Sermon 28th February 2010 Lent II
February 28, 2010
Sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent (with Baptism), 28th February 2010
Fr Richard Coles
From the letter to the Philippians: for many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
A week or two ago on Ash Wednesday we met here in church to mark the beginning of Lent. Before the service we burned last year’s Palm Crosses, distributed and blessed on Palm Sunday, in last year’s Lent, and with the ash the priest made the sign of the cross on our foreheads with the words, remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. We left in silence, out into the street bearing the sign of the cross, turned the corner, wiped the ashy smudge from the foreheads, and went out to dinner.
It is the Anglican way, partly reflecting, I guess, a reluctance to make a show of one’s faith, to look silly, or the odd one out; for many live as enemies of the Cross of Christ.
It is, after all, an instrument of torture and death, and Lent reminds us that on the Cross our Lord and Saviour suffered and died. Do we need reminding? Just look around this church and count how many depictions of the Crucified Christ we offer for your consideration.
And yet, over the centuries, and in the course of our lives, the Cross has become familiar, domesticated; indeed, for many people it’s become a sign of its opposite, something anodyne, even cosy. So to be called to reflect again on its purpose as the instrument of Christ’s death makes us uncomfortable. Especially when we’ve gathered here not only to share the bread and wine of the Eucharist but to welcome India, at the beginning of her life, into the family of the Church?
Well, we don’t often have baptisms in Lent, and perhaps that’s because we sense that the mood of the season is out of tune with the mood of the sacrament; widow’s weeds clash with christening robes. But when we look at the baptism service it seems to have more in common with Ash Wednesday than we might at first expect.
In a moment, as deacon of the mass, I will mark the sign of the cross on India’s forehead, not in ash, but in oil, holy oil, blessed by the bishop in the cathedral on Maundy Thursday, the eve of the commemoration of Christ’s death on the Cross. And I will say Christ claims you for his own, receive the sign of the Cross. Is it, then, a badge, a mark of membership? Yes, but it is more than that, more than a statement of affiliation, like the Tufty Club; or even of belief, like the pound sign for Eurosceptics. It is a sign that we share in Christ’s death.
Uncomfortable again? Is it that same discomfort we’ll feel in a moment when we we’re gathered at the font and the celebrant prays, We thank thee, Father, for the water of baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death: a cold wind blows across the water’s surface – Ash Wednesday.
A bit of editing called for perhaps? We’ve edited the marriage service, after all, which used to speak of men’s carnal lusts and appetites, compared the ushers to brute beasts that have no understanding, and recommended itself as a means of avoiding fornication; you could almost see the orange blossom wilting.
In the new, edited, marriage service that’s all gone; instead we’re obliged to speak of ‘the delight and tenderness of sexual union’, which I find no less embarrassing, and usually pretend to cough at that bit and move on.
Well there are worse things than a Curate’s embarrassment – selling a baptism short for example – which we would if we lost sight, at the beginning of our lives, of their end.
Perhaps it is not just the character of the baptismal service, the christening of a child, that makes those reminders of mortality feel so jarring; it is also because as a culture we are no longer on terms with death. Twenty five per cent of my grandmother’s twelve brothers and sisters didn’t make it to adulthood – Spanish flu, ruptured appendix, failure to thrive – and every household in her childhood had a drawer full of black crepe (well-used). Death was not something awaiting us, finally, in the antiseptic impersonal environment of a hospital, but was a regular knocker at the door. She grew up with all the elaborate Victorian paraphernalia of death, full-mourning, half-mourning, black bombazine, weeping willows, and in her lifetime it all but disappeared, in proportion with the rise in life expectancy, enduring today only in Undertakers’ Parlours and the East End of London. Even the word ‘death’ seems to have become unsayable – have you noticed how more and more people prefer the euphemism ‘passed away’, an expression oddly resurrected from Victorian piety for use in world which grows every day more secular.
For us, as individuals and for our culture, death may have been banished to the edges of our experience, but sooner or later, inevitably, we will become expert in it, through the loss of others, and finally the loss of ourselves. If, as Benjamin Franklin observed, it is the only inevitable thing (along with taxes), don’t we, at the very least, need to come to terms with it (for it will certainly come to terms with us)? And I don’t mean by this a sort of golden sunset – angel’s feathers falling to the sound of Dvorak’s New World symphony – or a melodrama – black-cowled figures wielding scythes – or an evasion – I have just gone into the next room. I mean the blunt fact of death, so difficult to face with equanimity, no matter how theologically well-equipped, how pious, how serenely composed we like to think we may be. Not existing is literally unthinkable, and like all living, feeling creatures, we dread extinction; it’s hardwired into our brains, a fundamental strategy for survival, the selfish gene being its selfish self.
