of devotion and of love – is a difficult one for many of us, myself included. I am not a Quaker, but if I ever become one it will be the uncompromising opposition to war and violence as much as the silence that will draw me. But I think that what I’ve just described could be a way into an understanding of Remembrance Day that even pacifists can make our own. There must be a reason why the Old Testament, the first instalment of the history of God-with-us, is so heavily based on patriotism, on passionate love for one’s country; why God based that first call not only on a nation but on a country, on a specific piece of ground, and why he instructed his people Israel to fight for it to the death.

The conclusion that I have come to is, first, that this is yet another example of the care with which God trains us by teaching us the easy things first and only later raising us to the more difficult ones, and, second, how badly we need something to love. Something to live for – something, indeed, to be willing to risk dying for. It is so important to us that we justify the most horrendous, or the silliest, things because they answer that need. Something in us tells us that apathy, all the same, is the most dangerous thing. It has been well said that for evil to triumph all that is necessary is for good people to do nothing.
Of course the devil can use anything. He can use enthusiasm, faith, and all these good things. But I am sure that the thing the devil likes best is what paralyses us, makes us give up, makes us not bother, lose confidence…that, of course, is why he so much loves guilt. And why Jesus said “I came that they might have life, and have it in abundance”; and why his chief commandment, the thing that we must absolutely do in order to be his disciples, even if we never follow a single one of his other commands, is to love. Love, and just-not-bothering, love and life not-in-abundance, are simply incompatible.

Earthly patriotism is not a Christian virtue. But the instinct towards patriotism is correct. When St Paul says that “our commonwealth is in heaven” and the author of the Hebrews that “here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” they confirm that the patriotic instinct is a good and useful one, and give us the clue as to where it is properly directed. “Our commonwealth is in heaven” is not a metaphor. This world is important. Not only did God create it and put us here, he lived here himself, and gave us the patriotic instinct. He had it himself. But it is not ultimately to this world that we owe allegiance, nor to its standards of love.

And there is a reason for this. Because another statement that is not mere metaphor is that we are made in the image and likeness of God. And although they are not God-bearers as we are, there is something of God in all creation, and especially in all sentient beings. The idea that creation is evil is about as unChristian as you can get.

Some Christians believe that when the priest is at the altar celebrating the eucharist, he or she is acting “in persona Christi”, in the person of Christ. In some sense it really is Christ up there and not John or Clephane or Donald. I am sure this is right; but I am equally sure that what we are all on earth for is to act at all times in persona Christi; to see Christ in others and to be Christ to others. To be carriers of his Spirit and act according to his ways, and to sanctify, not deny, the instincts he has placed within us.

I remember a lengthy discussion once as to whether we should mind being loved simply because someone was “seeing Christ in us”. What’s the problem? If someone genuinely sees Christ in me – well, what could be better? The problem, I suppose, is that “seeing Christ in someone” is so often regarded as a last resort: there’s nothing lovable about this person but – hang on – they are surely loved by God and made in his image and so, well, I guess we can look at that, and gratefully avert our eyes from the reality of the person. A sort of spiritual equivalent of saying “Well, I’m sure his mother loves him.” This would be laughable if it were not so sad. Because that kind of love is the most perfect and the most unconditional, and the kind of love that Jesus is talking about. It is spiritual recognition of the very nature of the person who stands before you – and of yourself.

The difference between "godly love" (I mean what Paul calls charity) and other sorts of love is that in human love (of whatever kind) the “glue” that holds the two people together is "preference”. I prefer Jane to Mary and therefore Jane is my friend; I prefer Fred to Bill and therefore I’m married to Fred. Well and good – that is where we must begin. But in godly love the "glue" is God. In other words God holds the two people - made in his image and likeness - together. Which among other things explains why you can perfectly well love someone you don't like, or who has done dreadful things. And that’s how Jesus can call “Love one another” a commandment.

That glue is far stronger than the glue that holds together two Scots, two Hungarians or two children of Israel – which all the same is perhaps the best human analogy, one we all recognise, and the one around which today’s commemoration is based.

Rabbi Lionel Blue comments that God has given us the book of the Torah, but he has also given each one of us the book of our life. If we don’t find God there, we will never find him anywhere. If you want to see God, look at your neighbour. Or yourself. If you want to know how to love heaven, you could do worse than looking at how you love Scotland, how these men and women who lost their lives in the wars from the dawn of time loved their countries.

This world is one in which we see through a glass darkly – but we do see. The world is charged with the grandeur of God – yes; but I would rather say that the world, and the people in it, are transparent, and in it we see God, and his world – if we will only look.

An All Saints Latin lesson

2009-10-31T13:41:00.000-07:00

Omnipotens et misericors Deus, de cuius munere venit ut tibi a fidelibus tuis digne et laudabiliter serviatur, tribue, quaesumus, nobis, ut ad promissiones tuas sine offensione curramus.

Almighty and eternal God, by whose gift your faithful people serve you in a worthy and praiseworthy manner, grant, we pray, that we may run unerringly towards your promises.

The Carthusians, who, one might argue, are a touch too big for their boots, have a certain aversion to canonization: non sanctos patefacere, they say, sed multos sanctos facere: not to make many saints known, but to make many saints. The implication, intentionally or not, is that their standard are so high that nobody could ever reach them and be considered a saint. They do celebrate those Carthusian saints who have been canonized with as much vigour as any other Order, but they pride themselves on how few there are. For the nuns, indeed, there is only one: St Rosaleen who, though she has nothing to do with Roisin Dubh, would make a good dedication for an Irish house of nuns. Well, I don’t see why they are so sniffy about having their saints known; surely the more the better, and the greater the variety the better. Today’s feast, although it is mainly for the unknown saints (plenty of Carthusians, then) is encouraging because, quite simply, there are so many of them: a multitude that none can number, a vast cloud of witnesses. it would be even better (though impossible) to know the names and circumstances of each one.

But the Carthusians have got one thing right: when the obituaries are read in the chapterhouse, a select few are given the accolade “laudabiliter vixit” – lived in a praiseworthy manner. And, the implication is, if the Carthusians praise them, they must be praiseworthy indeed! Be that as it may, the word “laudabiliter” is spot on.

Digne et laudabiliter: that is very reminiscent of – indeed, means almost the same as – that other calm and prosaic description of the way a Christian should live their life: “iuste et pie”. Calm and prosaic, like so much true spirituality and mysticism; like Thomas Aquinas; and like all things that are seriously demanding. There’s no hot blood to get you through it; there’s no poetry or rhetoric or spin-doctoring to conceal the truth of it, the truth of its perfection and the truth of its exigency. Iuste, digne: as it should be, in a manner that measures up to the One whom we serve. Impossible, of course; the saints have done it because, as this week’s Collect tells us, God gives it to us as a gift; it is not our effort or our merit. Laudabiliter, pie: that does not so much go further as describe the first adverb: not merely worthy but praiseworthy; not merely rightly but rightly with devotion. Iuste et pie: St Paul’s little instruction to Titus is, though it does not immediately look it, an echo of the Beatitude of the pure in heart. That is well disguised by the very unsatisfactory translation of its second section in the English translation of the liturgy: “exspectantes beatam spem et adventum Domini” is rendered “as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ”. Which is not what it means. Firstly, beata spes is not joyful hope; secondly, it is one of the two direct objects of the verb. If beata spes is not joyful hope, what is it? It is – and I know this is an unfashionable word – “blessed hope”. In other words, our hope of blessedness, of beatitude; and it is here almost in apposition to “adventum Domini”, the coming of the Lord. The phrase means “awaiting the beatitude that we hope for {hope in the strictly theological sense, of course} at the coming of our Saviour”. It is the reward of living iuste et pie, digne et laudabiliter, pure in heart: to see the Lord when he comes and to know him as Saviour, not as Judge. That is certainly the moment at which our beatitude begins; but according to St John, that is also what constitutes the beatitude itself. “We know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is”. And he also makes the link between our hope and the coming of the Lord; the two are effectively the same; and it is to that moment that we are to direct our lives and our efforts. “For everyone who has this hope in Him sanctifies himself, just as He is holy.”

Hope does not deceive, we are told, because the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit; that, I take it, will be completely fulfilled at the moment when we see the Lord. But hope does not deceive – hope cannot possibly deceive – because it is founded upon the firm promises of God; and that is why I stressed before that when we say we “hope” for beatitude, that “hope” is to be understood as the theological virtue.

The phrase “to travel hopefully” is a very good description of the Christian life, if “hopefully” is taken in that sense. St Benedict and this week’s Collect would like us to run, the Collect (aware of the risks of that) thoughtfully asking God to remove all obstacles from our path as we do so. Well, running may be risky, but speed does have its advantages, as anyone who has tried to keep a bike upright at a snail’s pace in a traffic jam or behind a combine harvester knows. The Christian life is more like riding a bike than like going on foot: you have to keep moving or you will fall off. And as all good riders know, though not all act accordingly, it is not enough to keep the Highway Code – to ride digne et iuste. In the training book for the theory test there is a whole section on “attitude”: the way in which we keep the Highway Code, riding laudabiliter et pie – with, dare I say it, a pure heart.

Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God. I have not yet worked out whether All Saints always falls in this week, always, therefore, has this Collect around it, but if so that is most appropriate. It is hard to see the saints as largely people like us, people who had to work to get to heaven, people who were not noticed in their lifetime and apparently did no heroic deeds of virtue and sanctity. But they were; and there is no reason whatever why we should not join them in glory. We do not need to be martyred or live immensely ascetic lives’ we do not need to “do” anything at all that is visible, much less extraordinary’ simply, digne et laudabiliter, to direct our intention towards God. It may not feel like serving at all; we may wonder what value our lives can possibly have in his eyes. But it is’ by his gift it is. Somehow in God’s eyes, to be pure in heart is enough; that is the service he asks of us. The form our activity takes is up to us’ if it is undertaken digne et laudabiliter, with a heart as pure as our desire and his ft can make it, then we need not worry about whether it is pleasing service or whether it will get us to heaven: it is the service he has chosen; and we are already there.

Si comprehendis, non est Deus

2009-10-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

(Eccles 11,12)

As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb,
so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.

That reading from Ecclesiastes wasn’t intended to be a test of your attention span, honestly. I am quite sorry that this is a sermon and not a discussion, as it would be so interesting to know which verse or verses jumped out at each one of you. A friend used to say to me that whenever you read a Bible passage with attention, God underlines something in red for you. Or, as Kierkegaard said, the way to read the Bible is to remember at all times “It is of me this is spoken, to me this is said”. The Bible isn’t a book like any other. Well, of course it isn’t, it isn’t a single book at all but a library. But I mean more than that.

It’s obvious that the epistles of Paul are letters, from Paul to a specific group of Christians and, with the proviso that some things will not apply in different circumstances and to different people, to all people. But the whole Bible is a letter, or a collection of letters, from God to God’s people; and “God’s people” means every human being. We can read some parts of the Bible out of interest – historical interest, sometimes; cultural interest; literary interest. That’s fine, of course it is. When I look at old letters from my late friend Jo-Jo in South Carolina I am interested in what he tells me about his own life, what his grandmother says about the race laws in America in the last century, and what his wife experienced when on active service in Iraq. But if I just wanted to know about life on Death Row, segregation, and the US military, I‘d read a book. I read those letters because they are from Jo-Jo to me. And if the Bible is a collection of letters from God to me, from God to you, then that is the primary reason why we read it – if we do.

Life is difficult. If we have any sense we do not try to go it alone. In my opinion trying to go it alone, refusing to take wisdom from wherever it may be found, is the characteristic not of the adult but of the child, not of the strong person but of the person who is afraid that their weakness will be discovered. I once shocked a boss (I should say that I knew I was going to be resigning in a couple of days!) by saying “Yes, you know, I’m fallible, like most of the human race. Do you have a problem with that?”

I think it was Augustine who said “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”: “If you understand it, it isn’t God”. I’d go further. I’d say that since everything is charged with the grandeur of God, everything has God as its ground, then “Life, the Universe and Everything” is beyond our comprehension. The answer may as well be 42 as anything else. Which is why I am completely unfazed by Ecclesiastes and his cry of “vanity of vanities, all is vanity”.

I come back again and again to Kierkegaard’s comparison of the Christian life to floating over seventy fathoms of water (that’s 140 yards or 420 feet…a lot of water). I can never understand how people can consider faith to be a crutch. Real faith spends most of its time staring things straight in the eyes. Our moments of faith are when we say, with Job, “Though God slay me, yet will I trust in Him”. Real faith means living in reality, facing the apparent vanity, meaninglessness, keeping death ever before our eyes (that recommendation has a good pedigree – it comes from St Benedict, not me). Because death is the moment when everything but reality is stripped away.

Some of you may recognise this sentence: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” Yes, it’s Karl Marx, Das Kapital, and it’s the description of life when the bourgeoisie are in power. It’s a bad situation, but it has its plus side, because it is the situation that leads to the proletarian revolution. Now I’m not talking politics here. I am quoting that sentence because I can see such a clear parallel with that terribly uncomfortable moment when the ground of certainty is no longer there, and we are floating above seventy fathoms, relying on faith alone, on unfelt faith alone, on the unseen and unknown God. “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

That is probably the most precious and significant moment in the life of any human being. If you asked me to name the important moments in my life I wouldn’t mention any of the outward events. I would name those moments when all that was solid melted into air. When I took apart my faith (or it collapsed around me) and rebuilt it stone by stone. I can stand up here and talk like this because what I say comes from experience. I don’t do theory now, though undoubtedly you do need theory first to underpin and to some extent explain experience.

Just as it takes nerve sometimes to say “I don’t know”, so it takes nerve to know, to face, that ultimately it is between me – you – and God, and nothing else on earth has any real reality. We have constructed amazing cities, amazing machinery, we have domesticated the world and all that is in it. We have even had a good shot at domesticating cats. But we are alone with God as surely as was the first human being who discovered God’s presence in his cave.

Frightening? No, not really. Not when you face that realisation and its implications rather than turning away and distracting yourself. Esther prayed to God in a terrifying situation and said “For there is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God”. Indeed – but why would she need anyone else? We are alone with God – indeed we are, but who better to be alone with?

Theorising will tell us a certain amount about God. Definitions may help, as long as we don’t push analogies too far. But “si comprehendis, non est Deus”. We don’t theorise about our friends and the people we love, we get to know them.
And so I come back to the Bible. In my opinion there are two ways of getting to know God: God in his word and God in his creation. The book of the Bible and the book of my life. We are made, as I insist ad nauseam, in God’s image and likeness. We will discover an immense amount about God by looking at ourselves and all the other images and likenesses around us. As the Quakers say, by seeing “that of God” in each person. And we go to the Bible partly to see more images and likenesses, but above all to read God’s letter to me, to you.

You do not need to be a biblical scholar – trust me on this: I used to be one. The way to read the Bible is to read it knowing that God is saying something to you, personally, and you will hear it if you give it time. Read it slowly. And as soon as you spot the red underlining, stop and sit with it. Let it sink in and then have a talk with God about it, not forgetting to listen when God answers. It’s known as lectio divina and as prayer – and both are very much easier than you were ever told. Why don’t you start with that huge Ecclesiastes passage that we heard earlier? I bet you won’t get halfway through the first chapter before you see something that speaks to your own life. And the God with whom you are alone will suddenly seem a whole lot more real, more close and more reliable. And you will know that you are not alone at all.

And so let us pray: O you who are the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets, Christ our God, you have carried out the Father’s will in its entirety. Fill our hearts with love and our souls with light each time we take your holy scriptures in our hands, you who live and reign with the Father and the Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

Sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris

2009-09-05T01:59:00.000-07:00

“As we forgive those who trespass against us”

It can be difficult to forgive those who trespass against us; it is perhaps even more difficult to cancel their debts, which is what this petition of the Lord’s Prayer really says. When someone trespasses against us we can, especially if they apologise, smile magnanimously, say “Oh well, no harm done” and forgive them. It’s another matter if they owe us something, when they are not just trespassers but debtors: not only have they walked on to our land, they have killed our fatted calf and eaten it. Then we can’t say “No harm done” – where’s the calf? And however magnanimous we are, and even if they apologise, there remains in us the perfectly correct thought: “After all, they do owe me a calf”. We may not demand it back, but we would like it back all the same, and we wouldn’t say no if someone undertook to make them replace it. That may be forgiving those who trespass against us, but it isn’t what the Lord meant. To do what the Lord meant we have to make sure, as far as we can, that the calf is not replaced; because if the debt is cancelled, it’s cancelled: nothing is owed to us any more. As Stephen, the first martyr, said as they stoned him, “Do not let this sin stand” (on their bill or account); that is, scratch it out, cancel it altogether. Stephen was, I think, one of those saints who might have been rather hard to live with – he was definitely not the most tactful of Greeks. But his debts were cancelled, as he had cancelled those of his debtors.

“As” is probably the most awe-inspiring and frightening little word in the Bible. Kierkegaard said “if the command to love one’s neighbour were expressed in a way different from this little phrase “as yourself”, which is so easy to wield and yet at the same time has the tension of the eternal, then the command would not be able to overcome self-love as it does. This “as yourself” does not waver in its aim, but penetrates to the innermost hiding place where a person loves themselves. It does not leave self-love the slightest excuse or the tiniest escape-hatch.”

In the case of the commandment “you shall love your neighbour as yourself” the “as” is certainly demanding and inescapable. But it’s in other places that it becomes really alarming. The most obvious example is the phrase which opened this sermon; if we do not forgive our debtors, neither will our heavenly Father forgive our debts. And we call that fate down on our own heads by the word “as”: forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. That little word is one which, to quote Kierkegaard again, though out of context, “wounds from behind”; it turns harmless statements or commands into two-edged swords. Another example that jumps to mind is Jesus’ prayer “May they be one in us as you are in me and I am in you” “That they may be one as we are one”; “Love one another as I have loved you”. We are to have the same relationship – yes, the same – with the Son as he has with the Father. But today, faced with the Lord’s Prayer, I want to concentrate on the second commandment: our relationship with each other.

It was bad enough – or, if you like, good enough – to be told that we are to love our neighbour as ourselves. I wonder whether anyone has ever done it, with the single exception of the Lord. We certainly can’t do it by our own power, and that is why Jesus went on to even more impossible-sounding heights: we are to love each other as he has loved us; we are to love each other as God the Father loves God the Son; we are to be as perfectly one as the Blessed Trinity in whom there can never be the slightest hint of disunity.

That is the ideal for all our relationships. It makes our attempts at tolerance, reconciliation, inclusiveness and ecumenism seem pretty feeble. To misquote St Benedict, we lukewarm lovers should blush for shame.

St Silouan of Mount Athos said that the greatest height of sanctity was to love (or forgive) one’s enemies. I used to think this strange, as I haven’t any enemies, and would think most ordinary people are in the same position. But then my thoughts began to move in the direction suggested above and I realised how far-reaching this forgiving one’s enemies thing is. All debts, real or imaginary, are to be cancelled so that they no longer exist. No cause for disharmony must exist in me, in my mind, heart or actions. And since I am not God, I may not say “as” to my neighbours. It is sometimes easier to forgive one’s enemies than to cancel all debts in regard to a sort of person one can’t stand. I have to cancel that debt. The fact that I can’t stand that sort of person has to go. You can’t merely put up with a person when you have been told that, as far as you are concerned, the relationship to strive for is that of the Blessed Trinity. And that applies to everyone without exception, because God doesn’t make distinctions. All who want it may have the water of life, and have it free. This really is a serious business and I am the first person who needs to hear that. Love, not to the limits of human capacity, not even to the limits of the sacred human heart of Jesus but the love that is in God for God, a love so total that it is a Person. My love for my neighbour (and as Jesus told us clearly, everyone without exception is my neighbour) has to be such that it would, so to speak, breathe forth the Holy Spirit.

Impossible? Yes, of course it’s impossible. However much we love, however inclusively, if we love to the death, still that word “as” will rise up and condemn us. But it was the same Silouan of Mount Athos who heard from the Lord in a vision the words “Keep your soul in hell, and do not despair”. And the same Silouan who, following the ancient Orthodox tradition in which St Seraphim of Sarov stands out, taught that, if the highest Christian virtue is forgiving one’s enemies, the goal of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. We know that the water of life which we are all offered already in this life is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit welling up within us unto eternal life which we will be given, and given free, if we want it, is, as I’ve said, the personal love of God for God; there it is within us, the impossibility made not just possible but real.

Behold what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God, and so we are. That isn’t just God’s own love for us, it is God’s own love given us to use, to love with. Tradition and Scripture insist in chorus that God, if he gives the commandment which is impossible for human love to fulfil, also offers to give us the love which alone can fulfil it, his love for our use, his Spirit. Is that so very difficult to acquire? Yes, it takes a whole lifetime of unseen warfare, of spiritual struggle. Is it so difficult to acquire? No, we have only to desire it. When John of Panephysis was asked a question along those lines, “he stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said: “If you will, you can become all flame.”

May the fire of the Holy Spirit, burning within the Trinity and within us, enlighten and enkindle us until the day when we know as we are known, and love as we are loved.

Domine, ad quem ibimus?

2009-08-31T07:46:00.000-07:00

Er, this is really last week's...and the one I put in last week is this week's...

"If our love were but more simple,
We should take him at his word
And our lives would be all sunshine
In the brightness of our Lord."
A bit naive, you might think? On the childish side of childlike, perhaps?
Maybe. But that hymn, which I have quoted several times before, was written by an old fashioned Catholic priest and scholar who had no time for modernism, liberals or situation ethics, and would not have thought much of the laxer ideas of some of us here at St. John’s. It was written out of an overwhelming love of God, certainly, but the humble love of a creature for his creator. Father Faber knew what he was talking about and he didn’t say - much less write - anything lightly.
I’d like to try a thought-experiment. A while ago I saw a sign outside one of the city centre churches. I wonder what your first reaction is to what it said: “Suppose everything that Jesus taught was true: what difference would it make?”
I’ve asked quite a few people that. I was particularly interested to know what non-believers would say. Interestingly most of them have been unable or unwilling to answer the question I actually asked. Most of them - and I was surprised at the vehemence of their reactions - took the opportunity to insult Christianity in the strongest possible terms. The two non-Christians who did give me a civil answer were, first, a Buddhist, who said something that, although it was based on a misunderstanding, moved me immensely. He said: “I would be desperately sad, because that would mean that hell would exist. I would volunteer to go to hell to show my compassion for all sentient beings.” The other was my friendly household agnostic, who said that he found it so completely inconceivable that he couldn’t answer. Part of his problem, I suspect, was that he knows rather more than most agnostics about the Bible and wasn’t sure where to start imagining.
It is true that if one starts thinking about all the details of what Jesus said it is hard to start answering the question, and even more so if we start arguing about what is authentic and what isn’t.
So let’s just concentrate on the basics - the sort of thing that CS Lewis called “Mere Christianity”.
That, somehow - presumably due to some sort of fall, though Jesus never specified - we need to be saved from our condition of potentially eternal separation from God (that, put simply, is what hell is). That God who created us loved us so much that he - his son - was born as a human being for our sake and for some reason had not only to live and preach and perform signs and wonders but die in a horrific way to effect that salvation. That he did it willingly and lovingly; and that he rose bodily from the dead, also for our sake, as, although it was quite unnecessary for the ‘effectiveness’ of our redemption, he knew we’d never understand otherwise.
And that somehow we have to unite ourselves with his life and death or we will not make that salvation ours.
My own first reaction to the sign outside the church, then, is ‘In that case Jesus Christ would be central not just to my life but to the world and its history; his coming into the world would rightly mark the change of the eras; it would be the central event in the many millions of years his world has existed, and in my life too.’
That is so, and that is summed up in St Peter's comment in today's Gospel:"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."
But it is striking that I, who have spent the best part of my life as a ‘professional religious person’, still frame my answer in the conditional: “If it were the case, then such and such would follow”, and make a statement which my life does not always reflect.
Only one of the Christians of whom I asked my question responded “What do you mean, ‘if’? It is all true.” while even the civil non-believers were quite clear that it is not.
What is the matter with us?
At St. John’s we are inclined not to avoid the difficult questions. While my non-believer friends found it impossible to ask themselves the question “what if it were all true?” I am sure that most, if not all, of us have asked ourselves the opposite question: “what if it were all false?”, and perhaps over and over again.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we do a little too much of that. We must do some of it; of course we must. We must do it in order to understand non-believers, & we must do it quite simply out of our nature as thinking & compassionate creatures. But perhaps, just perhaps, we become mesmerised by the difficult questions. It is true that faith is not knowledge. Doubt is part of faith. But I wonder whether that side of faith has not been over-emphasised recently - say increasingly over the last fifty years? I would not advocate blind faith, or the sort of faith which is so afraid of doubt that it will not talk, will not think, & becomes fundamentalist. We are so much freer in so many ways than our parents & grandparents were & that is undoubtedly a good thing.
But perhaps it is time not so much to call a halt to this as to realise what we are doing. To realise that perhaps we are coming at all this from the wrong direction. Listen to St. Paul:
Christ is the image of the invisible God; in him all things were created; all things were created through him & for him. In him all things hold together. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, & through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. The Father has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light; he has delivered us from the dominion of darkness & transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Supposing this were true? It is true. St. Paul does not - ever - deny the existence of darkness. The world is a terribly dark place. But Christ has died & Christ is risen & the darkness no longer has dominion over us.
And that is where we should be starting. We are not better than anyone else because we are Christians. We are not the only ones who will be saved from our sins. But we are the ones who have received & accepted God’s ultimate, though not his only, revelation & we should receive that as a blessing, not as a burden. To whom should we go? He has the words of eternal life.
We suffer as much as the non-believers do at the darkness of the world. But there must - there must - be one difference.
I have spoken before about the paradox of the good God & the darkness of the world. I will no doubt speak about it again & I will not solve it. There are some things which are too big for us, & perhaps we just have to acknowledge that & put our trust in God.
Because God is there & he is trustworthy. The world is dark, but God is light & in him there is no darkness at all.
So I am not suggesting that we stop asking ourselves the difficult questions; but I do suggest that sometimes we look at the other side of reality, which is just as real or more so. Could we try to be at least as confident in our side of reality as the non-believers are in theirs? Could we try to trust in God & rest in his light - just sometimes? In Julian’s words:

He said not: Thou wilt not be travailed, thou wilt not be tempested, thou wilt not be dis-eased;
But he said: Thou wilt not be overcome.

The Beatitudes

2009-08-26T09:20:00.001-07:00

Both in sermons and in commentaries, people so often seem to see the Beatitudes - & much of the Sermon on the Mount - as a puzzle to be solved. How is it to be understood as a practical guide to life, as a sort of New Testament Ten Commandments, when so much of it is so “difficult”?

I am not going to add to the gallons of ink and the millions of spoken words that have been expended in commenting in detail upon the Beatitudes and the Sermon. Instead I am going to accept them as they are: if you want to be polite, paradoxical. If you want to be honest, they are crazy, unreal, even incomprehensible.

Yet they are central to Jesus’ teaching, to who Jesus was and to who we are.

No, Jesus was not saying that it is jolly to be poor, hungry and sorrowful. He did not expect you to cut off your hand, literally, if you are tempted to sin with it. He is trying to make us stop, rebel, and think. The impossible, the absurd, the contradictory, the apparently untrue, were his delight. They were his stock in trade.

The best way to make people listen is to startle them (remember Haydn’s Surprise Symphony?). And the best way to make them think is to make them rebel. As Kierkegaard rightly said, it’s no good telling people things; they have to get there themselves; to make them get there themselves, not to tell them, is your job...my job...what Jesus was doing.

So often, he is not trying to tell you about money, or mustard-seeds. He is trying to get you to see something. “O foolish and slow of heart!” “How long must I be with you? How long must I suffer you?” “Have I been with you so long, Philip, and still you do not know me?” How is it that you can’t see?

The Beatitudes are not like the Ten Commandments, to be learned by heart and carried out in detail. They are there, like so much of Jesus’ teaching - & his life - to be shocked by, nonplussed by; at the most, directed by. The Sermon on the Mount does not set out a law. It shows you an ideal you cannot achieve and possibly can’t even understand. “Be ye perfect(repeat, incredulously), as your Heavenly Father is perfect”? (repeat, incredulously)
It is, I think, quite likely that Luke’s version of the Beatitudes - which also includes the parallel Woes - is what Jesus actually said. It is certainly the more shocking. Matthew’s version seems to have been smoothed over, made, if you like, more ‘religious’. I suspect that what Jesus said was “Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who hunger and thirst...” It is an answer to the problem of pain, but not an immediately comprehensible one. It is not nice to be poor, to mourn, to hunger and thirst, to be persecuted. It is generally not a good idea, in this world, to be meek. And it is not unknown for peacemakers to struggle through life and meet a violent end.

My favourite childhood book was called “The Phantom Tollbooth”. It tells an Alice-like story of Milo, a small boy who entered a strange world by travelling, in his toy car, through a toy tollbooth. After many adventures he succeeds in reconciling two brothers who have been at war for as long as anyone could remember. At the start he was told there was a secret about his mission which he could only be told at its successful conclusion. What was it? he asks at the end. The reply is: “It was impossible.”

Well, it clearly was not impossible, because it was done: and yet it was impossible, and that was the magic of it. It was because it was impossible, rather than just difficult, that the story exists at all. Remember all those fairy tales and folk songs where the impossible is demanded: “Tell her to find me an acre of land (Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme) Between the salt water and the sea strand; Then she'll be a true love of mine. ...”
There is magic in the impossible.
Didn’t Tertullian suggest something of the kind when he said:
The Son of God was crucified: it does not make me ashamed, precisely because it is shameful.
The Son of God died: it is credible, precisely because it is absurd.
He was buried, and rose again: there is no doubt about it, precisely because it is impossible.

That is usually condensed as “Credo quia impossibile” - “I believe it because it is impossible”.
Or, as Jesus said, “With humans it is impossible. But with God all things are possible.” Of course they are. But they have to be impossible - and acknowledged as impossible - with humans first.

When things are clear, but very difficult, (some of the Ten Commandments or St. Paul’s lists of do’s and don’t’s) the result is discouragement. When they are impossible or absurd, there is space for magic - or for divine power.
Over and over in the Christmas liturgy, from the oldest Roman texts to the newest carols, you find this effort to express the shockingness, the absurdity, the sheer impossibility of the Christmas story - of Christianity, then, as it gets more impossible as the story progresses. Have you read the Athanasian Creed? Try it sometime. Three Persons in one God is absurd. True God born as true man while still remaining true God is absurd. The death of the Son of God is absurd. God cannot die. Come to that, creation from nothing is absurd. It cannot be. And there, where we come to a stop, is the space for the divine.

