Righteous Power

Sermon preached by the Revd Neil Fernyhough, First Sunday of Advent (November 29, 2009).

Readings:  Jeremiah 33: 14-16; Psalm 25: 1-9; 1 Thessalonians 3: 9-13; Luke 21: 25-36

Jesus said, “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the seas and the waves.  People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the film 2012.  The unforgettable image of California literally sliding into the Pacific Ocean like a toy city off a tabletop – which, for all I know, may be what they filmed – came unbidden to mind as I read Jesus’ words.  These are, after all, the first two sentences of the first Gospel reading of this Advent 2009.  A literal disaster – not a figurative disaster, but a literal one – is about to befall the whole earth, one in which the whole cosmos is touched.

Those of you who have had the dubious pleasure of watching 2012 (which, by the way, is so laughably bad it’s good) will know that it all ends quite badly for the planet.  It’s a disaster movie, so I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say that virtually everything and everyone is annihilated in a denouement that is not unlike the flood parable of Genesis.  And probably not un-coincidentally, either, since Hollywood has been recycling story-lines since antediluvian times.  They likely also know that a certain proportion of their audience will be made up Millennialists, Christian and otherwise, indulging in the guilty pleasure of seeing a fictionalized account of a deeply held expectation.

Millennialism is the belief that there will be a one thousand year period in which the heavens and the earth will pass away and Satan will be chained, after which he will do battle with God as a final and necessary prelude to the Last Judgement and a new, golden age.  It’s all right there, in the Book of Revelation.  It was a popular view in the early church, but by the fourth century it was rejected, mainly because it is so at odds with everything else the New Testament has to say about Jesus.  Wasn’t it just last week, after all, that we celebrated the Feast of the Reign of Christ?  The doctrine of Christ’s ascension to govern at the right hand of the Father would seem to trump the frequently suspect theology of the Apocalypse pretty soundly.  And it was chiefly for that reason the Fourth Century crafters of the Nicene Creed inserted the line that, having ascended, Christ’s “kingdom shall have no end.”

If we think about the end of time at all from the standpoint of faith, and if someone were to press us on the point, I think most of us would instinctively respond with the perfectly orthodox belief that the so-called millennial age is now – the age of the Church.  Everything we read in the Bible, proclaim from the pulpit, and experience in the sacrament of the altar, points to the reality that we exist at an in-between time, an in-between state, one in which the kingdom of God is already – but not yet.  This is a time of preparation.  And we prepare by paying attention to the Biblical blueprint of what a God-filled reality looks like; whether it be from the visions of the prophets and sages, the hopes of the matriarchs and patriarchs, the poems of the Psalms and the canticles, and above all in the teaching and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth and of his apostles.  We don’t prepare the kingdom by sitting back and enjoying self-satisfied fantasies about a cataclysmic battle between personifications of Good and Evil, followed by the descent from the sky of a perfectly dimensioned, gilded, and bejewelled ideal City of God.

The doctrine of passivity – yes, even of active destruction – preached by certain fundamentalist biblical idolaters is really the true Antichrist.  The idea of global cooperation, of peace between peoples, tribes, and – heaven forefend – faiths smacks a little too much like the Devil’s peace coalition to such types.  For them, “the dream of total victory cannot abide the nightmare scenario of negotiation,” to quote the theologian Catherine Keller.  The state can, and does, rain down omnipotent fire on whomever it chooses; and the handmaids of annihilation wish to have the final say over the handmaid of the Lord – whose child’s birth as the Prince of Peace we now prepare to commemorate.

Traditionally, it has been those at the margins who have most welcomed the idea of the apocalypse.  But beware of what happens once the elites appropriate the narrative of the end times.  When political edginess becomes political expediency, it is those very ones on the margins who will feel the all-too-real wrath of the almighty – with a small “a.”  When judgement day approacheth, how convenient a device its spectre can be made into, in order to instil fear and docility in a population that might otherwise pose a risk of exercising righteous power.  It’s easy to forget that it is precisely the powerful who are condemned and overthrown in the Book of Revelation, just as they are in every single Gospel of Jesus Christ, in the letters of Paul, in the prophets, and – oh, I don’t know – just about everywhere else in the Word of God.

In short, Advent is not about preparing for the end of days, any more than Christianity itself is.  It is about preparing for a new day – a day that is always dawning, a day that even now shines with hope for all those who would dare take the risk to step out into it.  It is simple to focus on the first two sentences of today’s Gospel and suddenly acquire that curious tone deafness of fear; the convenient fear of which I spoke.  But consider the real nugget – the gold coin embedded in the narrative meringue:  “Stand up and raise your heads,” says Jesus, “because your redemption is drawing near.”  The dark time he describes was a reality in which his hearers lived every day – their land under occupation, labouring under three levels of onerous taxation, their very lives under threat from the four horsemen of the very real Apocalypse that was daily life for the bulk of people in first century Jewish Palestine.  Their end times were upon them, and before them stood their redemption – and all of a sudden, their fig tree sprouts green shoots, and summer is upon them.

In the not-too-distant past, Advent was a penitential time for Christians; a sort of a Lent-in-miniature.  And so, the liturgical colour, like that of Lent, was purple – and the prayers, readings, music, and worship all spoke of a bondage that could only be released by the coming of the Lord.  I don’t want to discount that as an important element of the Advent message.  But I am concerned above all today with the things that obscure.  And so let nothing obscure our vision from what we already have.  Advent is a polite fiction in which we pretend that we’re waiting for Jesus.  In this sense, it is an exercise in collective imagination, as we ponder what it was like before liberation was made real in God’s incarnation.  And, in a similar sense, we reflect on what it is like for those who still feel themselves to be untouched by that liberation.

Apocalyptic thinking moves beyond the pretence of waiting for Jesus to actually believing he’s absent – which is why I find it so profoundly sad and unfaithful.  In a world in which Jesus reigns, we still prepare a realm in which the kingdoms of the earth are truly made into the kingdom of God.  This is the function of the Church, and passivity has no role in such an awesome responsibility, and in such awesome accountability.  My prayer for you as we begin this Advent season is that you will indeed stand up and raise your head, prepared to receive the redemption that is already yours.  Let this time be one in which you boldly proclaim in word and deed, Emmanuel…God is with us.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

 

Happy New Year!

In common parlance, the advent of something means that it is beginning, or coming into view.  Advent is therefore a very apt name to apply to this season.  In common with most major faiths, ours is a narrative tradition – we convey our beliefs, values, and hopes through stories.  And at the centre of those stories is the one about Jesus of Nazareth.  By reading about his life and teachings we learn unique things about God, and about our place in the grand narrative – a narrative Christians define in threefold terms as creation, redemption, and sanctification.

Advent is the first chapter of the Christian story, the prologue, really:  the coming of God into the world as a human being is foretold and proclaimed.  A bold proclamation like this carries equally bold consequences.  What we are saying when we profess God incarnate is that there is a radical identification between the human and the divine.  How empowering, awesome, and – indeed – frightening is that?!  That God decided to show such solidarity with the human condition by taking on the life of Jesus in order to rescue humanity from spiritual self-destruction, cannot help but create a sense in us of our awesome responsibility and accountability before the Almighty.

The complete identification of the spiritual with the physical feels right for Christians.  It feels right when we see the Spirit at work in the wondrous beauty and complexity of creation.  It feels right when we perceive that God feels and shares in our grief, joys, struggles, and accomplishments.  And it feels right when we experience a keen sense of God’s presence as we pray and meditate, partake of the sacraments, chant and sing spiritual songs, and come together in fellowship.  Is it any wonder that the first hymn we sing of our New Year, Advent, is O Come, O Come, Emmanuel?  After all, the Hebrew phrase emmanu-el means nothing less than “God is with us.”

And so begins another cycle of the story, taking us through the birth of Christ (Christmas), his manifestation to the non-Hebrew community (Epiphany), his brief and dangerous ministry (Lent), his condemnation, trial, and execution (Holy Week), his defeat of sin and death (Easter), and his ascension to heaven and gifting of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost).  We then take several months (the weeks after Pentecost, or “ordinary time”) to meditate more deeply on Jesus’ teachings, the words of sages and prophets, and the continuation of the Christian story through the ages in the lives of saints and holy people.

