God's self-communication

God’s self-communication

Prov 8.1, 22-31; Col 1.15-20; John 1.1-14 (2nd Sunday before Lent)

“O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” Psalm 34.8

Facebook. What's it all about? In the five years since it started on 4th February 2004 it has become a social phenomenon. There are over 175 million people signed up in this worldwide network of friends. They upload 850 million photos each month.

There are 20 million active user groups, including St Paul’s Knightsbridge, Stale Expressions of Church and the Richard Coles Admiration Group.

And what’s it all about? Well at it’s most basic level it is about communication on the worldwide web. But more than that, it’s about presenting an image of yourself to family, friends and anyone else who is allowed to see your facebook.

And of course it is highly selective in what you choose to display. I wouldn’t try to give a false impression to people who look at my facebook. It’s just that I don’t happen to have any photos of myself that weren’t taken at least 10 years ago.

And when my hard-working colleagues read in my status that ‘Nick is on a course’, it is only for the sake of brevity that I haven’t written, slightly more accurately, ‘Nick is on a golf course!’

However, you still pick up a fairly good impression of what someone’s like from their facebook.

You could just write a letter. The Valentine’s card I received yesterday spoke volumes: “Every time I see you dearie, I can believe in Darwin’s theory.” It’s a succinct and topical way of saying they admire my animal magnetism.

But if I want some one to know what really makes me tick, I need to spend time with them face to face. Self-communication is better done person to person.

Even then, there are limits as to how completely I am able to communicate myself to another person, partly because I don’t fully know my own self.

The Christian faith is in essence the self-communication of God to us human beings, and it has been a progressive revelation over several thousand years.

The Bible tells us that God’s first self-communication was in creation itself. In today’s Gospel, John deliberately starts with a reference back to Genesis, ‘In the beginning was the Word’.

The passage from Proverbs refers to this Word as ‘Wisdom’ who says: "I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world 
and delighting in the human race (8.30f)”

St Irenaeus was to express this in his famous phrase: The glory of God is Man fully alive: Gloria Dei vivens homo.

St Paul puts it this way in the opening of his letter to the Romans:

Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.

We celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday this weekend. So let him have the last word on this:

This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather the impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe including man as a result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a first cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man and I deserve to be called a theist.

But in the wisdom of God, simply becoming a theist by considering the universe was not all that God wished to say about himself.

So, thousands of years later in human development, there was a fuller, deeper self-communication: the Word, the Divine Wisdom, became flesh, and dwelt among us.

This was the greater self-communication of God in Christ, a human being like us who lived and taught among our ancestors.

And in a world that was full of pain and suffering, which was, as Darwin observed, red in tooth and claw, God not only became one of us, but suffered with us and for us.

There is of course no answer to the question of why God created so much pain and death in his universe. It’s an essential part of the process of evolution and was a problem that stopped Darwin and many others from fully embracing the God of love whom we see in Jesus Christ.

But although the life and cruel death and resurrection of Jesus doesn’t give us an answer to our questions about the cosmos as it is, it does signify to us the depth of God’s concern and identification with our struggles, and his great desire to reach out to us in love.

There is a third and crucial stage in the progressive revelation of God and this is not determined by the unfolding of history, or the development of human culture and self-understanding.

It is determined by our own personal response to the love of God.

Facebook aficionados will know that you receive messages from people who wish to ‘be your friends’ and who are then able to see your facebook.

But before they can do this you have to accept their request, and if you don’t want to, you simply press ‘Ignore’. They are not told that you have ignored them, and the hope is that they will eventually forget they asked to be your friend and go away. But some are persistent.

God not only reveals his wisdom and glory in creation; he not only reveals his love and compassion in Jesus Christ; he persistently, persistently requests our friendship.

In Kant’s words: “God is not an it to be discussed, but a Thou to be met.”

Or in the words of the Psalmist and of our text this morning: “O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that trusteth in him.”

Men and women, down through the centuries have experienced, have tasted the love of God. By the mystery of the Holy Spirit we believe we are able to apprehend God, to know him.

This is what John marvelled at when he wrote in this morning’s Gospel:

But to all who received him… he gave power to be become the children of God… and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

This was what Irenaeus had in mind when he wrote: the glory of God is Man full alive.

This is what Jesus meant when he said: “I have come that you might have life and have it in all its fullness.”

At this Table we see all the progressive revelation of God, all his self-disclosure met in the meal of his love.

We bring the gifts of creation: bread and wine, music and liturgy, the best that our culture can offer; and we offer the one perfect and complete sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the suffering servant; and we bring our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice. We take God into ourselves. There can be no fuller self-communication this side of death.

As we draw near with faith, the invitation to friendship with God is given again this morning:

“O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” Psalm 34.8

Candlemas

Candlemas

Malachi 3.1-5; Hebrews 2.14-18; Luke 2.22-40

“A sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.” Luke 2.35

Have you ever had one of those moments, which is so perfect, so beautiful, that it hurts?