And yet this selfish gene, which provides us with our dread of death, is also, paradoxically, death’s executor. Last week there were a number of reports in the papers about breakthroughs in our understanding of how this works, how we age and die. It’s the focus of intense research and debate at the moment, and according to one school of thought, it’s pre-programmed, part of the design.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA – hence the cover image on the service booklet this morning – like the cross it is a more than a symbol, for in its double helix our fortune and fate is written. Who we will be, our virtues and vices, the curl of our hair, and the rate of its loss; the loss of our teeth, our marbles, and our lives. It’s a bit like built-in obsolescence in a washing machine, the future failure of the spin cycle engineered in so we’ll have to go and buy replacements and keep the world economy, or at least Peter Jones, in business.
The difference between your Zanussi and your DNA is that no-one knows why our obsolescence is built in. We know how we age, we don’t know why we age, and before we get too beguiled by the promise of the former, maybe we should reflect a bit on the latter.
Gene therapy, we are told, promises greatly extended life-expectancy, already double that of our not too distant ancestors (and not too distant neighbours) thanks to healthier lifestyles and cleverer medicine (for those, of course, who can afford them). You and I may reasonably expect to be playing golf into our nineties – India, however, and her peers, may get well into triple figures before the accumulation of cellular wear and tear annuls their club membership.
The prospect of a hundred and fifty candles on a birthday cake fills some with relief; but others, I suspect, dread it. Not because the thought of getting through more hips than a centipede is unappealing – if these therapies work then our cells will continue to renew themselves – but because the sheer weight of a hundred and fifty years of life could so easily be more burden than bonus. Janacek, the greatest composer of the twentieth century… arguably… Janacek’s opera The Makropoulos Case dramatises such a fate, of a woman, Emilia Marty, living beyond her span thanks to a life-extending potion: but it is a life of dreary uniformity, without risk or savour or pleasure. We love parties, she discovers, because they end.
We know how we die, we don’t know why we die? But our lives are not our own, we are not the authors of our own stories, deciding our beginnings and our ends. What we really are is beyond us utterly, created by God in the fathomless mystery of his image, redeemed in the fathomless grace of his love; our futures and our fates not a matter of genetic snakes and ladders, but signed with his cross, transforming the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.
Weekly Sheet 28th February 2010 Lent II
February 27, 2010
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| ‘A Matter of Death and Life’ by Fr Alan Gyle, Vicar 
The saddest point in our week at St Paul’s was the funeral on Thursday of the outrageously influential fashion designer Alexander McQueen. But that Johnny Depp was staying next door at The Berkeley, and that as a result Wilton Place was swarming with paparazzi hoping to photograph him, we might have succeeded in holding the simple private funeral for close family and friends everyone wanted; as it was there was lots of photography and media coverage – tho’ much of it sensitive. Good to see the paparazzi lower their cameras and stand quietly when the family arrived just before noon - vestiges of decency and respect, even in our frenzied media age, and recognition that his death was not just a story but a tragedy.
A suicide at any age is a tragedy, but the death of someone so greatly respected and prodigiously talented at only forty is a deep shock and raises again for us deep questions about the meaning and value of life, and about how it can be that individuals find themselves so at odds with the idea of life as a ‘gift’ that continuing in it becomes untenable for them and they choose to return that gift to God, as it were ‘unopened’. A funeral in church after a suicide?, some have asked… well, yes, of course. The traditional view of the Church that those who took their own lives were expressing rejection of God has given way to a more informed and pastoral view that those who take their lives are often expressing dissatisfaction with the life they are experiencing, and are – in some way or another – uttering a cry for help. We pray for all his departed children, and commend them to his love and mercy.
No moral condemnation, then – but what moral stance are we to take in the midst of widespread current public debate about suicide and assisted dying, death and life? All around us societal views are in flux. What are we to think, as Christians, about ‘choosing’ death?
Perhaps one key insight is that such issues can never be reduced merely to calculus about death and the mechanics of the ending of life – but, stepping back, must always be addressed as issues about life itself in all its fullness: life not as something that is ours merely to use as we see fit, but rather life as a gift from God to be seized and used gloriously, outrageously, wonderfully and creatively, and always respected as infinitely precious. Darkness and struggle has its place in the midst of all of that, of course: that is what made Lee McQueen so brilliant. The challenge we face is that in the West we have, quietly, become utilitarian and consumerist in our thinking… and in such a thought-world there is little place for respect and wonder, even respect for life itself. In the wider debate humanity is reduced to commodity: value questionable? – then throw it away…
But respect and wonder still lurk – as at noon on Thursday when something – for a moment – halted the clicking of cameras and everybody paused in the face of mystery. We need in our society to give more space to those deep, instinctive, God-given feelings.
