Luminous Darkness

Eucharist for the Sunday Anticipating the Feast of Candlemas
Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of St. Clement, Chorlton cum Hardy, Manchester, UK
29 January 2006

Malachi 3:1-5
Psalm 24
Hebrews 2:14-18
Luke 2:22-40

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

Those words come from the book Night by the Jewish author Elie Wiesel, and they recount the memory of his first night at the concentration camp Auschwitz during the second world war. As some of you may be aware, this last Friday, the 27th of January, is marked annually as Holocaust Memorial Day. A friend told me recently that, while natural disasters do not challenge his faith, events such as the Holocaust do because they show that human beings are capable of evil on a massive level. What terrifies him is the way that an entire nation was so easily persuaded into believing that it was acceptable to slaughter millions of people, mainly Jews, but also members of other minority groups including gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and the physically disabled.

In light of this, many of us might be convinced to side with Wiesel or with my friend and conclude that the presence of such evil in the world clearly demonstrates either that God does not exist, or, if God does exist, that God is cold, distant, and unfeeling about creation. However, I believe that the Christian gospel can speak to us even in the knowledge of the Holocaust and the other incidents of mass genocide that continue into our own day. Since I have never been in a situation like Wiesel’s, my words may seem empty. However, I hope that through my exploration of the gospel, you will hear Christ’s words coming through because he, as we all know, has been in a situation exactly like the one described above.

It is clear to any student of european history that one of the causes of the rise of the Nazi party was that the people living in Germany after the first world war were in a desperate situation. The terms of the armistice they had signed were devastating to the Germany economy, and people were afraid of many things – afraid of being hungry or cold, afraid of watching their children suffer, afraid even of death, that is, and unregarded and meaningless death. People who are afraid are easy to control, easy to take advantage of, and can have their wills twisted before they even realize it, as Hitler and his compatriots quickly discovered. As Jedi Master Yoda says in one of the Star Wars films: “Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”

So the first then for us to consider is how we can be freed from this fear, which at its deepest level comes down to fear of death, so that we do not fall prey to it. One answer comes from our lesson in Hebrews: Christ came among us, as one of us in flesh and blood, in order to free us from the slavery that we were held in because of our fear of death. This is a powerful message, and we should pay close attention to what it means for us. However, I imagine that many of you might be thinking that while this sounds good in theory, in practice it might well be a bit more complicated, and I would agree.

Another possible theme to help us here comes from our gospel story. Today we are celebrating the Feast of Candlemas, also known as the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. The gospel relates: “When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought [Jesus] up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.” The author of Luke shows Mary and Joseph behaving just like any other Jewish family by performing the expected public rites of purification and sacrifice to the Lord at the Temple upon the birth of a new child. Religious rituals such as these were centrally important to family life for Jews at this time, and would have covered all aspects of both daily life in the community, and the milestones that mark the course of the life of an individual. The prophets Simeon and Anna responded to the family’s desire to be in right relationship with God by reminding them about the role for this particular child in God’s plan. By participating in these ritual acts of daily life the holy family encountered God in a real and meaningful way.

In our own time these kind of experiences are much less common. Throughout the course of the twentieth century, daily ritual religious observances were in many ways lost from our public and corporate life, and those who engage in them privately or in small groups such as a church community are looked on by society with at least mild suspicion or contempt, and, at worst, outright mockery or derision. Even for those of us of faith, it seems that we often prefer to encounter God only in the specified situations of supposed holy places, holy books, or holy services performed by seemingly holy people – and I mean no offense to my friends up there in the chancel!

I think that fear is again involved here, and that it is one of the reasons we have lost touch with a sense of sacred ritual in our lives. To be involved in such an act is necessarily to be in a place where we might encounter God, just as Mary and Joseph did, and we are afraid of that. We remember the God of the prophet Malachi that we heard about in our Old Testament lesson today, who says that he will draw near to us for judgement. I personally struggle with this because even though I know that God knows everything about me and loves me completely, I am still ashamed to appear before God knowing what is in some of the dark places of my soul. It is that same fear of death – I am worried that, despite my intellectual understanding of the God of love, if I were to really encounter God, it would not be a happy meeting.

