Homily for second Sunday of advent

Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Matthew 3:1-12; Romans 15:4-13

One apocryphal tradition has it that biblical chapters and verses were selected by a horse rider who marked a new verse every time the horse hit a bump. This morning’s Isaiah text, 11.1-10, is a case in point. We should have begun reading at 10.33: ‘Look, the Sovereign, the LORD of hosts, will lop the boughs with terrifying power; the tallest trees will be cut down, and the lofty will be brought low. He will hack down the thickets of the forest with an axe, and Lebanon with its majestic trees will fall.’ It is in this context that we should read the phrase ‘A shoot shall come from the stock of Jesse’. The idea here is that renewal will follow some kind of quite dramatic divine judgement. Lopping, hacking and cutting will be followed by the tiny, tender shoot emerging.

The expression ‘the stock of Jesse’ suggests going back behind David to his father, which is possibly a critique of David as monarch but also indicative of a pattern of renewal from the margins. We might regard this as a divine preference, similar to the idea of a divine bias for the poor. We see it in John the Baptist – the lone prophet offering forgiveness in place of the Temple system – and in the annunciation to Mary – renewal coming from the obedience of an unmarried Jewish young woman (in contrast, we should add, with Zechariah the married, male priest). This makes sense sociologically and theologically: after a religious system or institution becomes unable to meet the religious desires of a people, to mediate a sense of the divine to them, they begin to look for new religious forms.

The claim that the spirit of the Lord will rest on the king is, at this stage in Israel’s history, close to an oxymoron. In the wisdom and prophetic books – and the story of Saul as Israel’s first king is especially relevant for this passage – the spirit of God is seen as a manifestation of God’s power that is unusual, unpredictable; suddenly manifesting itself in a word or judgement or frenzy, and then departing. So the idea that god’s spirit could rest and remain on someone and grant all the qualities a king needs to lead Israel in the divine way is a bold theological innovation and hope. The sort of hope expressed in today’s Psalm. (It’s very tempting to see in John’s gospel and letters the stress on the Spirit abiding with Jesus and the disciples as picking up exactly this theme but that’s another story.)

Matthew’s John the Baptist picks up Isaiah’s metaphor of chopping down trees as a form of judgement. And as Isaiah went behind David to Jesse, Matthew goes to the beginning of Israel’s history to Abraham. The suggestion seems to be not only that the coming Messiah will heal the divisions within Israel but that he will be able to raise up new descendents of Abraham, probably a reference to the inclusion of Gentiles into god’s family. That is certainly Paul’s reading of Isaiah.

Perhaps we can trace two sequences through these three passages today. In terms of judgement, Isaiah speaks of the defeat of nations in war and the establishment of a just monarch to rule Israel in the way of the Torah. Matthew’s John the Baptist seems to expect the deposing of an entire religious class. Paul speaks not of judgement but of a god of steadfastness, encouragement and hope. In terms of god’s spirit, Isaiah speaks of the spirit resting on the king to enable just governance. Matthew speaks of ‘the Holy Spirit and fire’, perhaps suggesting spiritual power, the power to generate social transformation. Paul speaks of the spirit of hope and joy.

These two sequences could appear as a disappointing climb down. In the first sequence, concerning judgement, haven’t we moved from looking to the divine for real socio-political change, to looking for a therapeutic, feel-good religion for our little in-group? And in the second sequence, concerning God’s spirit, haven’t we moved from God enabling just governing, to inspiring human transformation, to granting nice emotional feelings? Has Paul projected onto Christ the prophecies of spiritual power and just governance and thereby removed from the church the impetus to seek justice?

Things are not quite so straightforward. We must first take note of the different contexts of Isaiah, John the Baptist and Paul. Isaiah and John both expected a Messiah who would renew Israel as a political-ethnic-religious unit. Paul believes Jesus was the Messiah in a different mode. It seems the messianic strategy was rather to generate ‘harmony’, that is, to enable Jews and gentiles to live together as the paradigmatic case. In other words, Jesus’ aim was not only to renew Israel but also to enable hospitality and community to be generated across any human division. For a community to realise this is a significant achievement, because nationalism and ethnicity are very dangerous when taken as central to political identity, as they so often and so easily are. We can see this in immigration debates in this country: immigrants “steal our jobs,” and “undermine our values,” and “contribute to our lack of national identity.” We see it in colonialism: think of Aboriginal children being taken away from their parents in Australia; a pattern visited upon the Scottish by the English and on the Jenisch by the Swiss. We can see it in the conflicts and massacres in the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East.

