The Blessed Virgin: Sleeping and Waking

Jesse Tree icon at Guildford Cathedral

The Lady Chapel of Guildford Cathedral contains within it an icon of the Jesse Tree. At the heart of its branches is the Mother of God with her Son, the focal point of the icon, enthroned upon her lap. Jesse sleeps at the foot of the tree. He sleeps not inattentively but in a generative repose of deep sleep as Adam did. Out of Adam’s side a rib was taken to create the mother of all the living, Eve, and out of Jesse’s side comes the tree from which the New Adam is descended and the mother from whom he is born.

St John of Damascus calls Mary New Eve. This title, which predates John, alludes to sleep since this is used to ‘correct’ the action of the first Eve. So, as Kallistos Ware says, ‘where Eve is disobedient, Mary is obedient. Where Eve is unguarded and inconsiderate, listening all too readily to the deceitful words of the serpent, Mary is watchful and prudent, only accepting the Archangels’ message after she has carefully questioned him’.[1] So for John, Eve brings the ‘sleep of death’ upon humankind, but Mary is, ‘initiator of life for the whole race’.[2] Mary’s is the ‘unwedded bride’ or ‘Bride without bridegroom’ she is the Wise Virgin who watches for, and points out, the bringer of the New Wine (John 2.5)and resists the Eve-like sleepy behaviour of the foolish bridesmaids in the gospels who fall asleep.

Icon of the Dormition of Mary

The Eastern Church proclaims that, ‘Neither tomb nor death overpowered the Mother of God, unsleeping in her prayers, unfailing hope in intercession’.[3] This proclamation is for the feast of the Falling Asleep of the Mother of God, the Dormition. It recalls the declaration of the Saviour at the bed of Jairus’ daughter, ‘she is not dead, but sleeping’ (Luke 8.52). This is the proclamation made to all who hear the voice of Mary’s Son, ‘Very truly, I tell you, the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live’ (John 5.25). She who is declared by the angel to be ‘the favoured one’ (Luke 1.28) falls asleep and the human body of one of God’s creatures is ‘crowned with mercy and loving kindness’ (Psalm 103.4).

It can now be said:

The virgin of the Magnificat, on whose lips is placed the message that God is exalting the humble and casting down the powerful, finds her life confirmed and glorified by the Father of Jesus. Mary’s assumption – seen in the light of Jesus’ resurrection – is hope and promise for the poor of all times and for those who stand in solidarity with them; it is hope and promise that they will share in the final victory of the incarnate God.[4]

For John of Damascus Mary is ‘Ladder of Jacob’. She is the ladder whose two extremities touch earth and heaven whilst Jacob, and humanity, sleeps. She was awake and alert, though fearful at first, of an angel who stepped off the ladder to call her to be mother of the Saviour.

Mary is not a goddess, not immortal, but as John of Damascus teaches emphatically, she who fell asleep was raised as expression of love.[5] It is out of this love, and echoing Song of Songs that, John places on the lips of Mother and Son these words, ‘Into your hands my child, I commend my spirit, says the Mother to her Son as she dies; and her Son replies, ‘Come, my blessed Mother, into my rest…Arise, come, my beloved, beautiful among women’.[6]

At the coming of sleep we entrust ourselves into the hands of God and pray that we will sleep in peace ready to be raised to the life of the new day, as Mary in her Dormition was swept up, like Elijah (2 Kings 2.1-12), to the very presence of God. Hence why the Church for centuries has associated sleep with the maternal care of Mary.

Dom David Steindl-Rast describes the monastic practice of Compline at his community:

At the very end of Compline, it has become a custom for the Abbot to bless the whole community by sprinkling them with holy water, a sort of evening dew. The monks then file into the Lady Chapel for a final hymn to Mary. This hymn changes with the seasons. For most of the year it is Salve Regina; at other times, there are Marian antiphons like the Regina Coeli or the Alma Redemptoris Mater, jewels of chant.

