Sermon for Advent 4

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Advent 4 (Year C)

Isaiah 7.10-16; Matthew 1.18-25

Among the things that are haunting me is... How... Trump? How Trump? I probably don't need to say any more. I'm speaking about the President Elect of the USA and how he got to be that. Well, one line among the commentators is that some took Trump literally, and some took him seriously.

• Those who took him literally saw a man of misogyny, racism, treason indeed and voted against him.
• Those who took him seriously heard him as a change-maker, and they voted for him, as they wanted change above all else.

Personally, I doubt that works (though it would be nice in some ways if it were that). But! But it's a good distinction to make - when it comes to today's readings.

Let's be clear about the difference.

• To take a statement literally is to understand each of the words in their simplest, plainest most obvious sense. Nothing can 'stand for' something else. If you say 'it's literally raining cats and dogs' you can only mean furry animals are falling from the sky, woofing and miaowing as they fall.
• On the other hand, to take a statement seriously is to look at it as a whole, and think about what the speaker meant in the whole string of words. So someone can't literally have meant 'it's literally raining cats and dogs'. I take that statement seriously as meaning: 'it's raining very heavily'.

There are of course Christians - many millions of them perhaps - who think (or think they think) that to take the Bible seriously, you must take the Bible literally. A literal and a serious reading of the Bible are the same thing, they'd say. But today is one of the many occasions when they are – not to be unduly diplomatic about it – proved wrong.

Take the Gospel. Matthew tells us that Jesus' birth is to fulfil Isaiah's prophecy

'the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel'.

Literally - taking this prophecy literally - this does not happen. This passage is clear. The child is, we know, called Jesus. Not Emmanuel. If you say: 'But surely his other name (middle name, nickname, whatever) was Emmanuel', I'd say: When? Where is the evidence? When is Jesus ever called Emmanuel?' You'll have guessed the answer is never. If we try to read Matthew today literally, we tie ourselves in knots. The text denies us. The prophecy is of a child called Emmanuel; The fulfilment is a child called Jesus.

But it gets worse for the literalists. Go back to the first reading, and you'll see that Isaiah actually says 'the young woman is with child and shall bear a son'. Young woman, not virgin. There is no implication here of a virgin birth. This is because the first reading we have looks to the classic Hebrew text. But Matthew was almost certainly looking instead to an ancient Greek translation. In that Greek translation, the word for virgin is indeed found. But the people that want to take the Bible literally (or think they want to take the Bible literally) tend not to value the Greek translation, but stick to the Hebrew. So they have another problem.

And such problems as these happen time and time again, whenever anyone one tries to take the Bible literally. What about: 'If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off'. What about: 'Leave the dead to bury the dead?' Which Christian community has ever taken these phrases 'literally'?

So let us take today's gospel not literally but seriously. That the name of the Christ-child, of Jesus, is also Emmanuel, or Immanuel (Immanuel gets us closer to the underlying Hebrew). Immanu El means literally 'With us Gd'. But biblical Hebrew does not have a word for is. So if you want to say 'Gd is with us', what you say is 'with us, Gd'. So indeed Immanuel means 'Gd is with us'.

Gd is with us. There is no sentence in the history of language and of languages that is more worthy of being taken seriously. And it's perfectly natural that we attend to this now.

Where are we? There's a lovely (I think it's lovely) Irish expression (from the Irish language): 'to be in the mouth of Christmas'. And we are 'in the mouth of Christmas'. Almost there. On the point of. And with today's gospel, the sense that Gd is with us is intimately linked to Christ's birth, to Christmas. But it's worth remembering that for Isaiah too it was possible, natural, encouraged to think that 'Gd is with us'. It's not an idea that enters into history with Jesus, as if all others thought that Gd was uninterested, distant, too busy with His own majesty.

I'm going to go further. I'd say it can be said that the conviction that Gd is with us is a theme that runs naturally between the Old and New Testaments. It runs through the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Genesis. Think about that evocative phrase that in Eden Gd was walking in the garden in the cool of the day. You can say that's a crude idea about Gd that we need to get over. Or you can say it's dropping the hint, right at the beginning of the Bible, that Gd is with us. Of course, Gd is not like us. Gd does not benefit from taking an early evening stroll. But Gd chooses to do what is necessary to come to us, as if one us, to communicate to us, to be with us.

Think of the call of Abraham (or Abram as he then was). The text says simply 'And Gd said to Abram'. Nothing more complicated than that. Think of Moses. We are told 'Gd spoke to him face to face, as one speaks to a friend'. And so on, and so on. Jews and Christians, sharing this biblical heritage, take heart time and time again from hearing that Gd is with us. Things go wrong when we think 'Gd is with us' means 'and not with them'. No. Surely, we are meant to hear and proclaim that Gd is with us, human beings.

Gd is with us human beings. We need to hear this now. Even more than Trump, another thing is haunting me. Aleppo.

The whole of the catastrophe which is the violence and militarism and the lies in and around Syria. And Aleppo quite specifically. In the unspeakable horrors that are taking place there – unfilmable, let us be clear about that; any shocking footage we see on our screens is but the bits which are safe to be shown – in these current horrors, we are reminded that it is not natural in the sense of obvious to think that Gd is with us, with humanity. It seems that Gd has left humanity to it. And indeed it seems that our bit of humanity has left that bit of humanity to it. As one commentator has put it: Let us never again say 'never again'. For we don't mean it. We let it happen again and again.

Now, I don't know quite what 'letting it happen' means in this context – quite how we could have stopped it. There may some myth of the West's omnipotence revealing itself here. As if we could solve all problems with a bomb here and a stern word there. Nevertheless, how can we not feel not only grief but also shame, as the news of yet more children killed – they are not just dying; they are being killed – comes in.

