Greater Love has no man... Easter 6

Gospel Reading, Easter 6, John 15.9-17

“There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John  15.13

I hope you enjoyed the great British Bank Holiday last Monday. If you were in London you will remember that it was cold, wet and dark.

Unfortunately I was entertaining a guest from out of town. So instead of staying indoors with books, films, fortifying spirits and unhealthy food, I found myself battling through the rain and heading for the Museum of London in the Barbican.

The Barbican is seen at its best I feel in driving rain under leaden skies.

So ever the cheery host and like thousands of families out on the streets with girning children, I put on a brave face and tried to take the scenic route to the Barbican from the Tower where I now live.

And that’s how I found myself in that little-known patch of grass called Postman’s Park, the old churchyard of St Botolph Aldersgate. It was next to the General Post Office and many postmen took their breaks in the park.

The park came into being when, to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, the aspirational Victorian painter GF Watts decided to build a Memorial of Heroic Self Sacrifice commemorating ordinary people who died while trying to save others.

There are 53 ceramic tiles, decorated and bearing a simple and often poignant sentence. Although nothing much was added after 1931, the Diocese of London gave permission for another tablet to be added in 2009.

That memorials reads: ‘Leigh Pitt, Reprographic operator, Aged 30, saved a drowning boy from the canal at Thamesmead, but sadly was unable to save himself. June 7 2007’

Some of the early memorials sound rather quaint to our ears – locally, across the roadhere, ‘William Drake lost his life in averting a Serious Accident to a Lady in Hyde Park whose horses were unmanageable through the breaking of the carriage pole. 2 Apr 1869’

Jesus says to his disciples in a phrase that has entered into our cultural consciousness, “There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Now many of the incidents recorded in the tablets on the Memorial wall tell of men and women who laid down their lives for strangers, not friends.

And of course most of these heroic deeds were not premeditated. They were spur-of-the-moment decisions to take bold action without thinking too much about the consequences.

You stand and read the wall and can’t help but think: “What would I have done?” And of course you don’t know.

Maybe we would be heroic and act instantly. But maybe we might hesitate long enough to consider the possible outcome of any action and simply wring our hands.

Most of us recognise and admire those who take such actions. And of course the children and men and women who were saved will always carry a burden of gratitude to their saviours.

But what was Jesus talking about in today’s Gospel? He was certainly talking about the heroism that Watts sought to encourage by his memorial.

And he was certainly talking about his own impending death, which was to be a means of ‘saving’ his friends and indeed the whole world.

Yet the death of Jesus was different. It was not like these people listed on the tablets.

It was not like brave St Alban, the first English martyr, feigning to be the Christian priest he was protecting and executed by the Romans in the priest’s place.

No one was about to be killed when Jesus was crucified.

Yet still Jesus taught, and Christian theology has insisted, that it was necessary for him to die.

There’s a Jesuit theologian, Jack Mahoney who has recently attempted to look more deeply into the issue of Christ’s death and how it is traditionally interpreted.

Especially to look again at that idea of an angry God who will not forgive us unless blood is shed to appease him. It somehow doesn’t ring true to the God we see in Jesus.

This is a particular aspect of a doctrine known as penal substitution. Philip Bliss’s hymn, written at about the same time that Watts was planning his wall, has these lines: “In my place condemned he stood, sealed my pardon with his blood.” (Man of Sorrows)

The theology of the redemption of you and me through Christ’s sacrificial death is at the heart of Christianity and of this mass.

And as we ponder it there are always more layers of understanding to uncover.

So Fr Jack Mahoney in his book Christianity in Evolution: an Exploration (Nov 2011) develops what he calls "a Christian theology of altruism".

He emphasises that Christ’s death was not so much to deal with ‘original sin’ but that it was to teach us how to imitate Trinitarian altruism – giving ourselves for others.

We are "prone to self-concern and even self-obsession", he writes, but this is not attributable to "some primordial moral disaster" in a garden of Eden.

Christ by example shows us how to overcome these natural evolutionary characteristics so that his death and resurrection – and here I quote Mahoney -  "can be seen as a major evolutionary step in the moral advancement of humanity, and an indication that universal altruism is the moral invitation and evolutionary destiny of the human species." (The Tablet Blog.)

Well it’s an interesting book, but you’ll be relieved to hear that there are limits to what you can do in ten minutes on a Sunday morning.

Sufficient to say that Mahoney is encouraging a fresh understanding of living for others.

Not in that joyless way that CS Lewis describes: “She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression!” (Screwtape Letters)

A moment before Jesus spoke of laying down one’s life for friends he had said: “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” (John 15.11)

This talk with his disciples is all about joy and loving one another – giving ourselves to one another – laying down our lives for our friends.

It was the outspoken journalist and literatus Malcolm Muggeridge who said in a moment of candour:

I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness; or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus. 

 “There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John  15.13 

Epiphany

“Arise, shine, for your light has come.” Is 60.1

I suppose I always get a bit maudlin at Christmas and New Year - another birthday, another year, another wrinkle, a stronger pair of reading glasses. And even bishops begin to look young.

The Feast of the Epiphany can help us to look more joyfully at our own mortality.

The Epiphany - the Manifestation - the Showing; or the Theophania as it was also called - the showing of God - it's been celebrated since the early 3rd Century. By the 4th Century, in the Western Church, its focus became the Revelation of God to the Gentiles - personified in those three Wise Men from the East, or were they Kings, or Astrologers? We don't know what they were, or for that matter how many of them there were.

What were they expecting as they followed the star? They had riches and wisdom, and yet left the security of their homes to follow a hunch. Maybe they were going through a mid-life crisis and needed some adventure in their lives?

I think there is some truth in that. Men and women, often at the height of their powers, secure with family and jobs, sometimes question what life is all about. Some change jobs; some climb mountains; some have affairs; others hit the bottle, and some look for the meaning of life. These wise men, from outside of the Jewish tradition, came looking for the one who was to unlock the key to life.

In the paradox of Christian faith, and of this Mass, they found the answer to life in death.

This is a theme in TS Eliot’s famous Journey of the Magi, written as Eliot was going through his own mid-life changes in 1927 when he gave up agnosticism and was baptised.

