Resurrection - Easter 2003

The Gate of Heaven

“Jacob was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven."” Genesis 28.17

So Father Murphy walks into a notorious pub in Donegal, and says to the first man he meets, "Do you want to go to heaven?"
The man said, "I do Father."
The priest says, "Then leave this pub right now!"
He approaches a second man. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"Certainly, Father."
"Then leave this den of Satan," says Father Murphy.
He walks up to O'Toole. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"No thank you very much Father.”
Father Murphy looks him right in the eye, and says, "You mean to tell me that when you die you don't want to go to heaven?"
O'Toole smiles, "Oh, when I die, yes, Father. I thought you were getting a group together to go right now."

Today’s collect reminds us that ‘Jesus Christ has overcome death and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life’ - the gate of heaven.

The opening chapters of the Bible describe an open and ungated Garden of Eden. But after the Fall, an angel is set as a gate to keep humankind out and away from the Tree of Life - of everlasting life.

“God drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.” Genesis 3.24

At one level the Fall is an aetiology of fears that run deeply within the human psyche.

There is the fear of exclusion, being shut out; of alienation and of being alone; and the ultimate fear, the old enemy, death, and oblivion - being cut off forever from the tree of life.

Gates and doors are potent mythic symbols common in most religions and folk tales. They are often hidden, or guarded or require a key or an ‘open sesame’ to admit the seeker. In Christian folk religion they are the familiar pearly gates, guarded by St Peter with his book of life, with all the overtones of exclusion and judgement.

They are symbols used powerfully by Jesus, who describes himself as the door, the gate to the sheepfold.

In the Old Testament and into the time of the New, the City Gate is the place of discussion, of welcome and business; where the elders sit and offer advice; where the judges make pronouncements; where the guilty are executed.

So the writer to the Hebrews takes up this rich vein of imagery and reminds his readers: “Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood.” (13.11)

In a positive light, the gates becomes the symbol of security and safety. So for the suburban English family, the garden gate is the drawbridge into the castle. My mother’s instructions still ring loud and clear on any trip to the neighbours:

“Have you got a clean handkerchief? Remember to say thank you. And close the gate when you leave.”

I love Alan Bennett’s line in A Cream Cracker under the Settee, when Thora Heard has been visited by the Christian sect who push tracts through the door and call through the letterbox that Jesus loves her. She remarks with fine British bathos: “Shouting about Jesus and leaving the gate open - it’s hypocrisy is that!”

Our Lord emphasises this sense of security that a gate brings by describing himself as the gate of the sheepfold. The Good Shepherd is the door of the pen, as he lies across the opening protecting the sheep from robbers and wolves.

But he goes on to take the imagery further, providing the basis for today’s 1549 collect. “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.” (John 10.9)

However, we must always remember that metaphors are just that - metaphors. There is no literal gate, nor key, nor mystical password.

When Christ says he is the gate to eternal life, it is because of the way Christ lived and all that he accomplished: his life, his death and his glorious hope-inspiring resurrection.

And for us the ‘narrow gate’ that we are commanded by our Lord to enter, is similarly about a way of life. There is no such thing as a death-bed conversion. There may appear to be, but it could not have happened without a process that went before.

Jacob’s encounter with God (our text this morning) through the dream at Bethel was a sort of conversion, as was his wrestling with the angel 14 years later. But it was all part of a divine process which had been going on in Jacob since before his first self-conscious thoughts.

I think this is what CS Lewis is getting at in his wonderful little fantasy, The Great Divorce, where he describes heaven, not so much as a place, but as a process– the process of becoming fully alive, fully real.

“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. Evil can be undone, but it cannot "develop" into good... If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth), we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell... But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning, a part of Heaven itself.”

Lewis is right, I believe. Heaven's gate is narrow, and the meaning of our lives is to be found by engaging in the quest to find it and enter it. And that means paying attention, living mindfully rather than mindlessly, never trying to live on the energy of past religious experiences, but always being open to the new promptings of the Spirit: to renewed conversions.

It takes discipline, it takes much prayer, and a great deal of courage and faith to be a pilgrim.