            This custom has always reminded me of children being tucked up in bed at the end of the day by their mother. It brings a smile to my face to think of all those monks sweetly singing at day’s end to their Mother, opening themselves to the anima realm of their psyche, and entrusting themselves to the infinite darkness as maternal. Thus the part of the monastery indelibly linked for me with Compline is the Lady Chapel, where we return to our spiritual womb to be reborn again next morning.[7]

Jean-Luc Nancy’s words could almost have been written as a meditation to be placed on Mary lips as she gazed upon the Christ-Child:

Tomorrow morning, God willing, you will awake again: sleep my child, sleep my soul, sleep my world, sleep my love, sleep my little one, the child will sleep soon, already he’s sleeping, look he goes to sleep with the first night of the world, the divine child who plays with the dice of the universe and of all its centuries, he sleeps with every night that rocks anew, tirelessly the repetition of the first, of the initial nocturnal lullaby where the first day fell asleep with the first sleep.[8]

The new day will come, before which we sing, ‘Ave Regina caelorum’:

 

Hail, Queen of Heaven, beyond compare,

To whom the angels homage pay;

Hail, Root of Jesse, Gate of Light,

That opened for the world’s new Day

Rejoice, O Virgin unsurpassed,

In whim our ransom was begun,

For all your loving children pray

To Christ, our Saviour, and your Son.

As we prepare to lay ourselves down to sleep let us close in prayer before sleep with the words of St Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) entrusting us to the care of Jesus Christ, Blessed Mary and the angels.

Jesus Christ my God, I adore you and thank you for all the graces you have given me this day. I offer you my sleep and all the moments of this night, and I ask you to keep me from sin. I put myself within your sacred side and under the mantle of our Lady. Let your holy angels stand about me and keep me in peace. And let your blessing be upon me. Amen.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

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[1] “‘The Earthly Heaven’ – The Mother of God in the Teaching of St John of Damascus” in McLoughlin, W, & Pinnock, J,. 2002. Mary for Earth and Heaven: Essays on Mary and Ecumenism. Leominster: Gracewing. p. 358.

[2]

[3] Kontakion Tone 2 www.monachos.net/idomel accessed 19th March 2014

[4] Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, Mary, Mother of God, Mother of the Poor, trans. Phillip Berryman, (Maryknoll N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989),119.

[5] Ware, ‘The Earthly Heaven’, 364.

[6] Dormition Sermon 2.10.

[7] David Steindl-Rast and Sharon Lebell, Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey Through the Hours of the Day. (Berkeley CA: Ulysees Press, 1998, 2002), 109.

[8] Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, 32-33.

'A song to sing': Liberating God, past, present and future

Isaiah 11.10-12.6; 2 Corinthians 1.1-22

‘Sing praises to the LORD, for he has done gloriously; let this be known in all the earth’

+ In nomine Patris…

I am not usually given to quoting lyrics of the Swedish pop group Abba – I usually reserve my references to Abba as the beautiful, intimate Aramaic phrase used by Jesus, and elsewhere by St Paul, to speak of the intimacy of the relationship between each one of us as a child of God in relation to our loving heavenly Father: Abba, Father.

However I want to quote a verse from Abba’s song, ‘I Have a dream’, because the words seem to have a contemporary resonance for many people, especially, but not exclusively, the young. And these lyrics lay down a challenge to those of us within a religious tradition in how we respond to the desires, fears and hopes of our generation and how they are met in Christ.

So Abba sing:

I have a dream, a song to sing
To help me cope with anything
If you see the wonder of a fairy tale
You can take the future even if you fail
I believe in angels
Something good in everything I see
I believe in angels
When I know the time is right for me
I'll cross the stream, I have a dream

In a sense what I want to do is an exercise in Christian apologetics on these lyrics to see how we respond to the contemporary challenge that both our readings tonight can be used to address.

