Sunday, 8 April 2012

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 4 2012

2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23

Ephesians 2:4-10

John 3:14-21

“God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

That is said to be the most famous verse in the Bible; Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms give it in dozens of languages. But it is also one of the most revolutionary texts as well, and perhaps we don’t notice that so much because we are so familiar with it.

The conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in chapter 3 of John’s Gospel is told as part of John’s grand announcement of the person and purpose of Jesus. As Duncan was telling us last week, this began with the great prologue, “In the beginning was the Word”, and continues with the call of the first disciples, the wedding at Cana, and the cleansing of the Temple.

Through all these stories John is telling us that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God. He is the light come into the world, the light of God in whom there is no darkness at all, as the first letter of John says.

What is revolutionary about this is that it undoes the way that humanity has been used to thinking about God from the beginning.

Most ancient cultures seem to have imagined God or the gods as being larger versions of themselves. More powerful, but just as tricky, deceitful and violent. Just pick up any book of Greek or Aztec myths for examples. The gods needed to be bargained with. You had to earn their favour, perhaps by killing enemies, or by offering animals in sacrifice. If you didn’t, the gods might curse you by sending a plague or by ruining your crops.

But myths and sacrificial rituals disguised a grim reality. Ancient societies were riven with dangerous rivalrous desires which threatened self-destruction. Sacrifice and myth were an unconscious way of diverting that violence onto expendable substitute victims.

And because this was bundled up with people’s intuitions of the Divine, people came to imagine that this was what God was like. God or the gods had to be bargained with and appeased. God was wrathful and demanded sacrifices.

But the Jewish people had seen beyond this. The law of Moses sought to restrain sacrificial cults and violence by imposing ethical conduct, the ten commandments. And the prophets through the centuries had spoken of a God who wanted justice, not sacrifice. A God who spoke of new beginnings when his people had gone astray, and who promised that through them salvation would come to the whole human race.

John in his Gospel is saying that Jesus is the completion and the fulfilment of that revelation. In Jesus what was promised by the prophets has arrived.

And Jesus reveals that God is entirely about love. “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son.” There is no talk at all of bargaining, or sacrifices, or wrath, or curses. Here we are, helpless sinners, and God has come to meet us where we are, freely and of his own love giving himself to us. Asking nothing in return except that we receive the gift.

And when Jesus talks of being lifted up on the cross, as the serpent was lifted up by Moses, he is saying that it is through the cross that this gift of God will be made known to all. By being lifted up he will be exalted, glorified.

The cross represents all the sacrifices and expendable victims that humanity thought God required. Remember, it was the religious people who put Jesus to death, because they thought he was a blasphemer and under a curse. When Jesus is lifted up on the cross, he places himself at the heart of the violence that we thought God wanted, and does away with it. The cross is the revelation of God’s love. It is God’s subversion of our demands for sacrifice.

So when Christians use the word “sacrifice”, as we do in the Mass, we are saying something revolutionary: the “sacrifice” of Christ is God’s offering of himself to us, out of his love, not our offering something to God to persuade him to like us.

The Father does not condemn the world. Not at all. Nor does Jesus. And yet there is condemnation, as we have read. “Whoever does not believe is condemned already.” But this is not God’s doing. If we refuse to come into the light of God’s love, then we choose to remain in the darkness of the old sacrificial way of thinking, trapped in rivalrous desires which end up only in violence and death. Our choice is its own judgement.

But our choice cannot change the nature of God, cannot change the offer of God’s love, which still remains. God is patient, and repentance is always possible.

To turn to Christ, to repent, is not a one-off choice, like ticking the box for an insurance policy. Repentance means turning around, changing our whole mindset. It is a process of transformation. And it issues in a changed life.

St John says that if we live by the truth then we come into the light, and it will be plainly seen that what we do is done in God. And the letter to the Ephesians this morning says that God’s work in us results in us living the good life as he means us to.

Living a good life is not at all about trying to persuade God to like us. That is an idea that belongs in that old sacrificial mindset. God loves us first, our acceptance of that gift then opens us up to live according to his love. St Paul says, “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith; not by anything of your own, but by a gift from God”.

