Sermon: "Knocking on Heaven's Door?"

This week I returned to Durham from ten weeks in Dallas as a seminarian at Church of the Incarnation as part of my degree requirements at Duke Divinity School.  While there, I was given the opportunity to preach a sermon during the three traditional services one Sunday.  I preached on Jesus' teaching on prayer in Luke 11:1-13 (the other readings were Genesis 18:20-33; Psalm 138; Col. 2:6-15).  The experience has, among other things, showed me the weight of responsibility involved in faithfully proclaiming the Gospel.  I've posted the manuscript below.  (You can listen to me preach it here.)

“Knocking on heaven’s door?” (Luke 11:1-13)
July 25, 2010 | Year C, Proper 12

Beginning in the third century of our era, many earnest Christian men and women set out into the deserts of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in pursuit of a life totally dedicated to God.  The sayings of these ‘desert fathers’, as these simple hermits came to be known, have been handed down to us in a collection conveniently known as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.  One of them goes like this:

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, 'Abba as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and, as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?' Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, 'If you will, you can become all flame' [From The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, ed. Benedicta Ward (New York: Penguin, 2003).]

“If you will, you can become all flame.”  Now, I don’t know if one can become all flame, or even whether Abba Joseph’s fingers really did become like ten lamps of fire.  But I share this story with you because Abba Joseph’s response shows the power of a transformed imagination.  Abba Lot could not imagine what else he could do to grow in love and devotion to God, but Abba Joseph’s uplifted, flaming fingers showed him that something else was possible.  Abba Lot had suffered from an inadequate perception of the possible, until Abba Joseph showed him that he could become all flame.

If we are honest with ourselves, I think that we often suffer from a similar lack of imagination, a similarly limited worldview.  And I want to suggest that Abba Joseph’s horizon-expanding response is similar in effect to the parables of Jesus.  That is, Jesus challenges our perceptions of what God is like and what it means to be in relation with him.  Take today’s Gospel lesson for instance.  How might Jesus’ teaching on prayer effect a transformation in the way we view God and our relation with him?  Consider for a moment what you imagine God to be like.  Is he like a man sleeping at midnight, oblivious to our needs unless we bang on his door, and only then reluctantly answering us?  Or do you believe God will graciously give you what you ask? that you will find what you seek? that God will open the door at your knock?  What do you imagine God is like?

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Liturgy and the Parousia

“The motif of the Parousia becomes the obligation to live the Liturgy as a feast of hope-filled presence directed towards Christ, the universal ruler.  In this way, it must become the origin and focus of the love in which the Lord can take up his dwelling.  In his Cross, the Lord has preceded us so to prepare for us a place in the house of the Father.  In the Liturgy the Church should, as it were, in following him, prepare for him a dwelling in the world.  The theme of watchfulness thus penetrates to the point where it takes on the character of a mission: to let the Liturgy be real, until that time when the Lord himself gives to it that final reality which meanwhile can be sought only in image.” 
- Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life

As part of my internship this summer, I've been teaching a class on eschatology (we're calling it "The End of the World").  I have made use of Joseph Ratzinger's brilliant textbook, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, which he wrote for the Dogmatic Theology series, edited by himself and Johann Auer.  As previous posts may suggest, I have found it to be full of extraordinarily rich theological insights.

The above passage is a good example of the richness of Ratzinger's theological vision, and one that has made me look at the liturgy in a new light.  For Ratzinger, the Eucharistic Liturgy figures the Parousia and the Parousia interprets the liturgy.  That is, insofar as Jesus is present in the bread and wine, the Liturgy is an actual foretaste of the Lord's second advent.  Therefore, the Eucharistic Liturgy is an image of the Parousia, of that great Day when the Lord will return in power and glory to "judge the quick and the dead." 

The Eucharist then is not only about remembrance, anamnesis, of Christ's life, death, resurrection and ascension, but it is also a looking forward.  As one of the eucharistic prayers in the Prayer Book has it, we come to the Table (which is also called the altar because on it we remember the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ, the true Paschal Lamb, who is also the one true Priest) "looking for his coming again with power and great glory."  Before this we say, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,” echoing the words of the crowds who greeted Jesus as he went to the Cross, and welcoming his presence as the Host of the marriage-supper of the Lamb of which the Eucharist is a foretaste.