People talk about “fruitful tension”. To me the effect of these absurdities, these apparent untruths, these contradictory statements, is not so much a fruitful tension as an explosion in my brain. In the familiar phrase, it blows your mind. It must blow your mind. God - is - mind-blowing.

It is when we realise that we can’t do it, that we haven’t even begun, that divine power is let loose. That is what Jesus is trying to do.

So often we object to his parable in which the master orders his servants about & then does not thank them, & Jesus adds: “So you also, when you have done all these things that are commanded you, say: “We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which we ought to do.”
Why do we object? Do we think we are already perfect, when even St. Paul knew otherwise?

Kierkegaard remarks that it is always the stupid pupil who puts his hand up after ten minutes and says he has completed the assignment. He thinks he has completed it because he has not even understood what was required.
The point is that you have never finished. There is never a moment at which you have done it all. Like young Milo’s mission to reconcile King Azaz the Unabridged & his brother the Mathemagician, it is impossible.

But, you know, that is the Good News. It is absurd - but it is true. It is impossible - but it happened. We need no longer fear the incomprehensible, the vastness of the universe in comparison to our insignificance. We no longer need to fear anything at all. For God has overcome the world. He has led captivity, and our limitations, captive. In those frightening things, the absurd, the impossible, the apparently untrue, all we need see is his magic, his divine power; his resurrection - and ours.

Iustus quidem tu es - late again

2009-08-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

When faced with a passage like “if you walk in my ways and obey my statutes and commands as David your father did, I will give you a long life”, and similar passages, I am afraid the only thing I can do is struggle; I can’t produce tidy answers, only pointers and suggestions. All I can do is take you with me on my struggle and hope that somehow, something will make sense to you...and to me. If you have no problems with it, please do feel free to stop listening now.

That sentence put me in mind of Psalm 1, with its unequivocal statement of “just deserts in this life”: Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked: he is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season; and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so but are like chaff which the wind drives away.

It’s great poetry, and very stirring; and in certain frames of mind it is very consoling; there are times when we all need to hear this. We are trying so hard, and everything is going wrong – but Things Will Change.
However, there is other, equally great poetry, which says things that are, in general, closer to our experience; Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it this way:

TThou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause.

Equally great, and in part equally inspired, since the first two lines are lifted bodily from the twelfth chapter of Jeremiah.

So what are we to do with sections of the Bible, such as that psalm, and this reading in which God tells Solomon that if he is righteous and godly he will receive earthly blessings? When our own experience tells us that things just aren’t like that?

There are two easy answers. One is to look at such passages, and others, in the Bible, say “This is all rubbish” and discard the whole thing, and probably Christianity, and all religion, into the bargain. To shut your eyes to the word of God in the Bible.
The other is to say “Well, it’s the Bible so it must be true; if you are suffering you must in fact be a sinner”. To shut your eyes to the word of God in real life.
Neither option is acceptable; indeed, these two options are the same option, the unacceptable option of refusing to look with both eyes, refusing to see the word of God wherever it is; refusing to think and search and take risks.

We do have to remember that the Bible is not a book but a collection of books; and that while undoubtedly, as Paul said, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness”, it has to be used correctly.

At times, when we are learning something, it is useful to go back to an earlier stage. But at a certain point we have to decide that the previous lessons are learned, and move on. And that is the case with the lesson that God is here teaching us through Solomon. It’s a twofold lesson: that God cares about us; and that he wants us to act rightly and according to his spirit.

The way to teach a child to “be good” is to reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour and to reinforce that with threats and promises. I’d be concerned if an adult needed that treatment; but if it is never given, then there’s a fair chance that the person may never acquire the concept of good and bad.

Perhaps that straightforward correspondence between righteousness and prosperity is how things really were when God first starting bringing up his children. We don’t know. But quite clearly it is not so now and there is no profit in expecting it to be so, or claiming it is.

I think one problem is that for most of us over a certain age (and most of us here just now ARE over that certain age!) Christianity is the background to our lives; we received a basic formation in Christianity, in Bible stories, and in the “general respectable behaviour” expected of good Christian folk.

The result is that to some extent we take it as read that we know about God, about Christianity, And we don’t realise that in that, as in everything else, we need to grow up. We need to stop wondering why, or complaining that, God doesn’t treat us like children any more. You wouldn’t try to teach a three-year-old fuzzy logic; and God didn’t try to teach the newly-monotheistic Israel the concept of doing good for the love of God and his kingdom. The Christianity appropriate to a child is not sufficient to build an adult life or understanding of God on; just as the first rigid rules about grammar and spelling are not sufficient to understand poetry. Both are necessary; both have to be grasped and then superseded. We must continue to move on and to grow, even if it is frightening. Paul put it this way: “when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” His understanding of God and how to serve him did not gain him earthly prosperity, nor did he expect it to. It led him to persecution, imprisonment and a violent death.

And his comment on that was “what has happened to me has really served to advance the Gospel…I hoe that now as always Christ will be honoured in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain”. He does not understand how, or need to feel safe. He has the courage to float without constantly feeling for the sea-bed below him. It seems to me that that is a grown-up response, from a grown-up man.

We are growing, as Paul says elsewhere, into the stature of Christ, but we are not quite grown. And while there’s no doubt that some things are obviously good for us and some obviously bad, we do not always know the difference – but God does. If we ask for bread to eat, we won’t get a stone; but if, because we are still half-grown, we do ask for a stone, we may find that we are given bread all the same, and may not realise until much later why we did not get what we asked for. When St James says that if we don’t get what we ask for it is because we don’t pray as we should, he does not mean that we haven’t been subservient enough, not used the correct formulas, or missed out a semi-colon in the Collect. He means that we haven’t grasped that God is bigger than the things we have asked for.

Ultimately, it all boils down to trust – and doesn’t it always? Trust that God’s gift, and the joy it brings, is always greater than we can imagine or ask for. The psalmist got it right when he said “Thou hast put more joy into my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound”. What God promised Solomon is no longer enough; what he gives us now is himself.

And that is not always immediately satisfying, or even immediately obvious. Some of us may wait a lifetime.

I’ll let Hopkins have the last word, as he had the first; as he turns away from his own troubles and complaints, and towards the beauty of God’s creation, and realises that the only answer – always – is to turn back to God, and pray, and wait, for his gift of his Spirit. I think this is a prayer that many of us could make our own.
See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

May He send to all of us the rain that will make us grow in Christ. Amen.

The Three-Legged Stool

2009-08-13T01:16:00.000-07:00

On the principle of "Better Late Than Never", here is last week's sermon!

"and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, "Know the Lord" for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them" saith the Lord."

Or, as Isaiah put it, "And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children."

Our personal, immediate communication with God is constantly stressed in the Scriptures. We are, certainly, to be guided by church leaders and official pronouncements (or Moses if we happen to be children of Israel) but ultimately we are in life, as in death,alone with God; it is a a question not of acting according to the church’s rules, not of having the correct belief about the exact nature of the Trinity, but of knowing God, the personal God, whoever, however or whatever you understand him or her to be; it is clear that our God is a God who does communicate with each of us.

Jesus, picking up the words of Isaiah, responded thus to the people who were wanting doctrinal definitions from him about the Bread from heaven: “No man can come to me, except the Father, which hath sent me draw him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh to me.”

And this learning does not even need to involve a conscious relationship with the church. Paul, who knew what he was talking about when it came to direct communication with God, put it very strongly: “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves”.

So what am I doing standing up here, then? You may well come to a conclusion about that during the next ten minutes or so.

Almost from the beginning of Christianity there has been some disagreement about the source of our knowledge about God and how he wishes us to live our lives. To oversimplify the position as it is now and has been since the Reformation: Protestants claim that Scripture alone is the source, Roman Catholics would add Tradition - that is, the teaching of the Magisterium of the church (let’s say “the Vatican”) - and Anglicans, which includes us Episcopalians, would add Reason. Scripture, Tradition and Reason, are the "three-legged stool" upon which faith rests.

This so-called "three-legged stool" probably originates with the work by Richard Hooker, an Anglican divine of the reign of Elizabeth I in his work "The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity". He never used the phrase, but the concept is clearly there.

However, it must not be misunderstood. One of the beauties of the Anglican part of the church - in theory at least - is its inclusiveness, its refusal to over-define, its openness to people as they actually are. Yes, certainly. But if we accept Hooker's understanding of the source of our faith, we should do him the courtesy of listening to what he actually said. Which was this: "What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due; That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgements whatsoever"

"What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due". Sometimes - I would even say usually - it is perfectly clear what Scripture is saying. But sometimes is it is not, and then we have the choice between taking another’s word for it, or struggling to understand for ourselves. The Roman church, and possibly most Anglicans, would assume that using our own judgement comes last; but that is not the original Anglican tradition, and it is not the belief of Hooker: “the next is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth.”

Can we really decide for ourselves what a particular passage of scripture means? Yes, I think we can (and must?).

The Roman church, when pronouncing on an area of doctrine, may give three broad judgements: This is what you should hold; this is something you should not hold; or: This is the safe position to hold. I really like the thinking behind this third possibility. In this case, you are told you are free to think differently if your reason and your understanding of the scriptures leads you so to do, but if you wish to be safe, then you know what the "safe" belief is.

In fact, I think my appreciation of this Roman Catholic concept has helped me to understand, and appreciate, what some see as "Anglican woolliness". We have the choice, I believe, to accept the "safe" way. Some people may choose that all the time; probably all of us choose it some of the time, or on some subjects; it would be arrogant to think that one person has such acuity and is so close to God that they could, in Kierkegaard's phrase, "float above five hundred fathoms" unaided at all times. And we must not look down on those who do choose the safe way, the way of seeking out and accepting without question whatever the church teaches.

But we also have the choice, where it cannot be said that "Scripture doth plainly deliver" - and only there! - to try to make out "what we can necessarily conclude by force of reason". We shouldn’t forget that the Psalm calls God “Deus scientiarum Dominus”, a phrase taken up as a motto by Cambridge university.

But God is more than the God of intellectual knowledge. Some have spoken of a “four-legged stool” which adds experience to Scripture, Tradition and Reason. As someone said, "I would rather feel contrition than be able to define it". Now this does not mean ”feeling” as in “if I feel it is so, it is.” It is best expressed by Melanchthon's equally famous phrase "this it is to know Christ - to receive his benefits - not to contemplate his natures, or the modes of his incarnation".

Of course, we need to do both; and the Scriptures are there for us to interpret, and god is there for us to know.

So what AM I doing standing up here, if God speaks to all of us through Scripture, reason and experience? Why have I got a special right to instruct any of you? I don’t think it is a question of right to instruct. I think I am here to do a bit of encouraging. To say “Do not be afraid”.

Our God is not a God who lies in wait for us to put a foot wrong. He is not even a God who stands and cheers us on from the sidelines. he is a God who is with us ever inch of the way: the safe way and the risky way; the joyful way, the sorrowful way, and ultimately the glorious way, for he has walked them before us. A God who said “I am with you in tribulation” and “Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I have called you by your name; you are mine.”

So let us pray: “O you who are the source of our faith, Christ our God, you have fulfilled th law and the Prophets in their entirety. Fill our heart with love and our minds with understanding each time we take your holy Scripture in our hands; you who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever. Amen.”

Per ducatum Evangelii pergamus itinera Christi

2009-08-01T02:28:00.000-07:00

2 August 2009
2 Samuel 11:26-12:13; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35
Kierkegaard said: “Far be it from us to endeavour to win human admiration by fathoming what is not to be fathomed; we do not believe that he came to this earth to propose for us themes for a learned investigation. But He came to this earth to prescribe the task, to leave behind Him a footprint, so that we might learn from Him.” Elsewhere he remarked that, rather than agonising over the parts of the Bible we do not understand, or even abandoning our faith because of them, we would do better to take in the parts we do understand, and live by them. If we really try to do that, he suggested, we probably wouldn’t have time to worry about the rest.

Christianity, living according to the will and law of God, is dead simple. Sometimes, in my more unconventional moments, I suspect it may even be dead easy, once you really get stuck in. Momentum doesn’t only work for the devil; it’s perfectly true that one sin leads to another (just look at David) and that once we get on to the slippery slope of vice it is difficult to turn and climb back up, and so forth. but, as someone said, the best way to pray is to pray. Praying is not easy, not for anyone, unless they are really experienced, and perhaps not even then, unless they have been given the grace of discovering “their” way of prayer. But once you actually start doing it, it does become easier. You are carried by the momentum. The same applies to virtuous actions; and the simpler both the prayer and the action is, the better.

We have an awful tendency to mock the Jewish Law, especially as it became in the Pharisaic and Rabbinic periods. Hedges round the Torah, hedges round the hedges. But we would do well to glance at our own faith. Now, I do not deny the necessity of law. Jesus gave us a law, and a very clear one: and if we do not keep that law we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. The simpler the law, the more binding – if not in theory, certainly in practice. Paul himself said that neither his generation nor their fathers had been able to keep the Jewish Law, and we have gone a long way towards making the Christian law equally impossible (and might I say undesirable) to keep. The church over the millennia, through, I believe, the same laudable desire to be certain about God’s will as the Jews had, has built up a vast structure of details, commandments big and small, sub-clauses of sub-clauses, full of ifs and buts and at the very same time extreme precision – I think that if everything seems to be collapsing around our ears, if our own part of the church appears to be tearing itself apart, it is because we have sowed the wind and we are now reaping the whirlwind.

Paradoxically, it is a minimalist attitude that leads to this mind-breaking (and soul-destroying) maximalism. It is the minimalist attitude that needs to know who my neighbour is (or rather, who he isn’t) and how little I need to do for him and still squeeze into heaven; and that same attitude, therefore, which leads to the details, the hedges, the ifs and buts. And still more paradoxically it is the minimalist attitude which leads to the need for domination and laying down of rigid rules. if I can’t get away with this, neither shall you; I want to do this but I am not allowed to, so neither shall you; if I have to do this, then you shall do it too. At which point I quote, yet again, Father Faber’s “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea”. Jesus, who is God, was as un-minimalist, un-hedged-about and as free from both ifs and buts and sweeping rigidity as we are the opposite. “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

We are full of the wrong kind of fear: a fear of the consequences, a fear of inconvenience, a fear of discomfort; a fear that “God might be cross with us” as if he were an unreasonable and unpredictable parent; an insecurity; a human respect. Like Kierkegaard, I am preaching primarily to myself. We are too afraid to dare to be wrong, and too insecure to bear seeing another exercising the freedom which both attracts and frightens us. We have been held back by minimalism, by suspicion and by insecurity for too long; we are trying to break out of a painful situation, but we are going about it in the wrong way. It is as if we said “These rules as to who is my neighbour and what I must do for him are absurd and constraining. Therefore I will cast aside the very concept of “neighbour” and “charity” and be free from such shackles.” They are indeed absurd and constraining. indeed we should not be shackled; but we will only unshackle ourselves as God wishes it by going in precisely the opposite direction. Yes, this is the Edinburgh-Perth road. But to get to Perth, you don’t only have to be travelling on this road, you have to be travelling in the right direction. When theory becomes crushing and maze-like, when law turns into a great heap of tangled details and all sense of proportion and hierarchy of values is lost, the answer is not to chuck all theory and all law. The answer is to go back, to discover the foundations of the theory and the law, the point at which they are as clear and unmistakable as a signpost to Perth.

It is true that not everything is in the Gospel, or not explicitly so. When dealing with situations which are not explicitly there, one may respond in one of two ways. The first is the one which the church has adopted up to now and when I say the church I am starting with Moses, if not Abraham. It is to start to build up, or build up again, a huge structure of laws, each logically or not so logically deduced from previous ones. It does feel safer, I admit, and it is probably easier. But the other, which has not been tried except in very circumscribed areas – yes, even by the Anglican communion – could be simply to say “We don’t know” and leave it to private judgement. This is really scary to the average Christian (even to the congregation of St John’s) but it seems to me to be far more in tune with the Gospel itself. There are passages in the Gospel which are beyond us; but we have got to deal with that. It is not a disaster. There are situations for which the Gospel does not even give us guidelines. I think we have got to deal with that too. There is so much in the Gospel that we can understand, so much that we can carry out. The word is very near to us, in our mouth and in our heart that we may keep it. We do not need to cross the sea or climb mountains to find it. We do not even have to climb up to heaven to fetch it down: it has already come down to us. AN Whitehead complained that “the brief Galilean vision of humility flickered through the ages uncertainly…but the deep idolatry of fashioning God in the image of Egyptian, Persian and Roman rulers was retained. The church gave unto God attributes that belonged exclusively unto Caesar”. God is not a dominating God. God is a God whose truth gives freedom. When St Mechtild asked God what was most pleasing about St Gertrude, God replied “Her freedom of heart”. That sounds like a bad joke in the context of the church as institution, but it is true. It is only human beings who need to dominate and to hedge things about.

Could we perhaps try to walk in the direction of the sometimes wild-sounding indications Jesus has given us or, better still, follow in his footsteps? And maybe worry a little less when we can’t see them and the path is not quite clear? It may well be that in the area where we are walking just now there is no one correct path. If we are following his general direction we will come out automatically in the right place and find the footprints again.

Of course, this can be carried too far. The following suggestion by Dermot A Lane could be dangerous if taken maliciously. But perhaps some of us could try to use it benignly and see what happens:

“The need to move beyond a modern mechanical perception of the world towards some form of post-modern, inclusive, progressive paradigm is receiving growing acceptance among scientists and theologians alike. The issue facing humanity is to move from theory to praxis, from an instrumental rationality to a liberating wisdom, from an ethic of domination to a new ethic of social and ecological solidarity.”

Well, I mightn’t have put it quite like that. But when I unpack it it seems to say exactly what I mean. God, and so the things of God, is too big to be contained in one way of looking at things, and too simple to be codified. The essentials do not change, and changing world-views do not make them change. All truth speaks truly of God, since it comes from God. We could do with being a lot less afraid, and we would be a lot less vulnerable to the devil and his angels and a lot more supple in the hands of God. Per ducatum Evangelii pergamus itinera Christi!

Gone Fishing

2009-07-04T14:40:00.000-07:00

Back, with luck and a fair wind, at the end of July. There may (if you are lucky) be a sermon for the feast of St Benedict.

Salvum me fac Deus quoniam intraverunt aquae usque ad animam meam

2009-06-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

I recently heard someone say, as if it were a given, that, had we not had the letter to Philemon (in which Paul pleads the case of Onesimus, Philemon’s slave and Paul’s convert) we would never have known that he had a softer, more human – more Christlike – side. This rather shook me.

Paul is unpopular – I wanted to say “nowadays”, but I get the impression that he has been unpopular ever since I remember, and no doubt earlier than that. The reasons that are generally given are (a) that Paul was a legalistic reactionary misogynistic, cantankerous old so-and-so and (b) that he introduced alien Greek philosophical ideas into the simple teachings of an itinerant Rabbi and turned a branch of Jewish thought and practice into a new religion, an offshoot of Stoicism Neo-Platonism Gnosticism and – well, you think up your own insult.

So poor Paul was at once a hidebound Hebrew traditionalist and a dangerous syncretistic progressive. In other words, in twenty-first century Scottish words, he was at once a hardline Calvinist-leaning pillar of the Kirk and a liberal with New-Age and probably Buddhist leanings. A bit Festival of Spirituality and Peace, ken.

Hmm. Well done, Paul. For wasn’t this the man who said “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some”?

Well, I like Paul. I can imagine having a stormy but fruitful friendship with him, punctuated by long discussions as to how he saw and understood that Jesus Christ whom he had persecuted, whom he had met on the road to Damascus and with whom he was now deeply in love, so deeply that he could hardly think of anything else. Do you know the folk song “O Waly Waly”? It contains these lines which, especially in the context of today’s reading from Acts, immediately make me think of Paul:

“There is a ship, and she sails the sea;
She’s loaded deep as deep can be;
But not as deep as the love I’m in:
I know not if I sink or swim”.

I think that’s why Paul could be so casual about physical danger, why he could be cheerful in the midst of a shipwreck. The ship might sink, he might be in deep water, but no water could be as deep as his love.

Jesus told us that the two great commandments, love of God and love of neighbour, are one and the same. To see this demonstrated in action, you can look at Jesus himself, or you can look at Paul. And I sometimes think that it is easier for us to look at Paul. He’s just a little less perfect! Do people forget those many passages where he proclaims – no, sings – his love for God, his breathless wonder and worship, or those passages where he pours out his love for his converts: “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God every time I remember you, and in all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy”.

If he sometimes spends page upon page discussing and teaching detailed, intellectual doctrine, that is simply what we all do when we are getting to know someone who bowls us over with love. Paul had thought he knew God – and then he met God. As some of you might have thought you knew the person who was to become your spouse or partner during your initial time of acquaintance, until that moment when you suddenly discovered who they really were, and getting to know them as soon, as quickly and as thoroughly as possible became imperative. You get the same thing with Thomas Aquinas and also with Jeremiah: “But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name," his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.”

When you are passionate, you are sometimes excessive. We do need passion. Passion for God and passion for God’s people.

Paul was a brave man, that’s evident. But the most striking thing about this passage for me is the way he is permanently turned towards God. God is the constant in his life, his point of reference for everything. When you have been adrift in a storm for 14 days, what do you do? You try to escape surreptitiously, you panic, you despair. Paul? He celebrates a dawn eucharist (well – yes – listen to the phrase: “and when he had said this, he took bread, and giving thanks to God he broke it..” – the word for giving thanks is, of course, eucharistein), having been in such close communication with God that he had total assurance that they would all get safely to land.

If I had never read a single word of this man’s letters, I would know there was something extraordinary about him, not just extraordinarily God-centred, but also something extraordinarily powerful and attractive. He couldn’t still the wind and the waves like Jesus, but he could still 276 terrified people in a half-wrecked boat.
And so we come to the other objection people have to Paul. He wasn’t Jesus, Paul added stuff to the simple teaching of Jesus, turned it into a new religion. full of doctrine and rules. First – are you sure Jesus’ teaching was so simple? I haven’t got time now to detail just how complicated, ground-breaking and often explosive it was, but may I just direct you to the sixth or seventeenth chapter of St John’s gospel?

But you know – I am glad that we have Paul as well as Jesus. Jesus was – is – God; there are things that he simply did not experience. There are things that he simply wouldn’t think of. He did not, for example, experience his own sin; and he did not experience conversion. He did not battle with doctrine; he told it as he had seen it with his Father. We should imitate Jesus; but in many ways we cannot be like him. We are not God made man; we are not the source of Truth, who can neither deceive or be deceived. But we can be like Paul. Inspired he may have been, apostle he may have been, but he could not see as Jesus saw, and neither can we. He had to be precise, to define, to be on the safe side, just as we have to. On a beautiful bright day you may walk right up to a precipice; you will keep a mile away from it in a fog; and the vision and understanding of the greatest saint and doctor of the church is as fog compared with that of God made man.

It would be idle to deny that the godly life taught by Jesus by word and example differs in emphasis and maybe content from the religion preached by Paul. There are many things I wish Paul had not said, which I am sure Jesus would not have said, and which I sometimes suspect he would not have approved of had he heard it said by one of his disciples “while the Bridegroom was with them”. However, Paul was the man hand-picked – warts and all – by the Holy Spirit for the job, and we ignore or deny his teaching at our peril. We may disagree with him sometimes as we may not disagree with Jesus – but only if we are very clear of the risk we are taking and are sure we know what we are doing. I cannot resist quoting a passage from the instructions for my chainsaw at this point; I think it answers that second objection better than a more pious expression ever could:

“We strongly recommend you do not attempt to operate your chainsaw while in a tree, on a ladder, or any other unstable surface. If you decide to do so, be advised that these positions are extremely dangerous”.

Paul, lover of Christ and seeker after his truth, pray for us that, like you, we may walk in the safe way of his commandments, and come at last to the unspeakable joy and glory of his Kingdom. Amen.

Unconditional Positive Regard, or "On Love....again!"

2009-06-20T16:12:00.000-07:00

Sermon, Evensong, 21 June 2009 – Jeremiah 10:1-16; Romans 11:25-36
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in God’s justice which is more than liberty.
At first glance you might think that the two readings we have just heard are saying contradictory things. In the first reading everyone except the chosen people is wrong and, basically, there’s not a lot of hope for them; in the second, not only is it now the chosen people who are wrong, but there is plenty of hope all the same.

Well, I don’t think they contradict each other at all. I think they are both saying what God has said over and over again, in both Old Testament and New, and that we continue to fail to hear: Fear not. Do not be afraid. Not of those non-gods who scare the gentiles so much, and not of God himself. And certainly not of anything less.
There was once a theologian called Jacob the Carthusian who wrote a cheery little work called “De paucitate salvandorum” – “Of the fewness of those who will be saved”. I often wonder what he thought about his own chances. From some of his writings it would certainly appear that he took a pretty dim view of most of his colleagues. Father Faber, the Oratorian who wrote the hymn that I quoted at the start of this sermon, have quoted before and will no doubt quote again, concluded that, on the contrary, most Catholics will be saved. We would no doubt go further and say at least that most Christians will be saved. I’m fairly sure that God would go further still; and I think it was a realisation along those lines that made Paul burst out in that famous cry of adoration, which bears hearing again: Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.

We echo that in our communion service when we say “for everything in heaven and on earth is yours. All things come from you, and of your own do we give you.” But I wonder whether we really grasp the literal truth of this.

We have most of us heard the teaching that we can do nothing by ourselves, that we cannot save ourselves; that none of our virtues are our own, that we are saved quite simply by the blood of Christ, or, rather, by the love that led him to shed that blood. That can seem quite an unattractive teaching. So we are useless, are we? Even our virtues are as filthy rags, are they? Well, no. And yet it is true. The point, however, is not that God looks on our good deeds, on our efforts, on our observances, and sneers. The point is that God looks on them with love, but would look on us with love just as much without them.

When one is learning the basics of person-centred counselling, as I am, the first thing one is taught is that it is not a technique, but a way of being with a person. And that the so-called “core conditions” (that is, the characteristics of that “way of being”) are, by themselves, enough to lead the person you are listening to to find their own solutions. These core conditions are empathy, congruence (or honesty), and that thing which for us is impossible, though we strive to get as close to it as we can: unconditional positive regard. Yes, it’s jargon; but it does what it says on the tin. It means to look at a person positively (as opposed to negatively) without imposing any conditions on that positiveness. Perhaps it’s loving the sinner and hating the sin; or, as I believe Carl Rogers himself once suggested, simply…love.

Love is something we have difficulty with. We are apt either to put conditions on our love, or if we try not to, we end up becoming doormats, which is not what it is about. And that’s where another of the “core conditions” can come to rescue us: congruence. Congruence is the thing that makes you speak the truth in love; because if you are withholding an important part of yourself you are not truly loving. It doesn’t mean that you have to tell someone you love that their new hat is ghastly – but it does mean that you have to be straight with someone you love about the drinking habit that is wrecking their life. If it is important to the person who loves, then it needs to be brought into the love.

I am not claiming this is easy, and indeed my purpose in mentioning it is not primarily to tell you – or to tell myself – to do it. Indeed, only God can perfectly do it, and that is why I’m talking about it. Because that is what these readings are about. God’s love, which is unconditional; and God’s congruence, which means that God will never pretend something is OK when it isn’t. Emmanuel, God-with-us, as well as being called “Almighty God and Everlasting Father” is also called “Wonderful Counsellor”, and while it is a different sort of counsellor that is meant, I like to think that God is the model for those of us who would be counsellors, as well as for those of us who would be Christians…or Jews…or Moslems…or...

Congruence means that God, through Jeremiah, says clearly that the customs of the gentiles are worthless, that their fears are unfounded; it means that through Paul God says that the chosen people “has experienced hardening in part”. But, Jeremiah hints, all the gentiles would have to do is to stop fearing those worthless bits of wood and stone, and discover the God whose love casts out fear. And Paul states very firmly that, hardened or not, the children of Israel, once loved, are loved forever. Unconditional positive regard or what!

And so I come back to fear. There are things that we should indeed be afraid of, some for this world (such as hungry tigers or speeding cars), and some for the next (such as final impenitence, which means continuing to turn away from God until we die, still turned away). Part of congruence, part of empathy, indeed, is refusing to take away a person’s free will, their autonomy, their right to decide to destroy themselves. That loved one who is killing themselves with drink – we have no right to stop them, even if we could. And in that we are struggling to imitate God, who will never force anyone to love him…even if he could. God will not, and, yes, cannot. Because free will cannot be forced. God will remind, will threaten, will cajole, will die for you, will love to the end. But God will never force. Perhaps, indeed, that is the only thing that should frighten us: our own free will. But we have been given it to use, not to deny or to throw away. It is the sign of God’s love in us, and his love, we are told, is without repentance. With God we can dare what we can hardly dare with human beings: we can dare to risk getting it wrong. As Father Faber says: The love of God is broader than the measure of our mind.

And so, as Paul prayed for his Ephesians, let us pray: that we, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell

2009-06-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

Normal service will (I hope) be resumed next week...

(not unwell, just overworked)

Sanctus sanctus sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth

2009-06-06T04:09:00.000-07:00

7 June 2009: Ez 1:4-10, 22-28, Rev 4

The readings we have just heard strike me as quite surprising, and perhaps unhelpful ones for the Feast of the Trinity. When I hear about the four living creatures it is the four evangelists I think of: Matthew the man, Mark the lion, Luke the bull and John the eagle. Not the Trinity. What I think the church is trying to convey by choosing these passages is the awesomeness, awe-inspiringness of God. God, the Trinity, is altogether too much, too high for us, a mystery before which we must bow down and hide our faces.

OK. You can approach the Trinity like that: “Fear God” – you get that right down into the New Testament. And it’s true that the moment we lose that, the moment we forget that we are creatures and have a Creator – is the moment that we cease to be believers, cease to be followers of Jesus Christ. But – should we leave it at that?
Who, after all, is God to us? Who is God to you? Who is the Trinity to you? It’s God the Father, who created us: not some terrifying emperor figure but our father; God the Son, who dwelt among us as one of us; and God the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us. I’ve said many times that if you want to see what God is like, look at Jesus – well, he said so, didn’t he? “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”. But I’d go further than that, especially for us who do not see Jesus in his day-to-day life. Do you believe that we are made in God’s image and likeness? Do you believe that YOU are? In which case, if you want to see what God is like, look at yourself.

Yes, the angels hid their faces and said “Holy holy holy”; but I venture to say that our relationship with God is different. The angels say holy holy holy, but Isaiah confesses his sinfulness and is cleansed, chosen and given a mission by God. As Paul said, “unto which of the angels said he at any time “Thou art my son, this day I have begotten thee”?