Like the cycles of the seasons, or the cycle of a life, the cycle of the church year carries with it both regularities and unexpected surprises.  Our church life, our church seasons frame the events that happen within it – but we, the faithful, give those events shape and meaning.  Through our worship and ministry, our outreach and evangelism, our education and formation, and our fellowship and mutual care, we make the cycle come alive.  For, ultimately, the stories are not a one-way narration intoned to a passive audience.  Rather, they are an invitation to dialogue and to enter the story, to make it our own, and to adapt it to our lives as one might adapt a piece of literature to a screenplay, and a screenplay to performance.

May this Advent be for all of us an opportunity to enter the story anew and claim it as our own.  As God chose to walk with us as the human Jesus, may we choose to walk with Jesus as children of God, and as Christ’s own body in the world.  Let us, through our words and actions, invite the whole world into magical, miraculous, liberating story of emmanu-el!  Happy New Year!

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

 

Setting the Moral Roundtable

The concept of Christian morality is evolving and dynamic, and something we ordinarily like to avoid talking about.  It can convey unpleasant images.  We may conjure up a stereotype of the hectoring, rule-bound preacher, telling his audience that they are damned to hell if they don’t meet certain standards.  Or, we may shudder as we recall vicious battles over hot-button issues like abortion, divorce, capital punishment, and homosexuality which have divided faith communities and destroyed relationships.

Yet if one accepts a divine being, or even a more amorphously-defined spiritual reality, then it is hard to resist the conclusion that we live in a moral universe.  In other words, our existence is one in which our thoughts, speech, and actions are judged according to fundamental, universal principles of right and wrong.  Whether it is Buddhist Dharma, Islamic Sharia law, or the Jewish Torah, all major faith movements teach a code of conduct.  Fashioning a “good life” in which personal fulfilment is joined with a standard of universal values is integral to religious self-identity.

For Christians, morality is informed by a number of often incongruent streams.  In our holy book, the Bible, a strict code of life enunciated in the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament) is by turns affirmed and modified (or even denied) by a uniquely Christian canon (the New Testament), which upholds an appeal to conscience as the basic arbiter of moral judgement.  Moreover, as a syncretic religion – that is, one that draws in people of diverse cultures and points of view, rather than a tribal religion like Shinto or Hinduism – Christianity has no “culture,” and has incorporated insights from many sources.  This is already seen in the accommodation of Greco-Roman thought and cultural beliefs about right and wrong found in the writings of St. Paul and the Acts of the Apostles.

In more recent times, Christianity has had to respond to the insights of science and modern philosophy.  It is no coincidence that the end of the Reformation roughly coincided with the birth of the Enlightenment.  In part, divisions in Christianity reflected increasingly diverse ways of understanding how to make moral judgements, and what those ought to be.  By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many Christian pastors and theologians were fighting an increasingly desperate rearguard action against moral relativism – the contention that ethical principles are not universal, but are socially, culturally, and historically contextual.

A main effect for contemporary Christians of both the complex foundation of Christian morality, and the ascendance of moral relativism has been the adoption of a sort of informal situational ethics, viewing all moral actions through the lens of Jesus’ love commandment.  But what does this mean in practical terms?  Is it workable or desirable?  How do we live the ethical aspect of our faith, and what sort of compromises do we make with a world in which ethics and morality are opaque concepts?

Through Advent, Wednesdays at 7pm, we will explore these issues by examining four areas:  loving our neighbour (presented by Bruce Morris); relations with indigenous people (presented by Paula Sampson, Director of First Nations Ministries at VST); aging and the elderly (presented by Linda Varin); and consumerism and consumption (presented by me).  Information about this program, called The Moral Roundtable: Christian Morality in the 21^st Century, is available in the bulletin, on posters around the church, and in the flyer accompanying this year’s Advent and Christmas letter.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

 

Pledging Allegiance

Sermon preached by The Rev’d Neil Fernyhough, Feast of the Reign of Christ (Nov. 22, 2009).

Readings:  2 Samuel 23: 1-7; Psalm 132: 1-19; Revelation 1: 4-8; John 18: 33-37.

About a month ago, Toby and I spent a few days visiting Los Angeles.  Now, I hadn’t been to LA since I was 13 – if by “LA” you mean Disneyland and Universal Studios.  So I arrived not really knowing what to expect, beyond the city’s legendary sprawl and horrible traffic – which indeed proved to be just as bad in 2009 as it was in 1978.  We stayed with a friend in West Hollywood, and on our first night there, he took us to his favourite frozen yoghurt place, a local fixture a few blocks away on Santa Monica Boulevard.

The three of us got our frozen yoghurt, and went to sit at a table on the sidewalk.  As we chatted and ate, a sleek, stately Bentley glided up in front of the shop.  A chauffer hopped out and opened the back door, and the from the car emerged a rather ordinary looking couple, who went into the store while the Bentley idled.  A few minutes later, they emerged with their frozen yoghurt, the chauffer hopped out again to open the door for them, and off they drove.  Toby and I, as the tourists, seemed to be the only people to look up and gawk.  Welcome to Los Angeles, where you are chauffer-driven in your limo to the local frozen yoghurt place.

West Hollywood and Beverly Hills are adjacent to one another, and it is not at all unusual to see Rolls Royces, Jaguars, and BMWs caught in the ubiquitous traffic snarls along Sunset Boulevard or Rodeo Drive.  Meanwhile, open-topped mini-buses climb the less jammed hills to drive by the homes of the stars.  In Century City, the old 20^th Century Fox back lot converted into high-rises, there is a street called the Avenue of the Stars, and along Hollywood Boulevard, red marble stars are embedded in the sidewalk, each bearing a familiar – or perhaps forgotten – name from some branch of the entertainment industry.  Some stars remain empty, awaiting the next big thing.  And brooding over all this, on an undistinguished hillside, is the famous sign bearing the name in large white letters of the subdivision that started it all – “Hollywood.”

Toby’s not a churchgoer, so when I sang, “Who are these like stars appearing?” – the first line of a familiar hymn dedicated to the saints – as we walked along looking at the stars in the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, he didn’t catch the irony.  But I, in any event, was struck by the displacement of one pantheon of heavenly adoration by another, more earthly one.  Hollywood is the dream factory, located in a country in which the pursuit of the American Dream is a shared aspiration.  But of course, the thing about dreams is that they are not reality.  In the context of Hollywood and of the culture of consumption generally, the “dream” is essentially a metaphor for the pursuit and conspicuous display of wealth.

On a Sunday dedicated to the Christian belief that God is at the helm of creation and society, what can we say about competing claims for the title?  How do the royalty embedded in the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard compare with the peasant rabbi dragged before Pilate on the charge of being king of the Jews?  How do the multimillion dollar shrines in the Hollywood Hills visited by supplicants in minivans clutching “maps of the stars’ homes” stack up to the plain clay huts with the grass roofs visited by Jesus and his followers as they cured the sick and preached the good news of God’s kingdom of reversed fortune?

“You say that I am a king,” Jesus says to Pilate in answer to the charges brought against him.  “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world – to testify to the truth.”  Left out of today’s Gospel lection is Pilate’s enigmatic reply.  “What is truth?” he asks his prisoner, either rhetorically or with genuine interest, we do not know.  What we do know is that then, as now, truth had less value than a tub of frozen yoghurt, much less the Bentley one might eat it in.  For some, the only truth that matters is the truth that will get you these commodities, in denominations of tens, hundreds, and thousands – and the power those commodities represent.

