Allerheiligen (B) – 31. October 2015

Predigt in der alt-katholischen Gemeinde Münster

Offb 7, 2-4. 9-14
1 Joh. 3, 1-3
Mt 5.1-12a

Seid ihr schon mal einem Heiligen — oder einer Heiligen — begegnet? Würdet ihr es wissen, wenn ihr einem Heiligen begegnet wäret? Wisst ihr überhaupt, wie ein Heiliger, eine Heilige aussieht?

Allerheiligen – das Fest der Heiligen. Aber wer sind überhaupt die Heiligen? Und was heißt es überhaupt, heilig zu sein?

„Ein Heiliger ist ein Mensch, durch den die Sonne scheint“, hat einmal ein Kind gesagt. Es hatte nämlich vorher ein Kirchenfenster mit Heiligenfiguren gesehen und war erstaunt vom hellen Leuchten des Bildes, weil die Sonne es von außen bestrahlte und hindurch schien. Gott ist die Sonne unseres Lebens und will uns zum Leuchten bringen; und ein Heiliger ist, wer sich von dieser Sonne zum Leuchten bringen lässt, so dass andere es wahrnehmen können.[1] Heilig: das sind Menschen, Orte und Handlungen, die eng mit dem göttlichen Bereich in Berührung stehen.

Sanctus, heißt das im Lateinischen. Es kommt wohl von einem Verbum „sancire“, was „begrenzen“ „umschließen“ bedeutet. Als heilig wurde ursprünglich ein abgegrenzter Bezirk (lateinisch „fanum“) gekennzeichnet, so dass alles, was sich vor diesem Bezirk befindet, als pro fano, also vor dem heiligen Bezirk liegend, galt.[2] Heilig war, wer und was zu diesem Bezirk gehörte. Die römisch-katholische Kirche macht hier weiter, in der sie bestimmte Menschen „heiligspricht“: „setzt einzelne ihrer Glieder unter die heiligen“. Nach dieser Definition sind Heilige gesonderte Menschen – andere Menschen. Sie sind näher an Gott, hieß es in der mittelalterlichen Theologie, haben sich mehr Gnade angesammelt, als normale Menschen, und ihre Gebete funktionieren besser als die Gebete aller anderen. Dies ist der Grund, warum die Heiligenverehrung so wichtig war, warum Heilige eine fürbittende Funktion hatten (oder auch noch haben).  Und da ist sicher etwas daran: Heilige sind unsere spirituelle Vorbilder, und das ist gut und richtig so.

Das Neue Testament sieht die Sache aber anders. Denn im Neuen Testament gehören alle dazu. Die werden die Gläubigen – alle Christen und Christinnen – „die Heiligen“, tous hagios genannt. Die Heiligen sind diejenigen Menschen, die Christus nachfolgen wollen, die über Christus auf der Suche nach Gott sind. Freilich auch in dieser Zeit eine begrenzte, ein abgegrenzte Gruppe. Aber wichtig ist, dass alle Christen dazu gehören. So gesehen sind die Heiligen Menschen wie wir – Menschen, die auf der Suche nach Gott in dieser Welt sind; Menschen, die auf dem Wege sind, Gott näher kennenzulernen. Menschen, die es versuchen und manchmal auch schaffen, Raum und Platz für Gott in Ihrem Leben zu finden, Menschen, die bewusst Christus, Gott nachzufolgen. Vorbilde halt, aber nicht von uns abgesondert, sondern uns ganz nahe.