God the Son did not become an angel. He became incarnate as one of us. Like us. Like you. Like me. It is extraordinary and incredible, but after all not so extraordinary and incredible; who, according to Genesis, is “made in the image and likeness of God”? That already suggests something. the Trinity includes Jesus Christ who has been and eternally is one of us. We, the human race, are part of, intimately part of the Trinity.

The Son is not less than the Father because he has been incarnate. The Son is not intrinsically more visible than the Father. Don’t imagine that the OT God is the Father, the NT God the Son, and the God of the era of the Church is the Holy Spirit No. All three are the Trinity. God is the Trinity. YHWH is the Trinity.

All God’s actions external to himself are actions of the Trinity – there is no distinction. It is only in the relations within the Trinity that there is a distinction. Undoubtedly, when it comes to incarnate life on earth, to crucifixion, that blows your mind. but – of course God blows your mind. And that is the sort of awe, the sort of “too much for us” that we should feel about the Trinity: not that God is so far removed but that God is so intimate, so close to us, so much part of us and we of God. Jesus prayed “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me.” So – hang on to your pews here – God is not just close to us because the Son was incarnate. God, the Trinity, is close to us because we are made in the image and likeness of the Trinity.

I think that was what St Augustine was getting at when he devoted a large part of his book on the Trinity to a discussion of our own internal being and to searching for the trinity within. He found it in many places, but settled for the mind’s self-memory, self-understanding and self-willing or self-loving, and the way in which these mental acts proceed from one another or are generated or conceived one by another. The Trinity, far from being something utterly remote from us, is in fact the blueprint of our being, just as the design of the Temple was supposed to be a copy of a heavenly original. The Feast of the Trinity is our feast. If you feel inclined to argue that we cannot understand the Trinity, that it is a great mystery, indeed it is. But – are we much less of a mystery? I understand myself better than I did twenty or thirty years ago, but there are still deep recesses of mystery within myself, and I think there always will be; and I am just a finite created being. The infinite uncreated God whose finite created image I am will be infinitely, uncreatedly more mysterious than I am, but not in an entirely different way. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Augustine, utterly fascinated by his own being and psychology, made the Trinity the subject of his major work, a work he spent his life writing and rewriting until his friends, impatient with the endless revisions, pinched the manuscript and published a pirated edition.

All this is babbling. Of course we cannot understand the Trinity. But all the people over all the centuries who have tried, suggest to me two things. One: that it is worth trying; and two: that the Trinity is indeed closer to us than we are to ourselves. We try to grasp the Trinity with the same hunger with which we try to understand ourselves. And since we cannot look into the Trinity and we have been told that we are made in its image, all we can do to “feel after him and find him” as Paul says, is to look into ourselves.

Augustine is saying that if you are interested in looking for God and finding him, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you must look within yourself, through a glass darkly. You must in fact also be engaged in a quest for your true self. And conversely, your only hope of finding your true self is in finding, or at the very least in continually seeking, the true God, who is eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

This trinity in us is not static; as the Blessed Trinity is anything but static, being constituted by relationship and the ceaseless ebb and flow of the love which is God, which generates God and which is the God who is generated. Augustine sees the action of the Trinity in our souls, turning our self-understanding, self-memory and self-loving towards God, when it becomes God-understanding, God-memory and God-love. Our mind or soul reflects the Trinity not just in its structure but in its proper sphere of activity, which is union with God.

So might I suggest, as a hymn to accompany our thinking about the Trinity, our praying to the Trinity, not “Holy Holy Holy” but this one:

Lord, your summons echoes true when you but call my name
Let me turn and follow you and never be the same.
In your company I’ll go where your love and footsteps show.
Thus I’ll move and live and grow in you and you in me.

Et renovabis faciem terrae

2009-05-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

Send forth thy Spirit and they shall be created; and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.

What is preaching for, anyway? My favourite preacher asked me that a few weeks ago, and I have been worrying at the question ever since, and the answer I have come up with – not very earth-shaking, I think you’ll agree, but appropriate for Pentecost - is that it is has to be about communication – real communication. Thomas Aquinas insisted that if we reach the heights of contemplation of God, it is our duty to come back down and transmit to others the fruits of our contemplation. We are not all contemplatives – I am not – but all the same, preaching must be along these lines.

When I was studying Ancient History at university – so long ago as to be almost ancient history itself – our supervisor’s main strategy to make us THINK was to cover the margins of our essays with the word “Evidence?” interspersed with “Was it?” “Did he?” and so on. They say a good teacher can make all the difference to your entire life, and Liz Rawson certainly did to mine.

Her insistence on evidence and her refusal just to accept bald statements (which were in any case probably pinched from a book she knew far better than we did – or indeed, had written herself) have had profound effects on me.

One of those effects was to make me rather picky in what I read and hear, whether it is an academic book, an article on fishing, or a sermon. Very often, when I listen to a sermon (and if there are any preachers here, may I reassure you by telling you that it sometimes happens to me with St Paul’s epistles too) I find myself silently arguing with the preacher. “Evidence! Evidence! Evidence!” “How do you know?” Or when they say “We so often think...” “Aren’t we all inclined to...” I silently shout “No, I don’t!” “Well, I’m not” and so on.

Don’t you? Ah, yes, I see you do. Or at least, you are now.

I think this is a good thing. I think a sermon should come out of serious engaging with the Word of God and with the Christian life as lived; and sermon-hearing should also be a serious engaging; with the Word just heard (it is not by chance that the sermon immediately follows the readings) and with the words of the preacher, in the context of one’s own experience. The sermon should not be a ten-minute slot of extreme boredom, of half-listening to stuff you have heard a thousand times before (Guilty as charged, m’lud).

You can’t get up in the middle of a sermon and challenge the preacher, despite Edinburgh’s honourable tradition of stool-throwing, and I have only known one preacher who invited comments at the end of his sermon (you can, maybe, guess who was the only person to get up and make a comment on that occasion!). But if you are carrying away with you a niggle, a disagreement, or even just a cry of “Evidence!” you can stop her as she tries to slink away un-noticed or you can get her e-mail and argue with her that way. If her sermon has come from something real in her, and your niggle has come from something real in you, then at least one of you is going to gain something.

We can’t all be “original thinkers” in the usually accepted sense of the word. But since we are all unique, we are all original liv-ers, and if we think at all, we think “originally”. Each life is different, each mind is different and each soul is different. Which can make communication incredibly exciting; and I believe that real communication is part of the purpose of life.

God appears to think so too. Looking at the Bible, one of the things that leaps out at me (and very definitely in the two readings we have heard this evening) is just how important it seems to be to God to communicate effectively with us, and to get us to engage with him. To the extent that the Second Person of the Trinity is called The Word. It has been said – and I wish I remembered by whom – that if the Son is the Word, the Holy Spirit is the Voice.

If we are to understand the Trinity in any way but the most academic and theoretical – and I am not sure that it is worth bothering to understand it at all in that way – then we have to see it as an expression of the truth that relationship, and communication, are essential to the very nature of God and of ourselves. You know the blessing – “may the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you”. In Latin the last part of this is “et communicatio Sancti Spiritus” “the communication of the Holy Spirit”. If you take that word communicatio apart, you will get “the making-one”. The very nature of the Holy Spirit would appear to be communication, or “making one”; within the Trinity, and between the Trinity and creation.

That seems to be God’s main purpose: by his very own unity to make us one. His own unity, his own love, is so – dare I say “solid”? - as to be a Person in its own right. That is who the Holy Spirit is. That is the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity whose visible descent we celebrate, and whose spiritual descent we pray for, today.

But in what sense do we pray for the Holy Spirit to “come down”? The Holy Spirit does not come again every Pentecost as if she had been absent. The Spirit of Jesus, is “with us always, even to the end of the age”; and indeed always has been, ever since she brooded over the formless void that she hatched into our universe. It is for us to tap into the ceaseless ebb and flow of the love within the Trinity; and tapping into that union, that comm-unicatio within God, is what we call prayer.

Prayer is, for many, a scary word. It’s hard enough to communicate properly with another person without hiding behind ready-made phrases and opinions, behind talk of the weather and the price of cheese, without censoring our thoughts and the less attractive or interesting parts of ourselves. And that’s when you can see the person you are communicating with – though, be it noted, you can’t see their thoughts. But God is worse. God does not answer in a way we are used to; he can’t be seen (unless you are Moses); he knows us better than we know ourselves, and he knows our needs before we tell him. How are we supposed to communicate with God?

No. Prayer is not scary and it is not difficult. What is difficult is praying in a way that does not suit us. Just as I find maths difficult, while you might find languages difficult. Maths may be a breeze for you. I pick up languages out of the air. Well, I spent nearly twenty years faithfully trying to “do” contemplative prayer. And it was only towards the end of those twenty years that I began to understand what “my” way of prayer is, and to discover that it has a respectable history, in both the Eastern and Western parts of the church. Some of you may have been faithfully trying to “meditate”, or to “recite prayers” or to “practise the presence of God” – or whatever. And failing. Because we have been “told” that this way, or that way, is the only way, or the best way, to pray. Nonsense. The best way to pray is the way that suits you; the way in which, as Walter Hilton put it in the fourteenth century, you “find most savour”. Prayer – like preaching, and like responding to preaching – has to come from something real within you. As soon as you stop listening to “the authorities” and instead do some research into the myriad ways in which people have prayed over the millennia and then...TRY IT...you will discover the language in which you and God communicate. It may be silent contemplation. It may be imaginative meditation. It may be walking in the Pentlands and responding to him in communion with the natural world. It may be a ceaseless conversation, as if he was walking next to you wherever you go. But find out for yourself, and don’t worry about doing or saying the right thing – Paul tells us quite plainly that God isn’t bothered about that: “"Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness: for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words" . As the slogan from that famous brand of sports clothing has it: JUST DO IT!

..........and so:

may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communication of the Holy Spirit be with us all.

Beati mortui, qui in Domino moriuntur

2009-05-23T14:42:00.000-07:00

Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him:

So God loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

John 17, and indeed John 15-17, tends to scare people. So many words, so many tangents, so much said. I suppose I could try to give a nice meaty exposition of it; but then we’d be here until Christmas, & you’d be much better to go home and get out a good commentary.

So I’m not going to do that. I was considering doing something like it, until a friend rang me to tell me that his cancer has spread and that the best they can offer him is palliative chemo.

And then this passage took on quite a different meaning for me.

I think we can all sometimes be mesmerised by the mass of words and the apparent difficulty of certain passages of the Bible. It is so easy to burrow into the words and forget about the meaning - and, perhaps even easier, to forget the context, to forget who is talking; and, in the case of John 17, who is talking to whom, and when.

It’s very simple really: this is a prayer, a prayer from the man who gave us the Lord’s Prayer; the man who also happened to be God and so knew how God wants to be prayed to.

St Augustine said of the Psalms: “So that we should know how to praise God, God first praised himself.” That’s even more true of the few examples that have come down to us of Jesus’ own way of praying: what we call “The Lord’s Prayer”; the various very short prayers scattered through the Gospels; and this one.

And this one teaches us two basic things: how to pray - and it isn’t necessarily what we would expect - and how to face death.

Well, yes: this is a relatively young man, in full health and lucidity, facing death, undoubtedly the most significant and well-prepared death in history, praying his last thought-out prayer to God; it is a prayer that sums up his life, mission and teaching, and his dearest wishes. The last testament of a person is a thing of great significance; if it is actually spoken as they face death its significance is hugely increased. Many of us, when we get to that stage, and if we are not too incapacitated, are so scared of death that we are not capable of articulating any such thing.

I am not generally too keen on Radio 4’s Thought For the Day, but I make an exception for Rabbi Lionel Blue. A while ago, having just come home from a stay in a hospice he was musing on the NHS, the lessons that his hospital stays had taught him, and finally - briefly - he referred to the debate about assisted dying. I paraphrase: “I hope I will be free to choose to end my life when the time comes,” he said, “but I am not sure that I will actually do it. I have found that God comes closest when I am at my lowest...and I wouldn’t want to miss out”. “And I wouldn’t want to miss out.” Three years later I am still in awe over that phrase. It shows the most astonishing courage, and the most astonishing faith - the courage and faith, properly speaking, of the martyr. A willingness to endure absolutely anything to find God, or, as another Rabbi put it, to be found in him: “I count all things to be but loss for the excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord; for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but as dung, that I may gain Christ and may be found in him.”

Dying is not a pleasant process, and facing death is terrifying. Most of us would like to avoid both, and most of us, if we were honest, would prefer a sudden death. However, in the old Litany of the Saints we read: “From a sudden and unprovided death, deliver us, Lord.” We are not to desire a sudden death: “in case we miss out”.

That’s quite a good answer to those who accuse Christians of seeking out suffering or making themselves miserable in the name of their religion. No - by no means. Jesus came that we might have life, and have it in abundance. But some of us find - I think many of us find - that God is closest to us when we are at our lowest; and while we rightly hate the lowness, still...if we have courage, and if we truly seek God, do we really want to risk “missing out”?

“Blessed are the dead, who die in the Lord.” (Rev 14:13:)

Kierkegaard believed you could build an entire spirituality around the word “as” (forgive us our sins AS we forgive, be ye perfect AS your heavenly Father is perfect). I think you could construct an entire spirituality around the word “in”.

And the place to find it is in these “difficult” chapters. We are in Christ, and he is in the Father, and God is in us, and we are made for glory.
People often stress, and rightly, that there is no glory without the cross. But I wonder whether Jesus wouldn’t prefer us to say that with the cross there is glory. As he makes this prayer he knows what he’s on his way to, but it’s the glory he sees, the glory which is his by nature and ours by gift.

I am not sure there is one “correct” Christian position on “assisted dying”. I don’t think my friend would want to make use of such a thing, even if it were available - because he knows he is in the Christ who descended to the depths and is with us in the depths, and he wouldn’t want to miss out. But we are not all so brave, and we shouldn’t condemn those who hang on to their faith by the skin of their teeth, or be ashamed if that is true of us.

But isn’t there something exhilarating about going all the way? About descending with Christ - no, in Christ - all the way to the depths, to the very door of eternity, in his way and in his own time, and finding him far, far closer than we had ever dreamed, far far closer than he had been even at our lowest during our life?

In the words of John Tavener’s Funeral Ikos:

With ecstasy are we inflamed if we but hear that there is light eternal yonder; that there is Paradise, wherein every soul of Righteous Ones rejoiceth. Let us all also enter into Christ, that we may all cry aloud thus unto God: Alleluia!

Nunc, Christe, scandens aethera, ad te cor nostrum subleva tuum Patrisque Spiritum emittens nobis caelitus.

2009-05-22T14:26:00.002-07:00

21 May 2009
Ascension Day

Ego veritatem dico vobis: expedit vobis ut ego vadam: si enim non abiero, Paraclitus non veniet, alleluia
I am telling you the truth: it is better for you that I am going away; for if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come, alleluia.

The word “alleluia” has a special atmosphere for us which it cannot have for Eastern Orthodox Christians; because we give it up for Lent. It keeps that Paschal feel about it even, say, in Advent, just as a food which we give up for Lent retains a festive feel even if it is not, as such, notably festive: I gave up olive oil for Lent once, and it took some months to regard it as a perfectly normal part of my diet. Just as we tend to commit excesses with that food in Paschaltide, so the church commits excesses with the alleluias, especially in the monastic liturgy. The word is tacked on to every text, sometimes in clumps, whether or not the text calls for the cry of “Praise the Lord!”. One of my favourites for sheer illogicality and unreasonable optimism is: “Mercenarius est, cuius non sunt oves propriae: vidit lupum venientem, et dimittit oves, et fugit, et lupus rapit et dispergit oves…Alleluia!” “The hired hand is not the shepherd who owns the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it…alleluia???”

The Ascension is certainly a joyful feast, and the thought of the coming of the Paraclete certainly one to provoke alleluias. But I confess to having a battle with this every year when I read the text “While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem WITH GREAT JOY”. There are only two other occasions in the Gospel where such joy is expressed: “When the Magi saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy” and “The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord”. In both cases the joy is caused by the sight of Jesus, either immediate or imminent, while here, at the end of Luke’s gospel, it is Jesus’ disappearance which precedes – surely we cannot say causes – the joy.

Jesus has already assured us that the father is greater than he is; now he seems to be saying that the Holy Spirit is greater than he is, and that, therefore, we will be better off with the Spirit than with him. That isn’t what he’s saying; the Father, as underived, as origin of the Godhead, is “greater” than both Son and Sprit. it is true that if Jesus were speaking as man then the Spirit would indeed be greater than he, but I do not think that is what he is doing. The Holy Spirit is “better for us” largely because of our weakness and our fleshly nature, because we are all Thomases at heart and we cling to what we can see hear and touch; unless that is removed, we will never rise higher. In the beginning it was not so and perhaps in the greatest saints it is still not so, but for most of us the flesh is an impediment to the spirit. So what we need is the Spirit. But also because of our weakness and our fleshly nature we would prefer to keep Jesus. I can imagine that even after the resurrection somewhere in the disciples’ heart there was the unspoken cry – unspoken, but heard by Jesus nonetheless – “Lord, never mind this unknown Paraclete – just don’t you go away!”
That, I confess, is how I feel on this feast. The Collect says that it is Christ’s ascension that raises us to the heights, and that the hope of the Body is to be called to the glory of the Head, but for the moment I feel bereft. We know that Jesus tells the truth – Truth himself speaks truly, or there’s nothing true – and so we do have to accept that somehow this Paraclete is at least as good to have around as Jesus is himself, But I am not a pure spirit, and neither were the apostles, and it is undoubtedly easier when it is Jesus, the Incarnate Son, who is there.

This sense of bereavement, impending or completed, is heightened by the antiphons that are sung at this season. “Peace be with you, it is I, alleluia! Fear not, alleluia!” And, worse still at this point for those of us who are only to aware of it, “A spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see that I have: now believe, alleluia!” The Holy Spirit isn’t warm and solid (pace Hopkins) and she can’t smile, or overturn the tables of the money-changers in the temple, or take your hand, or say things in just that characteristic tone of voice, or with those well-known verbal habits and that facial expression – or die for us. Nor can she at once be God and speak to us in a human voice from human vocal chords authoritatively what she has seen with the father. And even she is not present with us on this feast, even for her we have to wait; and the disciples did not know, as we do, that the wait will be only for the space of a novena.

The joy of this feast is an exclusively spiritual one. more so than any other feast in the calendar. It is a feast of complete. and literally blind, trust in God, in the words of the Lord. What it looks and feel like to us is the final disappearance of the one we love It is, it’s true, a disappearance in triumph, a disappearance in joy, the joy of all the heavenly choirs –I think it’s St Gregory the Great who points out that it is at the Ascension and not at the Nativity that the angels are see robed in white, the colour of rejoicing, because at the Nativity the divine nature is humiliated, while at the Ascension the human nature is exalted. But a disappearance which takes all but altruistic and anticipated joy away from us and leaves the present moment, the only moment that really exists, feeling drab indeed.

So why must Jesus go before the Holy Spirit can come; why was the coming of Jesus, indeed, a prerequisite for that of the Spirit; and why should it be “better” for us that Jesus should go, to be “replaced” by the Spirit? I’d say that the second question gives a good part of the answer to the first. one cannot see – that is, receive, the Holy Spirit, unless one has seen Jesus – and so, as he explained, seen the Father also, with that same capacity. The Incarnation was necessary in order to draw us, via bodily sight, to spiritual sight, not as if we saw Jesus with bodily sight and the Spirit with spiritual sight, but that although we once knew and saw Jesus according to the flesh, we now know him so no longer. it was during his lifetime on earth, and of course more specially after the resurrection, that he taught his disciples to move from one form of sight to the other. By the time the Spirit came, their spiritual eyes were ready for her; and she is the consummation of the work of the incarnation and our confirmation in spiritual sight. The world cannot see, cannot receive, the Spirit, because it has not seen Jesus. As Jesus implied, it is only in, through the Spirit, that we can fully see Jesus: because there are so many things we could not bear (the Greek word is the same one as that used for carrying the Cross) before Pentecost, and because we cannot even hold in our minds and hearts all that we have received from the Lord. we need the Spirit to recall this to us, and so to keep Jesus with us. That is why it is to our advantage if Jesus goes and send the Spirit; not that the Spirit is greater than Jesus but that only in the Spirit do we truly possess Jesus.

There’s another reason, and a sadder one. As Dostoevsky, among others, pointed out, human nature (and therefore the church as human institution) being what it is, we would never really accept the Incarnate Son of God. We would continue to find him and offence and a scandal, and we would keep crucifying him, or using whatever method of semi-judicial murder was in vogue at the time. It is instructive that the Baha’I religion, which holds that, in some sense, God has been incarnate several times, teaches that he has een killed – murdered – in all his successive incarnations; he has never been accepted. I hold no brief for the Baha’is; but that is a sound perception of the nature of God and humankind. We can’t crucify the Holy Spirit. We can certainly ignore and blaspheme her – and we do – but we cannot affect her activity in the world, as was possible in the case of the Word Incarnate.

That means that, just as no-one can snatch us from the Father’s hand, no-one can take the Holy Spirit from us. Jesus Christ chose to be at the mercy of humans, and he still chooses to be so in the eucharist. They could take him away from his disciples, even if only for a time; and now they can deny us the eucharist if they wish and are powerful enough. But the Holy Spirit cannot be touched. So perhaps we can even see how the presence of the Holy Spirit I one that gives us the greatest safety and confidence in this unspiritual world. And we mustn’t forget that she is not any old spirit, She is the spirit of the Father and the Son; and, specifically, as St Paul calls her, the Spirit of Jesus. To meet her is to meet Jesus. I think that when the disciples first encountered the Spirit, on the day of Pentecost, they at once recognised her as the one with whom they had lived all those years. It has been said that the Old Testament times were the era of the Father, New Testament times the era of the Son, and Church times the era of the Spirit. That’s oversimplifying and over-categorising, and I’m not sure it’s true anyway. But one thing is true: these three Persons are one God, one and the same God; and I don’t think the three Persons have three personalities in the loose sense in which we use the word nowadays. More of this maybe on Trinity Sunday; but I think these Persons have one personality in that sense: that they are recognisably one God. At the risk of being burned at the stake I might say “Three Persons, but one person”. If you knew Jesus, you’d recognise his Spirit. if you had really known YHWH, you would have recognised Jesus – as many did. And I suspect that those who so much dislike the God of the Old Testament have never really known Jesus.

On the day of Pentecost, then, the disciples were not presented with an unknown Paraclete They were reunited with Jesus, though in a different way. And it is in our relationship with the Holy Spirit that we will know not only the Spirit but the Incarnate Word and the Father.

2009-05-22T14:26:00.001-07:00

Christo omnino nihil præponamus, qui nos pariter ad vitam æternam perducat

2009-05-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

"Just as there is a bitter and evil zeal, which separates us from God and leads to hell, just so there is a good zeal, which separates us from sin and leads to God and to eternal life. This is the zeal that we should use with the most fervent love: that is, that we should seek to outdo each other in showing respect, tolerate each other’s weaknesses, whether of body or behaviour, with the utmost patience, and give way to each other. No-one should do what seems to be to his own advantage, but should consider what is to the advantage of others. We should love each other with chaste and brotherly love; fear God; and prefer nothing whatsoever to Christ. And may he lead us all to eternal life. Amen."

That is the seventy-second chapter of the Rule of St Benedict: “Of the good zeal which the monks should have”. Zeal is a word we don’t use much nowadays. If we were to refer to someone as zealous, and, even more, as a zealot, we would mean that he is a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and probably dangerous. It’s interesting that Jesus included among his apostles a Zealot, one of those Jews who rebelled against Roman taxation, and finally, by their open rebellion, led to the destruction of Jerusalem. He didn’t mind zeal, but I think it’s a safe bet that, in line with the message to the church of Laodicea, he minded lukewarmness, and minded it a lot. If you described the apostles he chose, lukewarmness is not a characteristic you’d mention, and zeal is one that you probably would. Even though I must die for you, I will not deny you! Lord, shall we call down lightning from heaven to strike them? You shall never wash my feet! Show us the Father and we shall be satisfied! And when Jesus called James and John from their fishing, they dropped everything, left the boats and nets and fish and their father, and followed him.

I need hardly say that Jesus was zealous. “Zeal for your house has consumed me”. Let the dead bury their dead! Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! My food is to do the will of the Father. And, in another vein, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; but not my will, but yours be done”.

Sometimes I think that one of the most important things Jesus ever said – for me at any rate – was a throwaway line, spoken to Peter who had shown curiosity about what was to happen to John. Jesus replied: “If I wish him to remain until I come, what is that to you? As for you, follow me.” That has become a sort of mantra with me when I find that I am becoming too concerned about the things of this world, or if I find myself being envious of, or over-curious about, another person. What is that to you? As for you, follow me.

That is what we are here for. Seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness. Being a Christian, following Christ, is not something that we do in our spare time, it is not an optional extra tacked on to a life in which we try to be nice and honest people (though that’s a start). It is life. It is our whole definition. It is easier to remember that in a monastery, since all you need to do is glance at one of your fellow nuns or monks, and their clothing will tell you what they are and what you are. There is a saying in monastic circles: The habit may not make the monk, but it helps to keep him. It does; it helps to remind him and to keep him faithful. We lay people do not have such helps. We live in a world that reminds us of almost everything else at every turn. It is not a wicked world, but our part of it is largely indifferent to Christ, and we are lucky if it is not actually hostile to Christians. Or perhaps I’m wrong there; perhaps hostility is better than indifference. “I wish you were either hot or cold! But because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” At least hostility reminds us of what we are, we who bear the name of Christian.

Today’s reading from the Song of Songs contains one of the great biblical misquotations. When a beloved person dies, there is sure to be someone who says “The Bible says that love is stronger than death”. The Bible does not say that love is stronger than death. What the Bible says is that “love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave.” Very different. It means not that love endures beyond death or overcomes death, but that love is as strong, as unconquerable, as death. No connection is being made between love and death; the author simply couldn’t think of anything more powerful or uncompromising than death. And that word “jealousy” – in Hebrew it is from the same root as zeal. It’s the same word, really. The phrase does not mean that a jealous person will never forgive; it means that love’s zeal is boundless, its strength comparable only to the strongest thing there is – death.
That’s why these two readings are put next to each other: the exhortation not to be lukewarm but zealous, and the poetic explanation of where that zeal comes from. From love. We have been told that “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us”; but love elicits love, and love – not hard work, not weekly attendance at the eucharist, not preaching or teaching – is the only appropriate response. Imagine if the Bride in the Song of Songs had responded with anything but love; even if she had offered the Bridegroom all her possessions “it would be utterly scorned”. Just so with God. As so often, it is Paul who puts it in the clearest and most extreme form: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.”

It is worth noting that we are given these readings on the Sunday before Ascension Day, when the disciples all had to move out of the realm of sight into the realm of faith, which is the one we all live in, and the one that Jesus called blessed: Blessed is the person who has not seen, and yet believes. Jesus is no longer visibly there to remind the disciples of their mission, of their purpose in life, of what it means to be a follower of Christ. And as we see, lukewarmness set in for them too. As I’ve said, there is nothing exceptionally wicked about today’s world. And there’s nothing exceptionally lukewarm about today’s Christians. But we have waited a long time for the coming of the Bridegroom. It is hard to keep our first fervour and our first love. But he will come, to the world at the end of time, and to each of us at our own death.
Christ does not stand at the door and knock, physically, as the bridegroom did in the Song of Songs. But, interestingly, that, and the word “zeal”, is the only phrase common to the two readings, and I think we are meant to notice that. Christ’s presence, and his love, is always there. And the only response he asks is – love; and the zeal which manifests it.

And so let us use this zeal with the most fervent love; let us love each other with chaste and brotherly love; fear God; and prefer nothing whatsoever to Christ. And may he lead us all to eternal life. Amen.

Vergine Madre, Figlia del tuo Figlio

2009-05-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

A bit early, but I'm off down to darkest Somerset for work tomorrow, so here it is:

10 May 2009 - Fifth Sunday of Easter

You in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person

I suppose you could sum up today’s Gospel in the phrase “and the Word was made flesh”. It is not so much “the Word is flesh”, even after the union of the two natures in Christ, and you can’t quite say “flesh is the Word”, though maybe that would be a good corrective to our almost Manichean fear and contempt for the body. Ever since Christ died, death has not only lost its sting, but it has become something beautiful and even precious (oh yes, I have seen people die, and I know it doesn’t always look like that; but then, neither did Christ’s death). The same is far more true of life – life in the flesh on this earth, I mean. People travel for hundreds, even thousands of miles to touch or even to see relics that have been used or touched by a saint or which made up part of her body; we have all heard about the statue of St Peter in Rome whose foot has been worn away by the pilgrims’ constant caresses. There’s another, by the way, in the Brompton Oratory. But why just speak of saints? Consider the popularity of houses where great people have lived, or museums which contain their clothing or possessions: the frisson that goes through you when you are allowed to touch the piano that Chopin once played. The fact that these things once had some contact with these great people – great in whatever fashion – invests them with a special value. But it doesn’t seem to strike us that ever since Christmas our life, our very flesh, and since Easter our death, has been invested with a far more special nature, because the One with whom it has had contact is divine; is God.

In a group discussion during my time at Cambridge, our philosophy tutor suddenly demanded: “Where are you?” We looked at each other, uncertain as to what he was on about. Finally a brave soul piped up: “We’re in your rooms at King’s College.” “No, no,” cried Dr Lloyd. “I mean where are YOU, where is YOU, where in your body do you feel YOU reside? Is it here –“ and he gave the unfortunate young man a cuff on the head, “and if not, where?” I think we all agreed that we felt we “were” in our heads. I’m not sure whether I would feel that quite so strongly if I were blind: the eyes are our windows on to the world, and it seems logical that “I” should be behind my windows, looking out. Of course our ears, and our senses of taste and smell are also in our heads, but I do feel that “I am “ behind my eyes. However, if I asked myself “where” I feel my source of life to be, I would reply “in the region of my heart”. Which is, mechanically speaking, correct: that’s the engine room, and the captain is up in my brain. certainly the further from my heart a part of my body is, the less life-threatening an injury seems; and the further from my brain it is the less it feels like an essential part of me; while it would be inconvenient to lose one of my feet, I would not feel it affected my being; while damage to my face would feel like damage to “me”. Well, I’m not sure that “I” am in my brain; but I am very sure indeed that the source of my life is not in my heart. When Paul says “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me” that is not a pious allegory. It is literally true. Since the Incarnation “all flesh” is the Body of Christ. The Word was made flesh, and flesh can never be the same again.