The poem ends with one of the Magi reflecting on their momentous journey:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth

and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

The gifts the Magi bear to the infant Christ, although never mentioned in the poem, fit well into this theme of death and life. They symbolise, if you like, Three Deaths.

1. Gold represents the Death of Self. Christ was born to be King, symbolised in this king of metals - gold.

"Born a king on Bethlehem plain, Gold I bring to crown him again..."

In his earthly ministry Jesus was to demand total allegiance from his followers, promising them that only by death to self, would they ever find their true selves.

"For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it." (Lk 9.24)

Jesus is encapsulating the heart of the Gospel: it is in loving abandonment to Christ that we become fully human, and learn how to love ourselves.

The little boy is standing up in the back seat of the car (this is before seatbelts) and his father keeps telling him to sit down. At last the father stops the car and forcibly sits the boy down. As they continue the journey, the sulking boy in the back shouts: “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I’m standing up on the inside!”

This is the individual, assertive self that wreaks such havoc in our lives and in our world; the Naked Self, the Selfish Gene. It does not deserve our loyalty. We only need to look at the world around us to see how love of this self leads to destruction and death. Fealty to Jesus is the only way to life; and to bring life to others.

But wait a minute, we are western liberal thinkers, and all this loyalty to Christ alone sounds a little too exclusive. So let’s look at the second death.

2. Frankincense represents the Death of the gods. We live in a pluralist society. And rightly, there must be acceptance and dialogue with those of other faiths and no faith.

But true as this is, there has also been much twaddle about all faiths being basically the same. They are not. Look for similarities between Mormonism and Melanesian Frog Worship and you will look in vain.

I will respect and defend the rights of others to practise their faith, but I must also proclaim as a follower of Christ that I believe him to be a unique revelation of God to all nations and cultures.

There is no contradiction in thinking in this, and indeed the Incarnation leaves us no choice - 'Incense owns a deity nigh'. We do not believe that Jesus was just a good and holy man, or a prophet. We worship him, with all around the crib, as God. There is no God other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now this is not to say that he does not reveal himself to others outside of the Christian faith. Or to put it another way: a good Muslim may be much nearer to God than a bad Christian. But I must not let my acceptance of others and their ways of believing paralyze me from holding on to my own Christian faith.

"There's a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea" as Faber put it. But if we believe that Jesus is Very God and Very Man, there can be no other gods.

3. And that brings us to the central mystery of our faith, and the 3rd Death: The Death of God.

CS Lewis puts it this way:

"The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact." Mythology is full of dying and rising gods. But in Christianity, "we pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to an historical Person crucified under Pontius Pilate…" ('Myth Became Fact' is in Undeception and also in God in the Dock.)

Myrrh represents the Death of Death in the Death of Christ (the wonderful title of John Owen's book).

Mary must have felt one of the first pains of the sword piercing her heart as she was presented with myrrh - used for embalming the dead.

This tiny, mystical life was directed from its first human moments towards a terrible death. But in this death he was to rob death of its finality and darkness. Death is a part of the human condition and is only ‘gone’ when we pass through it to a fuller life.

This is why at times we long for death - moments of despair, moments of ecstasy ('les petits morts'), moments of loneliness, moments of deep faith, moments of deep doubt. At the heart of our faith, at the centre of this Mass, is a Death which brings Life.

I’m a person who always gets very emotionally attached to the community I find myself in. So ever since primary school, I have wept whenever I have left any community: schools, university, colleges, churches. I always wanted to stay.

But of course I have realised as the years have passed that all these little deaths have been necessary if I am to flourish and grow.

Every death has led to a new life.

Or to put it the other way round, as we journey with the Magi, may we not so much “be glad of another death” as embrace the bubbling life of the Christ-child that will invigorate our living, now, through death, and forever.

“Arise, shine, for your light has come.” Is 60.1

All Souls Day Solemn Requiem

All Souls Day

Duruflé Requiem

“I will raise them up on the last day.” John 6.40

I fell into conversation with a woman while I was on holiday this time last week. When she discovered I was a priest, she started asking me questions about the recent death of her young mother and about her miscarriage a few months later.

Why had this happened? Was it punishment for something she had done wrong? Was her premature baby in heaven? What age were people in heaven?

All Souls and All Saints tide is one of the times in the church calendar when we are encouraged to ponder these questions which affect us al.

‘Why did this happen?’ the woman asked. We can answer that question. We don’t know. Bad things happen. It’s the experience of life we all share in one way or another. And some people, for no apparent reason, endure more than their share of bad things – and we don’t know why.

What about the other question: what happens after death? Here, we don’t know all that we’d like to know, but as Christians we share a hope that has been given to us by our Lord Jesus Christ himself.

Because we believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus - what we celebrate at this mass tonight - we believe in the resurrection of the dead.

We do not believe in re-incarnation or the transmigration of souls;
We do not believe in the absorption of the soul into the great soul of the universe, like a drop of water returning to the ocean;
We do not believe in existential oblivion – in Sartre’s words: “There is darkness without, and when I die, there will be darkness within."

These are all respectable beliefs, held by many people, but they are not Christian beliefs.

Jesus said to his disciples and to all of us who follow in their footsteps: “I will raise you up on the last day”. He has already blazed the way for this.

Jesus appeared in a resurrection body; there was continuity with his old body and he was still the same Jesus – not a disembodied spirit, recognizable to his disciples.

I was listening to some tapes of my father the other day. He died five years ago. He was a radio ham and one of my earliest memories is of my father sitting in his ‘shack’ – in fact the larder of our little terraced house – surrounded by huge radios with glowing valves, tapping out in Morse code ‘This is G2DPY – George, two delta, Peter, yoke. The handle is Stan, the location is Sussex…’

50 years on, when he was in his 80s, and I in my 50s, he sat with his compact little solid state transmitter, sending out the same message, only by voice now rather than Morse (although he still used Morse with his old friends as it was quicker than talking!): ‘This is G2DPY – golf, two, delta, papa, Yankee (the new politically correct phonics). The handle is Stan the location is Sussex…’

It was the same message, the same Stan, but expressed through different media – a new transmitter, and the body of an old man.

Now, as they say in the world of Amateur Radio, he is a ‘silent key’.