This is our good news, our Gospel. God loves us. Anyway. Regardless of who we have been. And God gives us his Son that we might be transformed, and live according to his life. That is good news for us, and it is good news for everyone, without exception.

“God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Saturday, 17 March 2012

Transfiguration: Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 2 2012

Genesis 22:1-2, 9-13, 15-18

Romans 8:31-34

Mark 9:2-10

Here is a little exercise in inductive reasoning to wake us up:

Weary but satisfied, Fred turned off his computer. He had ordered everything he needed from the online catalogues. Everyone would be very happy. Six days later he put on his red trousers, red tunic, fur lined hat and fake beard.

Question: on what date did Fred complete his online ordering?

If you answered 18 or 19 December, congratulations! Because we are familiar with our own annual cycle of seasons and festivals, we recognise that Fred is preparing to act as one of Santa’s helpers at Christmas.

Now, today’s gospel reading: “Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.”

Six days later. Time intervals like this are significant in the gospels, because the life of Jesus is told against the background of Jewish festivals, so that the events in the life of Jesus bring out the inner meaning of the festival. The one we are most familiar with, probably, is the death of Jesus taking place at the Passover, the inner meaning of which is that Jesus is bringing about a new liberation from sin and death foreshadowed in the ancient liberation of the Israelites from Egypt.

But there are many more such connections with the calendar in the gospels. According to biblical scholars today’s story of the Transfiguration is placed on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, which is six days after the Day of Atonement.

During the Feast of Tabernacles devout Jews live for a week in makeshift shelters – “tents” or “tabernacles” – to recall the wandering of their ancestors in the desert. Prayers are offered for the gift of water – very important in a desert climate. So the feast looks back to God’s saving work in the past and prays for present benefits. But it also looks forward, to the messianic age to come, in which, it is believed, the just will not live in a man-made city but in tents dwelling with God, enjoying God’s abundance. So those makeshift shelters are places of feasting and celebration in anticipation of this.

So on the Feast of Tabernacles Jesus takes his chosen disciples up Mount Tabor and is transfigured before them: literally he changes his form, and shines with the light which is the uncreated light of God. Jesus is seen to be God. And this is confirmed from heaven: a cloud overshadowed them, just as in the Old Testament the cloud of God’s glory, the shekinah, hovered over the Tent of Meeting. And the voice from the cloud proclaims “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”. And there appear Moses and Elijah who also experienced revelations of God on mountains.

There is a wealth of meaning here. The Tent of Meeting that Moses set up in the wilderness was a place where God was only present from time to time, and which only a few people could approach, very fearfully. But Jesus is here presented as the new Tent of Meeting, the dwelling place of God in person, a permanent dwelling which comes near to us and which all can approach. In Jesus the Feast of Tabernacles is fulfilled: the messianic age has come, God is dwelling with his people.

And whereas Moses brought down the tablets of the Law from Mount Sinai and said, “listen to these”, now on this new mountain the voice from heaven says, “listen to him”. Jesus is being presented as the law in person.

And Peter, in his stumbling and terrified way, recognises this: “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Peter recognises that the messianic age promised by the Feast of Tabernacles is now here. God is dwelling with his people. But the cloud overshadows them: the revelation both discloses and conceals a God who cannot be contained or grasped.

Six days before was the Day of Atonement, when sacrifice was offered for the sins of Israel and the scapegoat driven out into the wilderness to bear their sins away. On that day Peter had confessed that Jesus was the Messiah, but he had then been scandalized by Jesus’ prediction that he would be rejected and killed and rise again. God’s atonement was to be brought about by the death and resurrection of the Messiah.

Peter had not understood that at all, and had tried to talk sense into Jesus, saying that mustn’t happen to you, and had earned a rebuke from him. And then came the dark and mysterious teaching that Jesus’ disciples, too, must take up their cross and follow him, that those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for his sake will find it.

The Transfiguration comes between that prediction and its fulfilment. It is at this point that Jesus begins his final journey up to Jerusalem to be betrayed, and killed, and to rise again.