My source of life is not within myself. I am not an independent plant, entire by itself, that has only to be rooted in the soil to live. I am part of the one plant, and if I do not receive the sap from it, I wither and die. Any idea of self-sufficiency is pure illusion, not because some tyrant God wishes to keep me in subjugation, but because apart from him there is no life. I am free within the vine, but only within it. But there’s another side to that: if I am in the vine, I cannot die, any more than Christ, once risen, can die. My participation in the vine is not a fiction. If I cannot live outside it, that is because its life – God’s own life – is mine. Christ is the vine, but so am I; apart from the fact that you can cut off the vine’s branches without killing the vine, you cannot distinguish between vine and branches. If that isn’t being deified, I don’t know what it is.

Of course another thing that means is this: you cannot prune the branches without pruning the vine. If one of the branches is cut out, or even pruned, Christ feels it: not “as if” it were himself but because it quite literally is himself. To say “the vine” and “the branches” is more or less synonymous. If I spray the vine’s branches, I spray the vine. It is far more than Paul’s “head and members”, as there there is a genuine distinction: if I cut my hand I do not in any sense cut my head. You talk about pruning the rosebush, not about pruning the branches of a rosebush. It is meaningless to say “I didn’t prune the bush, I only pruned the branches”. At most, you could say “I pruned part of the bush”, but that wouldn’t in fact give an accurate impression of what you actually did. So “I am the vine, you are the branches” is really a form of the Hebrew parallelism which you find, for example, in the phrase “What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou considerest him?” There is no distinction between “man” and “the son of man”. The two are the same. I am Christ and Christ is me. He said so: he said that whatever we do to the least of his brethren, we do to him. He did not say “It is as if you had done it to me”; but “You did it to me”. We are in Paschaltide, so perhaps I shouldn’t point out what the cost of this is to our Lord, but we wouldn’t have Paschaltide without the Passion, so here goes: when the Father prunes the branches, he prunes the vine. He prunes the Son. I think that was what was happening in Gethsemane. It would be meaningless to say “I’m going to prune the branches because they have curly-leaf disease (in our case, sin) but I am not going to prune the vine – Christ – because it hasn’t (in his case, he is sinless). If you prune the branches you prune the vine. A person damned is part of the vine – of Christ – cut away and burned. So, of course, is pruning, but that is health and life giving. Christ feels it, not in sympathy, but in himself. It is far more than any person could feel for any other, because it is not other, but self.

Perhaps the only person who could fully understand this was Mary. Not because she was supernaturally enlightened – maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t – and not because, being sinless, she would have been more conscious of her likeness to the Vine. But simply because she had experienced a paradox that no-one else ever can: she had been, literally and physically, the source of life, not just of any embryo, but of God. It is impossible that she should not have meditated on her extraordinary pregnancy, extraordinary not just in the manner of its beginning but in its very nature. She was the source of life for the one who was the source of life. As she felt her own blood being pumped around her veins and knew that her child, a separate person from the very instant of his conception as we all are, was being sustained in life by the beating of her heart and the flow of her blood, she must have been aware that the converse was also true, and that if – so to speak – God’s Heart, God’s love which is his being, were to cease to beat, she would cease to be, as surely as her child would do if her heart were to stop. And as she felt her life flowing through her body she knew that in some sense it was God’s life, and that she, although a separate and independent person, was in some way part of God. It was her Son who expressed it, but – and I am sure this is not the only example, it was Mary, the Virgin Mother, daughter of her Son, who first felt it.

Blessed are they who hear the word of God, and keep it!

Amazing Grace

2009-05-02T02:48:00.000-07:00

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now I’m found, Was blind, but now I see.

Could we just take a minute here to ask ourselves in what way, if at all, we identify with this verse of that well-known hymn?

I have been thinking, in the context of a well-heeled city centre church, about the sheepfold, about insiders and outsiders, about people who belong and people who don’t. People are not consciously included or excluded, but I think you could safely say that this congregation is made up almost entirely of “insiders”, people who “belong in the sheepfold”. Few of us have a serious struggle to make ends meet. Few of us are addicted to illegal drugs (though I’d be prepared to bet that there are a few problem drinkers around, on sheer statistical probability). Few of us have ever been homeless, and I would be very surprised if any of us were so now. Few of us have any convictions, with the possible exception of minor road traffic infringements. Few of us have been refugees. though maybe some of our parents were. I suspect that few of us have major mental health issues, few of us have been victims of domestic abuse, and few of us live in the seriously disadvantaged parts of the city. Pennywell or Bingham, anyone? Well, this sounds really great, doesn’t it? A church full of happy and successful people. Actually, it worries me quite seriously.

In the second chapter of the epistle to the Ephesians we are clearly told that Christianity started by turning everything upside down – excluding the chosen people, the insiders, unless they were willing to accept that others were equally chosen; and welcoming in “those who were outside”.

We have a tendency (and I think we hardly give it a thought) to distinguish between what we do for ourselves as a congregation, and what we do as “outreach”. Out – reach. The insiders reaching out to the outsiders. Well and good, as far as it goes. But – what are they doing outside?

We are followers of the man who said: “But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself”. How have we managed to neutralise Christ’s magnetic power? What have we done to the magnet that is Christ? and what do we even mean by “outside”? It might do us no harm to listen again to those words of St Paul’s as addressed to us – as indeed they are. “Remember that…you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.” As Kierkegaard repeated in season and out of season as he read the Bible: “It is of me this is spoken, to me this is said”.

A friend told me the following story: a very scruffy looking man turned up to a service in a nice church in a nice part of the south of England. Sharp intakes of breath all round. At the end, prompted by the churchwardens, the vicar took the man aside and said "during the next week I want you to talk to God and ask Him if He really wants you to come into His house dressed like this". Next Sunday, there the man was again, still dressed just as scruffily - sharp intakes of breath again. After the service the vicar took him aside again and asked him why he hadn’t spoken to God. "I did" responded the man "and He said He didn’t know your church".

Christ’s brothers threw their hands up in despair and said of him: “He is mad”. One of the precious things that Christ did on earth was to show us a completely different reality. There is no doubt that we are called to be Christ to the disadvantaged, and to those whose reality is different from ours. But if we are willing not only to do that, but also to be open to their reality, we are receiving Christ from them. and there are times when it is more blessed to receive than to give. It does our humility no harm, and the thing we receive may turn out to be just the thing that leads us to the Lord.

I am now going to “out” myself as a member of Al-Anon, the twelve-step fellowship for families of alcoholics. I think there is an interesting comparison to be drawn with the church. People first go to Al-Anon because they think that they will be given some way to stop the alcoholic drinking. It is not long before they are told very firmly that that is not what it is about. Al-Anon takes the focus away from the alcoholic and puts it squarely on the person who has come to the meeting. The only person you can change is yourself. Most people are, at first, disappointed when they understand this. But if they keep going back, and keep an open mind, the Al-Anon programme “works”. People change. People recover. and new people come, and see the change and recovery…and keep coming back until they too are changed and recover. and exactly the same thing happens at AA – Alcoholics Anonymous.
Why is it quite normal for people to be transformed by AA and Al-Anon, and to keep going back with enthusiasm, perhaps long after the original problem has been solved? While we Christians drag ourselves unwillingly to church, and remain, many of us, unchanged?

I suggest that one reason is that no-one would go to AA or Al-Anon if they had not first recognised their brokenness, their outsiderness. We know our neediness in an immediate way, as most churchgoers do not, and we know how precious that knowledge – that grace -is to us, because without it we cannot change.

I think we need to advert more to the outsiderness in ourselves. We are all able to say “oh yes, there is broken-ness in me, and I have faults”. But as long as we regard those things as weaknesses to be hidden (“I don’t really fit in but I try to make it look as if I do”) we are not going to be healed, and we are not going to connect with those people whose brokenness is more obvious than ours. These things are facts, and they can be the most important facts about us, and the facts that build bridges.

In Al-Anon we not only acknowledge our brokenness to ourselves, we acknowledge it to others. Nothing can be healed unless it is brought into the light.

Why would a broken person come to a church full of happy and successful people? What he wants is a church where people are healed and transformed. and he wants to see it happen. He wants a church which includes the outsiders, the excluded: “separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world”. The church that Jesus Christ founded, and whose foundations were built upon by the probably illiterate Galilean fisherman and the heretical Rabbi, Saints Peter and Paul. John Newton knew who belonged in that church. and perhaps we happy and successful people, with our brokenness well papered over, might give it a thought. We need God. and unless we acknowledge that, to ourselves and to others, there will be no healing and no transformation, and the insiders and the outsiders will never meet.

and so let us pray, in the words of a Native American prayer:
Grandfather, Look at our brokenness.
We know that in all creation Only the human family has strayed from the Sacred Way.
We know that we are the ones who are divided
and we are the ones who must come back together to walk in the Sacred Way.
Grandfather, Sacred One, Teach us love, compassion, and honour
That we may heal the earth, and heal each other.

Gratiam et gloriam dabit Dominus

2009-04-26T14:03:00.001-07:00

26 April 2009 – 3rd Sunday of Easter

“We give thee thanks for thy great glory”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Gloria since we started singing it again after the long, long break of Lent. and I paused at this particular phrase. How exactly are we to give God thanks for his great glory? Praise, yes, but thanks? How can we thank God for something which he has in any case, which he has without any reference to us, which is one of his attributes from all eternity? Can I thank a person for their beauty which, although it gives me pleasure, is not there for the purpose of giving me pleasure? I think I can do even that. If I say to that person: Thank you for being such a beautiful creature to look at, they should reply: “Don’t thank me, it is not due to me; thank God. But I am happy that my appearance gives pleasure”. Two points arise from that reply. Firstly, the person is directing the thanks to where it is really due; and secondly, by taking pleasure in giving pleasure, they do acquire a certain responsibility for the giving of that pleasure: they join their will s to the will of God, who made them so beautiful precisely to add to the sum total of beauty and so of joy and pleasure in the world; and so they genuinely share in his desire and his act. They also, one might add, have a responsibility thenceforth for using their beauty for good and not for evil.

If we are talking about the beauty of God – which, it can be argued, is the same as his gory, not least because his attributes, being part of his essence, his being, are not separable – his power, for example, is not something other than his mercy or his justice – then it is clear that our thanks are indeed due to him: he, and none other, is responsible for his essential glory, and when he created us he did so in order that we should see and rejoice in his beauty, through a veil in this life and with unveiled face in the next. So, if you like, thanking him for his glory is really thanking him for creating us to behold that glory. Which is what we are referring to when we say in today’s Collect: “we who now rejoice that the glory of adoptive sonship has been restored to us”. The glory of adoptive sonship in which we rejoice means God’s promise that we will behold his glory in the intimate way proper only to true children.

St Peter – who is much more bold and revolutionary than one tends to think – makes a statement in the first chapter of his first epistle which would seem almost blasphemous if the church had not set her seal on it: it seems to suggest that we are the centre of the universe from God’s viewpoint as well as from our own. The ransom paid to free us was paid in the blood of Christ “who, though known since before the world was made, has been revealed only in our time, the end of the ages, for your sake. Through him you now have faith in God, who raised him from the dead AND GAVE HIM GLORY FOR THIS VERY REASON: SO THAT YOU WOULD HAVE FAITH AND HOPE IN GOD”. God gave Christ glory in order that we should benefit? clearly this has to be taken in context, but all the same, we can certainly thank God for Christ’s glory, since it seems it was for our sake that he was given it. And doesn’t the Bible say somewhere (I forget where) “The glory of God is a living human being”?

St Thomas Aquinas is saying something of the sort when he defines glory as “clara notitia cum laude”. The simple meaning is that glory consists of a clear knowledge o vision accompanied by praise; but “clarus” in Latin has a double meaning. It does mean “clear”, but it also means “eminent, renowned”. So clara notitia cum laude means seeing something or someone clearly, perceiving them to be worthy of renown, and praising them for it. Now if that is the definition of glory (and who am I to contradict Thomas Aquinas?) it would appear that glory in a subject, to be complete, requires not only the glorious subject but also someone to perceive the glory. The reason why God has no need of us, even as regards the completeness of his glory, is that he is not alone: he is the Blessed Trinity, in which each of the Persons perceives and praises the glory of the others. Obviously we cannot add anything to the essential glory of God. But there is no doubt that we can add to his accidental glory, in that we too can have the clara notitia cum laude. That is to say that we can give him glory, can glorify him. That is enough to take your breath away: we, who have nothing, can give to God, who needs nothing; and if strictly speaking we cannot add to his glory, he has chosen to make it possible for us to do so. The greatness of his glory is not increased when we give him glory, and yet…it is his glory that enables us to give him glory; and this clara notitia cum laude will be our eternal occupation in heaven as it is our joy here in a feeble form. If that is not a reason to give him thanks for his great glory, I don’t know what is.

That is the sort of glory the Gloria in Excelsis is referring to: the sort of glory which, when clearly perceived and recognised as worthy by us, gves us the gift of giving glory. It is the glory which God got over Pharaoh and his chariots and horsemen, and it is what Jesus was thinking of when he asked his father to grant his disciples to see the glory which he had with the Father before the world was made: he desires for them the gift of glorifying him for his glory and thanking him for that gift.

God’s glory is intrinsic to him; but it is also something he gives to us; and even when giving his glory, he does not give by measure. When he gives his glory, he gives himself, and the response to a gift should always be thanksgiving. When his glory filled the tabernacle it evoked awe and praise; but it should also have evoked thanksgiving. Perhaps it is easier for us to thank God for his presence than it was for the people of the Old Testament; we have been shown God’s gentleness and humility in a way they were not. Maybe we are still instinctively afraid of his presence (by the way, that’s why prayer is so difficult – we’re scared) but we know that he does not come to destroy but to heal and bless. When his glory passes we need not hide in the cleft of a rock, we can simply bow down in gratitude. The whole earth is full of his glory, and the heavens sing of it’ and while the mere fact of living in this world may not be as heartstopping a gift as being present at the transfiguration, the fact remains that both are gifts of glory, as was the Incarnation: a light to enlighten the Gentiles, and the glory of his people Israel.

We have all sinned, and have fallen short of the glory of God, and we all need the glory of God to have the power to rise again. We have received the glory of adopted children, but we have rejected it. Time after time God offers us his glory again; we can only thank him in the lowliness of our fallen nature which cannot rise to him without it. God’s glory is our life; we live by it as plants live by the sun, and we need a constant supply of it to preserve us in being, a constant supply which he has undertaken to provide unto all eternity. If we thank God for our lives, for our creation, we are thanking him for his glory, the glory of the Sun o Justice, manifested and living in different ways in all his different creatures. “There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial bodies: but the glory of the celestial bodies is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for star differs from star in glory. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory.”

Bernanos’ Cure de Campagne said “Tout est grace”. I would add: “Tout est gloire”. And always a reflection and gift of the one glory, the great glory of God for which we are to praise, bless, adore, glorify and thank him our whole lives long. Thank him for the beauty of his essential glory, thank him for the gift of his glory in its earthly form of grace, thank him for the heavenly glory which we shall gaze upon, reflect, and share.

“For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.
For the Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.
O Lord of hosts, blessed is the man that trusteth in thee”

I ha' seen him eat o' the honeycomb sin' they nailed him to the Tree

2009-04-18T16:36:00.000-07:00

19 April 2009 – Low Sunday

A son of God was the Goodly Fere
That bade us his brothers be.
I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men.
I have seen him upon the tree.
A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind & sea.
If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.
I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb
Sin' they nailed him to the tree.

I hope you’ll forgive me for not preaching on today’s Matins readings. To me they seem to hark back altogether too much to the suffering & the sacrifice. Today is sometimes called the Octave of Easter, the day, a week after a great Feast, when in some sense we celebrate it again. It is a day of rejoicing in the Resurrection, not of looking back at the Passion, however worthily & theologically correctly we do it. Today is the day when the risen Christ came into the presence of his disciples & convinced them that he was not a ghost by tucking into some broiled fish, & according to some versions, a honeycomb.
Eating a honeycomb is quite a messy business. It cannot be done with dignity, nor while retaining an atmosphere of mystery & awe. Indeed, I’ve never seen it done with a straight face, despite having watched an entire convent of nuns engaged in this activity. That is one of the reasons why, in the teeth of the evidence, I would love to retain the honeycomb in Luke 24:42.
Jesus did not need to be taught how to put people at their ease. We forget tat he knows exactly how we feel & how we work, & exactly the right way to deal with us. Not only has he been one of us, which need not imply more knowledge of the rest of us than any sensitive person might have, but he made us. He didn’t just make us in the sense that he set Creation in motion & let it proceed by natural reproduction; he made each one of us individually. We do not, according to the Fathers of the Church, derive our souls from our parents; the soul is created immediately by God & infused into us as we are conceived. Jesus had made each one of his disciples, both the easy ones & the difficult ones, like Peter, the sons of Zebedee, & Thomas. I have no doubt that, within a moment of taking up the honeycomb, he had them all giggling like schoolboys.
I once read a book of the Miserablist School of Theology which stated flatly, with no substantiation whatever, that “ Jesus had few joys”. Although I was in those days more inclined to swallow that sort of thing than I am now, even then I found that statement unconvincing. If there was one thing that Jesus obviously knew about, obviously knew how to experience & to give, it was joy. You can’t give something you haven’t got, & didn’t he say to Nicodemus “We speak of what we know”? He knew joy all right. Read the parable of the lost sheep or the lost coin. At the Last Supper, according to John, he prayed: “that my joy may be in them & their joy may be complete”. If we are, at the last, to enter into the joy of our Lord, it does follow that our Lord has a joy for us to enter into. I am not that keen on the song “Lord of the Dance”. But it does express a truth, if not in its words, in its irrepressible rhythm: “They cut me down & I leapt up high; I am the life which will never never die”. Jesus was irrepressible. He couldn’t be silenced. He couldn’t, ultimately, be killed. Thomas Aquinas said that the more intense one’s life, the more agonising is the separation of soul & body & the acuter the suffering. True, obviously true. But it is equally true that the more intense one’s life, the more intense one’s experience of life. & life – being alive – is, in itself, an experience of pure delight, of pure joy. Things can happen to make a person’s experience of living a painful one. But even then I maintain that being alive in itself is joyful & delightful. Why else would the prospect of eternal life, life in its essence or distillation, attract us?
Jesus was not just fully alive. He was Life. & that means he was joy & delight. His joys, far from being few, were constant. He had the joy of an intensely living & sinless man; & he had the infinite, unimaginable joy whereby God rejoices in his own existence & which overflowed, by his choice, into Creation. If we think about the elements in our joys, we realise that he created them all. To me it is almost blasphemous to refuse such joys, even if we claim it is to be in union with Jesus in his sufferings. There are no doubt some whose vocation is to embrace suffering & asceticism, but for the vast majority of us the way to God is the way of his creation, &, essentially, the way of joy. If sufferings are sent, I think we will be more able to embrace them as Jesus did if we have embraced joy, embraced creation, as he did.
A totally spiritual person, who despised the flesh, would, I think, have responded to Thomas’ doubts somewhat along these lines: “I am not constrained by death, because I am above the flesh, I transcend it. & so should you. You should not need to see me in order to believe something which, after all, s self evident.” He would not have done what he did, which was to give Thomas an exclusively fleshly proof of the resurrection. He did not say “You should not need to see me” but “You believe because you see”. Of course, Thomas believed more than he saw, & Jesus knew it. & then he said something which should be a source of joy to those of us who wish we had seen him & did not. He looked down through the endless ages & saw all of us & each of us who would believe in him without seeing & pronounced all of us & each of us blessed. Here is the perfect balance between the spirit & the flesh.
& since I am talking about that, I’ll end this sermon with Jesus’ blessed Mother, the one who is blessed among women, & yet whose blessing, as Jesus had insisted, was upon all who heard the word of God & kept it. No doubt the Miserablist School of Theology would point out that she is the Mother of Sorrows & that her joys were few also. But there are ten joyful mysteries in the Rosary (glory is only heavenly joy) & only five sorrowful ones. She did suffer, the sword did pierce her heart; just as Jesus did suffer. But as by nature he is life & joy, so by nature & by grace she is the joyful one. In the Greek of the Gospel, the angel didn’t, actually, say “Hail Mary”, he said “Rejoice, Mary”. He didn’t, come to that, say “full of grace”; he said the untranslatable word “kecharitomene” which could equally well be rendered “full of joy”. Did he at least say “You have found favour with God”? Not necessarily. The meaning of what he said could equally well be “You give joy to God”. “Rejoice, O joyful one! You rejoice the heart of God.”
I think that Mary was in Jesus’ mind as he spoke to the Apostles at the Last Supper: when he referred to the woman in labour it was Mary that he meant first & foremost, & the pains which, according to legend, had not touched her at his birth were to take place at the cross. But when that child rose from the dead, she no longer remembered the sorrow, for joy that all mankind was born to eternal life.

Alleluia!

2009-04-11T14:34:00.000-07:00

Legend and devotion has it that the Risen Christ appeared first to his blessed Mother. Maybe; it would have been a fitting reward to her unshakable faith. But the first recorded appearance, the first appearance we are sure of, was to – of all people – Simon. That is, of course, Peter, though he hardly deserved the name and I expect he shuddered if anyone used it. “Simon”, though, was as bad: no-one had used it for three years, and here it was surfacing again. He knew why he was being denied his Christian name, and knew too well. Another legend says that for the rest of his life, after complete forgiveness, after leading the Christian community, after becoming the first Pope, after being imprisoned in Rome in the sure hope of dying with the Lord as he had sworn he would do (that was Jesus’ last desperate attempt to make him grasp that his sins had been flung into the depths of the sea) he still never ceased to weep for that moment of madness in the High Priest’s courtyard, until the tears wore furrows in his cheeks.

I can understand Peter’s lifelong sorrow. There is something in the life of each one of us that we cannot look back on without flinching, as if a sore spot had been touched. It may have been a sin – it is a fact concealed but well-documented (and I know it directly, though, thank God, not in my own person) that abortion leaves lifelong psychological and spiritual damage. It may have been a moment of great shame; it may have been a hut done to us – it may be another person, or even circumstances or God, that we cannot forgive, rather than ourselves. Or it may be something for which we “cannot forgive ourselves” even though we know perfectly well we were not to blame. A common example is having failed to be present at the moment of death of someone we love. Maybe we were there day and night for weeks; but we will never forgive ourselves for having been elsewhere at that instant. Some of us find that we can scarcely look back at any moment in the past without flinching for one reason or another. So Peter was simply reacting in a normal human way. But, as I said sadly on Good Friday, there is still a lot of the human, as opposed to the superhuman, in Christianity, and it should not be there. it should not have been there in Peter, and it should not be there in us.

The Lamb of God takes away our sins; He takes away our guilt as well, and we should also allow Him to take away our guilt or otherwise painful memories. A lot of emphasis is placed now upon the “healing of memories” by psychotherapists, counsellors and others. They are quite right: our memories do need healing. But I do not believe anyone can heal what is within us except the One who knows what is in humankind. Human beings can soothe the pain of them and help us to understand them (and that is already something) but no more. It’s not that difficult to make someone feel better but only a miracle can heal the scars: and a miracle is precisely what the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection was. it is not impossible that God chose Peter precisely in order to hammer home the completeness not only of forgiveness, but also of healing, that is offered to us. if Peter did carry the scars of his memories with him to the grave, that was not God’s will, nor was it for want of trying on His part.

I arrived at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper this year with my usual burden of painful memories. I am such a fool, so inclined to say and do the wrong thing, to react sharply, to let pride run away with me, to be complacent, petulant, selfish, sulky, cowardly…shall I go on? As quite often happens, when I settled down to pray afterwards, one of the memories rose up from nowhere and gave me a kick in the solar plexus. I winced. Then by association of ideas another joined it, and another, until I felt that I was being assailed by a hail of missiles. I suppose I could have prayed to St Stephen; instead I thought of Peter, and began to enter into his memories rather than my own. And I flinched in sympathy as I ran through his appearances in the Gospel.

Since it was Maundy Thursday, what sparked off my train of thought was his behaviour at the Last Supper: he managed to get it wrong in two opposite directions in the space of thirty seconds. I suspect that when Jesus returned to the table and asked “Do you know what I have done to you?” he gave Peter a quick but searching stare; and Peter either nodded vigorously (having, al the same, not a clue) or else shook his head mournfully. Never could he have looked back at that event without an embarrassed shudder. but he never did twig, poor Peter. After ceaselessly hammering home his teaching of giving without expecting any reward, Jesus found himself being asked by Peter “And what shall we have?” Patient as ever, he gave Peter the answer. But maybe not without an ironic shake of the head. Which is what Peter remembered. “Oh dear, I should never have said that”. And he had forced Jesus into a rather unusual miracle by his over-confident declaration (prompted by extreme nervousness) that oh yes, of course Jesus paid the Temple tax. Jesus’ rebuke on that occasion was very gently: it has the tone of one explaining something to a rather thick six-year-old. But that was not the case when Peter, in horror (quite reasonably, humanly speaking) at the prophecy of the Passion, protested. He’d put his foot in it many times, and Jesus had been calm, gentle and, mostly, patient. But now! Peter quailed and backed off under the onslaught, finding himself addressed not as Peter, not even as Simon, but as Satan. “Oh dear” thought Peter many years later. “I think he was right…and it doesn’t help that it was I who confessed him as the Christ, the Son of the Living God. He as good as told me that it wasn’t me saying it at all.” And who was it, when Jesus said that they should sell their cloaks and buy swords (I am not sure exactly what he meant, but I am sure he did not literally mean what he said), who produced a sword, and waved it about? There were four of them, but we know one of them was Peter. And when he tried to use it, he was told in no uncertain terms that he had got the wrong end of the stick…or the sword…again. “Well,” he consoled himself (as I console myself) at least my faults mean that I am tolerant and forgiving. I have obviously taken on board at least that essential piece of teaching.” No, Peter, unfortunately not, as your memory will tell you in a split second. Your generous offer to forgive your brother seven times made Jesus, figuratively or actually, throw his hands up in despair.

Peter sighs. “I warned him,” he says. “I told him to go away from me for I am a sinful man.” You did, Peter; and what would have happened to you if he had taken you at your word? “Oh dear,” he mutters again. And unfortunately, thinking about boats brings up another uncomfortable memory. Who was it that (a) did not believe that the walker on the sea really was Jesus (b) was confident that he could do it too (c) sank at the first puff of wind and (d) was informed, by One who knew, that he hadn’t any faith to speak of. And looked a right idiot, too, being hauled, drenched, into the boat. By now Peter, as I visualise him, is sitting hunched up in exactly the same position as my soul, and maybe my body too, adopts once Sister Mind has been allowed to wander among her memories. And I feel a great deal better.

But I feel better not for the obvious, human reasons. It’s not a sort of Schadenfreude, pleasure that St Peter was as bad as I am or even worse. or even consolation that someone like Peter could be so hopeless and make it all the same. it is the knowledge that “by His stripes we are healed” and that God has provided a cure for all our dis-eases. He did not create Peter, with his character and vocation, specifically for me; but then He did not create penicillin specifically for me either, and I have every right to thank him when my sinusitis clears up after a course of it. It seems logical that I can thank him for Peter.

You are about to complain that, today of all days, I haven’t even mentioned the Resurrection. What do you think I have been talking about all this time? Because our whole life is in the image of the Lord who died and rose again. We have been buried together with him in our baptism, and we rise with him to glory. But for us it is usually a long process, and at every moment he is with us and gives us the help we need, with us himself and with us in the companions he has given us for the way. We do not go to God alone, but in that great company, spread through time and space, which makes up the Church Militant. For my companion is not St Peter in glory, but Simon son of Jonah, surnamed Peter, struggling on earth, together with me, both of us led, not in spite of but by way of our weakness, to the glory of the Resurrection.

Alleluia!

Consepulti sumus cum illo in baptismate

2009-04-10T08:19:00.001-07:00

10 April 2009 – Good Friday

Since the Fall, we have managed to ruin or misunderstand everything, and we have turned the following of Jesus Christ into two things it is not: first, an ideology; second, a religion of success. We Scottish Episcopalians have not yet got to the point reached by those American churches which encourage their embers to become as wealthy as possible and achieve as much worldly success as possible as an integral part of their religious practice, but I am not sure that we look at things in a fundamentally different way. It is human to try and get rich, and to need approval, and there seems to be a lot of the human – as opposed to the superhuman – in Christianity.

Look at the cult of the saint; look, above all, at hagiography. have you noticed how they were all beautiful, talented, intelligent, and successful at everything they put their hand to? I usually complain about this because it seems to put the saints out of our reach, and absolve us from trying to become saints ourselves. But today I’m complaining because these are just the characteristics which a saint does not need – I almost said: these are unchristian characteristics. I suppose it is inevitable that most of the canonised saints were in some way successful, or we’d never have heard of them, and they would never have been canonised. Thank God, I say, for saints like the Cure d’Ars and Benoit-Joseph Labre. Especially the latter, that most glorious of failures. A failure, you could say, in the image of his divine Master.

And that, you see, is why our cult of success is all wrong. That is why I like to see a “failure” saint. Not because it makes me, in my mediocrity, feel better; but because the most outstanding thing about Jesus’ life, looked at humanly at this time on the first Good Friday, was his resounding failure. In the old days those of us who were reluctant about penance and asceticism were scolded and admonished to remember that we were “members of a thorn-crowned Head”. True, of course, though Jesus was no ascetic. His life was, as it happens, very hard, but never, I am sure, just for the sake of it. But we should remember that we are members of a Head who was condemned as a criminal and executed, betrayed by one of his disciples and denied by another, and deserted by all of them – except, needless to say, by the women; because woman, in her natural state, understands and values failure. The Cross we are to carry daily was the instrument of execution for the lowest class of criminal. It is not just that we’ll be accepted even if we fail. But that the more we are failures by the world’s standards, and those standards encompass everything except holiness, the more – yes, the more – we will be like our Lord.

God does not stand at the end of our road watching us struggle, tutting when we go off the road, smiling approvingly when we do not, and occasionally cheering us on. He is there on the road with us, at all times, especially in our failures (he who failed), even in our sins. If when the two of us reach the end of the road our sins have brought us to the point at which we choose to turn away from him, that is another matter. But he will never leave us: our life is a series of choices, or one enormous ongoing choice, whether to leave him. We need to realise who it is we are choosing to cleave to, whose road we are choosing to walk, and see things with his eyes; but conversely, we must realise that it will never be failure that will separate us from the Crucified One, whose only success was being God; for that is what he offers us by his own free gift, he who became man that we might become gods.

St Benoit-Joseph Labre, pray for us!

