Asking a person to preach on that Genesis passage is the equivalent of asking them to nail their theological colours to the mast. The temptation is to skip it altogether and preach on the Gospel. However, while I do appreciate the Anglican reluctance to define, perhaps we do have to be clear on what we do, and do not, believe. In his first letter St Peter says “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have”. I think that means that we should be clear about our beliefs and the foundation of them, not just in our minds but in what we say too. Theology isn’t just for the clergy. We, the lay-people, are if you like the “default” Christians. The clergy have a particular role, but they are Christians first and foremost just as we are. St Peter is not talking to the clergy, or to members of the ministry team, or even to the unusually devout. He is talking to you and to me – ordinary piskies in the pew.
It should be said, of course, that anything we state about God, whether it is about God’s nature or about salvation history, can never be more than provisional. In Thomas Aquinas’ words, we cannot understand “what” God is, only “that” God is. Which didn’t stop Thomas from writing dozens of books about “what” God is and “how” God works, but as he said after the great vision or dream that he had the year before his death, “All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me”. That’s the problem with any definition – if you have a living faith, nourished by prayer and chewing over the scriptures, it will not be long before you realise that “that’s not it…” It has been said many times that the only way to define God is to say what God is not. And some early Fathers of the Church used to say that it was better to say that God is not good than to say God is good and then sit back and think you had defined God.
But we do need to be able to say “This, so far as I understand it, and with the proviso that better understanding may come and lead me to change the way I express it, is what I believe.”
So here goes. This, so far as I understand it, and with the proviso that better understanding may come and lead me to change the way I express it, is what I believe about why the Son of God died on the cross for us and rose again.
The Genesis passage we have just heard is key, and that is why we have it at the beginning of Lent, the time set apart to meditate on precisely that.
God created human beings with free will. He did this, I believe, because he was more interested in being loved than in being obeyed. Paul says the demons believe and tremble; equally one could obey and tremble; obey and hate. That was not the sort of obedience God wanted, the sort of obedience it was his to command. Love cannot be commanded; love must be free. When Jesus says that the first commandment is to love God and the second is to love your neighbour he is not saying (how could he?) that he commands us to love. What he is actually saying is that that is the one thing necessary – if you do that there is no need for you to be commanded to do anything else. It is almost saying “There is no commandment: love, and do what you will”.
Now human beings, having free will, disobeyed God. There are people who believe the Adam and Eve story is literally true, and you may believe this if you wish. I don’t really mind whether it is or not; on balance, I doubt it.
Are you a bit shocked that I say that the Genesis story may not be true, that it may be just a myth? But I’m not saying that. A myth is something profoundly true, and it is never “just” a myth. It is a way of expressing a truth which both tells that truth and is within the grasp of the person you are telling. For example, when you tell a child that if he sticks a wire into the socket the Electricity Monster will get him. It’s not true, but it IS true that something very bad, that you can’t explain because he can’t yet understand it, will happen. That’s the sort of myth that Genesis is.
What Genesis is telling us is that human beings, created by God with free will, lost sight of love, and started being bothered about obedience (and it is only one step from valuing obedience above love to wondering just how obedient the letter of the law requires us to be, and thence to disobedience). That’s what it is, you know; and if you will forgive me for speaking so irreverently about God the Son, you can tell it because that, following the letter and not the spirit, is one of Jesus’ “hot buttons”. He can’t stand it. It is the one thing that makes him really, really angry.
People often have difficulty about the question of why the Son was crucified. Is it a sacrifice, is it a sort of restorative justice, what is it? I think the answer is that it can be understood differently by different people, different societies, and different times. We do not now naturally understand the concept of sacrifice in atonement for sin. We don’t do it. The original sense of the word is repugnant to us. To describe Christ’s death on the cross as an atoning sacrifice does not make sense to the modern mind.
Similarly the concept of “making satisfaction”, of appeasing an angry god, or the idea that someone had to die for the sin of the first human being. As if our God demanded suffering and death in strict justice and somehow was pleased by the suffering and death of his Son. These explanations fitted with particular societies, particular belief systems, particular ways of life. They do not seem to fit now.
But “Christ yesterday and today, and the same for ever”. Christ did die on the cross for our salvation, and that does not change. And we need to understand this during Lent and at Easter, because we need to understand what God has done for us and to us. May I suggest one possible way of understanding it, a way that fits – for me – with the idea that our first parents replaced divine love with human obedience, fits with Isaiah’s statement that “He was offered up because he wished it so”, and fits with that beautiful phrase “the restoration of all things in Christ”. In some way the death of Christ restores us to our original state of blessedness by restoring us, from the realm of law and obedience, to the realm of love and grace. What did he say? “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”. Love is his meaning, and love is the meaning of his death. To me it is not a question of justice, of a necessary death following a sin, but of such a weight of love thrown into the balance that it outweighs centuries – millennia – of law, obedience, and disobedience. Augustine said Amor meus pondus meum: My love is my weight: my love for God is what moves me, as surely as gravity. And Christ’s love is his weight, the weight that outweighs all our sins. Love is stronger than death, so how could he not rise again? It’s not a final answer – no answer will ever be final until, in God’s nearer presence, we know as we are known. But just now it’s my answer, and the answer I will try to take with me through Lent. I think…one could do worse.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Dust and ashes?
