The Lamb Blake/Tavener

The Lamb

Trinity 2 & Adult Baptism

In the order of service sheet:

The Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice:
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

And mentioned in the sermon

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger. burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
On what wings dare he aspire!
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

“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. Of course, it was unthinkable to me that this little old lady had conceived 3 children out of wedlock in the 1910s.

I began to realise 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. The Bible traces the loss of innocence of Adam and Eve in the Garden, through the violence and injustice of tribal humanity that culminates in the death of the one innocent man – our Lord Jesus Christ - to the final book, Revelation, which looks to a new and different age of innocence.

In my sermon this week and in a fortnight’s time, I want to explore this Bible theme through the offertory motets. Today it is William Blake’s The Lamb.

William Blake was absorbed by this idea of loss of innocence. He grew up during the turbulent 18th C, 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 by his own mystical visions and a strange romantic mythology that 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 and was influenced by Rousseau’s belief that children are free and innocent until society corrupts them.

But in Blake’s peculiar belief system, there was also a more traditional Christian understanding of a fallen creation. Blake and his wife, practised nudism, as a gesture towards returning to the innocence of Adam and Eve. They would have been at home with the 1000 naked cyclists who were here yesterday!

In the early church, baptismal candidates, both children and adults, went naked into the waters, and were then clothed in white as they emerged to a new innocence in Christ – it is a theme in the baptismal liturgy. (Time will not permit me to tell you of an adult baptism by immersion that I carried out while wearing white, designer cotton trousers, which turned transparent as I walked down into the water of the baptistry!)

In The Lamb, Blake draws a picture of an innocent child... and of an innocent God. The engraved and then painted illustration in his book 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, walking in the garden with his creation. The child sends up the simplest of innocent prayers - “Little Lamb, God bless thee!”

This is the sweet innocence that haunts us throughout our adult life. If only our life could be full of simple pleasures and simple childlike trust. But it’s not.

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 sense of wonder?
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. (Which Tavener also set in a complementary setting to The Lamb.)

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 dualism which places blame elsewhere – in some other god of chaos. Luther’s striking words encapsulate 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" – a couplet from The Tyger.

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 – such as we see in the current writings of Richard Dawkins.

Blake's contemporary "rationalists" who had hoped for a tame, gentle world guided by kindness and understanding must face the reality of the tiger.

To change the historic setting to our own, postmodernity with its ironic and wry take on the world has nothing to say to the jackboot or to the brutal rawness of nature. It has no power to tame the tiger within or the tiger without. 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, and it is that which humanises us and gives us hope for a second innocence.

John Tavener, who composed the musical setting of Blake’s poem, is a Russian orthodox convert and is making a similar point as he describes the icon-like nature of his compositions:

'There is in ikons an uncontrolled wildness, a coarseness almost, a deep sense of the untamed ferocity of the desert… 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, the lion of Judah.

There is no loss of innocence in Christ, only a carrying forward of that innocence into experience. ‘He who knew no sin became sin for us’ as Scripture puts it.

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 – not loss, but a maturing of innocence.

In Emperor Constantine’s time, the 4th century, it was common practice to delay baptism until the deathbed, in the hope of passing through death in pristine innocence.

This was a mistaken understanding of baptism and forgiveness. Rather, as baptized Christians we must persevere until that time, after death, when we join all those who have struggled through innocence and experience, both in themselves and in their understanding of God.

Here in this life, 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 God constantly forgives us.

Then, in the life after death, at last our innocence will be restored and will make perfect sense of all our experience, and of all that we do not understand about God. 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!”