Sermon. In Praise of the Coventry Carol: Rejoice in Lamenting!

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 29.12.19.

·       Matthew 2.13-23

In today’s gospel Matthew gives his account of the Holy Family’s escape into Egypt and return to the Holy Land, but with a move to the North, to Galilee and to Nazareth. He tells us quite explicitly that this story fulfils various prophecies. But, over and above that, the story into and out of Egypt resonates with the central stories (central story) of the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). So, in that way too, Matthew lets us know that Jesus is something like the fulfilment of those earlier stories.

It would be worthwhile setting this out in some detail. But the danger with this particular gospel passage is that we concentrate on Jesus and his family so much that we treat the intervening story as a detail, a little adornment, an aside. And that won’t do. For the intervening story is the slaughter of the innocents. Or maybe that is too familiar a way of putting it. The intervening story is of a powerful man, and the forces of law and order, invading people’s homes, and murdering harmless infants in cold blood.

Surely the most painful story in the New Testament. Worse than the crucifixion? I think so. We are used to thinking of Jesus as having had a brief but fruitful adult life, and we are used to making sense of – or at least trying to make sense of - his death. Here, it’s right in front of our eyes that neither of these things applies. These are infants, cut off, killed, really before their life had started, and for no good reason, for no reason at all, just because of one inadequate man’s cruelty, resentment and fear.

What do we do with this story?

On the one hand, we can take some comfort from the fact that it is likely that this never happened. I mean it probably never happened quite as we understand Matthew as he writes it down (as mass murder). He may have developed and expanded a story, for his own theological purposes. (That idea need not threaten us.) Herod was a Jewish “King” of sorts. But he had his role as a puppet of the Romans. The Romans were brutal. But they were so brutal they would not have been embarrassed about making a record of such an act, which they’d have called an “expedient execution”, no doubt. But we have no such record. We have no other references, anywhere.

On the other hand, we can take no comfort from the notion that the story is quite impossible. It is only too possible. Powerful rulers do misuse their power, do find it convenient to do away with people, to protect their own privileges. They have done so throughout history, and we had better not kid ourselves. Parents have had to mourn the deaths of their children and still do, including their willed deaths at others’ hands – including after killing. So the story fits only too well within the human story.

I am not going to tell you the “secret meaning” of this horrific story. As if I could! I’d like to say something else. If we take this story to heart, what we most need is surely not an answer, still less a justification. What we most need is some way to lament, to feel the pain, and sing it out. To articulate pain and grief.

And the good news is: we can do this. In fact, we English speakers are blessed with an excellent way of doing this. We already have a faultless lament for the Holy Innocents.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”

This is from the Coventry Carol, which comes from the medieval Coventry Mystery Plays. The words are 15^th century, the tune we have for the words is 16^th century. We will hear this later, as our anthem.

It happens to be my favourite carol, although that might give the impression I am more glum than I actually am. I simply think it is musically perfect and the words match. (Yes, brothers and sister, you heard that right: I don’t want to amend a single word! [cf. Advent 3 and Carols]).

For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”

Let me add this. I am proud that this is one of our oldest carols. We English-speaking people have this as our heritage. This will to take seriously the story of the murder of the innocents, and offer a fitting lament.

We might even say that lament – songs of grief and the staying with grief – are a central thread of English creative writing. Not a golden thread, but a purple, a dark purple thread.

Shakespeare did it well (of course). We actually heard some of that in St Mary’s Singers’ Carol Concert, a wintery lament:

            Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

                        Thou art not so unkind

            As man’s ingratitude;

                        Thy tooth is not so keen,

Because thou art not seen,

                        Although thy breath be rude.

Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:

Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:

            Then, heigh-ho, the holly!

[Amiens, in As You Like It.]

But the journey of English lament does not stop, and maybe does not peak there. We can plot lament in Shelley, to Auden, to Larkin, to… well, tell me who your favourite English-speaking poet is, and we can look for a lament.

What do you make of all of this? I say: Rejoice! Rejoice in the lamenting! Rejoice that we are so good at lamenting. In this life, we need to lament, not to swallow down but to sing out our pain. And we can.

