Intervention - Advent Sunday

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” Isaiah 61.1

Well it’s been another week of depressing and frightening events. And of course the terrible deaths of the 200 in Mumbai have eclipsed the news of violence in the Congo and Zimbabwe and Orissa and Thailand and Iraq and Nigeria and Somalia and so the list goes on.

And like the prophet Isaiah, and men and women of faith throughout the centuries, we cry: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”

Why doesn’t God do something!

Christians have moved in two opposite directions in trying to answer the question: why doesn’t God do something.

At one extreme there is a theology which sees God as the Grand Designer who created the universe like some huge clockwork mechanism, wound it up, and then retired to see how the next few billion years unfolded.

William Paley popularised this in the 18th century in his book on Natural Theology. If you had never seen a watch, he argued, and found one, you would assume that it had both an intelligent designer and a purpose.

The universe is much more complex than a watch and it too, he argued, must therefore have a designer and purpose.

Richard Dawkins partially refuted this argument in his early book The Blind Watchmaker.

But a by-product of this whole line of reasoning that goes back to the Greeks, Thomas Aquinas, and the Deists among the 17th century Anglicans, is the notion that God is incapable of intervening in his creation. That would somehow be breaking his own rules.

Then there is the other extreme view about God’s role in human affairs. God is forever tinkering with the mechanism – a little fine tuning here, a replacement cog there, the occasional rethink about how the whole thing is going – perhaps I don’t want a clock, maybe I want a mechanical jack-in-the-box!

The trouble with both these extreme views is that they do not take into account either the complexity of God, or the complexity of the universe.

Another model more consonant with Scripture and our experience of life, the universe and everything, is the relational model.

God is bound up with the universe he created in a similar way to how we are bound up in our network of family and friends.

Genesis paints the picture of God in relationship with his human beings, made in his image, walking in the garden with them in the cool of the day.

And then, things go wrong. And relationships between the humans, and their relationship to the Creator, become far more complex.

But then so does God’s relationship with the whole universe become more complex.

We also know now that although the cosmos is in many respects like some vast mechanism, it nevertheless has some bewildering characteristics.

Quantum mechanics means it is full of strangeness, uncertainty and unpredictability.

Well where does all this leave us? It leaves us with the joys and pains of living in relationship.

In our prayers, we of course express to God our frustration that he doesn’t act, that he doesn’t rend the heavens and come down. We tell him what we want to happen in the world. We bring our sorrows and anger and hopes and fears.

And do we expect him to turn up in Zimbabwe and give that Mr Mugabe a talking to? (A lightening bolt would do Lord!) No! Of course not.

Or do we expect those cancer cells to suddenly disappear from our loved one’s body? Sadly, no.

But we know that the world is a much stranger place than we can imagine, and that wars cease, dictators are deposed, and that cancer sometimes does go away.

And so we talk to God, not to try and persuade him to do something, but to express our dependency on him to make some sense of it all; and of course, because we wish he would do something!

The Scripture themes in advent are generally dark and bleak, an opportunity to take a long hard look at life red in tooth and claw, but always against the background that ‘Christmas is coming’. God will tear open the heavens and come down.

He will be born among us, the strangest creature in all the universe. ‘God contracted to a span, inexplicably made man’.

And somehow, this is enough to break through the sadness that all these injustices bring to our life. We know that God knows, and that he meets us both as God and as one of us; he meets us here in the mystery of the mass, and in one another.

There’s a poem by Sheena Pugh which expresses this advent hope of waiting and watching through all the changing scenes of life. It’s called Sometimes.

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

Sheena Pugh (b.1950)

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” Isaiah 61.1

Remembrance Sunday

Remembrance Sunday

“Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22.19)

Last weekend was my little sister’s 50th Birthday and so 25 or so of our extended family spent the weekend celebrating in a Chateau outside of Cherbourg.

We spent a cold and grey Sunday on Omaha beach where on D-Day in 1944 the Allies had made the bridgehead into France.

My great nephew James was old enough to clamber over the gun emplacements and run down into the grassy shell craters.

My nephews Neil and Jason were older than most of the 4,200 men who died there that day. They were just old enough to have seen Saving Private Ryan when the film came out ten years ago, with the horrific opening sequence of the Americans landing on Omaha beach.

The rest of us were old enough to remember the barbed wire and tank blocks of our childhoods on the beaches and rivers of Sussex.