But the journey of faith and hope and love is its own reward, and a precursor of its destination. And if we walk it faithfully, we shall not have to wonder fearfully if anything or anyone awaits us beyond death's door; we will discover that our pilgrim journey itself was, in fact, that very gate of heaven, which Christ at his resurrection flung wide open.

Now as it’s Easter Sunday, and you can never have too much risus paschalis (Easter laughter), I’ll finish with another joke.

A church member who was a devout golfer came to talk to his priest one day. "Tell me, Father," he demanded, "are there going to be golf courses in heaven? I have to know."

"Well," said his priest, "I'm not really sure, but tonight I'll say a special prayer and see if God will tell me the answer."

The next Sunday, when the service ended and the congregation was shaking hands with the priest on the way out, the golfer cornered him again. "Did you get the answer, Father? Are there going to be golf courses in heaven?"

Well, George," the priest replied, "I've got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?"

"Tell me the good news first," George said.

"The good news is that, yes, there are golf courses in heaven. Beautiful courses, where the sun is always shining, the rough is not too deep, there are no sand traps, and you never have to wait to tee off."
"Hey, that's great!" exclaimed the golfer excitedly. "But what's the bad news?"

"Well, the bad news is that St Peter has you down to tee off this coming Tuesday morning at 8."

On this Easter Sunday as we celebrate Christ’s resurrection, we have a foretaste of heaven and if we will be open to his Holy Spirit, this place becomes for us the gate of heaven.

“Jacob was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven."” Genesis 28.17

The Lamb - Blake

The Lamb

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise!” Revelation 4.12

My maternal grandmother lived with us until she died. I remember asking my mother when I was about 11, what granny Steele’s maiden name was. “Steele”, my mother replied somewhat curtly. In what was probably one of my last acts of childhood innocence I reasoned out loud: “so she was called Steele and then she married someone called Steele.”

I won’t give you my mother’s exact words of reply, but it was a strong suggestion that I was stupid and that I should grow up.

And I did. I realised that the world of adults was anything but straightforward, and that many things, in my family, among the neighbours, at church, were not what they seemed to be. And horror of horrors, neither was I.

Loss of innocence is a gradual process, but most of us can remember some defining moments. And of course the process goes on through different degrees right through our lives.

William Blake was absorbed by this. He grew up during the turbulent 18th century, with all the uncertainties of revolution and war in Europe. He was a London journeyman engraver. But he was more than that. He was an artist and a free thinker. His Christian views were shaped my his own mystical visions and a strange romantic mythology which he developed in his later writings.

When he was barely 30 in 1789 he published his first, very unusual book, comprising 31 colour plates of poems intertwined with design and illustrations. It was called Songs of Innocence.

To some extent this was influenced by Rousseau’s belief that children are free and innocent until society corrupts them. But in Blake’s peculiar version of gnosticism, that persistent sub-Christian undercurrent, there was also a more traditional Christian understanding of a fallen creation. Blake and his wife practised nudism, unusual in 18th century London, and dangerous for a number of reasons - it was a gesture towards returning to the innocence of Adam and Eve, Blake wrote.

So in today’s communion motet, the last in our series, entitled The Lamb, Blake draws a picture of an innocent child... and of an innocent God. The engraved and then painted illustration shows a small naked androgynous child, talking with an attentive lamb in a rustic setting.

Here are two of God’s creations, harmlessly wandering in a paradisial idyll - “and was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?” - well here, at least, it was.

Christ became a little child, and became known as the Lamb of God, meek and mild. Blake wonders at the beauty and simplicity of it all; the resonances between Creator and created; the sheer grace of God experienced in the delight of nature.

The child senses his kinship with the Lamb and all creation, and with the great God who made them all, and yet who is immanent within his world. He sends up the simplest of innocent prayers - “Little Lamb, God bless thee!”

This is the sweet innocence which haunts us throughout our adult life. If only our life could be full of simple pleasures and simple trust. If only the world and politicians would realise that all you need really is love. If only the church were a pure mirror of the gathered saints in heaven.

But it’s not. As the old doggerel puts it - ‘to dwell above with those we love, Oh that will be glory, but to dwell below with those we know is quite another story.’