Although there is much we cannot grasp about heaven, and much we cannot understand about the meaning of our lives here on earth…

Jesus shows us that there will be personhood; there will be recognition of one another; we will be raised up and not simply absorbed back into some universal life force.

From the point of view of our loved ones who have already died, many of whom we shall remember in a few moments, it is already the last day and they are raised up: a little sleep and then the dawn.

From our perspective, we still await the last day.

But the assurance is that whether we are alive, or as St Paul puts it, asleep in Christ; we shall all be raised up.

This is the Christian hope in the face of the death of our mortal body; what the former Dean of Westminster, Michael Mayne in the title of his book calls ‘The Enduring Melody’, the cantus firmus of our lives, the tune that weaves through all the changing scenes of life, and eventually, of death and new life.

Here is John Donne using different imagery, but making the same point. (It’s earlier on in that passage with the familiar words, ‘no man is an island’ and ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’)

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

Or in the words of our Lord:

“I will raise them up on the last day.” John 6.40

The Cross, Good Friday 2006

The Cross – Good Friday

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” 1 Cor 1.18

It is said that when Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Last Supper he used the innocent face of a choirboy for his portrait of Our Lord. Much later (and he took many years to complete it) he looked for a suitable model for Judas and found it in the degenerate and corrupt face of a dissolute young man recruited from the gutter.

Something familiar about the face prompted him to ask the young man about his origins. And to his surprise and horror it was the same choirboy who had fallen into a depraved and degenerate life.

And this is part of our common human dilemma. For the same face can present innocence and corruption. We know in our best moments and in our worst moments, what we are capable of.

The very name Good Friday contains this ambiguity, for it reminds us that the cross is the Good News of the Gospel, and yet at the same time it is the instrument of torture for our Saviour.

On Good Friday our Lord wrestles with the powers of sin and darkness, and overcomes. We still wrestle with our own sin and darkness and with the corruption which blights the whole human race on this war-riven planet.

Yet the Cross is our strength and our help, and the guarantor of our ultimate victory – the victory we will celebrate tomorrow night.

But on this Good Friday, let us spend a few minutes looking at the daily struggles we all face to choose the hard way of the cross, rather than the easy way of self.

One of John Donne’s poems illustrates this struggle very well – A Hymn to God the Father.

As you read the poem you are reminded of the choices and contrasts in Donne’s career (1573-1631): from ‘Don Juan’ to Dean of St Paul’s; from ‘Man of the World’ to ‘Man of God’; from dashing young love poet to the shrouded marble corpse that still stands today as his memorial in the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral. Donne knew all about original sin and Augustine and Calvin’s emphasis on the ‘total depravity’ of man.

He would take very seriously indeed the 9th Article of Religion, formulated just before his birth: that "man… is of his own nature… inclined to evil". Not surprisingly then in his poem Donne first confesses the effects of original sin: the sin of Adam; the first choice that went so very wrong. But also the choices we make day by day, even when we know they are wrong and ultimately self destructive. We follow the example of Adam & Eve.

Even from outside the Garden we still hear God’s voice announcing: "Behold the man is become like one of us, knowing good from evil".

Donne writhes with that human consciousness of the trapped-ness of existence. We’re doomed to follow the sins of our forebears. To lighten the theme a little, he makes a play on his name ‘Donne’, throughout the poem. Let me read the first verse that looks back to Adam’s sin:

WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

And the ‘more’ is the realisation that his sinful behaviour affects others. However much we imagine that our sins are simply ‘private’, they always contribute to the greater woe of our corporate humanity; and more specifically to those closest to us at home, at work, in church. The second verse:

Wilt Thou forgive that sin by which I won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

In the final verse, Donne begins to bring some resolution to this dilemma. The verse reminds us of another 17th century poet with far better Protestant credentials; namely John Bunyan.
You may recall in Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is shown a vision of a man locked in a room: the room of his own despair; despair that he can ever be saved; despair that he can ever be loved by God.

And this too is Donne’s last fear – his greatest horror. Why? Because it is the underlying neurosis of the human condition; now, in the 21st century, as then in the 17th. We too fear being locked into an empty, Godless universe. We too fear being locked out from the love of the God who made us.

But Donne, unlike many today in the Western world, can dare to believe - can allow himself to see - the human face of God shining from the face of this clouded universe. John Donne believes in the Incarnation; believes that God and Man, the objective and the subjective, the spiritual and the material, meet in the person of Jesus Christ. The Cross is a crossroads, where the sin of man is overwhelmed by the love of God. Through the saving work of Christ on the Cross, there is the death of death, and therefore for those who cling to the cross, even the death of the fear of death.

Hear the third verse:

I have a sin of fear, that when I've 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.

In our sophisticated, liberal Western lives, we sometimes forget the simple assurance and wonder of the Cross: that our sins are forgiven.

I remember a young man called Neil, who had a past that could almost match Donne’s! He came out of church after mass one day – tears streaming down his face – ‘you ought to put tissues in the pews!’ he said. He was overwhelmed by the fact that he was forgiven and loved by God.

Today as we venerate the cross, we mourn for our sins and the sins of the world which cost Christ so dearly; and yet we wait with quiet confidence for the power of the resurrection to break afresh into our lives.

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” 1 Cor 1.18

Epiphany, death

Epiphany - death

I suppose I always get a bit maudlin at Christmas and New Year - another birthday, another year, another wrinkle, a stronger pair of reading glasses. And even bishops begin to look young.

The Feast of the Epiphany can help us to look more joyfully at our own mortality.

The Epiphany - the Manifestation - the Showing; or the Theophania as it was also called - the showing of God - it's been celebrated since the early 3rd Century. By the 4th Century, in the Western Church, its focus became the Revelation of God to the Gentiles - personified in those three Wise Men from the East, or were they Kings, or Astrologers? We don't know what they were, or for that matter how many of them there were.

What were they expecting as they followed the star? They had riches and wisdom, and yet left the security of their homes to follow a hunch. Maybe they were going through a mid-life crisis and needed some adventure in their lives? I think there is some truth in that. Men and women, often at the height of their powers, secure with family and jobs, sometimes question what life is all about. Some change jobs; some climb mountains; some have affairs; others hit the bottle, and some look for the meaning of life. These wise men, from outside of the Jewish tradition, came looking for the one who was to unlock the key to life.