Ash Wednesday 2009
Yearly I am struck by the irony – which I am sure has not escaped you either – that on the only day of the year on which our Christian observance shows – when we go out into the streets with a large sooty smudge on our foreheads and trickling down our noses – we have the Gospel passage in which Jesus tells us most insistently and most severely that our observance should not show. I know there are ostentatious people around today, and I suppose there are even people who are ostentatious about their Christianity. There are indeed those who are pushy about their moral stance, and you do get the odd noisy procession or celebration, but on the whole we – especially we Anglicans – prefer to hide in our pews and keep a stony face, and sing and respond as unobtrusively as possible. We like to give our contributions to the collection in those little envelopes so that no-one can see what we are giving; I have derived a certain amount of innocent amusement from watching the various methods of discreet giving. There is the careless toss: the coin (this does not work with notes) flies rapidly from the fingers and disappears quickly among its fellows. There is the protective crouch: the hand, containing the donation, descends into the collection basket and crouches, crablike, over its contents as they release the offering into the heap. There is the nervous stab: in which the thumb and forefinger insert the coin violently, as into a slot machine, into the contents of the basket, burying forcefully. This too, is dicey with notes, except in an unusually generous congregation. And then there is the furtive plonk, in which the donor glances almost fearfully at almost any point in the church, thus distracting attention from the donation, which is placed rapidly down as if both money and basket were red hot. Sometimes I feel I should like to see some shameless person hold up a £50 note, raise a horn to their lips, play a quick fanfare and place the note reverently (on its own little silver salver) upon the heap of fifty pees and pound coins.
We need a touch of ostentation, a touch of shamelessness, a touch of chutzpah, in this area, to counterbalance the vast weight of it elsewhere. I am not just talking about the collection; in fact, I am not really talking about the collection at all. I have spoken before about the absurdity of attempting to show one’s own humility and devotion to holy poverty by denying glory and richness to the house of God. I would like to see, among so many people who, by their actions as well as by their words, declare ostentatiously “I matter”, a few who will equally ostentatiously declare “God matters”.
God matters, God’s church matters, God’s servants matter. Of course I matter; but that is, frankly, only because I matter to God, because in some way I am part of God’s glory. “The glory of God is a living human being”. Of course it matters that I become a complete and actualised human being, and fully myself; but it only matters because I am part of God’s creation, a unique part (as are all the other parts) and the perfection of God’s creation and God’s plan for his creatures matter. And, incidentally, nothing else does.
I acknowledge that it is hard to tell the difference, sometimes, between a person who is showing himself off and a person who is showing God off. It is difficult sometimes even to tell the difference within oneself. But, firstly, the difficulty in distinguishing does not mean that there is no distinction, or that nobody in fact shows off God; and secondly it is not necessary, as it is most likely not possible, to have completely pure motives. I think that if I make it clear that God matters, that God matters primarily and uniquely, it is a small price to pay that I am drawing attention to myself. I do not mind if I am criticised for standing in a pulpit and holding forth; just as I did not mind, in my hermit days, if I was criticised for wearing a monastic habit, for presenting myself as “holy”. Nobody criticises a police officer for drawing attention to herself and presenting herself as “virtuous, law-abiding and courageous” or a doctor for presenting himself as “intelligent, hard-working and caring”. How you perceive a doctor, a police officer, a nun or a preacher, and whether or not you feel resentment or jealousy, is your baggage and not mine. I am not presenting myself as a professional – much less a successful – seeker of God; I am simply saying that God is worth seeking.
I am sorry if all you can see is a woman standing in a pulpit and holding forth with her own opinions. What I want you to see is the overwhelming importance of God. I acknowledge that I am a sinner and that my motives are mixed; but I am doing, from that point of view, the best that I can. I am acting out, in a manner approved by the church, my conviction that God is what matters. On Ash Wednesday we act out, in the manner approved by the church, the fact that we are sinners, yes, but above all that God made us out of the dust of the earth and that we would not exist at all were it not for God; that we have no existence apart from God and independent of God, nor would we want to. In addition, by marking in this way the beginning of our forty days of penance we proclaim that Christ became human for us, was tempted in the desert for forty days, gave us the new law, led us out of slavery, and lay forty hours in the tomb. None of that, surely, should make us seem to be glorying in ourselves? We may, I should have thought glory in the Cross of Christ without being accused of self-ostentation.
People forget – and the Pharisees criticised by Jesus forgot – that if we do penance it is for a reason and that reason is that we are sinners and belong to a sinful race. It does not show that we are holy it just shows that our sins are sufficiently flagrant to have come to our notice. Religious observance is so rare nowadays that people tend to think that simply by taking part in it we are presenting ourselves as somehow superior beings. It reminds me of the frequent reaction when I entered the monastery and, more so, when I became a hermit. I was widely accused of thinking I was holier and better than everyone else. What a strange idea. On the contrary. In the Eastern tradition it is assumed that one becomes a monk in order to repent of one’s sins, and a hermit because one’s sins are such that they need more intensive repentance and reparation. The hermit who goes into solitude because he thinks he’s holy won’t last unless he undergoes a major change of heart: there are a few amusing stories to that effect in the Lives of the Desert Fathers.
So please don’t be intimidated by those who think you are showing your holiness off together with the sooty smudge on your forehead. Remember that you are approaching as near as we ever do nowadays to covering yourself in sackcloth and ashes, and that you are doing penance for your sins. We are all dust, and unto dust we shall return; the only difference between those with a smudge and those without is that we know it, and know that God will raise up that dust on the last day.
By all means keep your exceptional penances under wraps; we are asked to do that, and that was what Jesus was getting at; the observances he mentions were optional ones, which should have been done in secret. But not the observances laid down by the church – let people see our faithfulness, such as it is; it is not ours, but that of the church.
But there’s one thing that Jesus recommends which we should keep to scrupulously. I’m not suggesting that we should all dance out of church today singing the forbidden A-word. But don’t forget that we are saved, that our repentance and penance, through the sufferings and merits of Jesus himself, are all fruitful, for ourselves and for the whole world; and let us look forward with all spiritual longing, as St Benedict says, to the holy feast of Easter.
