Homily for the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy

First Sunday of Lent 2014 – Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London W1

At first sight it looks strange that, just as we begin to keep Lent, we mark its first Sunday with a celebration. The Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy marks the decision of the Synod of Constantinople in 842 that ended once and for all the Iconoclast Controversy that had disturbed the peace and unity of the Eastern Church of the Roman Empire for a hundred years. This controversy was not just a question of whether sacred images were permissible in Church, but of the very nature of how you believe in Christ and what you believe Him to be.

For instance, you will see pictures of old Byzantine churches where, in place of the image you expect in the apse of the Mother of God bearing Our Lord, the Iconoclasts placed instead the plain representation of the Cross; it bears no figure of the Crucified Lord. There are some who say that the banishing of wall-images and icons from churches took the ban on “graven images” in the Ten Commandments in the Book of Exodus to extreme. Others say that it was a reaction to the rise of Islam, for Muslims misunderstood that the Christian veneration of images is not the worship of them, but worship of the inexpressible Divine Mystery that they depict and draw us into; thus, it is said, Iconoclast Christians were striving for it to be clear that they were not idolatrous pagans to be converted to Islam but the People of the Book who worship the God of Abraham alone. Still others liken this controversy to the Latin Church’s “Reformation”-“Counter-Reformation” struggle, the defining moment for Byzantine Christianity: one side saying that God and the glory of His saints cannot be portrayed in man-made pictures lest it debase Him to the worldly order of human sinfulness – a cutting down of the Kingdom of heaven to man’s size; while the other was saying that if you exclude images of Christ, the Mother of God, the mysteries of salvation and of the glorified saints, you are denying the truth of the incarnation itself and the sheer physicality of God’s constant dealings with humanity in the world. If so, you are effectively saying that God cannot take form in the created world, He cannot be viewed as man, and He cannot be shown in His glory and in His saints. You are saying that the created world - and humanity within it - does not bear what the Scriptures and the Church return to time again: that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, that Christ, true God and true Man, is the Image of the unseen God, that the Church which is His Body is the fullness of Him who fills the universe, and that the whole of humanity – together and as individuals – bears the very image of God. For Christianity is not just a matter of what is written in the Book, or believed in the heart and mind, or acted out in discipleship and the rites of worship. It is about the union of God and humanity, God become man, and Man-in-Christ, full of grace and truth, endowed with glory, making humanity one with the very life of God Himself.

In the argument between emperors, bishops, monks, armies and faithful that had lasted for decades, the Seventh Ecumenical Council settled it, the state power intervened, images were banished from churches, orthodox bishops deposed, and clergy exiled and persecuted, until the Constantinople Synod in February 842  confronted the stark choice between all or nothing – is the Church orthodox or heretical? Does it believe in the Incarnation of God in Man or not? Does Christ fill His material creation and is His glory to be seen and shown in it, or not? Do we behold Emmanuel, God among us, or do we fail to contemplate the mystery that seeks to draw us in, here in our midst?  Resoundingly the Synod chose orthodox Christian faith. The first session closed with a triumphant procession, in which the images were restored to the Great Church, Hagia Sophia, the true faith was articulated and false belief named and expressly rejected. From that day, the First Sunday of Lent recalls us not to an historical event 1300 years ago, but to the abiding, annual need each Lent to return to God, not just from our sins but also from our wanderings, constantly back to the Truth, the reality of who Christ is, why He came and how He comes to us still.

The reading from the Apostle (Hebrews 11) reminds us that keeping faith with Christ has been costly, from the times of the Scriptures and of St John the Baptist into the present day. We see it especially at the moment in Syria and Nigeria in the martyrdom and persecution of clergy and lay people, and the kidnap of bishops, priests and religious sisters. We see it in the recently attempted suppression of this Greek-Catholic Church by the last government in Ukraine. We see it in the massive scattering of Christian communities dating from the time of Christ, out of the Middle Eastern cradle of the Church as refugees to the four corners of the globe. Thus the Church today follows in the footsteps of the Master and those who have gone before us. The Apostle therefore calls Him our pioneer who perfects our faith the more we follow along the narrow path He trod; and he calls those who have taken it ahead of us our witnesses. “Witness” is what martyr means. And it is why we keep the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy today. When we look at the images, the icons, it is not we who are looking at them, witnessing their existence, or significance, or presence, but they who are looking at us, witnessing us, representing the significance and the presence of Christ.

For the Iconostasis before us is not a shield to restrict our view of the Holy Mysteries, but the frontier of paradise from which the Lord on His Throne and His saints in glory gaze out upon us. What is in their gaze? We can readily imagine they see sin and imperfection. But they also see those whom God loves, redeems and saves. They see our repentance and our adoration and our own love, encouraging it, deepening it with their prayers, because – by the mercy of God working in us – it proceeds from honesty, it is genuine, “coming out of hiding”, realistic about how things are with God, yet also things about us longing to be what they should become. Thus the Lord and His saints who pray for us see the Truth at work within us – the truth about Christ as God made man Whose image is still conforming humanity to Him.

But the truth about us is also that the more this image of God within us looks out to meet the gaze of Christ, the more we would deform, disfigure it;  mask it and encrust it; and prefer that it looked away from the glory.

All during the week, we have seen images of human beings who cannot tell the truth – not just leaders corrupted by power and greed, but other men of violence hiding their faces, concealing their true identity, bearing false witness, wearing the uniforms of others to sow discontent and mistrust, and blaming their wrongful deeds on the innocent. These are people who cannot take the stare of God. They are naked in the Garden of Eden and it is shame that makes them clothe themselves over. Thus do they cover up the image of God within them, because it shines too beautiful to show, when dishonesty is required for the deeds of darkness. But in return, as G. K. Chesterton put it, “God abides in a terrible patience, unangered, unworn.”  God in Christ looks out with His saints on the sheer Truth and untruth of it all with love. So great is their glory that they are undisturbed in peace. The image of Him, the vision of Him, moves us to repentance, not so much out of our sense of remorse at our sins as out of our picking up on His longing for the same glory as His to be ours. St Philip says to us, “Come and see”. We too are intrigued, and we see the Lord; we open our hearts and mouths to confess Him Son of God and our King. He tells us we will see greater things and heaven opened before us.