In the paradox of Christian faith, and of this Mass, they found the answer to life in death.
This is a theme in TS Eliot’s famous Journey of the Magi, written nearly 80 years ago. The poem ends:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth
and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

The gifts the Magi bear to the infant Christ, although never mentioned in the poem, fit well into this theme of death and life. They symbolise Three Deaths.

1. Gold represents the Death of Self. Christ was born to be King, symbolised in this king of metals - gold.

"Born a king on Bethlehem plain, Gold I bring to crown him again..."

In his earthly ministry Jesus was to demand total allegiance from his followers, promising them that only by death to self, would they ever find their true selves.

"For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it." (Lk 9.24)

Jesus is encapsulating the heart of the Gospel: it is in loving abandonment to Christ that we become fully human, and learn how to love ourselves.

The little boy is standing up in the back seat of the car (this is before seatbelts) and his father keeps telling him to sit down. At last the father stops the car and forcibly sits the boy down. As they continue the journey, the sulking boy in the back shouts: “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I’m standing up on the inside!”

This is the individual, assertive self that wreaks such havoc in our lives and in our world; the Naked Self, the Selfish Gene. It does not deserve our loyalty. We only need to look at the world around us to see how love of this self leads to destruction and death. Fealty to Jesus is the only way to life; and to bring life to others.

But we are western liberal thinkers, and all this loyalty to Christ alone sounds a little too exclusive. Let’s look at the second death.

2. Frankincense represents the Death of the gods. We live in a pluralist society. And rightly, there must be acceptance and dialogue with those of other faiths and no faith. The Queen's Christmas Speech reflected that again this year. While affirming her own Christian faith, she was careful to flag up respect for those of other faiths, and for atheists – or as Woody Allen prefers to call them, God's loyal opposition.

But true as this is, there has also been much twaddle about all faiths being basically the same. They are not. Look for similarities between Mormonism and Melanesian Frog Worship and you will look in vain. I will respect and defend the rights of others to practise their faith, but I must also proclaim as a follower of Christ that I believe him to be a unique revelation of God to all nations and cultures.

There is no contradiction in thinking in this, and indeed the Incarnation leaves us no choice - 'Incense owns a deity nigh'. We do not believe that Jesus was just a good and holy man, or a prophet. We worship him, with all around the crib, as God. There is no God other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now this is not to say that he does not reveal himself to others outside of the Christian faith. Or to put it another way: a good Muslim may be much nearer to God than a bad Christian. But I must not let my acceptance of others and their ways of believing, paralyse me from holding on to my own Christian faith; albeit with due humility.

"There's a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea" as Faber put it. But if we believe that Jesus is Very God and Very Man, there can be no other gods.

3. And that brings us to the central mystery of our faith, and the 3rd Death: The Death of God.

CS Lewis puts it this way:

"The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact." Mythology is full of dying and rising gods. But in Christianity, "we pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to an historical Person crucified under Pontius Pilate…" We are indeed people of the Empty Tomb, and yet we must not rob the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, of the mystery and potency of myth. "We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology." ('Myth Became Fact' is in Undeception and also in God in the Dock.)

Myrrh represents the Death of Death in the Death of Christ (the wonderful title of John Owen's book).

Mary must have felt one of the first pains of the sword piercing her heart as she was presented with myrrh - used for embalming the dead. This tiny, mystical life was directed from its first human moments towards a terrible death. But in this death he was to rob death of its finality and darkness. Death is a part of the human condition - it is not simply its conclusion. Death is present with us throughout our life.

This is why at times we long for death - moments of despair, moments of ecstasy ('les petits morts'), moments of loneliness, moments of deep faith, moments of deep doubt. At the heart of our faith, at the centre of this Mass, is a Death which brings Life.

I spoke to an elderly lady who had just come out of hospital in my home town, Shoreham-by-Sea: Southlands Hospital, a dilapidated, run-down old 30’s 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 Father” Elsie told me, “I’m at the gates of Paradise and they ask me if I’d like to come back to Southlands!”

This is the faith of the saints.

As we journey with the Magi, may we not so much “be glad of another death” as embrace the bubbling life of the Christ-child that will invigorate our living, now, through death, and forever.

Take him earth - London Bombings 7/7

Take him earth – (The London Bombings) 7/7/05

A verse of a hymn written in the fourth century by Prudentius, but which reminds us of some of the horrific pictures we have seen this week:

Take him, earth, for cherishing,
To thy tender breast receive him.
Body of a man I bring thee,
Noble even in its ruin.

Today has been chosen to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War. The Queen is attending a service in Westminster Abbey this morning and there are various events throughout the day. Fifty million people lost their lives in that war. And more than that number have lost their lives in wars since then. Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of the massacres in Srebrenica.

But whether fifty million or fifty in our own City, cut down by terrorist bombs on Thursday, we struggle to make sense of the violence that has been the undercurrent of human history since Cain slew Abel.

Of course, there is no sense to make of it. We live with human wickedness, and like every generation, hope for a better world and an end to violence. This was Isaiah’s vision in our first reading today. We are helpless and angry, but dare to hope that the goodness of God will triumph.

And in the face of evil, and when words of comfort fail, the people of God have always sung.
Our text, this 1600 year old hymn by Prudentius, was chosen by Herbert Howells as the text for his own composition to be performed at a memorial service for John F. Kennedy in Washington Cathedral in 1964. I often listen to it when contemplating the death of family and friends.

I cry for them and at the thought of my own mortality.

Prudentius’ hymn is a profoundly Christian work. Nevertheless, it is expressed in the high language and solemn imagery of Late Classical Latin. To that extent solemnity and faith mingle. Dignity and mystery are the keynotes of this elegy, just as dignity and mystery will be the keynotes of the many memorials we will hold for those who have died so tragically this past week.

Whilst the language and form of the hymn is redolent of Late Antiquity’s fear and respect for honourable death, in fact the heart of this poem is the redeeming death of Christ; a combination that made it especially appropriate for the funeral rites of the murdered President Kennedy. What’s more, the tragic, even gruesome circumstances of that untimely death are reflected in the poem’s use of the classical device of entrusting; entrusting the "Body of a man… Noble even in its ruin" to the cherishing, gentle breast of his Mother-Earth.

