Peace - St Bartholomew

Peace

From the prophet Isaiah in today’s communion motet: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.” Isaiah 26.3

When I was a child, I used to look at pictures I really shouldn’t have looked at. And I don’t mean the underwear section in my mum’s Freeman’s catalogue.

I’m not very good with gory pictures, with blood and guts, and when I saw things like that as a child, the images would haunt me for weeks.

The lives of the saints are littered with gory pictures, and none are much gorier than the martyrdom of St Bartholomew. Of course we know precious little about this Apostle.

He comes in at number six in the lists of Apostles given in the synoptic Gospels, Matthew (10.3), Mark (3.18) & Luke (6.14). He has dropped to number seven in the listing by the time we get to the Acts of the Apostles. (1.13).

The Gospel of John doesn’t mention him, but appears to replace him with Nathaniel, who is not mentioned in the other Gospels.

(This, by the way, is why the Old Testament reading today is Jacob’s ladder with the angels descending and ascending - it ties in with the Gospel reading of Nathaniel under the fig tree - a reading we don’t use because it is not the Prayer Book reading - an intelligent congregation is supposed to make these connections...)

So he is often referred to as Nathaniel Bartholomew, which means Nathaniel son of Talmai (or Ptolemy).

In church history he doesn’t get a citation till Eusebius in the early fourth century, who mentions that he preached in India and gave the church he founded there a Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew.

According to legend, he was either beheaded or flayed alive and then crucified upside down.

Which brings us back to those gory pictures.

One of the least bloody representations is found in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. St Bartholomew is portrayed in the usual form, holding his own skin and with a skinner’s knife. (As a little conceit, Michelangelo makes the skin the Apostle is holding look like himself, the artist.)

With that fine mediaeval penchant for devotion to saints who died particularly horrible deaths, he is patron saint of many gilds, including Skinners and Tanners.

Thomas Traherne, the mystic Anglican poet of the seventeenth century, wrote a poem entitled An Hymn upon St Bartholomew’s Day, and it was reading this that led me to the theme for the sermon.

Traherne is musing about the way his soul seems, so loosely, to inhabit his body. It is perhaps a reflection of the bemused look on St Bartholomew’s face as he regards his owed flayed body.

In the spiritual context, Traherne is exploring the ability of the Christian to live in the world below, while finding his true home in the world above. Here is the fourth stanza:

Dull walls of clay my Spirit leaves,
And in a foreign Kingdom doth appear,
This great Apostle it receives,
Admires His works and sees them, standing here,
Within myself from East to West I move
As if I were
At once a Cherubim and Sphere,
Or was at once above
And here.

And that brings us back to our text: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.” Isaiah 26.3

Peace of mind is not a modern obsession, although contemporary adverts play heavily on it to prize open our wallets. It appears to be a concern running through the millennia of human consciousness.

As soon as we developed the ability for self-reflection, we became anxious, or more importantly, we knew we were anxious. Animals appear to demonstrate anxiety, although presumably without reflecting on it.

The baboon pacing up and down in his cage and showing all the signs of worry, is unlikely to be pondering universal angst and the pointlessness of existence without a fixed cosmic referent. Indeed that particular issue doesn’t keep many of us awake at night. It is more likely to be the gas bill, or as I have found out more recently, the dentist’s bill.

The Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, constantly addresses the tendency of the human spirit to be anxious. And its message is consistent although expressed in different ways.

The changes and chances of living in a frail body, on a delicate planet, in an unpredictable society, are enough to make anyone anxious. And there is no fixed point in this earthly realm which can give us security.

But, as the Apostle Paul puts it, ‘our citizenship is in heaven’. (Phil 3.20) Our point of reference is heaven. Isaiah expresses it in a different way - ‘whose mind is fixed on thee’ - our point of reference is the eternal and unchanging God. That is our fulcrum, our anchor.

And this is part of the mystery of faith, testified to by the lives of countless millions down through the ages: that such a seemingly ephemeral thing - belief in God - can provide so firm a foundation that it gives us peace of mind.