Sermon for Palm Sunday

2009-04-04T12:15:00.001-07:00

It isn’t usual to give a sermon on Palm Sunday, and you can see why. There are two possible responses to someone getting up to talk after the reading of the Passion: either “We have just heard the most tragic and mind-blowing narrative there is, and I am shattered: and YOU think you can add anything to it? Shut up and sit down.” Or” “We have already had to endure an endless reading, and are we to have to endure a sermon as well? Shut up and sit down.” I think that is fairly conclusive, don’t you? There can in my opinion be no other possible response. If you have entered into the reading of the Passion and it has entered into you, anything added can only be a best irritating and at worst crashingly insensitive and painful. if you have not, if even the Passion has not moved you, then a sermon certainly won’t. But I just want to reflect briefly on something peripheral to the Passion, or possibly peripheral to its reading.

It used to be the norm to stand for the reading of the Passion There was no special reason for that: we always stand for the reading of the Gospel. I was told by the good nuns who taught me that if you stand without moving for the whole of the Passion, you will get a soul out of Purgatory. Now, this is no more or less than superstition. In fact, God is so pleased with us whenever we do anything out of love that it is quite possible that he would indeed free a soul from Purgatory if we asked for it I that way; but not because there is any virtue in the act itself. You’d be much better off wriggling and shifting a bit and concentrating on what the reading has to say to you than standing stock-still meditating on the twinges in your lower back and wondering whether blinking counts. I do think that God looks a little sadly on some of our observances, customs and usages, which make life even more burdensome and annoying than it is anyway. Maybe that is more true nowadays of the religious life, since lay Christianity has shed a great deal of that sort of thing. Most of these customs and usages – and I’d say many of the observances and ways of doing things within the church – are neutral in themselves, or can even be positively bad if the correct motivation is not there. It is perfectly true that whatever one does out of Charity is pleasing to God. But the fact that the Jongleur de Dieu pleased God by standing on his head and turning cartwheels does not mean that we should now found a new Religious Order of Tumblers or introduce handsprings into the offertory procession. The action itself is neutral; only the lve that is put into it gives it worth. I think it is true to say that the very Passion of Christ would have had no value if – to imagine the impossible – it had not been done out of love.

I think it is a pity we do not stand for the Passion for a different reason: standing as a mark of respect is just about the only naturally meaningful symbol we have left in our service; partly because the service has changed but partly also because we have changed. We no longer kneel or even genuflect in normal life; even the curtsy to the Queen has, I believe, been abolished. We do not bow – which is, incidentally, the reason why the small bow at the name of Jesus has gone: the present generation can’t understand why the Name should provoke a nod – that’s all it is to them and so cannot possibly take hold. Holy water? Most of us no longer know what it is like to have a bath or wash because we are genuinely dirty and need cleansing. The sign of peace? It is a very mixed-up piece of symbolism. Originally it did signify making peace (see its Gospel origin) and the handshake will just about pass for that. But now it is (wrongly) understood as a sign of fellowship, and a handshake is the last way we would express that; it is reserved for the most distant and formal greetings. And so on. But we do still stand as a mark of respect: when someone comes into the room, or even when, at a theatre or concert hall, an artist surpasses himself. Yes, that’s partly enthusiasm, but the two are linked.

The Jews have it right when, at the Passover meal, they ask a series of questions about what distinguishes this night from all other nights. We need reminded. The fact that by standing we treat the Gospel differently from all other readings is of great significance” we could perhaps ask the reluctant, or our squirming children (who squirm, incidentally, at least as much when they are seated): “What distinguishes this reading from all other readings?” and let them think about it. Why is this reading more worthy of respect than any other? The answer of course is that the Gospel not only speaks of the life of Jesus Christ but it symbolises him. He is as truly present in the Gospel, though in a different way, as he is in the bread and wine we receive at Communion. Would we sit to receive Communion? I don’t stand to hear the Passion because it is a salutary asceticism, or even in order to magic a soul out of Purgatory. I stand out of respect for the Lord present in the Gospel, and if it so happens that it is a Gospel passage that takes ten minutes (or whatever it is) to read, so what?

I have been rambling. But you take my point. Of course the service is boring if we reduce it to a series of meaningless actions and words. And it is of no help whatever to think up new meanings if the real ones have been lost. They will not be true, will not feel true, and will not have the effect that only the truth can have. The truth is frightening because it is too big for us; and as so often, we shy away from the very thing we should face. We attend the eucharist, we hear the Passion read and we are scared. We retreat from its reality, from its true meaning, and find – naturally – the superficial level boring. We shield ourselves from the re-presentation of the sacrifice of Calvary, the presence of God and the act of our salvation through history – and there is nothing left. We have lost the soul of the thing. It is essential that we search for that soul ceaselessly, like the woman with the drachma, until it is found. And I think that this is a good time to do it, now when the historical events which are the core of the eucharist and are re-presented in it are about to be enacted before our eyes. Maybe after the events of Maundy Thursday – and if you can’t remember them, it would be no bad thing to supplement the liturgy by reading them for yourselves – the reading of the Passion of Good Friday, and the Vigil Mass on Easter Sunday, might feel a little different from those same things today. If so, thank God for it and take that to the eucharist with you from now on. Never mind the rite, the denomination, the translation, the version, the vagaries of the priest or minister; remember what you are doing, at what you are assisting, and hold fast to what is good – and true.

Sermon for Passion Sunday

2009-03-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

“When Christ came into the world, he said: "Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased. Then I said, 'Here am I; I have come to do your will, O God”
I have been thinking a lot about sacrifice this Lent. Not sacrifice in the colloquial sense, the sense we use it in, but in the real sense. Today is the fifth Sunday of Lent, sometimes called Passion Sunday. The whole of Lent is intended to lead up to the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but it is today that what is going to happen is really brought home to us. The readings at the 9.45 service are designed to make the actual events live for us, most especially the gospel passage in which Jesus faces his own death: “Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name! Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” His task, which had been before him all his life but placed somewhere in a vague future, is suddenly weighing heavily upon him. He suddenly has to wrestle his human will into conformity with his divine will, or, if you like, come to terms with what was before him and what was within him. That is what the devil – “the prince of this world” is doing in the scene. Had Jesus felt no reluctance about the job and the way in which it was to be carried out, the devil would have had no handhold, no point of attack; and he clearly had. Of course; because Jesus may have been true God, but he was also true man; one would have to doubt his humanity had he never run up against the devil. We are now in the deepest part of Lent, and the time for speaking, for preaching, for healing, is at an end. All that is left is God’s glorification through the sacrifice of the Son, and he knows it.
And that’s where the readings we have heard at this service fit in. They are the theological commentary on the event narrated in the 9.45 gospel. If, as the poet Hopkins says, each mortal thing expresses its self in what it does (Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:…myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came) that is even more true in the case of Jesus, the Son of God who became incarnate to do what he is: to be God to us, God with us. And to be the sacrifice that sums up, completes and ends all the sacrifices offered until then.
The sacrifice we heard about in the first reading was not the first sacrifice; but it was one of immense significance, as it sealed the first covenant, the Old Covenant, which is summed up, completed and ended by the New Covenant in the blood of Jesus.
As to our second reading, the letter to the Hebrews is a poetic explanation of how the life, and specifically the death and resurrection of Jesus both fulfils and ends that Old Covenant and everything that it comprised. You need to know your Old Testament very well indeed to understand all the points it makes, but once you do, it changes from a beautiful but rather obscure piece of poetic writing to an extremely clear and rigorously thought out treatise. What it really is is a sermon, though I’m not sure how people nowadays would take to a densely argued sermon taking a good hour to deliver. It may, or may not, have been actually sent as a letter. It has been attributed to St Paul, but honestly the Greek is simply too good for it to have been written by someone who thought in Aramaic, as he did. Various authors have been suggested, from Apollos to Priscilla (writing as a man so that people would not dismiss the piece as worthless). I don’t think it really matters who wrote it. It has been in the Canon of the Scriptures since the earliest days, and that is enough for me.
If you want to know how the Jews of the first century struggled to reconcile what they had learned at their mother’s knee, from their teachers and in their synagogues with what they were now hearing from Jesus and his disciples, the letter to the Hebrews is the place to go. Over and over again the author gives a well-known event or character from the Old Testament and then its fulfilment in Jesus. At the end of the book a receptive Jew could be in no doubt that the Lord really had visited his people.
But for those of us who have never been Jews, who are not really that bothered whether Jesus perfectly fulfilled the prophecies and types of the Old Testament (because for us it is the New Testament that matters and the Old Testament that we read for context and background) …is the epistle to the Hebrews just a historical religious curiosity, with not a lot of relevance to our lives? Well, you might say so if you are the sort of Christian who thinks that all we need to do is be reasonably nice people and go to church occasionally. God is unbelievably merciful, so that may even be true, but how much such people miss!
In fact, it is relevant in two very different ways: in what it tells us about Christ and how our salvation was achieved; and what it tells us about how to deal with suffering. Both are particularly appropriate in Lent and most particularly today as we move into Passiontide.
The death of Abel at the hands of Cain is extremely important. We are told the myth of the fall of Adam and Eve – the first sin being depicted as a refusal of love and a move towards pride and disobedience – but it is with the first murder, of Abel by his brother Cain, that we see its effects. Effects that are reversed, objectively for all of us, and subjectively for each of us as we accept Christ’s grace, by the death of another innocent at the hands of his brothers. God heard Abel’s blood crying out from the ground where it had been spilt, but the blood of Christ, true God and a willing sacrifice, outshouts it, so to speak. That sacrifice reversed everything, turned everything upside down. God’s mountain is no longer the physical Mount Sinai, but the spiritual Mount Zion; God’s presence is no longer seen in darkness, thunder, terror and death but in the brilliance of heaven – or rather, of eternal life, a life in which we already live if we so choose. Because Jesus Christ willingly walked through the darkness, the thunder, the terror and the death, it no longer has any power over those who follow him. Our life makes sense because God lived it. Our sufferings make sense because God suffered. And our death made sense because - God died.

So let us enter into Passiontide with gratitude and mindfulness, and show our willingness – no, our longing – to be with him and follow him wherever he goes.

O God of endless mercy, by our annual celebration of these mysteries you rekindle the faith of the people consecrated to you; increase the grace which you have given us, so that we may fully understand what baptism has cleansed us, what Spirit has given us new life, and by whose Blood we have been redeemed. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Laetare, Ierusalem

2009-03-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

A while ago I heard this comment on the radio: “Well, that’s what Lent is about, isn’t it: to discover how strong we are.” I was so distracted by that phrase that I hardly heard the rest of the programme. Strangely, Lent, like Christmas, has entered secular culture (“what are you giving up for Lent?” people with no Christian connection ask, rather as they ask about New Year’s Resolutions), while Easter seems almost entirely confined to the shops; I can see the mounting panic in the shops already, as they advertise cut-price Easter eggs. They won’t sell, of course - they don’t sell - and after Easter chocaholics swoop on Scotmid and make a killing.

I am not sure why Lent has caught on. Perhaps it is a cover for, and a spur to, dieting - the most common thing for people to give up being chocolate, closely followed by alcohol.

But if there is one thing Lent is not about it is “discovering how strong we are”. It is also not about increasing our self-control by practice. Stoics and Buddhists may cultivate “apatheia”; it is not a Christian virtue. Christian indifference is something quite distinct. We do not reach the point at which we have risen above joy and sorrow pleasure and pain, to such an extent that we no longer feel them or even no longer care about them. or maybe some do, but they have no advantage, Christianly speaking, over the rest of us Christian indifference is this: first, we know that whatever God sends or permits it will ultimately turn out to our advantage; as Paul said, all things work together for good to those who love God. So if something unpleasant happens we dislike it, and would have preferred if the contrary pleasant thing had happened. God knows what he is doing and while I do not believe that he ever sends troubles principally “to try us”, he is not put off by their troublesome nature if he knows that they are the best thing for us. And secondly, as St Ignatius pointed out, we want to be as like Christ as possible, and he had a pretty rough time of it. So if we have a rough time we may not enjoy it (we are certainly not required to enjoy it, and most certainly, short of a special vocation not required to ask for it) but it is OK by us, because although we have the bad experience of having the rough time, we have the good experience of being like the Lord.

“How strong we are” is not of any real interest to the Christian, except insofar as learning that contributes to our self-knowledge. As Paul said, “our sufficiency is of God” - the sufficiency that matters, that is. If he asks a particular thing of us, whether it is martyrdom or keeping the Lenten fast, he will provide the required strength; but there is no reason to suppose that he will give me the strength to keep off olive oil for six weeks just because I on a whim think it might be a good thing to give up for Lent. “Strength” has nothing to do with God; look at the people who have the “strength” to put themselves through misery and suffering to win an Olympic medal or look like a catwalk model and apparently find it quite easy. They have “discovered how strong they are” - and where does it get them, Christianly speaking?

There is no harm in fasting or performing ascetic practices, but it must be for the right reason, or, Christianly speaking, it is worthless. The other bad reason for fasting is indeed religious, or quasi-religious, and pretty poor religion it is too. It is to punish ourselves, to make ourselves suffer. Because that is what God likes, isn’t it? I am afraid that is indeed the impression that many Christians have given throughout the ages, but it is not Christian; it is perhaps a basic human instinct and stems from our fallen natures. We know, in a very confused way, that we are sinners, and to us sin means punishment. And so we punish ourselves; but we generally pin it on the wrong thing - think how guilty a thirty-something feels when she eats a slice of chocolate cake! - and we misunderstand the purpose and nature of punishment. To God, sin does not call for punishment; sin calls for healing.

I think one of the main lessons of the Bible is just that: our sufficiency is of God. Pharaoh could persecute the children of Israel as much as he liked; Moses the chosen one not only survived, but was suckled by his own mother, infiltrated Pharaoh’s very palace, and finally robbed him of his entire contingent of Hebrew slaves. You could of course argue that while God’s overarching Plan was no doubt behind all this, the instruments he used were the midwives and the mothers. And I guess that is quite topical today, because, of course, it is Mothering Sunday.

Jesus told us that we must be like little children if we are to enter the kingdom of heaven. Those of us who have dealings with children, or can remember our own childhood, know that children are not innocent little darlings absolutely all of the time. What he meant to evoke was the trust that children have in their parents, their awareness (most of the time!) that they can’t go it alone. Our sufficiency is of God - we should know it, and live by it, as Moses must have known throughout his life that had it not been for his mother’s courage and right decision, he would not have survived.

Christians of the Reformed traditions are perhaps less likely than Roman Catholics or Orthodox to regard the Church as their mother, but it wouldn’t do us any harm to think, occasionally, of God as our mother. God is certainly our father; but God has no gender; God is also our mother. The concept presented no problems to Julian of Norwich, Indeed, she went further; not only God, but Jesus himself, is our mother. She says, for example: “What does Jesus, our true mother do? Why, he, All-love, bears us to joy and eternal life…The human mother will suckle her child with her own milk, but our beloved Mother Jesus feeds us with himself, and with the most tender courtesy does it by means of the Blessed Sacrament, the precious food of all true life.”

Is that so strange? When we make a list of the ways in which Jesus described himself, we remember the True Vine, the Way, the Truth and the Life, the Good Shepherd, but do we remember the mother hen? It is one of my favourites. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered together your children as a hen gathers her chicks uner her wings, & you would not”.

We are safe under the wings of Jesus. I am aware that there is controversy around exactly how much we have to contribute to our salvation, but I think we will all agree that, firstly, we could not have done it for ourselves, and, secondly, Jesus’ sacrifice was sufficient, once for all. Our sufficiency is of God.

That is what Lent is about. Not discovering how strong we are. Not punishing ourselves by suffering. But discovering, or reminding ourselves of, the true relationship between ourselves and God. Of course that will involve some sadness, because, like the publican, we are sinners, & our salvation required great suffering & the ultimate sacrifice from God. But Lent is, as the Orthodox have it, a time of “bright sadness”, because it leads, through Good Friday, to Easter. In Christianity, everything is ultimately joyful because however much our Lord suffered for our sins, the fact remains that he died to free us from them & that he rose again in glory & is seated at the right hand of the Father, where we shall join him when our own personal Lent is over.

What do we need “strength” for? We have the Lord.

Better late than never

2009-03-15T15:41:00.000-07:00

3rd Sunday of Lent 2009

The most terrifying moment of my childhood was on a holiday in Yugoslavia, when my father, finally driven to the end of his tether by a half-witted switchboard operator who kept inanely instructing him to “dial 9” on a telephone that possessed no dial, ripped the telephone out of the wall and smashed it upon the floor.

When I read today’s gospel and imagine myself in it, I am reminded of that moment of terror. Perhaps that is not surprising if I am seeing myself as an unconcerned bystander (I’ve never seen myself as one of the money-changers, but that is not so much because I’m convinced of my virtue as because I have never been engaged in business). But even when I do see myself as one of those who are being ripped off by the money-changers, desperate to buy the smallest of birds for a sacrifice and realising that the coins I am getting back amount to barely half of what I have brought with me – and therefore should feel grateful to this man who is revenging himself, and us, on these criminals who are using their position in the religious establishment to make life difficult for the faithful – I still find that my primary reaction is fear. I think there are two reasons for this. Firstly, any violence frightens me because violence means anger that has lost control, and you never know what might happen next; and secondly, this is just not going to help. Violence rarely does. he is only going to make things worse. The traders will not only become angry and vindictive themselves they will increase their prices to make up for their losses and their inconvenience. What is the point of this action? No doubt the man will feel better for having goy it out of his system, but even he won’t get any benefit – he’ll probably end up being lynched or thrown into prison.

this last was perfectly true, and Jesus knew it, which suggests that we ought to look deeper for his motivation. To begin with, in this case violence did not signify anger that had lost control. Strictly speaking, Jesus never lost control – indeed, could not lose control. St Thomas explains that although Christ’s soul was passible, yet he did not have passions as we do; he certainly had passions in the sense of “affections appetitus sensitivi” (so his soul was passible, subject to suffering) because that is part of being a human being. However, says Thomas, his passions differed from ours in three ways: as regards their object: he could not be led by passion towards illicit things; as regards their origin: his passions always arose according to the judgement of reason; and as regards their effect: in us our passions overcome our reason and lead us to do things we should not; in him that could not happen. In other words, his passions were real and he felt them (they arose in “the appetite of his senses”) but they never went further than that. St Jerome seems to be the one who coined the word “propassion” to distinguish Christ’s passions from ours. This long theological digression is not a digression at all; it attempts to explain my statement that Jesus’ passions could never lead him to lose control: anger, sadness and the rest were there, but always within the control of his reason. And there is an interesting fact to add to that: although we are frequently told in the gospels that Jesus was sad, or angry, or had some other emotion or passion, none of the four accounts of the cleansing of the Temple suggest any such thing.

So perhaps we should see the scene differently: not according to that famous painting in which a furious Christ is laying about him with a whip, incensed beyond measure with what is going on, but rather as a calm authoritative Christ, in control not only of himself, but of the whole scene. He is not whipping the traders, much less the animals. He is walking quietly through the Temple, pushing over the money-changers’ tables as he goes, pausing to open the birdcages, and driving the sheep and oxen ahead of him. That’s what the whip is for – it is the language they understand. All this fits far better with the reaction he received: bewildered, hostile certainly, but not violent. it is not as if the people were reluctant to abuse Jesus, try to arrest him, stone him or throw him over cliffs when he made them angry. Had he barged through the Temple in an unseemly rage, attaching respected members of the public and scattering terrified livestock all over Jerusalem, I can’t imagine that they would simply have politely asked Him: “What sign can you show us to justify what you have done?”

This is an important point; because upon Jesus’ behaviour in the Temple depends the meaning of the whole episode. Of course he did intend to show that what was going on in the Temple was an abomination; but there was a lot more to it than that. his action is yet another of those acted parables which I have mentioned before. He is pointing out the unsuitable behaviour of the traders in the Temple, yes, but almost in passing; it is the occasion, not the message. he is not telling us primarily about the Temple but about himself. Because the request from the Jews “What sign can you show us to justify what you have done?” was completely the wrong request; this WAS the sign. Jesus only once, according to the gospels, used, unqualified, the phrase “I AM”, the pointer to identity with God. “Before Abraham came to be, I AM”. But that does not mean he never otherwise made that point. The Hebrew mind does not say “My essence is the same as my being” or “I possess my being entirely and not by participation” or such Greek ideas. The Hebrew mind says: “I lay down my life that I may take it again. No man taketh it away from me; but I lay it down of myself, and I have power to lay it down; and I have power to take it up again” or, perhaps even more significantly, “Although I give testimony of myself, my testimony is true; for I know whence I can, and whither I go; but you know not whence I come or whither I go”. Which is precisely the sort of thing he is saying in this acted parable. The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, and we see here that the Son of Ma is also Lord of the Temple; something greater than the Temple is here.

He did not give a new sign, but he explained the one he had already given, wen he said “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up”. He was speaking, we are told, of the temple of his body. Well, yes, he was. But he was also questioning whether there was any difference between the two temples, and challenging his hearers to follow his answer to its logical conclusion. His body and the Temple were one: both were the place where God was. As John Austin Baker has put it, “When God enters our space and time, a man is what he becomes”. A temple can be a privileged place to find God, but only a human being can truly be what he becomes. Jesus was the true Temple; the other one was only a shadow. He did explain his sign, but you could have understood it without the explanation as he walked through God’s house, rearranging it to his liking, as if it were his own dwelling – which is exactly what it was. “The Temple and I are one”? He did not need to say it.

And so we return to the point of the whole episode. Of course Jesus knew that he wasn’t going to “achieve” anything by disrupting the money-changing and selling on one day. he wasn’t a fool, to think that the shock would convert the traders or would give the punters the courage to stand p to them. And he certainly wasn’t overcome by rage. The point of the episode is to tell something about himself, and so aout God. The message was not so much about the traders as about the Temple, and about the od of the Temple. The message could e summed up as: “Look at me, and see what and who I am” but Jesus, who was meek and lowly of heart, had no interest in being recognised as God for the sake of it. He had come to earth not only to redeem us – we could have been saved without all that blood, sweat and tears, had God so chosen – but to show us, we who, as Thomas said, can grasp nothing in our mind unless it has first passed through our senses, what God is like. As the Jesuit van Breemen put it, “The epitome of the Good News is not that Jesus is God, but that God is as he appears in Jesus”. Quite so; and that is why it is important that we should grasp that he is God; and it should have been enough to convert the lot of them at a stroke. And, incidentally, if we could leave it at that and stop picking at it, it might well solve a great many of our interdenominational squabbles, which are no less of a scandal than the most dishonest of the money-changers in the Temple.

Frygt og Bæven

2009-03-07T08:59:00.000-08:00

Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Lent, Year B
Genesis 22:1-18

I have chosen the Roman Catholic readings for today, simply because this passage from Genesis has always been regarded as a problem, and I do not think it is. It has caused much heart-searching and hair-tearing among people of all shades of opinion. There seem to be two reasons for this: some feel that Abraham should not have done what he did, and some feel that God should not have done what he did. Some, of course, hold both opinions. Kierkegaard devoted an entire closely argued book to explaining that there can be “a teleological suspension of the ethical” (in more simplistic terms, that the end can sometimes justify the means). I agree with him that there can, though I am not sure either that that is the issue, or that Abraham regarded things in quite that way. In general I have no problem with this passage. Apart from anything else, we do not know enough about things to criticise the actions of an omniscent, omnipotent being; and we do not know anything about Abraham’s state of mind – or Isaac’s, for that matter. The Mystery Plays portray him as begging Abraham to spare him and/or accepting his fate with holy resignation; I wonder about both, and does it really matter? What we do know is that in fact, or for the purposes of the story, the communication between God and Abraham and vice versa was quite other than what we are used to; and, indeed, Abraham’s world-view and view of himself as part of it was quite different from ours.

“For the purposes of the story” is the operative phrase; for that is what this is: a story. By saying that I am not making any statement at all about whether it “really happened” or not; sometimes a story is pointless unless it is a story about what really happened. Don’t forget that God the Father and God the Son are, with the Spirit who proceeds from them, one God. Indeed, that as far as their actions towards creation are concerned, there is no distinction between them. God the Son taught by preference in parables, both spoken parables and acted parables, of which there are more than you might think: from his birth in the stable in Bethlehem to his taking a repentant criminal with him into Paradise, from the cleansing of the Temple to the cursing of the fig tree. And the Father and the Spirit do exactly the same thing. In words through the prophets God tells parables, and in actions – and sometimes in the prophets’ actions – God acts them. God was acting a parable when he sent the plagues upon Pharaoh and drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea while Israel crossed dry-shod; and he was acting a parable when he instructed Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

It is said that we are an individualistic and selfish lot, we at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; my instinct is to deny it, to say that human nature doesn’t change much. But I think, when I compare us with Abraham, that it might just be true after all. It is certainly true that we are desperately concerned about our rights and our dignity; Abraham would, I believe, not thank us for our concern for his rights as against God. Perhaps we are not to blame; I don’t know whether more rights have been violated in or time than in others, but it is certain that we hear more about it. had there been a Hitler, somewhere away in the barbaric North, Abraham would never have heard about him. The only violation of human rights that he was aware of were those close to him: the capture of Lot, for example. And these were fairly straightforward affairs, which he could generally do something about. Abraham was a confident man, sure enough of himself to be humble and obedient; he was a good man, honest and loving enough to be trusting. We are like frightened animals, seeing predators, tamers and domesticators behind every bush, fearing always that our very nature as the animals we are is at any moment to be negated. How could Abraham think that? Only God who had made that nature could touch it. We are, I suppose, less at the mercy of the natural world than Abraham; but our aeroplanes and air-conditioning and our super-hygienic environment have made us more, not less, aware of our vulnerability, and more at a loss when we do lose control. Isn’t that why we respond as we do to terminal illness and death? To Abraham these things were part of life: floods, hurricanes, droughts; these things happened, but could not fundamentally alter the nature of things. We have lost our sense of the nature of things and live on perpetually shifting sands in the midst of a hostile sea; we are unable to receive eents as they come, and peacefully wait to see what will come of them, in this world and the next.

Not only did Abraham have a more correct view of the universe than we do – we have no view of it at all except as a subject for investigation and as something to protect ourselves against – for the purposes of the story we are to understand that he did not misinterpret the Lord’s messages. he had, as we would say, a hotline to the Holy Spirit. Few of us could be sure we heard a clear message from God, especially if it were something outrageous like an instruction to sacrifice our only son. There is therefore a whole ethical question for us which does not arise for the Abraham of the story. When Job said “God has given and God has taken away”, he meant it in a literal way that we cannot begin to conceive: and for Abraham it was clearer yet: as clear, indeed, as it was for Mary when she returned to God – no ram-substitute there! – the son whom she had received from him thirty-three years earlier. For Abraham as for Mary the son of the promise belonged to God. Everything he himself was or possessed was of God. God’s rights over himself and over Isaac were absolute; and God would never act in a way that contradicted himself, that violated his promise. Paul tells us that God’s promises are without repentance, and Abraham knew that. Isaac was his heir; through him he would be the father of many nations; how God chose to achieve that was up to him. Abraham’s only task was to obey, and obey one whom he knew from experience to be his protector and so by definition the protector of his descendants after him.

So for the purposes of the story, Abraham has no problem with the command – which is not to say that it didn’t hurt. I had no problem, more than a quarter of a century ago, with the command to enter religious life, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed causing my parents pain and my friends bewilderment. Abraham knew that if the episode ended as, humanly speaking, it ought to have done, he would have to cope with a distraught Sarah, quite apart fom his own feelings. But I think that his faith in God was such that he did not look ahead, did not make assumptions.

No problem for Abraham, then. And certainly no problem for God. It may be unfashionable to say this, but there can be no question, ever, of seriously judging God’s actions to be wrong or immoral. We can cry out “God, why?” and we can challenge Him after the manner of Job. But it is essential that we know throughout that there is an answer, and that our bewilderment is due to our limitations and not to God’s failure. Did God have the right to command Abraham to sacrifice his son? Without any doubt. And he would have had the right to let him do it, too. He would even have “had the right” to break his promise, but he does not do that, by his very nature. God is truth, not in the sense that “he really exists” or that he dictates truths to which we must assent, but in that he is totally true to himself, totally reliable, totally faithful.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time justifying God and Abraham. But in fact, what really justifies this episode is something quite different: it is, quite simply, the true meaning and significance of the episode. That is on two levels: the effect God intends it to have on Abraham and Isaac; and its status as “a Scripture” which is to be remembered and believed when shadows are chased away by reality. God knew perfectly well that Abraham would obey him without fail. But, I am sure Abraham didn’t. We all doubt our fidelity, and that doubt detracts from the vigour we bring to our Christian lives. Not just “will I let God down?” but “God, who knows me, can’t possibly trust me”. After this, Abraham had no such handicap. It was he, not God, who was reassired, he who now knew that nothing could come between God and his love and obedience. If he had not known that, he would not have shown himself worthy to be the father of many nations, the beginning of God’s own people. His will and God’s were one, and that was something he had to know. I think Isaac had to know it too: to know that God had to come first, and that he could be trusted in all circumstances, terrible though they might seem. Abraham and Isaac would not have come out of this as we might, feeling like the playthings of God, but rather they would have felt honoured to be confirmed as the pillars of God’s plan.

God is not Zeus; Abraham is not Agamemnon, nor Isaac Iphigenia. No human being could have such value or be so close to God’s heart as to renew all things. But there was to be a father whose broken heart was not spared, and there was to be an Iphigenia, a child who was not substituted; and it was when Abraham (and Isaac) saw his day that they understood, and rejoiced.

The first Sunday in Lent

2009-02-28T14:39:00.000-08:00

Asking a person to preach on that Genesis passage is the equivalent of asking them to nail their theological colours to the mast. The temptation is to skip it altogether and preach on the Gospel. However, while I do appreciate the Anglican reluctance to define, perhaps we do have to be clear on what we do, and do not, believe. In his first letter St Peter says “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have”. I think that means that we should be clear about our beliefs and the foundation of them, not just in our minds but in what we say too. Theology isn’t just for the clergy. We, the lay-people, are if you like the “default” Christians. The clergy have a particular role, but they are Christians first and foremost just as we are. St Peter is not talking to the clergy, or to members of the ministry team, or even to the unusually devout. He is talking to you and to me – ordinary piskies in the pew.

It should be said, of course, that anything we state about God, whether it is about God’s nature or about salvation history, can never be more than provisional. In Thomas Aquinas’ words, we cannot understand “what” God is, only “that” God is. Which didn’t stop Thomas from writing dozens of books about “what” God is and “how” God works, but as he said after the great vision or dream that he had the year before his death, “All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me”. That’s the problem with any definition – if you have a living faith, nourished by prayer and chewing over the scriptures, it will not be long before you realise that “that’s not it…” It has been said many times that the only way to define God is to say what God is not. And some early Fathers of the Church used to say that it was better to say that God is not good than to say God is good and then sit back and think you had defined God.

