Sermon: Let Gd Arise - Even As We Wait

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford, 22.05.20 

Easter 7 

• Acts 1.6-14; 
• John 17.1-11 

I have an Ascensiontide story (don’t think I have shared it). It didn’t happen in Ascensiontide, but the theme shines through.  

It was late-ish in the evening, in North London. I’d just moved into a place, and was getting to know the area. If you know me, you know that means I was lost. I was walking by a library. A man came out of the library, and called me over. He was an Asian gentleman, in a Muslim prayer hat. The matter was urgent.  

He pulled out of his bag a book. He showed it to me. He asked me, in very broken English, what the title meant. Now, as he seemed to be a Muslim, I did not suppose that Arabic was his first language, but maybe it might be as close as we got to a shared language. I know perhaps as many as thirty words in Arabic, mainly religious. I thought this, on seeing the title of the book. You see, it was Let God Arise. I know the Arabic word for God. Well, you do too. Allah. And I happen to know the Arabic verb to rise. How do I know the Arabic verb to rise? Because I know the Arabic Easter greeting. “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” in Arabic, enjoyed by Arab Christians, is “Al Masih qam! Haqqan qam!” So I brought the two words together. Allah. Qam. I also, as you can imagine, added a lot of British Sign Language.  

Fortunately, he seemed satisfied with this. I wondered what would happen next. I thought perhaps he would try to sell me the book. He seemed to have little need for it, after all. Or he might use the book as a hook to hang a defence of Islam on. Such as this has happened to me in North London. What he actually did... was thank me warmly and walk off. That was the end of our encounter. Two strangers meet, discuss how God arises, and walk off.  

Two strangers meet, discuss how God arises, and walk off. This of course should not have happened in London in the 21st century. Back in the 1960s many, really most commentators were convinced that the world, or at least Europe was becoming simply more secular, atheist, and the engines for the secularisation process were the great cities, where science and technology dominate. It hasn’t worked out like that. London is – I have to speak as I find – London is a religious city, where happenings such as the one I’ve mentioned can happen, any day.   

Two strangers meet, discuss how God arises, and walk off. It is a strange tale, I don’t deny that. But, then, life is strange. It has never been more obvious to all of us that life is strange. And... this. We don’t say this as often as we should: the Bible is strange; the story of Jesus is strange; the story of the emergence of the Church after Easter is strange.  

Let us think about the strangeness of today’s readings. In our first reading, we revisit the Ascension. Jesus is raised from the dead. He is asked whether we are on the cusp of fulfilment of all things. He says he can or will say nothing about that. Rather, you are to receive the Holy Spirit, and be sent out, not to conquer the world, but to bear witness. No fulfilment, but the Holy Spirit, and a never-ending task. And then? Then Jesus disappears. He is taken up. He is taken from us. And we wait. Before the Holy Spirit, before our new task, our sending-out, there is... a wait.  

Isn’t that strange? I mean: why? Why is there a wait? Why must we wait? We are not told. There is no hint of a rationale in the story. I am not sure the Church has ever really supplied a rationale. It is just that the disciples had to wait. It is just that we have to wait.  

Life is strange. The life of faith is strange. Sometimes, God requires us to wait. Sometimes, there is nothing to do but wait.  

Look, believe me, I am boring myself in saying this. I am scarcely saying anything that you do not know. You know it. You feel it in your bones. We all do. This is us. In the strangeness, in the waiting. At the heart of our faith, just at the moment, is the strange waiting, the waiting strangeness.  

Of course, we need not be bored by the meeting of themes, then and now. We can be moved. Because what this means is that we have the Bible’s own assurance that this can be done, that this can be borne, that we can wait, wait in Gd, wait for the gift of Gd which is to come, which comes, because Gd is faithful.  

Let us not be in any doubt that the disciples were as fearful as we are. They have, between them, spent 40 days with the Risen Christ, and now he is taken from them. And they, of course, do not – cannot - know for sure how the story is to continue. Imagine their sense of grief. Let’s name it! As we are grieving, missing our meetings, missing our churches, missing our fellowship, our toast, our cake, our lunch club, our chats with others using the Froud Centre – and all the rest of it... as we are grieving, so they were grieving.  

Certainly, as the Church reflected on the Ascension, it saw it as a cause for celebration, and rightly so. Jesus Christ takes his place at the right hand of Gd. All is glory. The glory that Jesus in our Gospel speaks of. But, at the human level, all is loss. All is the blankness, the bleakness of waiting. And that can be borne.  

Brothers and sisters, is that enough? Have I said enough? Should I be saying more of hope, joy, positivity, and the great scheme of things? Perhaps I should. Certainly, if we look for hope, joy, positivity, and the great scheme of things in our texts, we will find them. The texts are rich enough, we know that.  

But I want more to bring us back to where we are, in our reading and in our lives. The strangeness of waiting. The waiting strangeness. The knowledge – the confidence – that it can be borne. We can see this through.  