I hasten to say that the issue is not one of money or possessions, but it is one of allegiance to a realm of power.  In this sense, allegiance comes down to what it is one values most of all.  In a world controlled by values so at odds with the charter of the spiritual realm to which we pledge our own allegiance, what is a citizen of that realm to do?  I don’t think that the answer is necessarily to shed our clothes and pick up a begging bowl in the manner of St. Francis of Assisi.  The answer is recognizing that everything we have – including the ability we have to produce it or purchase it – is a gift of God.  The bodies in which we move to experience creation; the air we breathe in and out, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the labour and skill we possess, are gifts over which God has ultimate sovereignty.  As Jeremiah says, the pot does not ask the artisan who fashioned it, “why did you make me this way?”  It simply gets on with fulfilling the purposes for which it was created.  And for us, those divine purposes abound within us in complex and munificent glory.

This is the message of the Feast of the Reign of Christ.  It is the coda of the twenty-four week season after Pentecost that is just ending, a season in which the liturgical colour is green, to remind us of the faithful growth it represents.  This message is the “therefore” at the end of a lengthy, sustained rhetorical argument.  This message is the picture that finally emerges when you connect the dots.  And unless you concentrate and pay attention you’ll miss it, and go back to taking for granted everything you’ve been given, beginning with your life itself.

Given this, how can our attitude be anything less than one of gratitude?  And yet, so often it is.  In his epistle, the Apostle James admonishes his audience, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money’…you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’”  To James, the human being is like a “mist that vanishes,” just as for Isaiah, we are like grass that withers in the sun.  For Jesus, the human being is like a lily of the field, beautiful, albeit ephemeral – receiving all that is needed for sustenance from the hand of God whose giving never ends.

As Christians, the trick for us is to live in the world, while refusing to cling to its values.  The risk, on the one hand, is falling into hypocrisy by proclaiming kingdom values even as we pursue lives of consumption and pride.  On the other hand, we risk turning our backs on a world so sorely in need of the liberating message of equality and inclusive love inherent in our faith, and rejecting the very gifts we’ve been given to accomplish that.  A life of faith is a life in which one is constantly striking a new balance, in order to live with integrity as a resident within a society, while directing our allegiance elsewhere.

As the story begins anew next Sunday with the new year of Advent, each of us will continue to refine the lesson and so to shape our lives in faithful citizenship to that other realm.  May we each discover a place in that realm – God’s realm, and may we be empowered to prepare places for others to join us there.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

 

The Memorial of Peace

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Remembrance Sunday (November 8, 2009).

Readings:  Wisdom of Solomon 3: 1-9; Psalm 116: 1-8; 1 Peter 1: 3-9; John 6: 37-40.

A common ritual for me growing up in Victoria was to accompany my father downtown for the Remembrance Day service at the cenotaph.  I should say that it was common once I was old enough to be on my own, since dad would leave me to join the other veterans and march behind the active service personnel to the memorial on the corner of the grounds of the Parliament Buildings.

I was always inordinately proud of my dad on these occasions, dressed in his crisp Legion uniform, his medals newly polished, and – more often than not – white-gloved and carrying one of the flags in the colour party.  In those days, the contingent included veterans from the First World War as well.  I think everyone’s hearts swelled with pride and gratitude as we saw these men and women marching ranked behind one another – those of my father’s generation followed by those of my grandfather’s generation.  And I sometimes realized, that, had they lived, indeed my grandfathers, great-uncles, and my uncle would have been there, too.

Of course, people choose to go to war – or submit to be sent to war – for a number of complicated and conflicting reasons.  Let’s not forget that these are almost entirely young people, many barely out of high school.  For sure, some are called by a profound sense of idealism to defend deeply held principles.  For others, war is an adventure – a chance to perhaps escape a humdrum life in a small town.  And still for others, signing up is simply what one is expected to do by the often unconscious forces of societal and peer pressure.  When I was 18, about the same age as my dad when he signed up for the Air Force, I vividly recall asking him why he went to war.  He looked a little surprised by the question, and replied simply, “Because there was a war.”

Around my apartment are scattered, sepia-tinged photographs of men in uniform of three generations on both sides of my family – dating back to a great uncle who went with a Scottish regiment to fight an imperial war in South Africa at the turn of the last century.  Given that legacy, I suppose I’m not the only one of my generation who felt that I dodged a proverbial and perhaps literal bullet having not been called into battle myself.  The threat of a Third World War was somewhat distant by the 1980s, when I was of that age, and, in any event, my friends and I thought that if it ever came, we’d all be fried in a nuclear holocaust before we’d get anywhere near a recruiting office.

After the massacre of the Second World War, it was evident to many people that another global conflict could risk a catastrophic collapse of civilization, in light of this new and horrifying spectre of nuclear annihilation.  After sixty-five years, the deaths of  up to 200,000 people by the detonation of just two bombs over Japan retains a fresh power to appal – and it is all too easy to survey the photographs and films taken of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the explosions and imagine Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal.  But, despite the ghastly number of fatalities inflicted by these two nuclear weapons, it is important to recall that over seventy million people died in the Second World War, almost four times as many as in the war to end all wars, just a scant generation earlier.

As we all know, warfare – what von Clausewitz euphemistically defined as “the continuation of political discourse, carried on with other means –  has not ended.  Indeed, it’s often all too easy to forget that we are at war right now, 132 Canadians having died in Afghanistan over the last eight years.  According to the United Nations, there are six active wars and as many as seventeen smaller conflicts currently underway, which have so far consumed as many as one million lives.  When we turn our attention to our own small country, 115,000 or so have perished in warfare since Confederation.

In services of remembrance at churches, it is not uncommon to focus on peace; and, indeed, we incorporate a peace theme here at St. Hilda’s today, as well.  But we need first to take note of the dead, for peace is really their memorial – and it is still uncompleted.  It is significant, as it is poignant, that the readings appointed for Remembrance Sunday are for the commemoration of the dead.  The readings speak to them, and they speak to us about them, those who “run like sparks in the stubble,” as the Book of Wisdom says, those who have received “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,” according to the First Epistle of Peter.  And from the lips of Jesus, the promise to these faithful dead that they will “have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”

Christians have reflected on the justness of war since Augustine first explicitly addressed the subject in the fourth century.  Christianity’s past complicity with secular powers, and perpetration of violence in conquests, crusades, and that oxymoronic condition known as “religious warfare,” has often made a mockery of Jesus’ promise that “in me, you may have peace,” and “peace, I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”  Given this, we ask, is pacifism the answer?  War is a manifestation of evil, of sin – in other words, of the darker recesses of human nature, a nature is not always pacific.  War exists.  It happens.  And we have to respond to it – sometimes theologically, and sometimes actively.

When we consider the dead, some of whom may have been our loved ones, it is sobering to reflect that one of the most important lessons of war is the one so frequently the first to be forgotten.  That lesson is the imperative of peace.  Peace is essential to progress, it is essential to survival, it is the necessary precondition to the fulfilment of human potential and spiritual sustenance.  Peace is a product of righteousness just as surely as war is the product of sin.  To ask whether Christians should be pacifist sidesteps the real issue.  Afflicted with illness, quiescence is nothing less than submission to its power.  The medicine to cure war is peace; and pacifism is the state of a collective, peaceful consciousness.

St. Paul teaches that one of the primary attributes of a Christian is to be a minister of reconciliation.  By professing this, he acknowledges that there exists a rupture to be reconciled.  Forces are always at work to create oppression, to plant division, and so to reap inequality, injustice, and conflict.  It is our Christian calling, and our Christian duty, to water the tree of life through completing that memorial of peace whose foundation is those countless graves.  Educating the young leads to their participation in society; participation leads to action; action leads to justice; and justice leads to peace.  These are the means to combat war, and defeat sin, which is really the most significant conflict people of faith can wage.  The only casualty of such a conflict is the darkness of evil that permeates human history, obscuring the light of God’s kingdom which we alone have the power to shine.  Let us leave here today committed to shine that light, and build the memorial worthy of our fallen:  the memorial of peace.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

 

Continuity, Connectedness, Veneration

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Feast of All Saints (Nov.1, 2009).

Readings:  Isaiah 25: 6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21: 1-6a; John 11: 32-44.

