Sermon by Fr James Heard at St George's Church, Sunday 8th May, Easter 7 with Ascension Celebration
Sermon by Fr James Heard at St George's Church, Sunday 8th May, Easter 7 with Ascension Celebration
What would you say to
someone if they asked you, ‘Do you believe in God?’ I wonder how you might
respond. At first glance, such a question requires a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. ‘Yes
I do’, ‘no I don’t’, or ‘it depends on the day or week’. The former Bishop of
Durham, Tom Wright, suggests one response that I’ve found helpful. What do you
mean by the word ‘God’. The word ‘god’ can be loaded with all manner of ideas,
many of them quite awful: jealous, petty, vindictive, angry, intolerant, to
name just a few. When I hear new atheists describing this sort of god, I want
to affirm that I don’t believe in that sort of god either. This raises a
further question: how might we describe God?
We started our United
Tuesdays course on the Christian Mystics two weeks ago. One of the important
themes that recurs throughout the centuries in Christian thought is the mystery
and essentially ‘unknowability’ of God. Of course, being human, we can’t help
use what we have, words, metaphor, art, music, at an attempt to understand by
mystery of existence. But God is beyond any human concept, beyond words, beyond
pictures. God is the love that is to be experienced, not the God that is open
for a scientist to, as it were, test and dissect as one thing amongst other
things in the universe.
One way this has been
articulated is through apophatic theology. Apophatic is the grand word for
‘negative theology’. It isn’t possible to express the essence of God, to say
what God is, because he (note the personal pronoun ‘he’… of course, God
is not a he or a she, but we don’t want say the impersonal ‘it’, so we have
tended to use ‘he’). God is mystery beyond understanding and we can only really
say what he is not. This is how one of the early church fathers describes it,
Clement of Alexandria:
‘[God] is ineffable,
beyond all speech, beyond every concept, beyond every thought. God is not in
space, but above both place and time and name and thought. God is without
limits, without form, without name. He is anonymous.’
Perhaps, like me, you
find this approach appealing. It has been recognized throughout the world, and
can be found in Sufi mysticism as well as Zen Buddhism. But it also makes many
people rather uneasy. One commentator (Thomas Biggs) says that Clement has made
God the everlasting ‘no’, and has through the process of stripping and
abstraction, ended up not with God but with nothing at all.
In response to such
critique, it is possible to reflect upon two images, the onion and the statue.
Is the process of stripping away like removing one skin after another from an
onion? If it is, then you’ll eventually, as you peel one layer after another,
end up with no onion at all. Or does the apophatic approach more resemble the
action of a sculptor chipping away the stone of a block of marble so that the
latent image gradually emerges. The sculptor chips away at the stone, a
negative action, but its aim is positive, to reveal the form within.
This is what the
apophatic approach is attempting, chipping away our human ideas about God. And
then, slowly there will emerge before us, by God’s grace, true vision of what
God actually is. But this is something we can’t express in words. And so we are
left, not with an absence, but with a presence.
That’s the first
dimension, the essential otherness and unknowability of God. Clement then goes
on to give a distinctive Christian perspective in his stress on the
incarnation. The unknown God makes himself known to us in Jesus Christ. This
sort of counter-balances the negative way, although even within the
incarnation, there is the sense of beyond, the sense of mystery, the sense of
wonder (Kallistos Ware).
Through the
incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ, the disciples lives had been
turned upside down. They had experienced the presence of God in the
person of Jesus, a person completely transparent to the very being of God. A
person who challenged injustice and hypocrisy; who touched ritually impure
lepers; who brought God’s healing touch to the sick and those of unsound mind;
he absorbed the anger, violence and hatred of the world and responded with
self-giving love. All this they had seen and participated in. But from the
Ascension, which we have celebrated this week, things are going to be different,
uncomfortably different, for the disciples.
This unknowable God,
having briefly become present, withdraws again, and the disciples are left
alone. Or did he withdraw? And are the disciples left alone?
Well, Jesus certainly withdraws physically: he is no longer physically present
to the disciples, nor is he to us. And, despite artistic representations, God
is not ‘up there’.
A man in white, the
astronaut Yuri Gagarin, reportedly said: ‘I went up to space, but I didn't
encounter God.’ But had he listened to the two men in white who spoke to the
men of Galilee, he could have saved himself the trouble of seeking God up in
space. ‘Why do you stand looking [up] into heaven?’ (Acts 1:11). We won’t find
God down in the grave nor up in the skies. Whilst Jesus is beyond the
perceptivity of our senses, this doesn’t mean that God is thus absent or
non-existent, as Gagarin supposed.
Because in the person
of Jesus Christ, everything has changed. Heaven and earth united, the physical
and non-physical is transcended, inner and outer are interfused. God is all
around us. At Pentecost the disciples encountered God all around them: fire,
wind, God’s Holy Spirit bubbling up, not only around them, but within them. And
we may experience the Spirit too. But that’s a sermon for Pentecost.
So, whilst many have
had profound experiences of God, a strong sense of God’s presence, whilst
acknowledging all this, many Christians throughout the centuries have also
described how they also have experienced a disturbing sense of the absence of
God. It’s when prayers feel empty, or as RS Thomas describes it, ‘Prayers
like gravel / Flung at the sky’s /window, hoping to attract / the loved one’s/
attention’. It’s when Church
feels like an empty meaningless ritual.
In our journey
towards the experiential oneness with God, described in our Gospel reading, we
will encounter seasons of darkness. John Bunyon described the challenging and
varied path of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress. During these seasons, God is
teaching us to walk by faith and not by feelings or sight. The mystics suggest
that in these ‘night seasons’, God initiates a purging, a cleansing and a
purifying of our souls from everything that’s not of faith. Such times become
our own Gethsemane.
In conclusion, how
might we bring these thoughts together for our journey of faith today: holding
together God’s absence as well as presence? During Holy Week our speaker, Carys
Walsh, reflected on the poetry of RS Thomas, a remarkable Welsh priest and
poet. His gift was to reveal a richness and depth to our life of faith. Thomas,
in his life of faith, allowed a sense both of God’s absence as well as
presence. He made space for the human experience of faith, recognizing it as
often ambivalent, and all the richer for it. His gift was poetry which could
hold faith, doubt, tension, darkness, pain, acceptance, uncertainty and
expectancy. RS Thomas is the story of a questing soul, never satisfied with
easy answers, constantly questioning God’s way with humankind, and our struggle
to know a God at once loving and intimate, but also mysteriously other and
distant.
The reason Thomas is
content to call himself a Christian is because the Christian belief that God
has taken suffering into himself is the most profound and satisfactory answer
to the great problem of suffering. This is expressed in this poem, which I
shall with:
The Coming
And God held in his hand
A
small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As
through water, he saw
A
scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On
a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. many People
Held out their thin arms
To
it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To
return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.