Easter 5 (C) – 24 April 2016

sermon preached at St Margaret’s Newlands

Acts 11:1-18
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”

The Book of Revelation offers us a series of visions, prophetic visions of a new world.  The old has passed away; something new has arisen in its place.  The world is being changed, radically changed.  “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.  And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’”

I am reminded here – as I think I am meant to be – of those passages in Isaiah and the other prophets which proclaim the coming of the Messiah:  “Every valley shall be raised up, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places a plain.” (Isaiah 40:4).  God’s coming will make things new.  It is clear that neither of Revelation nor Isaiah think that that being made radically new is going to be particularly comfortable.  And yet it is clear as well that both John the Divine and Isaiah think that it may be somehow comforting.  Radically uncomfortable, and yet deeply comforting:  how can that be?

Peter encounters radical change as well.   Our reading from Acts shows us how Peter is confronted in a dream by a sheet full of things that are forbidden by Jewish law: “four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air.”  Peter hears a voice – presumably he thought he was being tested or tempted in some way – telling him to eat these forbidden things:  “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.”   But Peter is a good Jew, and he knows what is done and what is not done:  “No, Lord;” he says, “nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.”  And then his world, his religious understanding is turned upside down:  “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”  The Jewish law, Peter is told, is not definitive for the early Christian community.  A radical shift.  A radical change.  This is a making new, the coming of a new way of thinking about religion.  And it is one that is not initially recognised or accepted by his fellow apostles.  And yet this radical shift, this rejection of the religious teaching about what is sacred and what is profane, what is clean and what is unclean, opens the door to a new phase of the church’s development.  Peter is sent to the gentile Cornelius; he baptizes Cornelius and his household, even though they are not keeping the Jewish law.

In this passage, in which he is explaining himself to his disapproving colleagues in Jerusalem, Peter can only say that he had recognised that Cornelius too was filled with the Holy Spirit.  And in the end, the other apostles come to agree with him:  “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”  This is a radical change, a radical reorientation, a total revision of what had been the practice of the Christians until this point.  It is a passing away of what had been, a making new.  It was disorientating, disconcerting, for those who had until then known exactly what was right – and yet it brought new life, new insights, new energy, new vision.

“See, I am making all things new.”  These might have been words spoken to Peter and the other apostles too.  Acts offers a reminder of the way in which such a making new can involve the destruction, the rejection, the relinquishing of what has gone before.  That can be very painful.  It can be particularly painful when – as for the Jewish Christians – what they are being asked to reject was precisely the patterns which had given their lives meaning and shape.  I wrote a book a few years ago called “If you love something let it go…”  It was a book for Lent and Easter, and I was exploring how the Easter season reminds us over and over again of how we have to let go of what we are used to and open ourselves up for something new.  Jesus is crucified: the disciples have to let go of him, bid him farewell and open themselves to the resurrected Christ.  The resurrected Christ will ascend to heaven.  The disciples have to let go of him, let him go, and open themselves to the coming of the Spirit.

Letting go can be particularly hard in the church:  for how we have learned to approach God, to worship, to enter into the encounter with Christ is deeply personal, deeply part of who we are in relationship with God.  Just as the Jewish dietary laws were for Peter.  I am a historian of the Reformation, which was a period of just such letting go and rethinking, to build anew.  But here too, we are called to let go: to let old forms and structures die that the gospel may be resurrected.   Rowan Williams writes that we are called to enter again and again into the realisation that nothing works, that no form of worship can give us a certain encounter with God, to let ourselves risk entering the terrible darkness of not knowing what is the right way to do things, the right way to believe, and to encounter there, in it, the presence and the light of God.

“This brings on a kind of vertigo; it may make me a stranger to my self, to everything that I have ever taken for granted.” writes Rowan Williams.   “If you want God, you must be prepared to let go of all, absolutely all, emotional satisfactions, intellectual and emotional.  .. If you genuinely desire union with the unspeakable love of God, then you must be prepared to have your ‘religious’ world shattered.”[1]

The unspeakable love of God.  And yet it is that love that transforms us, that teaches us to see anew.

As Ken Rookes puts it, in three Haiku:

Life poured out for friends,
generous, painful, costly;
so are we to love.

 Following Jesus
means loving one another.
No more; nothing less.