One of the purposes of liturgy and Bible reading, of mass and the daily offices, of priests and the religious; is to bring us back to that quiet centre; to recall us to the peace of God which passes all understanding.

But of course, nothing is ever as simple as that. There’s a dialogue between Lucy & Good Ol’ Charlie Brown which illustrates the dilemma.

Charlie Brown is irritable and restless and Lucy says to him: “I thought you had inner peace.” “I do” replies Charlie, “but I still have outer obnoxiousness”.

There is an inbuilt tension in our human make-up. The strength of that tension will vary with our personality and with the circumstances of our life.

The degree to which we can be at perfect peace and show it by our outward demeanor, is moderated by another probably evolutionary force which disturbs our equilibrium and leaves us dissatisfied with the cheap answers of religion.

It is probably this creative tension which urges the human spirit to it’s greatest feats of love, beauty and creativity, as well as its depths of destruction and depravity.

This is the life force which constantly we need to temper by trying to reflect the goodness of the Giver of life.

George Herbert picks up this tension in the title of his poem The Pulley - will we be lifted up to God and peace, or drawn down to earth - to Pandora and chaos - for there is also a Christian reworking of the Pandora myth in the poem.

At risk of turning this sermon into an edition of Poetry Please let me read you The Pulley.

When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by—
"Let us," said he, "pour on him all we can;
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span."

So strength first made a way,
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour,
pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.

"For if I should," said he,
"Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in nature, not the God of nature:
So both should losers be.

"Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.
(George Herbert 1593-1632)

Those words of Augustine readily spring to mind: “Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.” (Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Chapter 1)

As we pursue God, and try our best to trust in him, we do indeed achieve a good measure of peace of mind. But in order to keep alive the divine spark within us, we will also experience a divine restlessness.

If we don’t want the restlessness to overwhelm us, then we must put in place those structures that enable our inner life to come back, again and again to the hope of the Gospel; to be stayed on God.

Let this Bread & Wine be such a recollection for you.

“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.” Isaiah 26.3

For interest of readers I add the poem

An Hymn upon St Bartholomew’s Day
By Thomas Traherne (?1636–1674)

WHAT powerful Spirit lives within!
What active Angel doth inhabit here!
What heavenly light inspires my skin,
Which doth so like a Deity appear!
A living Temple of all ages, I
Within me see
A Temple of Eternity!
All Kingdoms I descry
In me.

An inward Omnipresence here
Mysteriously like His within me stands,
Whose knowledge is a Sacred Sphere
That in itself at once includes all lands.
There is some Angel that within me can
Both talk and move,
And walk and fly and see and love,
A man on earth, a man
Above.

Dull walls of clay my Spirit leaves,
And in a foreign Kingdom doth appear,
This great Apostle it receives,
Admires His works and sees them, standing here,
Within myself from East to West I move
As if I were
At once a Cherubim and Sphere,
Or was at once above
And here.

The Soul’s a messenger whereby
Within our inward Temple we may be
Even like the very Deity
In all the parts of His Eternity.
O live within and leave unwieldy dross!
Flesh is but clay!
O fly my Soul and haste away
To Jesus’ Throne or Cross!
Obey!

Transfiguration

The Transfiguration

“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32

‘Weighed down with sleep...’ We all know that feeling: in front of the television late at night; frighteningly at the wheel of a car on a long journey; or with a dear friend who nevertheless bores for England. Had Peter, James & John succumbed to sleep, we would not be celebrating this great Feast of the Church tonight.

Although it has only been celebrated in the western church in recent centuries.

It was on this day in 1456 that the news that the Turks had been chased out of Belgrade, reached Rome. So the Borgia pope, Callistus III, in honour of the victory, declared that the church should observe August the 6th as the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord.

But what actually happened?

Well, as with many of the pivotal events in the life of Jesus, it is not clear exactly what happened. And even more of a mystery is why John’s Gospel, perhaps the one you would expect to make most of it, is the only one of the four not to mention it.