But we do need to be able to say “This, so far as I understand it, and with the proviso that better understanding may come and lead me to change the way I express it, is what I believe.”

So here goes. This, so far as I understand it, and with the proviso that better understanding may come and lead me to change the way I express it, is what I believe about why the Son of God died on the cross for us and rose again.

The Genesis passage we have just heard is key, and that is why we have it at the beginning of Lent, the time set apart to meditate on precisely that.

God created human beings with free will. He did this, I believe, because he was more interested in being loved than in being obeyed. Paul says the demons believe and tremble; equally one could obey and tremble; obey and hate. That was not the sort of obedience God wanted, the sort of obedience it was his to command. Love cannot be commanded; love must be free. When Jesus says that the first commandment is to love God and the second is to love your neighbour he is not saying (how could he?) that he commands us to love. What he is actually saying is that that is the one thing necessary – if you do that there is no need for you to be commanded to do anything else. It is almost saying “There is no commandment: love, and do what you will”.
Now human beings, having free will, disobeyed God. There are people who believe the Adam and Eve story is literally true, and you may believe this if you wish. I don’t really mind whether it is or not; on balance, I doubt it.

Are you a bit shocked that I say that the Genesis story may not be true, that it may be just a myth? But I’m not saying that. A myth is something profoundly true, and it is never “just” a myth. It is a way of expressing a truth which both tells that truth and is within the grasp of the person you are telling. For example, when you tell a child that if he sticks a wire into the socket the Electricity Monster will get him. It’s not true, but it IS true that something very bad, that you can’t explain because he can’t yet understand it, will happen. That’s the sort of myth that Genesis is.
What Genesis is telling us is that human beings, created by God with free will, lost sight of love, and started being bothered about obedience (and it is only one step from valuing obedience above love to wondering just how obedient the letter of the law requires us to be, and thence to disobedience). That’s what it is, you know; and if you will forgive me for speaking so irreverently about God the Son, you can tell it because that, following the letter and not the spirit, is one of Jesus’ “hot buttons”. He can’t stand it. It is the one thing that makes him really, really angry.

People often have difficulty about the question of why the Son was crucified. Is it a sacrifice, is it a sort of restorative justice, what is it? I think the answer is that it can be understood differently by different people, different societies, and different times. We do not now naturally understand the concept of sacrifice in atonement for sin. We don’t do it. The original sense of the word is repugnant to us. To describe Christ’s death on the cross as an atoning sacrifice does not make sense to the modern mind.

Similarly the concept of “making satisfaction”, of appeasing an angry god, or the idea that someone had to die for the sin of the first human being. As if our God demanded suffering and death in strict justice and somehow was pleased by the suffering and death of his Son. These explanations fitted with particular societies, particular belief systems, particular ways of life. They do not seem to fit now.

But “Christ yesterday and today, and the same for ever”. Christ did die on the cross for our salvation, and that does not change. And we need to understand this during Lent and at Easter, because we need to understand what God has done for us and to us. May I suggest one possible way of understanding it, a way that fits – for me – with the idea that our first parents replaced divine love with human obedience, fits with Isaiah’s statement that “He was offered up because he wished it so”, and fits with that beautiful phrase “the restoration of all things in Christ”. In some way the death of Christ restores us to our original state of blessedness by restoring us, from the realm of law and obedience, to the realm of love and grace. What did he say? “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”. Love is his meaning, and love is the meaning of his death. To me it is not a question of justice, of a necessary death following a sin, but of such a weight of love thrown into the balance that it outweighs centuries – millennia – of law, obedience, and disobedience. Augustine said Amor meus pondus meum: My love is my weight: my love for God is what moves me, as surely as gravity. And Christ’s love is his weight, the weight that outweighs all our sins. Love is stronger than death, so how could he not rise again? It’s not a final answer – no answer will ever be final until, in God’s nearer presence, we know as we are known. But just now it’s my answer, and the answer I will try to take with me through Lent. I think…one could do worse.

Dust and ashes?

2009-02-24T09:11:00.000-08:00

Ash Wednesday 2009
Yearly I am struck by the irony – which I am sure has not escaped you either – that on the only day of the year on which our Christian observance shows – when we go out into the streets with a large sooty smudge on our foreheads and trickling down our noses – we have the Gospel passage in which Jesus tells us most insistently and most severely that our observance should not show. I know there are ostentatious people around today, and I suppose there are even people who are ostentatious about their Christianity. There are indeed those who are pushy about their moral stance, and you do get the odd noisy procession or celebration, but on the whole we – especially we Anglicans – prefer to hide in our pews and keep a stony face, and sing and respond as unobtrusively as possible. We like to give our contributions to the collection in those little envelopes so that no-one can see what we are giving; I have derived a certain amount of innocent amusement from watching the various methods of discreet giving. There is the careless toss: the coin (this does not work with notes) flies rapidly from the fingers and disappears quickly among its fellows. There is the protective crouch: the hand, containing the donation, descends into the collection basket and crouches, crablike, over its contents as they release the offering into the heap. There is the nervous stab: in which the thumb and forefinger insert the coin violently, as into a slot machine, into the contents of the basket, burying forcefully. This too, is dicey with notes, except in an unusually generous congregation. And then there is the furtive plonk, in which the donor glances almost fearfully at almost any point in the church, thus distracting attention from the donation, which is placed rapidly down as if both money and basket were red hot. Sometimes I feel I should like to see some shameless person hold up a £50 note, raise a horn to their lips, play a quick fanfare and place the note reverently (on its own little silver salver) upon the heap of fifty pees and pound coins.

We need a touch of ostentation, a touch of shamelessness, a touch of chutzpah, in this area, to counterbalance the vast weight of it elsewhere. I am not just talking about the collection; in fact, I am not really talking about the collection at all. I have spoken before about the absurdity of attempting to show one’s own humility and devotion to holy poverty by denying glory and richness to the house of God. I would like to see, among so many people who, by their actions as well as by their words, declare ostentatiously “I matter”, a few who will equally ostentatiously declare “God matters”.

God matters, God’s church matters, God’s servants matter. Of course I matter; but that is, frankly, only because I matter to God, because in some way I am part of God’s glory. “The glory of God is a living human being”. Of course it matters that I become a complete and actualised human being, and fully myself; but it only matters because I am part of God’s creation, a unique part (as are all the other parts) and the perfection of God’s creation and God’s plan for his creatures matter. And, incidentally, nothing else does.

I acknowledge that it is hard to tell the difference, sometimes, between a person who is showing himself off and a person who is showing God off. It is difficult sometimes even to tell the difference within oneself. But, firstly, the difficulty in distinguishing does not mean that there is no distinction, or that nobody in fact shows off God; and secondly it is not necessary, as it is most likely not possible, to have completely pure motives. I think that if I make it clear that God matters, that God matters primarily and uniquely, it is a small price to pay that I am drawing attention to myself. I do not mind if I am criticised for standing in a pulpit and holding forth; just as I did not mind, in my hermit days, if I was criticised for wearing a monastic habit, for presenting myself as “holy”. Nobody criticises a police officer for drawing attention to herself and presenting herself as “virtuous, law-abiding and courageous” or a doctor for presenting himself as “intelligent, hard-working and caring”. How you perceive a doctor, a police officer, a nun or a preacher, and whether or not you feel resentment or jealousy, is your baggage and not mine. I am not presenting myself as a professional – much less a successful – seeker of God; I am simply saying that God is worth seeking.

I am sorry if all you can see is a woman standing in a pulpit and holding forth with her own opinions. What I want you to see is the overwhelming importance of God. I acknowledge that I am a sinner and that my motives are mixed; but I am doing, from that point of view, the best that I can. I am acting out, in a manner approved by the church, my conviction that God is what matters. On Ash Wednesday we act out, in the manner approved by the church, the fact that we are sinners, yes, but above all that God made us out of the dust of the earth and that we would not exist at all were it not for God; that we have no existence apart from God and independent of God, nor would we want to. In addition, by marking in this way the beginning of our forty days of penance we proclaim that Christ became human for us, was tempted in the desert for forty days, gave us the new law, led us out of slavery, and lay forty hours in the tomb. None of that, surely, should make us seem to be glorying in ourselves? We may, I should have thought glory in the Cross of Christ without being accused of self-ostentation.

People forget – and the Pharisees criticised by Jesus forgot – that if we do penance it is for a reason and that reason is that we are sinners and belong to a sinful race. It does not show that we are holy it just shows that our sins are sufficiently flagrant to have come to our notice. Religious observance is so rare nowadays that people tend to think that simply by taking part in it we are presenting ourselves as somehow superior beings. It reminds me of the frequent reaction when I entered the monastery and, more so, when I became a hermit. I was widely accused of thinking I was holier and better than everyone else. What a strange idea. On the contrary. In the Eastern tradition it is assumed that one becomes a monk in order to repent of one’s sins, and a hermit because one’s sins are such that they need more intensive repentance and reparation. The hermit who goes into solitude because he thinks he’s holy won’t last unless he undergoes a major change of heart: there are a few amusing stories to that effect in the Lives of the Desert Fathers.

So please don’t be intimidated by those who think you are showing your holiness off together with the sooty smudge on your forehead. Remember that you are approaching as near as we ever do nowadays to covering yourself in sackcloth and ashes, and that you are doing penance for your sins. We are all dust, and unto dust we shall return; the only difference between those with a smudge and those without is that we know it, and know that God will raise up that dust on the last day.

By all means keep your exceptional penances under wraps; we are asked to do that, and that was what Jesus was getting at; the observances he mentions were optional ones, which should have been done in secret. But not the observances laid down by the church – let people see our faithfulness, such as it is; it is not ours, but that of the church.

But there’s one thing that Jesus recommends which we should keep to scrupulously. I’m not suggesting that we should all dance out of church today singing the forbidden A-word. But don’t forget that we are saved, that our repentance and penance, through the sufferings and merits of Jesus himself, are all fruitful, for ourselves and for the whole world; and let us look forward with all spiritual longing, as St Benedict says, to the holy feast of Easter.

Capis unum captus ab uno

2009-02-21T13:48:00.000-08:00

“Jesus Christ, whom having not seen ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”

I have known people of whom this is transparently true. My father had, shall we say, an ambivalent attitude towards the Church. He did not like being limited, being constrained, being dictated to (oh yes, I’m his daughter!). He would have found life very much easier had he been without religion. He tried. He tried hard. He didn’t set foot in a church for twenty years. He called himself an atheist, while writing passionate poetry to, and about, Christ and his apostles. He was finally forced back into the Church when, as he said, “they tried to take the beauty away”; and he fought with his characteristic mix of ferocity and gentleness for the rest of his life for the return of that beauty.
Well, not everyone has the same opinion about the effects of the Second Vatican Council and the new rite of the Roman Mass. A reasonable comparison for us might be the difference between the Book of Common Prayer and the Alternative Service Book. The latter is more easily “understanded of the people”, undoubtedly; more accessible, maybe; but, I think, less beautiful. And for many people like my father, people who are captivated by the beauty of Christ, totally unsatisfying. One of the last things he said to me was “I would have really liked to be an atheist. But…I love Christ too much”.

St Bruno, the founder of the Carthusian order, was another person like that. His epitaph, which suits him down to the ground, is almost untranslatable. For the Latinists among you (I am sure there are some) it is: Sic Pater o Bruno, capis Unum captus ab Uno. The nearest I can (clumsily) get to it is: “At last, O Father Bruno, you possess the One by whom you were possessed”.
St Paul too. He was totally possessed by Christ, possessed in both senses. He was entirely Christ’s own, which does not mean all his faults and weaknesses were wiped out, as he knew only too well. But in the other sense too: I doubt if he ever thought of anything else but bringing people to Christ, because he knew that that was the only thing that mattered. He was captivated; he was – there is really no other way of putting it – in love. And it was love at first sight, life-changing and permanent. Love unto death.

How about you? Now I am not trying to make you feel guilty, in the old-fashioned way – “If you REALLY loved God, if you REALLY had faith, if you REALLY prayed…” We’ve all been damaged to some extent by that one. But the feeling of these things is a gift, and to some extent either you have it or you have not, rather as you are either musical or you are not. I’m just wondering. What is it that keeps you coming to church, or that brought you in here today?
I suggest that, unless it is sheer habit, you too are motivated by the love of God, even if you are not as acutely aware of it as St Bruno or St Paul – or my father.
I think I see some of you muttering, “Well, convince me. Convince me that I love God.”

We need to look for a moment at what the word “love” means. People who have come through difficult times in a marriage, to find that the bond is stronger than ever, or parents who have continued to love a child who has fallen into bad company, perhaps into addiction or crime, have in my opinion, a good notion of what love is. Love is the thing that is still there when you no longer feel love. Love is the thing that keeps you trusting when your reason tells you there is nothing left and you might just as well cut your losses and run. Love of God, for most of us, is what keeps us defining ourselves as Christians and keeps us coming to church when it is patently obvious that there is no God. I think it is what keeps those Christian writers who appear no longer to believe anything that is recognisably Christian indefatigably continuing to define themselves as Christians. They would prefer to be atheists…but they love Christ too much. Love, real love, is the thing that you don’t feel, and yet you act upon.
It’s a bit like courage, really. Acting bravely when you are not afraid is not courage. Courage is, in the hackneyed but useful phrase, feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
We are told that “there is no room for fear in love. We love because God loved us first.” Being what we are, even that can make us feel guilty and doubtful. Do I really love God if I am still afraid – of so many things, including my meeting with him after my death? Yes, you do. It is only perfect love that casts out all fear, and I don’t know anyone who has got there. All fear is cast out when we love as we are loved, and that will not happen until we know as we are known. To misquote, we love now as in a mirror, dimly; but then face to face.
Yes, of course, sometimes we do feel love of God, or fervour, and we do, to our own surprise, sometimes find ourselves praying spontaneously, or really meaning it when we say we are Christians. But, as I said, these things are gifts. They are not, for most of us, the normal state, and they are not the bread and butter of our life with God. God is spirit, and for flesh to love spirit - which is what is happening when we feel these things – it requires a special dispensation, a small miracle, if you like. Miracles do happen – oh yes, they do – but they are not the basis of everyday life for most of us. Loving in spirit and in truth is the real thing, the everyday thing, which for most of us will simply keep us coming to church, attempting to keep the commandments, and being, as far as we can, good and faithful servants. Some of us - we don’t know who until it happens - will one day realise, perhaps with incredulity, that when we are called to make a stand, perhaps even give our life, for God, we are ready for it. Reluctant maybe, terrified perhaps, but our love, whatever that unfelt thing is, carries us through.
There’s a splendid prayer in the prayer corner over there, written – or prayed – by Harry Williams. It may shock some of you and I’m sorry if it does, because in my opinion it is a nearly perfect expression of selfless love of God. He sits before God, completely honest, completely human, completely transparent and guileless, and completely loving, and prays thus:
O God, I am hellishly angry; I think so and so is a swine; I am tortured by worry about this or that; I am pretty certain that I have missed my chances in life; this or that has left me feeling terribly depressed. But nonetheless, here I am like this, feeling both bloody and bloody minded, and I am going to stay here for ten minutes. You are unlikely to give me anything, I know that. But I am going to stay here for ten minutes nonetheless.

If you really want to exercise and prove your love of God, go and do likewise. And may the joy unspeakable and full of glory of which St Peter speaks be yours now and always.

A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief

2009-02-14T10:02:00.000-08:00

Sermon 15 February 2009
2Kings 5:1-14, 1 Cor 9:24-27, Mark 1:40-45

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities, and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted…and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all…For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken.”

Today’s readings very definitely want us to think about leprosy. It isn’t a pleasant thing to think about, even for those of us who have never to their knowledge seen a leper and are in no danger of catching the disease themselves. But given the fact that we are so used to the Cross that it leaves most of us unmoved, it is no bad thing to think about something which is still painful to us, in connection with the Lord. But leprosy? In connection with the Christ? Why not? The idea dates back to the Isaiah passage I have just quoted, although most versions – the Douay version is an exception – do not use the word itself. The Douay has “We have thought him as it were a leper” for “We considered him stricken by God”; and the phrase “One from whom men hide their faces” is simply a euphemism for a leper.

I don’t suppose many people now remember the novel “Christ Recrucified”, but it was much read and discussed some forty years ago. I must have been thirteen at the most when I read it, and I remember very little about it, except that the hero Manolios (Emmanuel), the “Christ” of the title, was suffering from a mysterious disfiguring disease – not leprosy, but something very like it – and this was one of the reasons why he was persecuted. Indeed, the only reason I now remember. That idea, and its connection with Christ himself, has remained with me ever since.

I’ve often thought, in this connection, of the way in which Jesus dealt with lepers. It is striking that he never touched the possessed – or not until he had cast out the demon – but touching was his normal response to the sick, and his normal way of healing them, including the lepers. He did not hesitate to do what would not only have put him, in the view of the time, at great risk of contracting leprosy himself, but would have also made him ritually unclean. It’s obvious that he didn’t care much about ritual uncleanness, but didn’t he care about the risk of leprosy? I’m not one of those who believe that Jesus, being God, had a perfect knowledge of all arts and sciences, and so would have known, as we do today, that leprosy is in fact not very contagious. He would have had the same belief as everyone else, and no doubt the same instinctive horror of leprosy and lepers. And, I think, more so, because he knew who he was and he knew Isaiah. Just as I’m sure he thought of Nebuchadnezzar and his madness while he was himself in the wilderness with the wild beasts and was wet with the dews of heaven, and may have consciously accepted the possibility that madness, at least temporary madness, might be the will of the Father for him too (and did he not feel that also in Gethsemane?) just so he may have lived consciously with the possibility that Isaiah’s prophecy might be fulfilled literally.

He certainly did nothing to avoid it. That doesn’t just show that he was an extremely courageous and selfless man – though he was – and it has nothing in common with the heroics, admirable though they are, of Francis of Assisi or Catherine of Siena. It was simply a total openness to the will of the Father. Jesus had a human nature like ours: there were things from which he shrank, and things he preferred to other things. But he never protected himself against any thing unless he knew it to be contrary to the Father’s will for him. He did know it was contrary to the Father’s will for him to be thrown off the cliff at Nazareth or stoned in the Temple. And as his consummation approached, its nature became ever clearer to him until the point at which he saw it as clearly as if it had already taken place, though even at that point his openness to the Father’s will received its final proof. And it was then, in Gethsemane, that he understood Isaiah’s prophecy. Because his treatment of lepers, his willingness to lay himself open to leprosy, even, perhaps, a sense that it might be decreed for him, was in a deep sense an entirely sound instinct: no, he was not to contract physical leprosy, but at the time when he was most the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief, he was to experience the most terrible form of leprosy as belonging to him, as forming part of his being.

Because physical leprosy is no more than the shadow of sin, though not in the sense that it follows upon sin, but in the sense that there is a natural connection of thought between them. Leprosy is the epitome of physical loathsomeness and sin is spiritual loathsomeness. The real fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy was when the Lord was faced with that loathsomeness not outside him – which was bad enough – but as it were within him, as it were a disease of his own spiritual organism, as if he, like the rest of us, carried within himself the seedbed of sin, the fomes peccati as Thomas Aquinas calls it. He was a horror to himself and must have felt that he was a horror to all the righteous, not to speak of his heavenly Father.

I make no apology for leaving the greater part of the rest of this sermon to John Henry Newman, who not only understood this, but could express it with a force which we of the twenty-first century have lost.

“There, then, in that most awful hour knelt the Saviour of the world, baring His breast, sinless as He was, to the assault of his foe – a foe whose breath was a pestilence and whose embrace was an agony. Here He knelt, while the fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime, which clung close round His heart, and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of His mind and spread over Him like a moral leprosy, till He almost felt Himself to be that which He could never be…He looked, and did not know Himself, and felt as a foul and loathsome sinner…He found His eyes, feet and lips, and heart, as if the members of the Evil One and not of God!...Of the living and the dead, of the yet unborn, of the lost and the saved…all the sins are there…They are upon Him, they are all but His own; He cries to the Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim; His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition, with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints and penitents together; for He is the one Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, all but the real sinner.”

The Synoptic Gospels call the wonders that Jesus did “miracles”; St John calls them “signs”, and he is right, for so they were. And I think that one of the most fundamental signs is his healing lepers by laying himself open to contracting the disease – for that, precisely, is what he came to do for our souls.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God

2009-02-07T12:52:00.000-08:00

When Soren Kierkegaard was asked, late in his writing career, why he had wasted so much of his time and energies in writing novels and other frivolous works, he had - he always had - an answer ready. Throughout his life as a writer, he claimed, his only intention was to bring people to God. That sounds fairly unlikely. How, people asked, could he claim that he had written a novel about a young man falling in love in order to bring people to God? His answer was this: people live on three different spheres – or stages - of existence: the aesthetic stage (unspiritual and basically shallow) the ethical stage, people who are trying to do the right thing, and the religious or faith stage, those whose whole desire is to give their lives to God. You have to catch people where they are, he said; they won’t respond to something in a different sphere from their own. So he wrote his novels to catch the people in the aesthetic stage; the philosophy to catch them in - or move them on to - the ethical stage, and the religious works to complete the job. Well, maybe. But the idea of catching people where they are is hugely important. It is important because it is what we must do, and more important because it is what God does.

When we read the Old Testament there is always a problem lurking in the background: God's - and Israel's - relationship with the other nations.. and, non-Christians would say, we are as bad. We think we are God's chosen people, we are Right, we have the monopoly of truth.
Why, anyway, should God have to “choose”? Why Abel not Cain, why Shem not Ham or Japheth, why Isaac not Ishmael, why Abraham, why David, why Jacob...why Israel…why Christians?
Er...why anyone?
Why anyone? The astonishing thing, the wonderful thing - and I mean wonder-full - is that God chooses anyone. The more wonder-full thing is that God chooses everyone, every one, each one, all and singular.

You have to take people where they are, and the twin ideas that God chooses each person as if they were the only person in the world and that God does not choose a person because they are righteous but because they are loved, are extremely difficult ones. We find them difficult, and we should be used to them by now. At the beginning of God's dealings with humankind they would have been quite impossible to grasp.

You see that with children; as they discover that either they have the toy or their sister has it, or either they are top of the class or Freddy is. It's him or me. and later this is reinforced over and over again; in school, at university, in the workplace and in social life.
If you are unsuccessful in all this competition, if it's never you who gets the gold star, the bicycle, the first-class degree or the girlfriend, then you are going to conclude that you are a failure, unloved and unlovable, not worthy of being chosen.
But if you are successful you will conclude the opposite. and that is a good start, even if at that point you still assume that your success means another's failure.
In the ordinary life of the world, the usual way to discover your worth is to discover that you have been preferred to another. In God's world it is not like that, but God's thoughts are not our thoughts. It's a wise woman who can experience failure and know that it makes no difference whatsoever to God's love for her, to God's choice of her.

So I come back to my original point: catching people where they are. Perhaps, in order to get across to humankind that they are a beloved and chosen race without doing violence to their free will, God had to - shall we say - rather do violence to his own nature as Love; First he had to get into their heads the idea that there should be anyone who is chosen and beloved by God. First an individual. Then a tribe. Then twelve tribes and then all who adhered to the faith of Israel.

Slowly, slowly, a small part of humankind began to understand just how great was God's love. “You are my people, I am your God.” Had he said straight off “I am everyone's God” it would have sounded like indifference rather than the universal love that it in fact is. It was not until Israel had really got it firmly into their head that they were first in God's heart that God could take the next step; he sent his son. The one who really was first in the Father's heart. To show us all, not just Israel, that incredibly - incredibly - in some way God is not enough to fill God's heart. To show us that in the infinite God an all-consuming love for one does not mean a lesser love for another.

You know, we still haven't grasped it, and the way non-Christians react to us shows that with horrible clarity. How many times will we have to be told that God hates nothing that he has made and does not wish the loss of any person? How many times will we have to be told that God does not choose anyone because they are already somehow worthy of his love? Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be. “I did not choose you because you were the greatest nation but because you were the smallest”. “You are the smallest of all the towns of Israel, Bethlehem Ephrata…” “When we were yet without strength…Christ died for the ungodly…God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.”
As Kierkegaard suggests, God takes us where we are. While we were yet sinners Christ died for us; he came not for the righteous but for sinners; he died for the ungodly. He did not say: “First become righteous and then I will do my stuff”.

and now we need to do what God does. Maybe Christianity has taken a step further than Israel. Maybe we do accept that anyone can find salvation. We are right to refer to ourselves as the Catholic church; Christianity should be truly catholic. But we are still in the business of exclusion, and people undoubtedly feel excluded by us. We all have people or classes of people we exclude, even if it's only “people who are still in the aesthetic stage”. But that won't do. If they are “without God in the world” that is not because God has rejected them; but simply because they do not see the world as charged with his grandeur. We may find them unlovely, but God does not. Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.
So let's get this straight. We are indeed God's chosen people. We do indeed have the gift of knowing his only-begotten Son. But that's not because we've Got It Right, or are particularly lovable or particularly clever. We have been given a gift: we know ourselves to be fellow-citizens of the saints and members of the household of God, and the correct response to that gift is twofold: wonder, and the desire to share it. With everyone, every one, each one, all and singular. and we must take them where they are, not demanding more of them than God demanded of us. He died for us while we were yet sinners. can anything we do compare with that? and so let us pray:

Almighty and ever-living God, we most heartily thank thee, that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom, by the merits of the most precious death and passion of thy dear Son...to whom, with the Father, in the Spirit, be honour and glory in time and eternity. Amen.

Inconnu excepte de Dieu (sorry, can't do accents!)

2009-01-31T13:22:00.000-08:00

1 February 2009 - Candlemas
1Sam 1:20-28, Lk 2:22-40

In my old parish church in Kent, there is a painting behind the altar depicting the Presentation of Mary in the Temple (a purely legendary event, but one to which there is considerable devotion among Roman Catholics). The striking thing about that painting, and the reason why I mention it today, is the way in which the child Mary is welcomed: by the High Priest, formally, and as someone already singled out as special.

You couldn’t imagine the Mother of God being received into the temple by the under-doorkeeper, could you? This is legend, and legends always conform to the laws of imagination. Special arrangements must always have been made for her. She must have been raised in the Temple, and she must have been received there in a special way. There have been attempts to create legends around Jesus, too, of course: the first ones were the apocryphal gospels, and the genre continues to this day. But these legends are powerless, because we have the gospels, and we know that Jesus was not received as someone special, that he was not even noticed until he began his public life. We find this difficult, but it is indisputably true.

I was talking recently to a man whose ideas are, shall we say, a little unusual. For example, he believes that we were created 300,000 years ago by aliens from outer space. I was finding it a bit difficult to feign interest, but I was suddenly jerked out of my glazed non-listening when he began on the subject of Joseph, Jesus’ foster father. “Of course,” said Hamish, “we have got it quite wrong. Joseph wasn’t a carpenter at all”. “Yes he was,” I protested, “the Greek has tektwn, the Latin faber. A joiner and builder. A jack of all trades. A brickie.” “Oh no” said Hamish. “that’s not what the original word meant. He wasn’t a craftsman, he was a ‘man of the craft’. The craft of the kings, the secret craft passed down from King David to his kingly descendants. What we are being told is that Joseph knew the craft of the kings”. I rolled my eyes. It’s not surprising that this idea appealed to Hamish, what with Rosslyn chapel and the Da Vinci Code and all. It is of course nonsense; by the time of Joseph there were innumerable descendants of David, and there is no reason to suppose that Joseph was in direct line to the throne. He knew he was of David’s line because the Hebrews, like the Scots, had a very strong sense of tribe and clan. I have at least two friends in Edinburgh who can tell me exactly which thrones they are heir to and why. The English are not at all like this, but most Scots can at least tell you their clan, especially if they are Highlanders. Freddy, who “should be” the present king of Scotland (and possibly England and France as well) is a businessman like any other; he has no arcane kingly knowledge. Things do not work that way, except in the fevered brain of the Hamishes of this world. But he is not totally wrong. We instinctively feel that someone who is significant in the supernatural sphere must also be so in the natural sphere. Something in us rebels against God incarnate being an insignificant, unnoticed brickie, son of the same. I remember how shocked we were as children when our scripture teacher suggested that Mary might have been a bad seamstress (going by the parable of the patches which came undone). How much more shocking would it be if I suggested that Jesus Christ might have been a relatively unskilled brickie; reliable and honest, of course, but not top-class otherwise. But after all, it’s no big deal whether God incarnate could build a wall straight or cut an accurate tenon joint. It doesn’t matter whether Jesus was a dicky brickie or a master carpenter. What is interesting to me on this feast of his presentation in the temple is that it is so different from that painting in Kent. The presentation of Jesus that we are given in the gospel is not a parallel to the legendary and much-embellished presentation of his mother.

There was no priest there to greet the Lord when he suddenly came to his temple. Someone handed over the two turtle-doves for the sacrifice, and someone took them back; but no-one even glanced at the little bundle in Mary’s arms. Until, on their way out, they met Simeon, and later Anna, the only two people who realised what was going on. Now, Simeon and Anna were not “personalities”. They were not a prophetic double-act. They may never have met before. They were, so far as anyone knew, in the temple by chance. They weren’t the dignified, almost Moses-like types we imagine, generally recognised as saints by the inhabitants of Jerusalem. We haven’t even any evidence that Simeon was old and venerable. He may well have been a nondescript middle-aged man whom no-one had ever noticed. God had noticed him; he was of great significance and importance to God. He was given the grace not only to sum up in a few words the mission of Christ and his Mother, but also explained exactly how it affects and changes our lives. As for Anna, she was the first person known to have brought the Good News to the Chosen People. But how would her words have been received? We know how the apostles received the women’s announcement of the resurrection, despite knowing, surely, that they were serious and respected people: “their words seemed to them to be idle tales; and they did not believe them”. And would Anna have been believed, Anna, one of the countless babushkas around in the temple, the equivalent of the little old ladies who irritate us by muttering their devotions and knocking over their walking sticks?

This was not because the Lord could not have arranged for a priestly or angelic reception-committee, he who could ask his Father and he would send more than twelve legions of angels. If the first Candlemas was very different from today’s, there was a reason.

Because this baby grew into the man who said: Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them. When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.

It is so difficult to do this. Not necessarily because we want praise, but because, somehow, unless someone notices what we do, we don’t entirely feel that we have done it. We have a need to be official, to be seen, almost to have our very existence affirmed. The extreme version of that is the culture of celebrity. It takes serious faith to need no other witness but God.