Moreover, our Bible too in effect says this with great force. If we think of the hymn book of the Bible, the book of Psalms, we find laments. Plenty of laments. How many? In truth, it’s hard to say. In truth, psalms often do “hand-brake turns” when it comes to their themes and moods and tones. From praise to lament to rage to calm to praise, and more, without any intervening stages. So it is notoriously hard to classify individual psalms. But, you know, if wouldn’t be out of the range to say that one third of the psalms are lament, or contain lament.

And our hymn books don’t.

Yes – you knew I’d get some criticism of something musical in somewhere. I dare to think it is valid. I ask: where are our laments, these days? Dare we share with Gd our pain and distress and loss and grief? If we dare not, what does that say about us? If we dare not, what does that say of Gd, of what we think of Gd, of how we seek to treat Gd?

Does this sound like a miserable message for the first Sunday of Christmas? Maybe. I’ll take that. But! But it’s our gospel account today which compels us to at least touch upon such things. So let one of the changes we make in the time ahead be that we look at how we might better offer chances for good lamenting. Nothing is more natural and at times necessary.

We need to be able to lament before Gd. We need Gd to sanctify our pain. For Gd will.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”

Amen.

Sermon. Advent 3. Redeeming "Lo, He Comes"

Sermon. 15 December 2019. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Advent 3 (Gaudete), Year A

·       Matthew 11.2-11

Here’s a simple summary of where we are today:

·       We have lit a candle, which people often call “the pink candle for Our Lady”.

·       That said, that is wrong.

·       It is the rose candle for our joy, because a traditional service would begin with a call to rejoice (Gaudete!).

·       That said, we don’t do that.

·       That said, the theme linked to the candle is not Mary, nor joy, but John the Baptist.

·       That said, we were already introduced to John the Baptist last week.

·       That said, we might be invited to introduce Our Lady today, if we had chosen the canticle, the great Magnificat.

·       That said, she is not the theme and the candle is not hers!

Confused? Brothers and sisters, every Western Christian is surely confused by this great pile-up of themes. Worry not; take from it what speaks to you.

But, any way, there is something confusing about the hero of today’s candle, John the Baptist. He is difficult, and confusing. Consider what might sound like an easy question: Was John the Baptist a Christian? He was and is a saint, but was he ever a Christian? And this doesn’t mean: Was he a churchman who was baptised in the name of the Trinity and recited the creed? We know none of that applies; such things developed centuries after his death. But really the question is: Did he ever become a follower of Jesus? In today’s gospel it is clear that he is considering becoming a disciple. But we are not told whether he actually did. Did he welcome the answer to his question: “Are you the one who is to come?”, or did he find it evasive? We are not told.

So Saint John is often – and not wrongly – presented as one of the principal bridging characters. He bridges the Old and New Testaments. He bridges (for Christians) the Judaism of the Old Testament and the Second Temple and the emergent Christianity of the Jesus Community. This means, while it might be controversial, it’s not wrong to think of John the Baptist as a Jewish but not a Christian saint.  

The Jewish saint, John the Baptist… Yes! Yes, you are right in supposing I do want us to reflect on Christian approaches to Jews and Judaism. (No apologies for that.) But I am going to do so via what you may well think of diversion.

By a diversion, I mean I want us to think about… the hymn we will sing at the end of this service. That hymn is Lo, He Comes. It is a great hymn, in many ways one of my favourites. But I do have problems with it. They relate wholly to the second verse. Let me remind you:

            Every eye shall now behold him

            robed in dreadful majesty;

            those who set at naught and sold him,

            pierced and nailed him to the Tree,

            deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing,

            shall the true Messiah see.

I can see that you will enjoy singing it. Many do. How often do we get to sing about wailing, in church, to a powerful, Wesleyan tune? Only really here. But! But I feel a need to say that the problem with this verse is this: the most natural subject in mind, for “those who set at naught and sold him/pierced and nailed him to the Tree” are… Jews, and even “the Jews”. And that is wrong, and that is bad, and even wicked. Wicked, because the underlying theme here is: at the second coming, most of humanity will rejoice, but the Jews will be found out and blamed for killing their Messiah; all they will get to do is wail for their sins.

