Day: December 15, 2022

Sermons

2022 Advent Programme 2: “And she was troubled at this saying”

“And she was troubled at this saying”

The Ember Days are a special spiritual reminder of the primacy of the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit as the guiding principle of the Church’s life in each of the seasons of nature’s year. As Lancelot Andrewes observes, the sending of the Holy Spirit is really the alpha and omega of all our celebrations. Along with being special times for ordinations, they recall us to the purpose and meaning of the ministry: in the spring of Lent, in the summer of Whitsunday, in the Autumn, and now in winter, in Advent. For each, too, there is a special focus of spiritual intention. For Advent, it is Peace in the World which relates to the reading from Micah as the lesson along with the story of the Annunciation at the Gospel.

The lesson from Micah highlights the very powerful concept of “beat[ing] swords into ploughshares” and “spears into pruning hooks”, images of the transformation of the city at war into the city of peace, a peace which is ultimately found in our “go[ing] up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob” where “he shall teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths.” These are images which have their Homeric counterpart in the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad which depicts the city at peace and the city at war. The images here in Micah belong to the redemption of our humanity in our being restored to fellowship and life with God. It is very much about our learning the ways of God in whom alone we may find peace and joy.

It cannot be found simply in ourselves. We need these spiritual reminders precisely in the face of catastrophes and tragedies that we confront in our current war-torn world, a world of ‘the endless wars’, it seems, as the sad legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries especially. We confront the endless spectacle of humanitarian disasters and the horrors of war that is simply mind-numbing at the same time as we talk about world peace. How to think about such things? Only through prayer. Only through the sober and sombre reminder of the complexities and confusions of human sin and wickedness. Only through the radical message of Advent which counters all human presumption. The Advent Embertide calls to mind the message of Pentecost, namely that the human community and city has no unity in itself. Peace and unity can only be found in God and in God with us. Only through the co-inherence of our humanity with God and so with one another. Such is the burden of the story of the Annunciation tonight. For we, like Mary, are surely troubled in our hearts about the words we hear in the face of the world we experience.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 15 December

Journeys

Exams end the school term, or so it seems. Yet they are really a feature of the continuing and, we hope, never-ending journey of learning; in short, they are a basic feature of education and life.

In the Christian understanding, Christmas brings us to Bethlehem. But it is not just a destination, an ending. The pageant of Lessons and Carols as well as the Christmas crèche scenes concentrate a great crowd of images in Bethlehem: shepherds and kings, men and angels, a man and a woman, a woman and a child, God and Man, heaven and earth, and, at the very least in the biblical accounts, sheep, to which holy imagination has added a whole menagerie of animals! Bethlehem is paradise restored, we might say, with the idea of the harmony and unity of the objective diversities of creation. “High and low, rich and poor, one with another”, as the Advent Matin Responsory suggests. This contrasts with the subjective categories of radical indeterminacy in our contemporary confusions.

But Bethlehem is not an end-point but the beginning of a greater journey that encompasses within the Christmas mystery the flight into Egypt and then the journeys to Jerusalem. Bethlehem and Jerusalem are the twin poles of the Christian imaginary around which everything moves as in an ellipse. They are inseparably connected. As the poet/preacher John Donne nicely notes: Christ’s “Christmas-day and his Good Friday are but the evening and the morning of one and the same day”.

As has been noted on occasion in Chapel, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all religions of the logos, of the Word, albeit in different registers of understanding. For Judaism that is captured in the TANAKH, an acronym of Hebrew consonants representative of the Torah (Lawa), the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvim) emphasizing the centrality of the Word as Law; for Islam, the Word is concentrated in the recitation of Allah to Muhammed, the Qur’an, the Word as Will; for Christians, it is the Scriptures of the Old Testament and the New Testament understood as witnessing to the concept of the Word made Flesh. Along with other world religions and philosophies there is an abiding focus on things written, on texts. One of the meanings of the word, religion, is re-reading (re-legere). The other is the idea of a bond (re-ligare) between God and humanity.

Bethlehem in both these senses marks the beginning of the longer journey of the understanding. The metaphysical light which comes into the darkness of the world in Advent becomes the light of God within the world which teaches and illuminates our understanding in the midst of the complexities and confusions of human experience. Like exams, it is all part of the journey of education that belongs to a deepening of the understanding of our humanity.

A blessed Christmas break to all.

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy

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