It is not only in glory on the mountain, but also on the road to the cross, that God is dwelling with his people. The light of God has shone from Jesus, but that light illuminates the cross. The cross can only be understood in that light. And the light of God can only be understood through the cross. For the cross too is a “mountain experience”, in which God is both disclosed and concealed on the symbolic mountain of Calvary. On that mountain God’s glory is revealed in the form of submission to suffering and death, when God of his own free will and of his love endures the consequences of our sin.

Peter still doesn’t understand this. He wanted to fix the experience of the Transfiguration, to stay with the glory but avoid the cross. Even when coming down from the mountain the disciples still had no understanding of what “rising from the dead” might mean. Peter, and the rest of the disciples, will first have to go through the experience of loss and darkness and death. It is only in meeting the risen Christ at Easter that their understanding will finally be changed.

As for them, so for us. We shrink from the way of the cross. Nature and instinct want an easy path. We would rather stay with the light than follow Jesus into the darkness. But the light of God shows us the way we must go: the way to glory is the way of the cross, and none other. In fact, the light of the Transfiguration and the darkness of Calvary are the same: both hide God from our gaze, and both reveal to us that it is in dying that we live. Both reveal the mystery of God dwelling with his people: a sign of contradiction, but also of hope.

If we set out to follow Jesus he will lead us along a path which is often what we do not expect, and sometimes where we do not wish to go. And whenever we think we think we’ve got it all planned out, that we know what God wants of us, that it will all now be clear and easy, that is when we are most likely to find ourselves suddenly in the dark, learning to trust God again instead of dictating our agenda to him. But that darkness is also a revelation of God. St John of the Cross says that the light of God is darkness to the senses, because we cannot know God by sight or hearing or intellect, but only by love through faith.

The uncreated light transfigures our mortal bodies, changing us into the likeness of Christ. But this can only happen by the way of the cross, the way by which we renounce ourselves and willingly follow Christ on the path of self-emptying, self-denial and self-sacrifice. The light of God comes to us as darkness to lead us away from everything we think we know so that we can fully enter into that mystery of God dwelling with us, the God who hides himself in the glory of Tabor and in the darkness of Calvary.

Monday, 6 February 2012

Sermon at Parish Mass, 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 5th February 2012

Job 7:1-4, 6-7
1 Corinthians 9:16-19, 22-23
Mark 1:29-39

I don’t know quite how mother-in-law jokes became such a stock in trade of British humour. Les Dawson was one of the great exponents; they are part of our culture. But perhaps they have them in other cultures as well.

Anyway it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a mother-in-law joke that goes with this gospel reading. Simon Peter must really have loved Jesus, if he carried on being his disciple even after he healed his mother-in-law. Ba-boom.

Jokes aside, though, we might on hearing this reading experience another response which also reflects our culture. “The fever left her and she began to wait on them.” We might think, how typical, the men are all standing around being important, and the women are left to do the serving.

But that would be to mis-read the gospel, because service, in fact, is absolutely central to what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. Simon’s mother-in-law, in this passage, is being presented as the model Christian disciple. In fact the word used for her service is “diakonein” – deaconing. The word does simply mean waiting at tables, but by the time Mark’s gospel was written it was also being used of a distinctive category of public Christian ministry, the ordained diaconate. So this does indicate a representative kind of Christian discipleship. And Simon’s mother-in-law is presented as the model disciple in contrast to the men, who haven’t yet understood what Christian discipleship is about.

Look at who is there: James and John. They appear later in the gospel, in the scene in chapter 10 where Jesus says, “anyone who wants to be great among you must be your servant, and anyone who wants to be first among you must be the slave of all. For the Son of Man himself did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

And Jesus said that because James and John wanted to have seats at the right and left hand of Jesus in his glory. They wanted the power and the status. Jesus had to teach them that that wasn’t what it meant to be a disciple of his.

But Simon’s mother-in-law understands this straight away, and that is something to do with her being touched and healed by Jesus. Jesus “helped her up”, in fact he “raised” her in Greek, and the word has connotations of resurrection. Jesus shares his life with his disciples, so that those who follow him start to reflect his life. That life is the power and love of God come into the world.

But the world is run on very different lines from those shown to us by Jesus. The world is run by a power which is based on rivalry, domination, conflict and violence. The love and power of God, come into this world, does not mimic those powers; indeed it cannot, because then it would be just another rival in the same old system.

