Santa Lucia, ora pro nobis!

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

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

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...

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

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

(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

“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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!"

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.