There have been attempts to ‘explain it away’. Bultman suggests it was a post resurrection appearance transferred back to this point in Christ’s ministry by the Gospel writers. How this ‘explains it away’ I’m not quite sure…

Then others have called on the vision hypothesis. The disciples were drowsy and stressed and misinterpreted a mystical experience of praying with Jesus. Professor Morna Hooker seems to favour this approach.

Or perhaps Mark made up the story as a vehicle for some special teaching that Jesus gave to the three: Peter, James and John. It was the best way of explaining things in a pictorial fashion?

Or maybe it was just a plain old Gospel miracle! I don’t have a problem with occasional miracles, although I can’t quite join my Pentecostal friends who think nothing of a hundred impossible things before breakfast.

So I assume it happened more or less as the three synoptic Gospel writers remember it. The veil between this world and the other became gossamer thin and the disciples were caught up in a nexus of spiritual realities and blurred frontiers.

They saw Moses and Christ as the fulfilment of the Law. They saw Elijah and Christ as the One to whom all the prophets pointed. They heard the voice of Almighty God, reiterating Christ’s Baptismal affirmation that this was his beloved Son and that they should listen to him.

And they saw the Shekinah cloud, a theophany of the God of glory, and the reflection of that glory in the face of their teacher, Jesus the Messiah.

And they saw all this because they stayed awake, despite the lateness, after a long day and a climb up the hill.

There is a little Jewish joke here as well - a sort of pun.

Some of you will remember in another sermon how we saw that the Hebrew word for ‘glory’ was the word for weight, heaviness, gravitas. Here the disciples are weighed down with sleep, Luke tells us, but they remained awake and so were weighed down with glory.

If we are to celebrate the Glory of God, then we must stay awake, or be vigilant. For it is too easy to be so weighed down with the sleep of this world that we miss the glory of the other.

It struck me as we read tonight’s OT passage from Exodus, that after Moses went up the mountain to be enveloped in the glory of the Lord, he waited 6 days for anything to happen. Most of us, I suspect, would have given the Lord an hour at most and then been off to the next engagement.

Celebrating the Glory of God takes time. I remember inviting the local Pentecostal pastor to preach at my church in Camberwell and explaining that the service had to finish by noon. He looked at me as if I were mad and exclaimed: “But sometimes the Holy Ghost don’t get there till 12.30!”

Whether it be in Church or at Glyndebourne, in reading a book or watching a film, in a walk in the country, or looking at the stars - so many places where we can glimpse the glory of God who created all things for our enjoyment; if we will but stay awake spiritually and let the weight of God’s glory settle on us, then we begin to celebrate life in its fullness - and this is the glory of God.

The spiritual disciplines, and the daily offices are not there to stop us enjoying the world too much (although reading some of the Fathers you might suppose this); they are there to slow us down and help us to savour the world, the moments of each day.

What use are all our ‘havings’ if they are weightless - without glory. What use is a life packed full of experience if - ichabod - the glory has departed.

As Jesus goes down the mountain with the disciples, he speaks to them of his impending suffering and of his resurrection. And he has already told them, although they do not understand, that his Passion will be the greatest display of God’s glory.

We celebrate this Mass to the Glory of God. As we bring the gifts of the world at the offertory - our bread and wine and money - so we celebrate God’s glory in all he has given to us.

And as we lift up our Lord’s broken body, so we celebrate his victory over death and the glorious hope he has given us.

It is hard to celebrate the glory of God when we are suffering, in body mind or spirit; or watching those whom we love suffer. Yet as we look at the suffering of God in Christ, and remember that we will share in his resurrection glory, then even suffering and death become part of the path to glory.

The Westminster Catechism reminds us that “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.”

Secular drowsiness, the stupor of 21st century life, must not rob us of seeing God’s glory and delighting in his creation.

And here at this mass, as Christ is again transfigured in this bread and wine, let us be awake to the presence of the Glory of God.

“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32