Homily at Mass, Tuesday 17 January 2012

Mark 2:23-28

What is the Sabbath about? It is a memorial, in the formal and Biblical sense – that is, it is something which makes God’s action present and effective, just as in the Mass we “make the memorial of Christ your Son our Lord”. The Sabbath is a memorial of three things:

(i)                       God completing the work of creation, and seeing that it is good, and resting.

(ii)                 The liberation from Egypt

(iii)               The covenant of Sinai, where it is enjoined as a commandment.

What runs through these things is a principle of festivity. The goodness of creation is to be celebrated. God’s work in human history to restore the right ordering of creation – as in the liberation of slaves from Egypt – is also to be celebrated. The commandment to observe the Sabbath day is about festivity – the interruption of normal work so that creation can be enjoyed. So that we can pause and join in God’s act of seeing that creation is good.

So Jesus teaches and heals on the Sabbath, and even permits ordinary activities such as eating corn, because, on the Sabbath, these are acts of festivity. In such moments of festivity we see God completing his work and seeing that it is good. We in fact participate by grace in that one Divine act of completion, and seeing, and goodness. Meister Eckhart once said, “The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me”. Human existence, within God’s creation, is ordered towards the beatific vision, seeing God and seeing as God sees, in which blessedness consists. The purpose of festivity, as part of the rhythm of creation, is to help train our eye to that vision.

But to focus on mere external observance is not to see. So the Pharisees, dramatic characters who crystallise the opposition to the early Church community, object that what Jesus and his disciples do is forbidden. They don’t see what Jesus sees.

And Jesus responds by asking if they have not read the scriptures, and gives them a story about David and his followers entering the temple and eating the loaves of offering.

Now the intriguing thing about this is that the story Jesus tells isn’t in the Bible quite as Jesus tells it. The reference is to 1 Samuel 21 1-6, but in 1 Samuel the name of the priest is different, David is alone and not described as hungry, and although he takes the bread he doesn’t eat it.

In re-telling this story to emphasise the point perhaps Jesus is saying that if the Pharisees had really read the scriptures they would have seen the underlying meaning beyond the outward observance. They would have seen that creation is good and ordered towards human goodness and flourishing, because that is how God sees it.

For us too, because we are part of the same creation, festivity is vital. For Christians the observance of the Sabbath has been subsumed into Sunday, the Lord’s day, the day of resurrection. Beyond the seventh day of rest, when Jesus lay in the tomb, there is the eighth day, the day outside time, the day of eternity, which Jesus entered through the resurrection. In that day all is compassed by the vision of God and all is very good.

Our times of festivity, of pause and interruption, and most especially our celebration of the Sunday Eucharist, make present and effective that vision of God which restores and re-orders the right relationship of all creation. Even with the world as frantic and busy as it is, or maybe especially with the world as frantic and busy as it is, it is very important that the Church does not lose the distinctive character of that festive time, the Lord’s own service on the Lord’s own day.

For more on the Eighth Day, see here

Sermon at Parish Mass, Epiphany 2012

Isaiah 60:1-6

Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6

Matthew 2:1-12

In my spare time over Christmas I’ve been reading WH Auden’s long poem, “For the Time Being”, subtitled “A Christmas Oratorio”. He wrote it in America in 1942, while the world was at war, filled with anxiety, uncertain of the future; while the powers which seemed to be controlling events were all too certain of the kind of future they wanted.

Against this background Auden explored the stories of the different characters in the Nativity. All of them, in one way or another, are forced to face the challenge that the Christ Child represents to the certainties and securities of the world they know.

Caesar, Herod and the army that massacred the innocents carry on regardless, rejecting any other way of doing things than the settled order. After all, they had a world order which worked, and kept things stable and controlled. Progress was sure. Everyone knew where they were. A God who presumes to intrude into finite, vulnerable space, being born as a human baby, makes everyone vulnerable. We can’t have that.

