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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

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.

This week's sermon

Christ yesterday and today; the Beginning and the end; Alpha and Omega; all time belongs to him and all the ages; to him be glory and power through every age for ever. Amen.

I suspect that the feast of Christ the King may arouse some mixed feelings – if it arouses any feelings at all, of course, not being entirely familiar to an Anglican or Episcopalian congregation. It was in fact introduced in the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI in 1925. This was, significantly, the sixteenth centenary of the Council of Nicaea. which defined the dogma of the Consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and added to the Creed the words "of whose kingdom there shall be no end," thereby affirming the kingly dignity of Christ.

Mixed feelings? I know that some people consider that this feast emphasises Christianity to the unreasonable detriment of all other faiths, and that it is therefore divisive. Well…maybe it is in one sense. A rather traditional old priest of my acquaintance, when accused of being “divisive” in his insistence on certain aspects of Christian morality, roared “The Day of Judgement will be divisive!”. And, whether we like it or not, so it will. It is not up to us to condemn others, but it certainly is up to us to make sure that Christ and no-one else is our king. It is a word used by Jesus himself. In one alternative reading for this Feast, the Parable of the Sheep & the Goats in Matthew chapter 25, it is notable that at the beginning Jesus refers to the Son of Man, but at the end, when judgement is pronounced, he says “The King”.

Now, I am mystified by the strange logic which refuses to adorn churches and vestments beautifully (which need not mean expensively!) on the grounds that Christianity and Christians should be humble and simple. Fine. But how refusing to God the honour and glory due to Him can demonstrate my humility I am at a loss to understand. The churches and vestments do not celebrate me, nor is God only my God, as if His splendour reflected upon me and not upon others, whose God is inferior or non-existent. As Pius XI pointed out, God is the God of the atheists too, whether they like it or not.

I wonder whether the same sort of reasoning might be behind the discomfort some people do feel when they consider this Feast. We have so long been warned against “triumphalism” and “imperialism” that we have come to believe that it is a serious sin. But, great heavens! – and I choose my exclamation with care – could someone tell me what is wrong, or mistaken, about proclaiming, with joy, and from the housetops, the triumph and the power of God? “Far be it from me to boast”…indeed. But have we forgotten the second half of that phrase: “except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”?

Glorying in the Cross is not just thanking God for having died to save us. It is not, primarily, rejoicing in our share of the Cross. The Cross, the point of the Cross is, first, not the suffering but the love which is behind the suffering; and therefore the effect of it. Love may not have an external moving cause – in God it has not; all his motivation is within himself – but it must necessarily have an external (by which I mean external to itself) final cause. The final cause of the love which underwent the Cross was our salvation; and that is not a question of warm feelings, or even of forgiving us our trespasses. The Cross would not have been necessary for that. As Thomas Aquinas says, a single drop of Christ’s blood would have been enough to save the whole world from every sin. But there was one thing for which the Cross was necessary: it was the decisive event among those events which we glimpse in the Apocalypse: the war against the devil and all its works. The Cross is not just (though it is that) the sign of love. It is the sign of victory. I do not understand how Almighty God can have a genuine struggle with his finite creatures; but if he can, and our faith tells us that he can and he did, then the Cross is that struggle and that victory.

This feast is a shout of joy; of joy – and, yes, relief – that the devil did not have the last word, that God is almighty, and that all is well.
If this is triumphalism and imperialism, the triumph we celebrate is not ours. It is the triumphalism that led us to add to the Lord’s Prayer “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever”. It is also an underlining of the paradox that God reigned on the Cross – one of the alternative readings for this feast is the death of Jesus. His power is so absolute that even apparent defeat cannot overcome it. I think we need this reminder just before Advent, just before the incarnation, when God seems so terribly powerless and vulnerable. His love is obvious – it cannot be in doubt. But his power, the power of a new-born baby, or indeed of an embryo, which for so much of modern science is a “non-person”, can indeed be in doubt. But not after the feast of Christ the Universal King.

It is striking that this feast was introduced at a time when monarchies everywhere were breaking up or had broken up, when the very concept of kingship was passing away as if old-fashioned and no longer relevant to this new world. And now, in the third millennium, there are only a handful of kings and queens left, and none of them, in the west at least, has any real power: those there are are mostly figureheads, or even figures of fun (see Private Eye, constantly!)