Yearly I am struck by the irony – which I am sure has not escaped you either – that on the only day of the year on which our Christian observance shows – when we go out into the streets with a large sooty smudge on our foreheads and trickling down our noses – we have the Gospel passage in which Jesus tells us most insistently and most severely that our observance should not show. I know there are ostentatious people around today, and I suppose there are even people who are ostentatious about their Christianity. There are indeed those who are pushy about their moral stance, and you do get the odd noisy procession or celebration, but on the whole we – especially we Anglicans – prefer to hide in our pews and keep a stony face, and sing and respond as unobtrusively as possible. We like to give our contributions to the collection in those little envelopes so that no-one can see what we are giving; I have derived a certain amount of innocent amusement from watching the various methods of discreet giving. There is the careless toss: the coin (this does not work with notes) flies rapidly from the fingers and disappears quickly among its fellows. There is the protective crouch: the hand, containing the donation, descends into the collection basket and crouches, crablike, over its contents as they release the offering into the heap. There is the nervous stab: in which the thumb and forefinger insert the coin violently, as into a slot machine, into the contents of the basket, burying forcefully. This too, is dicey with notes, except in an unusually generous congregation. And then there is the furtive plonk, in which the donor glances almost fearfully at almost any point in the church, thus distracting attention from the donation, which is placed rapidly down as if both money and basket were red hot. Sometimes I feel I should like to see some shameless person hold up a £50 note, raise a horn to their lips, play a quick fanfare and place the note reverently (on its own little silver salver) upon the heap of fifty pees and pound coins.
We need a touch of ostentation, a touch of shamelessness, a touch of chutzpah, in this area, to counterbalance the vast weight of it elsewhere. I am not just talking about the collection; in fact, I am not really talking about the collection at all. I have spoken before about the absurdity of attempting to show one’s own humility and devotion to holy poverty by denying glory and richness to the house of God. I would like to see, among so many people who, by their actions as well as by their words, declare ostentatiously “I matter”, a few who will equally ostentatiously declare “God matters”.
God matters, God’s church matters, God’s servants matter. Of course I matter; but that is, frankly, only because I matter to God, because in some way I am part of God’s glory. “The glory of God is a living human being”. Of course it matters that I become a complete and actualised human being, and fully myself; but it only matters because I am part of God’s creation, a unique part (as are all the other parts) and the perfection of God’s creation and God’s plan for his creatures matter. And, incidentally, nothing else does.
I acknowledge that it is hard to tell the difference, sometimes, between a person who is showing himself off and a person who is showing God off. It is difficult sometimes even to tell the difference within oneself. But, firstly, the difficulty in distinguishing does not mean that there is no distinction, or that nobody in fact shows off God; and secondly it is not necessary, as it is most likely not possible, to have completely pure motives. I think that if I make it clear that God matters, that God matters primarily and uniquely, it is a small price to pay that I am drawing attention to myself. I do not mind if I am criticised for standing in a pulpit and holding forth; just as I did not mind, in my hermit days, if I was criticised for wearing a monastic habit, for presenting myself as “holy”. Nobody criticises a police officer for drawing attention to herself and presenting herself as “virtuous, law-abiding and courageous” or a doctor for presenting himself as “intelligent, hard-working and caring”. How you perceive a doctor, a police officer, a nun or a preacher, and whether or not you feel resentment or jealousy, is your baggage and not mine. I am not presenting myself as a professional – much less a successful – seeker of God; I am simply saying that God is worth seeking.
I am sorry if all you can see is a woman standing in a pulpit and holding forth with her own opinions. What I want you to see is the overwhelming importance of God. I acknowledge that I am a sinner and that my motives are mixed; but I am doing, from that point of view, the best that I can. I am acting out, in a manner approved by the church, my conviction that God is what matters. On Ash Wednesday we act out, in the manner approved by the church, the fact that we are sinners, yes, but above all that God made us out of the dust of the earth and that we would not exist at all were it not for God; that we have no existence apart from God and independent of God, nor would we want to. In addition, by marking in this way the beginning of our forty days of penance we proclaim that Christ became human for us, was tempted in the desert for forty days, gave us the new law, led us out of slavery, and lay forty hours in the tomb. None of that, surely, should make us seem to be glorying in ourselves? We may, I should have thought glory in the Cross of Christ without being accused of self-ostentation.
People forget – and the Pharisees criticised by Jesus forgot – that if we do penance it is for a reason and that reason is that we are sinners and belong to a sinful race. It does not show that we are holy it just shows that our sins are sufficiently flagrant to have come to our notice. Religious observance is so rare nowadays that people tend to think that simply by taking part in it we are presenting ourselves as somehow superior beings. It reminds me of the frequent reaction when I entered the monastery and, more so, when I became a hermit. I was widely accused of thinking I was holier and better than everyone else. What a strange idea. On the contrary. In the Eastern tradition it is assumed that one becomes a monk in order to repent of one’s sins, and a hermit because one’s sins are such that they need more intensive repentance and reparation. The hermit who goes into solitude because he thinks he’s holy won’t last unless he undergoes a major change of heart: there are a few amusing stories to that effect in the Lives of the Desert Fathers.
So please don’t be intimidated by those who think you are showing your holiness off together with the sooty smudge on your forehead. Remember that you are approaching as near as we ever do nowadays to covering yourself in sackcloth and ashes, and that you are doing penance for your sins. We are all dust, and unto dust we shall return; the only difference between those with a smudge and those without is that we know it, and know that God will raise up that dust on the last day.
By all means keep your exceptional penances under wraps; we are asked to do that, and that was what Jesus was getting at; the observances he mentions were optional ones, which should have been done in secret. But not the observances laid down by the church – let people see our faithfulness, such as it is; it is not ours, but that of the church.
But there’s one thing that Jesus recommends which we should keep to scrupulously. I’m not suggesting that we should all dance out of church today singing the forbidden A-word. But don’t forget that we are saved, that our repentance and penance, through the sufferings and merits of Jesus himself, are all fruitful, for ourselves and for the whole world; and let us look forward with all spiritual longing, as St Benedict says, to the holy feast of Easter.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Capis unum captus ab uno
“Jesus Christ, whom having not seen ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”
I have known people of whom this is transparently true. My father had, shall we say, an ambivalent attitude towards the Church. He did not like being limited, being constrained, being dictated to (oh yes, I’m his daughter!). He would have found life very much easier had he been without religion. He tried. He tried hard. He didn’t set foot in a church for twenty years. He called himself an atheist, while writing passionate poetry to, and about, Christ and his apostles. He was finally forced back into the Church when, as he said, “they tried to take the beauty away”; and he fought with his characteristic mix of ferocity and gentleness for the rest of his life for the return of that beauty.