This feast, paradoxically, is a feast for the little people, the unseen people. Most of us, most of the time. Just like Jesus, most of the time.

People sometimes complain that it’s ridiculous to expect us to “imitate Christ”. How can we imitate God incarnate? But yet again, as always, all we have to do is look. Of course Jesus loved preaching and teaching and healing. But I rather think that he was happiest, most himself, when he was alone with his father, silent, unnoticed. And it’s the best place for us to be if we want to be like him, and the safest: hidden with Christ in God.

Jonah Man Jazz

2009-01-24T14:07:00.000-08:00

Nineveh City was a city of sin,
The jazzin’ and the jivin’ made a terrible din;
The beat groups playin’ the rock an’ roll:
And the Lord he said: Well bless my soul!
The people wouldn’t listen, danced night and day,
No time to work, no time to pray:
The beat groups playin’ both day and night:
And the Lord he said: Well, this ain’t right!

It’s a pity that when we hear of Jonah, the first thing we think of is the whale. You might argue that that is partly Jesus’ fault: when he refers to Jonah it is to use his stay in the whale as a symbol of Jesus’ own death and resurrection. To be frank, I don’t think Jesus meant us to take this reference quite as seriously or as literally as we seem to have done. It was surely not a serious parallel, as if Jonah had been swallowed “in order to foretell” – or even foreshadow – the Son of Man’s sojourn in the heart of the earth. And it makes me tired when scholars argue at length about the “problem” of the “three days and three nights”. All Jesus meant, I suspect, was that for God nothing is impossible. Jonah, once swallowed by the whale, was a s good as dead – indeed, under normal circumstances would have been dead – and yet emerged miraculously unscathed, through the power of God, to go and fulfil his task. Jonah does not foreshadow Jesus; he is certainly not a type of Jesus except in the very loosest sense. He is a cross between Jeremiah at his most recalcitrant and the elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Though I suppose that if Jesus could compare the Father with an unjust judge, he wouldn’t have had any problem with being himself compared with the elder brother. As I’ve suggested before, the phrase used by the father in the parable “You are always with me, and all I have is yours” is highly significant in that regard.

The point about the Book of Jonah – and that’s why it doesn’t matter in the least whether or not it “really happened” as told – of course it didn’t – is repentance. And sin. The sin, I think, not so much of the Ninevites, who did not know their right hand from their left, as of Jonah. If anyone is a sinner in this book, it is its “hero”. The Ninevites, in the Book of Jonah, far from being an example of sin, are an example of conversion, of faith, of obedience to God. When we say “Nineveh”, we should feel not as if we had said a slightly less shocking version of “Sodom and Gomorrah”, but as if we had said “Jerusalem” or “Rome”. When we say “Jerusalem” we do not think of the Jerusalem that persecuted and crucified the Lord, and when we say “Rome” we do not think of the corrupt centre of a corrupt Empire, or of the immorality and corruption which have existed in it since, and not only in its secular part. We think of the Jerusalem which foreshadows the Kingdom of God, and we think of Rome, which was, and to some extent still is, the heart of the Church. Nineveh’s sin, like the sin of Jerusalem and Rome, like all repented sin, has been wiped out by the glory of its conversion. We know that all the righteous who died before the coming of Christ are, all the same, redeemed by his blood. And so Nineveh, like the church which is symbolised by Jerusalem and Rome, has, in her conversion, been sanctified by Christ, who loved her and delivered himself up for her, that he might present her to himself glorious, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. The idea that God was primarily angry with Nineveh – as the king of Nineveh believed – has no basis in the text of the book. Its wickedness “was come up before him”, but he shows clearly at the end of the book that his motive was quite different. I suppose that, had Nineveh not repented, God would have carried out his threat to destroy it, just as he did – finally – to Sodom and Gomorrah, but his desire is that all should be saved; he is not only slow to anger and rich in mercy, he is love itself. And love is what he feels for Nineveh. Incidentally, you will search in vain for any suggestion that he was “angry” with Sodom and Gomorrah, except in the words of Abraham as he sought to persuade God not to destroy the innocent with the guilty.

If God threatens retribution for sin, it is not because he is angry. Or rather, he is angry, in the way one might be angry with a small child who is poking a metal skewer into an electric socket. God threatens when the love he has shown has not had the desired effect in leading his beloved back to him – or back to whatever, in their knowledge of the natural law, they understand of him. Jonah would have rather liked to see Nineveh destroyed – what a demonstration of the power of the God of the Hebrews! He was, he felt, a righteous man – though, as we know, God’s choice does not always, or even usually, fall upon the righteous – and therefore he should be the only one to receive God’s favour. More: he was a Jew, a member of the chosen people, and the Ninevites were Gentiles. I nearly said “goyim”. That is certainly how Jonah regards them. however, unfortunately God does not, and Jonah does not approve of Him. Why exactly did he refuse to go to Nineveh in the first place? Could he have been afraid of the king of Nineveh and how he would respond? He does not seem a very terrifying character. No; I think that from the first Jonah was so disgusted at the thought of God taking any notice of these sinners – other than to send down fire from heaven upon them – that he flounced off to Tharsis in a sulk. It did not occur to him. I suggest, that God would disagree with him or rebuke him, let alone punish him. He was, after all, a privileged person…And despite his superb canticle, and despite his very effective preaching, he did not emulate the Ninevites’ conversion. It did not occur to him that he needed to be converted; even when he had been punished for his disobedience, he believed that all God wanted was that his command should be obeyed. Jonah did not know that – as St Benedict says – if we murmur, not only in words but even in our heart, our work will not be pleasing to God, who sees that our heart is murmuring.

Yes, God was pleased at the obedience without delay of the Ninevites. But he was not pleased with Jonah, although he had been the material cause of that conversion. There are in God’s eyes two capital sins: idolatry, and lack of love. Or perhaps I should say there is one; what is idolatry but lack of love towards the God who made us? And here was Jonah committing both: lack of love towards his brothers the Ninevites, and idolatry in placing himself before God. The Douay version, in its heading to Chapter 4, gives: “Jonas, repining that that his prophecy is not fulfilled”. What mattered to Jonah was the fulfilment of his own prophecy, not the fulfilment of God’s loving mercy. It is perhaps worth noting that it was Jonah’s own fault if his prophecy was not fulfilled; had he preached what, by his own admission, he knew to be true, namely that the city would be destroyed IF its inhabitants did not repent, his prophecy would indeed have been fulfilled.

God’s final attempt to convert Jonah can be interpreted in may ways; but one thing it certainly is is an attempt to teach him about love. God's method is to keep giving, whether we respond or not; it did not seem to penetrate Jonah’s thick skull – or heart – that he in no way deserved this special treatment, or did he have any justification for complaint when God’s free gift was withdrawn. He was not “grieved” for the ivy, but for himself. I doubt whether he would have been capable of grieving for anyone, or anything, else. God’s suggestion that he might be was a final attempt, by irony, to get him to see the true situation. And there follows what is, to me, one of the most precious verses in the Bible, surpassed only by that same God’s cry on Calvary: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. God says to Jonah: “But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?” Ignorance may not be a defence in human law, but it is with God, who will go to almost any lengths to exonerate his children.

But it is “almost”. A cut-off point does exist, and then as the tree falls, so shall it lie. We do not know what happened to Jonah, and it is none of our business. What is our business is to look to ourselves and apply the lesson. While we shouldn’t be tax-collectors, sinners or idolaters, while we should learn to tell our right hand form our left, it is better to be all these things and repent, than to be the “righteous” person who believes he has no need to repent, and that he has no responsibility for seeing that others repent. Had God destroyed Nineveh, he might well have had the same message for Jonah as he later had for his descendants: “Do you think that they were sinners above all men because they suffered these things? No, I tell you; but unless you do penance, you shall likewise perish.” It is not only in connection with “outsiders” that God says, again in the words of “Jonah Man Jazz”

Take my warning
early in the morning,
as early as you feel inclined:
Shout to the people,
Shout from every steeple,
tell them the judgement bell has chimed;
And I will smite ‘em
Ad infinitum
If they do not turn to Me once more!

Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be

2009-01-17T03:44:00.000-08:00

18 January 2009
is 62:1-5, 1 Cor 6 11-20

What are we intended to learn from these readings? The answer is not as obvious as it might appear. Yes, the obvious subject of the reading from Paul is sexual immorality, and you could certainly leave it at that. His advice is perfectly good, if not exclusively Christian except in its manner of expression, and we would all do well to follow it.

However, there are a few hints in that passage as to what the two readings, taken together, are really about, and the passage from Isaiah clinches it. As always, the meaning is love, God’s love for us and the love that that should elicit from us.

Undoubtedly it is faith that saves us, and not good works, but of the three dispositions that Paul lists as necessary later in this epistle, the greatest is love, and love in us human beings is a response and necessarily shows itself in action. In God, of course, love is not a response; it is part of his nature. God does not love us because we are lovable; we are lovable because he loves us into being and loves us into lovableness.

The phrase I used then: “God loves us into being” is a clue to why these two readings go together so well. In the Old Testament the relationship between God and humankind is seen as analogous to that between a husband and wife; and that is what Paul has in mind when he writes to the Corinthians. The classic text here is Ezekiel 16:
“This is what the Sovereign Lord says to Jerusalem: On the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloths. No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to do any of these things for you. Rather, you were thrown out into the open field, for on the day you were born you were despised. Then I passed by and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, "Live!" I made you grow like a plant of the field. You grew up and developed and became the most beautiful of jewels. Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign LORD, and you became mine. You became very beautiful and rose to be a queen. And your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, because the splendour I had given you made your beauty perfect, declares the Sovereign Lord. But you trusted in your beauty and used your fame to become a prostitute.”

This is a recurring theme in the prophets, if not usually expressed with quite such forcefulness (and what I have given you is an expurgated version). We would not now look on the relationship of marriage as being so unequal, but if we can see it in the context of the time we will understand why it is such a good analogy for God’s relationship with us. In Biblical times it was difficult for a woman to manage unless she was under the care of either a father, a brother or a husband. The father would in the normal way of things die before her; the brother might have more than enough to cope with with his own family; the husband therefore was in a way the woman’s saviour, and she owed him gratitude for making her life possible. He was not, of course, her creator, but without him she might well be destitute, and destitute in a world without health service and benefits; he had not brought her into life, but he certainly preserved her in life. That, I believe, is the background to the double standard that still exists today regarding adultery or sexual misconduct. A promiscuous man is seen as “sowing wild oats”; a promiscuous woman is seen as “no better than she should be”. It is not so long since having a child out of wedlock was enough to ruin a woman’s whole life. Similarly, a man having an affair is seen as “having a bit on the side” while a woman is seen as a home-wrecker. In the west in the 21st century this is ridiculous. In biblical Israel it wasn’t. In the west in the 21st century describing the church (or the individual Christian soul) as the bride of Christ is misleading and confusing. In biblical Israel describing Israel as the bride of YHWH was an extremely clear and hard-hitting metaphor.

It’s because of this huge change in culture that it is even necessary to explain what these readings are about. And what they are not primarily about is sexual immorality. They are about faithfulness and gratitude. And, of course, about God’s love.

When King David repented of his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband, he said “I have sinned against the Lord”. He did not say he had sinned against Bathsheba or Uriah, although he most certainly had done. Because all our sins are ultimately sins against God, and that is why they matter even if no other human being is hurt by them. What is the reason Paul gives when he adjures us to “flee from sexual immorality”? It is that our bodies are members of Christ himself and we are not to take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute; and that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in us, and whom we have received from God. We are not our own; we were bought at a price.

It is impossible adequately to grasp what we owe to God. Our creation, our preservation in being, our salvation. Everything. The biblical writers all struggled, using metaphor and allegory and analogy, all of which finally date and become incomprehensible or at least liable to be misunderstood. There is only one Word that does not date or change, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, Christ yesterday and today and the same for all eternity. We cannot live up to his fidelity, but that is the example we have been set.

Of course we must be faithful to our earthly partners. But fidelity to God comes first, because it is from our relationship with God that everything else flows. And it is not as if we had to do it all ourselves. As Paul said in his second letter to the Corinthians, our sufficiency, our capacity, is of God. You’ll find it summed up in Lamentations Chapter 3:

Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion therefore I will wait for him."
The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.

Glorious now behold him arise; King and God and Sacrifice

2009-01-10T10:28:00.000-08:00

The Baptism of the Lord

Until very recently there was no feast of the Baptism of the Lord; Epiphany was the end of Christmastide and commemorated three very disparate events: the visit of the Magi, the Baptism of the Lord and the Marriage at Cana. So far we haven’t been given a separate feast for the Marriage at Cana, but I live in hope.

It is a good thing that our attention is now properly focussed on the Baptism; only liturgical geeks like me knew that it was one of the vents celebrated on 6 January; most people never thought about it at all, although it is one of the most important events in Jesus’ life, and is the source of arguably the most important event in our lives, our own baptism. This event was not only important to Jesus as an experience, as confirmation – if he needed it, and I suspect that it was at least welcome, if not necessary – that he was who he believed himself to be, but it was an event which actually made a difference to his status, and certainly marked the official opening of his mission as Messiah. It would be wrong, in fact it would be heretical, to suggest that it had an ontological erect on his person: he did not begin to be the Servant of God at his baptism, and he certainly did not become Son of God at his baptism. But I think there is a sense in which he did begin to be the Messiah, King, Priest and Sacrifice at his baptism. A parallel might be like this: the infant son of a king, when his father dies, does become king in fact – ontologically, one might say. But the exercise of his kingship does not take effect from the moment of his father’s death. A regent will rule on his behalf until such time as he is declared capable of ruling and – this is the point – anointed, or crowned, or whatever the ritual is. There was never a time when he was not king; but his reign was, all the same inaugurated at his coronation. It’s an imperfect parallel, but you see what I mean. That is why St Peter could say that “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ”. Jesus is the Son of God incarnate. There was no time when he was not Lord and Christ. But it was from his baptism that this actually took effect. “Christ”, like “Messiah”, means the anointed one, and this was his official anointing, the official anointing as King, Priest and Sacrifice of him who had always been so. It is clear from the sequel that it made a difference: Luke says “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert”. He had always been full of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. But he was now full of the Holy Spirit to a purpose: for his mission, for his messiahship. Something new had begun.

So it was central to Jesus as a person. It was also central to us. Just as I said at Christmas that when Jesus entered into his inheritance, it was not he but the inheritance that came of age, just so when he was baptised, it was not he but baptism that was regenerated, and ourselves with it. Although the baptism Jesus received was John’s, he was himself instituting a new baptism, the sacrament of Christian baptism. God has always been our Father. But at this moment that fatherhood came into effect in its completeness. No, Jesus didn’t “become God’s Son” at his baptism. But I think we did; and our own baptism, the baptism of each one of us individually, is simply an individual application of what took place at the Jordan. It was the inauguration of Jesus’ mission; it was also the beginning of what he referred to as “his baptism”, for whose accomplishment or completion he longed.

It is interesting that the feast of the Baptism holds the same place in relation to Christmas as the feast of the Trinity does to Paschaltide. The feasts conclude the seasons, and herald the return of Ordinary Time the following day. They also do not seem to have much to do with the seasons to which they act as finale. Our own baptism day may be closely associated with our birth day, but Jesus’ wasn’t; it took place, Luke tells us, thirty years later; and I think that’s a bit of a red herring. The point is, I think, in both cases, to remind us that God is the Trinity. In Paschaltide we have been attending largely to the risen Christ, with a nod to the Holy Spirit at Pentecost; although Christ is glorified, we do still run the risk of forgetting, so to speak. “the rest of God”, especially since we’d previously spent six-odd weeks fighting our way through Lent in company of a very human Jesus. The risk is still greater during Advent and Christmastide, when we are looking at a human family with a baby – and babies bring out the human and sentimental in all of us. There are miracles, yes; there are the magi; and there are frequent reminders that this baby is more than he seems. But it isn’t enough. Whatever our intellects do, our devotion remains by the crib. It needs something to shake it back to the whole picture, not for the sake of cold realism – there is nothing cold about the Trinity, as St Augustine could tell you – but in order that we should not forget why we are celebrating at all. The Baptism of Jesus is the only clear manifestation of the Trinity. If the Transfiguration or possibly the Sermon on the Mount is the new Testament Sinai, then the Old Testament foreshadowing of the baptism is not Ezekiel and the waters flowing from the Temple or any such thing, but Abraham’s hospitality to the three mysterious beings at the vale of Mambre.

Whether it was a manifestation that all or some could see and hear, or whether it was for Jesus alone, is not clear in Luke’s version. But both Matthew and Mark say he saw the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit descending. It isn’t very important. I once heard a sermon on this depicting the event as a wet young man standing in the river surrounded by a flock of doves, one of which settled on his shoulder. All right; maybe it did look like no more than that to bystanders, but it was more than that, and Jesus made sure his disciples – and we – knew it. I say “Jesus made sure”. Because if no one else saw what really happened, then this event joins those texts of the Gospel which one considers either most suspect or – as I do – most privileged, because they can come only from Jesus himself. It joins those precious moments of the Temptations and the Agony in the Garden. That is most suitable, because it shares another vital characteristic with them.

If the Baptism of the Lord is a clear manifestation of the Trinity, it is also a clear statement of the two natures in Christ, as are those two other occasions witnessed and transmitted by him alone. “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil…For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted…For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.” However, if he had not been God, he would not have been able to redeem us – the devil knew that, which is why he was so keen to find out whether or not he was the Son of God. In Gethsemane the same applies. His weakness – his agony indeed – highlights his true humanity; his total obedience shows his unique sonship; and again, the magnitude of his suffering. paradoxically also show his Godhead. However, the Baptism is perhaps the clearest manifestation: he is the Son, the Second Person of the manifested Trinity; but he is also human, as he shows by submitting to the baptism of John. He does not suggest thereby that he has sins to repent of: as John says, he is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. He takes away the sins, yes, but takes upon himself, too; that is what Gethsemane is. No man, therefore could have suffered as he did. And that was what the Temptations were: in him the devil was tempting the whole human race. All this began at the Baptism.

He regenerated the baptismal waters and the human race: may God fulfil the grace of our own baptism and conform us perfectly to the image of his beloved Son.

Quis enim mihi est in caelo? Et a te quid volui super terram?

2009-01-06T11:36:00.000-08:00

What can I give Him
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part;
But what I can I give Him:
Give my heart.

Jesu, quem velatum nunc aspicio, oro fiat illud quod tam sitio: ut, te revelata cernens facie, visu sim beatus tuae gloriae

2009-01-03T10:55:00.000-08:00

Epiphany 2009

Not much attention is paid to Epiphany in the UK, especially now that it simply falls on the second Sunday after Christmas rather than having its own special day on the sixth of January. It is simply Twelfth Night, the day when you are supposed to take down the Christmas decorations, on pain of appalling bad luck in the year to come. In Spain, it is the day when presents are given, the equivalent of Christmas Day in the UK; in Italy it is celebrated as Befana (though what witches have to do with Epiphany I do not know) and in France they eat, with much ritual, the Gateau des Rois – very much nicer than Christmas Pudding – and the person who gets the bean in their portion becomes King or Queen for the day. But I’m not sure that they are more concerned than we are about the significance of the feast, which is a pity. Epiphany is perhaps the richest of all the feasts of the Church’s year. I don’t say it’s the most important; it clearly isn’t that; but first, it is the only feast that celebrates more than one event: the coming of the Magi, the Baptism of Christ, and the Marriage at Cana; and, second, it is suggestive as no other feast is, overflowing with so many and so varied themes. It has been called the Feast of Light, and seen as a celebration of the stars and of the angels which belong to them. It is the justification of lavishness and riches in the service of God; it is the distant prophecy of the entry of the Gentiles into the Church; it tells of Christ’s triple nature as God, mortal, and universal priest-mediator; it contains both the Blessed Trinity and the Holy Family, it is a celebration of life and joy in the Marriage at Cana – and it is an indisputable expression both of Mary’s care for us and of her power with her divine son.

But you couldn’t exhaust Epiphany with a list, however long. And the wonderful thing about the feasts of the Church, a characteristic they share with the Bible, is that they say different things to you each year. I am no mystic, despite my monastic past. I am never rapt in ecstasy, and I do not have an intense or palpable sense of the presence of God – not most of the time, at any rate. My prayer is mostly just like yours is mostly: as disturbed and dissipated, as seemingly useless, as boring and unsatisfying for the one praying. But one thing I have been given – as can be guessed from the fact that the last verse of the hymn “Adoro te” most fully sums up my spirituality – is a longing, at times an almost unbearable longing, for God. Not even for the “heavenly homeland”; not a nostalgia for a golden age; for God. I suspect that the dismal failure of so many of my hour-long prayer-times is due to the fact that one can’t just sit and long for an hour at a time without becoming both distracted and self-conscious. For what, precisely, do I long? That I can’t tell you. I know that when in the psalms I come across verses such as “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water”, I am saying something profoundly true, not in the abstract, not with an undertone of “wouldn’t it be nice”, but very specifically true for me.

But I can’t tell you what are the characteristics of this Person for whom I long. I have never met him closely enough to know that; I can only tell you what he is not. I lose interest pretty quickly when people list the lovable or adorable characteristics of God. I suppose they are right, though at times I feel like crying (in an echo of my History supervisor at Cambridge) “Evidence! Evidence!”. Those characteristics are just not interesting. They are not gripping. They do not hold my attention. They feel abstract and irrelevant. I know that Jesus is the Good Shepherd. I know that God is Love. I know that Jesus is the Wisdom of God and the Power of God. And I know that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And these are things which he has said about himself and which are, therefore, true: no lack of evidence there: Truth himself speaks truly, or there’s nothing true. I have been known to wrestle with these during prayer time, trying to squeeze some spiritual or even emotional response from myself. It cannot be done, except insofar as I succeed in not thinking about the concepts but connect with the One about whom all these words are used. Because spiritual response does not take place in the brain but bypasses it; and the only way words will ever elicit it is if they are allowed to go straight to the soul, where a response undoubtedly takes place, but not one that can be explained, rationalised, or, sometimes, even perceived sufficiently for it to be comprehensible, recognisable, or make any sense at all. The other things, the non-biblical things that people say because they like or approve of a certain characteristic or feel the need of it in their own lives (under this heading come not only personal devotions, some most odd, but also all the groups who have hi-jacked Jesus and him into one of them), all these I can only ignore. They do not speak to me, the more so because, as doctrines and teachings of human beings, they risk misrepresenting the One for whom I long.

I can feel you getting restive. This insight into the spiritual life of the blogger is gripping, I hear you say, but what has it got to do with Epiphany? As Paul would say, much in every way. Let me return to what I said earlier: the feasts say something different every year, and something different to every person. This year, and to me, Epiphany is the feast of longing, the feast of those who consider no effort too much in their search for their heart’s desire. To me there can be no more potent symbol of longing than those Magi, whoever they were, from heaven-knows-where, following a star on the slimmest of evidence to heaven-knows-where, in search of a shadowy king of a mysterious tiny nation whose significance on the world stage was almost nil. Why? They could not have told you why, they could not have told you what they hoped he would do for them, what would happen if they did find him. All they knew was that they were drawn so forcible that they could not resist; and the pull was not on their bodies but on their hearts and souls. They did not know what it was for which they longed. But they longed, unbearably; nothing could compete.

Today or maybe not today
Tonight or not tonight,
All voices that command or pray
Calling me,
Shall kindle in my soul such fire
And in my eyes such light
That I shall see that heart’s desire
I long to see.

Sermon for the Feast of Mary, Mother of God

2009-01-01T05:34:00.000-08:00

Germinavit radix Jesse: orta est stella ex Jacob; Virgo peperit Salvatorem: te laudamus. Deus noster.

The root of Jesse has flowered; a star has risen out of Jacob: the Virgin has given birth to the Saviour: we praise thee, our God.

Whose fest is this? Is it Our Lord’s; are we celebrating his circumcision” Is it Our Lady’s; are we celebrating her motherhood It’s both; but this year, perhaps because the earthly Israel is involved in such terrible bloodshed, it seems to me that we are celebrating something which is at the root of both, and which. as the world calculates time, goes back far beyond either. We are celebrating the true Israel. The chosen people, God’s election. As Paul insists, the New Covenant has not abolished or deleted that election. Mary is the daughter of Zion, and Jesus is – well, Jesus is both the summation of Israel which was chosen, and the God who chose Israel. As he did not come to destroy the Law but to fulfil it, so he did not destroy Israel but fulfil it. his own received him not; but that does not change the ontological effect he had on his own, and also on those sheep who were not of that fold.

From the time of Moses and long before the time of Moses, Israel is a blessed nation, and in its name were all the nations of the world to be blessed.. It might seem hard to understand why God – who is God of the whole earth, should choose one particular nation out of all nations to be his own; why he should, in the early days, choose one man out of all to be the vehicle of his blessing. We can hardly imagine it: Abraham was the only believer in the entire world: he had no support or affirmation from any other human being. That is why he is the father of faith = he’s almost faith personified. The reason, I think, is not that God prefers or chooses any person or nation to the exclusion of any others. He is infinite and therefore capable of preferring, absolutely, each one of us, and does. However, we can’t grasp that; indeed, if God hadn’t begun by choosing Abraham and not Lot, Israel and not Esau, we simply couldn’t have grasped the concept of being “chosen”. And it is only once we have grasped that concept that we can begin to grasp the fact that all creation, and each member of creation, is his chosen – in just that “preferential” sense.

“What advantage then has the Jew, or what is the profit of circumcision? Much in every way. First indeed because the words of God were committed to them. For what if some of them have not believed? Shall their unbelief make the faith o God without effect? God forbid. But God is true.” there has grown up – though I think it is less strong now – a form of “replacement theology” in which Christianity is seen as the replacement of Judaism, the Church the replacement of the synagogue. There is a small amount of truth in this, in that present-day Judaism is incomplete; it needs the Christian revelation to complete it. Christianity is not the replacement but the fulfilment of Judaism. Jesus himself said so; and Paul who might be accused of being at the origin of the replacement theology, insisted that there is one God who justifies circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision by faith. “Do we then”, he asks. “destroy the Law through faith? God forbid; but we establish the Law”. A possible analogy, it seems to me, is the relation between an engagement and a marriage. When the couple have married, they could say with equal truth “The engagement is at an end, it is over it is not longer relevant”; and “The engagement has been fulfilled, has come to full flowering, in the marriage.” So too with Judaism and Christianity. The flower that came forth from the root of Jesse is the full flowering of Judaism. Christianity is simply the full faith implicitly contained in Judaism, and is named after its full flowering. Jesus was not a Jew by chance. “For the end – in both senses – of the Law is Christ, unto justice to everyone that believes”.

the motherhood of Mary contains all we need to know about the new dispensation: the Virgin overshadowed by the Holy Spirit gave birth to Jesus Christ, God incarnate, true God and true Man, who was born to save his people from their sins. Yet that same Jesus was circumcised according to the old dispensation, thus sealing his identity as a Jew. The Apostle of the Gentiles used very strong language in order to insist on this, to stress the continuity between the two Testaments. It would certainly never have occurred to him that he had ceased to be a Jew because he accepted Jesus as the Christ. “I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit—I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised!” I have no doubt that although Mary suffered greatly at the sufferings of her son, that sword which Simeon predicted would pierce her heart was made up largely of that same great sadness and continual sorrow of which Paul speaks. She too was an Israelite, and could see that blindness in part had happened in Israel. The will of her heart, indeed, and her prayer to God, was for the unto salvation. For she could bear then witness that they had a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they, not knowing the justice of God, and seeking to establish their own, had not submitted themselves to the justice of God.

Blindness in part. justification by faith and not by law. And yet, it was an Israelite, a daughter of Abraham, whom God chose as his mother. “It is not as though God's word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham's children. On the contrary, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." In other words, it is not the natural children who are God's children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring.” No, God had not cast away his people. Mary also was an Israelite of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Judah.

We are told that God is able to bring good out of evil, and there is no doubt that Mary believed this, and so did Jesus – except during those agonising hours in Gethsemane. No, the Israelites have not ceased to be children of God. “As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable.” What has happened is that those who were not Israelites according to the flesh have received the sonship which previously appeared reserved only to Israelites. it is as if the failure of part of Israel had opened a breach in that dividing wall which Jesus cam to destroy, and allowed the Gentiles to enter Somehow, by their offence, salvation is come to the Gentiles; that blindness in part is temporary: it is to last only until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and so all Israel will be saved.

There’s a homily for the feast of St Stephen by Fulgentius of Ruspe which seems to me to express beautifully the end result of all this. “This is the true life, in which Paul is not brought to confusion by the murder of Stephen, but Stephen rejoices at the company of Paul, and charity gives joy to both. Charity in Stephen overcame the ferocity of the Jews; in Paul, charity covered a multitude of sins. Charity has given to both the possession of the Kingdom of Heaven.” Paul, the Jew, and Stephen, the Gentile, will be joyfully united in the Kingdom of Heaven. “For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? If the part of the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; if the root is holy, so are the branches. If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not boast over those branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you…And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree?”

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of the children of God.” Children of God, and with the Only-Begotten Son, children of Mary, mother of God, and mother of the Church.

Venerunt nobis vere omnia bona pariter cum illa!

Iam non sumus hospites et advenae; sed sumus cives sanctorum et domestici Dei

2008-12-27T09:17:00.001-08:00

Feast of the Holy Family 2008

Today some parts of the Church are celebrating the feast of the Holy Family. For those of you who are not familiar with this feast, it refers to the family of Joseph, Mary and Jesus. While agreeing that this is indeed a holy family, and one worthy of a feast in its own right, I am going to suggest that we too are the holy family. I would think that that would be quite easy to accept, if we can be the created image of the uncreated God.

I have so often heard sermons which speak about the way in which our own family groups should model themselves on that perfect one – and so they should, while accepting that we know, in fact, very little about it – but on those occasions I have felt that the preacher is barely scratching the surface of what this feast is about. I do have an axe to grind: I have no family and have felt left out and almost cheated; as if the preacher were suggesting that because I am a single person with no family, this feast has nothing to say to me, as if this is not my feast, as if I have no part in it. The essential part of the collect for the feast is the petition to God to “help us to live as a holy family”; a petition which is rightly on the lips of every child of God.