The Wise Men respond differently. Auden presents them as sophisticated and intelligent, vastly knowledgeable. Today they could be professors presenting television programmes, or pundits on Newsnight. And the Star summons them to follow, in haunting lines which promise only that they will lose their certainty and sense of direction:

Beware. All those who follow me are led
Onto that Glassy Mountain where are no
Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread
Where knowledge but increases vertigo:
Those who pursue me take a twisting lane
To find themselves immediately alone

The first Wise Man is presented as a scientist, who has tormented nature to get ever more precise answers, pinning down ever more facts. But he realises that truth, in spite of all the facts, has eluded him. For him,

To discover how to be truthful now
Is the reason I follow this star.

The second is a philosopher, whose abstract speculations about existence are undermined when he realises that his theories have all been strategies to avoid the present and the real:

With envy, terror, rage, regret,
We anticipate or remember but never are.
To discover how to be living now
Is the reason I follow this star.

The third, a utilitarian philanthropist, has used his intelligence to study, dispassionately, how to improve the general lot of mankind and achieve the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number, but discovers that he had:

Left no time for affection,
Laughter, kisses, squeezing, smiles:
And I learned why the learned are as despised as they are.
To discover how to be loving now
Is the reason I follow this star.

They conclude in chorus:

At least we know for certain that we are three old sinners,
That this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners,
And miss our wives, our books, our dogs,
But have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are.
To discover how to be human now
Is the reason we follow this star.

Truth, life and love have eluded them. The star points the way. But it is a way which is to seem like darkness and horror and loss, for they must leave behind all they have known. Their journey is the journey into faith. For them, and for Mary, Joseph and the Shepherds, as Auden relates their story, the response of faith means leaving behind all certainty and security.

All of Auden’s characters live in the middle of a brave new world of knowledge and control and order, a world which is continually convincing everyone that it is all that anyone needs. It might be mediocre and dull, it might be sustained by fear, but it is safe. Your identity is defined by your place in the system, so don’t upset the system.

What Auden does is to uncover this as idolatry. Certainty, security, being safe in the system, are attempts to seek the truth of who we are where it is not to be found. It is easy to accept the off-the-peg, ready made false “self” that the world system offers, easier by far than to admit that we do not create ourselves and cannot control our destinies, that our existence is a mystery even to ourselves.

To come to faith is to acknowledge that we are created, and that is scary because it means that our entire existence depends on the will of someone else, the one who has called us into being. But to come to faith is also to come to love.

The revelation of God in the Christ Child shows us that God is love. Perhaps up till now humanity had feared that the First Cause which causes us to be was some terrifying vast cosmic principle, unseeing and unfeeling, or, worse, capricious, anarchic, unjust. Who would venture to draw too close to what might prove to be ultimately horrific? Better not to know. And so the First Cause came to us, came among us, finally touched our world and our lives, in the entirely contingent, and vulnerable, and lovable. In a baby. A baby come to live and die, to show what love is.

When Herod heard that the Child had come, the Gospel tells us, he was perturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. This Child, even before he can speak, disturbs the established order. Love has slipped in under the radar, destabilising the thrones of all the idols that tell us we create ourselves and determine our existence. Love whispers to us that we are loved, that we can let go of our fear and our control and our little mediocre safety zone. Love invites us to love.

But Herod demands that the wise men “find out all about the Child, and when you have found him let me know”. Knowledge is power, isn’t it? Perhaps this so threatening love can be controlled, brought into subjection, sacrificed to the idols of the status quo. Perhaps we can be kept safe from love, if we know enough about it to pin it down.

But love cannot be pinned down, even when love allows himself to be nailed to a cross, allows himself to become the sacrifice the idols demand. For love is both the creator and the redeemer. The resurrection is love triumphant over all our attempts to avoid the truth of our creation.