 

So it was for the Fathers of the Synod in February 842. So it is for us this Sunday of Orthodoxy’s Triumph a millennium and centuries later. We have beheld the Truth about God and the truth about ourselves. As the Troparion we have sung today puts it,

“We bow before Your most pure image, O kind Lord and beg pardon for our sins, O Christ our God…. You… free Your handiwork from enslavement to the enemy … By coming to save the world, our Saviour, You filled all things with joy.

So let it be that a world that cannot bear the truth about itself, and the people that hide in untruth and cowardly darkness because they cannot bear Christ’s glory to show them in its light, will likewise come out, come and see, see greater things, behold heaven opened and stand in the gaze of Christ pouring glory into his saints, filling the space where sin is washed away with nothing but joy.

 

 

Address to Churches Together in Mayfair: at Byzantine Vespers in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2014

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

23 January 2014

Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London

Address to Churches Together in Mayfair

Exodus 19. 3-8

We love to describe ourselves as what the Lord meant us to be for him, as his own people – a Kingdom of priests, a holy nation. But we are less keen on the other side of the covenant we entered, when we said, “Whatever the Lord has said, we will do”.

What did the Lord say? On the night before he died, he said, “Father, as you and I are one, may they all be one, so that the world may believe it was you who sent me.” Well, he said it; and we say we will do it.

The trouble is that we have been saying we will do it for hundreds of years. What we have meant is that we will bring about unity when other people come round to our ways, and when we can prevail as they submit. Each of us belongs to a Church body that we think is, in some ways, the right one; each of us thinks our take on the Truth is truer, at least for us and our way of thinking; each one of us thinks our Church body is better organised for the task in hand, or is a more faithful embodiment of the Gospel.  Yes; we must be faithful to the vision we have each been given and the call that each Church body has received. But it is not the end of the story for any of us. The principle and integrity, to which we cleave and which appear to keep us divided now, should be seen only in the light of the unity of the Church from which all derives and to which all returns. Thus the times when a Church exhorted others to give in, and to come round to its position ought to be long gone (though some people still try it on). Apart from anything else, it is futile. For example, we live in an age where people are loyal to the banks, the shops, the TV stations and the clothing brands they know; but they feel quite at liberty to change, and not to be defined by anyone other than what they choose. The more we try to force an identity on people, the more people will suit themselves, especially if it is over against others. People will feel they can take this from here and that from there, making up a Church to their taste, and retuning Gospel message only to the frequency they want to hear. So, forcing an identity on a Church body that is not natural to it would undermine what each of us, in our different Church bodies, is witnessing to as the Truth that we possess: that there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father, and one Church in the life of the Spirit. We are right, each of us, to say we have the Truth and that we are the true Church – but only if we remember that this will only make complete sense when we are utterly united and can be seen to be at one. In the meantime, to be partisan and competitive about our Church is not to be faithful to the integrity of the faith that we have received and follow in conscience, but to make it just one more competing choice among many.

The famous 1910 Edinburgh Mission Conference - the start of the modern ecumenical movement - was a concerted effort to end rivalry between European and North American Churches in world missionary endeavours. It had been realised that Churches’ self-interest was an obstacle to presenting the Gospel. The penny had dropped – the Churches were not one, but many: and people who had begun to listen about Christ would hear no more, because the noisy messages of a Presbyterian Christ, a Lutheran Christ, a Catholic Christ were unbelievable.

When Pope Benedict came to visit us three and a half years ago, he reminded us in the magnificent Anglican Evensong in the Abbey that, however far we have come in love and friendship, however closely we work together on addressing the ills and injustices of the world side by side, however great our solidarity in spirit is, nonetheless our disunity in living together the Church’s and sharing in the risen Christ’s own Body at worship means that, to the world, we fail to give a convincing account of the hope that lies within us.

Yesterday, Pope Francis said much the same thing, but in his usual direct way.  He said,

It is good to recognise the grace with which God blesses us and, moreover, to find in other Christians something which we need, something we can receive as a gift from our brothers and sisters. The Canadian group which has prepared this Prayer Week has not invited the communities to think about what they might give to their Christian neighbours, but rather … to understand what all communities can receive from time to time from the others. This requires something more. It requires humility, reflection and continual conversion. Let us follow this path, praying for Christian unity and an end to this scandal.

106 years ago in 1908, the Anglican rector of Moreton-in-Marsh, Spencer Jones, and a Roman Catholic Franciscan friar in New York, Paul Wattson, after six years of correspondence, became so thoroughly convinced in their own minds of the scandal of disunity that they set up a Church Unity Octave - a whole week of prayer from 18 to 25 January. The Anglican believed that his Church, even though it was a towering presence in English Church and Society as a whole, was nonetheless cut off from the universal Church of which it saw itself as a part. He was penetratingly clear of the need for the Church of England and the Catholic Church to reunite, not to change the Church of England into something it was not, but so that together - and in the harness of the same faith - they could strengthen each other’s proclamation of the Gospel - and be believed. At the same time, the Catholic in New York realised that his Roman Catholic Church, for all that he saw it to be possessed of everything needed for the Church to be fully the Church of Jesus Christ, is nonetheless lacking in something: those who do not belong to it! He saw too that it lacked the many blessings in faith and holiness that had clearly been bestowed on others in abundance. Surely God did not give spiritual treasure to his People, so that only some could benefit to the exclusion of others? He longed for unity and to receive and grow through the same holy gifts. By the same token, he longed for other Christians to see what he loved in the Catholic Church and come to love it as a gift for them to long for too. But he refused to pray against other Churches, or their beliefs. He and his English Anglican friend desired the Church and the Christians who belong to it to be drawn together in one Church.

Twenty five years later, a French priest, the beloved Paul Couturier, was taken up with the same idea. But he saw that Christian Unity, and the sharing of God’s spiritual riches that we have received while we are apart, can never be enjoyed by offloading them onto others unbidden, by imposing them because we think we know better or think we ARE better, teaching other people what we think they need to learn. No; in the divided Church as it is in the world, we can only share in these divine gifts, by asking to receive them, not as little commodities to suit our individual tastes, but as part of what make the whole Church universal. Couturier had this idea that we could take on each other’s gifts of God’s blessings and then outdo each other in growing in them. We could thus vie with each other in advancing in holiness, drawing closer to Christ from where we started out in isolation, until we were united in him and found ourselves united to each other. Thus he thought our parallel lives would converge as we grew in love, and faith and spiritual knowledge.