What will each of us remember of the family day on Omaha beach in 20 years time, and will great nephew James remember any deeper significance of the place in the bloody history of the 20th century?

Memory is a strange but very important human ability. It creates the substance of our being. There can be no ‘What I Am’ without the memory of ‘What I have been.’

In human evolution, it was the creatures with memory that won over those early creatures with no memory.

It is the foundation of all our deep relationships: shared history; shared memories. How often in our conversations with friends do we start a sentence with “Do you remember?” It is the stuff of family get-togethers – for better for worse!

Remembering where we have been, helps us to make sense of where we are now. So music has no beauty without the memory of what was. The resolution of the chord or the conclusion of the book is meaningless without the retention in your memory of what has gone before.

The short-term memory is the most vital and sometimes the most fragile. Sentences begun but unended with ‘what was I saying?’

Perhaps you suffer like me, from phone memory syndrome? You push a single phone memory number, and in the ten seconds the call takes in connecting, your mind wanders to other subjects and other things to do; so that if someone finally answers simply with ‘hello’, you’re left wondering ‘who have I telephoned?’

Long-term memory is even more of an enigma. A cameo appearance of an old friend 40 years ago is there in all its vividness: the flares, the knitted tie, the bicycles on the tow-path with the Sturmy Archer 3-speed gears.

But what happened in 1964 when you were in the fourth form? The entire year is a complete blank!

Then there is communal memory, which is what today is about, passed on from one generation to another.

The Bible and the Church have always placed a strong emphasis on the integration of our communal memory - commonly owned history - into the present reality.

Indeed there can be no present reality without a sense of what was.

These vestments, the liturgy, the music, the art and symbols of recent and long past centuries - these all give greater reality to the ‘now’.

Why has Remembrance Day become arguably of greater significance in the last decade than, say, in the 60s and 70s? You'll remember there were calls for its abolition back then.

Many of us now have no direct memories of the world wars, yet the act of remembrance - the liturgy at the Cenotaph, the poppies, the veterans, the engraved walls, the war poems - all these give substance to the reality of the war dead, and a poignancy to the new struggles with terrorism and the daily casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan or the Congo.

These yearly community remembrances; the counting of the decades of uneasy peace; these 63 years of nervous optimism that we will never fall into another world-wide conflagration; these ceremonies of thankfulness and hope...

...they help to give expression to our inner longings for peace and a better society, for an end to violence and hatred. They are a shared history which guides us in shaping the present.

Of course there are cultures whose communal remembering is rooted in vengeance and hatred which prolongs the relentless cycle of bloodshed. This sort of remembering must be expunged if the culture is to survive. And once it has taken root, it is difficult to remove.

Increasingly fewer of us now have direct experience of the two Great Wars, but of course none of us have direct and experiential memories of the man Christ Jesus; who lived and died and rose again these two millennia past - 50 generations ago.

Yet we believe that our remembering of this man, deeply affects our present - and our future.

Catherine Pickstock at Cambridge wrote a startling but difficult book a few years ago entitled After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. It is an attack on the floating, postmodern self, detached from history and memory. She wrote of this service, the mass:

“… the worshipper’s forward journey is precisely its journey towards memory: the occasion of our meeting God is our memory of him.” (p.231)

“Do this” says Jesus, “in remembrance of me.”

I remember, as a young teacher, standing in the memorial cloister of Lancing College at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 35 years ago.

And looking at the 500 young men and masters around me, and then at the 500 names etched in the cold November walls in front of us. The lesson needed no words of explanation.

Today we remember and honour the war dead. We give thanks for their sacrifice and pray to God that we will not let such carnage happen again.

It is Remembrance Sunday. Our communal memory encourages us to work for a better present reality – and if we remember rightly, it brings that reality into being.

Which is why for Christians every Sunday is Remembrance Sunday.

Our communal memory allows God to make himself a reality amongst us in bread and wine and fellowship.

So, a deep understanding, a deep sense of who we are; what we are doing on this war-riven planet; why our relationships have any value; how the suffering and death of God in Christ nearly two thousand years ago affect us today...

...the conviction that the Risen Lord is with us now, and that we will be with him and all those who have gone before; and the hope that 63 years of peace will lead to that time when the lion will lie down with the lamb, and they will study war no more…

…this is all bound up in the profound utterance of our Lord which we and the Church Universal repeat in every hour, of every day, of every century:

“Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22.19)