The Holy Family is, of course, a family unit, what they now call a nuclear family. I was never quite sure why that name was used, but it goes some way towards explaining the most important thing about the Holy family. The nuclear family (father, mother and offspring) is quite simply the nucleus, or one of the nuclei, of the family with which this feast is concerned, the family with which God is concerned: the family of humankind. Anyone can proclaim the value of family life. Both the present Government and its predecessor have done so and I cannot seriously describe either of them as Christian governments. The “nuclear family” is good for society; it is one of its most effective building bricks and undoubtedly, if it is happy, does prevent some of the unrest and general moral decline about which we hear so much. But there is nothing specifically Christian about the nuclear family. It has existed since records began, and doubtless long before that. It exists and has existed in various forms, of which the form we have now in the West is only one, and not necessarily the best. And even when lived Christianly it is a human thing baptized, not a divine thing. The divine thing is our universal brotherhood (and I do not use this phrase in a sentimental but a literal sense) stemming from the universal fatherhood of God.

The nuclear family does not have a large place in the teaching of Jesus; that is not, I am sure, because he did not value it, but simply because he saw its value as the very relative thing that it is. It sounds rather extreme to tell us to call no man on earth our father, but when he explains that it is because we have one father who is in heaven and that we are therefore all brothers, it becomes clear that this is like his instruction to hate our parents, our family, and our own life. It is a wild attempt to get into our thick heads what matters and what doesn’t; it is an a fortiori argument, of which he was in general rather fond. We all know how natural it is to love father and mother – and certainly ourselves. Well, compared with the love we are to have for God, that love is more like hatred than love, so much lesser is it. Just so, compared with the family relationship between the children of God, mere blood relationship is hardly a relationship at all. It is an attempt to make us lift our eyes from what is on earth to what is in heaven.

There is a parallel with the Martha/Mary story here. Martha’s vocation – the active one – was not a bad one. It was given by God. The difference is that Mary’s – the contemplative one – does not end with life, but will never be taken away from her. in heaven, Mary will remain a contemplative; but Martha will, in her own way, and while still remaining distinctively Martha, become a contemplative too. the time for action will be over. Blood relationship, the family structure, does not even remain unchanged throughout life; and it ends with death. That does not – emphatically not – mean that in heaven we will cease to love those whom we loved on earth. We will love them still more; because the real relationship, the relationship between members of God’s family, only becomes closer and clearer in the next world; death cannot change it. My other and father were indeed my mother and father; the relationship was a close one. But far more important, more fundamental and more true – an more lasting – is the fact that as children of God they were, and are, my sister and brother.

Family relationships are exclusive, as are friendships and all relationships based on profit or esteem. That is not a bad thing in itself; but by definition it means that they are not relationships that can be universal, common to all human beings; we cannot base on such relationships our status and bond before God. Everyone was born of parents, certainly; but there are many who never knew those parents, and very many who never had family relationships properly so called. Not everyone has friends; not everyone has relationships in which they help or are helped, admire or are admired There is only one universal relationship, only one relationship in which we all find ourselves equally members of God’s holy family; if any one human being is excluded, the we are all excluded, at least in theory. Kierkegaard pointed out that if we deny to any person the status of child of God – and that includes failing to treat them as such – then we are denying ourselves that status: either God is the Father of every member of the human race or else anyone’s status as child of God, including mine, may be called into question. The basis of our behaviour towards other human beings cannot be that of a blood relationship, friendship or any such limited thing.

To be a father or other is a great thing. It is like being an apostle; to them the Father says, as Jesus said to his apostles, “Whoever hears you hears me”. We honour our parents because they hold the place of God the Father in the nuclear family. But since the incarnation it is a great thing to be a son or daughter too; we stand in the place where the Word Incarnate stood. We are all sons and daughters, in the sphere of nature as in the sphere of grace; since the Incarnation there is no-one who does not stand in the place of God. We are not only heirs of God, we are fellow-heirs without Brother Jesus Christ.

And that. to me, is the value and lesson of the Holy Family: it was the place of the Incarnation, the place where our likeness to Jesus was born. It cannot really be called the origin of the nuclear family, though it may very well be taken as a model;; but it is truly the origin of the family of God. Before the Incarnation, Israel was God’s People, and all humankind was his creation; ad the universe was its mysterious setting. But since God became the son of the Virgin and (most truly, if not physically) of Joseph, there has been a dramatic revolution: creation has become a family, and the universe has become its home.

Sermon for Christmas

2008-12-24T10:13:00.001-08:00

Christmas 2008

“In these days God has spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world”.

We are the inheritance of Christ; as he suffered to enter into his glory, so he became incarnate to enter into his inheritance. It’s a poor inheritance, for him who is the brightness of God’s glory and the reflection of his substance, and upholds all things by the word of his power. It is small consolation if all the angels of God adore him; the fact remains that he has inherited clay, and clay made unusable by sin; he came unto his own, and his own received him not. As the clay, we rejoice; but for him we can only feel sorrow.

The Christmas story, the whole story of Christ’s life on earth, is the story of what happened when the Son of God entered into his inheritance. It is perhaps revealing that he only told one parable about an heir, and that was the parable which most nearly approximates to an autobiography. The importance of that parable was realised: all the Synoptics related it. The details vary, but the versions come together at the sharp point: “The lord of the vineyard said: What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; it may be, when they see him the will reverence him Whom when the husbandmen saw, they thought within themselves, saying: This is the heir, let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours. So casting him out of the vineyard, they killed him.” The servants who had been sent before him were not asking what was theirs by right of the husbandmen; they were, shall we say, prophets, speaking on behalf of another. But he came unto his own, came to his own inheritance, to that which was his own as much as it was his Father’s; that which was planted by him; far from failing to know him (St John is too kind here) the husbandmen destroyed him precisely because they did know him. This is the heir.

These don’t seem very seasonal thoughts. But it is to this kind of thought that I always find myself turning during Mass on Christmas night; sometimes when I enter the church and see the crucifix, but very often, with a shock, at the eucharist. On the night he was betrayed he took bread…this is my Body which will be given up for you. This is my Blood of the new and everlasting covenant; it will be shed for you. Betrayal? Giving up of his Body, shedding of his Blood? But we’re talking about a baby! We are talking about a baby, yes, because Christ was true Man; but really, we are talking about the Incarnation, the clothing of God in our garment, the entering of the Son of God into his inheritance at the time appointed by the Father for him to become the heir of all creation.

Most rights involve responsibilities and duties. Christ knew what he was saying when he told us that more is demanded of him to whom more is given. Like us, the Son of God receives his being from the Father, but in his case it is the very Godhead he receives, and the task that that entails. To God, no task is a burden, but from the moment of the Incarnation it was a man who had to complete that task and near that burden. Receiving the universe as inheritance means the task of redeeming the universe, transforming it so that it is a worthy kingdom to be delivered up to God the Father, when he shall have brought to nought all principality, and power, and virtue; for he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

Christ faced this immense talk not only with courage but with alacrity. Isaiah was speaking from our point of view when he said “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings” and the Song of Songs is speaking of the same thing but from another point of view, the point of view of Christ’s eagerness: “Behold, he comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills”. It is always a joyful thong to enter into an inheritance, especially if it does not involve the death of one’s father, and so it was for Christ; not as if he loved himself and wanted to receive a benefit – but because he loved the inheritance and wanted to bestow a benefit.

Indeed, all this talk about Christ's inheritance sounds rather strange. If it isn’t the sort of inheritance which requires the death of a father, then it must be the sort which requires a coming of age. But are we to think that somehow Christ came of age at the Incarnation, as if he gained something thereby? “As long as the heir is a child, he differs in nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all, but is under tutors and governors until the time appointed by the father.” Are we to say that of Christ” No; but in this case the usual circumstances are strangely reversed: it is, rather, the inheritance which comes of age. “For we also, when we were children were serving under the elements of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, made of a woman…that we might receive the adoption of children…therefore now we are not servants but children; and if children, heirs also through God”.

This was Christ’s task, and he knew very well what it was to mean for him, from the self-emptying with which it began until the death with which it ended. And in an odd way, it was his own death that completed his entering into his inheritance; because it completed the task of conforming us to him; the task of leading not just the Head, but also the body, into the inheritance. Strange sort of inheritance, indeed, for which the death, not of the testator but of the heir, is required!

The conclusion I find myself coming to is that what Christ inherited was the capacity to make us inherit: that his entering into his inheritance was ours; that as he inherited clay, so we inherited glory. O admirabile commercium! O wonderful exchange! As so often, my confession that I don’t understand is not so much a reflection on my incapacity and littleness as on God’s power and infinity. Somehow, by the Incarnation, I have inherited God.

Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Cum esset desponsata

2008-12-20T06:16:00.000-08:00

“Cum esset desponsata”

It is traditional in monasteries to give a sermon on 20 December, when the Gospel is “The angel of the Lord was sent…” The sermon is called “Sermo super Missus Est”, and you will find examples as far back as St Bernard of Clairvaux. Legend has it that there was once a lay sister who only discovered in her eighties, after fifty-odd years in the monastery, that it was not a sermon “about Mrs S”…when it comes to transparency, monasteries still have a lot to learn.

However, I don’t think it’s fair to expect two sermons in two days, and since today’s Gospel reading is the annunciation not to Mary but to Joseph, I thought I would grab the opportunity to redress the balance a bit for those who feel that my sermons are sometimes a bit sexist. I do often wonder why St Joseph is consistently presented as inferior to, standing in the shadow of, his more prominent wife, not so much as a historical figure, but as a saint.

It is perfectly true that no word of his is recorded and that the total of his appearances is marginally less than hers, but what we do see is certainly not a second-class saint. Indeed, during the time when he was alive (it is clear that he was not alive by the time of the Crucifixion, and unlikely that he was so by the time Jesus’ “mother and brethren” came looking for him) there is only one incident in Mary’s life in which she appears alone, or else which is not paralleled in the life of Joseph, and that is the Visitation. I also wonder why it is that Mary is always portrayed as a silent woman – as an index of her humility – while in fact, though we have evidence of humility, we have none at all of silence. Surely the model of the silent and humble saint is rather Joseph, despite the fact that he was clearly a man of action (as was Mary a woman of action). His silence and his lack of interest in himself come through most clearly in today’s narrative, whose original can only have come from him. When Mary related the story of her Annunciation – Missus Est – she related faithfully all the details, what she said no less than what the Angel said. I suppose the narrative of the Visitation comes from her too, and she has given us not only Elizabeth’s words but her own Magnificat. When Joseph told the story of his Annunciation – Cum Esset Desponsata – and, perhaps, the story of the dream that led to the Flight Into Egypt, he did not think it of any importance what he said or did not say. He had to tell us that he had been considering “putting Mary away quietly” or the rest of the story would not have made sense, but that is the only information he ever gives about himself.

It may well be that he obeyed without a word, and I do not think he did have those doubts about Mary’s virtue that seem to be plaguing him in the icons of the Nativity, although even more faith was required of him than of her. Partly because her holiness must have been so blindingly obvious to a man hardly less holy than she; but also because he would never, being a righteous man, have married her unless the dream had been completely convincing; nor, I think, would he ever have admitted that he had contemplated “putting her away” had be retained any doubts. Mary’s consent was required for the conception of Christ, but Joseph’s was required if his preservation through childhood – and Mary’s preservation too, come to that – was not to demand a flood of complicated miracles and divine dispensations. Mary gave her consent in words, Joseph in actions. One might even say that his obedience was even more unhesitating than hers.

I am not saying – how could I – that Joseph was “a greater saint” than Mary. But I sometimes think it was a close-run thing. And while feminists complain that they suffer and are discriminated against because they are women, I would reply that in the great-saint stakes, Joseph was disadvantaged because he was a man. He did not have the Immaculate Conception because, as the mere foster-father of Christ, unrelated to him by blood, he didn’t need it. There was no reason why he should be completely untouched by original sin. He could not, as a man, conceive Christ in his body. He undoubtedly did conceive him in his heart, which is more important. St Augustine commented that Mary could not have conceived Christ in her body had she not already conceived him in her heart. But that possibility is open to anyone, not just to Joseph; and it can pass completely unnoticed except by God.

From his reticence about himself and the fact that he let Mary take the lead when it was not a matter of life and death, I suspect Joseph was relieved that he was only the foster-father and so need not be subjected to the limelight. Where was he when the Magi visited? Out mending someone’s door-frame? Discreetly in his workshop till they left? Joseph had the gift of being there when he was needed and disappearing when he was not.

I know that all God’s actions are supremely free. But in a way his choice of Joseph – of any man – to assist at this point in the plan of salvation was particularly gratuitous. A woman was strictly necessary and he chose and prepared a perfect one who, all the same, also cooperated perfectly with her gracing. But a man was not strictly necessary. I sometimes like to imagine that God would have been quite happy to preserve his incarnate Son without the help of a human foster-father, but, seeing the magnificent holiness of Joseph (before the world was made), was so captivated that he could not resist giving him to that Son as a birthday present. Joseph was the most perfectly beautiful creature that ever lived and attained to holiness with no special helps. He really was worthy to be the husband of the Queen of Heaven and, as I’ve said before, the understudy of the First Person of the Blessed Trinity. And all this addition to the essential (that a virgin should conceive and bear a son) perhaps provoked simply by one great saint. I m not suggesting that God was persuaded to change his mind, any more than our prayers do that. But the saints, and their prayers and ours, all have an essential place in the unfolding of God’s plan.

Perhaps you were surprised at my claim that more faith was required of Joseph than of Mary. I would go further. Faith has been satirically described as “the capacity to believe that which you know to be untrue”. But, you know, that is very much what seemed to be required of Joseph. I do not think there has ever been a person asked to base his whole life upon something for which he had no evidence and which everyone, including himself, knew to be impossible. Mary was told specifically that nothing is impossible for God’ Joseph just had to know it without being told. Blessed are those who have not been told and yet believe! Mary, in fact, despite the enormity of what she was asked to believe, had solid evidence such as has rarely been vouchsafed to anyone. Every other human being had to believe that she was a mother and a virgin; she alone knew it. But Joseph – well, it is he and not St Rita of Cascia who should be the patron saint of the impossible. Politics may be the art of the possible; St Joseph teaches us, without a word, that sanctity is sometimes the art of the impossible. And he should know; he was married to a living impossibility: a virgin mother.

Which does not mean that sanctity is impossible. I am sure that when Jesus made his celebrated comparison he did not have in his mind’s eye a miserable and hopeless-looking camel, regarding with depression the tiny eye of a minuscule needle. What he saw was that camel squeezing happily through the needle’s eye. losing the odd package, perhaps, but emerging unscathed. It really is true. For God all things are possible.

Joseph fidelissime, ora pro nobis!

Rejoice, again I say rejoice

2008-12-13T02:51:00.000-08:00

“I have come that they may have life, and have it in abundance”.

Abundant life! I am not sure that that is the definition that many people would give of Christianity.
Philip Yancey, in his book “What’s so amazing about grace?” muses on the ungracefulness, the ungraciousness, the apparent ungracedness, of so much of Christianity, and of so many Christians. Grace – it should be one of our defining characteristics. You know the old acronym definition of grace: God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. We should be visibly full of God’s riches, of his abundant life.

Similarly, Gerard Hughes in a recent talk on the subject of the “gap” between our everyday lives and our religious lives, asked us what the word “holy” meant to us. The conclusion was that we thought immediately of someone on their knees; someone with a halo; better still, someone on their knees with a halo. Not very attractive. Would we like to be “holy”, or live with someone “holy”, if that’s the sort of thing it involves? This, as Gerard Hughes pointed out, is pretty silly. Holiness actually involves being like Jesus, because it involves being indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And it therefore involves being filled with the fullness of life. And the fullness of life, life in abundance, involves joy.

This Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, has been known as Gaudete or Rejoice Sunday probably ever since the time of Pope Saint Gregory the Great. In the days when Advent was treated like a sort of mini-Lent it was the “day off”, so to speak, the day when you didn’t fast, the day when instead of black or violet vestments the clergy wore pink. That, incidentally, is the origin of the one pink candle on the Advent wreath. It used to be lit on the third Sunday and to symbolise rejoicing. There’s a similar Sunday in Lent, you may recall – the fifth Sunday, known as “Laetare” or “Be happy” Sunday. These seasons of preparation are seasons when we are, or should be, aware of our sinfulness, our need to repent, and the reason why the Son of God took flesh and died for us. The readings, in general, reinforce that atmosphere. But today – and today’s Lenten equivalent – are quite different. Today we remember not so much our sinfulness as the fact that our sins have been forgiven. Not so much that Christ died as that he rose again and all is well. Not so much that he came in poverty and was exiled, persecuted and judicially murdered as that he came at all. Today we lift up our eyes and look towards the Incarnation. And you know, that’s the reason why I so much hate our “consumer society’s” premature Christmas season. As some of you may know, I was a Benedictine nun for twenty years; and one of the wonderful things about that way of life is that the liturgical calendar, life with God and his saints, becomes much more real than the secular one. As the saying goes, “the veil is very thin”. In some ways, for me, it still is. At a certain point in Advent – more often than not either Gaudete Sunday, the day before, or the day after – everything shifts. When the Christmas season begins in September, or even on St Andrew’s Day, that shift is impossible, and the amazingness of grace – of the Incarnation – never really gets the chance to hit home.

Is it really more difficult to be a Christian in this society than in earlier times? It does seem so, it does feel as if everything conspires to make the veil as thick as possible. And if society militates against Christians, maybe it is time for us to fight back. Not by being argumentative, much less by being violent, but by making sure that our own minds and our own hearts, and if at all possible our own homes, are places where the veil is as thin as possible. The Advent and Christmas season is a perfect opportunity – the church takes us by the hand through them, if we will only go with it.

I don’t know whether any of you has had the same experience as I have recently had when faced with the newspapers, or the news in any form. It is so overwhelmingly bad, and so largely tragic, that it was threatening to become altogether too much. Sometimes it is a stark choice between going under or getting things in perspective – and that has got to be God’s perspective, or as near as we can get to it, as that is the only one that takes in all the data. It’s not easy to do, partly because obviously we haven’t got all the data, and partly because it can feel escapist, or unreal. Pie in the sky, in other words. Quite true, we haven’t. But it is certainly not escapist or unreal. Just as the liturgical calendar is the real one – the Kingdom of Heaven is within us NOW – and the secular calendar is simply the one that we run our day-to-day lives by, so the joy of the Lord is the real one and the struggles of this life are simply the ones that we have to get through somehow, with God’s help and according to God’s perspective, until...until…
I’ve mentioned before that I always read very slowly the texts I am to preach on, listening carefully for the phrase that God will underline in red for me. Today’s was” “At that time”. “At that time I will gather you; at that time I will bring you home.” I doubt if anyone else noticed it – we may all read or hear the same Scripture, but God uses it to say a different thing to each of us. The Fathers of the Church have a lot to say about the timing of the Incarnation, and why it was exactly the right time. In fact, whatever God does, he does not only perfectly, but at the right time, and it is wonderful to realise how the liturgy of the church guides us to see it. And that applies not just to the great sweep of history, but to our own lives. I am not pretending that life is one great picnic. For many people it is one long – or short – tragedy. For the majority of the human race it is a ceaseless life-or-death struggle. For us too, sometimes, in our western, middle-class, reasonably prosperous way, it can be a great struggle, sometimes more than we can bear without help. But the help is there, although sometimes we may have to swallow our pride, and find a lot more courage than we ever thought we had, to ask for it and take it. It’s known as grace.

So let me repeat some less well-known words of Julian of Norwich, which have been rather like a life-raft of joy for me for at least thirty years, and will be until that time of gathering and bringing home comes for me. I commend them to you for the same purpose:
He did not say: “Thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be dis-eased”; but he did say: “Thou shalt not be overcome”.

Candor est lucis aeternae et speculum sine macula

2008-12-06T10:10:00.000-08:00

“They flew away like so many sparrows; only there were more of them”. This sentence, from one of my favourite childhood books, still makes me chuckle. And I see no reason why a text for a sermon should not be modelled on a phrase taken from the adventures of Professor Branestawm and his friend Colonel Dedshott; you can find truth anywhere, if you are looking for it.

And today, in Advent, which is the season of the Mother of God, I want to talk about Mary; not because she is something different from us, something halfway between ourselves and God; but because, precisely, she is just like us, only more so.

Today some Christians are celebrating Mary’s Immaculate Conception. This is not the same as the Virgin Birth – that Jesus was born of Mary through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, not in the normal way, of Mary and Joseph – but the belief that the Mother of God was sinless from the very moment of her conception (that is, she did not inherit original sin as the rest of humankind does). Whether it is true or not (and how can we possibly know?) it is in my opinion a very beautiful belief and one that expresses not only the great power of God and the great holiness of his Christ, but also the value he places on humankind. Eadmer of Canterbury, defending the teaching, said: “It was fitting for the Mother of God to be sinless; God was certainly able to make her so; therefore he did.” Of course, the “therefore he did” is doubtful logic, if it’s logic at all, but I think this little sentence makes it quite clear that if the doctrine honours anyone, it is God, and Mary only by the way. And that should be the case with any teaching about Mary, and any veneration of her.

This belief is rather like the instinct, when a new little person comes into the world, to make things as good for them as possible. We redecorate the spare room to make a nursery, or if that’s beyond our means, we provide a new soft blanket or a furry toy. Maybe a better analogy is the advice given to pregnant women not to smoke or drink – not for the woman’s sake, but to honour this new person by making their first dwelling as worthy as possible.

It wouldn’t have mattered if Mary had had the occasional roll-up or dram. That is not unsuitable for the Mother of God. But for there to be any stain of sin – the theologians’ instinct said: no. And there was something correct about that instinct; because sin alone, and not smoking or drinking, is the ruin of humankind.

I know that many Christians of the reformed traditions are uncomfortable with too much talking about the Mother of God, and given the history of Mariology I do understand why. But, in fact, anyone who considers the birth of Christ to be the central event of history, the moment at which heaven and earth were united in an admirable exchange, should quite naturally want to “visit” her, as you might visit the place where someone you greatly admire was born, or lived. I’d love to see Copenhagen, where Kierkegaard was born and lived; to walk around the same streets as he walked, and remember the things he said about them. Copenhagen may well be a beautiful city, but that isn’t why I want to go there. If any of you have been to the Holy Land, you may well have been overawed by beauty of the landscape and the buildings, but that’s not why you went.

Don’t be put off or confused by the excesses that do, undoubtedly, take place with regard to Mary. Mary is not a mediator between ourselves and God: there is one mediator, Jesus Christ. Mary has not got special, semi-divine powers; she prays for us as do the other saints, and our dear ones who have gone to God before us. The point of Mary - like the point of everything – is Jesus Christ. It is not for nothing, I believe, that we have been told so little about her. Of course it is a human instinct to embellish and invent – there wouldn’t be any historical novels otherwise – but what we do know about Mary is all we need to know, and inventing other things does little other than diminish her.

So what do we know? What does the canonical scripture tell us about her? That she was married to a man of the house of David; that she conceived her son by miraculous means; that she was pronounced blessed – twice - because of him; that she suffered persecution because of him, and was told there was worse to come; that she did not understand what he said, but accepted it and pondered it; that she was there when he was crucified. And that she was to be found among the faithful after Pentecost.

That is all; and there is nothing there that does not point to her son; she was created by him and for him and nothing extraneous to him has been recorded of her.

If I could choose what people would say of me after my death, I can think of nothing better than that. “Nought be all else to me save that Thou art”. But how far it is from being the truth! And how far I am from even desiring it, if my actions, and even my words, are any witness.

Mary is, as Wordsworth put it, “our tainted nature’s solitary boast” not for fanciful or pious reasons about which, in fact, we know nothing at all. She is so because she is what we were created to be: so far as we know, she existed only to build up the Kingdom of God. She was like us; only more so.

Immaculate? Maybe, maybe not. But certainly the greatest of all creatures. Not in her actions, so far as we know. Not in her words, though the Magnificat is one of the most universally recited texts among Christians. But in her transparency, in her refusal to get in the way, her refusal to “be” anything on her own account. Her only purpose on earth was to be the channel of the Incarnation and in that sense – yes – the channel of our salvation.

Mary is a good companion for Advent, a time when we should be trying to focus our lives more sharply on the coming of Christ and his kingdom, at Christmas, at the end of the world, and at the end of our own life. We are preparing to ask Christ to descend to us, cast out our sin, and be born in us. There is no-one who knows more about that than the woman he chose to be his mother.

So let us pray: O God, who didst endue with singular grace the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Lord: Vouchsafe, we beseech thee, to hallow our bodies in purity, and our souls in humility and love; through the same our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Sermon for the first Sunday of Advent

2008-11-29T07:11:00.000-08:00

But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

I have often wished that I could manage with three or four hours of sleep per night. At times it rouses me to fury to think that I am forced, by a mere quirk of human nature, to lose a third of my life in sleep. True, a cat – so I’ve heard – loses at least twice that; but on the other hand a cat lives with such intensity, is such a paragon of watchfulness, during that third of its life in which it is awake that I am not sure it doesn’t pack as much living into its eighteen years as I will into my threescore and ten. A cat does not mark time. A cat gets on with its life, and always with total concentration.

Jesus told us that we must become as little children, and that is generally understood – when it is understood at all, and not merely quoted – as referring to a child’s innocence (where did they get that idea from?) or its trustfulness; to a child adults are infallible, even if the child does have a tantrum when the infallible adult does or decrees something it does not like. That probably is true, and we are required to trust God equally absolutely, preferably without the tantrums. Another possibility is that it refers to a child’s simplicity; a child does not learn to be “double-minded” until it reaches the age of reason – now that I come to think of it, that’s quite a good definition of the age of reason. But today, meditating on wakefulness and cats, I wonder whether that might be it. Children and cats have quite a lot in common. Whatever a child or a cat does, it does with all its being. A cat seems to be concentrating not only with its mind but with its every muscle. A child can’t do that: its muscles are not sufficiently under its control; but that seems to increase the impression of concentration of the mind. Every movement needs complete absorption; anything less and the hand will not reach the toy train and the balance of body upon legs will be disastrously upset. Have you seen a small child fall asleep? He does it instantly, decisively, and often with no warning. A cat does the same, but there are two differences: first, most cats have a patch of thinner fur, sometimes almost a bald patch, just above their eyes. When the eyes are closed, the skin of the bald patch is stretched, so that, from a distance at least, it looks as if the cat is wide awake and looking at you. Then, a child wakes up by degrees, maybe reluctantly, and often in a bad temper; but a cat is all there at once. A dog rolls over and looks at you, bleary-eyed; a cat sits up instantly, takes notice, and washes.

When Jesus said “Be vigilant” or “Stay awake” (depending on your translation) he did not mean that we must never sleep. We are not designed never to sleep, just as we are not designed never to eat. Walter Hilton is very insistent that we must observe a reasonable measure in all our religious practices – except in mindfulness of God. We must eat and sleep as our body reasonably demands, as if we were taking medicine. He does not mean that obsessive humanist hygiene against which GK Chesterton rightly fulminated; he means simply that we must take our bodies as God made them and allow them what we may perceive to be their weaknesses. Paul explains the meaning of this kind of vigilance:

“The day of the Lord shall so come as a thief in the night…but you, brethren, are not in darkness that that day should overtake you as a thief. For all you are children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore, let us not sleep, as others do, but let us watch, and be sober. For they that sleep, sleep in the night, and they that are drunk, are drunk in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, having on the breastplate of faith and charity, and for a helmet the hope of salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us, that whether we watch or whether we sleep, we may live together with him.”

The essential thing is not that we should not sleep, for whether we sleep or whether we watch, we can be with Christ; the essential thing is that we should not sleep “as others do”. The Bride in the Song of Songs was not trying to be paradoxical when she said “I sleep but my heart wakes”. She was certainly not making excuses for having fallen asleep despite herself; the issue was far too serious for that. Had she believed that the beloved would escape her if she slept she would have sat up all night drinking coffee and sticking pins into herself and if she had fallen asleep despite the coffee and the pins she would never have forgiven herself; there would have been no well-turned phrases to excuse the inexcusable. But as it was, she knew she could sleep safely, as long as she did not sleep “as others do”, as long as her heart was vigilant.

I suspect that a cat’s heart is always vigilant and that Christopher Smart was not far wrong: a cat is always ready to look up for instructions. It so happens that we cannot generally hear those instructions – maybe because our own hearts are weighed down and sluggish; and it is certainly quite unlikely that it is our instructions that the cat will follow. But a cat is not following its nose; it is drawn on by something outside itself; not a ball or a stick like a dog, but something always out of reach, always upwards. Why do you suppose cats so frequently get stuck up trees? They are not fools enough to believe that they will catch birds that way. They are trying to reach the Voice whose instructions they have followed since kittenhood. A cat does sleep. A cat does eat. But it knows that those are not its first priorities.

I think it is very difficult for us adult human beings to attain to that combination of recklessness and single-mindedness which cats display so naturally and which a child can clumsily imitate. But that is what Jesus is demanding of us when he tells us to watch. Can you imagine a cat or a dog sleeping through a burglary? Well, it is of little consequence, sub specie aeternitatis, whether or not we sleep through earthly burglaries. But it is of the utmost importance that we do not remain asleep “as others do” when the Divine Burglar (his choice of title, not mine!) comes to us, And I am not just talking about his coming at the end of our lives, or at the end of the world; we will wake up then, all right, but if we’ve been asleep “as others are” until then, it will be too late. The Bride knew that she had to be attentive, had to be awake in heart if not in body, at all times. There was no telling when, or how frequently, the Bridegroom would present himself, or what exactly he would require of her at each visit.

The post-resurrection appearances of the Lord provide a good parable to express the degree of attentiveness we need. He was not always recognisable, even to those who truly loved him. Short of a divine dispensation, you only saw him if you were expecting to see him, which was why John knew him at once. Peter and Mary Magdalen – who arguably loved him no less – needed telling, and as for the travellers on the road to Emmaus, they were like the Bride on the occasion when her attention did wander: he was gone before they knew it.

It goes without saying that it is not enough to remain “sober” in the strict sense, to abstain from excessive strong drink and food and other bodily pleasures. As I have frequently said (and I have a reluctant St Augustine on my side) these are not the serious sins, not the serious lapses in vigilance. And both Augustine and I know something about sin. Bodily sins are sins, and bodily excesses are excesses and not helpful in our journey towards God or in preserving our attention to him. But it is in our souls, in the spiritual part of our being, that we “chiefly resemble God” and it is certainly with that part that we chiefly attend to him and serve him. No bodily sobriety, vigilance or service is of any value if the soul does not watch and serve – and the mind too. We may eat, drink, marry and be given in marriage, as much as we like, as long as our soul is serving the living God and walking in his light. We cannot and must not judge others; we would not have known which of the two men in the fields, which of the two women at the grindstone, would be taken and which left. We should not be concerned about them except to pray for them (which is part of vigilance). The cat attends to itself and to the Voice it hears, its ears twitching as it sleeps to pick up the merest whisper. Let us do the same.