Nevertheless, here we are, 106 years after Spencer Jones and Paul Wattson first became impatient, still disunited. Here we are, a Kingdom of priests, saying we will do what the Lord says, but not obeying his prayer - addressed as much to us as to his Father – that we be one, so that the world might believe. Here we are finding ever new reasons to back up our separations and to continue to go on in our preferable own way. As Pope Francis says, it is a scandal. And as the world tells us, with its deeply unanswered questioning, we are unconvincing.

Yet to lose heart after all these years of prayer together is to forget what we have seen. The Lord reminds is of “how I carried you away on eagles’ wings and brought you to me”. We have come so far.

We understand that we do not need all to be the same, in order to be Christian. The Pope, like his predecessors, reminds us that other Christians teach us the things we still need. We can attend each other’s worship and combine our efforts to meet the needs of the world. We draw on each others’ traditions and are constantly enriched as we do so. This service tonight is in its way a small miracle. The Ukrainian Church this week is facing a deep crisis in the country that is its homeland; nonetheless it desires to play its part as an integral part of the Christian Church here in England. It brings with it the tradition of ancient Christian Byzantium, in its fusion of monastic psalms and hymns, with the drama of the light, the incense and the icons that are at the heart of Eastern Christian devotion to our Lord, as somehow we pass into the courts of heaven as we worship in the Church below. (Hymns were not only invented in recent English history - tonight’s come from the first millennium!) And after Vespers there will be more recent Christmas and Epiphany carols from Ukraine. Thus English-language Christianity, the liturgy of the Christian Roman emperors and the music of Ukrainians all come together, as do we, joined by beauty in worship and hope.

In this giving and receiving, it is as though there is something in our Christianity - when it is truly the faith of Christ - that is restless for as long as it is not the faith that can be shared with and embraced by all who love and follow Jesus our Lord. We have been learning for years, almost without noticing, to go beyond ourselves, so as to find how to be more truly the Church that is Universal, with the whole faith, in the whole Christ, for the whole of humanity. We have all looked at our Churches and asked ourselves, “Can we imagine what more can be added, what new space can be opened up in our Church, so that it can also be the home that others can recognise as their own?” All of our Churches have acted on this questioning in the past, and it has made us what we are today. For instance, the Catholic Church has learned not to be a monolithic institution but a communion of Churches, movements, and new ideas that can embrace people in the way that God has called them to hear his gospel.  We have our parishes, priest, bishops, dioceses and religious orders, but we also have our new lay-led renewal and evangelical mission movements, offering and exploring new ways of being the Church for England’s people.

The Catholic Church does not wish simply to be a Roman Catholic denomination, but to be more and more like the universal Church, honouring and embracing the Church of others on their own terms but in complete communion of united life and faith. I like to hope that the Ordinariate, for instance, will one day come to be seen as a way for the Catholic Church to embrace a religious tradition from which it was once estranged and live out in a prophetic way that Anglicans and Catholics can live as one in communion, united not absorbed, not amalgamated and assimilated, but in the lively, diverse, abundant communion of all the People of God in the one Body of Christ His Son. There is great ecumenical potential to be tapped and it should bring us close in respect, understanding and conscientious faith.

Likewise the Salvation Army, which every Christian in this land loves and rejoices in, represents a movement that was organised to meet the needs of the poor and destitute, and to bring them to the love of Christ on his Cross, in a way that no other Church could at the time. It still meets those that not all of us can. We have all gained so much from the gift of confidence in each other and trust from God that means we can do this work alongside each other, with mutual encouragement and mutual reliance. The Church of England, too, with its cultural-spiritual heritage, its liturgical and musical tradition, as well as its pastoral mission visible and active into every corner of the country, is a resource for the whole Church that is never static. For instance, it has sought to be imaginative in fresh expressions of Christianity that can meet the religious awareness of contemporary people but still take root in the wider Church. Even the Grosvenor Chapel began as a “fresh expression,” addressing unmet needs, and to this day creating distinctive Christian community. From all this, in a bewildering world of beliefs to choose, both sacred and secular, we learn that none of us can make it separately. We rely on each other, not only for aid and support, but for learning more about how Christ’s is the pattern we live as His Body, the pattern for the whole of humanity that stands in His image.

Thus the prayers of 106 weeks of prayer have been richly answered. The miracle of unity, when it is achieved will be God’s. We can take down our sinful man-made barriers and persist on the journey whose destination was determined at the outset. We should not fail to see how the Lord has taught us to turn to each other in our need to learn, and moreover planted that seed of imagination of how it could be - what it would be like - if we in our currently separate Churches could live as one, solid Church, a rock that the world could rely on and believe when they see it.

Long divisions that plague the Church: Article about Orthodox-Catholic unity in The Tablet

In 1923, a schoolteacher priest of Lyon started devoting his spare time to helping the 10,000 refugees from Bolshevism camped and lodged around the city and its suburbs. It was his first encounter with a Christianity that was not Roman Catholic. Thus he learned the friendship of receiving as well as giving, finding great respect for the Orthodox clergy and people in their moment of destitution, as his heart opened to their faith and the beauty of their worship. He was astonished to find Catholics from the old Russian Empire who were not Latins, but Eastern Christians who maintained their unity with the Bishop of Rome with roots to before the Great Schism. Over the next decade, Paul Couturier became convinced of the need for Christian unity, and in 1935 he took hold of the Catholic Church Unity Octave, founded in 1908, and developed it into a “Universal Week of Prayer for the Unity of Christians in the charity and truth of Christ”. Inspired by the holiness of the Orthodox, beyond this world he imagined an “invisible monastery”, in which all could unite in prayer to God in Heaven, in the hope of seeing the same union realised in the Church here. He took for his motto the saying of Metropolitan Platon Gorodetsky of Kiev: “The walls of separation do not rise as far as Heaven.”

