On the cross: and true and false gods

The formidable Kim Fabricius has provided the internet with a copy of his brilliant and bracing Palm Sunday sermon, entitled Lose your Faith, via Faith and Theology; it is moving, bold, poignant - and theologically right on.

It's possible that his wife was right and he should have curtailed the refrain of 'Lose your faith' - or maybe repeated something in a mood other than the imperative. But on the other hand the boldness - parrhesia? - and honesty in what he says, being unwilling to 'make it safe' or even 'wrap it all up' at the end makes it. On the whole, it's a tour de force. Here's an excerpt, to whet your appetite for the rest:

(All content of this excerpt is from Kim Fabricius, and I'm sure he claims (at least) moral right to be identified as its author - just so we're clear)

This sermon doesn’t have three points, it’s got three words: Lose your faith! (I warned you I would be sacrilegious.) Yes, lose your faith. Lose your faith in God. For as the French mystic Simone Weil insisted, there is a kind of atheism that is purifying, cleansing us of idols. Lose your faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. Lose your faith in the god who is but the product of your projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. Lose your faith in the god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the “machine god”, wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. Lose your faith in the god who confers upon you a privileged status that is safe and secure. Lose your faith in the god who promises you health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. Lose your faith in the god with whom your conscience can be at ease with itself. Lose your faith in the god who, in Dennis Potter’s words, is the bandage, not the wound. Lose your faith in the god who always answers when you pray and comes when you call. Lose your faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the “Father who art in heaven” – this week he is to be found in hell – with his Son.

I am just reviewing James Alison's book Undergoing God: Report from the Scene of a Break-in, and much of what Kim says resonates with Alison's unapologetically Girardian take on theology. While I am not a follower of Rene Girard, full stop, myself, he is insightful and even haunting in the way that his work illuminates Scripture, and helps to expose our own idolatries.

We need more people who are willing to wield the idol-hammer, not out of iconclasm (which, today, is usually more about the hammer-wielder than the icon), nor out of hatred of our images, but above out out of love for God - and, in God, love for humanity.

Stanley Hauerwas' sermon for Reformation Sunday

Stanley had the, um, privilege of preaching on Reformation Sunday, and here's what he had to say. Go and read it all.

Here's one thing he mentions:

"Reformation Sunday does not name a happy event for the Church Catholic; on the contrary, it names failure. Of course, the church rightly names failure, or at least horror, as part of our church year. We do, after all, go through crucifixion as part of Holy Week. Certainly if the Reformation is to be narrated rightly, it is to be narrated as part of those dark days."

It's hot and heavy - rhetorically freighted (even exaggeratedly so) to prove a point which he doesn't think a more evenkeeled approach would demonstrate.

I think he's maybe on to something here, though, that as a church - and here I mean not just Protestant/Reformed but all of us - we have difficulty naming and marking our failures as a part of our story, of connecting these up to the larger story of the cross. Some of us are able to do it personally, which is great, but as a community/communion/ body we don't seem able to do so. (In terms of the Reformation, even if we would want to mark something good that came from it, it would seem that we need to remember the way in which it rent and continues to rend the body of Christ, and this is so for both the Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic church; for humans to be out of communion /alienated from each other always takes two, and reconciliation always takes two as well.) I wonder if this has anything to do with our decline in public mourning or lament.

Check it out, it's every bit the provocative Stanley, we know and love (or hate, depending), still kicking it. (Also check out the extensive comments.)

My Neighbour, My Self (part II)

Maggi linked to my sermon from last Sunday (Thanks, Maggi!) and reminded me of an idea I had hit upon that I wanted to expand a bit.

I said, in reflecting on the part of the 'great commandment' which says 'love your neighbour as yourself':

Who is our neighbour? Suddenly, in the logic of the parable, we’re not calling the shots; we are not so sure just who our neighbour is. Suddenly we’re not so sure just who our self is. If I’m to love another as my ‘self’ then the upshot is that I’m not even totally familiar with who I am, as I seem constantly to find that self facing me in others. And here we find the most radical challenge, for in this we see that no boundary will finally stand in the way of us and our neighbour, if we are to love them as our self. There are certainly distinctions: yes; love doesn’t seek to make everything else the same. But boundaries? No. There are no boundaries to our neighbours, no limits to whom we are to find our very selves in, no restrictions to whom we are to love unstintingly in God.

What I was trying to get at, although I probably did not develop it as well as I should have was the ambiguity of 'as'. Usually we simply think that we love our neighbour 'as' ourselves, in the sense that we love them 'in the same way' we love ourselves. Then the debate becomes - what if we don't love ourselves? or do we always love ourselves regardless? And other generally unhelpful things to dwell on.

How to get around this to something else?

I noticed that 'as' is ambiguous - it doesn't just need to mean (in English, at any rate) 'in the same fashion as'. And the way we usually parse it out with this verse, it simply assumes - reifies, really - our sense of self as something independent, interior, not essentially relational. Thus, there are two 'selves', which are basically complete and independent: neighbour and oneself.
But what if our 'self' is not something (completely) independent and self-subsistent? What if it is in process and something which is not possessed but given - by God, and by others? In that way, we discover who we are gradually through others (and eschatologically in God), and our failure to love another as our self is indeed as failure to love oneself, because it is in the other - in all of their individuality and otherness, to be sure - that our 'self' is found.