“[T]hose who set at naught and sold him/pierced and nailed him to the Tree”. Yes, I know that a historian will say: that’s not the Jews; that must mean the Romans. Historically, the Roman overlords, in all their well-reported brutality, were responsible for the killing of Jesus. The trouble with that is that the Romans had no concept at all of a Messiah. To say to ancient Romans: “Here at last is your true Messiah! Wail!” would mean literally nothing to them.

“[T]hose who set at naught and sold him/pierced and nailed him to the Tree”. Yes, I know that a good preacher or theologian will say: that’s not the Jews; that is us, all of us. When we sin, we set in train the spiritual dis-ease which ultimately leads to the killing of Jesus. It’s good theology, but again, it doesn’t work here. It’s really the same point (though this is a harder claim to make). I am going to say that “Messiah” isn’t a Christian word. (Many, many apologies to Handel; it is certainly a Handelian word!) Messiah is an English version of the Hebrew word, Mashiach. But Christians (as their name suggests) overwhelmingly use “Christ”, the English version of the Greek word, Christos.

They both mean the same thing. They mean “anointed”, “the Anointed One”. But still the Christian preference for “Christ” over “Messiah is clear. It is clear in the New Testament, where the word Messias occurs how many times? Only twice [Jn 1.42, 4.25]. (The “Messiah” in today’s gospel is the translator’s interpretation of the Greek “Christos”.) It is clear in all our hymn books. It is clear in this hymn book [Common Praise]. You look for mentions of “Messiah”; you will find few. So, again, we are given a real nudge to think not of ourselves, but of the Jews, others, over there.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that when you sing, you consciously think: “the Jews killed Christ and this is about how they’ll get their comeuppance”. This is not a conscious thing. But we do have to have some historical awareness.

We do have to face clearly that from very early days, Christians have been saying “the Jews killed Christ”. And (even worse) not just a particular group of Jews, in Jerusalem around 33 AD. No. All Jews, everywhere, throughout time and space.[1] The Jewish people as a people have this guilt.

It was around – it was preached in sermon and sung in liturgy – already towards the end of the second century. Great saints like John Chrysostom (349-407) in the East and Augustine (354-430) in the West proclaimed it proudly. Martin Luther (1483-1546) also became increasingly insistent that it is so. It’s hard for us to hear this. But the historians are clear. They even speak of a “teaching of contempt”.[2] It’s not wrong to say that it has been as-natural-as-breathing for even great Christians to teach contempt for Jewish people.

It follows that we do need to go out of our way – we really need to go out of our way – to make sure we are not teaching or even hinting at that contempt now. And - in that context - to sing: “those who set at naught, and nailed him to the Tree, deeply wailing, shall the true Messiah see” must surely leave something of a bitter taste. You cannot not know that you are being given that nudge – whether directly or subliminally – to think that “the Jews killed Christ”.  

Fortunately, we do not have to abandon this otherwise lovely hymn. Nor does it need rewriting in any complicated fashion. What we can do is simply change one word, one syllable.

We can sing instead: “We who set at naught and sold him…”. That brings us back to the good, healthy theology I mentioned before. It is our sins which ultimately lead to the death of Christ. We should wail – deeply wail – that sorry state of affairs, always safe in the knowledge that we will be forgiven and restored. What is not to like?

So, brothers and sisters, I am going to encourage and, yes, urge you to do that, and not to please me (nor even to shut me up), but because it is a change that tells the gospel, that “speaks Christian” better than what is actually written in the hymn-book: “We [not “those over there” but “we over here”] who set at naught and sold him…”.

You may object on any number of grounds.

·       You may say you don’t understand what I’ve said. Please tell us this. Your preachers need to know if and how and when they are being understood, and this is a natural time for a review of our preaching.