 Disciples must love.
It is as simple as that.
Why complicate it?[2]

 The call to love is a call to see anew, to be made anew.  That is the message of our readings today.  And that initiates a process that the church has gone through over and over again.  It is a process that every congregation has gone through over and over again.  We notice it perhaps particularly on questions of liturgy and practice – the sticky issue of what we do and how we do things.

But for the church this has also meant thinking anew on the level of its teaching.  Questions such as slavery, the role of women, contraception and divorce are all questions that for a very long time the church had a clear position on, questions that pretty much everyone agreed about.  The church knew that slavery was right, that women should not be ordained, that contraception should not be used and that divorce should not happen. But they are all questions which we now see rather differently.  We reject slavery, we ordain women, we recognise legitimate uses of contraception, we allow divorce.  The process that moved the church from the one position to the other was always disruptive and difficult, although in hindsight the outcome might look clear.  We can understand that because we are in the middle of another process like that now:  about sexuality.  It is always difficult when you something that you have always known to be right, something that is part of how you see the world is suddenly placed into question.  When someone comes along as says you need to think, do, believe differently.  It is difficult.  It is uncomfortable.  And yet, sometimes – not always, but sometimes – it is indeed a making new.

Looking back, I think we can say that all of those shifts – the Reformation itself, and then over slavery, over women, over marriage – brought new life into the church.  And that is because all of them, it seems to me, pressed Christians to think more seriously about what it means to take seriously Christ’s commandment – in today’s Gospel – that we should love one another.  Christ speaks those words at a cusp in the story:  he has just told Judas that he knows that Judas will betray him.  And after this he will tell Peter that he knows that Peter will deny him.  And between those two acknowledgements of human failure comes the command:  “Love one another.”  Out of betrayal, out of failure:  love one another!  And that is the comfort in these difficult processes of change.  That we will indeed be made new.  That our world will be made new.  That we too will see and experience the new heaven and the new earth.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. … And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’”

Amen

[1]  Rowan Williams, Open to Judgement, p. 97.

[2]  https://poemsinseason.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/the-new-commandment-three-haiku/.

4. Sonntag der Osterzeit (C) – 17. April 2016

Predigt in der alt-katholischen Gemeinde Bottrop

Apostelgeschichte 5,27b-32.40b-41
Offenbarung 5,11-14
Johannesevangelium 21,1-19

Hoffnung haben in dunklen Zeiten.  Darum geht es in der Osterzeit.  Neue Wege finden, wenn alles aussichtslos erscheint.  Mitten in der Trauer, in der Hoffnungslosigkeit Hoffnung zu spüren, zu begegnen, zu erleben.  Darum geht es in den Auferstehungsgeschichten, auch in der heutigen Stelle des Johannesevangeliums.  In einer Predigt zu dieser Begegnung des auferstandenen Christus mit den Jüngern sieht Axel Schmidt die Versuche des Petrus, den Tod Jesus sowie die eigene Verleugnung zu verdrängen:

Als er zu seinen Freunden sagt: ‚Ich gehe fischen‘, da brennt in ihm noch die Erinnerung an seine schmähliche Verleugnung. Was tun mit solchen unangenehmen Erinnerungen? Am besten verdrängen – durch handfeste Arbeit, durch Tun dessen, was man gewohnt ist, bei dem man nicht nachdenken muß.
Aber die Rechnung will nicht aufgehen: Nicht einmal die Fische tun, was sie sollen. Alles geht schief. Alles ist umsonst. … Petrus ist verzweifelt, traurig, beschämt. Er fühlt sich schmutzig, müde, überfordert, weiß nicht mehr weiter.^[1]

Was hilft, wenn man nicht mehr weiter weiß?  Das muss die Frage der Jünger und Jüngerinnen gewesen sein in dieser Zeit nach dem Tode Jesu, in dieser Zeit des Verlustes, die doch immer wieder zu einer Zeit der Begegnung wurde.  Heute haben wir wieder eine Begegnung, da steht ein Fremder am Ufer, er würde gerne etwas zu essen haben, aber die Jünger haben doch nichts.  Und dann fordert er sie dazu auf, die Netze wieder ins Wasser zu werfen, und plötzlich sind sie ganz voller Fische – 153 an der Zahl, eine große Menge, ein Überfluss.