This sounds REALLY abstruse, when I put it this way! I arrived at it more intuitively than anything, in reflecting on the relationships in my life: spouse, child, parents, friends, mentors, strangers, etc. I wouldn't be - couldn't be - who I am without those people, most (or all) of whom I couldn't have anticipated. In that sense, my self is a gift (i.e. given to me rather than created by me) in the way that these others are gifts.*

Again, I want to emphasise that in saying that I find my 'self' in others, I am not colonizing others and co-opting them into my 'self'; just the opposite, in fact. The upshot of this all is not that the other is my 'self', but rather that my 'self' is not something I control and construct, but is itself - to a degree - 'other'.

And so, it is in loving others that we properly love ourselves, for it is only there that we truly discover, in God, our self; and we also then have the delightful opportunity - and the dreadful responsibility - to help the other, to some small degree, discover in us, and in God, their own 'self'.

Maggi helpfully clothed this all with a more concrete example: "Love your neighbour as if he was you" means I look at the homeless guy and realise that at the deepest level I too am vulnerable, lost, fragile, and so to offer him love and respect is to see myself mirrored in him. I love him, because I realise that I must also love myself as I really am, not just the exterior impressions that everyone else sees."

The only thing I could add to this is the sense that we don't just see ourselves mirrored in him, but who we are is extended through him, in a way it wouldn't be if we hadn't met him, or hadn't loved him.

A final thought is this: I don't think that Jesus had in mind all of the technical - and perhaps tortured - explanation I have just provided when he said 'love your neighbour as yourself.'** But I am also convinced that he didn't have in mind our usual sense of 'self' as something self-identical, self-created, and independent. I suspect that the sense of 'self' present in his culture would have been far different than our modern sense. But I offered this take on the passage not to 'read Jesus' mind' as if this is what he truly meant, but rather to attempt to faithfully expand on several implications of the gospel for our day, particularly having to do with our day-to-day lives and encounters with others. In this way, I think it is faithful to Jesus' teaching to 'love your neighbour as yourself.'


*I am aware of the fact that some of how people are given their selves - being defined by others through racism or sexism for example - is not at all a gift in a good sense. But I am not sure that the dynamic of one self only coming through others would be any different in an utterly virtuous and Godly community. The response, I think, is not utterly independent self-creation, but rather a restored communal creation.

** In fact, in Luke, it is the lawyer who says this, anyway.

On The Pentecost Parable

I wanted to say a few things about my sermon for Pentecost, to clarify and expand on it.

First, it is an adaptation of an adaptation. What happened was this: The Rev. Tim Schenck, an old friend from seminary, sent around via e-mail an adaptation of the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale. It followed the shape of the original story quite closely, ony with a bishop for the emperor. I found it quite humourous, but it also bothered me to some degree, and in reading it the ending as present in my adaptation occurred to me. I e-mailed Tim back, explained my changes, and asked to use his adaptation (with my adaptations) sometime in a sermon. He said 'fine'. I made numerous small changes throughout the body of the story, but it is essentially as Tim wrote, until the Pentecost service. From that point until the end is my contribution.

Second, what bothered me about the original story - and this is not a criticism of Tim so much as the use to which such stories are put these days - is that it was unapologetically moralistic, and served to do little more than reaffirm the hearers' self-righteousness. That is, the hearers are unlikely to be bishops or emperors, so that character will be to most hearers 'the other'. It is a tiresome commonplace - almost self-evident - that those in authority are out of touch, selfish, vain, conceited, trapped in systems of power which militate against recognising the truth. We've all heard the classic tale and have ingested it deeply, not least because we've also encountered it in real life as well. But this, as I say, only reinforces our own rightness and our low view of others, which is not (I think) a worthy goal in a sermon. So instead I wanted to stretch our imaginations a bit, and try to portray in a genuine way the work of the Spirit. The biblical trope of God using unlikely people on the margins is one way of doing this; I think that God using unlikely people not on the margins might be another way, especially to the extent that it might call our own presuppositions into question, expand our imaginations, and (especially) better know God.

Third, I did specifically include the choirboy - a feature of Tim's story - because for the bishop to realise what was happening on his own would not seem to render faithfully the work of the Spirit; in fact, it might have simply reinforced unthinking obedience and the sort of top-down authority, the apotheosising of bishops, emperors, etc. that Andersen's tale deflates. I don't think that is a worthy goal of preaching, either.