Fr Alan Gyle, Vicar.
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 REMEMBER, YOU CAN SUPPPORT OUR LENT APPEAL BY EATING AT THE SPAGHETTI HOUSE (www.spaghettihouse.co.uk) AND PRESENTING THIS VOUCHER (http://bit.ly/ccbeY0) - read more about this at http://bit.ly/LentSpaghetti THIS WEEKEND Sunday 28th February 2010: Lent II At 09:00: Family Mass Celebrant & Preacher Fr Richard Coles At 11:00: Solemn Mass Messe Basse - Faure, ’Long since in Egypt’s plenteous land’ - Parry; Ave verum corpus - Faure; Preacher: Fr Richard Coles At 18:00: Evening Prayer (said) THE WEEK AHEAD , then The Lent Course at the Grosvenor Chapel 19:45-21:00
NEXT SUNDAY AT ST PAUL’S The clergy are available daily at service times and by appointment for conversation and counsel; please ring the Parish Office on 020 7201 9999. |
Weekly Sheet 21st February 2010 Lent I
February 21, 2010
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| Please be seated… by Fr Richard Coles, Senior Curate  To Dorset on my day off, a six hour drive thanks to the failure of Tom Tom, the idiocy of the navigator (me), and the closure of the A303; but it was a journey well worth making. I had gone to meet David Saltmarsh, who has a smallholding near Lyme Regis, twenty five acres of organic veg, organic sheep, organic cows and organic hens, which he farms with his wife and children and the help of neighbours who have organised themselves into a kind of loosely aligned co-operative. When we arrived everyone had turned out to try to persuade a sick cow to stand on her own four legs, which she seemed disinclined to do. It is not an easy living, but David supplements his income from farming by making chairs - greenwood chairs, fashioned from newly cut oak and ash and beech grown on his own woodland, turned on a pole lathe, assembled without screws or nails or glue, a tradition that goes back further than anyone can remember. My grandfather, from just over the border in Devon, sat on a chair which his father and grandfather had sat on, a Windsor chair with a wheel carved in the slat that eventually went to my cousin and is now sat on by the seventh generation to be thus accommodated. It is Lent, and I must confess I coveted that chair (I got a fold-over mahogany card table instead) and have always wanted one like it, but thought the skills that went into making such a wonderful piece of furniture were extinct. And then I heard about David Saltmarsh, looked at his website, and found the chair which I hope will last at least the next seven generations. It is made from a single piece of oak, with pole-turned legs and stretchers, an ash seat, close-grained and carved for comfort, with a wheel cut into the central slat, and stands in my sitting room looking immensely inviting. An indulgence, surely, to buy myself such a present (and not a cheap present) as we enter Lent? Well, yes, but I don’t begrudge myself the odd indulgence, and I find as I get older I want fewer things, but better things, made by craftsmen and women, made to last, made with care. It woud be a bit of a stretch to describe sitting in it as a Lenten discipline (mind you, no upholstery), but it is a reminder of durable value and sound economy in our fickle-fashioned, throw-away culture. Check out David’s website: www.fivepennychairs.co.uk
Fr Richard Coles, Curate.
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THIS WEEKEND
Sunday 21st February 2010: Lent I At 09:00: Family Mass Celebrant & Preacher Fr Alan Gyle. At 11:00: Solemn Mass Darke in F, ‘Ich aber ben elend’ Op.110 - Brahms; Ave verum corpus - Elgar; Organ voluntary: Prelude & Fugue in A minor - Brahms Preacher: Fr Alan Gyle At 18:00: Evening Prayer (said) THE WEEK AHEAD NEXT SUNDAY AT ST PAUL’S The clergy are available daily at service times and by appointment for conversation and counsel; please ring the Parish Office on 020 7201 9999. |
Sermon 14th February 2010
February 14, 2010
Sermon for the Sunday next before Lent, 14th February 2010
Fr Nick Mercer
Glory, Postmodernity & Transfiguration
“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32
It was a residential Board of Trustees meeting in midsummer, and my first mistake was to suggest that we held the after lunch session out on the lawn.