No; the love and power of God, come into the world, takes the form of service, of becoming a slave, of giving love’s life as a ransom for many.

It’s difficult for us to grasp how revolutionary that is. In the Greek and Roman worlds servants and slaves were a lower form of life, and you aspired to be the person who was served. Humility was regarded as shameful. Or consider that rather gloomy reading from Job we heard this morning. That Old Testament voice sees nothing good in being a slave. The fact that humility and service are now considered praiseworthy, the fact that people are uneasy around arrogance and shows of power, tells us something of how the Christian gospel has worked its way into the mindset of Western European civilisation. It was not so anywhere before the Gospel was preached; it still is not so in cultures untouched by Christian influence – think of China and Japan, for example.

We have seen first hand this last week something of the legacy of Christian teaching in our culture, in the visit of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. They are two people who do indeed have power and status, but who have dedicated their lives to serving the community. Many of us were touched and moved to witness the real care and concern that they showed, and the encouragement that they gave us, for the Christian service that our churches offer to those in need and the wider community.

And of course Prince Charles is following the example of his mother, who explicitly understands her position as Queen to be one of Christian discipleship and service. Tomorrow is the 60^th anniversary of the death of King George VI, a man who was thrust into that position of service unexpectedly, at a very dark time just before the outbreak of the war. The film “The King’s Speech” brought home to us how much personal suffering that involved for him. But he did not shrink from it. And neither did his daughter.

This jubilee year is going to be a great opportunity to celebrate the service of our Queen over so many years – a service she shows no sign of relinquishing. But it is also an opportunity to restate what it means to be a Christian disciple, with a celebration of the great public example that the Queen gives. That is an inspiration to us all.

But for us as well as for the Queen, it all comes from Jesus. Like Simon’s mother-in-law, it is the experience of being touched and healed and forgiven by Jesus, that experience of being “raised” by him, which makes us his disciples. Jesus reverses our priorities. We become servant disciples because Jesus serves us, he ministers to us. It is through his grace that we enter his risen life, and it is through living with his life that we become servants too.

This works itself out in practice in our parish in so many ways. The night shelter; our welcome to visitors; our work with the Community Centre, with London Citizens and St Pancras hospital. Just a few examples of many.

The media spotlight has passed from us as the Royal couple go their way to support other initiatives, other forms of service to communities elsewhere. But we continue to bring to bear the light and life of Christ here where we are called to be the servants and disciples of Christ, making known his love in the world.

Sermon at Parish Mass, 4th Sunday of Epiphany 2012

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

1 Corinthians 7:32-35

Mark 1:21-28

Which teachers do you most remember from school? There’s one I remember for whom I’m particularly grateful. There was a time when I was falling a bit behind, and that can be a dangerous trap for a child to be caught in. Your feeling of self-esteem and capability can plummet, and then your performance does too, so you feel even worse. It’s a vicious circle. But this teacher noticed. And quietly, without fuss, without showing me up in front of the other boys, he helped me, gave up his time, coached me – in his own subject and others – and helped me get back on track. Good teachers don’t just tell you things you need to know, they change your life.

Teaching is about so much more than imparting information. It’s about growth, development, and transformation. Good teaching is relational, and helps you to grow by opening you to the truth.

The people in today’s Gospel reading are said to be astonished by the teaching of Jesus, it makes a deep impression on them. This is interesting as Mark doesn’t actually tell us what Jesus has taught. All we have is its result, given in a symmetric sequence of the kind that Mark likes: the people are impressed, a man described as possessed by an unclean spirit is delivered, and the people are impressed again.

It is as though the presence of Jesus is in itself his teaching. It is his presence which is transformative, which opens people to the truth. This is because Jesus is not imparting truth as an abstract concept, rather he is the truth in person. To be taught by Jesus is to enter into relationship with him, to be opened to the truth.

The reading we heard from Deuteronomy is important for understanding this. Moses promises the people of Israel that God will send them a prophet like himself who will teach them everything that God commands. The prophet like Moses is not any old prophet. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the others aren’t in the same league. The prophet who will be like Moses is unique, just as Moses uniquely delivered the law to the people on Sinai, so this new prophet will uniquely make known everything that God teaches.