But I do not think Pius XI was out of touch and trying to hold back the tide of the modern world by introducing a feast which gave Christ an outdated title. On the contrary, I believe that he read the signs of the times; saw the future clearly, and drew the only conclusion possible for a Christian or, come to that, a Jew. “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.” It is inevitable that all kingdoms and kingships will pass away; there is only one that will not. “The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.”

As Christ said: In the world you will have tribulation; but fear not – fear not! – I have overcome the world.

I’ve been speaking about Christ the King – but we should also remember the traditional Anglican name for this Sunday, dating from long before the introduction of that feast. This is Stir-Up Sunday, which has nothing to do with Christmas puddings, but refers to the old collect for the day; one, I think, that should not be lost.

And so let us pray to Christ our King: Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This week's sermon

16 November 2008
Prov 31:10-13, 25-31; Rev 7:9-17
November is the month of the saints, so I hope you won’t mind me grabbing the opportunity to preach on the subject of heaven – and hell.
Milton puts these words into the mouth of Lucifer:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in hell:
Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven”
I think that would be echoed by a frightening number of people who have completely failed to understand the nature of heaven and of hell. As with so many things Christian, the secular world seems to have got completely the wrong end of the stick about heaven and hell. Have any of you listened to the Radio 4 comedy called “Old Harry’s Game”? It is set in hell, and stars Andy Hamilton as Satan. It is very funny indeed. For a while I felt I really should not be listening to it; not because it is blasphemous – though some people might find it so – after all, there is an old and venerable tradition of poking fun at the devil. CS Lewis claimed that the devil hates to be laughed at, and who knows. I must say, I can’t imagine that the devil cares in the least whether or not we laugh at him; I suspect that it is laughter itself he dislikes or, at least, the sort of laughter that means happiness or, worse, joy. I felt I should not be listening to Old Harry’s Game because it promotes the idea that hell is quite a jolly place, full of interesting people, and where it might be possible to “rule”. How often have you heard someone say that hell would be a much more interesting place to go to than heaven; “I’d rather be with Oscar Wilde and Napoleon than Mary Whitehouse and Sarah Palin!” Can you imagine the boredom, they say, of sitting on a cloud and singing hymns all day long!
I would not like to sit on a cloud. I would not like to sing hymns all day in the way we sing hymns in church. However I would very much like to sing hymns as one sings a love song. Because that, of course, is what heaven is all about and that is what differentiates heaven from hell. And because most of us share that sneaking feeling that heaven could be quite dull and hell quite diverting (I blame Dante) the truth must be insisted upon, in season and out of season.
Heaven is not where the pious or servile go. Heaven is where the loving go. Hell is not where people who sin go. Hell is where the people who do not love go. And that is the only difference, and it is a world of difference. I assure you that if a stereotypical paragon of virtue did not love, you would not find them in heaven. And I assure you that if a great sinner did love, you would not find them in hell. Jesus told us so. When the Pharisee was shocked that he allowed the Woman Who Was A Sinner to touch him, he replied “I tell you, her sins – and they are many – have been forgiven her, for she has loved much.” Sin and love cannot coexist for long.
You’ve read lives of the saints. You know that all the saints (according to their Lives) are entirely perfect, probably died with their baptismal innocence intact, and (unless they are Joseph Cupertino) were also unusually beautiful and unusually intelligent.
The people who write those Lives have got it all wrong, as wrong as Milton’s Satan. Saints, well saints on earth, saints in the making, are simply one kind of sinner, a sinner whose sins are outweighed by their love. Are you shocked when the psalmist thinks and speaks of himself as righteous? You shouldn’t be. Listen to what he says: “Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the LORD does not count against him”. Not the person who has never sinned. Not even the person who doesn’t sin any more. No: the person whose sins are forgiven – because their love weighs more than their sin. St Augustine put it beautifully: he said Amor meus pondus meum: My love is my weight; meaning that the weight of his love was caught by heaven’s gravity and drawn inexorably to God.
The confusion about heaven and hell is related to the confusion about sin. Have you noticed how the secular world talks about sin? Sin, to them, is something you enjoy but shouldn’t. Smoking. Eating chocolate cake. Adultery. Well, I have news for them. Only the third of those is a sin, and the sinful element in it is not the enjoyment. Arguably the enjoyment is the only good element in it, but I won’t press that too far. You should not commit adultery not because it is fun, but because it is harmful. At best it harms your relationship with God, because it is dishonest; at worst it harms you, your partner in crime and their spouse. And perhaps yours. Oh, and your relationship with God. It is replacing true love with false love.
The devil is the father of lies. God is truth. There must always be deceit in sin. Sin is always in some way hidden, hole-and-corner. For everyone. But especially for those of us who believe in God and supposedly live in his presence. It is impossible for us to pretend before God. So we have to pretend to ourselves too. There is not just the sin, there is the disposition-to-sin that has to come before it, the shift into unreality, the shift out of God’s presence, the shift into a place where sin is possible. The place of unreality, the place of unlove. And the place of total unreality, of total lie, of total unlove – that is hell.
I think you will already be getting the feeling that hell would not after all be that interesting place where you could anticipate chatting with Oscar Wilde and Napoleon, nor heaven that tedious place where you would have to sit po-faced on your cloud listening to Mary Whitehouse. There’s a well-known story told about a dream of heaven and hell, and even if you have heard it, it bears repeating.
"In my dream I was in hell, and there were hundreds of tables full of food. And everyone was weeping and cursing because their elbows had been straightened and they could not feed themselves. I was then taken to Heaven, and again saw a huge feast prepared.
Those in Heaven also had straightened elbows, but were full of joy, because each person fed someone else and was fed in return."
So you might say that in one thing Milton’s Satan was right: not that there can be any ruling in hell, but there most certainly could be joyful service in heaven. God does not need our service, not here and not in heaven; but there, as here, what is required of us is love. How better to show love than in service?
I note that I have developed a bit of a habit of preaching about love, in one way or another. I hope I am not becoming repetitious. But even if I am, I am in a good tradition.
Jerome says, that when John the Evangelist was an old man in Ephesus, he had to be carried to the church in the arms of his disciples. At these meetings, he was accustomed to say no more than, "Little children, love one another!" After a time, the disciples wearied at always hearing the same words. They asked, "Master, why do you always say this?" "It is the Lord's command," was his reply. "And if this alone be done, it is enough!"
And that is what, please God, we will be doing for all eternity. And if you doubt the joy of it, try singing your favourite hymn as a love song, and I think you’ll know what I mean.
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Remembrance Day Sermon