In answer to 105 Weeks of Prayer so far, considerable grace has been bestowed. All along, the 1,000-year separation between Christians of East and West has spurred us to overcome sinful division, and yet seek unity with integrity, respecting the faith that each professes. Thus the World Council of Churches, partly founded to promote reconciliation for all humanity after the degradation of the Second World War, enjoys the full membership of the Orthodox Church alongside the Churches that developed after the Western Reformation. The World Council and the Catholic Church are joint members of the even older Commission on Faith and Order, one of whose tasks is the organisation of each year’s Week of Prayer. For 50 years, the great families of Churches have undertaken ­searching theological dialogues, even if new challenges have been emerging. These have gone far towards profound mutual awareness of our belief and teaching, repeatedly consigning estrangement and rivalry to the past.

The same desire for unity, something more than ecumenism, is replicated in thousands of concrete examples of our Churches’ shared projects and resources in the service of the Kingdom in wider society, spiritual life in common through prayer, pilgrimage and study, and proclamation alongside each other of the same Christ before the world. Over the last year, it has been remarkable to see Christians of all kinds take Pope Francis to their hearts and sustain him with their prayers. It has been especially striking to hear Orthodox clergy and people observe how in contemporary society, with its secularising pressures and the globalisation that has sent the West east and the East west, our various Catholic and Orthodox Churches live beside each other, and how we need to rely on each other more and more. In this country, for instance, the steady development of English-speaking Orthodox Churches, together with the considerable influx of Eastern Christians from Russia, Ukraine and Romania, means that local Orthodox and Catholic priests are getting to know each other better, share similar concerns on family life, teach Christian ­discipleship in the Church from a similar ­outlook on the world, and seek to work more closely together, for instance, on the education of children, church schools, chaplaincy in ­hospitals and prison, and the education and formation of adults and priests. Only last week, Pope Francis gave his blessing to the Catholic Committee for Cultural Collaboration between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, which supports Orthodox laypeople and clergy studying in Catholic academic institutions. In its fourth year, the Centre for Eastern Christianity at Heythrop is a significant means for just such encounters for mutual learning here in England.

During Pope Benedict’s pontificate, the Moscow patriarchate picked up on his call for a New Evangelisation and pledged itself to an alliance with the Roman Catholic Church in what it called the struggle for the soul of Old Europe. The installation of Pope Francis was attended by many Orthodox representatives, led for the first time by the Ecumenical ­Patriarch, Bartholomew of Constantinople, whom he addressed as “my brother Andrew”. Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, the head of the department for external affairs of the Moscow patriarchate, has since returned to Rome to speak at a conference jointly arranged with the Pontifical Council for the Family. In the last few weeks, when asked about the prospects for a papal visit to Russia, he confirmed that the problems first to be resolved are not dogmatic, but rather ones which, he says, need clarification through dialogue.

But the way ahead is not all clear. Patriarch Bartholomew has just convoked the heads of the Orthodox Churches to discuss plans for the next preparatory commission ahead of the forth­coming Pan-Orthodox Synod scheduled for 2015. Bartholomew is concerned that in the present world the Orthodox Church as a whole needs to work more closely together and discuss how, beyond their respective homelands, the different Orthodox Churches relate to the other in the diaspora, as well as to the other Christian Churches. The invitation came at the same time as Moscow released its long-awaited position statement on the Ravenna document from the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches in 2006. This ­examined the role of primacy in the universal Church and thus the role of the Roman papacy. It looked behind the theories ­developed over 1,000 years of separate ­development, in search of how it functioned historically in the first 1,000 years of ­communion. Yet the modern Russian Church’s memory post-dates this shared experience and its own perspective is of “home rule” from Moscow. Thus the statement sees the universal Church as a communion of self-governing Churches, in which the Bishop of Rome possesses no overall jurisdiction but simply a primacy of honour. The statement has won strongly worded ripostes from the ecumenical ­patriarchate, identifying an exclusive ­nationalism and self-marginalisation on Moscow’s part that has no place in Orthodoxy. As one senior Orthodox ecumenist has observed, “Before we can talk to you Catholics about union again, we Orthodox need to come to agreement among ourselves.”

But the Russian Orthodox Church – by far the largest – sees itself as the natural leader in Orthodoxy and thus, for all practical purposes, the crucial interlocutor with the Catholic Church as its peer. It sees a contrast between successive Popes’ call for ­“communion, not jurisdiction” and how the Eastern Catholic Churches are perceived to be managed by a department of the Latin Roman pontiff’s Curia. Like many Orthodox, it is looking to see if Pope Francis’ curial reform will alter the role of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches in those Churches’ ­governance and relationship with the Bishop of Rome. Will they be self-ruling like Moscow? Could there be synodality between pope and patriarchs?

At the same time, Moscow’s self-understanding as the leader of all the Eastern Christians in its region – including the Belarussians and the Ukrainians – makes for an uneasy relationship with the reality of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Persecuted by Stalin and forced to conform to the Russian Church or go underground for four decades, it is once more threatened with legal deregistration, amid the Ukrainian Government’s difficulties with a substantial yet peaceful pro-Western protest movement that it falsely links to the Greek-Catholic bishops. At the same time, the Moscow Patriarchate stresses that the alliance it desires with the papacy is with a firmly Roman Catholic Church.

With so many considerations and principles for all sides at play, the unity we pray for is not going to come easily. But the desire for Catholic-Orthodox communion is perhaps stronger than ever and in May it will take Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew to pray for it with all their heart and strength in Jerusalem.

Mark Woodruff,
The Tablet, 18 January 2014

Nativity Homily for the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedal English Divine Liturgy, 11 January 2014

Nativity of Our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ

Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family of London

Sunday after Nativity, 11 January 2014
 

A few days before Christmas I visited the wonderful German Christmas Fair on the South Bank. With all its bright stalls, I hoped to be able to buy some presents at the last minute. My eye was caught by some pottery, unmistakably Palestinian. The stallholder told me it was from East Jerusalem and there were the familiar designs of fruit and flowers, loaves and fishes, birds and deer, and intricate, geometric patterns. Soon the seller and I got to talking. I told him that for a year I had worked in East Jerusalem; he knew the very house where I had lived. I was a Christian and he a Muslim. We commiserated over the plight of the Palestinian people, Christian and Muslim alike, and the peace that eludes both Arab and Jew in the Holy Land. He told me that he hated those who terrorise and kill in the name of Islam, since its name implies peace; and thus he recalled that in his religion there is supposed to be respect for Jews and Christians. “We are all the children of Abraham,” he told me, “and we share the same faith in one God. There should be no difference between us. In fact, there is no difference between us. Between the Christians and the Muslims there is only one, tiny difference: Jesus and who he was.”
 