·       You may say I have made claims but not brought much evidence. That is true. It has been (I know) a long sermon without “putting the quotes” in. But I can provide the quotations and statistics, if we seek some more teaching.

·       You may say that I’ve just preached on my hobby, my hobby-horse, Judaism. To that I want to say gently but clearly: No. To be a Christian is to engage in Jewish-Christian relations, even if we never meet a Jew. Our Scriptures, are all (or almost all) written by Jews, and are drenched in Jewish themes, like Israel, election, Hebrew heroes of faith, the hope of the prophets, and more.

·       You may say (most likely option, I’d say) that I’m a pedant! You don’t think about what you sing anything like as carefully as I’ve presupposed, and I should get over myself. To that I also say gently but clearly: No. It is precisely what we find ourselves saying or singing, without any need to reflect on it, that tells us what we truly believe. What we need to reflect on, we are still in some ways weighing up. What just launch forth into with gusto, that is what we have uncomplicatedly signed up to. That is worthy of our attention, from time to time.

Here I do finish. Please notice that I am not at all saying: We need to water down what we believe and sing, for fear of giving offence to Jews or others. I am a million miles from saying that. I am saying that here that, given how Christian history has unfolded, we have a chance and a need to improve what we sing, so that we can become better, more truthful, more authentic, and, yes, more orthodox Christians.

“We who set at naught and sold him,

            pierced and nailed him to the Tree,

            deeply wailing,

            shall the true Messiah see”

            and He will love us, forgive us, heal us,

            and give us what we need

to love and heal ourselves, heal others,

and bring and be reconciliation throughout the world.

Amen. 

---

[1] Perhaps starting with Melito of Sardis, d 180.

[2] Coined by Jules Isaac (1877-1963)

Advent Sunday Sermon

Sermon. 2 December 2018. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Advent Sunday

My late aunt was a churchgoer. She was a nun for most of her life. All the times I was in church with her (quite a few times), I never once saw her use a hymn-book. The organ would strike, she would stand (when she could) and sing out the hymn, word perfect, all from memory. I pointed out to her once how remarkable this was. She just turned to me and said: “I’ve been singing these songs since I was four”. (She lived into her eighties.) And that was the end of the matter.

So, brothers and sisters, we know each other. We know where this is going.

Lo, he come with clouds descending,

[inviting others to lead] once for favoured sinners slain…

Every eye shall now behold him

robed in dreadful majesty…

Those dear token of his passion

still his dazzling body bears…

Well, I don’t know if my aunt can rest easy in her grave, confident she still has the prize, or whether she’ll be spinning, because of the loss of shared knowledge of our hymnic heritage.

One more try:

Deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing

shall the true Messiah see.

This hasn’t just been an act of mutual humiliation. I do want us to spend a moment thinking of this great Advent hymn, Lo, he comes. It does, I think, bear attention.

One thing about it: notice what is absent. It is an Advent hymn or carol, and yet there is no mention whatsoever about Christmas. No manger, no shepherds, no wise men… and no birth. The focus of the whole hymn is the second coming of Christ. Christ coming in glory. Christ at the end of time. God appears on earth to reign.. high on thine eternal throne, claim the kingdom for thine own… It doesn’t hide it, does it? This is about the resolution of history, the end of suffering; the full, healing, intimate presence of Gd. This is of course one Advent theme. We may be less aware of it than we were, but the Second Coming is a focus of attention throughout Advent. But it doesn’t normally push the first coming – the babe in the manger – quite out of the picture.

What is even more unusual, there is a second Christian festival hinted at in the hymn. Not Christmas, but… Good Friday. Those dear tokens of his passion… gaze we on those glorious scars. The carol picks up the idea of John’s gospel, where Thomas asks about and sees the risen Christ’s wounds, and of Revelation, where the one who reigns is the Lamb who was slain. The risen Christ does not have his earthly history airbrushed – photoshopped - out. We wounded him. He, in love, takes it. He bears the scars. At the glorious end, the scars are made glorious – changed, transfigured – but they do not disappear. Because this life counts, what we do and receive in this life has eternal significance.

