L'Envoi

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

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

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

What canst thou say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God's Postie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sub pennas eius sperabis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gloria Dei vivens homo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oldie but goodie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen! Even so come, Lord Jesus!

Sapientia Dei, cum sit una, omnia potest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Santa Lucia, ora pro nobis!

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.