This thought is personified in the Pietà, those paintings and sculptures of Mary clasping the ruined body of Jesus to her breast. (You can see Bellini’s depiction in the order of service).

Of course, this concept is a deeply classical, a very Greek and Roman instinct – straight out of Homer’s Iliad! You can almost hear the lamentation of a Hecuba or Helen over the dead and despoiled body of their beloved Hector. Humanity has always lamented its dead and fallen; its heroes and innocent victims.

But if this hymn is classical, it is certainly not pagan! For yes, it does turn upon the body, upon this fallen flesh, but in a specifically Christian way.

The Early Church Father, Tertullian, wrote, "The flesh is the hinge of salvation" and this is why Prudentius (and his poem) pivots between two worlds. For death is the end of mortal existence. In the end it does all come down to bones and ashes and our bodies return, however reluctantly, and after all modern medicine can do, to their native earth. Yet, in that very returning, we have another poetic device; this time a very Christian one. It is the ‘bargain’ God makes with Mother Earth.Prudentius puts it like this:

"Comes the hour God hath appointed
Then, must thou [Mother Earth], in very fashion,
What I give, return again."

This is about Resurrection. The earth will one day give up its dead.

Thus, the Funeral March of this fallen warrior which you can feel in the metre and in the music of Howells’ motet, is not the resigned lurch of pagan hopelessness; it is not the sleepwalking oblivion of the pagan dead, drinking deeply in the waters of forgetfulness. Rather, it is what St Paul refers to when he wrote:

"Awake O Sleeper
And Rise from the Dead
And Christ will shine upon you".

This is the poem’s "shining road" that leads through death to the fields of Paradise, the open woodlands of eternity.

But this poem is not just about imagery. It is more than mere form. There is real substance here. This hymn is about you and me, about our dying and rising, because Christ has died and has risen in the substance of our flesh. It is this Paschal Mystery (of Christ’s Dying and Rising) that separates pagan from Christian – separates death as defeat from death as victory.

If Prudentius lived at a time when Europe was waking up to its Christian consciousness, we perhaps live at a time of cultural forgetting. More and more people today "live in a land where all things are forgotten". The Greek word for ‘forgetting’ is of course Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness in Hades. The word for truth is a-letheia, not-forgetting. And this is what death, Christian death, is about. Death is not oblivion but awakening to full consciousness of the truth.

Because of this, unlike most ‘modern pagans’, we Christians do well to remember our own death. The "Memento Mori" is a spiritual exercise commended to us by the Church. This is why the Church surrounds the death of the faithful with help, with support. It is why in the Prayer Book Litany we ask, "to be delivered from sudden death". We wish to be prepared.

In an age of forgetting, when Europe falls back into pagan forgetting of its Christian Faith; at a moment in history when war and death and terror may seem all too close, let us remember the great mystery of our faith: Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.

We mourn our dead, and pray that we will be delivered from evil; not as those without hope, but as those who believe in the resurrection of the dead, and that God’s kingdom is coming.

Like those early Christians, we sing with Prudentius of the mystery of a suffering God; of a king who rules in love from a cross.

And we entrust – give our dead, and our world and ourselves - to God’s strange cherishing.

Take him, earth, for cherishing,
To thy tender breast receive him.
Body of a man I bring thee,
Noble even in its ruin.

By the breath of God created.
Christ the prince of all its living.
Take, O take him,
Take him, earth, for cherishing.

Appendix
Take him Earth for Cherishing – Prudentius (348-413) & Howells (1882-1983)
Translated by Helen Waddell

Take him, earth, for cherishing,
To thy tender breast receive him.
Body of a man I bring thee,
Noble even in its ruin.

Once was this a spirit's dwelling,
By the breath of God created.
High the heart that here was beating,
Christ the prince of all its living.
Guard him well, the dead I give thee,
Not unmindful of His creature
Shall He ask it: He who made it
Symbol of his mystery.
Take him, earth, for cherishing.

Comes the hour God hath appointed
To fulfil the hope of men,
Then must thou, in very fashion,
What I give, return again.
Take him, earth, for cherishing.
Body of a man I bring thee.
Take, O take him.

Not though ancient time decaying
Wear away these bones to sand,
Ashes that a man might measure
In the hollow of his hand:

Not though wandering winds and idle
Scatter dust was nerve and sinew,
Is it given to man to die.
Once again the shining road
Leads to ample Paradise;
Open are the woods again,
That the Serpent lost for men.

Take, O take him, mighty Leader,
Take again thy servant's soul.
Grave his name, and pour the fragrant
Balm upon the icy stone.

Take him, earth, for cherishing,
To thy tender breast receive him.
Body of a man I bring thee,
Noble even in its ruin.

By the breath of God created.
Christ the prince of all its living.
Take, O take him,
Take him, earth, for cherishing.

Remembrance

Remembrance Sunday

“Do this in remembrance of me.”
There are lots of little deaths along our individual roads to death. And eventually the weight of them simply becomes too much and, sometimes with relief, we slip through death to a deathless life.

The commonest human experience is the little death of parting: of children leaving parents until, we hope in the fullness of years, they leave us.

The parting of friends and lovers, although it leaves us later more deeply alive, at the time feels like death.

And all the movings on: the leaving of a home, a church, where we have been happy; the forsaking of patterns that have sustained us; the passing of childhood; the loss of youth; the realisations that dreams will never be fulfilled: a thousand little wounds of death, intimations of mortality.

A Solemn Requiem reminds us of the Christian understanding of the nature of things. That it is only through death that we can enter more profoundly into life.

TS Eliot’s Magi are haunted by these little deaths which leave them longing for the death of death. His poem, The Journey of the Magi ends:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

What makes all these little deaths so enriching to our ongoing life? Why, in the words of our Lord, must we lose our life if we are to save it?

Well part of the answer is bound up in memory.

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

It is the foundation of all our relationships. Shared history. Shared memories. How often in our conversations with friends do we start a sentence with ‘Do you remember?’