Fourth, I guess it comes down to this: Hans Christian Andersen describes human behaviour. I am trying to describe what God does. (In saying that, I'm not trying to make a value judgement; they both have value for different ends.) In trying to construct the alternate ending I tried to make it as realistic as possible, not mawkish or exaggerated. I also tried to show the difference the Spirit makes for people, portraying it in narrative form for Pentecost. The bishop: 1) is able to be honest about who he is in God - his dual status as unworthy-yet-worthy-because-of-God; 2) repents of his sin (publicly) and recommits himself to his position - as loving service, not worldly honour; 3) in repenting and recommiting himself publicly, he comes to realise that his position is not for himself, but is only established in relationship - he very specifically asks for forgiveness but does not demand that it be given; and 4) in the coda, we see that his renewal is real, for he has been given an imagination of grace beyond self-righteousness and law - he becomes reconciled with those who betrayed him and opens up for them the possibility of new life. (I didn't say what happened to them - 'a story for another time' - because it seemed to make the ending too pat. To leave it open-ended, I hoped, would stimulate our own imaginations not just about the clever robbers, but about others in our lives, and maybe even ourselves.) Grace and love begets grace and love, or so I tried to show.

Anyway, for this sermon especially I wanted to say a few extra words not just in the sermon but about it: about the funny triple-authorship, and about my intentions in modifying it as I did.

Sermon Survival Tips

I've heard a fair bit of preaching, and done a bit of it myself. I have had the deep pleasure of being in a parish with another priest who takes her preaching quite seriously, and threw herself into the task with great devotion. I've endured a parish where the preaching was ostensibly held in honour, but the results and general disregard for hearers regularly called that into question. I've been in another parish -- quite high, Anglo-Catholic -- where you might expect the preaching to be marginalised, yet was quite well done: certain phrases and points made in sermons still roll around in my mind now, 13 years later. I've heard professors, priests, laypeople, deacons and bishops preach, and some of it has been sublime: informing, delighting, moving; some of it has been rubbish; and an awful lot has been somewhere in-between.

I try hard to be constantly improving my own preaching: trying to respect my listeners, convey my own humanity, tell the story faithfully, be responsive to (and responsible to) theology and our lived lives, help us all to see the wonder and delight and glory of God and God's ways with the world. All this and much else besides.

Somehow, by the grace of God, based on the feedback I have heard from people, my sermons sometimes achieve this. Other times, I am keenly aware, they fall quite short. And probably a lot fall in-between.

Clement Walsh, back in 1979 (link culled from King of Peace weblog), provided survival tips for sermon-hearers. I really quite like this and hope that it receives wide readership. I especially liked suggestion number three:

Let your mind wander. The art of mind-wandering is sadly neglected in these busy
times. If the preacher announces a subject and clearly has nothing to say about
it except plantitudes, let your imagination create the sermon that is eluding
the preacher. You have fifteen minutes to ask yourself questions that are so
important that they tend, paradoxically, to be neglected. "Why am I here? What
do I believe? What do I really want? Of what am I deeply afraid?" If a real
question grasps you by its excitement, go see the preacher later in the week and
talk about it. Such conversations can be powerful sermons in dialogue and as
good for the preacher as for you. (Did it ever occur to you that the preacher is
as bored with the sermon as you are? Preachers need stimulation to be enabled to
produce stimulating ideas.)

I tend to do this, to be honest. A sermon will steam along and get to one idea - or I will have heard something said in the Scripture lesson, some particularly piquant point - and in my mind I will take off from that point and I will start preaching my own sermon on it. On the one hand, this supports the idea that the Word and preaching are endlessly generative. Especially for a sermon which is just not throwing off sparks, this can be a helpful practice. On the other hand, I am also aware that this might distract me from some other point which the preacher is trying to make, that I could not (or would not) arrive at on my own. Preachers (at least most of the ones I know well) put a lot of effort into their sermons and the points they are trying to make, and they are not intended simply to be 'white noise' against which we can project our own sermons. But this 'other hand' is simply a caution against a possible danger, not an outright prohibition.

And I also wonder if there is a theological profit to certain kinds of 'mind wandering'? What I mean is this: as many other preachers have attested at one time or another, I have had the experience of someone coming up to me after the service -- or a few days later -- and thanking me for saying thus and such in my sermon, that they found it moving, brought them to a deeper experience of God, moved them to repentance, inspired them to love more, whatever. And the fact is, I often find that I did not actually say thus and such, or I may have said it but it was a very minor point, or some other similar situation. But the fact is, the Spirit used this moment as an opportunity to work, because (or more often, in spite) of my sermon, and for being a part of that I am humbly grateful.*

(This relates to my earlier post about unclarity [that is, when I heard someone pray for 'those in authority under us'], that unclarity might actually lead to a deeper understanding than an unexamined clarity. The Spirit may actually use someone's not grasping or not attending to one point to drive home another.)

I am also grateful for Welsh's other points, particularly that you should identify your disappointment with the sermon (strategy #4) -- so, do not simply be passive about it, but think through what went wrong and what could be better -- and (#5) do something! Engage the preacher between sermons to explore questions and possibilities. This latter is not at all a matter of telling or teaching the preacher how to do her or his job, but simply of being a colleague in ministry, taking preaching seriously enough to recognise that it is a multifaceted dialogue, rather than a top-down monologue, and taking the preacher seriously enough to engage him or her as a person.

Go and read it all here.

(With a hat tip to Dave Walker for pointing me to the article in the first place.)

* Naturally, there is much more to be said about preaching and preachers and the ministry of the church.