My second mistake was deciding not just to sit on the grass, but to lie down on the grass. And the third was when I thought ‘I’ll just close my eyes, but I’ll still be able to concentrate’.
I might just have got away with this had I not: one – been Chairman of the Board; and two - started snoring.
We’ve all had those situations where we are desperately struggling to stay awake – I’ve been with some of you at Glyndebourne after the dinner interval!
We would not have had this account of the Transfiguration of our Lord in the Gospels, if the disciples had succumbed to sleep.
And as they reflected on it after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, they realised what they had seen
· They saw Moses the lawgiver and Christ as the fulfilment of the Law.
· They saw Elijah the chief of prophets and Christ as the One to whom all the prophets pointed.
· They heard the voice of Almighty God, reiterating Christ’s Baptismal affirmation that this was his beloved Son and that they should listen to him.
· And they saw the Shekinah cloud, a theophany of the God of glory, and the reflection of that glory in the face of their teacher, Jesus the Messiah.
There’s a little Jewish joke here as well - a sort of pun. Blink and you miss it.
The Hebrew word for ‘glory’, ‘kabod’, was the word for weight, heaviness, gravitas. Here the disciples are weighed down with sleep, Luke tells us, but they remained awake and so were weighed down with glory.
One of my fellow students at theological college was good at everything. And he knew it. So nobody liked him very much. So there was much Schadenfreude when he was rusticated for a term for driving a mini car through the front doors of the college.
He was good at Hebrew of course as well, so someone pinned a large notice above his door with the single word in Hebrew: Ichabod - the glory has departed.
It was the name given to Eli’s grandson Ichabod, who was born just after a particularly crushing defeat by the Philistines who also stole the Ark of the Covenant which represented the glory of God – atheme running through all the readings and prayers today.
[In fact it’s a rather tragic story that the Jewish writer turns into another little joke at the end.
“And it came to pass, when the messenger made mention of the ark of God, that Eli fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died: for he was an old man, and heavy.” (I Sam 4)
So the grandson, born at the same time is called Ichabod, the glory has departed - the Ark of the Covenant has been carried off. But it could mean, the heavy one has departed - the fat man has died!]
Ichabod might be a suitable epitaph for the last 25 years: postmodernity as we are coming to call this period of history.
There’s much spiritual interest but little spiritual depth or weight. Believe but don’t belong. (70% of people claim to be Church of England – they believe, but they don’t belong to our congregations in any meaningful sense.)
Postmodernity describes, not so much a movement, as a mood in contemporary society. It is image with attitude; inner emptiness covered up by all the good things money can buy. Tesco ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am. Retail therapy doesn’t give meaning, but it makes me feel better!
The loneliness and ennui is eased by friendships and music, sex, alcohol and other drugs; and lots of idle humour.Veni, vidi, velcro - I came, I saw, I stuck around. Try and think of an advert that doesn’t use humour.
And one of the characteristics of postmodernity, is that it denies transcendence. So there is little focus to all that spirituality around, and indeed often a denial that there is any objective ‘other’ - the transcendent God of Glory. Spirituality is seen as something purely internal, subjective and personal.
Because of this absent substantiator in postmodern society; an absence of the One who gives weight to human existence, there is a lack of solidness in society, of glory, of weight.
We are in danger of becoming all surface and image.
Let’s go back to our Gospel – the transfiguration of Jesus.
As Jesus goes down the mountain with the disciples, he speaks to them of his impending suffering and of his resurrection. And he has already told them, although they do not understand, that his Passion will be the greatest display of God’s glory. That’s why we read this Gospel passage always on the last Sunday before Lent.
We celebrate this Mass to the Glory of God. As we bring the gifts of the world at the offertory - our bread and wine and money - so we celebrate God’s glory in all he has given to us.
And as we lift up our Lord’s broken body, so we celebrate his victory over death and the glorious hope he has given us.
It is hard to celebrate the glory of God when we are suffering, in body mind or spirit; or watching those whom we love suffer. Yet as we look at the suffering of God in Christ, and remember that we will share in his resurrection glory, then even suffering and death become part of the path to glory.
The Westminster Catechism reminds us that “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.”
Secular drowsiness, the stupor and busyness of 21st century life, must not rob us of seeing God’s glory and delighting in his creation. Part of the reason for the disciplines of Lent is to keep ourselves spiritually awake and alert.
And here at the mass, as Christ is present in another Transfiguration, not with Moses and Elijah, but with bread and wine; here is weight and depth in an increasingly light and shallow culture. Let us be awake to the presence of the Glory of God.
“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32