Aus dem Matthäusevangelium lesen wir heute de Seligpreisungen, die uns etwas über dieser Art von Heiligen aussagen. Selig sind, die arm sind vor Gott, die trauern, die keine Gewalt anwenden, hungern und dürsten nach Gerechtigkeit, die barmherzig sind, die ein reines Herz haben, die Frieden stiften, die um der Gerechtigkeit willen verfolgt werden. Das griechische Wort lautet makarioi, auf Lateinisch beati. Ich denke, es geht hier nicht darum Seligkeit mit Heiligkeit zu vergleichen. Ganz im Gegenteil, es geht darum anzuerkennen, dass diese Menschen in Situationen sind, bei denen sie merken, dass und wie sehr sie Gott brauchen. Selig sind, die erkennen, dass sie Gott brauchen, die erkennen, dass die Welt Gott braucht, die erkennen, das auch unsere Nächsten Gott brauchen. Selig bedeutet hier nicht fröhlich sein, nicht beneidenswert sein, sondern in Gottes Nähe zu sein. „Seligkeit wäre demnach der besondere Gad der Gottesverbundenheit.“[3] Gott besonders zu spüren – vielleicht auch in seiner Abwesenheit durch ein Sehen nach seine Präsenz. Diese Art Seligkeit ist (davon bin ich überzeugt) auch Heiligkeit.

Hier liegt für mich auch die Verknüpfung zwischen Allerheiligen am 1. November und Allerseelen am 2. November, die Verknüpfung auch zwischen den Heiligen und den Menschen, von denen wir uns haben verabschieden müssen, um denen wir trauern, die uns in diesem Leben nun fehlen. Denn sie zeigen uns doch ein Weg. In der Trauer spüren wir auch unser eigenes Bedürfnis nach Gott. Somit sind auch unsere Verstorbenen Heiligen, denn sie sind für uns eine Brücke zu Gott, mehr – sie sind Brücke zum Leben danach, zum ewigen Leben. Mit ihnen sind auch unsere Seelen vielleicht ein Stück ins Danach gerückt, ein Schritt näher an Gott angelangt.

Alle Menschen können Heilige sein, denn jeder Mensch kann uns näher an Gott bringen. So gesehen sind die Heiligen doch nicht ganz anders als wir. Sie blieben nicht verschont von den Auseinandersetzungen des Alltage, waren nicht völlig gelöst vom Hin-und-Her-gerissen-sein zwischen Hoffnung und Trauer, Wünschen und Wirklichkeit. Nein: sie habe genau wie wir ihr Leben leben müssen – aber sie haben dabei auf ganz besonderer Weise Gott bezeugen. Sie sind Vorbilder für uns, nicht weil sie unendlich viel besser sind, sondern weil sie das getan haben, was wir auch – zumindest manchmal – versuchen zu tun, zu leben, zu glauben.

Auch wir gehören dazu. Wie es im Tagesgebet steht: „Du hast uns aufgenommen in die Gemeinschaft deiner Heiligen, die zu allen Zeiten und an allen Orten deinen Namen verherrlichen.“ Und nicht nur wir, sondern auch die Menschen, die uns den Weg Gottes gezeigt haben. Es ist eine große Schar, die sich um den Thron Gottes sammelt: die Gemeinschaft der Heiligen, die Chöre der Engel. Auch wir, auch unser lieben Verstorbenen, gehören dazu.

[1]  http://www.k-l-j.de/predigt_allerheiligen.htm

[2]  http://de.encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761596982/Heilig.html

[3]  Te Deum, November 2015, S. 13.

Proper 25 (B) – 25 October 2015

sermon preached at St Margaret’s Newlands

Jeremiah 31: 7-9
Hebrews 7: 23 -28
Mark 10: 46-52.

Blind Bartimaeus is one of only two people healed by Jesus whose names we are given in the New Testament. (The other is Lazarus.) Bartimaeus means the son of Timaeus, and there has been a lot of discussion about who Timaeus might represent. But that is not what I want to explore today. Rather it is what Bartimaeus does that seems to me important. He calls out to Jesus, confessing his name: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! … Son of David, have mercy on me!” Others seek to silence him, but not Jesus. Jesus calls him over, and asks him what he wants. “My teacher,” says Bartimaeus, “let me see again.”

“Let me see again!” That the blind will receive sight when the kingdom arrives is a frequent image in Isaiah’s prophecies and occasionally also in the Psalms:

“The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down”

affirms Psalm146.

“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped,”
prophesies Isaiah (35:5).