Coming to the Eucharist with these ideas rattling around in my head has helped me appreciate both the solemnity and the joy of it.  As Geoffrey Wainwright, in his nourishing study Eucharist and Eschatology, writes:

"In the eucharist the Lord comes to judge and to recreate; to cast out what remains of unrighteousness in His people, and to continue the work of renewal begun in baptism; to threaten the world with an end to its old existence, and to give it the promise, through the new use to which bread and wine is put, of attaining to its true destiny."  

In other words, solemnity, because if the liturgy is a Parousia in miniature, then it is also a moment of judgment.  Joy, because the heart of  Christian hope is expressed in the cry, "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!" (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20).

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

This summer, several of the priests at Church of the Incarnation have introduced me to the writings of Anthony Bloom (✝ 2003), Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh (see also here).  He writes with deep wisdom and simplicity in the best tradition of Eastern Orthodox spirituality.  His Beginning to Pray is one of the best books on prayer I have ever read (and I've only finished the first chapter).  Yesterday one of the priests lent me his well-loved copy of Anthony's Meditations: A Spiritual Journey Through the Parables (now out of print, but reissued by Continuum as Meditions on a Theme), warning me in no uncertain terms that I must return it to him.  Below are two passages from Meditions that struck me, and which give a taste of his thought:

"We must learn not only to accept our neighbour, but also to accept ourselves; we tend too easily to consider that all that we like in ourselves is our true self, while all that we and others find ugly is only accidental.  I am the real, attractive self, circumstances are distorting my best intentions, queering the pitch of my most perfect impulses.  We might usefully remember a page from the correspondence of one of the Russian staretz, Macarius of Optina, taken from an exchange of letters he had with a merchant of St Petersburg: 'My maid has left me and my friends recommend a village girl to replace her--what do you advise me to do? Shall I hire her or not?'  'Yes', answered the staretz.  After a while his correspondent writes again. 'Father, allow me to dismiss her, she is a real demon, since she has come I spend my time in rage and fury and have lost all control over myself!'  And the staretz replies: 'Take care not to dismiss her, she is an angel whom God has sent to you to make you see how much anger was hidden within you, which the previous maid had never been able to reveal to you.'  So it is not circumstances that make shadows darken our souls, nor is it God's fault, although we accuse him all the time.  How often have I heard people say 'Here are my sins', then stop a moment to take a breath and begin a long discourse to the effect that had not God afflicted them with such a hard life, they would not sin so much.  'Of course', they would say, 'I am in the wrong, but what can I do with such a son-in-law, my rheumatism or the Russian revolution?'  And more then once I suggested, before reading a prayer of absolution, that peace between God and man was a two-way traffic, and I asked whether the penitent was prepared to forgive God all his misdeeds, all the wrong he had done, all the circumstances which prevented this good Christian from being a saint.  People do not like this, and yet, unless we take full responsibility for the way we face our heredity, our situation, our God and ourselves, we shall never be able to face more than a small section of our life and self.  If we want to pass a true and balanced judgement on ourselves we must consider ourselves as a whole, in our entirety."

The passage reminds me a bit of Father Zosima in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, who urges the protagonist, Alyosha, to accept responsibility for sins of the whole world.  Perhaps Zosima's advice is too extreme, but both make the essential point that I must take responsibility for the wrong that is within me, if I am to be forgiven that wrong.

Here is another passage on discipline, which needs much unpacking, but I will let stand without comment:

"Doing the will of God is a discipline in the best sense of the word.  It is a test of our loyalty, of our fidelity to Christ.  It is by doing in ever detail, at every moment, to the utmost of our power, as perfectly as we can, with the greatest moral integrity, using our intelligence, our imagination, our will, our skill, our experience, that we can gradually learn to be strictly, earnestly obedient to the Lord God.  Unless we do this our discipleship is an illusion and all our life of discipline, when it is an act of self-imposed rules in which we delight, which makes us proud and self-satisfied, leaves us nowhere, because the essential momentum of our discipleship is the ability in this process of silence and listening, to reject our self, to allow the Lord Christ to be our mind, our will and our heart.  Unless we renounce ourselves and accept his life in place of our life, unless we aim at what St Paul defines as 'it is no longer I but Christ who lives in me', we shall never be either disciplined or disciples."

Waiting for Love

"Love is the soul's true nourishment, yet this food which of all substances we most need is not something we can produce for ourselves.  One must wait for it.  The only way to make absolutely certain that one will not receive it is to insist on procuring it by oneself.  And once again, this essential dependence can generate anger.  One can attempt to shake it off, and reduce it to the satisfaction of those needs that require no adventure of the spirit or the heart for their filling.  Conversely, we can accept this situation of dependence, and keep ourselves trustingly open to the future, in the confidence that the Power which has so determined us will not deceive us." -- Joseph Ratzinger/ Pope Benedict XVI, in Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life.