It is a wonderful hymn, a wonder of the rich Wesleyan wealth of hymns. But there is one more thing. Sisters and brothers, we have to look again at the second verse.

Every eye shall now behold him/ robed in dreadful majesty/

those who set at nought and sold him/ pierced and nailed him to the Tree/

deeply wailing/ shall the true Messiah see.

Who are we thinking of? Who, amid all the feasting and rejoicing and the dazzling glorious glory – who gets to wail, to cry? To ask that question is of course to ask the deeper one: Who pierced and nailed him to the Tree? Who killed Christ? Is this making you feel slightly unsettled? I hope so.

There is of course a straightforward answer to the question “who killed Christ?” which is historical. The Romans. The Romans in the form of their army (their known-to-be-brutal army), under the instruction of Pontius Pilate (a brutal leader even by brutal Roman standards) killed Christ. But! But that doesn’t work here. In this verse, that doesn’t work. Why not? Because it makes no sense to imagine the Romans weeping and wailing on seeing the “true Messiah”. Romans had no concept of a Messiah – true or false. They could no more be thrown by seeing the “true Messiah” than we can be thrown by hearing we’ve made a mistake about “the line of tulkus”. The tulkus are those who, according to Tibetan Buddhism, reincarnate enlightenment and compassion, in such as the current Dalai Lama. You get the point. If it turned out that the person we know as the Dalai Lama were not a tulku, you might raise an eyebrow. You would not wail.

So here something else is going on. Here we are descending down to another Christian tradition. Here – I don’t like to say it, but I have to – we are saying, by implication, that “the Jews killed Christ”. Once we allow ourselves to see this (I don’t say agree with it), the verse makes sense. Talk of Messiah makes sense. It is a Jewish idea. Also, talk of selling and piercing and nailing to the Tree makes sense – these are all references back to the Hebrew Bible.

We have to be clear (clearer than we may like to be) that there is an ancient and widespread belief in Christian circles that “the Jews killed Christ” – and that is (bizarrely) all Jews everywhere. It has always been bad theology. Historically, a bunch of Romans, with a small bunch of Jewish leaders maybe, killed Christ. Theologically, we all have a share in the killing of Christ, every time we fall into serious sin. Whether we are involved in “Jewish-Christian relations” or not, we need to actively rid ourselves of any claim or implication that “the Jews killed Christ”. It is not true to the Christian way.

Fortunately, we can make an easy change, which allows us to enjoy Wesley’s hymn and sing it out with all the confidence of a musical auntie. Rather than sing “those who set at nought and sold him” we can sing “we who set at nought and sold him”, which is truer to the Christian way of thinking about things. When we, who say we know Christ, still act in ways which betray Christ, we bear the greater responsibility. When we fail, we can (thank Gd) be forgiven. For the whole message is about forgiveness. But we have to own the failing first. We who set at nought and sold him.

Now, if you tell me I am making a fuss about nothing, you aren’t the first to say that. But I want to say two things: it is the things we sing without ever needing to think about them that tell us what we truly believe. If we aren’t actively thinking “what is this about?”, then we are thinking “this is what is plainly true; this is home turf”. And secondly the idea that “the Jews – all Jews everywhere – killed Christ” is not at the front of our minds – I get that – but it bubbles up, still, even now. So a friend of a friend of mine – a priest who is ethnically Jewish himself – was stopped at Tel Aviv airport and asked about the church he was going to. He said: “Yes, it’s about Jesus Christ. You killed him. But, don’t worry. He rose again on the third day.”  Horrible, and stupid, and wrong words. Real-life words.

My late aunt was called Doreen. But as a nun, she took the name Bridget. She loved all things Irish, and was determined to take the name of the leading female Irish saint. (Her brother was a Patrick.) No pressure, but I invite you to sing out our final hymn – Lo, he comes  (but you’d worked that out that was our final hymn) with extra gusto, singing only “we who set at nought and sold him”, because otherwise it implies something which is damagingly untrue. Amen.