Well, not everyone has the same opinion about the effects of the Second Vatican Council and the new rite of the Roman Mass. A reasonable comparison for us might be the difference between the Book of Common Prayer and the Alternative Service Book. The latter is more easily “understanded of the people”, undoubtedly; more accessible, maybe; but, I think, less beautiful. And for many people like my father, people who are captivated by the beauty of Christ, totally unsatisfying. One of the last things he said to me was “I would have really liked to be an atheist. But…I love Christ too much”.
St Bruno, the founder of the Carthusian order, was another person like that. His epitaph, which suits him down to the ground, is almost untranslatable. For the Latinists among you (I am sure there are some) it is: Sic Pater o Bruno, capis Unum captus ab Uno. The nearest I can (clumsily) get to it is: “At last, O Father Bruno, you possess the One by whom you were possessed”.
St Paul too. He was totally possessed by Christ, possessed in both senses. He was entirely Christ’s own, which does not mean all his faults and weaknesses were wiped out, as he knew only too well. But in the other sense too: I doubt if he ever thought of anything else but bringing people to Christ, because he knew that that was the only thing that mattered. He was captivated; he was – there is really no other way of putting it – in love. And it was love at first sight, life-changing and permanent. Love unto death.
How about you? Now I am not trying to make you feel guilty, in the old-fashioned way – “If you REALLY loved God, if you REALLY had faith, if you REALLY prayed…” We’ve all been damaged to some extent by that one. But the feeling of these things is a gift, and to some extent either you have it or you have not, rather as you are either musical or you are not. I’m just wondering. What is it that keeps you coming to church, or that brought you in here today?
I suggest that, unless it is sheer habit, you too are motivated by the love of God, even if you are not as acutely aware of it as St Bruno or St Paul – or my father.
I think I see some of you muttering, “Well, convince me. Convince me that I love God.”
We need to look for a moment at what the word “love” means. People who have come through difficult times in a marriage, to find that the bond is stronger than ever, or parents who have continued to love a child who has fallen into bad company, perhaps into addiction or crime, have in my opinion, a good notion of what love is. Love is the thing that is still there when you no longer feel love. Love is the thing that keeps you trusting when your reason tells you there is nothing left and you might just as well cut your losses and run. Love of God, for most of us, is what keeps us defining ourselves as Christians and keeps us coming to church when it is patently obvious that there is no God. I think it is what keeps those Christian writers who appear no longer to believe anything that is recognisably Christian indefatigably continuing to define themselves as Christians. They would prefer to be atheists…but they love Christ too much. Love, real love, is the thing that you don’t feel, and yet you act upon.
It’s a bit like courage, really. Acting bravely when you are not afraid is not courage. Courage is, in the hackneyed but useful phrase, feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
We are told that “there is no room for fear in love. We love because God loved us first.” Being what we are, even that can make us feel guilty and doubtful. Do I really love God if I am still afraid – of so many things, including my meeting with him after my death? Yes, you do. It is only perfect love that casts out all fear, and I don’t know anyone who has got there. All fear is cast out when we love as we are loved, and that will not happen until we know as we are known. To misquote, we love now as in a mirror, dimly; but then face to face.
Yes, of course, sometimes we do feel love of God, or fervour, and we do, to our own surprise, sometimes find ourselves praying spontaneously, or really meaning it when we say we are Christians. But, as I said, these things are gifts. They are not, for most of us, the normal state, and they are not the bread and butter of our life with God. God is spirit, and for flesh to love spirit - which is what is happening when we feel these things – it requires a special dispensation, a small miracle, if you like. Miracles do happen – oh yes, they do – but they are not the basis of everyday life for most of us. Loving in spirit and in truth is the real thing, the everyday thing, which for most of us will simply keep us coming to church, attempting to keep the commandments, and being, as far as we can, good and faithful servants. Some of us - we don’t know who until it happens - will one day realise, perhaps with incredulity, that when we are called to make a stand, perhaps even give our life, for God, we are ready for it. Reluctant maybe, terrified perhaps, but our love, whatever that unfelt thing is, carries us through.
There’s a splendid prayer in the prayer corner over there, written – or prayed – by Harry Williams. It may shock some of you and I’m sorry if it does, because in my opinion it is a nearly perfect expression of selfless love of God. He sits before God, completely honest, completely human, completely transparent and guileless, and completely loving, and prays thus:
O God, I am hellishly angry; I think so and so is a swine; I am tortured by worry about this or that; I am pretty certain that I have missed my chances in life; this or that has left me feeling terribly depressed. But nonetheless, here I am like this, feeling both bloody and bloody minded, and I am going to stay here for ten minutes. You are unlikely to give me anything, I know that. But I am going to stay here for ten minutes nonetheless.
If you really want to exercise and prove your love of God, go and do likewise. And may the joy unspeakable and full of glory of which St Peter speaks be yours now and always.
I have known people of whom this is transparently true. My father had, shall we say, an ambivalent attitude towards the Church. He did not like being limited, being constrained, being dictated to (oh yes, I’m his daughter!). He would have found life very much easier had he been without religion. He tried. He tried hard. He didn’t set foot in a church for twenty years. He called himself an atheist, while writing passionate poetry to, and about, Christ and his apostles. He was finally forced back into the Church when, as he said, “they tried to take the beauty away”; and he fought with his characteristic mix of ferocity and gentleness for the rest of his life for the return of that beauty.
Well, not everyone has the same opinion about the effects of the Second Vatican Council and the new rite of the Roman Mass. A reasonable comparison for us might be the difference between the Book of Common Prayer and the Alternative Service Book. The latter is more easily “understanded of the people”, undoubtedly; more accessible, maybe; but, I think, less beautiful. And for many people like my father, people who are captivated by the beauty of Christ, totally unsatisfying. One of the last things he said to me was “I would have really liked to be an atheist. But…I love Christ too much”.
