Merton College, Oxford. Sermon for Evensong 23rd February 2014

.At the risk of stating the obvious, anniversaries and commemorative years inevitably evoke reflection on the passage of time and the significant events that punctuate it.In the religious community to which I belong, one of our number occupies the semi-official post of bard, composing jubilee songs to mark the 25th, 50th, 60th, occasionally even 70th anniversaries of her sisters’ commitment to our way of life.The songs are generally light hearted, often full of excruciating rhymes and allusions to the minutiae of family history that sometimes prove awkwardly meaningless to the guests we invite to share the jubilee celebrations. But the occasions of their singing, though festive, are universally also both poignant and inspiring, opportunities to recall the grace that sustains through frailty, sometimes even despite infidelity, and without which nothing could be built. Often enough, they elicit both laughter and tears, as they invite us to survey the entirety of a sister’s life in the Order, all that has been, all that, in God’s providence has not been. And, within the frequent silliness and occasional rueful sentimentality, there is always profound joy, compounded of gratitude for the sister’s vocation and the sense of being upheld and strengthened in our own.Our New Testament reading tonight invites us to survey a much more expansive sweep of time than that clocked up by a silver, golden, diamond or platinum jubilarian, even, dare I say it, more than the 750 years of Mertonian history that is my excuse for being here this evening. I’m going to suggest that we consider it as, so to speak, the jubilee song of all history, bringing together the unimaginably distant past with the unforeseeable future, and like the commemorative songs we sisters sing each other, marking significant points along the way as occasions of both thanksgiving and consolation.Like our jubilee effusions, some of the references this song contains will be utterly opaque to those for whom the collective memory from which it is fashioned is inaccessible.On first hearing, after all, what we are confronted with here is a shape-shifting, even slightly nightmarish surrealism, coalescing tones and colours in which trumpets speak and rainbows shimmer into monochrome; imagery as slippery as a sea of glass on which the intellect and the imagination skitters, unable to gain a foothold. A scenario, in which, as perhaps the best-known Merton poet has said, words strain, crack…under the tension…will not stay in place, will not stay still.We should not, I think, rush away too quickly from this initial impression, however much it disturbs us. One of the gifts this undeniably odd text gives us is a kind of license to let go of our need to understand. If God permits his seer to see this, and still more if God’s Church allows it into sacred scripture so that we can all see it, then maybe somehow we can be reassured that those moments of apparent irrationality we experience, when our own inner landscapes cease to make much sense, those moments when we can connect nothing with nothing, are somehow within his providence.But for those with ears appropriately attuned, and imaginations and memories appropriately stocked, there is something much more specific, much more straightforwardly comforting to be heard here. All this obscure imagery constitutes a series of echoes from earlier jubilee songs, all of which point to one wonderfully consoling, and wonderfully simple truth. God has always been with his people, and thus, we can confidently hope, the one who was, and is, and is to come will continue to be with us to the end, whatever he leads us through en route.He was with his people, for instance, despite all appearances to the contrary when, they were carried away into exile in Babylon, not only driven from all the familiar sights, sounds and smells of home, but – the deepest deprivation of all – denied access to the most privileged place of meeting with their God.For the original audience of our text, the four beasts full of eyes falling down in worship before the throne would have stirred slumbering memories of the similar zoological impossibilities sent to comfort the prophet Ezekiel centuries earlier, to assure him that even when the Jerusalem Temple was a distant memory, God’s people could nevertheless stand before the Lord, offering him the homage due from all humanity and from all creation. He will be with us, then, we may dare to hope, despite all appearances to the contrary, when we feel ourselves exiled from him; when the meeting places of prayer which have been sweetly familiar suddenly seem echoingly empty.He was with his people too when he redeemed them with outstretched arm from slavery in Egypt and, despite their turning aside to the more domestic, more manageable gods of their own imaginings, called them home to himself on Mount Sinai in the flame of lightning and the voice of trumpet blast. He will be with us, then, we may dare to hope, when we turn aside from him to more convenient masters, longing with a fire of passion for our return.He was with his people, represented by the good man Noah, before they were his people when, as the waters of the flood receded, he set his rainbow in the sky as a sign of the victory of his merciful love over human indifference and rebellion. He will be with us, then, we may dare to hope, when we are overwhelmed by the deluge of sin and suffering.So he has been with his people throughout history, throughout all their attempts to do without him. He has been with them from the beginning and from before the beginning, because he is the source of their beginning. Because it turns out this is the deepest truth, the truth that compels worship not just from humanity but from the entire cosmos: by his will they existed and were created. And it is here that we must turn to one more song of jubilee, one more song of the memory of God’s abiding faithfulness. Our Old Testament reading tonight harmonises beautifully with the symphony of allusions to God’s dealings with his people we have just been reviewing. It suggests that this divine will – by your will they existed and were created – is no cold authoritarian fiat, no infinitely magnified decree of the kind a human absolute monarch might issue to subjects to whose subjectivity he is at best indifferent. No, it is a matter of a lover taking delight in his beloved. God is with us, he has been with us from the beginning, because, quite simply, he wants to be, because he rejoices in our companionship, and his wanting, his desire, his joy, has unconquerable, creative force. God’s wanting to be with us is of a piece with his wanting us to be.The wisdom of God, we read, has been delighting in the human race from the dawn of history. It is consequently unthinkable that he will throw us away, that he will discard the work of his hands, the vision of his wisdom which, both individually and as a people, we are. As Pope Benedict reminded us at the inaugural mass of his Pontificate, “each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed. Each of us is loved. Each of us is necessary.”But the divine lover is not content to enjoy our company from a safe distance. Ancient Christian commentators on our passage from the book of proverbs very frequently saw the mysteriously personified figure of wisdom who toils beside God in creation as a prophetic hint, pointing to Christ, the mind of God without whom nothing was made that was made, the mind of God made flesh.Now, it is almost obligatory for Dominican preachers to make at least one reference per sermon to the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, and I know there are some of you here tonight who would be disappointed if I failed to respect this convention. It just so happens that, in a work traditionally dated to 1264, no less, Thomas adds his voice to the jubilee song we have been constructing from our two readings this evening.In his Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas produces a primer for interfaith dialogue, for the use of his Dominican brothers encountering Islamic theology at its most sophisticated in the course of their ministry in southern Spain. He is concerned, then, to address the questions a Muslim might be expected to put to a Christian; above all to makes sense of the distinctively Christian claim that the transcendent God does not behave out of character when he steps into the world He has made. Thomas approaches this great mystery by way of a meditation on the meaning of love. It is of the essence of love, he says, to seek to unite itself with that which is loved; to overcome the distance between lover and beloved, to the point where lover and beloved become one. As human lovers accomplish this miracle of unity in marriage; the divine lover accomplishes it in taking human flesh.When the voice of Christ our wisdom is heard to call out, then, the words of his jubilee song are those of the old English carol: sing o my love, my love, this have I done for my true love: this have I done in taking human flesh, the flesh which enables the immortal one to die and thus enables our mortality to be clothed with the transcendence of God’s own marvellous light. And that is our greatest reason for jubilation, tonight, and at every moment throughout our histories.