However, we do not need to be afraid of encountering God, and, perhaps, a lesson of Candlemas is that if we can recapture a sense of encountering God in the ordinary, in the daily ritual moments of our lives, then we will come to understand that this encounter will not be a fearful time, but instead a time to be released from our fear, even from the ultimate fear of death that enslaves us to will of the devil. The God of Malachi will judge us as we deserve, but in that judgement, we will be forgiven through the saving act of Jesus Christ.

Now by ritual religious observance, I do not necessarily mean, for example, going to church every day, although that kind of public ritual can be quite helpful. What I am really getting at is at a much more everyday level. For example, taking the time to express joy and gratitude at the start of the day for God’s presence in the world. Or praying together as a family before meals. Or uttering a silent prayer whenever we see an ambulance driving by for whoever may be inside it. Or ending the day in prayer; thanking God for what we have been given and remembering before him those times when we have not lived up to the better parts of ourselves.

These are simple acts, but they are also ritual acts and, through them, I hope that we can begin to see more clearly and be in touch with that sense of the holy which enlivens everything in our world at every moment in time. It is, as Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has said, “that extraordinarily vivid or exhilarating sense of the world penetrated by divine energy.” Every instant of our lives becomes holy and we can eventually grow into the people that God created us to be. And through that transformation, perhaps we can even see that, while we cannot undo past evils that have been done in the world, we can open ourselves up to the radical encounter with God that will prevent such things from happening again.

I want to close with a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that I think manages to express and unite many of the elements I have been trying to draw together this morning.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil,
It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck His rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And bears man’s smudge, and shares man’s smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights from the black west went,
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastwards springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast, and with, ah, bright wings.

Amen.

Eucharist for the Sunday Anticipating the Feast of Candlemas
Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of St. Clement, Chorlton cum Hardy, Manchester, UK
29 January 2006

Malachi 3:1-5
Psalm 24
Hebrews 2:14-18
Luke 2:22-40

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

Those words come from the book Night by the Jewish author Elie Wiesel, and they recount the memory of his first night at the concentration camp Auschwitz during the second world war. As some of you may be aware, this last Friday, the 27th of January, is marked annually as Holocaust Memorial Day. A friend told me recently that, while natural disasters do not challenge his faith, events such as the Holocaust do because they show that human beings are capable of evil on a massive level. What terrifies him is the way that an entire nation was so easily persuaded into believing that it was acceptable to slaughter millions of people, mainly Jews, but also members of other minority groups including gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and the physically disabled.

In light of this, many of us might be convinced to side with Wiesel or with my friend and conclude that the presence of such evil in the world clearly demonstrates either that God does not exist, or, if God does exist, that God is cold, distant, and unfeeling about creation. However, I believe that the Christian gospel can speak to us even in the knowledge of the Holocaust and the other incidents of mass genocide that continue into our own day. Since I have never been in a situation like Wiesel’s, my words may seem empty. However, I hope that through my exploration of the gospel, you will hear Christ’s words coming through because he, as we all know, has been in a situation exactly like the one described above.

It is clear to any student of european history that one of the causes of the rise of the Nazi party was that the people living in Germany after the first world war were in a desperate situation. The terms of the armistice they had signed were devastating to the Germany economy, and people were afraid of many things – afraid of being hungry or cold, afraid of watching their children suffer, afraid even of death, that is, and unregarded and meaningless death. People who are afraid are easy to control, easy to take advantage of, and can have their wills twisted before they even realize it, as Hitler and his compatriots quickly discovered. As Jedi Master Yoda says in one of the Star Wars films: “Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”

So the first then for us to consider is how we can be freed from this fear, which at its deepest level comes down to fear of death, so that we do not fall prey to it. One answer comes from our lesson in Hebrews: Christ came among us, as one of us in flesh and blood, in order to free us from the slavery that we were held in because of our fear of death. This is a powerful message, and we should pay close attention to what it means for us. However, I imagine that many of you might be thinking that while this sounds good in theory, in practice it might well be a bit more complicated, and I would agree.

