Sermon. Ash Wednesday. Rejoice!

Sermon. 10 February 2016. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Ash Wednesday

I used up my Ash Wednesday joke on you last year. But as it is a true story, I am going to risk repeating it. Do you remember? How the priest, when it came to the ashing, got somewhat confused and said to the first candidate: 'Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return; turn away from Christ and be faithful to sin'. But! Not only did he say those unfortunate words to the first person, he said the same to everybody there. So by the end, everybody in church – apart from the nonplussed priest – was doubled-up and pretty close to hysterics.

I said last year what I say now: that priest's embarrassment aside, it is a good thing to enter Lent feeling mirth. Lent is a 'solemn' season in the rather technical sense. But that doesn't mean – at all – that we are called to feel glum, or lower our self-esteem. On the contrary, we are called to know strength and hope, to be self-reflective, yes, but also, even now, oriented towards joy. This for (at least) three reasons.

First, the words 'Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return' do not mean: 'You're so rotten you deserve to die'. No. Rather, they mean: 'Remember that you are mortal, that your life is limited, is bounded'. You are unique and unrepeatable, and here only for a span of time. So you are precious. No one in the universe is more precious than you. (Others are as precious as you, including those people you can't stand. But that takes nothing away from the fact that no one is more precious than you.) No one else can live your life. So make the most of it. And we make the most of our lives not by desperately chasing after pleasure. (Think about those people who have tried it; it just doesn't work.) Rather we make the most of our lives by finding our calling (inasmuch as we can) and committing to it (as best we can). So – what are we waiting for?

Second, the words (let's see if I can get it right...) 'Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ' remind us that Christ is already here, waiting for us. We do not have to become good to earn his attention, good will or rewards. Rather, all we have to do is turn. And turn we can, however clumsily. So we already have everything we need to become holy, if we but trust in this. You see how this is not about lowering self-esteem. True self-esteem (not pride) can only be enhanced once we realise Gd is offering us holiness. Just turn.

Third, these things are true because Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death

by death and offering forgiveness and feasting, as we see from the New Testament resurrection accounts. So every day – including even Ash Wednesday and Good Friday – is also Easter. There is no moment that is not also Easter. The saint who saw this most clearly – and I've mentioned him a number of times, so you may well remember – was the Russian St Seraphim of Sarov, who, against the church fasting rules, would stand on the steps of the church on Good Friday, munching his sausages and greeting everyone with 'Christ is risen!'

Let me add another positive note that I haven't mentioned before. People sometimes think that the Roman Catholic Church is a great monolith, with everything determined by the Vatican and no variations. That's not true. For example, the French Catholic church uses different words at the Imposition of the Ashes: 'Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return; rejoice and believe in the Gospel'. I am saying there is something profound here. Lent is not about exuberance and feasting, true, but it is about a different, quieter way of rejoicing.

And just one more variation on this theme. The psalms. Yes, I am unashamedly reminding us of the Lent course this year, on the Psalms, and encouraging us to attend, even intermittently, if we can. The word 'Psalms' comes from the Greek 'psalmoi' which just means 'songs/music'. But the Hebrew is different. It's Tehillim, which means praises.

Now, people who don't read the psalms often think they are, you know, simply nice. You know: 'The flowers are lovely; Gd is all-powerful; all is well. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.' But if we do read the psalms, we know it's not like that. Rather, all human life is there. Including anger, rage, violence, depression, bewilderment, grief, despondency and despair. These things are not hidden from Gd. As if we could hide these things from Gd. And if we cannot hide them from Gd, why hide them from each other?

And yet! And yet the Hebrew insists that it is all praise. How? There are two ideas. One is that we work our way through these negative emotions to get to praise at the end. Certainly the Book of Psalms ends with a string of psalms of praises, full of the 'A' word we are not allowed to use in Lent. The other idea is that even in the anger, rage, violence, depression, bewilderment, grief, despondency and despair, we are still praising Gd, precisely because we are directly it all towards Gd, confident that he will hold it all, transfigure it all. We don't have to choose between these different ideas; it can be both.

Let us then make these words our own:

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return;

rejoice

and believe in the gospel.

Amen.