We can pray, for ourselves.  

We can pray for one another.  

We can pray for our parish and borough and city.  

can pray for the people we have determined to pray for in these days.  

And I add just this: in these and other quiet, unremarkable ways, 

let God arise! 

Amen.  

Love (and faith and hope) in a time of Corona.

These things let me remember,  

and let me pour out my breathing-self within me: 

oh, how I went along with the throng,  

how I’d process to the House of Gd, 

with the sound of ringing shouts and thanks,  

a crowd keeping the festival.  

Why are you cast down, my own breathing-self,  

and in turmoil within me? 

Wait for Gd, for yet will I thank him,  

whose very gaze brings rescue.1 

Bultmann once said that all theology is “theanthropology”: we can at best attend only to the relationship between the human and the Divine. Rabbi Tony Bayfield has recently refined this point, in insisting that all authentic theology must start with autobiography.2 A large part of the discernment process of “testing a vocation” to ordained ministry in the Church of England is repeated articulation of one’s own story. I am in a time of flux, which involves me in telling that story at interviews. All in all, locating myself in the wider narrative of our days (warts and all, on all parties) should come easily enough to me. Yet here I am struggling.  

Am I primarily a weak, fleshly human being, indeed one who himself almost certainly has a very mild form of the virus, and so must self-isolate? Am I a witness-bearer and truth-teller in my neighbourhood? (On some counts, half my parish is the epicentre of the epicentre – Newham – of the epicentre – London – of my country.) Am I one waiting to be taken on as an emergency bank health care support worker, with very focused hopes and fears? Am I a Church of England minister, adjusting to a strict ban on all corporate worship, and learning to play my role in building up a “virtual church”, lamenting the loss and celebrating the surprising gains at once? Am I co-minister and friend of my priest-in-charge, who bears responsibility as chaplain to the staff of the principal emergency mortuary, in our parish? Am I a particular pastor, with very particular responsibilities: for D., M., A., V., etc; for those whose burden differently pains me daily: funeral directors, prison staff? Am I an unsettled citizen – or just maybe a struggling Christian prophet – reacting to what I can only see as evasions and the rewriting of history by powerful politicians? The UK government, after all, seems to be passing all responsibility – blame – to the people. Their literal command is: “Be alert; control the virus...”. We are encouraged to return to work, but mocked for entering crowded tube-trains. Am I one who prays to Gd (or intends to, who is more myself when I pray), who can most authentically comment on changes to my prayer life? Do I “find” Gd “here”? 

Of course, the answer to these questions is consistently: Yes. So not so much a network of concerns, as a child’s scribble-drawing, perhaps. Little wonder that I know not what to say. But then I note that I do speak. One of the first things I did, after the government banned public worship with the Church’s full support and blessing (our Archbishops’ strong guidance went further than the government’s, I think with prudence), was draw people to the Psalms (Tehillim). I insisted (as many do) that all human life is here – joy, praise, naivety, contemplation, bewilderment, rage, hate, despair – and so here is the assurance that there will be ways to pray through this. I drew attention to Psalm 42/43 (treating them as one unit), because it is, inter alia, a psalm of lament, from one who clearly misses embodied and large-scale worship; who mourns that they no longer go “along with the throng”; who yet insists that waiting upon Gd (maybe with tears or gritted teeth) is good, valid, timely, and possible. I wrote my own translation, seeking nothing polished or poetic, but just to see what a return to the Hebrew might throw up. 

There is one other thing about this psalm-unit. Since a discussion with my spiritual director just before I was made priest (2006), it has been my custom, more often than not, to recite these psalms before I preside at the eucharist. So, more than a decade before this crisis, I was taking all the distress and lament and lostness of humankind in it as the raw material that is turned into thanksgiving (eucharisto!), through the encounter with Gd in it. This was in the first place because of the line (43.4a): ve-avo'ah el-misbach elohim el el-simchat-gili - “Oh let me go to the altar of Gd, to Gd, the joy of my rejoicing”. But, as soon as I started reciting it, I realised it was as much because of the opening (42.2): ke-ayyal ta’araog al-afike-mayyim, ken nafshi ta’arog elekah, elohim. “Just as a deer will pant for water channels, so it is my breathing-self which pants for you, O Gd”.  

Frightened and needy and desperate thirsting for Gd and Gd’s help may well be norm for human beings. This is bearable. This is met with.  

1, Psalm 42.5f. This is my own translation. For the whole psalm-unit, see http://frpatrickponders.blogspot.com/2020/03/psalm-42-and-43-bloggers-translation.html. Here also is a defence of my novel translation of nefesh as “breathing-self”, which I find unpoetic and even ugly, but still better than “soul”, and of the deliberate defective spelling of “God” as “Gd,” which strategy is indebted to R. Kendall Soulen in The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity: Volume One, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 2011