Why Remembrance Day? Why go on commemorating? Even if it is now reckoned to be a commemoration of all the wars of the 20th century - and maybe the 21st as well - why remember? Isn’t it better to forgive and forget? Forgive, certainly. But in this case, on Remembrance Day, what we must do is remember and forgive. Remember how things really were, and are.

It seems to me that Scotland - and who knows, maybe other small nations - has a particular attitude to war and conflicts.

A nation that can use ‘Flower of Scotland’ as its national anthem, even if only at sporting events, will see such things quite differently from one that uses ‘God Save The Queen’ (“O Lord our God arise, scatter her enemies And make them fall; Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks”) or the Marseillaise (“May their impure blood fill our furrows”)!

There has been some discussion about Scotland’s ‘national anthem’. I believe the main candidate for replacing ‘Flower of Scotland’ is ‘Scots wha hae’, and some have even suggested ‘Flowers of the Forest’. Oh dear!

In case any of you do not know these songs, what they have in common is that they commemorate occasions when the Scots fought bravely (and in the last case hopelessly) against a stronger, more numerous, invading foe. And, after all, even that victory against “proud Edward” was hardly definitive. You could add the ‘Skye Boat Song’ to the collection, and the appalling ‘Braveheart’.

Scotland, then, can hold herself absolved when remembering wars, can’t she?

Well, no, I think not. Charles Edward - underdog though he was - led an invading army, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, and Scots have always made up a large part - a disproportionately large part for the size of the country - of the great British army.

So, on Remembrance Day, we have to interrogate ourselves with the rest. Our fighting has not all been in self-defence. We have not always been outnumbered. We are not immune to the self-delusion that another small nation - Israel - seems to have fallen into.

In Habakkuk’s day, for much of Biblical times and in that war which - had President Wilson been right - should never have happened, Israel, the children of Israel, the Jewish nation, were indeed the small, oppressed, invaded and persecuted ones. The victims, the ones who could never act but only react against the aggression of others.

Like Scotland? Maybe. But this sense of victimhood, this sense of powerlessness, and the belief that attack is the best method of defence, has stayed with Israel to this day, to the extent that it cannot see that it has in turn become the aggressor and the oppressor.

And worst of all, there is the belief - maybe largely rhetorical now, but expressed nonetheless - that Israel has a right to do all this because she is fighting for land given her in perpetuity by God.

But of course the Palestinians also believe that they themselves, as the attacked and oppressed, have God on their side.