 

Christian sermon after Yom Kippur

Sermon, St Anne’s Brondesbury. 30 September 2012. Trinity 17.

Gospel: Mark 9.38-50

Bluntly you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. So I am going to risk a confession. There was a time when I thought – and enjoyed thinking -  that the Bible was perfectly clear. I read Jesus saying: ‘Whoever is not with me is against me and whoever does not gather with me scatters’ [Matt 12.30 // Luke 11.23]. And I thought: That’s clear then. But later I read, well, today’s gospel passage, where Jesus says: ‘Whoever is not against us is for us’ [Mark 9.40 // Luke 9.50]. And I had a problem. It’s not a problem of logic. (Logically, one might conclude that everyone is simply for or against Jesus.) It’s a problem of theology. How can I say the Bible is perfectly clear when quoting it in one place if I know it says something that at least feels like the opposite elsewhere? 

‘Whoever is not against us is for us’. Now, I don’t know you and you don’t know me. But I might have the smallest inkling about you. This is a community in an ecumenical partnership and involved in interfaith work in (let us remember) one of the most religiously diverse and religiously vibrant cities in the world. So I intuit that you might be a community which would quite like the Bible to be perfectly clear that ‘whoever is not against us is for us’. It seems a good, generous and hopeful statement. Whether you are that kind of community or not, I am happy to make a second confession: that’s my preferred starting-place. I like it that Jesus says whoever is not against him is for him. I struggle with Jesus’ claim that whoever is not for him is against him. Where do we/I go from here? 

I think there is one thing we can do, however we interpret these different biblical texts. We can make sure we are slow to say someone is ‘against Jesus’, without overwhelming evidence. We can make sure we are not being prejudiced, when we say that someone is ‘against Jesus’. And we can make sure we are not being prejudiced when we say a whole faith or faith community is ‘against Jesus’. You might say this is obvious. I might reply: the Church has historically not been good about living out this obvious truth.

For countless numbers of Christians it has in fact been obvious that ‘those others over there’ are ‘against Jesus’. And we know this, because we know what those others believe, even without asking them. The epitome of this attitude has been the Christian judgement on Judaism-after-Easter, and of rabbinic Jews. They are abandoned, to be punished. They killed Christ. Their religion is an empty shell. It is cold legalism cowering before a distant and/or bad-tempered God. It is law not grace. These things have been something like the ‘commonsense’ of Christianity from, well, earliest days. And we gain nothing by denying it.

I want us to look at the claim that Judaism (as we know it, the Judaism of the rabbis) is cold legalism seeking justification from a distant and/or punitive God. I want to do so precisely now, because in the week I had the huge privilege – and I do mean privilege - of attending services at a local synagogue for Yom Kippur. To get the emphasis right (and bear with me on this), I am going to look at only a few prayers from the Eve of Yom Kippur service, called Kol Nidre, and I am going to go backwards, starting with the end and ending at the beginning.

Kol Nidre ends, like many ordinary synagogue services, with a popular hymn, Adon Olam or Lord of the world. Here is a close translation of just one verse:

He it is who is my God, my life, my redeemer, my rock, my cord, when time is hard.

He it is who is my banner and refuge, the portion of my cup,

when I call out.

In other words, he it is who is God close to me, who is… lots of things, but never distant and punitive my nature. He is it to whom I turn for grace.

You think that prayer must be the exception not the rule? Well in the main body of the service (and throughout the High Holy Days) comes another moving sung prayer: Avinu Malkenu, ‘Our Father, our King’ (and, yes, note the ease with which Jews call upon ‘our Father’. It ends with this prayer:

Our Father our King, have mercy on us and answer us, for we have no good deeds of our own. Show us righteousness and mercy and save us.

I say again: ‘Our Father, our King, have mercy on us and answer us, for we have no good deeds of our own.’ And I say again: In Judaism, on its most solemn day, what you do is pray to God for grace.

And there is more. From the beginning of the service comes a statement repeated three times. The translation I have reads, slightly unnaturally like most translated liturgy:

And all the congregation of the children of Israel shall be forgiven, and the stranger that sojourneth among them: for in respect of all the people it was done unwittingly.