We must also bear in mind that whereas Isaiah addressed a relatively unified group, Paul lived in a somewhat brutal empire in which being ignored by the authorities was on the whole the best people could hope for. Isaiah could challenge the monarchy to be more just, more ‘holy’, on the basis of a shared understanding that this was the king’s role, and that it was the prophet’s role to remind him if he failed. Paul lived in an empire with a tendency for the emperors to divinize their own kind. Not a recipe for political transparency and accountability. So if Paul does not explicitly address questions of what we now call social justice with the clarity we would prefer, this is not because he has abandoned the prophetic tradition with its emphasis on divine and human justice, but rather than he sees such justice as transcending national and ethnic lines.

Still, I think we should feel nagged by the doubt that Isaiah’s vision is grander in scope than and therefore preferable to Paul’s. Let’s be grateful we read them together in the canon. And this immediately raises the question of our posture towards government. Given our vastly different context from any and all biblical situations we will not find any simple answers. Massive disagreement is to be expected but so must harmony: to paraphrase Paul, ‘there is no longer Left or Right’. Yet seeking justice for the oppressed and the victims of our society must be insisted upon as fundamental to Jewish and Christian scripture and religion. This emphasis, along with Paul’s repeated insistence on serving and loving our neighbours, I think clears him of the charge of promoting a therapeutic, narcissistic religion, designed to make us feel better about ourselves and cope with our stressful lives. The point for Paul is rather to re-orient ourselves towards others. This, when it happens, is certainly human and social transformation. But this is to remain at the level of the personal and social rather than the large scale political. Christianity places at the heart of its liturgy the re-enactment of the death of an innocent victim at the hands of political power. This suggests not only that Christianity’s relationship with such power is bound to be difficult and complicated but that, this Advent, as we practice looking for Christ, we would do well to look to our victims rather than our politicians.

A homily on miracles

This is from a couple of months ago.

Texts: 1 Kings 17.8-24; Ps 147; Gal 1.11-24; Lk 7.11-17

There are two main themes in our texts today. The first we can trace as a historical progression. Elijah helps a gentile as something of an exception. Jesus helps the outsiders – ‘the widow, the unclean, the Gentile, those of the lowest status’[1] – in a more programmatic fashion. Paul is appointed, directly by the exalted Jesus, to take the message of God’s acceptance to the gentiles. Given the demographic of our church I think we can safely say we’ve assimilated this message. In fact, the problem for the church for a long time has been how to relate to Israel rather than how to include the gentiles. You won’t be surprised to know I do not have the solution to that problem this morning. So let’s focus instead on the second theme.

This is a much more ironic theme for the season of ordinary time: that of miracles. Ordinary time is the season away from the feasts and highlights of salvation history, when we focus on how to follow Christ in the mundane texture of life. Not many miracles there. Yet this morning we have several stories of religious fireworks, even more if we set the stories in context. In 1 Kings 17.1-7 Elijah is miraculously fed and prophesies, correctly, that there will be a drought. Then our story follows: he is told by God he’ll meet a widow and he does; he prophesies that her food will last and it does; he raises her son from the dead. The Lukan story is even more impressive. In the story before ours Jesus heals someone from a distance without even seeing him, then he raises this corpse from the dead with a word. In the background of Paul’s claims about the origins of his gospel are the stories of him meeting the ascended Christ on the road to Damascus, a meeting so dramatic he literally fell on the floor. Is the lectionary deliberately designed to make us feel inadequate about our religious experience? Let’s not be too hasty.

These miracle stories are first of all designed to tell us something about God. They tell us that God, unlike the idols, is alive: God acts, God responds, God intervenes in people’s lives. They tell us that God is compassionate. This is part of the hinge of Luke’s story: Jesus’ compassion mirrors God’s. Miracles also serve to verify a prophet as true, and so to give authority to his or her messages, pronouncements, judgements and instructions. Luke is trying to tell us, amongst other things, that Jesus is a greater prophet than even Elijah. Where Elijah has to pray three times, Jesus simply speaks a word. He seems to perform the role that God performs in the Elijah story. With Jesus, the miracles were signs pointing to the truth of his proclamation of the kingdom of God and the character of the God who would rule such a kingdom. That’s why so many, if not all, of Jesus’ miracles restored people to their community as much as they did anything else. I think it’s fair to say that, ‘Together with the proclamation of the gospel, the healing of the sick is Jesus’ most important testimony to the dawning kingdom of God.’[2]

In Matthew 10.8 Jesus tells his disciples, ‘heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons: you have received freely so give freely.’ And sends them off to do it. This became an important, some would say essential, part of the church’s work. The early church recognised this by having an office of exorcist along with deacons and priests and bishops. The church still has a liturgy of exorcism, as well as liturgies for healing and anointing with oil, partly based on James 5 (which interestingly mentions the story of Elijah and the rain).