St Bruno, the founder of the Carthusian order, was another person like that. His epitaph, which suits him down to the ground, is almost untranslatable. For the Latinists among you (I am sure there are some) it is: Sic Pater o Bruno, capis Unum captus ab Uno. The nearest I can (clumsily) get to it is: “At last, O Father Bruno, you possess the One by whom you were possessed”.
St Paul too. He was totally possessed by Christ, possessed in both senses. He was entirely Christ’s own, which does not mean all his faults and weaknesses were wiped out, as he knew only too well. But in the other sense too: I doubt if he ever thought of anything else but bringing people to Christ, because he knew that that was the only thing that mattered. He was captivated; he was – there is really no other way of putting it – in love. And it was love at first sight, life-changing and permanent. Love unto death.
How about you? Now I am not trying to make you feel guilty, in the old-fashioned way – “If you REALLY loved God, if you REALLY had faith, if you REALLY prayed…” We’ve all been damaged to some extent by that one. But the feeling of these things is a gift, and to some extent either you have it or you have not, rather as you are either musical or you are not. I’m just wondering. What is it that keeps you coming to church, or that brought you in here today?
I suggest that, unless it is sheer habit, you too are motivated by the love of God, even if you are not as acutely aware of it as St Bruno or St Paul – or my father.
I think I see some of you muttering, “Well, convince me. Convince me that I love God.”
We need to look for a moment at what the word “love” means. People who have come through difficult times in a marriage, to find that the bond is stronger than ever, or parents who have continued to love a child who has fallen into bad company, perhaps into addiction or crime, have in my opinion, a good notion of what love is. Love is the thing that is still there when you no longer feel love. Love is the thing that keeps you trusting when your reason tells you there is nothing left and you might just as well cut your losses and run. Love of God, for most of us, is what keeps us defining ourselves as Christians and keeps us coming to church when it is patently obvious that there is no God. I think it is what keeps those Christian writers who appear no longer to believe anything that is recognisably Christian indefatigably continuing to define themselves as Christians. They would prefer to be atheists…but they love Christ too much. Love, real love, is the thing that you don’t feel, and yet you act upon.
It’s a bit like courage, really. Acting bravely when you are not afraid is not courage. Courage is, in the hackneyed but useful phrase, feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
We are told that “there is no room for fear in love. We love because God loved us first.” Being what we are, even that can make us feel guilty and doubtful. Do I really love God if I am still afraid – of so many things, including my meeting with him after my death? Yes, you do. It is only perfect love that casts out all fear, and I don’t know anyone who has got there. All fear is cast out when we love as we are loved, and that will not happen until we know as we are known. To misquote, we love now as in a mirror, dimly; but then face to face.
Yes, of course, sometimes we do feel love of God, or fervour, and we do, to our own surprise, sometimes find ourselves praying spontaneously, or really meaning it when we say we are Christians. But, as I said, these things are gifts. They are not, for most of us, the normal state, and they are not the bread and butter of our life with God. God is spirit, and for flesh to love spirit - which is what is happening when we feel these things – it requires a special dispensation, a small miracle, if you like. Miracles do happen – oh yes, they do – but they are not the basis of everyday life for most of us. Loving in spirit and in truth is the real thing, the everyday thing, which for most of us will simply keep us coming to church, attempting to keep the commandments, and being, as far as we can, good and faithful servants. Some of us - we don’t know who until it happens - will one day realise, perhaps with incredulity, that when we are called to make a stand, perhaps even give our life, for God, we are ready for it. Reluctant maybe, terrified perhaps, but our love, whatever that unfelt thing is, carries us through.
There’s a splendid prayer in the prayer corner over there, written – or prayed – by Harry Williams. It may shock some of you and I’m sorry if it does, because in my opinion it is a nearly perfect expression of selfless love of God. He sits before God, completely honest, completely human, completely transparent and guileless, and completely loving, and prays thus:
O God, I am hellishly angry; I think so and so is a swine; I am tortured by worry about this or that; I am pretty certain that I have missed my chances in life; this or that has left me feeling terribly depressed. But nonetheless, here I am like this, feeling both bloody and bloody minded, and I am going to stay here for ten minutes. You are unlikely to give me anything, I know that. But I am going to stay here for ten minutes nonetheless.
If you really want to exercise and prove your love of God, go and do likewise. And may the joy unspeakable and full of glory of which St Peter speaks be yours now and always.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief
Sermon 15 February 2009
2Kings 5:1-14, 1 Cor 9:24-27, Mark 1:40-45
“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities, and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted…and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all…For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken.”
Today’s readings very definitely want us to think about leprosy. It isn’t a pleasant thing to think about, even for those of us who have never to their knowledge seen a leper and are in no danger of catching the disease themselves. But given the fact that we are so used to the Cross that it leaves most of us unmoved, it is no bad thing to think about something which is still painful to us, in connection with the Lord. But leprosy? In connection with the Christ? Why not? The idea dates back to the Isaiah passage I have just quoted, although most versions – the Douay version is an exception – do not use the word itself. The Douay has “We have thought him as it were a leper” for “We considered him stricken by God”; and the phrase “One from whom men hide their faces” is simply a euphemism for a leper.
I don’t suppose many people now remember the novel “Christ Recrucified”, but it was much read and discussed some forty years ago. I must have been thirteen at the most when I read it, and I remember very little about it, except that the hero Manolios (Emmanuel), the “Christ” of the title, was suffering from a mysterious disfiguring disease – not leprosy, but something very like it – and this was one of the reasons why he was persecuted. Indeed, the only reason I now remember. That idea, and its connection with Christ himself, has remained with me ever since.