And in the Second World War, the Allies thought God was on their side. So did the Axis. So does the United States now. And so, with absolute conviction, does Osama bin Laden.

They are all wrong, but potentially they are all right: they are all children of God. Habakkuk came very close to understanding what so few of us who believe in God understand: if God is Adonai Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, those hosts are not human armies. God does not take part in human warfare, or, at least, not as a combatant. In human warfare God is, if not a conscientious objector, a member of the Ambulance Corps.

It seems at first in today’s reading as if Habakkuk cannot solve the conundrum that we all battle with: “How long shall I cry for help and thou wilt not save?” “Is he to keep on mercilessly slaying nations for ever?” But, like Job, he refuses either to despair or to fabricate an answer out of his own head. Like the author of the Book of Job he acknowledges God’s infinite power by recalling his past acts (as it happens, Habakkuk was probably wrong about God’s part in these events, but that isn’t the point) and expresses absolute faith for the future, even if there is, in fact, no visible salvation of the sort he was hoping for.

God’s greatness, God’s love, is not to be gauged by our good fortune in this life, as if he belonged to some people and not to others, as if he were the creator of some and not others.

God is not with us when we kill. Maybe he can tolerate a just war, if there is such a thing, or pure defence of self or others. I don’t know about that. But I do know that striving for peace and reconciliation always means God is “on our side” (or, better, we are on God’s side) - which does not mean that we will necessarily have success, humanly speaking. In this world we have tribulation, but he has overcome the world.

We are not different. Not because we are a small nation. Not because Christians are somehow specially God’s people and are free to dispose of those who are not. Or if we are specially God’s people, our great calling and duty is to work for the unity he prayed for, and which he will never force us into.

And Scotland’s national anthem? There really is no contest, especially in the present state of the world. If you do not know Hamish Henderson’s ‘Freedom Come-All-Ye’ I suggest you find a copy. But for the moment I will just quote you the verse that is central both in position and in significance. This is why we remember the past. Lest we forget what we have done, what we have all done, Israel, Assyria, Scotland, Germany, America, Iraq - all of us. We have marched to war, we have destroyed lives and families, we have all been caught up in the whirl of combat and propaganda and have claimed we were only obeying orders.

The instinct - yes - is to try to forget about it, but that is the last thing we should do. We must remember, remember we have all done it, and build on that remembrance a determination that it shall never happen again. Remember, but not remember and despair; remember and forgive; remember and hope.

Nae mair will our bonnie callants
Merch tae war when oor braggarts crousely craw
Nor wee wains frae pitheid an clachan
Mourn the ships sailin doun the Broomielaw
Broken faimlies in lands we've hairriet
Will curse 'Scotlan the Brave' nae mair, nae mair
Black an white ane-til-ither mairriet
Mak the vile barracks o thair maisters bare.

Today's sermon

Jesu! spare those souls which are so dear to Thee;
Who in prison, calm and patient, wait for Thee;
Hasten. Lord, their hour, and bid them come to Thee;
To that glorious home, where they shall ever gaze on Thee.

Let's get one thing straight at the outset: this Feast - and it is a Feast - is not about death. For once I thoroughly approve of a new name for an old feast: All Souls, while poetically excellent, was in fact misleading. The "Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed" is what this feast is. The Faithful Departed. These are fledgling saints or, if you like, chrysalis saints. They are not in any doubt, as we are, of their final destination; nothing is going to prevent them from becoming butterflies. They are not people to weep over; we'd do better to weep over our own sins and our own uncertainty of going to the glorious home where they are bound. They are better off - in the true sense happier - than we are. If there are still tears on their cheeks which the Lord has not yet wiped away, they are not the tears of our worldly sadness which is unto death, but the godly tears which are unto life, and which we so rarely shed, to our own great disadvantage. They are the sort of tears which I imagine could even be shed in heaven.

The difference between today's feast and yesterday's is only one of degree. Many saints whom we celebrate today this year will be celebrated on All Saints' Day next year; at the end of time today's feast will no longer exist, not because it is a sad day and all sorrow will be at an end, but because it is a feast of as yet unconsummated joy, and no joy will be left unconsummated when the number of the elect is finally fulfilled. The souls for whom we should weep, were it not totally pointless to do so, have no part in this commemoration. We are not obliged to believe that there is anyone in hell except the devil and his angels, and I am inclined to believe it is quite sparsely inhabited. But however many or few people are there, none of those for whom, and with whom, and to whom, we pray today, will ever be among them.