The first reading from Isaiah draws the reader to connect the way God has acted in the past, with the way God acts in the present and will act in the future. The dream, as it were, is of God’s restoration of his people so that they will be blessed by him afresh. This culminated in thanksgiving and praise, thanksgiving and praise that in Isaiah echoes the Song of Moses and the Song of Miriam (Exodus 15) when God had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, which becomes a model, a paradigm, of how God has, can and will act in human lives.

The first reading gives us the memory of a dream, and gives us a song to sing. So we Christians have a dream, the ‘glorious liberty of the children of God’ and we have a song to sing, ‘shout aloud and sing for joy, O inhabitants of Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel’ (Isaiah 12.6b).

Abba declare that a dream and song to sing will ‘help me cope with anything’. This isn’t so far removed from Peter’s injunction that we should always be prepared to give an account of the hope that is within us. This touches Paul’s language of consolation in our second reading. Consolation in affliction is the greatest of gifts. Paul describes, in the most heartfelt language, his own affliction to the point of feeling ‘utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself’ (2 Corinthians 1.8).

But what is the hope that breathes into situations of affliction and utter devastation, the hope that is less superficial than some pop lyrics? The hope is the deep, enduring conviction of the love of God in Christ Jesus which is sealed by the Holy Spirit.

This hope is what carries us into the future. Abba speaks of ‘taking the future’ which is one of those rather meaningless phrases but that many people respond to. It is the sort of pretty vacuous management speak that says things like, ‘take hold of your future or the future will take hold of you’.

That sort of saying strong in commending the importance of human agency and avoidance of fatalism, but is lacking in an account of what gives hope for the future and also the fact that our future is held more widely than simply our own efforts but in a deep conviction in God’s faithfulness.

‘I believe in angels’ sing Abba. Belief in angels is another interesting area where contemporary people are relatively happy to say that they are ‘spiritual but not religious’. To say, ‘I believe in angels’ captures the mystique and etherealness of spirituality, whatever that means, but does not connect the spiritual life to actual bodily existence. This is what is widely known as dualism, the notion of a dislocation between body and soul.

To live your life in the hope not of angels but in the Word Made Flesh makes for what might be called an holistic or whole person approach. We are body and spirit together. Religion is the rooting of the spiritual impulse of humanity into forms and ways of living embodied lives. This is about patterns and disciplines, habit forming in the ways of virtuous living.

This is the opposite of belief in angels, which keeps human minds in a never never land of vague spirituality.

And this is where, curiously, Abba touches on a deep motif of Hebrew and Christian religion and hope: ‘I'll cross the stream, I have a dream’

Chapter 12 of Isaiah echoes the songs of Moses and Miriam when they had crossed not simply a stream but the Red Sea, and in the preceding verses the prophet says,

The LORD…will wave his hand over the River with his scorching wind; and will split it into seven channels, and make a way to cross it on foot; so there shall be a highway from Assyria for the remnant that is left of his people, as there was for Israel when they came up from the land of Egypt. (Isaiah 11.15,16)

The ‘dream’, if we can call it that, of God’s people, the people who call God, ‘Abba, Father’ is that the God who has delivered his people through the waters can and will do that again, such that we can sing our own song of God’s salvation.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

Lord, teach us to pray

First preached as a sermon at Guildford Cathedral on Sunday 24^th July 2016.

Luke 11.1-13

‘Lord, teach us to pray…’ Luke 11.1

+ In nomine Patris…

Prayer is not unique to Christianity. It is not even unique to the teaching of Jesus. John the Baptist was already teaching about prayer, and the Old Testament is full of it: after all, Jesus’ disciples asked, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples’.

Prayer is a basic human desire and practice, deeper than religion, which takes many and various forms. Prayer and versions of it are visible in contemporary society.

For example, it is interesting to see how the practice of Mindfulness has taken off in the last couple of years. It seems so very similar to Christian prayer, especially of the contemplative, meditative type. Mindfulness looks like prayer very well branded! And it is very popular.