So now comes the hard part. The challenge for us is neither to disbelieve in miracles, ignore them, close ourselves off from them on the one hand, and on the other hand not to chase after them and ignore the wider context of the kingdom of god to which they point as signs. Miracles are frequently attested throughout history in all kinds of religions, so I think Enlightenment scepticism, though understandable, is misplaced. But miracles are also signs of the restoration of the people of God and of the opening up of God’s people to all. The challenge is both to follow the church in taking seriously Jesus’ commission to his disciples to ‘heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons,’ and to pursue justice and mercy.

It is useful at this point to pay attention to a tension in our tradition. On the one hand, and again James 5 makes the connection, it seems that in the church’s experience throughout history, it is the extremely righteous or holy person, the saint, whose prayers are effective, who are the conduit for miracles. In the gospels there are stories of the disciples failing to cast out demons that seem to be attributed to a failure in righteousness. Or we could think of demons crying out in the presence of Jesus but not in the presence of others. Or read Acts 19 in which some demons say to the exorcists, ‘we know Jesus and Paul but not you,’ and the beat them up. There is a similar story from the early days of Christian monasticism. Abba Zeno began to pray for a demon to leave a person. ‘The demon began to cry out, ‘Perhaps, Abba Zeno, you think I am going away because of you, look, down there Abba Longinus is praying, and challenging me and it is for fear of his prayers that I go away, for to you I would not even have given an answer.’[3] And there are many similar stories throughout church history.

On the other hand, there is also in the church’s experience ample testimony to new or ordinary believers performing miracles. In Matthew 10.8 when Jesus sends out the disciples with their rather tricky job description there is no indication that they had achieved some remote level of sanctity. Just recently Deirdre told us the story of a man who was converted in an Indian village and immediately went around praying for people’s healing and seeing it happen. The modern charismatic movement and Pentecostal churches provide many similar stories.

What, then, should we conclude? Today’s texts make us aware of God’s freedom, our inability to pin God down. They challenge us to accept that freedom and also God’s power. They challenge us to work with God and be open to whatever God may want to do, and that must include working to create the kingdom to which miracles are designed to point us. Yet evil continues to happen. In the ordinary experience of life, for many people all over the world, ourselves included, very often God seems absent and impotent, hidden and passive. Perhaps, then, we read these stories near the beginning of ordinary time to remind us that God is also present, alive, compassionate and powerful. It is to living out this contradiction, rather than trying to collapse it, that we turn our faces for the rest of the Christian year.

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[1] Joel Green’s commentary on Luke.

[2] Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 188.

[3] Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Longinus, §4, 123.

All saints homily

Isa 25.6-9; Psa 24.1-6; Rev 21.1-6a; John 11.32-44

I believe it was the famous Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, ‘if humanity was put on this earth for a reason, it certainly was not to enjoy itself.’ I’d ask you all to bear that in mind for the next ten minutes.

The early church had a regular practice of celebrating the example of the life and death of a martyr at the place where they had died on the anniversary of their death. They’d troupe up there and say prayers and so on. They also used their relics in churches to do the same thing, sometimes sharing relics between churches. If you go to Durham Cathedral you can visit the graves and relics of St. Cuthbert for instance. Eventually, there were so many martyrs, the church couldn’t celebrate them separately, so one day was instituted for all the saints. That day is today: the feast of All Saints.

This practice was combined with a belief within Second Temple Judaism that worship took place in concert with all the beings in heaven; that earth and heaven were more closely connected (or at least more obviously) during worship than at other times. But the early church took over and transformed this Jewish belief because of its own beliefs in the incarnation and resurrection. The resurrection meant the church could read Isaiah 25 – ‘he will swallow up death forever’ – as a real event. So, for instance, we find Paul in Romans claiming that nothing can separate us from God’s love, not even death, precisely because death has been overcome. The belief that death does not separate us from God was combined with the belief that there is ultimately only one church, against the background of combined heavenly and earthly worship, to provide an explanation both for the church’s practice of honouring the bodies of dead saints, and for the church’s experience of miracles and visions associated with those bodies. (You’ve got to explain the weird stuff somehow). This is not to downplay the reality of death (it’s not that such experiences are frequent) but it is to say that though the saints are dead, they are not ultimately separated from God or from us, even though it feels like it. Death and ‘mourning and crying and pain will be no more’: this is our great hope. But it is not easy to believe and we need All Saints is to help us inhabit it.