We always remember, but less frequently do we speak of, the little deaths in our own lives and those of our friends. But they are implicit to the depth of our relationships.

It is only wounded healers that can heal. It is only those who have suffered little deaths who bring comfort.

In Oscar Wilde’s children’s parable, The Selfish Giant, the Christchild welcomes the reformed Giant through the gates of death and into paradise by holding out his little scarred hands: ‘the wounds of love’, he says. There is memory in the Godhead.

So memory plays a vital part in making our little deaths an opportunity for life and growth.

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

And music has no beauty without the memory of what was. (In case our memories should fail. Mozart often reminds us 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.

I was looking through some old family photos while trying to unpack yesterday. And there is a 17 year old me, in braided jacket with a school prefect’s badge. But how is that me? I’m a stranger to myself. Every cell in my body has changed many times since then and half my brain cells have already died - and the other two are feeling distinctly queasy.

The Bible and the Church have always placed a strong emphasis on the integration of our memory - commonly owned history - into the present reality. Indeed, there can be no present reality without a sense of what was. The postmodern assertion that yesterday is another country, is a denial of the Christian view of personhood and Heilsgeschichte - Salvation History.

These vestments, the liturgy, the art and symbols of recent and long past centuries, the blood red poppies - these all give greater reality to the now.

I remember going to a service in Los Angeles to hear a famous housechurch founder, John Wimber, preach. There were a couple of thousand people on folding chairs in a converted warehouse - an orderly Stansted airport on a busy day. There were no Christian symbols in the building. No vestments but designer jumpers. The lively songs had all been written in the previous months. There was no liturgy but warm and friendly west-coast-speak. Theologically there was nothing outrageous. But the whole thing was somehow insubstantial. It was not rooted in remembrance. A change of social climate and it would evaporate like the morning dew.

Why has Remembrance Day become arguably of greater significance over recent years than, say, in the 60s and 70s? Many of us now have no direct memories of great wars, yet the act of remembrance - the liturgy of 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 wars and the war dead who trickle through our TVs day by day.

I was at the Menin Gate in Ypres last month and joined with hundreds of others for the nightly ceremony of prayers and Last Post. There are hundreds every night. (http://au.geocities.com/fortysecondbattalion/level2/memorial/01-menin.htm ) By usage, and because for most of us they are removed from any personal experience of war, these ceremonies enshrine a reality that we dare not forget. 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 helps to shape the present.

And 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 our remembrancing deeply affects our present and future.

Catherine Pickstock at Cambridge wrote a startling but difficult book five years ago entitled After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. (Gordon Dulieu wrote a very good appraisal of it in a recent edition of our magazine Salve.) The book is an attack on the floating, postmodern self, detached from history and memory. It is based on a detailed reading of Phaedrus and the medieval Roman Rite of the Mass. Pickstock wrote:

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

And nowhere is that more clearly seen than in these Holy Mysteries: these daily little deaths that incorporate us with the One Great Death.

’Do this in remembrance of me.’

Here is Catherine Pickstock again:

Thus, as regards the Eucharist which realizes the maximum possibility of mystery, sacrality, and signification, human rationality becomes less an attempt to make logically consistent, and more a recognition of an intimation of secret intelligibility, or luminous invitation, stimulating a contact of desire, will, and memory.

At the Mass, every Sunday is Remembrance Sunday.

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 affects 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, forever, and our own little daily deaths…

…these are 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’

Resurrection - Easter 2003

The Gate of Heaven

“Jacob was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven."” Genesis 28.17

So Father Murphy walks into a notorious pub in Donegal, and says to the first man he meets, "Do you want to go to heaven?"
The man said, "I do Father."
The priest says, "Then leave this pub right now!"
He approaches a second man. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"Certainly, Father."
"Then leave this den of Satan," says Father Murphy.
He walks up to O'Toole. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"No thank you very much Father.”
Father Murphy looks him right in the eye, and says, "You mean to tell me that when you die you don't want to go to heaven?"
O'Toole smiles, "Oh, when I die, yes, Father. I thought you were getting a group together to go right now."

Today’s collect reminds us that ‘Jesus Christ has overcome death and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life’ - the gate of heaven.

The opening chapters of the Bible describe an open and ungated Garden of Eden. But after the Fall, an angel is set as a gate to keep humankind out and away from the Tree of Life - of everlasting life.

“God drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.” Genesis 3.24

At one level the Fall is an aetiology of fears that run deeply within the human psyche.

There is the fear of exclusion, being shut out; of alienation and of being alone; and the ultimate fear, the old enemy, death, and oblivion - being cut off forever from the tree of life.

Gates and doors are potent mythic symbols common in most religions and folk tales. They are often hidden, or guarded or require a key or an ‘open sesame’ to admit the seeker. In Christian folk religion they are the familiar pearly gates, guarded by St Peter with his book of life, with all the overtones of exclusion and judgement.

They are symbols used powerfully by Jesus, who describes himself as the door, the gate to the sheepfold.

In the Old Testament and into the time of the New, the City Gate is the place of discussion, of welcome and business; where the elders sit and offer advice; where the judges make pronouncements; where the guilty are executed.

So the writer to the Hebrews takes up this rich vein of imagery and reminds his readers: “Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood.” (13.11)

In a positive light, the gates becomes the symbol of security and safety. So for the suburban English family, the garden gate is the drawbridge into the castle. My mother’s instructions still ring loud and clear on any trip to the neighbours:

“Have you got a clean handkerchief? Remember to say thank you. And close the gate when you leave.”

I love Alan Bennett’s line in A Cream Cracker under the Settee, when Thora Heard has been visited by the Christian sect who push tracts through the door and call through the letterbox that Jesus loves her. She remarks with fine British bathos: “Shouting about Jesus and leaving the gate open - it’s hypocrisy is that!”

Our Lord emphasises this sense of security that a gate brings by describing himself as the gate of the sheepfold. The Good Shepherd is the door of the pen, as he lies across the opening protecting the sheep from robbers and wolves.

But he goes on to take the imagery further, providing the basis for today’s 1549 collect. “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.” (John 10.9)

However, we must always remember that metaphors are just that - metaphors. There is no literal gate, nor key, nor mystical password.

