Homily for 30 August 2915. Proper 17, Year B. Deuteronomy 4: 1,2,6-9. James 1:17-27. Mark 7: 1-8,14,15,21-23

Last week Martin told us that when Paul said that we should fasten the belt of truth around our waists, the word he used which is translated as ‘truth’, alètheia, means openness, reality, authenticity, the opposite of lie or appearance. Martin said: “many people hide behind a façade, never really allowing others to get to know them. Like Adam and Eve covering themselves with fig leaves, many believers dress themselves in man-made realities that are easily penetrated, their weakness quickly exposed in times of intense spiritual onslaught. Paul exhorts us to be honest, to live with integrity and be real with God. Dishonesty is an open door that will wreak havoc in our lives, especially during any kind of enemy siege.” I suppose that’s saying, in short, the trouble with telling lies is remembering which lies you’ve told to whom: it gets so complicated that before long you’ll be found out.

Look at today’s Gospel: Pharisees concerned only about appearances, about doing the right thing, or rather being seen to do the right thing. Do you know people who are always finding fault? Do you know people who are always and only concerned with what the neighbours think? Do you know church people like this?

Look at the Epistle. Paul says: do it, don’t just listen to it, or think about it. JFDI. “If any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.” I’ve preached so often about looking in the mirror and asking yourself what you see? Do you see yourself as you would like to be seen? Or as the Lord sees you?

It’s hard work to sift through our facades, our appearances, our pretensions, our notions. Look at Hyacinth Bucket keeping up appearances. It takes so much energy to pretend, just as it takes so much effort to remember to whom we’ve told which lies. The result is that we don’t have the energy to live life to the full.

There’s a word in today’s Old Testament reading that’s important in this respect: discernment. It comes from two Latin words, dis and cernere. Dis– means apart, and cernere means to separate. In his book God of Surprises Fr Gerry Hughes writes “The words ‘shit’ and ‘discernment’ have the same root – the word ‘shit’ being related to the Old English sceadan meaning ‘to separate out’! The billions of cells in our body continuously practising ‘discernment’ on the food and drink we consume and on the air we breathe. Each cell accepts what it needs for the good of the whole body and rejects or passes on the remainder. Cancer cells could be described as a failure of discernment on the part of individual cells. They ‘forget’ the good of the whole body and concentrate only on their own individual good. As a result, the whole body suffers … In human society, individuals, groups, nations and religious bodies are all liable to act within the narrow parameters of their own immediate interests. Such behaviour brings oppression, misery, starvation and death to other human beings … Discernment is as necessary for survival as air, food and water.”

Sifting through our attitudes and actions to get rid of the masks, the notions, the pretences. It’s such hard work.

Let me tell you a story. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

I was a regular visitor to the biggest men’s prison in the Republic of Ireland. One of the gentlemen there said something that impressed me very much: “it’s such a relief be found out.” Now he was caught, he didn’t need to pretend any more. Such liberation, lightening of the load. I became aware of the energy we waste trying to put on a show, to pretend to be what we are not. The energy we use and the trouble we go to hide from ourselves and from each other. We become enslaved to pretence.

We – all of us –  need to find that same sense of relief in the liberation of being found out. It’s almost completely absent from ordinary lives because we try so hard not to be found out. The result is that we never find true freedom because we can’t bring ourselves to give up our addictions to pretending, even though it costs so much. It’s like being trapped in OCD (did you see the TV programme the other night – a young man weeping because OCD was ruining his life?)

If only we could expose our burdens to the light, as it were, instead of hiding them away. If only we could accept ourselves, warts and all. St Paul, the patron of this church, continually talks about the past he was ashamed of. He does this to show God’s mercy and he uses it to power his own work. It would be self-indulgent of me to do likewise, though I have no objection to doing so, and not now. But I know that until we’ve seen the dark places of our own hearts, the evil that comes from avarice, envy, pride … and so on, we will never be free and never be fully ourselves. Just think what could happen if instead of using energy to keep up appearances, we use it to bring healing and delight to the world, the last mask shed as we emerge from the chrysalis of old habits into the fully adult form, the imago. Imago Dei in whose image we are made.