The idea that God is strongly present through certain places or objects, such as the relics of saints or their graves, seems strange in a disenchanted world, but is deeply fitting for a religion that believes in the incarnation. The incarnation is partly about God’s presence coming through one body, with the aim of enabling all bodies to be carriers and transmitters of the divine. And this doesn’t just mean human bodies but all physical bodies; and that is why the pre-Reformation church was so insistent on the reality of Christ’s presence in the eucharist. The eucharist is like a mini-incarnation, as, once again, the material becomes saturated with the divine, the physical becomes the very means of God’s arrival in our midst. This idea is also, incidentally, why we as a church must continue to take our responsibilities to asylum seekers seriously: God arrives with and through them.

So now we can see why the saints are so important to the church, why we would celebrate their lives, remember them, pray at their relics, ask them to pray for us, and so on. If most of us here don’t do that, at least we can see the deep connection between those practices and the events and meanings so central to and generative of our faith. The saints ‘enrich the common life on which we all draw’ (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 216). And this common life is one of the channels through which we received God’s grace, which is to say, God.

Well, some time ago we read some biblical texts so I suppose we’d better talk about them in the time remaining to us. ‘Well-matured wines…well-matured wines strained clear.’ Isaiah proclaims God’s message of salvation as an abundant feast with all the good creation has to offer. Revelation goes even further, picking up our Isaiah passage about the end of death, but also Lev 26.11-12 – ‘I will place my dwelling in your midst…And I will walk among you and will be your god and you shall be my people’ – as well as similar passages like Jer 7.23 and 11.4 and others. What this passage from Revelation is deliberately doing is picking up so many of the most audacious and beautiful promises from the Hebrew Scriptures in order to say, ‘yes, they will come to pass and they have already begun to come to pass.’ And it’s all based on the resurrection. ‘What we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands…’ So we see Jesus ‘dwelling’ with us already, as a foretaste of how God will dwell with us in the future: the verb for God’s dwelling in Rev 21.3 is the same as in John 1.14, ‘the word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ What does it look like when Jesus dwells with us? Well, we see Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, we see Jesus himself being not being simply raised from the dead but resurrected to life beyond death. And we have this – the gathering and the eucharist – as a taste of our future hope.

It is Jesus’ bodily resurrection that confirms Isaiah’s hope that salvation will consist of all the material good of creation. Creation and redemption are, from one point of view, the same thing, a single divine action. In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, two of the main characters are old ministers who have been friends all their lives, Ames and Boughton. Neither of them is too far from death. Ames says:

We know nothing about heaven, or very little, and I think Calvin is right to discourage curious speculations on things the Lord has not seen fit to reveal to us…Not that Paradise could disappoint, but I believe Boughton is right to enjoy the imagination of heaven as the best pleasure of this world…Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day. He said, ‘Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I’d multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy. But two is much more than sufficient for my purposes.’ So he’s just sitting there multiplying the feel of the wind by two, multiplying the smell of the grass by two.

And so at last we return to Wittgenstein: humanity is not here to enjoy itself. In one way he is correct. Christianity does not teach an irresponsible hedonism (though I believe the Puritans have sometimes been accused of this). Whilst we are alive we are to work with God to perfect the creation and extend the unbounded communion of God. It is precisely this that the saints do and witness to: God’s love and forgiveness as massively anterior to any of our responses. And as Jesus’ example makes clear, such a life and witness can be difficult, painful, full of conflict and misunderstanding, even politically dangerous. But the grief in this labour is temporary. We are in fact created for joy, happiness, jouissance. “Before” we came along, God’s life was one big unending bliss, and we were created precisely to share in the eternal bliss of the triune life. There is a theme of joy in the NT, a feeling of a happy surprise, a shock that people were trying to assimilate after Christ’s death and resurrection. And that feeling of being ‘surprised by joy’ is a foretaste of what’s to come. Those moments of being captivated by beauty, of the joy of new birth or discovery, of re-uniting with old friends, those are not fortunate exceptions to a meaningless void or a world fundamentally filled with pain and antagonism, they are our access to the way things really are and will be, the most fundamental reality of all: the joy and friendship of the triune life.