But “Jesus and who He was” makes all the difference. We are not talking about a prophet from long ago. We are talking about Jesus and who He IS. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the apostle begins by making it clear that, while God spoke to us in the past through prophets, His last word is not through, but in, His Son. Jesus is not a prophet of Islam, later to be superseded by Mohammed. Even out of a well-meaning desire to be respectful towards the beliefs of our Muslim fellow-citizens and friends, we Christians must at all costs and in honest charity avoid disrespecting our own and referring to the great spiritual leader who was the founder of Islam as “the Prophet”, lest it be taken as our recognition that Jesus was but one prophet in a line completed with Mohammed. He is not our prophet, nor is he God’s last word to us. God’s last word became incarnate, and what used to be spoken to us in prophet’s words is now embodied in a human person whose followers have always recognised as being the Son of God.
 

Saying that Jesus is the Son of God does not mean that He is lower down than the Father, a little less of God than God. It means that He shares the same nature as the Father and comes from nowhere else but Him. A human son is not less of a human being than his father, but shares one and the same nature. Thus we describe someone who has grown up to be worthy of his parents as “a true son of his father”. By analogy, we likewise recognise in Jesus the Father, whose life, nature and glory He reflects and shares as the Son. The beloved, late Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Michael Ramsey, used to put it the other way round, “In God the Father, there is no unChristlikeness at all.” This is no mere poetic imagery. From the Church’s earliest moments, insisting on the title, “Son of God”, for Christ Jesus alone was costly and hard won. Prior to the birth of Jesus, the first of the Roman Emperors, Octavian Augustus, was hailed as Divi Filius, the son adopted by the deified Julius Caesar. He was praised as the son of a god for single-handedly bringing peace, order and prosperity to a once divided empire. You can see the inscriptions to this day in Rome. But to the Christians, the only bringer of lasting peace, peace on earth and peace between God and humanity, the only true Son of God, is Jesus. Thus with the Roman emperors began the long history of persecution of Christians for not worshipping human rulers as if they were above the earth and heaven that has lasted to this day.
 

Worshipping Christ as Son of God alone remains controversial. The week running up to Christmas I received an email from the Melkite Greek-Catholic Patriarchate in Antioch documenting the 88 church buildings and charitable institutions of all denominations that had been attacked, damaged or destroyed. On Christmas Eve came news of three more. This is to say nothing of the harrowing of thousands of Christians far from home, including two archbishops from Aleppo, an entire convent of nuns from the city of Malloula where the language of Christ himself, Aramaic had been spoken to this day, and the clergy and young people whose lives have been claimed from them for the sake of simply following and putting their trust in the Son of God.
 

Out into the cold winter, there are those who are bent on evicting Christianity from the land which cradled it. The Melkite patriarch Gregorius often says that while the Son of God was cradled in Bethlehem, it was in Syria that his Body the Church was cradled. It was here that Christianity was truly brought to birth, for it was in Syria that we were first called Christians for loving Christ, for loving each other and for loving all in His Name. And two thousand years after the Nativity of the Son of God in the nature of human beings remains a scandal. It is so incomprehensible that to some it is unthinkable and unacceptable. It is so astonishing that it has to be taken down. That God should become human to be part of us, so that we can become part of him, is something so beautiful that humanity cannot bear to behold it without defacing it. The pain of looking on it is exquisite, for the meaning of the Son of God made Son of Man is that Love, which will never depart from us, cannot be faced unless we recognise that He has come not in force but to embrace us in living with Him the very life of God, able no longer to avoid God but to call on Him as Father, truly His sons and daughters.
 

It is not a question of following a prophet, or a great spiritual teacher, or a leader who founded a great historic faith. The passage of time has not changed the fact that something happened that turned nature inside out and altered everything about its relationship with its Creator. We Christians see it as nothing short of miraculous that a human child was born to us and that he is Son of God. The Christian does not explain this away as myth or even magic. For the miracle of God is not to work against nature or confront it, but to take it on and work through it. Last year, the great broadcaster Melvyn Bragg led a radio discussion on the arguments in the early Church about “Jesus and who He is”, loosely describing Him as “half God and half man”. But if He is half God, He only gets us halfway to God. If He is half man, He only gets God halfway to us. This is a mere hero, not a Saviour. This is what a Roman emperor wanted to be, a superman, and everything he thus could never be – never fully the Son of heaven, because he never came from heaven to become fully a son of the children of men.
 

A few years ago one Christmas morning I went privately to a packed, small Catholic church in south London. There was no ceremony and no organ to accompany our carols. All the parish’s energy had evidently gone into making special the masses of Christmas Eve and I was fretting that the many visitors would be left with a rather flat impression of our Christmas joy. That was until I heard the sermon, which went as follows.

Yesterday evening for the Vigil Mass, we asked the children to bring their favourite toy animal – not the one they didn’t want any more, but their favourite – and place it in the Crib through Christmastide alongside the shepherd’s sheep, the inkeeper’s ox, St Joseph’s donkey and the Wise Men’s camel. It was beautiful to see the children so devout as they lovingly put their cherished teddies, My Little Ponies, baby hippos and elephants, giraffes and birds and squirrels into the Crib. All through Christmas, those children’s hearts will be adoring our Lord too. It was beautiful Mass and I though all had gone really well until afterwards an older parishioner told me off on the way out. “I can just understand toy bears and farm animals, father. But the rest made a mockery of Christmas. There is no place for a lobster in the Crib.” I replied, “I know. It’s as crazy to put a toy lobster in a Crib as it is for God to put His Son in a human being. But He did.”