If only we could pass our burdens to someone else. This is what talking with a trusted friend is about. I like Cardinal Hume’s image of God: someone into whose ear you can whisper all the things you’re afraid and ashamed to tell anyone else, and know that you will not be rejected. If you know of anyone who needs to talk in confidence to someone, tell them that I shall be in the Lady Chapel every Friday between 5 and 6. Nobody will be rejected.

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Much of this meditation has been inspired by the writing of Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of the Russian Orthodox Church in London. I finish by quoting someone whom he greatly admired, the Latvian Elizaveta Yurievna Pilenko (1891-1945), later Skobtsova, murdered in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, who became known as Mother (Saint) Mary of Paris.

It would be a great lie to tell searching souls “go to church because there you will find peace.” The opposite is true. Go to church because there you will feel real alarm about your sins, about your perdition, about the world’s sins and perdition. There you will feel an unappeasable hunger for Christ’s truth. There, instead of lukewarm, you will become ardent, instead of pacified you will become alarmed. Instead of learning the wisdom of this world you will become foolish in Christ.

A little brown bird

A homily for the Sunday after Ascension

Did you enjoy the reburial of Richard III down the road at Leicester? What a load of claptrap. Is that what the church is for now: heritage industry, pageantry, posh dresses, and anodyne addresses? That’s what people seem to want. Is this worship of the past all that we’re about. I hope not.

Evidently not for Jesus. In St John’s account of Easter morning, he says to Mary Magdalene ‘Don’t cling to me, Mary, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.’ I would be ashamed to confess how recently it dawned on me why this matters. I used to think that it was in Mary Magdalene’s interest not to cling to Jesus, and couldn’t work out why. Then I realized. It’s not for her sake, but for his (which in the long run is hers, but bear with me). ‘If you cling to me, you’ll stop me doing what I have to do’. Not for Jesus any idea of sticking with the past or even the present, but for him—and it could have been said brusquely—‘let go of me, I have work to do.’

We’ve waited 40 days since Easter to celebrate the Ascension and now, thank God, we’ve done so with great joy. Life that has been on hold, as it were, for 5+ weeks now resumes. I’d like to look at the Ascension in three ways.

First, the cosmic event. At the incarnation, God takes human form and enters into all human experience. These events take place at one time and in one place. At the Ascension the Christ-event becomes available to the entire cosmos, unlimited by space and time. Outside time—ex stasis. The cosmos is redeemed.

Second, the personal event. God returns into the Godhead. God returns to Godself, goes deep inside himself. This is a model for the way we can journey into ourselves, a call to searing self-examination, the better to gain wisdom and insights in the service of others. Paradoxically the more one goes into oneself, the more one is free from oneself. It is painful, as the crucifixion was. The blackening of the forge (Jung’s nigredo) before the transformation to new creation. Personal blackening, personal crucifixion, personal resurrection, personal ascension as we learn to fly—yes, fly. We become unlimitedly available for service to others, as Christ was unlimited by the Ascension. We do not impose ourselves on others, as Christ never did. It is a leaving behind of self, just as Christ left behind human flesh. An ascension beyond self.

Third, the salvation event. We are human beings. There is nothing shameful about this. If there were, why would the Ineffable God have taken the trouble to become one? At the Ascension all human experience was lifted up into the Godhead. The ascended Christ is the wounded Christ, the wounded healer, insulted, spat at, nailed, kicked, beaten, thirsty. By his wounds, we are healed. Through our woundedness we can act as channels of healing for others. We do not need to pretend to be what we’re not—that’s the sin of Adam and Eve in the garden where they tried to cover up who they were. Humanity with all its imperfections is divinized: ‘God became man so that man might become divine’—the interpenetration of divine and human. Rising above is always a metaphor for release, for a yearning (eros) for better things. Such yearnings are part of the human condition. The abused people I have dealt with ache for better things, and look forward to a better life. Ascension as something to aim for.