I was not charmed by my work during the spring and summer of 1993.  I had a number of difficult cases I was dealing with as a social worker with the Ministry of Family and Child Services, as it is now euphemistically known.  My personal life wasn’t going so well either.  I was bored and lonely in my little cedar shake cabin, located on three acres of broom and bramble north of Sooke on Vancouver Island.  Most of my friends had long since left the Greater Victoria area for other pastures, and my job was a daily drain on my energy and contentment.  My only real pleasures were my garden – a plantation for the deer, as I ruefully considered it – and hiking in the hills, often with the Book of Common Prayer tucked into my back pocket.

One of the few cozy, comfortable nooks of my life during those months was – and it’s a good thing you’re all sitting down for this – Saint Augustine (commemorated August 28^th).  I’d get home from work, crack a beer (in those days, I brewed my own beer, and consuming it was a constant chore), and curl up in a hammock strung between two pine trees to read his memoirs.  They are called – appropriately enough – Confessions.  For all that people in the church today deride Augustinian theology – even if they haven’t read any of it – there is little doubt that the scholar reluctantly made Bishop of Hippo was a deeply spiritual man.  He had undergone a very profound journey from Gnosticism to Christianity, guided by his mentor, St. Ambrose (commemorated December 7^th), and he detailed that evolution in his autobiography.

My encounter with Augustine changed my life.  I may not have made my own journey to ordained ministry had I not come across this book, along with John Dominic Crossan’s The Historical Jesus.  I mention this because it provides an example of how the saints – those people honoured and revered for their exceptional holiness – can work miracles in our lives.  And by saints, I don’t just mean the 157 individuals named in our yearly calendar, including our own Hilda of Whitby (commemorated November 18^th), I mean also your saints, and mine.  Beloved parents, brothers and sisters, children, husband or wife, friends, colleagues, and comrades, teachers, pastors, and mentors – we all build shrines in our hearts to the holy people who have changed, and continue to change, our lives.

So given this, why have we chosen today – the Feast Day of All Saints – to incorporate stewardship of creation into our worship?  If we consider the principles that animate our communion with the saints, it is, I hope, clear.  For those principles – continuity, connectedness, and veneration – are the same ones that animate our communion with creation.  Our hands reach back in time to clasp other hands, which in turn reach back until they touch those twelve pairs of hands – those of the first disciples – who touch the hands imprinted with nails.  This lineage – this web – is the superstructure of the saints which binds us together as a people called “Christian.”  Continuity, connectedness, veneration.

The heritage that has been entrusted to us is not an institution nor a set of dogmas.  It’s more organic than that.  It’s a movement – a movement for hope, for peace, for joy, for life.  A movement, in other words, of the Spirit.  And as a movement with those characteristics and this heritage of antiquity, we should be acutely concerned about its place in the fabric and fibre of the planet.  The message of Jesus is not words, it is action, beginning with a strong defence of the creation which makes life possible.  The first act of God was to bring being into being – the stage where the divine drama could eternally unfold and eternally enfold its creatures.  And whether it was St. Jerome (September 30^th) fervently translating scripture into the Latin vernacular, called the Vulgate, so that it could be read and understood; or whether it was William Wilberforce (July 29^th) exerting every ounce of his energy to ensure that human would no longer enslave human; or whether it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer (August 14^th) strangled with piano wire because of his opposition to Hitler’s fascist tyranny and race hatred; Christians have recognised that without creation, salvation and sanctification are meaningless concepts.

Our hands reach back in time in another sense as well – they grasp roots, paws, stones, talons, fins, soil, water; forming another sort of lineage, another sort of web, reaching back to our creaturely origins.  But this lineage and this web embeds us in the fabric and fibre of the planet as thoroughly as does the lineage of our human ancestors in the spirit; the saints.  In fact, and I hope this is not too heterodox a claim, the cloud of witnesses with whom we are surrounded include those rocks, earth, birds and beasts, water, trees and plants that truly make up this holy stage called creation.  This creation, sanctified by God’s original blessing of the Book of Genesis – “God saw it, and indeed it was very good” – abides indeed in the company of the saints.

Sanctification reminds us of the permanence of God’s original blessing in our lives, which seem so fleeting at times.  We are truly here in an instant and gone again, like a water drop vaporised in a hot frying pan.  But like the steam that thus rises, we don’t actually disappear, but are joined to that cloud of witnesses, to Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Wilberforce, Bonhoeffer, Hilda, and all those ones known to us alone, to smile benignly on the stage of nature where the divine show continues to play into the wee hours of eternity.

I invite you to step outside today prepared to breathe in the good air, to feel – perhaps – the rain and cold slap against your skin.  See the trees, these beautiful trees, rise up around us, and poking through them beyond, the vast, continuous ocean, to where it meets the vaster, limitless sky.  Breathe in and out and feel your heart beat and your blood pulse.  Experience the continuity, the connectedness, and the veneration.  And then think of those saints, those holy men, women, and children, who are bringing you to a state of greater spiritual maturity…and intimacy.  Recall their wisdom, and whet your appetite for further knowledge…and deeper love.  And again, experience the continuity, the connectedness, and the veneration.  So begin your week, and so begin your ongoing journey home to the saints above, even as you now abide with the saints below.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

 

Blindness

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, 21st Sunday After Pentecost (October 25, 2009).

Readings:  Job 42: 1-6; Psalm 34: 1-8; Hebrews 7: 23-28; Mark 10: 46-52.

Have you ever cured a person of blindness?  Well, it’s a great feeling, I can assure you!  Of course, a lot depends on what is meant by blindness.  While I can’t remove cataracts, I do preach, teach, and write in an effort to help others see.  Well, and to help myself see, as well, if I’m being honest.  Whether it is a case of the blind leading the blind I cannot say for sure, at least until I meet God face-to-face and get a status report.  But I try…and any frustration is more than compensated by the feeling a physician must get when she removes the bandages from a patient’s eyes, and previously unknown colours, shapes, and perspectives come into view.

Now, I know that the theme of spiritual blindness is a somewhat tired trope that preachers regularly trot out, but it is absolutely necessary to do so if we’re to rightly understand the message of the gospel.  Miracles abound in the stories of Jesus, and they’re so familiar we often can’t be bothered to take the time to ask why.  What do they mean?

In many cases, miracles represent a straightforward suspension of natural law in order to make a point about Jesus’ legitimacy as an emissary of God.  Think, for example, of him stilling the stormy Sea of Galilee, or raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead.  Those miracles simply scream what was heard on the mountaintop at the Transfiguration:  “This is my son, the beloved, listen to him!”  But, in this instance, the message is more oblique.  It is about society, and about our response to Jesus.  Now sure, to a certain extent, it is – like the other miracles I mentioned – a legitimacy thing.  Note that the blind man uses a very specific title to refer to Jesus:  “Son of David.”  In one sense, this foreshadows the immanency of Advent, in which the identity of Jesus as the consummation of the kingly lineage of David and Solomon is fulfilled.  But in another sense, the story is about us, and about the kind of world we need to be living in.

It’s hard to make the leap from hearing this as a story about an encounter between a suppliant and the messiah.  But it helps if we realise that the individualism of these narratives function as illustrations of a larger societal message.  This is a standard rhetorical device, easily observed when, for instance, a politician attempts to explain revenue policy by telling an anecdote about someone deducting taxes from his income.  Here, a metaphorically blind man wants to see the messiah, and his faith heals him.  The message that is being illustrated is summed up by a pithy saying of Jesus elsewhere in the gospels that “there are none so blind as those who will not see.”

What don’t we see?  What are we wilfully blind to in our society?  Who will remove the film covering our eyes and show us the messiah?  What keeps us from perceiving God’s world in our world?  Well, I want us to consider just one source of blindness – one I alluded to in my sermon last week when I contrasted consumption with commitment.  This is a theme I hope to develop next week when our worship takes on an environmental focus in the context of honouring All Saints, as part of our “Communities Caring for Communities” stewardship campaign.

What does it mean to live as a spiritual person in a consumer society?  First of all, it means having to respond to a culture that is profoundly alienated from spiritual values.  When church folk like us talk about reasons why people are alienated from religion, they usually cite issues around doctrine, about whether we’re too liberal or too conservative, or whether insights from science have undermined the credibility of an Author of Creation.  But I think the real elephant in the room is that people already are worshipping a God – the God of consumption.  When you do that, you don’t have any room to experience the real God.  And you can’t believe what you don’t experience.