Sometimes, when you see a service - especially of a traditional type - on All Souls' Day, you'd think we were lamenting the damnation of souls, or at the very least beseeching God for their salvation. We are not. At a Requiem Mass for someone who has just died – maybe at any Requiem for a specific uncanonised person – we are right to wear black, sing the Dies Irae and to beseech God to have mercy on their soul. To me a Requiem Mass in white vestments with alleluias bursting out all over is an insult to both the justice and the mercy of God, as well as a belittling of the seriousness of our life and death – unless, of course, we are speaking of a child.

But All Souls’ Day is not a day of blackness, of dread, of doubtful beseeching. We do celebrate Requiem Masses. We used to sing the Dies Irae. We still pray for their souls. But the atmosphere should be quite different. These souls are sure of their Eternal Rest; they rest in the certain hope of resurrection; but they are not there yet. Our prayers are intended to help them along the way on which they are already walking, to end sufferings whose end is already in sight. Black vestments remind us that they are still suffering, and that their suffering is caused entirely by their own sin: their sins against God, which is the most terrible thing of all; perhaps also of the fate which they – perhaps narrowly – escaped, to which in pure justice they should have been condemned and which may still await us. And the Dies Irae? I don’t feel it was in place on All Souls’ Day as it is at an ordinary Requiem Mass and as it most certainly is in is original – and renewed – place in the Divine Office at the end of the church’s year, accompanying Jesus’ prophecies of the end of the world. But it is salutary anywhere: each one of us could sing it for ourselves, and the Faithful Departed could join with us, but they sing it in thanksgiving and in acknowledgement that they should by rights perhaps be with the goats and not with the sheep.

Because there can be no doubt that they are, definitely, with the sheep. Purgatory has nothing to do with hell, nor is it a disconnected “halfway house”; it is on the opposite side from hell of that great abyss which, as Abraham explained to Dives the Rich Man, cannot be crossed – from either side. Newman put it not only poetically but accurately when he described it as a prison. A prison is not in a land of its own; nor normally, is it in a land where inmates and outsiders alike are criminals, it is in a land where, outside the prison, people walk about free, and in an ideal world the prisoners will be rehabilitated and eventually return to freedom. And, of course, heaven, the realm of God, is the ideal world. Purgatory, if you like, is an enclave of heaven; a prison, certainly, but in the realm of God.

Hell is not a prison. There is no free world “out there”; there is nothing at all “out there”. Hell is absolute separation from anything that is not hell. I find it pretty silly to discuss whether or not there is physical pain in hell. Hell is global pain; there is nothing else, just as heaven is global joy. Is there physical pleasure in heaven? Who cares? Who could distinguish? I think Purgatory is the only place in the “hereafter” of which such questions can sensibly be asked; Purgatory is the only place in the hereafter in which there is a mixture of any kind (which is, I take it, why it makes some sort of sense to talk about length of time in Purgatory). Purgatory is the only place where sin can be found in heaven, though in its proper place; and so where pain can be found in heaven, for its proper purpose.

Spiritual writers often say (or said, in the days when it wasn’t just oddballs like me who believe in Purgatory) that we should do and accept everything within our power to avoid Purgatory, and stress that however terrible our sufferings on this earth, they would be worth it to be spared Purgatory which is, they say, far more terrible than anything we could endure here. I can only partially agree. I think that Purgatory consists of two things: the indescribable suffering of seeing sin – one’s own sin – as it is in reality before God; and the indescribable joy of the absolute certainty of God’s love for, and ultimate acceptance of, oneself personally; that is, of one’s own eternal salvation. We cannot now understand how the second-greatest pain in the universe and the second-greatest joy in the universe can co-exist, but we may be quite certain that they can, and do. In a sermon Newman said “Sometimes before thy saints thou hast brought the image of a single sin, as it appears in the light of thy countenance…and they told that the sight did all but kill them; nay, would have killed them, had it not been instantly withdrawn”. Those of us who are not saints find this incredible, but the suffering of Purgatory is that we are able to contemplate this horror and yet remain alive and conscious. It is clear that the certainty of God’s love and our salvation do not lessen these sufferings – if anything, they are increased by the clear vision of his goodness. But should we wish to avoid them? If the pain is not lessened by the joy, so the joy is not lessened by the pain. The joy of Purgatory is more intense than anything we can experience here – and the paradox continues (indeed, Purgatory is one great paradox, like the Trinity or the Person of Jesus Christ, which is why it is so likely and so believable); as the joy intensifies the pain, so the pain intensifies the joy, because we know that by it we are consciously cooperating with God’s loving work in freeing us from sin. Once we see clearly what sin is it will be for all of us in Purgatory, as it was for some exceptional saints on earth, sheer joy to suffer for its expiation and our cleansing.