Für Karyn Wiseman beschreibt Johannes bei dieser Stelle eine dunkle Nacht der Seele.  Mitten in dieser dunklen Nacht, mitten in der Trauer können die Jünger im Boot das Wort Jesu hören und akzeptieren, folgen.  Dadurch wird ihre Situation verwandelt.  In der Gegenwart des Herrn kann alles neu werden.^[2]  Durch diese Begegnung wird alles wieder anders.

Dabei geht es um Gnade, schreibt Karoline Lewis.  Gnade, die größer ist, als wir sie uns vorstellen können, Gnade die mehr ist, als wir sie berechnen können.  Auferstehung ist Überfluss, ist Fülle: die Begegnungen mit den Auferstandenen zeigen uns, was Gnade wirklich bedeutet:  “Ganz schön viele Fische, wenn man sie gar nicht erwartet – genau wie der Wein bei der Hochzeit von Kana.  Wenn die Hoffnung am Ende ist, wenn man sich fragt, was man tut, wenn man glaubt, dass es keine Zukunft gibt, wenn der Brunnen ausgetrocknet ist, wenn man an der Gnade zweifelt – da kommt der Überfluß.“^[3]  Da kommt einem der auferstandene Christus entgegen, und zeigt einem, was doch möglich ist, welches Licht in der Dunkelheit brennt, welche Kräfte man trotz allem noch hat.

Aber manchmal fühlt es sich gar nicht so an.  Welche Fülle können wir überhaupt erleben, wenn wir um einen lieben Menschen trauern, wenn wir durch den Job oder eine Krankheit oder einfach das Leben völlig ausgepowert sind, wenn wir nicht mehr können?  Karyn Wiseman schreibt:  „Viele in der Welt sind verzweifelt, fühlen sich verloren, alleine, vernachlässigt, ohne Hoffnung.  Viele fühlen sich abgewiesen, ausgewiesen, benachteiligt.  Viele sehen kein Licht und habe keine Lust auf die Morgendämmerung.“^[4]  Petrus, den Jüngern ging es wohl auch so.  Aber:  Auch wenn wir uns alleine glauben, ist Gott bei uns.  Auch wenn wir Jesus nicht erkennen, sollten wir daran denken, dass damals seine Freunde ihn nicht sofort erkannten.  Auch wenn wir Christus verleugnen, können wir uns damit trösten, dass Petrus eine neue Chance bekam, seine Liebe für Jesus, den Christus auszusprechen.^[5]

Wichtig ist für mich in dieser Geschichte, dass die Jünger nicht alleine sind.  Petrus geht mit anderen zurück an seine Arbeit, die Jünger sitzen zusammen im Boot, im Raum, sie sammeln sich gemeinsam um das Feuer.  Für die Theologin Margaret Adam ist die theologische Hoffnung in Freundschaft , in Gemeinschaft begründet – Freundschaft in Christus, die wir aber oft in Form von Freundschaft unter Menschen erleben.  Freundschaft ändert sich nicht, wenn alles dunkel wird, wenn unser Leben sich schlagartig verändert.  Freundschaft, Ehrlichkeit, Vertrauen können einen roten – einen goldenen – Faden bieten.  Wie können Christen von einem Leben nach dem irdischen Dasein sprechen, ohne Leid und Tod zu verniedlichen, zu verringern, zu verleugnen?  Wie können wir mit dem Tod, mit dem Leiden unserer lieben Menschen in Hoffnung umgehen?  Für Margaret Adam bietet Freundschaft, Gesellschaft, Gemeinschaft eine Antwort auf diese Fragen.^[6]  Denn Freundschaft gibt eine andere Perspektive, erlaubt eine andere Sichtweise, erinnert uns daran, dass wir nicht alleine sind.  Augustinus soll geschrieben haben:  „Nur auf dem Weg der Freundschaft kann man einen Menschen richtig erkennen.“^[7]  Aber vielleicht sollten wir sagen: Nur durch die Freundschaft erkennen wir wirklich, wo wir sind.  Und Augustinus schrieb auch:  “Wenn ein Mensch ohne Freunden da steht, erscheint nichts in der Welt im freundlich zu sein.”^[8]  Umgekehrt – wenn die Freunde da sind, ist die Welt auch freundlicher.