A similar bubbling up of a form of prayer is also to be seen in public vigils and the lighting of candles in corporate acts of grief, as we have seen all too vividly in Paris, Nice and Munich.

We also see the discipline of frequency and posture of prayer offered by Muslims in submission to God.

Prayer is one of those things that is essential to the Christian life, yet for so many Christians, at least in the West, is problematic.  It often seems so unspecific and ethereal, perhaps not rewarding enough or associated with clunky phrases or a burden. We become suspicious of prayer.

Perhaps this is part of the appeal of Mindfulness. It uses many the techniques common to religious prayer but doesn’t seem “religious”. However whilst commendably paying attention to the body and posture it also totally fits the Enlightenment notion, I think therefore I am. It is the modern fallacy: I can conquer things with my own mind and from my own resources. It is in this sense that it is not Christian prayer. Let me be clear that Mindfulness is not bad, but Mindfulness is therapeutic and makes us dependent on self-will, whilst prayer takes us out to seek the will of God.

Another suspicion about prayer is that it can seem manipulative: we hear it in phrases such as, ‘I have prayed about this and decided such and such’ which leaves little scope for dissent or challenge. And how can it possibly work for us to ask for something in prayer?

So it’s  little wonder we ask again, with Jesus’ first disciples, ‘Lord, teach us to pray…’

So prayer may not be unique to Christianity, but prayer as offered by Christians is distinctive and particular. When we ask ‘Lord, teach us to pray’ we are asking that the human urge to pray effects, affects and reflects our relationship with our heavenly Father.

This is what takes us out of ourselves. Christian prayer begins in the simplicity of a relationship with God that can be understood in a generative, intimate way: ‘Abba, Father’. Not my Father, but Our Father.

This prayer takes us to the heart of the mission of Jesus Christ which is incorporation, being grafted, into the very life of God. It is what Eastern Christians term theosis or divinisation. That’s not divination, the reading of signs and omens, but divinisation which is growth into the image and likeness of God; God who gives us the capacity to become who God made us to be.

Prayer is how we seek out the wellsprings of God’s sustaining life and power. Just to say ‘Our Father’ places us into a relationship with the source and wellspring of life, and to drink from that life. This is not formulaic; it is not divination, where spells and ceremonies give access to some divine knowledge; it is not tranquil introspection but rather it is more like divining, the action of seeking springs of water that already exist.

Likewise prayer should never be an echo chamber of our own prejudices, manipulation or self-justification; but is a place where we lay bare before God the very depths of our hearts. We cannot do that alone. This is why St Paul speaks of the Spirit praying deep within us, ‘with sighs too deep for words’.

To use a now outdated image we might think of a radio set that needs to be tuned in to receive a signal. God is the transmitter and the transmission. The signal, God, transmits all the time, and our place in prayer is to tune in to receive that signal.

‘Lord, teach us to pray’ was the disciples’ request and is ours in our own day. And what Jesus offers is a pattern of prayer, and an actual formulation of prayer, against which all our prayer is measured and through which all our prayer flows.

In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus invites us into the relationship that he has with the Father so we say with him, and with one another, ‘Our Father’.

There are many books describing and explaining the Lord’s Prayer. They trace its Jewish roots, its style and shape and vocabulary. Yet, what we do day by day and Sunday by Sunday is to pray it and to breathe it such that it shapes who we are as persons in relationship with God in Jesus’ Name.

We are then drawn in to God’s inner life, such that we can make our requests known to God, so that we can be persistent in prayer, and accept that prayer will change us more than we can ever think we have changed God’s mind.

The ancient document known as the Didache, or the ‘Teaching of the Twelve’, says that we should pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day (VIII.3). If your life of prayer seems barren, unrewarding or confusing, that would be a very good place to start.

The techniques of Mindfulness - attending to your posture and breathing - are a good way in, but then to pray meditatively and reflectively the words that Jesus taught us. In doing so you place yourself in God’s presence as a precious child of God; you hallow God’s holy Name; you yearn for his kingdom and his power to sustain you day by day. You ask to be shaped and schooled in the ways of forgiveness and to be spared the ordeal of your own making and vanity.

