Peace & the Sword (Trinity 10)

Peace & Sword

10th Sunday after Trinity
Jer 23.23-29; Heb 11.29.12.2; Luke 12.49-56

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

Was I the only one to notice that last Thursday, the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis, the appointed reading for the day began “The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah concerning all the Jews in – wait for it – Memphis!” How much of a co-incidence was that? Or was God telling us that Elvis is not really dead?

It’s amazing what people can get out of selectively reading the Bible. Scripture is very slippery at times and in today’s Gospel we have Jesus, the prince of peace, telling his disciples that he did not come to bring peace but division, or as Matthew puts it even more graphically, ‘not peace but the sword’. (Matt 10.34)

Similarly that same Isaiah who has just re-assured us about being kept in perfect peace, rails against the false prophets who cry ‘peace, peace’ when there is none.

And in today’s first reading, Jeremiah condemns those prophets who have comfortable dreams about the future of God’s people when all he sees is fire and destruction.

Perhaps we need to spend a few minutes re-evaluating the Christian teaching about inner peace?

Striving for 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 our family, our health or the gas bill.

The Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, constantly addresses the tendency of the human spirit to be anxious, to be troubled. 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, which is why today’s epistle urges us to remember that “we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.”

Isaiah, in our text, 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; by the men and women of faith that the letter to the Hebrews catalogues: 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 or 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, and we come back to those apparent contradictions in Scripture which we pondered a few minutes ago.

There’s a dialogue between Lucy & Good Ol’ Charlie Brown which illustrates our 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. So even Jesus says in today’s Gospel “what stress I am under” – not a very good advert for being kept in perfect peace!

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

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

This is the life force which we need constantly 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, even divisions, and, God forbid, at times, the sword.

For we cannot be disciples of Christ without provoking divisions. We cannot bring into being that prophetic vision of a just and compassionate world without facing dissent and fighting evil and injustice.

But, if we don’t want the restlessness, the struggles within and strife without, 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

Consciousness, prayer & the Holy Spirit

Consciousness, prayer and the Holy Spirit

Let me read you a part of a letter:

“I venture to put before the conference the following practical recommendations: (1) Education of Ordinands--- That the bishops shall emphasize the need and importance of a far more thorough, varied, interesting and expert devotional training in our theological colleges which, with a few striking exceptions, seem to me to give insufficient attention to this vital part of their work. (2) The Clergy--- That they should call upon every ordained clergyman, as an essential part of his pastoral duty and not merely for his own sake: (a) To adopt a rule of life which shall include a fixed daily period of prayer and reading of a type that feeds, pacifies and expands his soul, and deepens his communion with God; b) To make an annual retreat; (c) To use every endeavour to make his church into a real home of prayer and teach his people, both by exhortation and example so to use it.”

A letter from Evelyn Underhill to Archbishop Lang of Canterbury for the 1930 Lambeth Conference.

I used to tell my students that Christians were permanently guilty about two things: prayer and sex. Too much of one and not enough of the other. And which way round that is depends on whether you are an evangelical or a catholic!

This evening I want to ease our guilt about prayerlessness - a little.
I want to agree with what Evelyn Underhill expresses as her hopes for ordinands and clergy, but to widen it a little. To remind ourselves, in Michelle Quoist’s phrase, that all of life becomes a prayer. To reflect on human consciousness, as Underhill does in some of her own mystical writings.

“The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.” (Romans 8.16)

Hyenas don’t really laugh. Rather, like the chimpanzees in the tea adverts, we are anthropomorphizing animals and giving them what are uniquely human characteristics. Dogs, if they look as though they are giving you a toothy grin, are usually about to bite you.

Human beings alone (as far as we know) in the universe, laugh. Only humans can blush or be embarrassed. Only humans need to feel embarrassed.

All this is part of our self-consciousness. The fact, that unlike any other creatures, to our present knowledge, we can reflect on what we are. This is the joy and pain of being a human animal: homo sapiens.

Julian Jaynes puts it this way in the opening of his fascinating book with the snappy title, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Penguin 1990): (cf Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash)

“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! … A secret theatre of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries… A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do… This consciousness…”

But where did self-awareness come from in our evolutionary history?

Well, we don’t really know. About 3 million years ago - a mere nothing in comparison to the age of the earth. (If the 4 billion years of the earth’s existence are represented by a clock, then we are looking at just over half a minute ago.) About 3 million years ago, Neanderthal humans appeared with brains the size of the planet; brains bigger than any other animal on earth. And they used only a tiny proportion of that massive brain.

It’s like the computers some of us have at home or in our office. They are capable of rocket science, and all we use them for is as a glorified typewriter & late night solitaire.

So late Neanderthals or maybe Cro-Magnon man began to use this spare brain capacity for inventing language and tools and weapons; and then art and music; religion and laws; and eventually political parties and Brylcreem…

At some point, and the experts differ as to when, these humans started to reflect upon themselves. They realised they would die, like the animals which they killed to eat.