In my experience such moments are rare, but I remember well over thirty years ago on a clear, frosty night coming over the Sussex downs on my motorbike, and arriving, frozen, at a friend’s house in Steyning.

There was a huge log fire and the only other light was from candles. We lay on the floor in before the hearth listening to Thomas Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah. Snow fell gently outside and the room was full of the beauty of dark and light, of music and companionship and the pain of knowing that the moment must pass.

I’m with Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Glory be to God for dappled things—
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Life only holds its interest because of the shadows; because it is bittersweet: from the pain of bringing a child into the world who then brings such joy; to the pain of passing through death and into eternal felicity.

And yet we naturally and rightly long for sweetness without bitterness, knowing that even if it were possible it would make for a dull existence.

Mary’s life was certainly bittersweet. All the confusion and shame of the conception, the agony of labour, the long uncomfortable journey, the indignity of the stable - all at last were past.

Now she brings her pride and joy, this six week old baby boy, to be presented in the Temple in Jerusalem: the first fruit of her womb to be dedicated to God.

Both Mary and this mewling baby-God are ritually unclean through childbirth. That was the Levitical law. They must offer two pigeons as a sin offering and a redemption price, to buy back this firstborn son.

These are the dual aspects of this Feast, as Bishop Cosin acknowledges in the 1662 Prayer Book which he entitles: “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called, The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin.”

It was primarily a Feast of Our Lord, rather than of his Mother, as the ancient collect which Father Richard sang earlier, taken from the 7thC Gregorian Sacramentary, makes plain.

And the blessing of candles? Well this was probably another example of that early Christian cross-cultural trick.

Take a pagan festival, any festival - like this one to do with flames and torches, and chasing away the darkness of winter, and baptize it.

Christ is the ‘Light to lighten the gentiles’, Simeon’s song which the choir sang as we started our service; so symbolically we bless all the candles we will use in the coming liturgical year and process with our torches and candles, putting to flight the steel-grey skies –Spring is coming!

And after a few centuries, no one remembers that it was a pagan feast of Imbolc & Oimelc which we have displaced with this Christian festival of light.

And while we are at it, let’s make St Blaise (February 3rd) the patron saint of Ear, Nose and Throat, and bless parishioners’ throats with the newly blessed candles to protect them from all the colds and 'flus so prevalent at this time of the year.

Of course our American cousins (pace those of you in the congregation) are busy doing the cross-cultural trick backwards. So Candlemas, which the puritans took over the pond, has become the much more politically correct, Groundhog Day, based on an old Scottish couplet:

If Candlemas Day is bright and clear,
there'll be two winters in the year.

Candlemas is a pivotal day in the Christian calendar. It is bittersweet, as we look back on the joy of the 40-day feast of Christmas and Epiphany, as Simeon and Anna rejoice in the Temple;
and yet we look forwards to Lent and Passiontide: the agonies of our Lord’s pierced Body; the anguish of our Lady’s pierced soul.

In some of the older rites where the blessing of candles took place after mass, the white and gold vestments of the mass were exchanged for penitential purple for the procession of lights.

Candlemas reminds us of Life as we Know It, dappled and pied with pleasure and pain.

Who has not watched children grow into adults and not known the bitter-sweetness of parenthood?

Who has not loved deeply and not known the bitter-sweet wounds of affection.

The joyful comfort of lovers, friends and family is always eventually plundered by death and grief.

And with all our conviviality and social pleasures, who has not sat down and felt so alone, and but precariously loved?

We can be optimistic about ourselves and about our world, but constantly nagged by intimations of despair. Recession hits us when we feared all was going too well.

As Hazlitt put it:

Man is the only species who can laugh or cry because he is the only being who knows the difference between what is and what should be.

We can long for peace and yet stand looking at war.

We can reach for the stars and in minutes be only too aware of our human mortality and of the contingency of all things.

But the Light shines in the darkness: that spark of hope which God implants within all of us.

We were hardly aware of it in the full blaze of day, in the sweetness of life. And even in the gloom we can still choose to turn our back upon it. But the light beckons.

As Barrack Obama expressed it in his appeal to the American people:

In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?

As Christians we believe that the Light is Christ. The bright radiance of candles around the altar draw us to him, the source of all light: the bittersweet man of sorrows who has been through what we go through, as the writer to the Hebrews reminds us in today's epistle.

We live this strange but alluring bittersweet life in the light of glory, and in the presence of Christ, and so we have hope.

And like John Donne, when we have those fleeting, perfect moments we catch glimpses of the life to be when the shadows have finally passed and we pray with him:

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of thy glory and dominion...

And with this confidence we shall not fear, even if

“A sword shall pierce through (our) own soul also.” Luke 2.35