An important thread running through the Gospels is that Jesus is this new prophet, the prophet like Moses who discloses the whole purpose of God. This is why we can see so many parallels between Jesus and Moses – but in all of them Jesus exceeds what Moses did. Moses divided the waters and walked through them, Jesus walks on them. Moses fed the people in the desert with manna that lasted a day, Jesus feeds the five thousand in a desert place and tells the disciples to keep what remains, pointing to the Eucharist, the food which endures to eternal life.

And where Moses delivered the law, the Torah, on Mount Sinai, written on stone tablets, Jesus is presented as the law in person. The Torah of the Messiah is not instructions you have to learn, it is a person with whom you need to be in relationship.

So in today’s Gospel reading we have the teaching of Jesus, which is astonishing, and different from the teaching of the scribes, because it is an encounter with a living person.

At the centre of this encounter, in which the teaching of Jesus is Jesus himself, we have the healing of the man described as possessed by an unclean spirit. This is not talk we are used to, but it is clearly of vital importance in this story.

Now in fact only Matthew, Mark and Luke in the whole Bible talk about people being “possessed’ in this way, and they are saying something important about the powers which hold human beings in bondage. Matthew, Mark and Luke are concerned to show the Kingdom of God breaking in to, and putting right, a human society which is radically disordered by powers which are actively opposed to that Kingdom. There is both a social and a cosmic dimension to these stories of possession. They reveal something about what is wrong beneath the surface of human society.

The two great oppressive social powers at work in first century Judea, as it is portrayed in the gospels, were the occupying Romans and the Temple. The Romans were unclean gentiles who ruled by keeping everyone in their place, often very brutally. The Temple had failed to be a house of prayer for all nations and had become a centre of power and privilege, amassing ever more money, wealth and prestige to feed its insatiable sacrificial cult, crushing the poor and excluding the supposedly imperfect and unclean. So you have these two oppressive forces bearing down on people from different directions.

In an oppressed society, who speaks? Who dares say what is wrong? It is often voices from the edge, and often distorted voices, which nevertheless speak something of the truth. In the Gospels, those who are described as possessed seem to have something of this function. The spirits of possession are described as “unclean”, meaning that they speak from a place of ritual impurity. They speak from a place where people are not allowed to participate in what human society is meant to be. Through being “demonised” these people personify the powers of oppression which harm society as a whole.

So it is very significant that Jesus heals people who are described as possessed, and that this happens as a result of his teaching. Jesus restores human society to what God intends it to be by defeating the cosmic powers of evil. And he does this because he is the truth, the full revelation of God, in person.

Today we don’t tend to talk about people literally being possessed by demons. But we can still be disturbed by voices from the edge, distorted voices perhaps, which nonetheless tell us something of what is wrong under the surface of things.

I was thinking this week of the Occupy Protest outside St Paul’s. Could we perhaps see them as people who have been “possessed”, captivated, fixated, by the way in which the giant corporations seem to have the whole of human life under subjugation?

Or consider the way in which tabloid headlines or lazy statements by politicians can demonise people. This week in relation to the Government’s cap on benefits we heard talk of “scroungers” and the “feckless”. But the rich can be scapegoated as well, as Sir Philip Hampton, the chairman of RBS, now deprived of his bonus, may be reflecting. There is something far more fundamental than individual greed at work here. The desire to exclude, to draw boundaries and say those people over there are not like me, is part of the deep flaw that runs through our natures, that the Church calls sin.

The brokenness of human society needs to be healed and forgiven. And that is what Jesus does, in the world today, in and through his Church. This requires our own healing and forgiveness. Today as in the first Century it is through relationship with Jesus that we are opened to the truth. It is in him that we recognise our complicity with the powers of oppression precisely as we are being freed from them ourselves. Sin is what we are leaving behind.

For us and for the world, today as in the first century, the good news is Jesus. His teaching is himself. He is the truth in person, the truth of the love of God for every person, the truth that he excludes no-one, the truth he wills to be known in the right ordering and flourishing of all human society.

Friday, 20 January 2012

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

Sunday, 8 January 2012

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.

Friday, 6 January 2012

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

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

Writing on the Walls of Nineveh