I’ve often thought, in this connection, of the way in which Jesus dealt with lepers. It is striking that he never touched the possessed – or not until he had cast out the demon – but touching was his normal response to the sick, and his normal way of healing them, including the lepers. He did not hesitate to do what would not only have put him, in the view of the time, at great risk of contracting leprosy himself, but would have also made him ritually unclean. It’s obvious that he didn’t care much about ritual uncleanness, but didn’t he care about the risk of leprosy? I’m not one of those who believe that Jesus, being God, had a perfect knowledge of all arts and sciences, and so would have known, as we do today, that leprosy is in fact not very contagious. He would have had the same belief as everyone else, and no doubt the same instinctive horror of leprosy and lepers. And, I think, more so, because he knew who he was and he knew Isaiah. Just as I’m sure he thought of Nebuchadnezzar and his madness while he was himself in the wilderness with the wild beasts and was wet with the dews of heaven, and may have consciously accepted the possibility that madness, at least temporary madness, might be the will of the Father for him too (and did he not feel that also in Gethsemane?) just so he may have lived consciously with the possibility that Isaiah’s prophecy might be fulfilled literally.
He certainly did nothing to avoid it. That doesn’t just show that he was an extremely courageous and selfless man – though he was – and it has nothing in common with the heroics, admirable though they are, of Francis of Assisi or Catherine of Siena. It was simply a total openness to the will of the Father. Jesus had a human nature like ours: there were things from which he shrank, and things he preferred to other things. But he never protected himself against any thing unless he knew it to be contrary to the Father’s will for him. He did know it was contrary to the Father’s will for him to be thrown off the cliff at Nazareth or stoned in the Temple. And as his consummation approached, its nature became ever clearer to him until the point at which he saw it as clearly as if it had already taken place, though even at that point his openness to the Father’s will received its final proof. And it was then, in Gethsemane, that he understood Isaiah’s prophecy. Because his treatment of lepers, his willingness to lay himself open to leprosy, even, perhaps, a sense that it might be decreed for him, was in a deep sense an entirely sound instinct: no, he was not to contract physical leprosy, but at the time when he was most the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief, he was to experience the most terrible form of leprosy as belonging to him, as forming part of his being.
Because physical leprosy is no more than the shadow of sin, though not in the sense that it follows upon sin, but in the sense that there is a natural connection of thought between them. Leprosy is the epitome of physical loathsomeness and sin is spiritual loathsomeness. The real fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy was when the Lord was faced with that loathsomeness not outside him – which was bad enough – but as it were within him, as it were a disease of his own spiritual organism, as if he, like the rest of us, carried within himself the seedbed of sin, the fomes peccati as Thomas Aquinas calls it. He was a horror to himself and must have felt that he was a horror to all the righteous, not to speak of his heavenly Father.
I make no apology for leaving the greater part of the rest of this sermon to John Henry Newman, who not only understood this, but could express it with a force which we of the twenty-first century have lost.
“There, then, in that most awful hour knelt the Saviour of the world, baring His breast, sinless as He was, to the assault of his foe – a foe whose breath was a pestilence and whose embrace was an agony. Here He knelt, while the fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime, which clung close round His heart, and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of His mind and spread over Him like a moral leprosy, till He almost felt Himself to be that which He could never be…He looked, and did not know Himself, and felt as a foul and loathsome sinner…He found His eyes, feet and lips, and heart, as if the members of the Evil One and not of God!...Of the living and the dead, of the yet unborn, of the lost and the saved…all the sins are there…They are upon Him, they are all but His own; He cries to the Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim; His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition, with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints and penitents together; for He is the one Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, all but the real sinner.”
The Synoptic Gospels call the wonders that Jesus did “miracles”; St John calls them “signs”, and he is right, for so they were. And I think that one of the most fundamental signs is his healing lepers by laying himself open to contracting the disease – for that, precisely, is what he came to do for our souls.
2Kings 5:1-14, 1 Cor 9:24-27, Mark 1:40-45
“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities, and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted…and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all…For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken.”
Today’s readings very definitely want us to think about leprosy. It isn’t a pleasant thing to think about, even for those of us who have never to their knowledge seen a leper and are in no danger of catching the disease themselves. But given the fact that we are so used to the Cross that it leaves most of us unmoved, it is no bad thing to think about something which is still painful to us, in connection with the Lord. But leprosy? In connection with the Christ? Why not? The idea dates back to the Isaiah passage I have just quoted, although most versions – the Douay version is an exception – do not use the word itself. The Douay has “We have thought him as it were a leper” for “We considered him stricken by God”; and the phrase “One from whom men hide their faces” is simply a euphemism for a leper.
I don’t suppose many people now remember the novel “Christ Recrucified”, but it was much read and discussed some forty years ago. I must have been thirteen at the most when I read it, and I remember very little about it, except that the hero Manolios (Emmanuel), the “Christ” of the title, was suffering from a mysterious disfiguring disease – not leprosy, but something very like it – and this was one of the reasons why he was persecuted. Indeed, the only reason I now remember. That idea, and its connection with Christ himself, has remained with me ever since.
I’ve often thought, in this connection, of the way in which Jesus dealt with lepers. It is striking that he never touched the possessed – or not until he had cast out the demon – but touching was his normal response to the sick, and his normal way of healing them, including the lepers. He did not hesitate to do what would not only have put him, in the view of the time, at great risk of contracting leprosy himself, but would have also made him ritually unclean. It’s obvious that he didn’t care much about ritual uncleanness, but didn’t he care about the risk of leprosy? I’m not one of those who believe that Jesus, being God, had a perfect knowledge of all arts and sciences, and so would have known, as we do today, that leprosy is in fact not very contagious. He would have had the same belief as everyone else, and no doubt the same instinctive horror of leprosy and lepers. And, I think, more so, because he knew who he was and he knew Isaiah. Just as I’m sure he thought of Nebuchadnezzar and his madness while he was himself in the wilderness with the wild beasts and was wet with the dews of heaven, and may have consciously accepted the possibility that madness, at least temporary madness, might be the will of the Father for him too (and did he not feel that also in Gethsemane?) just so he may have lived consciously with the possibility that Isaiah’s prophecy might be fulfilled literally.