They realised they were conscious - they were self-conscious. Julian Jaynes reckons that self-consciousness as we know it appeared less than 4 thousand years ago. Most scientists think it was much earlier.

Well what has all this got to do with our text?

Human beings are the only animals that consciously worship. Our God-consciousness emerged as part of our self-consciousness.

Non-realist theologians like Don Cuppit and the Sea of Faith group, and many philosophers of other faiths and none, assert that God-consciousness is only an extension of our inward monologue.

In other words, it cannot be an awareness of a Mind that is ‘other’ and somehow separate from our own minds. It is a defence mechanism that religion provides to make sense of our existence. It is talking to ourselves.

This argument runs, that the elaborate development of religions is an internal trick that has served human evolution quite well.

It has socialised us and, for quite long periods, stopped us living like the beasts we are, red in tooth and claw.

Rather like the self-deception which equates joining a gym with actually going to the gym…

But there is another explanation which our Christian faith provides and which many of us prefer to believe.

The Garden of Eden describes humanity coming to self-consciousness; and asserts that, that self-consciousness is a reflection of God’s self-consciousness. We are indeed made in imago Dei, in the image of God, knowing, and self-knowing. And so part of the human condition is bound up with knowledge of God: who is self-conscious within the Holy Trinity.

Adam is separate from the other animals, and to show his self-consciousness, he names them: they are tiger and horse; they are other; they are not flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.

Unlike the other creatures, Adam and Eve know good from evil, and know that they are capable of choosing evil. The tiger and the horse can know no shame, but Adam and Eve hide from God, full of remorse and embarrassment.

Cain slays Abel, not for food nor for evolutionary superiority; but because of jealousy and on account of religious convictions.

Self-consciousness leads to self-doubt and to strong convictions. I remember hearing Peter Ustinov remind us again on the radio just before his death that “It is our doubts that unite us. Our convictions divide us.”

Indeed. But we can have no doubts without convictions and it is those convictions which determine what we do with our convictions; and how we handle our doubt.

The Christian story unfolds through the centuries until the second Adam comes: Christ, who as he matures as a man and grows into self-consciousness; grows also into that unique and aweful destiny that is his alone - that unspeakable agony of inner thought - God-consciousness: the horror of realisation that he is God.

For us, the realisation is that we are loved and that we will never be alone. In St Paul’s words: “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.”

But for Christ, the Spirit testified to his spirit that he was the only-begotten of the Father.

One of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to direct our inner consciousness – to work alongside it, if you will. And he does this whether we are hectically busy, or whether we are in retreat: the Holy Ghost working alongside the ‘ghost in the machine’.

Maybe the human soul is a virtual reality created by the world’s most complex computer, the human brain. But that does not invalidate the belief that there is a Divine Consciousness, before all things, incarnate in Christ, and interacting with us by way of the Holy Spirit.

We believe that there is an internal dialogue - not monologue. We believe that our Divine Lover is literally, always in our thoughts.

Put another way, this is the testimony of the saints and the men and women of God down through the centuries: that they have tasted and seen that the Lord is good. The Spirit has enabled them, sometimes with faltering conviction, to cry ‘Abba’, Father.”

This understanding of human self-consciousness, certainly encourages us to make time each day when with conscious effort we open ourselves to the Divine Consciousness. It encourages us to make space in our lives in retreat to let our Older Brother heal and remould us in his image.

But it also encourages us to believe even through the guilt of prayerlessness and overbusyness, that even then God’s Spirit is at work in us: we are still useful servants.

We must not be robbed of that joyful conviction that

“The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.” (Romans 8.16)

Edward the Confessor

Edward the Confessor and Faith

“For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” Romans 10.10

One of the letters I had from a cousin after my father’s funeral commented on my eulogy. My family had wanted a non-religious service, but I had said in the course of the tribute “I am a Christian and so believe that my dad is now with God, and more alive than he has ever been, and that I shall see him again.”

My cousin wrote: “ It’s a shame that we can’t all believe that there will be life after death and that we will all be together one day. But it’s such a huge thing to believe. Paul, my husband, has such faith and I envy him.”

It is a genuine plea which I have heard so many times down through the years: “I wish I could believe.” And then they often add, “like you”. And I think, “if only you knew how I believe...”

How is it that some people seem to believe so fervently and deeply and others cannot believe even although they want to?

I make no apology for returning to a subject that we have looked at before because it is so important for our own self-understanding and for our understanding of the task laid upon us by our Lord to make disciples of all nations.

Today we remember one of the many rather dubious saints, Edward the Confessor. He was born in 1003 and became King Edward III in a roundabout way, when Hardicanute died unexpectedly in 1042.

He had a fruitless marriage to Edith Godwin, probably because he had taken a vow of celibacy and eventually banished her to a monastery. Rather extreme family planning.

Some historians blame him for the Norman invasion of 1066. If he had left an Anglo-Saxon heir, William the Conqueror might never have invaded.