So what?

God became man in order to raise man to God. Christ takes human-ness to the Divine Godhead. The Ascension unites earth to heaven, humanness to divinity: sanctification, divinization, redemption, theosis, call it what you will.

We are too obsessed with the puritan mentality of the BCP, miserable sinners and so on. We wallow too much in self-flagellation. This is self-obsession, a kind of inverted pride. We are obsessed with what we are saved from. We need to lift our eyes to what we are saved to: glory and splendour of Ascension. This is why we need the Ascension: to rekindle, restore, our sense of hope in a world where we hear and see too much of the nastiness of humanity, where we hear of people who ignore that longing for the divine, who shut it out. We need this when we hear the bad news that the media seem to like to concentrate on and when we are, as I have been this week, dealing with people for whom life is not worth living.

God the Logos became what we are, in order that we may become what he himself is. The glory of God is a living person and the life of man is the vision of God.

Harry Williams, author of “Life abundant or life resisting?”

The mission Jesus gave the apostles was simple. It was to teach others what he had taught them. So what are you going to do about it?

Let’s put heaven on earth. Let’s ascend to new possibilities. Let’s do what we can to enable others ascend to the heights of humanity. This is sharing in divinity.

You write a new page of the gospel each day, through the things that you do and the words that you say. People will read what you write, whether faithful or true. What is the gospel according to you?

What is the gospel according to you? Mine is life abundant, not life resisting.

Welcome deare feast of Lent.

We had beautiful Ash Wednesday ceremonies yesterday evening. Unaccompanied plainsong, psalm and Merbecke, and three gentle hymns. Whoever observed that in the catholic tradition music aids devotion and calms the spirit, whereas in the reformed tradition it excites the emotions, knew a thing or two.

Ash Wednesday is a wonderful feast of being human. Since dust we are and to dust we shall return, we might as well stop trying to be what we’re not. Ditch the personae, shed the skins. Relax into ourselves.

Lent as relaxation. Yes, relaxation. Letting go, loosening up. Freeing from constraints.

Relaxation from the constraints that we tie ourselves up with, and the new clothes we wrap around ourselves to appear bigger, brighter and better than we are, to impress others. (Evagrios the Solitary, 4th century: Of the demons … there are three groups who fight in the front line: those entrusted with the appetites of gluttony, those who suggest avaricious thoughts, and those who incite us to seek the esteem of men.)

Relaxation from the constraints that constitute addictions. I’m not suggesting we indulge them but, as it were, put them on the table in front of us and look at them full in the face. Addictions to food, booze, complaining, finding fault, having to win … and so many more. Hold them up to yourself and the Lord. You can’t let go of something unless you look at it and know what it is you have to let go of.

Relaxation – moving to a wide place. If we are not constrained, if our view is not limited, we have freedom of action, we are farseeing.

Relaxation – not laziness—far from it—but freeing up so each one of us can give to the world what only each one of us can give.

Relaxation – abstinence from things that hold us back. Don’t give up what you enjoy: that’s just another constraint. Rather give up what you don’t need any more. Let go of ways of thinking that you once needed but that now constrain you. Let go of hurts, resentments, oughts and shoulds. Let go of prejudices and attitudes that restrict your view of the world. Start saying ‘no’ to the expectations of others, and begin to get to know someone you’ve hardly ever met—no, not your maker, but yourself (thanks to W R Inge, sometime Dean of London, for this nugget of gold).

This Lenten abstinence has nothing to do with hair shirts, but everything to do with freeing up yourself for delight you had forgotten was in you. It’s about losing your ego, and rediscovering the Divine within.

Welcome deare feast of Lent.