By and large in our society, material hunger is substituted for spiritual hunger, and yet the appetite is never satisfied.  We see it all around us.  Take, for instance, the news media.  What is news?  Well, if you were to drop down here from another planet, you might think that the main issues confronting human beings were such things as climate change, overpopulation, and radical inequalities between rich and poor.  So, you might rightly expect to see those as the top stories on the news, and top priorities for the governments of the world.  And do you?  The US government very quickly gave away a trillion dollars over the past twelve months, but it wasn’t to solve these crises.  It was to subsidise industry during a financial crisis.  How can we ever believe a western government again when they say that they don’t have enough money to bring clean water to dying Africans, or HIV medicine to sick people in southeast Asia?

Truly, there are none as blind as those who will not see.  And so, journalists ask hard questions about whether a family in Colorado perpetrated a publicity stunt; but when they even bother to ask public officials about environmental destruction, they accept insipid platitudes in return.  Why?  I remember as a child that advertisements were all about luxury – from the silky smooth taste of the lowliest addictive substance right up to the football-field of metal called the family car.  Now, it’s all about convenience, economy, and what we might be able to get away with environmentally.  How long until the ads will be for products that will help you survive in a ravaged world?  And will we still refrain from asking questions of our god Consumption?

Jesus is all about good news, and so I foreswear sermons that paint a dark future, or that take a cynical stance with regard to human beings.  But we need to have a clear vision about the future, and be clear-eyed about human nature…lest we become so blind that we cannot see.  Building the kingdom of God doesn’t begin anywhere but here.  And it doesn’t begin any time but now.  Jesus didn’t promise the blind man that he’d strike a panel to discuss his blindness, and, when he got the results at unspecified time, would develop a ten-year plan with an ophthalmologist to give him his sight.  Jesus healed him there and then.  As the living body of Christ, we owe our community nothing less.

I think about Job, who was clear-eyed enough to realise that his punishment was unjust, but still needed to polish his spectacles to see the awesome grandeur of God in creation and salvation…and, just as significantly, the ultimate proprietary right of the Creator over that creation.  As stewards of God’s creation, we are uniquely called to bring sight to the blind, to bind up the broken-hearted, to let the oppressed go free.  It is a calling that is as breathtaking in its simplicity as it is in its audacity.  Let’s have the audacity to be simple, to get on with living this amazing gospel of miracles, and to touch the blind and make them see that faith will make them well.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

 

Creating a Religious Culture

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist (October 18, 2009).

Readings:  Sirach 38: 1-14; Psalm 147; 2 Timothy 4: 5-13; Luke 4: 14-21

The Gospel of Luke, and its companion piece, the Acts of the Apostles, are accounts of a revolutionary spiritual movement in action.  Consider the gospel we heard today – “The spirit of the Lord,” says Jesus, “has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…release to the captives…to let the oppressed go free.”  He is quoting from the Prophet Isaiah, and his audience merely nod their heads in agreement, and commend him on his delivery.  In this sense, they are akin to so many congregations deafened by familiarity with an oft-repeated holy text.  It is only when Jesus sits down, pauses dramatically, and declares, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” that all hell breaks loose.

Many of us familiar with this account know how it ends.  Jesus informs the hometown crowd that God was perfectly capable of showing mercy to the faithful of the foreign nations, while scorning faithless Israelites – reconfiguring for them who exactly is the wheat in God’s eyes, and who is the chaff, and why.  His former neighbours in Galilee respond to the perceived affront by attempting to hurl this upstart young rabbi off a cliff.

This is the tenor of Luke’s version of the good news from Mary’s famous proclamation of social reversal in the Magnificat – in which the lowly are raised and the hungry fed, while the powerful are toppled and the rich are sent away empty – to Paul’s proclamation before a crowd of hostile Jews that God’s love embraces the Gentiles, as well.  Yet, like the dulled attention of his Galilean audience, the church today has grown so accustomed to the radical nature of this message, that we often treat it as hollow rhetoric, despite our best intentions.  Sure, they are very noble sentiments, but what of it?

I don’t blame Christians for lethargy in this regard.  In draining the Lukan message of any hint that overturning the social order might actually be a spiritual imperative, we are merely imitating a culture in which consumption is valued over commitment.  This sense of a society untethered from commitment, a society of dilettantes in which self-obsession is a noble pursuit, was a recurring theme at the symposium I attended yesterday, and helped organize.  The symposium, called Spiritual But Not Religious: Challenges for the Church in a Post-Religious Culture, critically examined the place of faith in our region in the 21^st Century.  What I took from that day-long event was that we don’t live in a post-religious culture, so much as we live in a pre-religious one.  Allow me to explain.

Luke is a message of hope to us, living as we do in a part of the world where religion has never fully taken root, as it has elsewhere in North America.  Ours is a culture of individualism, where autonomy is frequently valued over community, and the principles of self-preservation and self-fulfillment are considered important values – even if they are rarely stated in such ethical terms.  One of our presenters yesterday, Dr. Patricia O’Connell Killen, recounted a comment made by the recently appointed pastor of the largest African American congregation in Seattle, who had moved to this region from Baltimore.  Concerning the attitudes she found here, she declared that, in Seattle, “most folks care more about their dogs then they do about their neighbours.”

Is she right?  I don’t know enough to comment about Seattle, but I think she’s right about this part of British Columbia.  We live in a society that, if you judge by actions rather than words, unquestionably values consumption and personal fulfillment over commitment and care for others.  This is, unfortunately, not only reflected in the spiritually narcissistic smorgasbord enjoyed by many outside of the church, but also by the complacency of so many inside it.  You cannot, along with the Galileans, admire the “gracious words” of Jesus’ paraphrase of Isaiah, if you are not prepared to respond to the sting of its application – good news for the poor, release for the captives, freedom for the oppressed.  At a time in our own parish when there has been much discussion of what we euphemistically call “outreach,” but is really just our commission as the baptised, we need to ask ourselves not if we are doing too much, but if we are doing enough.  We cannot confuse church with a sort of Medieval chantry chapel in which masses are perpetually said for the dead – in this case, for dead understandings, traditions, and practices of a culturally mandatory Christianity that has long since ceased to exist.

Another participant in yesterday’s symposium was Sharon Betcher, a Lutheran pastor and Associate Professor of Theology at the Vancouver School of Theology.  She said that one of the most profound messages of Jesus was that “giving yourself, even giving your life for others is a safe thing to do.”  It is a deafening counterblast to a prevailing cultural ethos which is all about minimizing personal loss, maximizing pleasure, and denying the sometimes difficult realities of life.  As a community of action in the Lukan mould, we must always be considering ways in which we can help our society move beyond this spiritually immature state:  to move from being a pre-religious culture to being a religious one.

We live in a part of the world that is much like the world Paul confronted at Athens, which Luke describes in the Acts of the Apostles.  We live, in other words, in a culture that builds statues to an unknown God.  But, like Athens, we also live in a culture that is a crossroads of many faith traditions.  In acts of social and environmental justice – whether it is helping to ensure food security for the hungry, or build houses for the homeless – there is room for us to live faithfully, to witness to others, and to discover room to think about how our wisdom tradition intersects with other wisdom traditions around us.  In this way, we can truly think outwardly rather than inwardly.

Our one nonreligious participant yesterday, Kolin Lymworth, is the founder and co-owner of Banyen Books, a clearinghouse of spiritual literature.  He suggested that one reason why people resist religion is the perception that it requires buying into dogmas and doctrines at the expense of acting with justice, kindness, and intentionality.  Our bishop, Michael Ingham, responded that attention to doctrine is the first step in scrutinizing it.  Without a set of shared beliefs, he claims, there is no impetus to self-examination as a community, so that the beliefs can be constantly judged, refined, and reinterpreted.  In this sense, doctrine doesn’t become the defining characteristic of a religion, rather, community does.