Someone has proposed a loose paraphrase, which brings out more the sense of the Hebrew (it’s a citation from Numbers 156.26). It goes like this: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

Yes, the Jewish congregation thinks of itself and all other Jewish congregations (hence it is ‘them’ rather than ‘us’) and says, in effect, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?’ You think the person suggesting this is a naïve Christian just pretending that Judaism is the same as us? You’d be wrong. The person who made this claim is… Lord Sacks, the Chief Rabbi.

And one more thing. Before this statement or prayer comes the declaration beginning Kol Nidre, which as I’ve already said gives the name to the whole service. It means ‘All Vows’. It is a declaration that vows made to God which cannot be kept are to be annulled. I quote:

They shall be absolved, released, annulled, made void and of none effect: they shall not be binding nor shall they have any power. Our vows shall not be vows: our bonds shall not be bonds: and our oaths shall not be oaths.

Some things to note. First, the musical setting of this statement (it is not a prayer, quite) is just beautiful, and stirs the heart in and of itself, as indeed does so much of the liturgy I have spoken of. If you have a musical bone in your body, do try to experience some of the Jewish High Holy Days at some point.

Second, note that the vows in question are those made to God. You are not claiming you can annul vows made to your neighbour. Those you have to keep or negotiate about.

Third, this is not saying that vows are trivial, and you can make them and break them at will. Rather it is saying that as persons and as congregations we know that even at our strongest we are weak. It is our nature to promise to God more than we can deliver. At the very least, we forget. Life intervenes.

And fourth, well, I wonder if you noticed… noticed that the verbs were all future tense? Our release from vows unfulfilled extends ‘from this Yom Kippur to the coming Yom Kippur’. I find that just extraordinary.

Here you are, on the most solemn day in the Jewish year, beginning 25 hours of serious fasting. It is a day spent largely in synagogue, praying and singing of repentance and turning anew to God in sorrow. You throw yourself on God’s mercy and ask for strength to live a better life. In all this, there’s a belief in grace all right. But! But the grace abounds yet further. You begin this process of repentance by admitting to God that your repentance may or will in important ways fail. Yes, you are taking yourself and your true standing before God most seriously. No pretence, no excuse  – ‘we have no good deeds of our own’ – and you are saying that you know even that is not enough. You will promise more than you deliver. You need God to have mercy not only on your sins, but also on your promises. It is in that spirit that: ‘Our vows shall not be vows: our bonds shall not be bonds: and our oaths shall not be oaths.’

Brothers and sisters, many of us have a sense that we have much to learn from Judaism and Jews. It is a way of life which values life, what makes for life and liveliness. I happened to be in Golders Green last night and saw crowds of people buying greenery for the joyful feast of Sukkot, the main Harvest Festival. Perhaps many Jews will sing their babies to sleep tonight singing as a lullaby, ‘It is good to be a Jew’. That’s a literally magnificent affirmation of life for the 21^st century, given all that happened in the 20^th century.

But for those who do sense that, let us go a step further, and own that we Christians – who are always talking about grace – also have much to learn from Jews and Judaism about – precisely - grace.

I don’t know if the journey I have taken us on, from the end to the beginning of the Eve of Yom Kippur, can convey the majesty and pity, the sorrow and hope of the liturgy of Yom Kippur. After all, without the music and the sounding of the shofar, with its visceral call, you get less than a shadow of it. But I do dare to hope that here are enough hints that Judaism is a religion of grace.

So, let me say it: It is sinful that Christians have been so very quick to judge it wholly cold, legalistic and indeed damned. We cannot cut ourselves off from our ancestors on this, as if we were altogether a different breed. Can a people so committed to God of grace - grace revealed in books we ourselves call ‘Scripture’ - be fundamentally ‘against Jesus’? Make no mistake about it: our answer to that question will help to shape the kind of Church we make, proclaim and become, even if we ourselves have no direct interaction with Jewish people. This is about who we are as Church.

‘Whoever is not against us is for us’, says Jesus. Is the Bible perfectly clear on the matter? Maybe; maybe not. But, brothers and sisters, let us go on attuning ourselves to the echoes, the beautiful echoes, at once alien and familiar, quite probably brought by or shared with the angels, which are out there, in Judaism, and the wider world of faiths. Amen.