Arguably, then, we could desire Purgatory for the joy as much as we fear it for the pain, but I think there is something else. St Augustine was very fond of repeating that God has ordered all things by measure, number and weight. In other words, he seems to like parallels, balances, things that are appropriate, fitting, seemly. Sin and death came through a man, a woman and a tree, so redemption came through Jesus, Mary and the Cross. That is how God works, and it is profoundly satisfying to us, who are made in his image and likeness. Like him we feel the need, as Kierkegaard put it, “to make a knot in the thread”, not to leave any loose ends. Which is why, I suggest, we should not even want to avoid Purgatory. in Purgatory we are tying up the loose ends: as by death God trampled down death, so by experiencing sin as it really is, we are trampling down sin. Should we be satisfied with, should we even desire anything less?

This week's sermon

There is a great deal of discussion at present about homelessness and begging. That is partly due to the large number of refugees – or asylum seekers, or economic migrants, or whatever you care to call them (I would suggest “people”) who have come to the UK believing it to be a “soft touch” - is the UK a soft touch? I would love to think so – and find themselves at best in government hostels waiting for their application to be processed and at worst on the streets, begging. It is also partly due to nerves about the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games. A certain amount of controversy has arisen, as, to my surprise, many are claiming that people choose to be homeless and live on the streets and do very well out of those who give sleeping bags, soup and money. It is true that some do choose to live rough, though few of those are of sufficiently sound mind to be said to “choose” anything (I do know that a few are, but very few, and I suspect they are easily recognisable. I am clear in my own mind that they should be allowed, and been helped, to live in the manner they have chosen) but most of those on the streets, or in car-parks, or under the hedgerows, have come there by a route not of their own choosing. Some have become homeless at the end of a relationship; some young people have been forced to leave home; some have been thrown out of a shared home or rented accommodation due to injustice or lack of funds; some have found themselves destitute through a habit of substance abuse which they never expected to bring them to that point. It can, in one way or another, happen to anyone. On two occasions in my life I would have been homeless had it not been for generous friends.

We have heard the opinions and feelings of many about beggars and the homeless and they vary from the unreservedly supportive to the unreservedly damning. Sometimes the statements of the latter group are prefaced by “As a Christian” (always a danger-sign). Well, I’m a Christian too; a bad one undoubtedly, but if I do not always live according to the Gospel I do know what it says, and I am afraid this is one of the points on which Jesus was unequivocal and very, very clear; following in that the teaching of the Law and Prophets sent by Himself in the Old Dispensation. There is nothing about the deserving or undeserving poor in the Gospels, or, so far as I remember, in any of the Bible. There is of course the delightful portrait of the sluggard, nut nothing is said about the way in which he is to be treated. As to the New Testament, Dives the Rich Man may have been a bad lot and Lazarus a saintly man; but equally Dives may have been a merry old soul with one fatal flaw, and Lazarus his ex-employee who had been justly given the sack for being a lazy and impertinent so-and-so. Being a lazy and impertinent so-and-so may disqualify you for employment with Dives (or anyone else) but it does not disqualify you for being taken up into the bosom of Abraham or for being a sacrament of Christ (“whatever you did to the least of these, you did to Me”) and thereby a sacrament of the One who sent him.

The point is quite simply that Lazarus was poor. Not deserving, just poor. That alone gave him a title to be helped. The point is that Lazarus was Dives’ brother, just as surely as those five brothers by blood whom Dives desired so ardently to save. In the Old Dispensation, while God was slowly and painstakingly educating humankind, he began with a single compact group, as easier to teach uniformly than a large unwieldy world. One’s brother, therefore, for the time being, was just any member of the Children of Israel. But now, since the world has shrunk to a sizable village that no longer applies. The word “globalisation” is much bandied about and people do not even seem entirely sure what it means. I will tell you what globalisation means, and it does not belong to the twenty-first century specifically but to the first; the world became a global village on the day that Our Lord Jesus Christ died for all and destroyed the walls of separation. From that moment every person on earth becomes the brother of every other person on earth. Not just neighbours, but brothers. I do not mean merely by blood or by common fatherhood; that was always tre, since we are all children of God and of Adam. I mean a brother with a special title to my care, to whom I owe in strict justice the treatment I owe to the members of my family. And again whatever one does to the least of these, one does it to God. The first commandment is to love God with all your heart, with all your strength and with all your mind; if the second commandment is “like it” that is because it is the same commandment. To love God is impossible if you do not love your neighbour; or, better, the fact that you do not love your neighbour makes it clear that you do not love God. Jesus presented as evidence for the restored relationship of love between the "woman who was a sinner" and God the fact that she was performing a service of love for him as a man.