Edward seems to have been a peaceful man and undertook no wars except to repel an inroad of the Welsh (and we can understand that), and to assist Malcolm III of Scotland against Macbeth, the usurper of his throne.

He was certainly a devout Christian, was very religious as a boy growing up in Normandy, took care of the poor when he was king, and decided to build a great Minster mausoleum to the West of the City of London on the site of St Peter’s Abbey - this became Westminster Abbey. It was consecrated only a week before his death in January 1066,

He was canonized by Pope Alexander III in 1161. His body was translated on this day in 1163 by St. Thomas of Canterbury in the presence of King Henry II.

So much for the history. But was it easier for Edward to believe than for us? Is the gift of faith somehow historically dependent? Did he live in an age of faith?

Well, in the long-term, faith is certainly dependent on our long human history.

And before we look at faith we should perhaps ask where did self-awareness come from in our evolutionary history, for there can be no faith without self-awareness?

Well, we don’t really know. About 3 million years ago - a mere nothing in comparison to the age of the earth. (If the 4 billion years of the earth’s existence are represented by a clock, then we are looking at just over half a minute ago.)

-about 3 million years ago, Neanderthal humans appeared with brains the size of the planet; brains bigger than any other animal on earth. And they used only a tiny proportion of that massive brain.

So late Neanderthals or maybe Cro-Magnon humans began to use this spare brain capacity for inventing language and tools and weapons; and then art and music; religion and laws; and eventually political parties and Kentucky Fried Chicken…

At some point, and the experts differ as to when, these humans started to reflect upon themselves. They realised they would die, like the animals which they killed to eat.

They realised they were conscious - they were self-conscious. Julian Jaynes in his controversial book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Penguin 1990) (it would have sold a lot more copies if it had had a more memorable title) reckons that self-consciousness as we know it appeared less than 4 thousand years ago - that there was a dramatic shift in the hard wiring of the human brain. Most scientists think it was much earlier.

Whatever, our God-consciousness emerged as part of our self-consciousness.

Non-realist theologians, sometimes called textual nihilists (Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith group) and many philosophers of other faiths and none, assert that God-consciousness is only an extension of our inward monologue.

In other words, it cannot be an awareness of a Mind that is ‘other’ and somehow separate from our own minds. It is a defence mechanism that religion provides to make sense of our existence. It is talking to ourselves.

This argument runs, that the elaborate development of religions is an internal trick that has served human evolution quite well. It has socialised us and, for quite long periods, stopped us living like the beasts we are, red in tooth and claw.

And the argument concludes that in the 20th and 21st centuries intelligent men and women can’t believe in this objective reality of God any more.

But of course many millions of people do believe. And many wish they could, and can’t.

Is it hard-wired in our brains? Is it in our psychological make-up? Is it a gift from God, given to some and not to others?

Remember Elsie whom I met in Southlands Hospital in my home town of Shoreham- by-Sea? She’s an elderly lady and Southlands is a dilapidated, run-down old 30s building, that was due to be rebuilt after the war.

She had been close to death at one point, and a bright young doctor had asked her, if she lapsed into unconsciousness, whether she wanted to be revived?

“I ask you” Elsie said, “I’m at the gates of Paradise and they ask me if I’d like to come back to Southlands!”

I envy that sort of faith.

The Myth of Certainty (Daniel Taylor, Word, 1986) is a book I found very helpful back in the late 80s when all the certainties of my faith seemed to be deserting me. I was sinking into post-hippy scepticism. And more importantly, I was turning grey and turning 40. I was beginning to think that faith was believing what you know isn’t true.

And so I learned, with many others down through the centuries, to abandon certainty and to embrace genuine biblical faith. That is, acknowledging what I believe - more strongly on some days than others - and acting upon it.

We cannot wish for the faith of others if we will not build on the little faith we have. “Lord I believe. Help thou my unbelief!” is the cry of all of us.

However intricately tied up our faith is with perhaps our genes, our psychology, our upbringing, an unpleasant experience with a nun...

If we wish to follow the likes of St Edward the Confessor, then we must act upon what we do believe.

There are certainly sufficient reasons for faith, but in our age in the West, few seem to find sufficient reason for a religious faith that results in action.

Biblical faith and hope always spring from action. If we believe half of what we are about to sing in the creed, then the hope and love which are the hallmarks of Christians, will flow from the actions we take in the light of that belief.

People stay away from church and sacraments and then complain that they find it hard to believe - it is hardly surprising. Those of us who come regularly to the altar often find it hard to believe!

People act in unloving and embittered ways and complain that they cannot believe in a God of love. It is hardly surprising.

John Donne, that early 17th century poet priest, was in some ways a great man of faith, another great confessor, and yet he hardly dared believe. He ends his Hymn to God the Father with these words.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done;
I fear no more.

Whether we have great faith, or only a tiny mustard seed of faith, if we act upon it, and treat it as a revelation of God’s truth, the hope of the Gospel,we can be free from fear.

“For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” Romans 10.10