Little wonder then that this prayer, which we delight in calling the Lord’s Prayer, is at the heart of the Christian life and our celebration of the Eucharist and receiving our daily bread: it is the source and summit of Christian prayer; prayer to Our Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

‘Lord, teach us to pray’.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

Lord, you search me out: imposter, hypocrite or true?

First preached as a sermon at Evensong on the Feast of St Thomas the Apostle (Psalm 139; Job 42.1-6; 1 Peter 1.3-12)

Psalm 139 is a remarkable account of the conviction that God knows us intimately: when we sit down; when we rise up; God even knows our thoughts even before we think them: ‘O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me: thou knowest my down sitting and up-rising, thou understandest my thoughts long before’ (Psalm 139.1).

It goes further, God knows us from cradle to grave, and, indeed, before birth and after death. It is a psalm of great grace and beauty, and describes the way in which the ultimately unknowable God knows us intimately.

For some people this is a slightly frightening thought, sometimes with good reason, other times not. Either way, it is a pointer that God is with us, which we know manifested in Jesus Christ.

That psalm is a call for us to know ourselves even as God knows us, honestly and without overblowing ourselves, or, as significantly, downplaying ourselves. It calls for honesty about ourselves, and is something St Thomas had to face within himself and in his relationship with Jesus Christ, the Crucified and Risen Lord.

So on this feast of St Thomas the Apostle, it is worth considering the nature of how we know ourselves, know Christ, and know the majesty of God, to whom Christ leads us in the power of the Holy Spirit. All of which will help us understand how we encounter, acknowledge and make known the Crucified and Risen Lord.

First there is a note of caution. And psalm 139 is the antidote to it.

I recently came across the phrase ‘imposter syndrome’. The features of imposter syndrome are self-doubt, a sense that at any minute one might be exposed as the fraud one thinks one really is.

Boy, it rang a bell with me! It seems to account for how I often feel about myself: feeling phony and not up to what I profess. It afflicts me sometimes as a Christian disciple: I believe this in my heart, but aren’t I an imposter if I can’t live up to my Christian calling? It can strike me at any time, not least when I am in a pulpit, or at the altar. It can strike me as a parent and husband, when things all seem too grown up for me.

‘Imposter syndrome’ isn’t simply something that affects clergy, but is a general discipleship issue too. It’s what hinders our ability to name and recognise the action of God’s grace in our lives. It makes us ask: ‘how well do I know myself?’; How well do I know God?; ‘how well does God know me?’

The confusion often comes when we mistake the ineffability of God with the limits of our own understanding. In other words, we feel like imposters because we do not and cannot fully understand God.

St Thomas was a fellow sufferer.  Thomas effectively says to his fellow disciples about recognising Jesus as Crucified and Risen, that he is an imposter who cannot speak about these things. Using Job’s word, ‘I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes’ (Job 42.3b,5,6).

Thomas, as a self-perceived imposter, has a problem with saying what he does not understand, or seeing what he cannot comprehend. The person afflicted with imposter syndrome feels like he or she is teetering on the brink of hypocrisy. Am I an imposter or a hypocrite? These questions haunt believers and we end up despising ourselves.

But this question and way of thinking comes from what St Ignatius of Loyola calls ‘the enemy of our human nature’, in other words Satan, which literally means in Hebrew ‘the adversary’. The adversary is very happy to make propositions that are not true of ourselves but sow seeds of doubt, because they sound so very plausible.

Imposter syndrome, or the charge of hypocrisy, is a seductive voice and plays to our deepest fears around our faith. And too many heed that voice.

There is a way out of this. The first letter of Peter reminds emphatically that faith in the Crucified and Risen Lord is not about understanding everything with our heads or about our own logic; it is not even about what we think we see with our eyes; our where we place our hands.