And again:

“I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people,
a light to the nations,
to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness.” (Isaiah 42:6-7)

And Jeremiah too, in the passage we have just heard read, includes the blind in those who are offered consolation:

See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,
and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth,
among them the blind and the lame,
those with child and those in labour, together;
a great company, they shall return here.
With weeping they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back,
I will let them walk by brooks of water,
in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.

Let me see! We who are blind, let us see! But this is a challenge: is physical sight meant here? Can people who are blind see? With the help of modern medicine, some can indeed. But not all, and that is the challenge of the New Testament healing stories. Where do they leave those who are not healed? Bartimaeus may offer us some insight here, because there is something important in this story about the way that seeing is also and importantly about understanding. The Greek here uses blepso, but there is another Greek word for to see, oro, which is closely related to oido, one of the Greek words which means to know. That points to something important: when we see better, when we see more clearly, we also understand better, understand more deeply. Here it seems to be almost the other way around; Bartimaeus has recognised who Jesus is – he has understood – and that is the prelude to his being given back his sight.

And yet: what of those who are not physically healed? Bartimaeus’s plea: “Let me see again!” could also be a plea: “Let me understand!” Let me understand what is happening to me; let me understand my condition. Bartimaeus is healed by being given his sight, but can healing sometimes take the form of understanding?

The need to understand our situation is sometimes very great, for so often we seem to be surrounded by impenetrable events and incomprehensible happenings. Death that comes, perhaps, far too early. Painful suffering and illness. The loss of a job, or the ending of a relationship. The destructive conflicts in the world. Natural disasters. All of these and many more can make us wonder why: why do these things happen? But asking “Why?” can also be a plea to understand. Help us to see! And that process of seeking understanding, of seeking to comprehend the sense in these things we find so hard to comprehend: perhaps this is a first step to understanding, what seeing in the Kingdom of God might be about.

This past week I taught a class on the controversy between Luther and Erasmus. This is a conflict about the complex question of the role of free will in salvation, but one of the questions that Luther is grappling with in De servo arbitrio, which he writes in the course of it, is precisely that of the apparently incomprehensible nature of the things that happen to us and to the world. Luther talks about the hidden ways in which God acts, the actions of God hidden (deus absconditus), in contrast to the open ways of God, the works of love which are the actions of God revealed (deus revelatus). For Luther, the cross is the first and primary example of the hidden, almost alien, actions of God: God has saved humankind through the cross, through a terrible and shocking death which seems to say nothing about love – this apparently evil act is what has brought about divine forgiveness.

This seems a deep paradox, and Luther suggests that it is characteristic of how God acts in the world:

When God makes alive he does it by killing, when he justifies he does it by making men guilty, when he exalts to heaven he does it by bringing down to hell, as Scripture says: “The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to hell and raises up” [1 Samuel 2:6] … God hides his eternal goodness and mercy under eternal wrath, his righteousness under iniquity.^[1]

To know Christ, for Luther, is to know “God hidden in suffering.”^[2] This so counters anything we might logically think we know about God that we can only admit our incomprehension and trust in a God who “works life, death, and all in all.”^[3] The challenge for Luther, is to see all that happens to us as God’s work.

Luther here doesn’t exactly offer an explanation, but a kind of acceptance or understanding that these things that we cannot change might be a part of something that we do not fully understand. Faith for Luther is about trusting that this all things do make a contribution to God’s plan of salvation. It is about accepting that God may act in ways which run counter to our human understanding. Seeing, then, may be at times be about understanding that we cannot and will not understand everything. Understanding could here have something to do with acceptance.

This is not a counsel of despair. This insight should not, I think, stop us being angry with God when these things are happening to us. The Psalms include a good many passages where the Psalmist rails at God for keeping at a distance, for acting in incomprehensible ways. “Why, O LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10:1) Or the words spoken by Jesus on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?” (Psalm 22:1) Protesting at a God who seems distant, who seems to be acting in unloving, unjust ways is perfectly normal. Indeed, this is honest prayer. A friend of mine whose husband was buried on Friday said she went for a walk on the morning before the funeral: “I had it out with God. And I said to God: if you have given me this to bear, then you need to give me the strength to bear it.” That is also an accepting, an understanding, a seeing.