God may have begun to speak to us in the past in stories and signs, in prophets and heroic spiritual masters, but for two thousand years his last Word to us on everything has been Jesus, the Son of God. This Word makes all the difference for it is not merely the Word from God, and not merely the Word to us – it is God’s Word dwelling richly in us, full of grace and truth, full of hope and love, full of faith and life. To this day this, the only, Son of God makes all the difference; and, even now, people risk everything in Syria, Egypt and Iraq, in Belarus, Nigeria and southern Asia to follow Him – even life itself. We are one with them.
 

For when we say, “Christ is born”, we are not looking back with nostalgia, or even with happy memory. We are looking to the present and to the future. We see that Christ is being born in us now, again and again, with all the purpose and confidence for our sake that brought him to us in the first place. At the coming once more of “The Only Son from Heaven”, let all our hopes and fears meet in Him as humanity’s only true hope and salvation. Let us again place our confidence in Him and adore Him as the One who first loved us. In the words of our much loved English Christmas hymn, let this be our prayer not just for us but for all who hope for peace and goodness, truth and justice to come finally and reign:
 

O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray:

Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.

 

 

Advent Homily for the Oxford Ordinariate Group

First Sunday of Advent : Vigil Mass for the Ordinariate Parish Mass

Church of the Holy Rood, Oxford

30 November 2013

Looking at the readings that set the course for a new year in the Latin Church, I am forced to recall how as a newly ordained curate I had to cover an interregnum for two years and when the second Advent dawned, I realised I had run out of the things to say that I had stored from my time in training. I therefore decided on a course of sermons at our Parish Mass, teeming with families and children, on the Four Last Things. Thus Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell were the cheering preparation for Christmas 1986.

I trust I did no lasting harm, since in those days people attended Church in good number for the Lord, and less hinged on the techniques of the priest and the disposition of those who heard him. But my mistake had been to confuse the beginning of Advent with a preoccupation with the Coming of God for the Last Judgment at the End of Times.

True: in the reading from the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 2. 1-5) we are inspired with the vision of the Temple Mount in the City of God, towering over the hills that currently dominate it, all lit up to reveal the right and safest paths to it from wherever you are starting, meeting you halfway with God’s own commands to give judgment on the injustices in which you are complicit, and then to reconfigure you as people shining with his reflected peace.

And in the Gospel that is nowadays chosen for this Sunday(Matt. 24. 37-44), we are asked to contemplate not bathing in the light of the New Jerusalem but a second great Flood that could take half of us away in an impenitent instant, or a Christ who is the thief in the night to steal the unwary soul.

So we have become accustomed to a frisson of rapture mixed with dread at the forthcoming end of time. We love nothing better than to sing a hymn that alternates our response to the sight of the true Messiah’s return with “Alleluya” in one verse, and “Deeply wailing” in the next (from “Lo, He comes with clouds descending”). But this Sunday will pass and we will quickly get on with our anticipations of Christ’s Nativity, the first coming of the Messiah.

Yet, here again, we would be missing the point of Advent. It is not so much a few weeks of preparation for Christmas, as the six or so weeks that form the season to prepare us for the great Baptismal Feast of Epiphany on January the Sixth. The Feast of the Nativity has come in along the way; but, just as Easter has its Forty Days and Pentecost its Fifty, so Epiphany is the object of this season upon which we are setting out today. For the Second Coming that is envisaged is not only the vindication that will come at the end of time, but the second Nativity of our Lord that comes into effect when the believer becomes a new creation in Christ at his baptism. Will we not be singing in a less than a month’s time, “Cast out our sin, and enter in: be born in us today”?

For the new Christians who once were baptised at the great celebrations of initiation that took place at Epiphany - and that still mark the liturgy of the Eastern Churches for the feast of Theophany, as they call it, the manifestation of God at his baptism, marked with the blessings of water and the copious lustral showerings of the people – for these new Christians, the culmination of a whole season’s preparation would be entry into the life of Christ incarnate and Christ victorious over death by His Resurrection in the flesh. For it is the constant Resurrection that is the Second Coming of Christ; and we are caught up in its constant happening by Baptism, the New Order on which there is no going back and the life of which is eternity now. Thus for new Christians, it is Baptism that is the end of the world they once lived in, and the beginning of the new. It is the end of the old living, the old sins, the old faults and the old memories; now it is the time for new living in the life of the Resurrection, with new virtues and new memories of new holiness: no longer the enervating disappointment of failed effort and spoiled attempts. Baptism is the illumination from the City of God’s Peace of which Isaiah speaks - not a lightning judgment that condemns, but one that reveals the truth and wins concurrence, and then wins hearts. So the great Epiphany event of baptism six weeks away, anticipated from the beginning of Advent, comes not to catch the unwatching soul in order to condemn it, but to take it through a journey of realisation, of revelation about itself, of repentance and conversion, and finally joyful desire to be living in Christ and as Christ.

St Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, set for this day from time immemorial (Rom. 13. 11-14), tells us that the time of God, the Day of the Lord, is not then in the future, but now. We are to wake up and leave the cover of darkness and stand up to do something very different, in the different Light that is now rising. The only armour we will need for protection in our new work is the life of Christ that we lead as His Body.

The Gospel in the Old Mass for today, from St Luke’s Gospel (Lk. 21. 25-33), warms to the same theme. It begins with signs in the firmament and distress among the nations, but points out that the coming of Christ is not a matter of grim destruction and fear, but of Glory settling what sin has disturbed, of high hopes, and of a summer of redemption that is coming very near, and coming in us. The comings and goings of generations are not the point; we will pass through earth and we will pass through heaven. But what abides is the Word of the Lord, Christ in us, and we in Christ.  The fundamental reality we face in our faith is the reality of me and the reality of God, an inescapable truth, one that inescapably binds me to Him and He to me. Blessed John Henry knew this; and will we, too, not soon be singing, “O come to us, abide in us, Our Lord Emmanuel”?

Even the Gospel appointed for today in the Book of Common Prayer, the Palm Sunday story, drawn from the Sarum Rite’s lectionary for the Sunday before Advent (Matthew 21), reminds us that the King has come to us for the moment of NOW. We call on Him to enter His own City - namely our otherwise impregnable soul - by naming Him its Saviour. Thus the thief in the night subverts the den of thieves. The first thing He does is to throw out all that is wrong in us, to cleanse us, to convert us back to being Temples for the Holy Spirit, and then to pray within us, taking his rightful place on the only throne that matters to Him – the human hearts made for the love of God alone.