When Christ says he is the gate to eternal life, it is because of the way Christ lived and all that he accomplished: his life, his death and his glorious hope-inspiring resurrection.

And for us the ‘narrow gate’ that we are commanded by our Lord to enter, is similarly about a way of life. There is no such thing as a death-bed conversion. There may appear to be, but it could not have happened without a process that went before.

Jacob’s encounter with God (our text this morning) through the dream at Bethel was a sort of conversion, as was his wrestling with the angel 14 years later. But it was all part of a divine process which had been going on in Jacob since before his first self-conscious thoughts.

I think this is what CS Lewis is getting at in his wonderful little fantasy, The Great Divorce, where he describes heaven, not so much as a place, but as a process– the process of becoming fully alive, fully real.

“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. Evil can be undone, but it cannot "develop" into good... If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth), we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell... But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning, a part of Heaven itself.”

Lewis is right, I believe. Heaven's gate is narrow, and the meaning of our lives is to be found by engaging in the quest to find it and enter it. And that means paying attention, living mindfully rather than mindlessly, never trying to live on the energy of past religious experiences, but always being open to the new promptings of the Spirit: to renewed conversions.

It takes discipline, it takes much prayer, and a great deal of courage and faith to be a pilgrim.

But the journey of faith and hope and love is its own reward, and a precursor of its destination. And if we walk it faithfully, we shall not have to wonder fearfully if anything or anyone awaits us beyond death's door; we will discover that our pilgrim journey itself was, in fact, that very gate of heaven, which Christ at his resurrection flung wide open.

Now as it’s Easter Sunday, and you can never have too much risus paschalis (Easter laughter), I’ll finish with another joke.

A church member who was a devout golfer came to talk to his priest one day. "Tell me, Father," he demanded, "are there going to be golf courses in heaven? I have to know."

"Well," said his priest, "I'm not really sure, but tonight I'll say a special prayer and see if God will tell me the answer."

The next Sunday, when the service ended and the congregation was shaking hands with the priest on the way out, the golfer cornered him again. "Did you get the answer, Father? Are there going to be golf courses in heaven?"

Well, George," the priest replied, "I've got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?"

"Tell me the good news first," George said.

"The good news is that, yes, there are golf courses in heaven. Beautiful courses, where the sun is always shining, the rough is not too deep, there are no sand traps, and you never have to wait to tee off."
"Hey, that's great!" exclaimed the golfer excitedly. "But what's the bad news?"

"Well, the bad news is that St Peter has you down to tee off this coming Tuesday morning at 8."

On this Easter Sunday as we celebrate Christ’s resurrection, we have a foretaste of heaven and if we will be open to his Holy Spirit, this place becomes for us the gate of heaven.

“Jacob was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven."” Genesis 28.17

Death of Queen Mother - Easter Day 02

The Christian Hope
Easter Day

“ But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”
” (1 Corinthians 4.13,14)

We mourn the loss of our beloved Queen Mother, on the day that we rejoice in our beloved Lord’s resurrection.

And St Paul tells us, not, that we should not grieve, but that we should not grieve as those with no hope.

Of course we will grieve. It is a symptom of our humanity; it is a sign of our affection for a good woman who has figured in the backdrop of our lives since before any of us were born.

But as Christians, on this First Day of the Week; on this First Day of the New Creation; on this Resurrection Morning which lifts the pallor of our lenten disciplines...

...as Christians, we grieve with hope: the hope that she who has lived life long and full, is now complete and summed up in Christ who is the firstfruits from the dead.

Elizabeth is not just a memory. She is not ‘kept alive in our hearts’. She is kept alive by the power of God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. And this our hearts know well although our heads are full of doubt.

I first learned grief from children’s stories. When I was too young to read, my father told me stories of an imaginary boy called Alby. But soon I was reading Rupert Bear - those lovely picture books with the rhyming couplets under each picture.

And then Worzel Gummidge, and then Mary Norton’s The Borrowers. I suppose I was 8 or 9 when I began to cry at the end of books - not just because the enchanting story was ended, but because I was old enough to realise that there was no Rupert Bear and Badger; no Earthy Mangold; no Ariadne. They were created in my imagination and then went into oblivion when I turned the last page.

But what of Jesus? That gentle, blond, blue-eyed man in all the pictures around my Sunday School walls. There he was surrounded by all the children of the world - “red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight...” And there he was with the disciples, who looked rather like my local football team - except for one who was dark and looked menacing, and had a large nose - obviously Judas.

Did gentle Jesus too pass into oblivion when we had finished the story, when the Gospel was shut?

We have enacted The Story again through this Holy Week, and as 21st century scientific postmoderns, the Queen Mother’s death and this resurrection Sunday leaves us pondering the same Big Question which is at the heart of our faith and the root of all our doubts.

We can express it in that classical exam question form:
A: Is the idea of a God who became a human being, who died and rose again, a myth which nurtures the ‘Christ within us’; which releases the power of that myth at the heart of our own consciousness; an ancient by-product of human self-awareness?

OR

B: Is there a reality which is beyond the cosmos, the First Cause of the cosmos, a Being who is the Ground of our Being; a transcendent God revealed in the man Christ Jesus?

If you ticked A, then the Easter story ends in the darkness of Good Friday. I was arguing with an atheist in a pub yesterday afternoon and found myself quoting Sartre, “There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within.” All the other high-flown talk about the power of myth is whistling in the dark. Although of course priests like Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith group, the so-called non-realists, or textual nihilists, would deny this. They somehow find hope for living in this myth tradition; this psychological self-trickery.

And if you ticked B when in fact A is correct, then as St Paul puts it, you of all men are most to be pitied. For you have lived your life on a lie. You have supposed there is ultimate meaning when there is none. Life is a Cabaret if you’re lucky, and a Nightmare on Elm Street if you’re not.

But wait a minute, we’re Anglicans. We don’t do ‘tick one box only’. We tick both and keep our options open.

But by ticking both boxes, we are making a profoundly Christian statement. The Answer to the Big Question is A because of B.

In other words: Yes we see the dying and rising myth enacted everywhere around us, and it has deep resonances within our psyche. Christ is within us, and the image of God is implanted within every human.
And the self-awareness of most humans for most of the last 10,000 years has been caught up with god-awareness.