Nicht alleine gelassen zu sein.  Ich denke an die Familie in unserer Gemeinde, deren zwanzigjährigen Sohn kurz vor Ostern so plötzlich, unerwartet gestorben ist.  Und auch an eine ehemalige Studentin von mir und ihren Mann, die seit letzte Woche wissen, dass das Baby, das sie im Sommer erwarten, schwerkrank ist und nach der Geburt nur ein paar Stunden höchstens ein paar Tage leben wird.  Ich bin bewegt und zutiefst beeindruckt davon, mit welcher Ehrlichkeit, Tiefgefühl und Mut sie mit dieser schweren, traurigen Nachricht, mit dieser neuen Zukunft umgehen.  Besonders wichtig ist die Erfahrung, vom Freundeskreis und Familie unterstützt zu werden, schreiben sie:  „Ohne Euch würden wir gar nicht so gut mit der Situation umgehen können.“  Auch eine Erfahrung der Gnade.  Diese Mut komme vom Heiligen Geist, schrieb sie mir gestern abend.  Mag es auch anderen in dunklen Zeiten so gehen, dass sie sich von den Begegnungen mit anderen unterstützt und getragen wissen, dass sie dadurch die Liebe Christi erfahren.

Der Glaube ist kein Polster, das uns vor Verletzungen schützt. Der Glaube ist die Kraft, Verletzungen zu ertragen, um der Wahrhaftigkeit willen.^[9]

Oder einfach:  Der Glaube ist die Kraft, Verletzungen zu ertragen.  Die Kraft, neues zu wagen.  Mut, sich dafür zu öffnen.  Glaube, Gnade, Auferstehung.  Die Begegnung mit Christus, auch durch andere Menschen, in Freundschaft, in Vertrauen, in Hoffnung.

 

Herr,
sprich dein ewiges Wort in mich
und lass es mich hören.

Herr,
strahle dein Licht in mich
und lass es mich schauen.

Herr,
drücke dein Bild in mich
und lass es mich bewahren.

Herr,
wirke dein Werk in mir
und lass es mich stets
von Neuem empfangen.^[10]

                                                Amen

[1]  Predigt 2007:  http://www.k-l-j.de/predigt_c_os_03.htm.

[2]  http://www.onscripture.com/finding-light-dark-hope-inside-desperate-discourse#sthash.iJqFkdKF.dpuf.

[3]   http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4583.

[4]  http://www.onscripture.com/finding-light-dark-hope-inside-desperate-discourse#sthash.9PT65kTn.dpuf.

[5]  Ibid.

[6]   Margaret Adam, Our Only Hope: More than we can ask or imagine (Pickwick: Eugene Oregon 2013), 222.

[7]   http://gutezitate.com.

[8]   Augustinus, Brief 130:2.4.

[9]   Te Deum, 16. April 2013.

[10]   Aus dem Kloster Rheinau (14. Jh.), Te Deum, 16. April 2016.

Easter 2 (C) – 3 April 2016

sermon preached at St Margaret’s Newlands

Acts 5:27-32
Revelation 1: 4-8
John 20: 19-31

Thomas: Doubting Thomas.  There is a strange appropriateness about my preaching this Sunday because this past year I have been co-editing a volume of essays on Doubting Christianity: The Church and Doubt.  The essays explore the way in which down the centuries people have asked questions about their faith, about the church, about the trappings of religion, and the ways in which theology and practice have been shaped by people’s doubts.  It has been a fascinating project, not least because it offers a reminder that people have always doubted.  Doubt is certainly not a modern invention.  Indeed, I think you can probably make a case that doubt is intrinsic to faith.

For who has not at some point asked for proof, for a direct experience:  “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”  When Jesus appears, Thomas gets his wish – or does he?  The text is unclear about whether he does touch Christ before he confesses his faith in him. Either way, he then seems to be reprimanded:  “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  Is that us: are we those who believe even though we have not seen?  This seems to be the implication, for John is writing for a generation who will not have seen Jesus.  And yet: John finishes this passage with a note about the point of writing the gospel:  these things, he says, “are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”  We do not perhaps encounter Christ directly, but we are given things that help us too to see, help us too to experience the presence of Christ with us, in our lives.