Search the scriptures, and you will not find any support of any but the most radically generous treatment of these people, deserving or not. If a person is in need, you help them; you lend, if there is any likelihood of the loan being repaid and if the person wants to repay it – and most people do. There’s not much point in taking a pledge, since it must be returned if they have need of it, whether the loan has been repaid or not. If there is no likelihood of repayment, then you must give: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the homeless – yes, even into your own house. I am afraid that if you give money to a beggar, it is his affair what he does with it; by giving you have fulfilled the unambiguous command of God. You may, of course, choose to buy the person something instead; that’s up to you. But you are, in any case, not to look for gratitude. You are serving God, not man; and what you are giving is far less than what you owe.

Does that mean that we must always give, even to the limit of what we possess, that we must never enquire into the character of the beggar, never note that the baby in the gipsy’s arms bears a singular resemblance to the baby in the previous gipsy’s arms? I am afraid it does. God does not deal in what ifs; God is not Gordon Brown: human prudence does not figure in his list of virtues.

I am aware of the dangers of the cry “Back to the Gospel!”. But I do think it is occasionally worth flicking through its pages to see what Jesus really said, and rearranging our lives and our priorities accordingly, even if it means flying in the face of tradition. Today I have focussed on one question whose Gospel answer is uncomfortably, and maybe surprisingly, clear and uncompromising, but there are many others. For example there is not a shadow of support for the doctrine of a just war; there is nowhere a recommendation to live and ascetic life. But there is insistence on unconditional charity; the necessity of prayer; the importance of right belief as well as of right action; the necessity of baptism and of the eucharist. The list could go on, but the list that strikes me of what is, and what is not, in the Gospel will not be the list that strikes you or the list that will be most profitable to you. As we move slowly towards the beginning of a new Church year, the exercise of making one’s own list might be a good foundation for some New Year resolutions which might bring our lives more into conformity with the Gospel. As Kierkegaard said, you won’t understand it all – and you won’t even notice it all. But you will have plenty to do – for the rest of your life – in your attempt to fulfil those things in which you can hear God clearly saying to you as an individual: “Go, and do thou likewise”.

This evening's sermon

It's easier to jump straight into cold water than to slide in inch by inch. So here goes.

