Revelation – the new temple
1994 (Year B), 30 January / Epiphany 4
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
On the evening of 2 January just gone, my oldest friend died. Some of you may remember him. He was a priest and took services here when we were on holiday for a couple of summers when we first arrived. He’d been ill for two months after being told he’d got terminal liver cancer. He was 48, married with two children, one eight the other just five. He had a painful life. A succession of jobs which he should never have had. He’d a depressive father who finally killed himself. He’d a debilitating illness which affected his back for most of his adult life. He was an alcoholic, banned from driving. He abused his body further by smoking vast amounts of cigarettes. He believed himself, with some justification, to be a dreadful husband and a rotten father. All of this, with an alarming sense of honesty, he would talk about with those people he felt he could trust. To others he was bad mannered, aggressive and loud.
He caused me more grief than almost anybody in my life. I loved him.
Reflecting on his life and death now all I can sense is tragedy. Of course there are memories which make me smile. They’re around specific events. But they’re not the totally of it all as it were. Some of the things which needed to be said between us before he died were said. Others were not. And now time has run out for him and me. There will be no more opportunities. The pain in his life was not nor cannot now be transformed into something life enriching.
It’s against this background that I come to the collect for today – let me read it again ‘Almighty God ... Transform the poverty of our nature by the riches of your grace and in the renewal of our lives, make known your heavenly glory.’ Hearing that prayer now seems almost offensive. It manifestly didn’t happen in the vast majority of Chris’s life and my guess is that it doesn’t happen in ours and most of the people we know. You can say we didn’t pray hard enough about it but he wasn’t transformed in this life. Nor are we or our friends and it’s hypocritical to pretend anything else.
There is a real problem here and it’s this. How do we reconcile our religious hope with the reality of life? Is our religion no more than pious longing which in no sense touches reality? Or do we somehow keep the two totally separate. So separate that no problem ever arises. Of course there are times when the God of Glory shines into people’s lives and they are transformed. We see the glory of God reflected in them as they overcome illness, bereavement, all kinds of hardship. But they’re not the majority. I’ve seen more people irrevocably damaged than I have seen transformed.
Somehow to point people to the possibility of glory and transformation denies or minimises the pain they’re presently experiencing. To sing always of the resurrection andto expect its arrival is to look at the world in the light of the resurrection rather than in the light of the cross. And the cross is, not was, is as an essential part of God as is the resurrection.
We have to come to terms with that or we are lost. The cross is as an essential part of God as is the resurrection.
Our ancestors in the faith knew it to be true. ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me,’ and the hand was not always a steadying hand; a hand to be relied on in times of distress; the promise of resurrection. There is another face of God. ‘And before this face the earth trembled and quaked, and the foundations of the mountains shook ... He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him – and the rain clouds of the sky. out of the brightness of his presence (out of his glory) clouds advanced (not tinsel town religion where all is good and fulfilled) but clouds, with hailstones and bolts of lightning.’
This also is the face of God. And if there is to be any transformation in our lives we have to be able to include this vision of God as well as the glory and the victory.
In this momentous week of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, one man described the experience, ‘Heaven and earth are on fire,’ he said. We have to grapple with this and not run away. We have to understand that God is present in the deepest darkness and utter despair. Not busy taking it all away, protecting us like a good parent; kissing it and making it all better. God is there experiencing the agony with us. God was in as much pain and despair as ever anybody was in Auschwitz. God was in as much pain, confusion and despair as ever Chris was. God was present in the tragedy of his death.
And God weeps. Sharing the agony of creation. One of the speeches made this week ends with these words. ‘Weep for Thy children whose death was not mourned then; weep for them, our Father in heaven, for they were deprived of their right to be buried, for heaven itself became their cemetery’.
Only after we’ve faced the reality of tragedy can we begin to move. And as we move we might pray, ‘Hear the entreaty of your servant and of Israel your people as they pray in this place. From heaven where your dwelling place is , hear; and as you hear, forgive.’ AMEN