On a day in which we raise up the teaching of St. Luke, let us remember his message of commitment over consumption.  Consumptions assumes the character of individualism, but commitment proclaims community.  The commitment we are proclaiming during this season of stewardship is, simply, communities caring for communities – in pastoral care, in outreach, in evangelism, education, and worship.  In all these ministries, may we never lose sight of the one prevailing endeavour.  That is to live out the commitment of Jesus that “today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

 

Preach It, Brother!

I’ve been both delighted and humbled by the positive feedback I have so often received for my preaching. On the one hand, I take such praise with a few grains of salt – offering it to the preacher waiting at the door to shake your hand is sometimes a matter of graciousness more than veracity. On the other hand, I am myself conscious of a gradual improvement in my sermons; and the fact that a few students and colleagues have asked me to share my ideas on developing and delivering them seems to support this self-assessment.

I have always felt that, like any craft, homiletics is both an art and a science. A lot of people can be taught to sculpt, or even cook – but to do these things well requires what, for lack of a more precise word, we call “talent.” I don’t think talent is some sort of innate magic that you either have or you don’t. Rather, one’s fascination with a process or activity fuels a desire to learn to do it as well as possible. This requires focussed attention on the production of the craft by others, as well as on one’s own process. Hence, just as an artist may view the world in terms of colouration, aesthetics, and composition – so a homilist often views the world semantically, allegorically, analogically, or morally; in other words, rhetorically – for rhetoric is the nature of homiletic discourse.

I was an indifferent student of homiletics at seminary.  For me, preaching was a matter of “common sense.” As a naïf in the wilderness of pastoral theology, I was much like the novice actor who thinks that if she simply gets an agent, then her natural charisma and talent will win over the producers at her first audition. There is little to compare with the crestfallen indignation and wounded pride of someone who thinks they’re “all that,” only to be informed by a teacher that, sadly, they’re not. I had to learn that. But one thing I already knew going into my first homiletics class was that I didn’t need to be remade into the mould of my instructor who – decent enough preacher that he was – had a style that would have been artificial had I adopted it. Nothing stirs up the cauldron of disgust in the thoughtful listener quite so much as the spectacle of a self-consciously synthetic orator.

In my opinion, there are three essential elements of any sermon: interpretation, rhetoric, and literary character. I’d like to discuss each of these elements at some length.

Interpretation
Regardless of Christian denomination, a sermon almost invariably follows the reading of scripture as an exposition or explanation of what the audience has just heard. Hence, if the notion of a “literal interpretation” made any sense, a sermon would be unnecessary. Even limiting the role of a homily to that of pursuing the application of a scriptural passage to the lives of the listeners requires the interpretation of the passage’s original meaning, and then translating that into the meaning of contemporary events.

“Literal interpretation” is little better than an oxymoron, since it rests on the untenable proposition that words are objects-in-themselves, rather than symbols pointing to ideas, archetypes, or simple grammatical functions. String words together in sentences, paragraphs, and books, and the level of interpretative complexity becomes densely multivariate. Scripture is freighted with additional complexity, of course, relating to the lengthy history and diverse sources of its authorship and development (through editing), the difficulty associated in identifying authorial intent and the way in which original audiences would have received the material, the relationship of disparate books to one another – not to mention the relationship of a Hebrew canon (the Old Testament) to a Christian canon (the New), the deformation of meaning inherent in translation from one language into another, and the history of interpretation and doctrinal development, beginning with the choices made in the third and fourth centuries determining the texts that would be included in the Bible.

Of course, this is all Bible 101 stuff, but it is surprising just how quickly preachers seem to forget the importance of these basic parameters when they launch into a sermon. Thus, to take a familiar example, a Christmas homily will frame the dubious birth narratives as historical fact – which I guess is what passes for a “literal interpretation” – without so much as a passing reference to the theological claims associated with the incarnation which these highly suspect narratives serve to illustrate. I would counsel any preacher to forego preparing their sermon on Luke 2:1-20 without first undertaking a close reading of John 1:1-14. There’s a reason why the latter was prescribed as the primary reading in the Book of Common Prayer, and the former was supplementary – our forebears were more self-consciously theological than we are comfortable being today.

I am not arguing in favour of a sort of dry, pedagogical lecture in place of a sermon. What I am arguing is that the preacher owes his congregation the benefit of his learning – that’s one of the reasons why they pay you the big bucks. We must resist discarding as superfluous the exegetical, hermeneutical, and linguistic tools we learned as seminarians. Scripture is not rightly expounded when fables are confused with fact, false connections are made (e.g., between the prophecies of Isaiah and the coming of Christ), or translational difficulties are elided (a virgin will conceive? Is that what Isaiah says?). One does not need to belabour exegetical points, but the most basic form of interpretation is the interpretation of the meaning of a scriptural passage as a piece of writing. You can’t talk about understanding a passage, much less applying it, unless you first deal with its actual content.

This reminds us that there are strata of interpretation, and that a fault-line in the foundation has the potential to undermine the entire structure of the argument a preacher wishes to advance. In other words, if the presuppositions are wrong or suspect, then the entire thread is tainted and compromised. What can the enlightened listener expect to believe if the preacher can’t even grasp basic literary criticism?

Understanding the text rightly, through critical methodology, permits the preacher to begin exploring the murky waters of what we usually call “sermon ideas.” Sermon ideas are, essentially, the message we want to convey. What do we want listeners to take away from what they have heard? By this, I don’t mean answering questions, so much as ideas that will raise questions. As a pedagogical matter, preachers need to be acutely interested in how people learn. And as much as we may be inclined to forget it, the rhetorical arrows in our quiver are only fired as far as the bow of our content will allow.

In practical terms, this means searching for the hidden nugget – the surprising or provocative element of a familiar story, often developed through reference to a personal analogy or topical situation. Interpretation begins with being perplexed by something. Ideally, a congregation should be provoked into perplexity, recognizing that “provoke” and “provocative” have the same Latin root: pro vocare, to “call out,” or to “call forth.” In this sense, what is being called forth is consideration of the questions being raised, and potential answers. Or, in some cases, not even potential answers, but a way of thinking about the questions in such a way that answers are even considered possible. The best of all possible sermons, from a purely pedagogical point of view, are those in which the listener is aware of questions she didn’t even know existed.

Awareness is the necessary condition for enlightenment in any realm of human understanding. Without the cultivation of awareness as the underlying strategy of a sermon, any rhetorical or literary device the homilist wishes to deploy may be rich in form, but vacant of content.

Rhetoric
When I began preparing sermons, I had already spent nine of my fifteen years out of high school in a classroom, and my delivery showed it. Sermons, I felt, were meant to be educational – hence, their primary function involved the transmission of information. In my rather simplistic way of constructing a sermon, I would typically begin with a very barebones anecdote, and then speedily go into an exegesis of the passage meant to support a certain conclusion – the “takeaway.”

To show how my approach has evolved, it might help to compare the introductions to two Christmas sermons – one which I gave shortly after being ordained a priest in 2000, and a second given last Christmas. First from 2000:

Growing up in a more or less secular household, festivals like Easter and Christmas were, for the most part, my only taste of the Christian world. What was Christmas to me? It was the family getting together, presents under the tree, the Christmas specials on television. And what was the message of Christmas? Well, I guess it could be summed up in the quotation from Luke, which has become a trite Christmas card slogan: “peace on earth, goodwill to all people.” For many folks, this is the beginning and the end of the meaning of Christmas. It has little to do with an invitation to emulate the life of the humble child whose birth was announced to poor shepherds. And it has little to do with the end of oppression, bondage, and war of which the prophet Isaiah spoke.