Another possible theme to help us here comes from our gospel story. Today we are celebrating the Feast of Candlemas, also known as the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. The gospel relates: “When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought [Jesus] up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.” The author of Luke shows Mary and Joseph behaving just like any other Jewish family by performing the expected public rites of purification and sacrifice to the Lord at the Temple upon the birth of a new child. Religious rituals such as these were centrally important to family life for Jews at this time, and would have covered all aspects of both daily life in the community, and the milestones that mark the course of the life of an individual. The prophets Simeon and Anna responded to the family’s desire to be in right relationship with God by reminding them about the role for this particular child in God’s plan. By participating in these ritual acts of daily life the holy family encountered God in a real and meaningful way.

In our own time these kind of experiences are much less common. Throughout the course of the twentieth century, daily ritual religious observances were in many ways lost from our public and corporate life, and those who engage in them privately or in small groups such as a church community are looked on by society with at least mild suspicion or contempt, and, at worst, outright mockery or derision. Even for those of us of faith, it seems that we often prefer to encounter God only in the specified situations of supposed holy places, holy books, or holy services performed by seemingly holy people – and I mean no offense to my friends up there in the chancel!

I think that fear is again involved here, and that it is one of the reasons we have lost touch with a sense of sacred ritual in our lives. To be involved in such an act is necessarily to be in a place where we might encounter God, just as Mary and Joseph did, and we are afraid of that. We remember the God of the prophet Malachi that we heard about in our Old Testament lesson today, who says that he will draw near to us for judgement. I personally struggle with this because even though I know that God knows everything about me and loves me completely, I am still ashamed to appear before God knowing what is in some of the dark places of my soul. It is that same fear of death – I am worried that, despite my intellectual understanding of the God of love, if I were to really encounter God, it would not be a happy meeting.

However, we do not need to be afraid of encountering God, and, perhaps, a lesson of Candlemas is that if we can recapture a sense of encountering God in the ordinary, in the daily ritual moments of our lives, then we will come to understand that this encounter will not be a fearful time, but instead a time to be released from our fear, even from the ultimate fear of death that enslaves us to will of the devil. The God of Malachi will judge us as we deserve, but in that judgement, we will be forgiven through the saving act of Jesus Christ.

Now by ritual religious observance, I do not necessarily mean, for example, going to church every day, although that kind of public ritual can be quite helpful. What I am really getting at is at a much more everyday level. For example, taking the time to express joy and gratitude at the start of the day for God’s presence in the world. Or praying together as a family before meals. Or uttering a silent prayer whenever we see an ambulance driving by for whoever may be inside it. Or ending the day in prayer; thanking God for what we have been given and remembering before him those times when we have not lived up to the better parts of ourselves.

These are simple acts, but they are also ritual acts and, through them, I hope that we can begin to see more clearly and be in touch with that sense of the holy which enlivens everything in our world at every moment in time. It is, as Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has said, “that extraordinarily vivid or exhilarating sense of the world penetrated by divine energy.” Every instant of our lives becomes holy and we can eventually grow into the people that God created us to be. And through that transformation, perhaps we can even see that, while we cannot undo past evils that have been done in the world, we can open ourselves up to the radical encounter with God that will prevent such things from happening again.

I want to close with a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that I think manages to express and unite many of the elements I have been trying to draw together this morning.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil,
It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck His rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And bears man’s smudge, and shares man’s smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights from the black west went,
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastwards springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast, and with, ah, bright wings.

Amen.