Sermons
Sunday 1st September 2013, Trinity 14, evening
Isaiah 33:13-22; John 3:22-36
by Revd Kate Tuckett
‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent ahead of him.’
I think it’s fair to say that John the Baptist was not a pretty saint. He was almost certainly rather a different figure to the rather limp-looking saints so beloved of Victorian artists. If we visualise this lonely voice crying in the wilderness, dressed in animal hair, we might imagine his breath heavy with locusts and wild honey, uncivilised, probably smelly, mincing none of his words as he stormed around the Judean countryside calling the people to repentance.
I think it’s also fair to say that in some ways John the Baptist is not a particularly attractive figure. His message appears to be very different from that of Jesus. He preaches fire and brimstone. While Jesus preaches unconditional love and compassion, likening God to the host of an incredible banquet and as a parent who cannot bear to reject his children, John preaches grim justice. Where Jesus embodies a wide and inclusive grace, inviting all manner of people to abundant life, John uses language of condemnation. Where Jesus offers healing and wholeness, mercy and compassion, righteousness and peace, John shouts words of angry judgment.
It’s little wonder, then, that John’s listeners wonder whether John had rightly discerned that Jesus was in fact the Messiah long expected. Their styles could not be more different. Here, John’s followers are questioning him about the apparent success that Jesus and his disciples are having in baptising people. Baptism, you remember, was a practice introduced by John the Baptist, and that he had been performing with great zeal. But now, according to the gospel writer, all are going to Jesus. John’s response is to remind his disciples that he is not the Messiah; his task is to point to the Messiah.
Mystical writers talk about thin places -- locations or a moment in time when the ordinary barriers between the human and the divine, between people and God, become thin. There are physical places that we call thin. Some people describe Iona, off the coast of Scotland, as a place where encounter with God feels easier. You will have your own places that have their own associations. Mountains, for me, are thin places. And it’s not just places that are thin. Some pieces of music may provide an encounter between earth and heaven. Words and poetry and art may be thin places. All of us have the capacity to be thin places -- even if some of us may feel less thin than others. John the Baptist, in some ways such an unlikely candidate, provides a thin place in pointing others on to Christ.
Ours is a faith with a strong sense of the sacramental. We rely on signs on things that point onwards. We know spiritual truths by analogy, by metaphor, by symbol – and this may be the only way we can glimpse these realities. And I believe that a lot of our Christian life is about training ourselves to recognise these thin places, and encouraging one another to do so. Worship can become a thin place, creating a sense of the sacred. Participation is the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist can be thin places – indeed, this is their function, they are means of grace. And the Bible can be a thin place, something pointing to a mystery beyond itself.
And so as Christians it is important for us to seek out the places and people that help to facilitate an encounter with God, but it’s also important for us to recognise that they are not, in themselves, God. John the Baptist’s teaching is not the grace-filled teaching of Jesus. The accoutrements of the church, however beautiful they are, may give us glimpses of the beauty of God, but they are not the beauty of God. The Bible, with all its glorious inconsistency, is a collection of history, of myth, of law, of propaganda, of poetry – and that contains some very toxic material -- offers an interpretation, a window onto God written by a particular people at a particular time for a particular audience. The writers of the Bible were interpreting the content already. And that’s a process that continues today. The stories of the Bible need to be interpreted in every context. We need to look to what they point towards, to the objects of the metaphor rather than getting stuck on the metaphor itself.
I struggled with the readings for this evening both in Isaiah and in John. Images of God as ruling king, as judge, as above and beyond us, as majestic may speak to you, and if they do, hang onto them, because they may be your thin place. But I struggle with them because they seem to me to justify oppressive means of relating to one another, abuses of power, militaristic behaviour that are so in opposition with the teaching of Jesus. And yet so often we hang onto the language we have inherited to understand God. And our understanding of God affects our understanding of morality.
So how would it be to subvert and destabilise some of these images? How would it be to consider new or recovered images for God and enable us to bring different names to the worship of the divine mystery? How would it be to image God as middle-aged woman, as hiker, as jester, as fool, as bread-baker, as wine-pourer, as dark lover in the Song of Solomon, as mysterious, unnamed presence in darkness and winter, as one encountered in every human worker, neighbour, stranger and friend[i]?
The first commandment – you shall not have any false gods – deals with handmade likenesses of God, but it also deals with all those images of God that we carry in our heads. The God of our dominant culture. The God who allows us to go on playing our game. The God who fits into our system. The God who likes to play war just as much as we do[ii].
But our faith invites us to new and unfamiliar places, to let go of our image of God, as well as our image of ourselves. And when we can do this, however fleetingly, however crookedly, we catch a glimpse of a God who is greater that we dared to hope for, and ourselves that are more beautiful that we could ever believe, and experience a joy that nothing can take away.
John the Baptist, this strange prophet who points towards Jesus speaks of his joy being fulfilled. And however unlikely and even unattractive a figure he is, this speaks of a whole being turned towards God. There’s none of us here whose lives will not have been touched somewhere with joy. Ironically enough, the joyous moments of our own lives may be precisely the moments we don’t associate with our religion. It’s easy to think of the stereotype of religious experience as sitting stiff and rather antiseptically, and perhaps rather bored, and that joy is laughter and freedom and reaching out of our arms to embrace the whole earth[iii]. But at the heart of Christianity is joy, and laughter and freedom and the reaching out of arms are the essence of it. Joy is not happiness. But joy is all-encompassing. And joy is a mystery, because it can happen anywhere, even under the most unpromising of circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, even nailed to a tree.
And so as we prepare to eat bread and wine, the symbols that point beyond themselves to God’s dying and rising and vast and expansive healing and love, may we too be touched by joy; may we let go of the images of God that are not joyful or life-giving; may we have the courage to awaken our curiosity, desire and longing for we know not quite what; may we be open to finding the places and practices and people through which we can be fed and nourished by the holy mystery that we call God, in which we live and move and have our being.
I want to share with you a blessing by John O’Donohue, whose poetry has been a thin place for me and who expresses the joy and the laughter of God in a way that refreshes my soul:
For Equilibrium
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.
As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity be lightened by grace.
Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.
As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.
As silence smiles on the other side of what is said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.
As time remains free of all it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.
May your prayer of listening deepen enough
To hear in the depths the laughter of God.