Rich thoughts here.  This summer they have taken on existential dimensions in my life, as I've wrestled with deep loneliness while I am in Texas for an internship and my beloved wife in Russia for studies of her own.  But Ratzinger points to the posture of waiting for love to come as something fundamental to our very being.  We humans simply are dependent, we cannot nourish ourselves with the fruit of love that is not love unless it comes to us as a gift.

Ratzinger continues by stating why this hope for love's arrival is not simply a "waiting for Godot":

"The God who personally died in Jesus Christ fulfilled the pattern of love beyond all expectation, and in so doing justified that human confidence which in the last resort is the only alternative to self-destruction."

Faith truly is the opposite of despair.  Despair gives up hope that love will come unbidden, and either turns towards the wall or reaches toward love in the self-defeating attempt to procure it for oneself.  (Was this not what Adam and Eve did when they reached out and took the fruit in the hopes that they would thus make themselves "like God"?)  Faith is the quiet confidence that God will nourish our lives with his love.  Faith waits for love even when everything seems to suggest that love will never come on its own.

"The Church of Sinners": Radner and Rahner

"The Scribes and the Pharisees—they are not in the Church alone but everywhere and in all disguises—will always drag "the sinful woman" before the Lord and accuse her (with secret satisfaction that she is, thank God, no better than themselves) —"Lord, this woman has been taken again in adultery. What sayest Thou?" And this woman will not be able to deny it. No, it is scandal enough. And there is nothing to extenuate it. She thinks only of her sins, because she has rarely committed them, and she forgets (how could the humble maid do otherwise?) the hidden and shining nobility of her holiness. And so she does not attempt a denial. She is the poor Church of Sinners. Her humility, without which she would not be holy, knows only her guilt. She stands before Him to Whom she is espoused, Who has loved her and given Himself up for her to sanctify her, who knows her sins better than all her accusers. But He is silent. He writes down her sins in the sand of world history which—with her guilt—will soon be effaced. He is silent a little while, which to us seems thousands of years. And He judges this woman only through the silence of His love which gives grace and absolves. In every century new accusers confronted this "woman", and stole away, one after another, beginning with the eldest, for there was not one who found her who was himself without sin. And in the end the Lord will be alone with the sinner. He will turn and gaze at His fallen Spouse, and ask: Woman, where are they who accuse thee? Has no man condemned thee? And she will reply with unspeakable remorse and humility: No man, Lord. The Lord will go to her and say: Then neither will I condemn thee. He will kiss her brow and say: My Spouse, my holy Church."

 - Karl Rahner, "The Church of Sinners" (1947, collected in Theological Investigations, VI)

Being an intern at Church of the Incarnation has many advantages, one of which has been the opportunity to attend a class on ecclesiology Ephraim Radner has been teaching as part of the Incarnation School of Theology.  Thinking through what we mean by "the church" with the Rev. Dr. Radner has been a timely exercise for me, as I consider where I stand in the mess that is Anglicanism in North America (more on this in future).  The last two days have been particularly apropos to the current situation, as we have considered how to articulate the church's oneness, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity in the face of her sinfulness and brokenness in history.

Radner has convinced me that any understanding of the church must acknowledge her sinfulness as part of her identity in time.  He suggests that a figural reading of the church is the best way to articulate how it is that the church that has so evidently failed time and again is truly said to be "one, holy, catholic and apostolic."  How?  Because a person (e.g. Adam, Israel, David, Mary, Peter) has a history which is marked by sin, judged and forgiven by Christ, and which finds fulfillment in the person of Christ.  Radner used Karl Rahner's famous essay, "The Church of Sinners" (with which I began this post) as an example of such a figural reading.  For Rahner, the church is the woman caught in adultery, whose holiness is found in her repentance and her Lord's forgiveness. (If you object to this figure on the basis of the story's questionable authenticity, then take the case of Peter, or Israel, or David, etc.)  Thus, the church is inescapably (in history) in need of continual conversion.  

If the church must be semper reformanda, always reforming, as part of its very identity, then surely division is not the solution to the church's failures. 

[The images are from Rembrandt's painting The Woman Taken in Adultery (1644) and his drawing Christ and the woman taken in adultery (1659), respectively.]