There is something in all this, in Luther’s grappling with the apparently intractable nature of how God acts in the world, that reminds us too of the need to take time to see properly, to come to some kind of understanding. The healing parables seem to happen so quickly, but how long had Bartimaeus been waiting for that moment, waiting for the encounter in which he could ask to regain his sight?

R S Thomas’s poem, the Bright Field, is a reminder that we may need to stop, to be attentive, if we are really to see:

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.[4]

Seeing differently: seeing “a brightness / that seemed as transitory as your youth / once, but is the eternity that awaits you.” Recognising that brightness, not just as a flash of something, but as an intimation of eternity.

Perhaps that is what seeing with understanding is about?

Andreas Knapp writes of Bartimaeus:

are you really sure
that you want to see
there are many terrible things
that until now you have only heard about

do you really want
to see others suffering
look the injustices of the world
in the eye

lord I want to see
see the moment
see you
and with you in my sight
I am not afraid
to see everything[5]

Being given the strength to see. To bear what we see. May we too find ourselves able to pray: “Let me see again!”

[1]    Luther’s Works, vol. 33, 62

[2]    LW 31, 53.

[3]    LW 33, 140.

[4]  From RS Thomas, Laboratories of the Spirit, © Kunjana Thomas.

[5]  Te Deum, October 2015, 244 (translated from the German by CM).

William Tyndale – 6 October 2015

sermon preached for Glasgow University Episcopal Chaplaincy

Proverbs 8.4-11
2 Timothy 3.12-end
John 17. 6-8, 14-19

I can’t help thinking that William Tyndale would have been somewhat astonished to find himself at the head of a list of writers from the Anglican Poetic Tradition. Tyndale after all was never an Anglican: having lived for several years in exile, he was executed in Antwerp on 6 October 1536, just two years after the Act of Supremacy removed the English church from papal authority, and thirteen years before the first Book of Common Prayer would be promulgated in 1549. It was that liturgical development that began to make of the Church in England the Church of England and to shape the tradition of Anglicanism which emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Tyndale was never an Anglican, and he was also not strictly a poet. But he was an engaged and talented Bible translator, and one who gave to the English language many of the rhythms and phrases which would inspire generations of Anglican thinkers, whether preachers, poets, or theologians, or a combination of all three.

Born in around 1494, Tyndale graduated BA at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, on 13 May 1512, and was made a subdeacon later that year. He was ordained deacon and then priest in March and April 1515, and took his MA in Oxford in July 1515, before beginning the study of theology, also at Oxford. At some point during his theological studies he encountered a copy of Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum, a revised Latin translation of the New Testament, printed alongside the original Greek (or most of it[1]). Tyndale clearly became fascinated by the New Testament. Erasmus had dreamed of the ploughboy reading the Bible at the plough, and Tyndale wanted to make that possible for the people of England. As a good Graecist, he also wanted the New Testament in English to offer a good translation of the Greek. And increasingly, from the early 1520s, he wanted his translation to reflect the insights of the theology he was beginning to learn from the Reformers. At some point he had encountered Luther’s work, probably whilst he was still at Oxford, and became a passionate disciple of the new, biblical, theology

We don’t know much about what happened to Tyndale in this period, but he certainly went to Germany (though probably not to Wittenberg). In 1525, he published a first fragment of the New Testament in English in Cologne.   It included a prologue, based on Luther’s prologue to his 1522 German translation of the New Testament. Only this prologue and the beginning of Matthew’s gospel are extant, but, as David Daniell says, “[some of] the words of Jesus that have chimed down the centuries appear here first—‘Ask and it shall be given you: Seek and ye shall find: Knock and it shall be opened unto you’; ‘Enter in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction’.”[2]