He certainly did nothing to avoid it. That doesn’t just show that he was an extremely courageous and selfless man – though he was – and it has nothing in common with the heroics, admirable though they are, of Francis of Assisi or Catherine of Siena. It was simply a total openness to the will of the Father. Jesus had a human nature like ours: there were things from which he shrank, and things he preferred to other things. But he never protected himself against any thing unless he knew it to be contrary to the Father’s will for him. He did know it was contrary to the Father’s will for him to be thrown off the cliff at Nazareth or stoned in the Temple. And as his consummation approached, its nature became ever clearer to him until the point at which he saw it as clearly as if it had already taken place, though even at that point his openness to the Father’s will received its final proof. And it was then, in Gethsemane, that he understood Isaiah’s prophecy. Because his treatment of lepers, his willingness to lay himself open to leprosy, even, perhaps, a sense that it might be decreed for him, was in a deep sense an entirely sound instinct: no, he was not to contract physical leprosy, but at the time when he was most the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief, he was to experience the most terrible form of leprosy as belonging to him, as forming part of his being.
Because physical leprosy is no more than the shadow of sin, though not in the sense that it follows upon sin, but in the sense that there is a natural connection of thought between them. Leprosy is the epitome of physical loathsomeness and sin is spiritual loathsomeness. The real fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy was when the Lord was faced with that loathsomeness not outside him – which was bad enough – but as it were within him, as it were a disease of his own spiritual organism, as if he, like the rest of us, carried within himself the seedbed of sin, the fomes peccati as Thomas Aquinas calls it. He was a horror to himself and must have felt that he was a horror to all the righteous, not to speak of his heavenly Father.
I make no apology for leaving the greater part of the rest of this sermon to John Henry Newman, who not only understood this, but could express it with a force which we of the twenty-first century have lost.
“There, then, in that most awful hour knelt the Saviour of the world, baring His breast, sinless as He was, to the assault of his foe – a foe whose breath was a pestilence and whose embrace was an agony. Here He knelt, while the fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime, which clung close round His heart, and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of His mind and spread over Him like a moral leprosy, till He almost felt Himself to be that which He could never be…He looked, and did not know Himself, and felt as a foul and loathsome sinner…He found His eyes, feet and lips, and heart, as if the members of the Evil One and not of God!...Of the living and the dead, of the yet unborn, of the lost and the saved…all the sins are there…They are upon Him, they are all but His own; He cries to the Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim; His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition, with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints and penitents together; for He is the one Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, all but the real sinner.”
The Synoptic Gospels call the wonders that Jesus did “miracles”; St John calls them “signs”, and he is right, for so they were. And I think that one of the most fundamental signs is his healing lepers by laying himself open to contracting the disease – for that, precisely, is what he came to do for our souls.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God
When Soren Kierkegaard was asked, late in his writing career, why he had wasted so much of his time and energies in writing novels and other frivolous works, he had - he always had - an answer ready. Throughout his life as a writer, he claimed, his only intention was to bring people to God. That sounds fairly unlikely. How, people asked, could he claim that he had written a novel about a young man falling in love in order to bring people to God? His answer was this: people live on three different spheres – or stages - of existence: the aesthetic stage (unspiritual and basically shallow) the ethical stage, people who are trying to do the right thing, and the religious or faith stage, those whose whole desire is to give their lives to God. You have to catch people where they are, he said; they won’t respond to something in a different sphere from their own. So he wrote his novels to catch the people in the aesthetic stage; the philosophy to catch them in - or move them on to - the ethical stage, and the religious works to complete the job. Well, maybe. But the idea of catching people where they are is hugely important. It is important because it is what we must do, and more important because it is what God does.
When we read the Old Testament there is always a problem lurking in the background: God's - and Israel's - relationship with the other nations.. and, non-Christians would say, we are as bad. We think we are God's chosen people, we are Right, we have the monopoly of truth.
Why, anyway, should God have to “choose”? Why Abel not Cain, why Shem not Ham or Japheth, why Isaac not Ishmael, why Abraham, why David, why Jacob...why Israel…why Christians?
Er...why anyone?
Why anyone? The astonishing thing, the wonderful thing - and I mean wonder-full - is that God chooses anyone. The more wonder-full thing is that God chooses everyone, every one, each one, all and singular.
You have to take people where they are, and the twin ideas that God chooses each person as if they were the only person in the world and that God does not choose a person because they are righteous but because they are loved, are extremely difficult ones. We find them difficult, and we should be used to them by now. At the beginning of God's dealings with humankind they would have been quite impossible to grasp.
You see that with children; as they discover that either they have the toy or their sister has it, or either they are top of the class or Freddy is. It's him or me. and later this is reinforced over and over again; in school, at university, in the workplace and in social life.
If you are unsuccessful in all this competition, if it's never you who gets the gold star, the bicycle, the first-class degree or the girlfriend, then you are going to conclude that you are a failure, unloved and unlovable, not worthy of being chosen.
But if you are successful you will conclude the opposite. and that is a good start, even if at that point you still assume that your success means another's failure.
In the ordinary life of the world, the usual way to discover your worth is to discover that you have been preferred to another. In God's world it is not like that, but God's thoughts are not our thoughts. It's a wise woman who can experience failure and know that it makes no difference whatsoever to God's love for her, to God's choice of her.
So I come back to my original point: catching people where they are. Perhaps, in order to get across to humankind that they are a beloved and chosen race without doing violence to their free will, God had to - shall we say - rather do violence to his own nature as Love; First he had to get into their heads the idea that there should be anyone who is chosen and beloved by God. First an individual. Then a tribe. Then twelve tribes and then all who adhered to the faith of Israel.
Slowly, slowly, a small part of humankind began to understand just how great was God's love. “You are my people, I am your God.” Had he said straight off “I am everyone's God” it would have sounded like indifference rather than the universal love that it in fact is. It was not until Israel had really got it firmly into their head that they were first in God's heart that God could take the next step; he sent his son. The one who really was first in the Father's heart. To show us all, not just Israel, that incredibly - incredibly - in some way God is not enough to fill God's heart. To show us that in the infinite God an all-consuming love for one does not mean a lesser love for another.
You know, we still haven't grasped it, and the way non-Christians react to us shows that with horrible clarity. How many times will we have to be told that God hates nothing that he has made and does not wish the loss of any person? How many times will we have to be told that God does not choose anyone because they are already somehow worthy of his love? Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be. “I did not choose you because you were the greatest nation but because you were the smallest”. “You are the smallest of all the towns of Israel, Bethlehem Ephrata…” “When we were yet without strength…Christ died for the ungodly…God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.”