Blake was wrestling with those age-old questions:
How do we retain our innocence and yet grow up and gain experience?
How do we gain worldly-wiseness and yet retain a childlike trust and naivety?
and
How can God be all loving and all good, and yet create a world red in tooth and claw?

In 1794 Blake published Songs of Experience. The perspective of the child in Songs of Innocence is now replaced with the perspective of an older and more bitter man, who has seen the evils and suffering of the world. The poems in these two volumes run in loose parallel and the corresponding poem to The Lamb is The Tyger.

No innocent child can stand and discuss names with a tiger, when the tiger simply wants to say ‘grace’ and get on with lunch. (Although Yann Martel has written a compelling novel which explores the life of a boy and a Bengal tiger at sea on a lifeboat, The Life of Pi)

Who dared frame the tiger’s ‘fearful symmetry’? Was it the same God who made the little lamb?

Blake is unequivocal in his answer. Yes, it is the same God. There is no escape into a gnostic dualism which places blame elsewhere. In Luther’s striking words, which encapsulates the problem for Christians: “Always remember the devil is God’s devil!”

The Tyger is about having your reason overwhelmed at once by the beauty and the horror of the natural world. "When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears" is one couplet from The Tyger. In the creation story in Job, the stars sing for joy at creation, a scene which Blake illustrated.

In Blake's later books, the stars throw down their cups at the collapse of a previous clockwork universe founded on pure reason. For Blake, the stars represent cold reason and objective science. Blake greatly appreciated the explosion of scientific knowledge during his era, but he was hostile to any attempts to reduce all phenomena to chemistry and physics,.

‘There is something about seeing a tiger which you can't learn from a zoology class. The sense of awe and fear defy reason. And Blake's contemporary "rationalists" who had hoped for a tame, gentle world guided by kindness and understanding must face the reality of the Tiger.’ (Ed Friedlander)

To change the historic setting, postmodernity with its ironic and wry take on the world has nothing to say to the jackboot. Pure rationalism, the enlightenment project, has failed. As all the recent surveys show, human beings are irrepressibly religious. There is more to life than what we see.

John Tavener, the contemporary composer, Russian orthodox convert and Hellenophile, is making a similar point as he describes the icon-like nature of his work:

'There is in ikons an uncontrolled wildness, a coarseness almost, a deep sense of the untamed ferocity of the desert, from the fact that the Orthodox fathers lived in the desert in close contact with nature. Thus Orthodoxy is so different from the scholastic intellectual approach of the Roman Catholic Church … I try to recreate today in my music just this uncivilised and surrealistic wildness'.

Our text today, comes from a passage which attempts to paint an impressionistic picture to help us in our understanding of innocence and experience. In the Revelation of St John the Divine we see the central figure as the Lamb, slain yet standing.

John has in his mind the writings of the Old Testament pseudepigraphal book, the Testament of Joseph (19.8f), in which the lion and the lamb appear together: the Lion is the Messiah from Judah and the Lamb is the Messiah from Aaron. And in this Testament of Joseph, the Lion and Lamb are not contrasting figures, they are different ways of looking at the same victorious and righteous God.

St John takes the conflation of the images one step further and proclaims Christ as both priest and victim; Passover lamb of sacrifice and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes who opens the seals and judges the world; the crucified, risen and ascended Lord.

There is no loss of innocence, only a carrying forward of that innocency into experience. He who knew no sin became sin for us.

And so the Christian path becomes for us not so much a loss of innocence - our childhood is still with us, sometimes in very positive, and sometimes in very destructive ways - but a maturing of innocence. We must keep on trusting even when our trust is sometimes rejected.

We must keep on loving, even when the love is not returned.

We must keep on forgiving, even as we are constantly forgiven by God.

And we must keep on working and praying for a better world, where, even if the lamb does not lie down with the lion, at least both will be content and truly themselves.

We must persevere until that time when we join all those who have struggled through innocence and experience, in themselves and in their understanding of God; until at last our innocence is restored and makes perfect sense of our experience. Then we will join the unnumbered host and proclaim:

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise!”