I have no answers. What I am saying is that to believe that Gd is with us can be an act of defiance, the defiance we need – and are going to need in abundance

• in the face of those who want us either to resign ourselves ('there's absolutely nothing I can do, so I won't even pay attention...')
• and in the face of the calls to vengeance ('we've got to teach them a lesson; ultimately only violence works...').

So I am quite simply going to invite us all to say it now.

Not shout it, we can say it softly. It's more a prayer than a battle-cry. Say it with me.

Gd is with us human beings.

Gd is with us human beings.

Gd is with us human beings.

Amen.

'We enjoyed you!' Sermon on the overcoming of death

Sermon. Trinity 4 2015 (Year B). St Michael and All Angels.

Wisdom of Solomon 1.13-15; 2.23

2 Corinthians 8.7-15

Mark 5.21-43

There's so much in today's Gospel reading. But I don't know if you realise that the First Reading shares some theme(s) with the Gospel. It's intended to. One of those shared themes might be this: death and the overcoming of death.

Hear again:

[First reading:] 'God did not make death and he does not delight in the death of the living.'

[From the Gospel, Jesus said:] 'The child is not dead but sleeping.'

'He took her by the hand and said to her: “Talitha qum!” Which means little girl get up.'

Or little one, rise – rise - as if/as in from the dead; both the Hebew (qum) and the Greek use the normal language for resurrection.

Death and the overcoming of death. It is good for us to think of these things, because death will come to us all, whether we face up to that or not. However, we also need to think of death because our news reports are drenched in talk of the taking of life, of death by killing. When we now hear of Tunisia, Kuwait or France (and there are other countries getting less publicity), we will not think of lovely holiday destinations of various degrees of exoticness. Our stomachs may tighten, and we fear news of new atrocities. Not only of killing, but of brutality, of people chopping heads off and displaying them on spikes! Lord, have mercy!

Clearly people are coming under evil influences to see violence as the answer to everything. That they have a duty to commit vile acts of violence, wherever and however they can. That they must teach others this too. That this pleases Gd even. We might add they fall in love with their own rightness, and that they get addicted to violence. Many, but my no means all of these people call themselves Muslim and say they're acting in the name of true Islam - not least when they kill other Muslims.

But to take a step back: it is not that this is a uniquely violent and violence-loving period in world history. In saying that, I am not saying 'things aren't that bad, just relax'. Quite the contrary. I am saying that there has always been violence and brutality in the world, including on industrial scale. This is scary and heartbreaking and unbearable. But there are two things we are forbidden to do.

The first is we are forbidden to take comfort (or add to our fears for that matter) by falling into prejudice against our Muslim neighbours, or against the 1-2 billion Muslims in the world. I wish the media would not speak about 'Islamic State' as they are not an Islamic. IS murderers revel in their violence. They film themselves killing people, quickly and slowly, and put the films on social media set to music. Apparently (I think one should not watch but I read from others) their film-making skills are high. 

Let us not do them the service of thinking they act out of piety. What they're saying is really: 'Look what a big boy am I! Look how frightening I am! My team are bound to win, and compared to me, you are not worth anything.' Let's be clear: Islam is against all of that. Alongside all the quotations in the Qur'an about peace and good relations, it is also the case that humility – against self-aggrandisement - is a cardinal virtue in Islam.

The second thing we are forbidden to do is despair. Violence will not win. Again, from the Wisdom of the first reading:

'God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome and there is no destructive poison in them.' 

So the world and its people were and are made, at heart, wholesome. How can we find and draw strength from that wholesomeness?

Well, let us think of another act of terror, which it seems was committed by an American White-Supremacist terrorist, in Charleston South Carolina. If things are as they seem (and no one has yet been found guilty), it seems that Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, attended Bible study for an hour, and then shot nine of the people there dead. Apparently he thought that to make white people stronger, you have to kill black people.

Once he was arrested, the families of those he had killed had chances to speak directly to him. Did you hear or read it? What they say, repeatedly is 'I forgive you. My family forgives you.' Extraordinary. This has nothing to do with politeness, niceness, softening or indulgence. But something profound about the Christian faith, and something revolutionary.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e26Eysq22Yg]

Now, please don't mishear me. What I am not saying is that if someone kills your nearest and dearest, it's your Christian duty to say to them: 'I forgive you'. It's not, because forgiveness means six or seven different things, and some are acts of will, and others are inclinations that come only over time, and after internal conflict. The only form of forgiveness Christians must offer is (and this is what the word literally means): 'I forgo – I forgo any instinct or plans for vengeance. The cycle of vengeance stops here.' (That is, of course, what is revolutionary about it.)

And another family member said this to the man (here I warn you I may do a bad American accent and I may cry):

'We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms. You have killed some of the most beautiful people I know. Every fibre in my body hurts. But as we say in Bible study, we enjoyed you. And may Gd have mercy on you.'

'We enjoyed you.'

I think what this wonderful Christian woman is saying may be something like this: I do not seek vengeance. And I am not going to re-invent history. Evil though your act was, it does not define you. Because we already had enjoyed your presence. We saw in you some of the wholesomeness that is at the heart of all creation, and we did what we could do to honour it. We refuse to take that back because of your actions. Through all the pain, through all that we are dealing with in living after your still-most-definitely-evil act, we say we were right. At the heart of our faith is the idea of welcome, and we enjoyed you. 

Let me add if we don't enjoy the people we welcome, heaven is going to be a form of hell. Of course, that can be hard. (Leaving aside sin, we are all very we are different.) But our faith trains us in the ways of welcome and the enjoyment of the another. Gd trains us in the ways of welcome and the enjoyment of the other, if we let Gd.

This – welcome and enjoyment of the other - is what will drive violence out of the world. This is the overcoming of death. May it come speedily and in our days. Amen.