The mystery of faith is not about bafflement but a place in which to immerse ourselves; it is the hope into which we are born through baptism; these are gifts given to us which make even the angels envious, as they want to peer into these mysteries too.

Thomas famously said that he could not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ until he had seen and touched. It was as if he felt himself to be an imposter in the fellowship of faith; he could not trust himself to accept the mystery of faith.

 

St Paul also names imposter syndrome, ‘We are treated as imposters, and yet are true’ (2 Corinthians 6.8b, 10). Paul lists the siren voice of our adversary - trying to capitalise on our imposter syndrome - who said to Thomas, and says to you and me, you and me as Christians: you’re unknown, you’re dying, you’re being punished, you’re miserable; you’re poor; you’ve nothing: you’re imposters in your claim to follow Jesus Christ.

Paul’s rebuttal locates us back where we are to be, men, women and children who are known by God and searched out by him:  “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Corinthians 6.8b-10).

This takes us back to Psalm 139, which St Paul alludes to in his first letter to the Corinthians, ‘for now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known’ (1 Corinthians 13.12).

You are not an imposter; you are true. God knows you inside out, and as you grow into the stature that brings you will know fully the reality and meaning of that status: that you are a beloved child of God by adoption and grace.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

Life in Christ: 'O lively life, that deathless shall persevere'

First preached as a sermon at Guildford Cathedral. Readings, Galatians 3.23-29; Luke 8.26-39

‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you’.

So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him’ (Luke 8.39)

+ In nomine Patris…

If you picture in your mind a prisoner or captive you will perhaps see someone with hands and legs bound, or in a cell behind bars.

It is a sad reality of human society that some people are imprisoned for punishment, or for their own protection or that of others. Either way imprisonment is a pitiful image. Even more shocking is when someone is held as prisoner of conscience or the victim of a miscarriage of justice; imprisoned unjustly, as Jesus himself was.

Imprisonment means deprivation of liberty, the restriction of movement and of seeing the world in its widest perspective. Imprisonment narrows down how we experience life. In contrast astronauts tell us about the wonderful experience of tasting fresh air, the vibrancy of colours away from the confines of a sterile, enclosed confinement on a space station. Something Tim Peake will be experiencing about now.

But we can also say that we are not only imprisoned behind bars. Imprisonment can be a metaphor deployed to describe a situation where one feels trapped and unable to leave and to be free. This is what Rowan Williams calls, ‘life shut in on itself’.

The political rhetoric of the European referendum debate illustrates this metaphorical use of imprisonment. For some people membership of the European Union is a prison in which the UK is trapped and fettered, where it is not able to be free to make decisions and pursue its own path. For others, precisely the opposite is the case. Remaining within the EU is a liberating position where free trade, freedom of movement and basic human freedoms can be protected.

The decision, as they say, is yours. But whichever way you decide please do decide, and when Thursday comes, if you have that right, do exercise your vote. All of us, whether able to vote or not, must pray for discernment in the decision making and have trust in the outcome, even if it’s not the one we want.

Both our readings today also illustrate the imprisonment and liberation image.

The gospel reading tells us about a man, a loner, calling himself Legion, who clearly has what today we would know as a serious mental illness. He went round naked, something shocking and unacceptable then as now.  And there in the tombs he was ‘kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles’. He was in quarantine, living in the cemetery, held at a ‘safe’ distance from where mainstream people live.

All his associations are with death, dead bodies and fear. In his nakedness he represents on the one hand the innocence of Adam before his rebellion, but also the discomfort that the naked body can present: vulnerability and suspicion. Because of this suspicion he is bound by chains, not free in any meaningful way.

We instinctively recognise life lived differently, lived freely and without inhibition. The coverage following the horrible and untimely murder MP, Jo Cox, tells us that she lived a life not shut in on itself but opened out in service to others, the poor overseas and those in her constituency, which ultimately took her life. It is the costs of living life open to others that generates the sort of society that we all cherish, and for which Jo Cox is a martyr.