And this is not surprising, for there is a God who is out there, beyond space and time, who has seeded us with longings of immortality. He is there and he is not silent. He woos us to faith by his wounds of love.

Let’s bring it back to the events we celebrate this Easter Day.

Of course I believe in the Death & Resurrection of Jesus both theologically and historically; and I have experienced that new-life-through-death which the Spirit works in me personally. I would not dare stand here unless, having not seen, yet, I have believed.

And yet… at a very deep level I cannot conceive a dead Man resurrected to a new and supernatural state of being. It is alien to all I experience in my everyday world of life and stay-dead death. It relates more to the powerful imagery of legend, saga and myth, whether The Iliad or Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings.

But if it is just myth, A and not B, then I take no comfort from it. For that would be to deceive myself and others. I want no fairy story to sweeten the bitter pill of life, and more to the point, of death.

Having not seen, I am drawn by the authenticity of Christ and his people, to believe.

That great student of myth, CS Lewis, puts it well: “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.” (1979:43) Mythology is full of dying and rising gods. But in Christianity, “we pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to an historical Person crucified under Pontius Pilate…” (Eng ed of God in the Dock, Collins, 1979:44)

We are indeed people of the Empty Tomb, and yet we must not rob the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, of the mystery and potency of myth. Or as Lewis puts it: “ We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology.” (1979:44/5 ‘Myth Became Fact’ is in Undeception and also in God in the Dock, Eng & US eds)

“…the mythical radiance resting on our theology…”

If only ‘seeing is believing’, then I am an unbeliever. If WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get - then, eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

The captain on the bridge of a large naval vessel saw a light ahead on a collision course. He signalled, "Alter your course ten degrees south." The reply came back, "Alter your course ten degrees north."
The captain then signalled, "Alter your course ten degrees south. I am a captain." The reply: "Alter your course 10 degrees north. I am a seaman third-class."
The furious captain signalled, "Alter your course ten degrees south. I am a battleship." The reply: "Alter your course ten degrees north. I am a lighthouse."

There are some things that are just non-negotiable. The Resurrection of Christ is a non-negotiable part of our Christian faith.

Today we celebrate the cornerstone of our faith. Christ is Risen, and because he is risen, because I choose to believe that he is risen, then I encounter True Myth. The Holy Spirit gives me a hope that I cannot explain, but which has been the at the heart of Christian experience through the centuries.

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother believed this and millions of ordinary Christians through the centuries have staked their lives upon this truth.

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”
(1 Corinthians 4.13,14)

Emmanuel - Christmas Day 2001

Emmanuel

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us." Matt 1.23

“Pooh”, said Piglet taking his paw.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just checking that you were there…” (The House at Pooh Corner)

I did a project on piglets when I was an undergraduate. It was really my room-mate, Andrew’s project - he was an applied biologist.

We weaned 6 piglets at two weeks, 4 weeks and six weeks. Then we jogged out to the university farm before breakfast each morning and weighed the 18 little piggies (easier said than done), each alone in their own snug little sty. The experiment was to see how early they could be safely weaned.

Sadly, our main finding was that piglets have little piggy nervous breakdowns when they are separated too early from the litter. They are social animals, and integral to their health and well-being is companionship, the warmth of others.

Piglet needed Pooh to be there.

Most mammals are social, and humans are no exception. We were not created to be alone, and we only sustain aloneness with some difficulty.

In the first chapters of the Bible we read of Adam naming the animals and finding none suitable for the companionship he longed for. But then Eve is created: bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh; a companion.

God himself is also a social being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the mystical, eternal society. And so it was natural for God to enjoy friendship with his creation. He walked in the garden with the man and woman, in the cool breezes of the evening.

Then in his incarnation, he became a tiny dependent baby, mewling for his mother’s milk and subject to Mary and Joseph for half of his life.

As a grown man too he needed friends. Jesus was fully human. He had many friends: men and women; he loved children and had presumably watched many grow up in his wider family and had doubtless played with the children of some of his disciples.

But he had an inner circle of close friends: James and John, and Peter - there with Jesus for the transfiguration; there in the Garden of Gethsemane - Jesus wanted them with him in his most agonising hour of decision. He goes off to pray, but keeps returning: “just checking that you are there, and preferably awake”. And they were there, after the women, at the resurrection. Of the three, Jesus had a Best Friend - John, who stands by his mother at the cross.

Now there is no more God, walking with us in the cool of the day. There is no more physical Jesus, ready to sit and chat, and share a drink.

But there is a profounder reality of God’s companionship.

For the virgin has conceived and born a son, and his name is Emmanuel, which means, God is with us.

He is with us in a number of ways.

Since he lived here on earth, and shared our joys and sorrows, he can empathise with us in all that we go through. He is not distant and unmoved, but he is with us in all the richness and vagaries of our lives.

Then he has taught us that all humans are made in his image, and are to be loved, second only to God. So all our kinships and friendships are part of God’s being with us.

We cannot hug God, but we can hold the hand of a friend to check that they are there. And in our turn we can sit with friends and strangers, and by our physical presence assure them that God is with them.

And if through the birth of this baby, Emmanuel, God is with us; then as St Paul says, God is for us and who can be against us? Christmas dispels any superstition that God is somehow out to get us; ready at the least excuse to consign us to hell!

The manger scene is charged with love and a self-giving God who longs still for the companionship of his creation.

But companions leave us and Christmas is always a reminder of the empty seats around the table. The disciples were filled with foreboding as they realised that Christ was leaving them, from the manger to the skies.
So he reassures them in his words of parting: “I am with you always, to the end of the age”. (Matt 28.20)

Here is an even deeper spiritual mystery. For it has been the experience of Christians through the ages, that by God’s Holy Spirit, they sense the loving presence of God; Emmanuel, closer than the breath on our lips.

It is of course very subjective, but nonetheless real for being that. Loving our partners and friends is very subjective, but nonetheless real for being that.

And what of Emmanuel, God with us, beyond the close of the age?

This has been a year with not a little grief and anguish. John the Divine lived in more uncertain and turbulent times than ours and in his vision, Emmanuel gives the ultimate reassurance of his presence and Being:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." (Rev 21.1-4)

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us."