The idols of control and self determination are as powerful today as they were in the days of Herod. This week in the news we had a group of people called experts saying that terminally ill people should be allowed to ask their doctors to kill them with lethal drugs. And we had Stephen Hawking on the Today Programme insisting that the human race must colonise other planets against the time when this one will become uninhabitable. What are these but denials of the basic truth of our humanity, attempts to flee in terror from the possibility that we are not created in love?

But faith tells us that we are. The journey into faith is the journey in which we leave behind our certainties and securities and all our vain attempts at self creation and self control. But it is the journey in which we discover love. It is the journey in which we discover our true selves in God who loves us. It is the journey in which we discover, finally, how to be human. 

Letter, the Church Times, 6 January 2012

Sir,

Hugh Rayment-Pickard’s criticism of John Milbank’s ecclesiology is insightful. A belief that the Church is the site of the ideal society because it is a group which models the ideal teaching can lead some to think of it a moralistic exclusive club, if the Church is viewed simply as a human construct.

Nevertheless, I wonder whether Dr Rayment-Pickard’s counter-argument does not rely on a false dichotomy between the Kingdom and the Church. It is true that Jesus said a great deal about the Kingdom and not much about the Church. He also did not write any books, or tell anyone else to. But all we know of his teaching comes from the books that were, in fact, written; and all of them were written in, and for, church communities. The New Testament texts, including the Gospels, are unavoidably ecclesial; the teaching of the Kingdom cannot be separated from the Church.

Jesus founded a community of disciples to be both the bearer of the Kingdom message and the place where it starts to manifest in concrete human society. And although Jesus himself did not say much about the Church, the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline epistles have a great deal to say. The imagery of the Body of Christ, a living organism in which Christ recapitulates a renewed humanity, is repeated too often to be ignored. Indeed the Kingdom is God’s initiative in Christ; and the Church is the movement of human society into that Kingdom.  Not perhaps the “site” of the ideal society, as Professor Milbank would have it, but at least where that society is beginning to become real. And not only human society. Salvation, as texts such as Colossians 1:15-20 make clear, is both ecclesial and cosmic. The Orthodox Theologian Vladimir Lossky once said, ““the entire universe is called to enter within the Church… that it may be transformed into the eternal Kingdom of God”[1].

None of this requires that the Church be seen as an exclusive club. Indeed, quite the reverse: an orthodox ecclesiology must be inclusive and generous. The redemption wrought by Christ is, in God’s will, universal, limited only by the extent to which creatures may refuse to participate. We may and should say that the movement into the Kingdom is happening in the visible community of the Church, but we cannot say where it is not happening. The ultimate boundary of the Church, “outside of which there is no salvation”, is stretched as far as the love and generosity of God revealed in Jesus will go. And I believe that is a very long way indeed.

Yours sincerely,

The Revd Matthew Duckett

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[1] V Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, (Fellowship of Ss Alban & Sergius, translators), James Clarke & Co Ltd., 1957, p 113

Sermon, 1 January 2012, St Michael's Camden Town

Numbers 6:22-27

Galatians 4:4-7

Luke 2:16-21

Who can tell me what the following names have in common? Tom Sayers, Father Willis, William Daniell, Joe Slovo, Dylan Thomas, Humphrey Jennings.

They are all commemorated on Blue Plaques in Camden, the plaques which are displayed on certain buildings to record the fact that some notable person was born, or lived, or died there. Now in fact as we walk round Camden we pass many old houses in which, over the years, very many people have been born, or lived, or died. But most of them don’t have Blue Plaques, because most of them aren’t widely known. To get a Blue Plaque, the story of your life has to have some significance in the public memory. The fact that someone was born at a particular place and time is only remembered because of what happened in their lives afterwards.

It’s the same when we read the stories of the birth and infancy of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. These stories are the Blue Plaques of the gospels. They are only there because of what happened afterwards, and we need to remember that when we read them. The baby born in Bethlehem will go on to preach the Kingdom of God, to heal the sick, he will be betrayed and crucified and will be raised from the dead. The meaning of his birth is found in what comes after.