Now from 2008:

Walking around the village about a month ago, I noticed that stores were putting up Christmas displays and decorations. So when I returned home, I cheekily changed the status on my Facebook page to read “It’s beginning to look a lot like Consumer-mas!” Within an hour, I received a comment from someone who took me to task for trying to spoil her Christmas fun with my “Scrooge-like cynicism”! Ouch! Of course, the suggestion that there are two Christmases – a secular one and a religious one – has become so trite, it’s scarcely remarkable. For some people the two intersect, and for some they don’t. Some go for the nativity scenes, church, and carols; others go for snowmen, Santa, and pop music. And some go for both.Contrary to what my innocent note on Facebook might have signified, I’m actually pretty broadminded when it comes to Christmas. I certainly hold my nose over the season’s role as an engine of the retail economy, and all that this says about the substitution of spirituality for consumption. But, what the heck. I buy presents and listen to Frosty the Snowman, as well. In fact, I see the truth about Christmas lying somewhere in an intersection between Jesus and Santa.

I think it is fair to say that the theology underlying both introductions is fundamentally identical: Christmas has secular and spiritual components; the former only skims the surface of the true meaning of the holiday; and the true meaning lies in the liberating theology represented by the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth. A standard Christmas trope, in other words – one which preachers generally feel obliged to adopt (as annoying as that sometimes is) on account of the large number of unchurched or minimally churched people in the pews on Christmas Eve.

Yet, the form has demonstrably changed. The anecdote is more detailed and extended, allowing people to visualize the events. It provides insight into the ambivalent feelings they probably share, and then I engage the provocative, unexpected part of which I spoke in the last section – in this case, asserting that the truth of Christmas can emerge out of this ambivalence.

The form has changed in subtle ways, as well. The tone is more colloquial, more intimate and direct, more engaged with the audience – in short, more conversational. Theological points can be made without an appeal to abstraction, as Jesus ably demonstrated. Language which obscures comes trippingly to the tongues of those who have spent vast swaths of their adult lives in university (I ended up spending fifteen years in post-secondary education). An important lesson for me was that I could speak in an educated idiom without resorting to dense, archaic, or technical prose. This came home for me most tellingly after preaching a sermon at my first placement upon returning to the Lower Mainland from pursuing doctoral studies in Berkeley. I had just preached a Pentecost sermon, in which I spoke about how we are all “vivified by the Holy Spirit,” when a parishioner approached me to congratulate me on it. “Except one part confused me,” he said, “when you said we were ‘vilified by the Holy Spirit.’” “Ah,” I responded, “you must have heard incorrectly. I said ‘vivified.’” He looked at me blankly. He didn’t know what “vivified” meant.
When I want to be stubborn about something, I can be a glacially slow learner. I chalked this incident up to one individual’s particular ignorance. It wasn’t until a few more similar episodes had transpired, and a few people politely told me that my language went over their heads, that I realised this was MY problem. Sermons are a rhetorical exercise – that is, they are discourses meant to persuade. But you cannot persuade people if they can’t understand you. By the same token, the King James Version has been largely abandoned in churches not because it is a poor translation (it is, in fact, a fairly literal one), or because the language is ugly (it is actually quite sublime), but because it is written in seventeenth century prose. By the time people have invested the mental energy in deciphering what is being said, they have none left over to absorb its meaning.

On the flip side, congregations are ill-served by language which is banal and anodyne. The most charming and amusing story in the world could be told, one which will be remembered for weeks – maybe even years – afterward. But if the theological point is nonexistent, you might as well be reading a short story by P.G. Wodehouse. Insipid or trivial sermons about how Jesus just wants us to love everybody are scarily easy to produce. But like a constant diet of fast food, it may make us feel good and fill us up for an hour or two; but in the long run, it’ll (spiritually) kill us. Homiletic rhetoric succeeds when a congregation is engaged and challenged. The challenge is primarily in the content, but the sermon also needs to be sufficiently intellectual to invite people to think and reflect. In this sense, the language should be comprehensible without being bland. Engagement is content driven, but the form is vital.

For the most part, my sermons begin with an anecdote (either personal, cultural, or historical), which serves as an illustration. Sometimes it begins with or contains a playful, colloquial retelling of a passage of scripture – in case people didn’t “hear” it the first time. Then I start exploring themes, putting them in dialogue with the passage(s) under consideration. There is no one way of doing this. Sometimes, I might spend half my sermon unpacking a theme, before I suddenly make the connection with a scriptural passage – “the long lure,” I call it. I once spent seven minutes talking about the dynamics of inferiority, personal and cultural, before I brought in the gospel passage – “the first shall be last, and the last first” – and how it related to such instances. Conversely, on another occasion, I spent an entire sermon retelling the story of Jonah. I related the amusing and brilliant ways that the author plays with the Hebrew language, how he takes direct aim at popular xenophobia, and then concluded with the very pointed, poignant, and timeless theological message of its conclusion.

The theme is important, of course. It needn’t always be about “right living.” It could be about the sacraments, biblical interpretation itself, or even – God forbid! – ecclesiology. Surprising connections are helpful, too. I recently preached a sermon on regret for a blessing of the animals service on the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. The underlying question of the sermon was whether Francis had anything to regret having thrown away a materially bright future in order to become a friar. Why didn’t I preach on animals? Because love of animals wasn’t Francis’ primary mission or contribution to the church; and because their presence at the service already provided a living (though mute) homily on the importance of animals in our lives. The feast day is about Francis, not about pets. In this way, I was able to introduce two levels of surprises – the sermon wasn’t about pets, and its discussion of Francis used an unexpected theme (one with which the listener could relate) as a touchstone. I received an extraordinary amount of positive feedback.

Obviously, each preacher needs to find his or her style – hopefully one that is authentic and free of gimmicks. Modulation of tone, the use of silence, and some animation in delivery are all important. Above all, even if one has the text before oneself, deliver the sermon, don’t read it! If you stray, omit, add, and edit along the way, go with it. As one practices, the text will become more a framework and an aide de mémoire rather than a script. Having said that, I wouldn’t dispose of it entirely, for reasons I’ll outline below.

Delivery should not be the primary conveyor of emotional content. A good sermon works on the emotional level as well as the intellectual, ideally producing a spiritual response. But the feelings generated come in the content, primarily by successfully inviting the listener to personally identify with the message. This is often accomplished most convincingly in the conclusion. Again, allow me to compare my 2000 and 2008 Christmas sermons. This is how the first ended:

As we heard this evening, “the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation to all.” Thus the message of Isaiah, manifested in the coming of God in Christ Jesus, is as much for the child who thinks that Christmas is all about Santa as it is for the most zealous follower of our Lord. Now that is a reason to celebrate and be joyful! We are called to remove the burdens, bondage, and oppression – those placed on others, and those placed on ourselves. My prayer for us all tonight is that every day we be renewed in the desire to build God’s kingdom of righteousness, justice, and peace – in our hearts, and in the world. Amen.

Yawn. Christmas is for everyone, and it means liberation, and I hope we all feel liberated enough to do good things. Compare with the following:

Because the divine God came to us in the human Jesus, Christians are called to see Jesus in all whom we encounter – those whom we love, and those whom we despise; those who make us comfortable, and those who make us uneasy; those who uplift, and those who annoy. In so doing, we begin the work of helping to reconcile individuals with themselves, with one another, and with God. It is the toughest of callings. And yet, it is so immensely rewarding. We are drawn into the story, with the shepherds and the angels and the magi – and we are brought to the foot of a cradle where we see that most vulnerable of creatures – a human infant. And likewise where we see that most powerful of figures, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. Both in this one, tiny being.
This Christmas I invite you to into that story – into the love poem that is Jesus Christ. Sing out that poem loudly as you journey through the coming year, sing it out as you see the face of God in all those with whom you will come into contact. Make the poem your own, being as Christ to others. For when you do that, you incarnate the truth that is Christmas, the truth that is love. The truth that we are not alone. Amen.

It says exactly the same thing. Only better.

Literary Character
My graduate thesis compared the rhetoric of wealth in the Epistle of James with that found in the discourses of the Greek philosophers Plutarch, Epictetus, and Dio Chrysostom. We sometimes forget that the prose works of the ancient Near East were meant to be read aloud. The aesthetic quality of oratory contributes to its rhetorical force, and that can only be preserved when it is prepared as a literary work.