Life in Christ shapes this way of living, and, if we live out that way of life and adopt its habits, we infect, in the best way, those around us. The call from this morning’s readings is to live ‘life in its abundance’ (John 10.10).

As well as being a man who has real needs for compassion, reconciliation and freedom he is a metaphor for life outside the resurrection, life not lived in Jesus Christ. Away from Christ he and we live a manacled, lifeless life contaminated by death, exposed and vulnerable.

Jesus Christ goes to the tomb for us and with us, is stripped of his clothes and dignity with us and for us, and is bound for us and with us, in order that, like with that disturbed man, we might be led out of slavery into freedom in the Promised Land.

So we begin to digest what this might mean for us, this liberation, removal of the shackles, this taking hold of ‘the life that really is life’ (cf 1 Timothy 6.19). The task of digesting what life with and in Christ means is tackled by St Paul.

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul speaking of the liberating power of faith says: ‘Before faith came we were imprisoned under the law until faith would be revealed’ (Galatians 3.23).

Let’s be clear though, Paul is not talking about the criminal or even civil law. He’s talking about the Law revealed to the people of Israel. The Law for Jews was and is the way in which they remain faithful to the promises of God.

For Paul, the question is how might those who are not part of the People of Israel, who are not Jews, can live in covenant with God. It’s a hard question for him because as a Jew, a good and righteous Jew, the Law and its observance had been the way in which he was right with God.

For Paul it is faith in Christ that is the key that unlocks the Law so that all people may be brought into relationship with God as God’s children. The way of life that binds us now to God, is life in Christ.

This is the paradoxical relationship that the second collect from Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer talks about: ‘whose service is perfect freedom’: how can service be perfect freedom? Paul answers by saying that by being in Christ, we are no longer bound to God through what we are compelled to do or not to do, but through our relationship with God in Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit, a relationship formed in faith and love.

This action of liberation is seen when a person moves into Christ, as Paul puts it: ‘As many of you as were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ; there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3.28).

                                      

We are not prisoners or free people, but persons in Christ. Those who respond in faith are heirs according to the promise, the promise of Jesus Christ at the heart of the Gospel of life in all its abundance: as a poet put it, ‘O lively life, that deathless shall persevere’.

It’s little wonder then that when Jesus said to Legion, ‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you’...he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him’ (Luke 8.39)

  

A blazing fire: A Trinty Sunday semron

Preached at Evensong on Trinity Sunday 2016 at Guildford Cathedral

Psalm 73; Exodus 3.1-15; John 3.1-17

‘The angel of the LORD appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out of a bush’ (Exodus 3.2)

+

A couple of weeks ago the pictures coming from Fort McMurray in Canada were terrifying in the extreme. Much like wild fires we have seen in Australia, the fire advanced at extraordinary speed, destructive and all consuming. The pictures of the aftermath of the fire are devastating: homes and livelihoods destroyed and a barren and ashen landscape of twisted metal and charcoal trees, barely hinting at what was there before.

Fire is dangerous. The phrase ‘you’re playing with fire’ serves as a warning of highly unpleasant consequences. The fiery pit is a very vision of hell itself, both smouldering and flames flaring up and licking: ‘unquenchable flames’ as it is described in one place (Mark 9.43b).

Fire is used as an analogy of God: destructive, all-consuming, purging, as in Deuteronomy, ‘For the LORD your God is a devouring fire’ (Deuteronomy 4.24).  This purging, refining and cleansing is not always destructive: in some places wild or controlled fires regenerate flora and fauna. The discovery of processes of refining metals in fire was one of the great advances in human ingenuity. The prophet Malachi speaks of God his people ‘like gold and silver’ in a refiner’s fire (Malachi 3.3)

So what of Trinity Sunday in all of this? Is there a clunky analogy to be made between fire and the Holy Trinity? Could one link the so-called fire triangle and the Trinity: fire needs heat, fuel and oxygen; Father, Son and Lighter Spirit? It would break down into contrivance and heresy. So no!