As Kierkegaard suggests, God takes us where we are. While we were yet sinners Christ died for us; he came not for the righteous but for sinners; he died for the ungodly. He did not say: “First become righteous and then I will do my stuff”.
and now we need to do what God does. Maybe Christianity has taken a step further than Israel. Maybe we do accept that anyone can find salvation. We are right to refer to ourselves as the Catholic church; Christianity should be truly catholic. But we are still in the business of exclusion, and people undoubtedly feel excluded by us. We all have people or classes of people we exclude, even if it's only “people who are still in the aesthetic stage”. But that won't do. If they are “without God in the world” that is not because God has rejected them; but simply because they do not see the world as charged with his grandeur. We may find them unlovely, but God does not. Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.
So let's get this straight. We are indeed God's chosen people. We do indeed have the gift of knowing his only-begotten Son. But that's not because we've Got It Right, or are particularly lovable or particularly clever. We have been given a gift: we know ourselves to be fellow-citizens of the saints and members of the household of God, and the correct response to that gift is twofold: wonder, and the desire to share it. With everyone, every one, each one, all and singular. and we must take them where they are, not demanding more of them than God demanded of us. He died for us while we were yet sinners. can anything we do compare with that? and so let us pray:
Almighty and ever-living God, we most heartily thank thee, that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom, by the merits of the most precious death and passion of thy dear Son...to whom, with the Father, in the Spirit, be honour and glory in time and eternity. Amen.
When we read the Old Testament there is always a problem lurking in the background: God's - and Israel's - relationship with the other nations.. and, non-Christians would say, we are as bad. We think we are God's chosen people, we are Right, we have the monopoly of truth.
Why, anyway, should God have to “choose”? Why Abel not Cain, why Shem not Ham or Japheth, why Isaac not Ishmael, why Abraham, why David, why Jacob...why Israel…why Christians?
Er...why anyone?
Why anyone? The astonishing thing, the wonderful thing - and I mean wonder-full - is that God chooses anyone. The more wonder-full thing is that God chooses everyone, every one, each one, all and singular.
You have to take people where they are, and the twin ideas that God chooses each person as if they were the only person in the world and that God does not choose a person because they are righteous but because they are loved, are extremely difficult ones. We find them difficult, and we should be used to them by now. At the beginning of God's dealings with humankind they would have been quite impossible to grasp.
You see that with children; as they discover that either they have the toy or their sister has it, or either they are top of the class or Freddy is. It's him or me. and later this is reinforced over and over again; in school, at university, in the workplace and in social life.
If you are unsuccessful in all this competition, if it's never you who gets the gold star, the bicycle, the first-class degree or the girlfriend, then you are going to conclude that you are a failure, unloved and unlovable, not worthy of being chosen.
But if you are successful you will conclude the opposite. and that is a good start, even if at that point you still assume that your success means another's failure.
In the ordinary life of the world, the usual way to discover your worth is to discover that you have been preferred to another. In God's world it is not like that, but God's thoughts are not our thoughts. It's a wise woman who can experience failure and know that it makes no difference whatsoever to God's love for her, to God's choice of her.
So I come back to my original point: catching people where they are. Perhaps, in order to get across to humankind that they are a beloved and chosen race without doing violence to their free will, God had to - shall we say - rather do violence to his own nature as Love; First he had to get into their heads the idea that there should be anyone who is chosen and beloved by God. First an individual. Then a tribe. Then twelve tribes and then all who adhered to the faith of Israel.
Slowly, slowly, a small part of humankind began to understand just how great was God's love. “You are my people, I am your God.” Had he said straight off “I am everyone's God” it would have sounded like indifference rather than the universal love that it in fact is. It was not until Israel had really got it firmly into their head that they were first in God's heart that God could take the next step; he sent his son. The one who really was first in the Father's heart. To show us all, not just Israel, that incredibly - incredibly - in some way God is not enough to fill God's heart. To show us that in the infinite God an all-consuming love for one does not mean a lesser love for another.
You know, we still haven't grasped it, and the way non-Christians react to us shows that with horrible clarity. How many times will we have to be told that God hates nothing that he has made and does not wish the loss of any person? How many times will we have to be told that God does not choose anyone because they are already somehow worthy of his love? Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be. “I did not choose you because you were the greatest nation but because you were the smallest”. “You are the smallest of all the towns of Israel, Bethlehem Ephrata…” “When we were yet without strength…Christ died for the ungodly…God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.”
As Kierkegaard suggests, God takes us where we are. While we were yet sinners Christ died for us; he came not for the righteous but for sinners; he died for the ungodly. He did not say: “First become righteous and then I will do my stuff”.
and now we need to do what God does. Maybe Christianity has taken a step further than Israel. Maybe we do accept that anyone can find salvation. We are right to refer to ourselves as the Catholic church; Christianity should be truly catholic. But we are still in the business of exclusion, and people undoubtedly feel excluded by us. We all have people or classes of people we exclude, even if it's only “people who are still in the aesthetic stage”. But that won't do. If they are “without God in the world” that is not because God has rejected them; but simply because they do not see the world as charged with his grandeur. We may find them unlovely, but God does not. Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.
So let's get this straight. We are indeed God's chosen people. We do indeed have the gift of knowing his only-begotten Son. But that's not because we've Got It Right, or are particularly lovable or particularly clever. We have been given a gift: we know ourselves to be fellow-citizens of the saints and members of the household of God, and the correct response to that gift is twofold: wonder, and the desire to share it. With everyone, every one, each one, all and singular. and we must take them where they are, not demanding more of them than God demanded of us. He died for us while we were yet sinners. can anything we do compare with that? and so let us pray:
Almighty and ever-living God, we most heartily thank thee, that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom, by the merits of the most precious death and passion of thy dear Son...to whom, with the Father, in the Spirit, be honour and glory in time and eternity. Amen.
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