The reason we do well to concentrate on the true purpose of this season that will take us up through the events surrounding Christ’s Nativity, to the moment of his Epiphany before the Kings and the Peoples, and pre-eminently at his Baptism in the Jordan, is that it restores our perspective. Our reference point is not a feast that will come and go, now that it has been largely reclaimed as Yule; nor is it the recapitulation of all things when the constructs of time and space cease to bear relation to us and our Maker. What we have to be concerned about is the eternal present of God’s moment when it comes. Jesus lamented the Jerusalem of his days for failing to realise the present action of God. So it faced its physical, moral and spiritual collapse. It could be the same for us, if we do not live in the new life that is our constant state of baptism, our risen life in Christ, our unendable endowment with the very nature of God that is the reason God in Christ came to endow Himself with ours.

This week Mr Speaker Bercow opined that the reason a series of Members of Parliament have been convicted following an expenses-fiddling scandal in which many more were shown to have no idea of the difference between right and wrong is because they were “bored” and “under-occupied”. Is this the best defence that humans can make before the bar of public opinion? Will it win acquittal and exoneration? If this ruse works, can we run the same defence past the Almighty? Clearly, if there are those who still care, they may well think so: “And he, seeking to justify himself said, ‘I was bored and under-occupied’.”

Not many people believe in sin, except it is other people’s. Not many people believe in forgiveness, unless it is their own. Not many people believe in mercy, unless it is something withheld from the offender. It is a strange phase in our society which once, for good or ill, had a corporate sense of its identity as Christian. This meant the values not just of what used to be called “respectability” – an ambition to behave in a way that others could honour, especially in adversity – but also honesty and virtue in personal conduct, as well as fairness and humanity in dealings with others.  Integral to all getting along - for it takes all sorts to make a world - were the qualities of patience, of charitable outlook, of non-aggressiveness in thought, deed and word, of mercy towards those who failed and compassion to those without aid. Most of all, even amid the more oppressive constraints in society, there has nonetheless often been an instinct for forgiveness offered, in the hope of forgiveness to be received, sometimes characterised by the prudent phrase, “There but for the grace of God go I”.

These outlooks are by no means general now. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor once observed that throughout his life it was as though we were all acting out the drama of our British way of life, while slowly behind us the backdrop of Christian values, of mercy, forgiveness and redemption, had been rolled up. To hear of people speak so vehemently of disaffected teenagers, of the fearful dangers posed by the imminent arrival of Bulgarian and Romanian jobseekers (mark you, our fellow Christians as Orthodox), of how every adversity now has to be someone’s glaring omission, and every public servant a blameworthy object of life-destroying retribution, is all so merciless. It is perhaps the greatest victory of the secularists that, having dethroned Christ from his English Christendom in schools, local authority services and our very culture, people have been left with nothing to fall back on, no story to remember that explains our deepest questions of why life and death and suffering and hope are as they are, no words to articulate in a moment when people feel they are “not religious but spiritual”, no prayers to say, no example to emulate and internalise so they know from deep in their heart of hearts what it is second nature to do, what is right and what is wrong - even if they feel “bored” and “under-occupied”. This latest of passing ages is serving people ill, for now there is no King to cry “Hosanna” to, no God to hope in, no Lord whose yoke I take and path I follow. I am my own judge; my own the law made up as I go along; my will the counsel in my court. I am left to be my own sovereign; there is no City set on hill that lights the paths for us all to start out on; there is no Law that binds me as much as it binds others, and no perspective on God the closer he comes. He draws up, he passes near; I cannot tell the distance, nor can I see how my NOW has to fit into eternity. Instead, I am left, not with his righteousness, but my own self-righteousness. It is a poor substitute; and the indignation, the frustration, the selfishness, the egos competing for prevalence, the urge to do what is advantageous in the moment regardless of what is good, the material covetousness that indulges our feelings but safely insulates our souls, the self-acquittal that is couched in the denunciation of others, is a dark and bitter place, where there is no satisfaction for all the effort and self-delusion we put into it.

Better then, as we look forward and look around, to take our bearings from the Epiphany, from our baptism, when Christ came again, risen from the dead and making us a new creation. Better for us to come out of doing whatever it is that we do in the dark, and to see where to stand in the light of the City of God’s peace rising, where to tell that the warming approach of God is on its way, and call out as it comes, “O Lord, shew Thy mercy upon us: and grant us Thy salvation”.

There, as new creatures, not the old deathful and dying spirits who destroy and are destroyed, let us be seen by God’s grace as the City of Light and Peace, about whom the Lord can say, “Come and walk by this light”.            `

The Universal Prayer of St Peter Canisius

A short essay on this vernacular sixteenth century re-emergent form of the Prayer of the Faithful within the classic Latin Roman rite, popular for 450 years in the German-speaking Catholic Church, with a translation and three suggested workings for use in either the Ordinary or Extraordinary Forms of Mass.

Download the article here, to read the background and liturgical versions. Here is the translated prayer itself, with the groupings of intentions as St Peter Canisius intended, allowing for a response from the faithful after each, and with the introductory invocation and the concluding prayer to be said by the celebrant priest:

The Universal Prayer of Saint Peter Canisius

Almighty, eternal God, Lord, heavenly Father, look with Your eyes of undeserved compassion on our sorrow, misery and need.

Have mercy on all the Christian faithful, for whom Your only-begotten Son, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, was content to give Himself into the hand of sinners and shed His precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.

For the sake of the Lord Jesus, most gracious Father, avert our well-deserved punishments, present danger and future threats, harm and outrage, arms and warfare, dearth and misfortune, sickness and sorrowful, miserable times.

Enlighten and strengthen in all goodness our spiritual leaders and earthly rulers, that they may do everything to further Your honour as God, our salvation, the common peace, and the welfare of all Your people.

Grant us, O God of peace, a true unity in faith, free of all division and separation. Convert our hearts to true repentance and amendment of life. Kindle in us the fire of Your love; give us hunger and zeal for justice in all things, so that we, as obedient children through life unto death, may be pleasing to You and find favour in Your sight.