So what might the fire in this evening’s first lesson point, and draw, us to?

What becomes clear is that as Moses gazed at that fire, he gazed at an intense mystery. There have been explanations ranging from Moses being under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, to a particular plant that, ‘excretes such a vast amount of volatiles that lighting a match near the flowers and seedpods causes the plant to be enveloped by flame. This flame quickly extinguishes without injury to the plant’. But no one suggests that Moses was lighting up a match or anything else that could have caused a plant to burst into flame.

We have surely to treat this as a theophany, a manifestation of the divine presence.

The burning bush grabbed Moses’ attention, ‘I must turn aside’ he said, ‘and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up’ (Exodus 3.3). Of course his head was turned by what he saw. With his head turned, and his attention held, he heard the God’s Word more clearly. The book of Deuteronomy puts it like this, ‘Then the LORD spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of the words but saw no form; there was only a voice. He declared his covenant, which he charged you to observe.’ (Deuteronomy 4.12).

Words without form, without a body to speak them, are as strange as fire that burns without consuming. The fire that Moses saw was entirely like fire and entirely unlike fire. And yet this fire didn’t destroy, didn’t consume and didn’t purge. It was a fire that called: it called Moses, it literally turned his head.

The fire that does not consume is something that can disappear without trace. It is wholly elusive, and yet absolutely real. This is where Abrahamic theology is distinguishable from, say, Indian religions, in their view of the sacred flame. As Elijah discovered, the LORD is not in the wind the, earthquake or the fire, but in a sound sheer silence (1 Kings 19.11-12).

The burning bush tells us about the ineffability of God: God beyond any description that words can give. In biblical terms this is against idolatry, which is thinking that words or images can define, trap or constrain God. So, for example, Deuteronomy reflects on the way in which the fire of the burning bush cautions us against idolatry, ‘Since you saw no form when the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, take care and watch yourselves closely, so that you do not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves, in the form of any figure – the form of male and female’ (Deuteronomy 4.15, 16).

Of course later when Moses came down from the mountain to bring the law later in Exodus, that is precisely what the Israelites had done, they had, with Aaron’s the priest’s connivance, created a golden calf which they worshipped. Concocting our own transitory ideas of God is constructing golden claves if we don’t pay attention to what we can’t say of God.

The doctrine of the Trinity guards us against saying too much of God, and not enough. It tells us that we can, and must, speak of God, yet with care. It is like a trellis, up which grows our understanding of the intense, burning, mystery of God, not subject to the whims and changes of our preferences.

As Christians we do claim to see God in an image, but one not made with human hands, and that is in the face of Jesus Christ, who, the letter to the Colossians tells us, is, ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1.15). And indeed Moses’ encounter with God is not wholly without words. Moses is told he stands on holy ground and that the God who speaks is the God of his ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Exodus 3.5, 6). And then God reveals God’s name, ‘I AM WHO I AM’ (Exodus 3.14).

Jesus shows us the ways of the Eternal God in the parables of the Kingdom, in his incarnation, death and resurrection, in healing and forgiving: the Trinity is implicit and revealed in Christ Jesus who is totally at one with the Father in the power of the Spirit.

So we now know God’s name and we see his face in Jesus Christ and the flame of the Holy Spirit catches our attention to remove our sandals before the mystery of God. Indeed the fire of the Holy Spirit invites us into share the very life of God, in the saving Name of Jesus Christ who shows us the Father and leads us, human and frail as we are, into the divine life. St Paul calls it in the Greek being en Christo, in Christ.

This is the Christian vision of salvation - not simply hearing and obeying law (that’s Judaism); not simply submission to God, abject or otherwise (that’s Islam) - but incorporation, being drawn into the sanctifying life of God, from which flows our thinking and speaking and acting in God’s name.

May we be like flames dancing out of the inner life of the very heart of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to be a source of blessing, peace and burning love for the whole creation.

© Andrew Bishop 2016