Sermon 19 October 2008: Prov 4:1-18, 1 John 3:16-4:6
“All you need is love, love, love…Love is all you need”
Doesn’t that date me! & I can’t say I think much of the rest of the lyrics. But that phrase, trite as it sounds, is quite simply true.
A religion, a faith, based on love? Unbelievable. Based on obedience, fair enough. Based on wisdom, oh yes. But love?
The funny thing is that you do need wisdom, & you do need obedience. But scour the religions, the philosophies & the ideologies, & they won’t tell you that above all you need love. To live The Good Life, to build the perfect world, to create permanent revolution, to keep the ten commandments…just do the right things. Tick the boxes, & Bob’s your uncle. But how about love?
The two readings we’ve just heard, placed next to each other, are quite remarkable. I wish we had time for you all to read them for yourselves now, before I go on. I’d love you to read them afterwards. Because, even more clearly than is usually the case, the New Testament reading interprets the Old. The reading from Proverbs is about wisdom – about Wisdom with a capital W, Wisdom the person; & the reading from John’s epistle reminds us what Wisdom with a capital W actually taught us when she became incarnate – when he became incarnate – & lived among us. Forgive the gender-bending. But it does us no harm to note that while Jesus was of course a man when incarnate (well, as a human being he had to be one or the other) in his nature as Child of God, he...she....is neither. He is the Power of God; she is the Wisdom of God. & the Holy Spirit is the Love of God & is the Spirit of Jesus. So when Wisdom was made flesh & dwelt among us, love was her meaning & love was her command. Proverbs’ “Get Wisdom” has been interpreted & clarified by the Gospel’s “Get Love”.
Love then, love & grace, which is simply the way God’s unconditional love manifests itself towards us imperfect & sinful human beings. So is that what we see when we look at Christians? Here’s another sentence from that reading from St John: “This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming, & even now is already in the world.”
I find that a chilling sentence. Not because John says that the antichrist is in the world, as I think that is very likely. Satan has been “roaming through the earth & going back & forth in it” since the time of Job & long before. & of course there was that small matter of a piece of fruit in a garden at the beginning of time.
No, I find it a chilling sentence because of the use that has been made of it, & of sentences like it, throughout Christian history. I have many times been a member of groups described by someone as the antichrist – I’ve been a Roman Catholic, I’ve been a Socialist, I’ve been on several Gay Pride marches, I’ve been in the audience when Bishop Gene Robinson was here in conversation with John Armes...in fact, in the opinion of some of those who met in Jerusalem before the Lambeth Conference, I suspect that the whole of the Scottish Episcopal Church has pretty strong links with the antichrist.
Philip Yancey, in his wonderful book “What’s so amazing about grace?” says “I think back to the comment of the despairing prostitute that originally prompted me to write this book: ‘Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse!’ & I think back to the life of Jesus, who attracted as if by reverse magnetism the most unsavoury of characters, the moral outcasts. He came for the sinners, not the righteous. & when he was arrested, it was not the notorious sinners of Palestine, but the moralists, who called for his death.” Yancey also quotes Bill Clinton, that famous flawed Southern Baptist, thus: “I have been in politics long enough to expect criticism & hostility. But I was unprepared for the hatred I got from Christians. Why do Christians hate so much?”
A far cry from the comment, quoted by Tertullian in his Apology, “See how these Christians love one another!”
As Kierkegaard so often said, try as you will to wriggle out of the difficulties of Christianity, again & again you are brought up against the clear, plain, unequivocal words of Jesus. When pinned down & asked for a straight answer by a canon lawyer he replied without hesitation: “The greatest commandment? To love God; & (which is the same thing) to love every other human being” (because that’s what the word “neighbour” means).
Loving God & loving neighbour is the very same thing. Actually the very same commandment. The very same action. & that, in my opinion, is the antidote to this awful tendency to see the antichrist everywhere. That person you see before you has the very human nature taken by the Son of God. Your approach to them is – IS, not just “indicates” – your approach to God. If you see Christ everywhere, you won’t see the antichrist. & I think we can safely leave the antichrist to God. The real struggle is not with people. The real struggle is against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. & we cannot cope with this; only God can. So perhaps it would be a better idea for us humans to let God deal with that, & concentrate on the one thing he has told us to do, which is to love.
God is love. That’s another of those phrases we are so used to that we don’t realise how astonishing they are. Thomas Aquinas in his learned way said that we can’t define God; we can’t know “what” he is, only “that” he is. Can’t we though! We can, & there it is in the epistle of the Beloved Disciple. God-IS-love. So if we do want to know the spirit of antichrist, to recognise it & avoid it, this spirit of antichrist, which only God is powerful enough to conquer, it is, surely, the spirit of unlove, or, as Philip Yancey would have it, ungrace.
God is love. God is not an abstract noun – we have turned solid, personal words like love & wisdom into abstract nouns because we are such a faint reflection of the reality that is God. In my opinion the only purpose of our life in Christ is to turn us into created reflections of his uncreated love.
I’ll finish with a quotation from an Eastern Orthodox author. Asked for whom we should, or should not, pray, he sweeps aside what he calls “Western ideologising” & answers thus:
Love in Christ is lived experientially, as a charismatic state. In this state, the Divine Comforter gives to man a compassionate heart, with the immediate result that he is now dominated by a boundless love for all of created nature. This charismatic love in Christ is most certainly not a sentimental love, that is, love within the limits of createdness; rather, it is the uncreated energy of God, which enters into our heart, making it merciful, in the likeness of God. Insofar as our Lord is all-merciful, so our hearts become all-merciful, by the action of Grace,
Just as our all-merciful Lord Himself does not hesitate to pour out His Grace—& this lovingly—even on the evil spirits & on those who reject Him, so also he who loves in Christ pours out his prayer lovingly, unconstrainedly, & naturally on all, being unable to restrain the abundance of life, giving what he has been given.
& so let us pray: Christ my God, set my heart on fire with love in You, that in its flame I may love You with all my heart, with all my mind, & with all my soul & with all my strength, & my neighbour as myself, so that by keeping Your commandments I may glorify You the Giver of every good & perfect gift. Amen.