Tyndale went on to revise his New Testament in 1534. He also learned Hebrew, probably in Germany, and translated the Pentateuch, which was published during his lifetime, and many of the historical books of the Old Testament, which was not. After his execution, Miles Coverdale produced an English “translation” of the rest of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, translating them from earlier German and Latin translations rather than from the Hebrew, and published these with Tyndale’s translations. These were then incorporated into the so-called Matthew Bible which was printed after Tyndale’s death in 1537.   Daniell suggests that about half the Old Testament translation and all the New Testament were Tyndale’s, and the rest, including the Psalms, was Coverdale’s. The Matthew Bible in turn became the Great Bible which from 1540 was to be placed in every parish church in England and Wales on order of the King and government. So Tyndale’s New Testament became available to everyone in England and Wales, and it was being read in Scotland as well. Over the next century, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible and King James’ Authorised version would all take the Great Bible – and with it Tyndale’s New Testament – as their starting point.

But this was not just about books: it was about reading, and access to Scripture. People all over the country could now read the New Testament, the Scriptures in their own language. David Daniell puts it like this: “The great change that came over England from 1526, the ability of every ordinary man, woman, and child to read and hear the whole New Testament in English, accurately rendered, was Tyndale’s work, and its importance cannot be overstressed. The Vulgate was incomprehensible to the ploughboy and most of his familiars throughout the land. Now all four gospels could be read, often aloud, in their entirety, and the whole of Paul. … There is no shortage of evidence of the gatherings of people of all ages, all over the country, to read and hear these English scriptures—and reading meant, so often, reading aloud.” Wills in 1579 put copies of Tyndale’s works in Edinburgh: he did not only appeal to the English, but to all who spoke English. And he continued to be read, for our modern translations still resonate with Tyndale’s language.

What did all this mean to Tyndale? The closing section of our reading today from 2 Timothy gives us a clue, I think. It reads in his translation: “For all scripture given by inspiration of God is profitable to teach, to reprove, to amend and to instruct in righteousness.”[3] This passage probably sets out the fundamental reason why Tyndale believed his work of translation to be so important. But it is clear that there was more to his understanding of the importance of Scripture than teaching and correction. In his Pathway into the Holy Scripture, an expanded version of the Prologue to his 1525 Cologne New Testament, which he published separately in around 1536, Tyndale wrote of his joy at discovering the gospel: “Evangelion (that we call the gospel) is a Greek word, and signifieth good, merry, glad and joyful tidings that maketh a man’s heart glad and maketh him sing, dance and leap for joy.”[4] He believed that giving people access to God’s Word, in their own language, would teach them the ways of righteousness – but he believed too that it would open them to joy.

For me, a key verse in the passage from John’s gospel we have just heard read sums up Tyndale’s life. In his translation these words of Jesus to God the Father, about his disciples, read: “I have given them thy words, and the world hath hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”

That was Tyndale’s experience too. He gave God’s “words” – God’s Word – to the world, and there were those in the world who hated him for doing so, condemned him as a heretic, and executed him. He died for doing it. But that gift of God’s Word in English proved lasting. The world – the English-speaking world – took his gift and made it their own, and in doing so gave it back to God.

 

[1] Erasmus was using a codex which did not include the final verses of Revelation, so he printed his own Greek translation of the Vulgate instead.

[2]  David Daniell, ‘Tyndale, William (c.1494–1536)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2011 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.lib.gla.ac.uk/view/article/27947, accessed 6 Oct 2015]. All other references to Daniell are also to this article.

[3]  I am using the edition of his New Testament printed in Antwerp in 1534: https://data.historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk/view?pubId=eebo-ocm20189777e&terms=william%20tyndale&pageTerms=william%20tyndale&pageId=eebo-ocm20189777e-2622-1.

[4]  Printed London, 1536 (unpaginated): https://data.historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk/view?pubId=eebo-99843731e&terms=william%20tyndale&pageTerms=william%20tyndale&pageId=eebo-99843731e-8484-1.