We also pray, O God, as You willed that we should pray, for our friends and enemies, for the healthy and the sick, for all Christians in sadness and distress, for the living and the dead. 

To You, O Lord, be entrusted whatever we do, whatever our path, our work and our dealings, our living and dying. Let us delight in Your grace here in this world, and attain the next with all Your chosen ones, to praise, honour and extol You in unending joy and blessedness.

Grant us this, O Lord, heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ, Your beloved Son, Who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Liverpool Care Pathway: A Homily

Three or four times a year, a group of fellow Catholics and friends meet to discuss a matter of current social, public or ecclesiastical interest. At the preceding celebration of Mass, I try to find in the Scripture readings of the day something that will reflect on the subject of the discussion.

On Thursday, the matter concerned was the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway. Intended to provide the framework for the best nursing and medical care for the dying, in the hands of some practitioners it is used as the basis for proactive judgments that determine the course resulting in the ending of life. It seems that withdrawal of sustenance or life-saving intervention can be decided, without the consultation of family or respect for a patient's faith or wishes, on a pragmatic (or economic) assessment that takes into account such considerations as the average likelihood of recovery, age, social demography and so on. As it has manifested itself in England – following a series of terrible instances of not only negligent but harmful nursing practice – it looks like the pressure of a “culture of death” from a medical establishment that steers people, either through persuasion or as a result of the ethic applied to the way the care programme is being applied, to a non-illegalised version of euthanasia.

Without getting into the technicalities, my homily sought to stress that human mortality can never be seen as “end of life” but as the setting of its resurrection. The dying person is thus not an animal being managed out of existence, but an integral member of the creation which has been and is being restored in Christ, all humanity in it, and him.
 

6^th May 2013

Thursday of the Sixth Week of Easter

The Frame of Risen Humanity and its Care

Acts 18.1-8

John 16.16-20

 

Through the readings, today we have witnessed that moment that so incensed St Paul that he turned his attention from revealing the true significance of Christ’s passion and resurrection just to the members of the Jewish diaspora, and oriented it to the rest of the world too. And we almost missed it, but we also saw the moment when St Paul baptised and thus admitted to the Church not just personal converts, but a whole family household. In other words, the resurrection to new life is not just for those who believe in it, or for those who form a religious group or, as we might relativise ourselves nowadays, a “world faith”, but for the whole world. Indeed it has happened TO the whole world, and it has re-created the nature of ALL humanity.

Similarly, we have stood before Jesus on the verge of his taking leave of us in this world, only to be told that his going away is nothing other than his constant returning. In other words, just as his death was not the end but the means to a new creation, so his new life, which cannot be contained within this world, is by no means restricted to the next.

If there is a weakness in the way we proclaim the Gospel of the Resurrection in the Christian West it is that we seem to be locked into the philosophy that heaven is an after-life, that life after death is a realm for the body’s leftover spirit, that rest eternal is inertia, that resurrection is a scientific conundrum to be explained away spiritually, or even denied materially. It is as though we more truly believe that this life here and now is what matters, that here is where we find the concrete reality.

In truth, however, as C S Lewis pointed out in The Great Divorce, here is the world of shadows, false impressions and soft authenticity – heaven is the hard and vivid reality, at first too hard and vivid to be bearable. Thus famously he also said that the suffering now is part of the glory then – the two are not only connected, they are the same thing as they impinge, the first in the fallen world, the second in the life that is to come and is already upon us. St Paul, with his massive impression of the way in which everything is integral to Christ who fills the universe, put it another way – “your life is hid with Christ in God”; and again, “it is not I who live, but Christ who lives within me”. Thus it is the great intuition of the Christian East that the resurrection is not some far off and distant result, still less a merely spiritual phenomenon appropriated now only through faith and grace, but it is the true, harsh, vivid, pointed reality of existence as it stands now, since Christ burst the tomb and ascended the heavens, and to which those who are baptised in the Spirit are – we trust – acutely attuned.

The resurrection is not then; it is now. Heaven is not hereafter; it is the present Kingdom that we pray may “come on earth - as it is … “.

All humanity is of one piece before it – not in one group, or nation, or religion; still less in one individual’s mind for faith. Just as we all belong to each other in this world, so this world belongs to heaven and in heaven. By the same token, there is no difference of separation now to the humanity that fell from grace, and the humanity in which Christ redeemed it from loss and endued it with the everlasting life, which is the quality of the Kingdom of Heaven. As St Paul also said, “it was sown a material body; it is raised a spiritual body”. Christ is risen – we are risen: “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ all are made alive”. The living of the resurrection in the body is not something from which this life and the barrier of death insulate us – this resurrection is the truth of who we are with the nature of human beings. And it is now. More vivid, harder, more blindingly apparent for all we believe we cannot see it. This is not a mere opinion of how Christians regard themselves. It is how Christians understand the created, fallen, forgiven and resurrected order in which we find ourselves, because this is where we see that Christ, who went “beyond” in his act of constantly being present again and again in it. This is what his going to the Father means: for ever being seen “on earth, as it is in heaven”.

This evening we turn our attention to the ethical questions surrounding end of life care, and the response of the Catholic Church, in its members, to those whose bodies decline, fade and falter, as well as to those who attend to their needs. For us, the first response must arise from our faith. And that is to profess the faith of St Paul that, despite appearances to the contrary in the physical changes that affect and challenge our living through this world, the body is not a manifestation of a person’s death and dying:  always it belongs to a person whose humanity is raised from mortality and restored to the Kingdom. The body is integral to their living within the resurrection, the “beyond” that has not departed, but still fills the universe. It is the frame of suffering now that is inseparable from the glory then. It is not the advent of decline, but of ascension.

The care of the end of any human being’s course through this world should hardly be marked by an attitude that looks upon it as loss, decline, ending and closure. Truly these are realities in the flesh that Christ our God went through too. But our eye is set at the same time on “the things that are above” them - a restoration after sin and suffering, and the working of a new creation as it is coming to pass in them. Thus, as the Prayer over the Gifts we are about to offer says,  even now we are being “conformed to the mysteries of … mighty love”.