Writing a sermon allows one to be careful with language, to make good use of the literary devices at hand (whether it be something as simple as alliteration or as complicated as allegory), to be subtle and precise, to be evocative. It also allows one to more easily develop the thread of a narrative in a focussed, complex way, for example by weaving in references and quotes, or revisiting key words or concepts.

From a purely practical standpoint, writing a sermon also keeps the preacher on track. The temptation to ramble, to lose the thread, to repeat oneself, or to digress is gone. There’s a lot to be said for telling stories around the campfire – but the best told stories are the ones told many times before, practiced and honed within an inch of their lives. Absent that, writing it out is the next best option.

Finally, writing a sermon commits it to posterity. By that, I don’t mean you can recycle it for later use. Unless one is in a terrible pinch, recycling a sermon does a disservice to yourself and the congregation: to yourself, because you are not doing the necessary work to develop your theology and your skill; and to the congregation, because you are giving them your theology, interpretation, and style reheated from circa [fill in the date]. What I do mean, is that you provide yourself and your congregation with a record of your exposition of passages of scripture to which you and they can refer. To that end, I recommend making sermons available to the congregation, either on a blog or in hard copy. It reinforces the message your sermon was meant to convey.

In a certain sense, preachers prepare the sermons they want to hear. It is often said that a hundred people will hear a hundred different sermons, but this is a misapprehension. If a sermon is rich in content and meaning, it will invite a variety of responses – but those responses usually flow from the message the preacher intends to convey. When this fails to occur, it is usually due to a lack of clarity in the message, and this usually results from a failure of literary soundness. A preacher shouldn’t be above saying, “This is what I’d like you to take away from my sermon,” when necessary.

Having said that, it is simply not possible to preach the sermon everybody wants to hear. Unlike the fond hope of St. Paul, one cannot be “all things to all people.” To get a sense of the culture and concerns of the community is important, of course, but so is getting a measure of the human condition and the vagaries of human nature. At its core, religion is about making sense of the world and one’s place in it. As such, sermons address basic existential questions – the nature and purpose of being; the roles that fear and love play in defining our thoughts and actions; understanding pain, loss, and the spectre of death; the fundamental human relationships with God, with one another, and with oneself; and, ultimately, how one might best live one’s life in the context of these questions. The rest is commentary.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

 

Regret

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Feast of St. Francis of Assisi (observed October 4, 2009).

Readings:  Galatians 6: 14-18; Psalm 148: 7-14; Matthew 11: 25-30

Someone recently asked me if there was anything in my life which I regretted.  What I think the questioner was really asking wasn’t so much whether there was anything I regretted as what it was I regretted, since regret is simply part of the human condition.  I suppose there are some folks who don’t have the capacity for it, or are somehow able to turn it off, but I don’t think that’s always a good impulse.  Regret over wilfully choosing to do the wrong thing, for whatever stupid, selfish reason we’ve chosen to do it, is the first step toward repentance.  But having done what we could to achieve reconciliation, we are supposed to put the regret away.

But what about that other sort of regret that says, “If I’d known then what I know now, I would have done x, and my life would be so different”?  I think, for example, of all the years I spent in school – seven years mucking about trying to decide on an undergraduate major (so much time, in fact, that I was inadvertently able to minor in philosophy); three years getting a Master of Divinity degree, my academic qualification to be a priest, and then another five years getting a second graduate degree and beginning a doctoral program, which I never finished.  So much time and money, and what to show for it?  I was forty when I finally gave up on the academic enterprise – folks I’d been in high school with had long since consolidated their positions in the world, establishing good careers, buying homes, travelling, raising a family.  I graduated from sleeping on a futon to sleeping in a bed just three years ago – I couldn’t afford one before that.

I thought about all this when I was asked about regret, but it was all too complicated to go into, so I deflected the question.  Still, I brooded, as I sometimes do, and wondered if I had to do it all over again, mightn’t I have been – I don’t know – a little more focussed?  And it nagged at me for a few days…that is, until I began preparing for the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi.

Of course, like most people, I knew a little about St. Francis.  I knew he was the son of a wealthy Italian merchant, who famously gave away the clothes on his back to a poor beggar before running away from home to found a new ascetic community of beggars, pledged to live lives of service and poverty.  I knew that he was famous for his love of animals and of nature, and that he preached to the birds.  And I believed I saw reflected in the Anglican and Roman Catholic orders that bear his name those same virtues of simplicity, humility, voluntary poverty, and service to others.

What I didn’t fully realize about Francis of Assisi was just how totally and breathtakingly he reformed the Church without even intending to.  Yet so effective was his community’s ministry, so complete their evident devotion to God, so charismatic the person of Francis, that within a few years, he was able to make a personal appeal to the Pope himself – the most powerful figure in Europe – to permit him to establish an order of friars.  Within a few years, the Order of Friars Minor was spreading out of Umbria, through the Italian Peninsula, and beyond into the rest of Europe.  Within a generation, it would be second only to the Benedictines as the dominant religious order in Europe.

What did Francis have to regret?  By the standards of the world’s customary values, plenty.  He had voluntarily estranged himself from his family, surrendering any hope of a career in their profitable textile trade.  He eschewed ownership of any property, opting instead to survive by begging.  He made it his life’s work to pray and practice acts of piety, scarcely a lucrative enterprise.  And he rejected the option of marriage and children, choosing instead to associate himself with a community of like-minded misfits.  Then he died at the relatively young age of 44, without the conventional comforts of family, income, or a home to call his own – those things we call “security.”  If you didn’t know it was Francis of Assisi I was talking about, you may be inclined to read these facts of his life as something pitiful, or at least hopelessly eccentric.

Of course it is Francis I’m talking about, and in the eyes of history, he had little to regret.  He travelled far more broadly than just about anyone of his generation – to Spain, to Egypt, to Asia Minor, he even attempted a trip to Morocco.  He conversed with popes and kings.  He attended great councils of the church.  And he founded what became one of the most influential religious orders in Christianity.  His example shamed a religious hierarchy which had grown indolent and corrupt, and served as a model of piety in action to the faithful sorely in need of exemplars of righteousness. Given all this, to say “Ah, but he might have been comfortable, wealthy, and surrounded by family,” misses the mark.

Had I an ounce of Francis’ humility, piety, and faithful devotion, I would indeed possess a pearl of great price, to quote the parable.  What I do possess results from choices I have made.  Some of them, while not as dramatic or influential as Francis’, were likewise gestures of the foolishness of faith, including most of my education.  But whenever I am asked a question, or my advice is sought, or I sit down to write a sermon or article, or prepare an educational program, or even when I am confronted by challenges in my own life, I am reminded that I did not waste fifteen years, and heaven knows how many tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and lost wages.

Instead, I think about how much my education has formed me as a priest and as a child of God.  It  taught me to think and reflect deeply on the world.  I couldn’t know what it was I wanted to do with my life – and more importantly, what God wanted me to do with my life – otherwise.  What I, at times, thought was a huge mistake has proven to be one of my greatest strengths, helping to afford me the capacity to see the world and the issues it faces with interest and concern.

Of course, as Francis’ own life demonstrated, you don’t need to have much education at all to foster these sorts of qualities.  One arrives at insight via different routes.  One thing you do need, however, is experience.  There are no shortcuts to wisdom – whether it be acquired in the classroom of a university, the classroom of nature, or the classroom of human nature.  I don’t believe Francis’ initial impulse to be the proverbial rich young man giving away all his possessions came out of nowhere.  At 21, he had already experienced warfare and captivity.  His brief life was full of amazing experiences which shaped and refined his relationship with others, with God, and with his own self-understanding.  He inadvertently transformed the church and the world.

On a day we honour our own relationship with the creatures of God who help make us more human and more humane, let us recall that assuming this and other responsibilities are a movement of God in our lives to greater wisdom – wisdom that does not exist in a vacuum, but draws us closer to wisdom’s source.  There are no acts which create regret that cannot be turned toward this goal.  Let us put aside regret through reconciliation, and act with the knowledge we have sometimes painfully acquired to prevent any temptation to regret in the future.  We may not change the world, but we may suddenly discover that we are living – as Francis lived – in the will of God.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.