It is important to remember this, because the naming and circumcision of Jesus, which we commemorate today, eight days after Christmas, are in themselves quite ordinary events. All Jewish boys of course were circumcised as a mark of belonging to the people of God’s covenant. And quite a lot of Jewish boys were named “Jesus” or “Yeshua” – Joshua, which becomes Jesus by way of the Greek of the New Testament.

Now the name Jesus, or Yeshua, means “Yahweh saves”. God is a saviour. So the naming of a boy as Jesus expresses the pious hope of Israel that God will save his people. But the naming of this particular child, the Son of Mary, has a greater meaning, because we know from what comes after that this particular child is, himself, the Saviour. This Jesus is not just a pious hope, but is God come to save his people in person.

He is the saviour who will preach the Kingdom of God. He is the saviour, because he will take away the sins of the world. He is the saviour, because he will share our death in order to raise us with him to new and eternal life. He is the Saviour, because he enters the mess of human history and sin and violence, to bring, not condemnation, but forgiveness and the grace to begin again.

As the Queen so splendidly said in her Christmas speech,

God sent into the world a unique person – neither a philosopher nor a general (important though they are) – but a Saviour, with the power to forgive.

Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It can heal broken families, it can restore friendships and it can reconcile divided communities. It is in forgiveness that we feel the power of God’s love.

If we have ever paused to examine ourselves, to look into our hearts, we will know that we need to be forgiven. As part of our common humanity we all have the tendency to prefer ourselves to the other, to turn in on ourselves, to turn away from love. Even if we sincerely strive to be good we know that we are continually wounding ourselves and others in the process. And we are sinned against, too, and the wrongs we suffer can so easily lead to bitterness and resentment and the desire for revenge.

Forgiveness undoes all that. Forgiveness breaks the chains of the past and sets us free. Forgiveness is God’s love breaking in to our unloveliness. And it is God’s gift. God in Jesus frees us from sin by both forgiving us and enabling us to forgive.

Jesus is the saviour. He is God with us; God for us; God on our side. He is the expression of God’s love, which is entirely for us and not against us. He is God showing that he actually wants to be with us in all the mess we’ve made.

The Church, meditating on this, realised very early on that, if Jesus is the Saviour, he must be both fully human and fully Divine. He must be human, because only one who is truly human can really be with us, really identify with us, really make that connection which can save us. But he must also be God, because only God the creator has the power to forgive sin, to set us free and give us a new beginning. So the Saviour must be one indivisible person, who is both human and Divine.

And this gave the Church the other title for today’s feast: Mary, the Mother of God. The Council of Ephesus in 431 decreed that Mary was Theotokos – “God-Bearer”, or “Mother of God”. This was as much a statement about Jesus as it was about Mary.  Jesus is one indivisible person, both God and man, and Mary is his mother; therefore Mary is Mother of God. That is to say, she is the Mother of the Saviour, the Mother of the one who has come into the world, and who can and will save us.

And that is why we read these Christmas stories from the Gospels. They are full of meaning, and hope, and promise, because the Saviour has been born for us. He is Jesus, “Yahweh who saves”. He is our brother, human like us; and he is our God, God with us, God on our side, God come not to condemn, but to forgive.

How appropriate it is that the Church on this day, the first of a new civil year, calls us to meditate on the name of Jesus, the name of God who saves.

New year is a time for resolutions, for new beginnings. But the new beginning that matters most of all is the one that Jesus offers us: forgiveness of all that is past, newness of life, freedom from sin and death.

If you make no other resolution this year, let it be to believe and trust in Jesus the Saviour. Maybe for the first time, or maybe to renew the belief and trust of a lifetime. It matters not. He is born for me, and for you. He is born to save. He is the risen Lord, with us now. He can, and will, change lives, remake us, transform us into his image, that we might live with his life. 

May you know the joy of Jesus, God who saves, in your life, this new year and always.