One of the essays in Doubting Christianity explores a commentary on the story of Doubting Thomas by a seventeenth century author, Nicholas Bownde.  Bownde compares the experience of faith to the experience of a pregnant mother:

For as the woman that is quickened with child, and feels it stir in her body, though she does not always feel it stir in the same way; and sometimes not at all, and sometimes more weakly then before: yet she assures herself, that the child is living, because she has felt it stir before, & so hopes that she shall do again. So when Christ is formed in us first of all, as the Apostle speaks, we have the feeling of him stirring and moving in our hearts by his holy Spirit, dwelling in us: which lively motions, though we do not feel them moving in us afterwards strongly, or at all; yet we do not doubt that Christ dwells in our hearts by faith still, and hope to feel it as sensibly again in time, as we have done.[1]

Now I am aware that this could be a horribly difficult metaphor for the death of faith for anyone who has lost a child in a later stage of pregnancy.  But when all goes well, the image of feeling the child’s movement and this being the basis for the hope that the child is alive and developing is an amazing metaphor for faith.  It reminds me of a man I prepared for confirmation some years ago, who spoke of his stepfather as the inspiration for his conversion:  “He goes to church Sunday by Sunday, always hoping that he will experience something.”  In that hope was the experience of faith for that man’s stepson.  Perhaps the step-father had never felt the quickening of faith and yet he hoped – and in hoping he believed.

Miguel de Unamuno has said:  “Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.”[2]  We might be struck by the way in which Thomas’s doubts end in a very powerful profession of faith.  Bishop Gregor pointed out to be that Thomas is not the only New Testament figure who has doubts.  Mary is not at all sure how to take her son’s actions; indeed there is an Orthodox tradition which has her saying toe the angel at the Annunciation “You are trying to deceive me.  How can this be?”  And questions about faith, about how we can be sure, resonate through the Christian tradition.  Several of the Reformers, including Martin Luther and John Knox, found themselves counselling people who were racked by doubts: “your troubles are the infallible signs of your election” wrote Knox to Elisabeth Bowes, his future mother-in-law.[3]  Her doubts, thought Knox, showed that she was aware of missing something, showed her longing to know God – and thus said something about God’s longing for her.  Doubts are part of the way that we express our searching, our need for God, our longing for God to reach out to us, to give us the experience of his presence.

For David Lose, a key aspect of the account of Doubting Thomas is that Thomas has an opportunity to voice his doubt.  For, he writes:

sometimes [we might even say often] faith is like that – it needs the freedom of questions and doubt to really spring forth and take hold. Otherwise, faith might simply be confused with a repetition of creedal formulas, or giving your verbal consent to the faith statements of others. But true, vigorous, vibrant faith comes, I think, from the freedom to question, wonder, and doubt.[4]

When I lived in Essen I worshipped at the Old Catholic Church.  For some years our parish priest organised a monthly Thomasmesse – Thomas mass – a Eucharist for “searchers, doubters and other good Christians.”[5]  Instead of a sermon, a Thomas mass has what is called an “open phase”, with creative activities in different spaces in the church, encouraging people to take time to think and ponder, to pray, to discuss.  Space to express and share doubts, space to talk together about the journey of faith which leads us in and out of doubt.  Richard Holloway has said:  “The opposite of faith, is not doubt, it is certainty.”[6]  Others have said, the opposite of faith is not doubt; it is fear.  Doubt can be the space in which faith grows.  The expression of doubt can take us to believing in ways that we did not know could be possible.  And so let us give ourselves space to doubt, And in doing so, let us open ourselves to, and pray for, the presence of Christ in our lives.

Risen Christ,
whose absence leaves us in despair,
but whose presence is overwhelming:
breathe on us with your abundant life;
that where we cannot see
we may have courage to believe
that we may be raised with you.
Amen.[7]

[1]     Cited according to Patrick S. McGhee, “Unbelief, the Senses and the Body in Nicholas Bownde’s The vnbeleefe of S. Thomas (1608),” in Frances Andrews, Charlotte Methuen and Andrew Spicer (eds), Doubting Christianity: the Church and Doubt (CUP, forthcoming 2016), 272 [modernised spelling].

[2]     http://www.tentmaker.org/Quotes/faithquotes.htm.

[3]     Cited according to Rosalind K. Marshall, John Knox (Birlinn 2010).

[4]     http://www.davidlose.net/2016/03/easter-2-c-blessed-doubt/.

[5]     See http://www.thomasmesse.org/.

[6]     Cited by Bryan Appleyard:  http://bryanappleyard.com/the-opposite-of-faith-is-not-doubt-it-is-certainty-2/.

[7]     Janet Morley, All Desires Known (SPCK ³2005), 11 (text slightly amended, following that used in the Australian Prayer Book).