Epiphany sermon: We shall not cease from exploration

The Magi searched for a sign, then searched for the one to whom the sign pointed, and then gave gifts when they found the one for whom they were looking for. We think of them as being wise for doing all this. When we think about their story in these terms, it can give us a framework or a pattern for thinking about our own lives; perhaps then we will also find or know wisdom!

The Magi searched the stars looking for signs of divine communication; messages from the gods that could guide individuals and nations in the present. In other words they were seeking answers, by the best means they knew how, to the big questions in life:

• Who are we or, in other words, what is the nature, task and significance of human beings?
• Where are we or, in other words, what is the origin and nature of the reality in which human beings find themselves?
• What's wrong or, in other words, how can we account for all that seems wrong or broken in the world?
• What's the remedy or, in other words, how can we alleviate this brokenness, if at all?

These are questions that each of us, consciously or unconsciously, find answers to by the way that we live our lives but it is only when we consciously ask them and actively search for answers that we begin to leave behind our natural inclination to live life for our pleasure and convenience.

The sign which the Magi found through their searching was the star in the east which they thought was a sign that the king of the Jews had been born as a baby. This sign uprooted them from where they were. If they were to see and to worship the baby King then they had to leave where they were and travel not knowing for sure where their journey would take them. Their journey was probably inconvenient and uncomfortable for them but was the only way for them to find what they were seeking. It is similar for us as we consciously ask ourselves the big questions in life and seek answers; asking questions and seeking answers is uncomfortable and often means making changes to the way that we are currently living which are inconvenient and disruptive, yet necessary, if we are to find any sort of answers at all.

T. S. Eliot writes, in his poem called ‘Little Gidding,’ “We shall not cease from exploration,” and that is right because if we stop searching, if we stop questioning, then we get stuck and stagnate. We only have to look at nature to see the way in which all growth involves change; the caterpillar and butterfly being one of the most dramatic examples. Our own bodies are constantly changing throughout our lives with many of our cells being replaced as we progress through life. Growth involves constant change and if we apply this same principle to our thought life, our emotional life and our spiritual life then, as Eliot wrote, we must not cease from exploration.

The Magi’s journey found its immediate conclusion when they knelt before the Christ-child and worshipped him. They had no independent verification that this child was the King that they were seeking; they simply had to trust that this was so because they had arrived at the place to which the star had led them. Once again, T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ describes this well:

“If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel …”

The answer to our questions is a person, not a fact, and the person who is the answer to our questions turns out to be God himself. Because God is infinite, he cannot be fully known or understood by human beings. With God, there is always more for us to know and understand. Knowing God is like diving into the ocean and always being able to dive down deeper therefore are ultimately only three responses we can make to the wonder and majesty of God. The first is, as we have been saying, to keep exploring and the second is this, to express our sense of awe and wonder by kneeling in worship.

The third is to give gifts. The Magi gave gold, frankincense and myrrh; each being costly gifts expressing aspects of Christ’s nature and purpose. Christina Rossetti expressed the significance of the Magi’s gift-giving beautifully in her carol, ‘In the bleak midwinter’:

“What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.”

She understood that the costliest gift we can give is our life and that our life is given to Jesus when we express through our lives and actions something of who Jesus is.

Kneeling in worship was the end of the journey that the Magi took when following the star but it was also the beginning of the new journey that they were now to make; the journey home. Eliot used the phase, ‘In my end is my beginning,’ at the end of his poem called ‘East Coker’ and, in ‘Little Gidding,’ he writes:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

The Magi journeyed home but their home was no longer what it once was because they had been changed by their journey. Eliot’s poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’ ends with these lines:

“were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.”

The Magi are no longer at ease with their old way of life because they have been changed through their searching and journeying. Now they see life differently because of what they have seen and heard; the answers they give to life’s big questions are no longer the same as before – their worldview has changed.

Are we asking the big questions? Are we constantly questioning and exploring yet also kneeling in awe and wonder to worship? And are both our answers to life’s big questions and to the way we live our lives changing as a result? If we wish to be wise like the Magi then our answer to all those questions will be, “Yes.”

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Christina Rossetti - In The Bleak Midwinter.

The Magi: searching and worshipping

The Magi searched for a sign, then searched for the one to whom the sign pointed, and then gave gifts when they found the one for whom they were looking for. We think of them as being wise for doing all this. When we think about their story in these terms, it can give us a framework or a pattern for thinking about our own lives; perhaps then we will also find or know wisdom!

The Magi searched the stars looking for signs of divine communication; messages from the gods that could guide individuals and nations in the present. In other words they were seeking answers, by the best means they knew how, to the big questions in life:

·        Who are we or, in other words, what is the nature, task and significance of human beings?

·        Where are we or, in other words, what is the origin and nature of the reality in which human beings find themselves?

·        What's wrong or, in other words, how can we account for that seems wrong or brokenness in the world?

·        What's the remedy or, in other words, how can we alleviate this brokenness, if at all?

These are questions that each of us, consciously or unconsciously, find answers to by the way that we live our lives but it is only when we consciously ask them and actively search for answers that we begin to leave behind our natural inclination to live life for our pleasure and convenience.

The sign which the Magi found through their searching was the star in the east which they thought was a sign that the king of the Jews had been born as a baby. This sign uprooted them from where they were. If they were to see and to worship the baby King then they had to leave where they were and travel not knowing for sure where their journey would take them. Their journey was probably inconvenient and uncomfortable for them but was the only way for them to find what they were seeking. It is similar for us as we consciously ask ourselves the big questions in life and seek answers; asking questions and seeking answers is uncomfortable and often means making changes to the way that we are currently living which are inconvenient and disruptive, yet necessary, if we are to find any sort of answers at all.

T. S. Eliot writes, in his poem called ‘Little Gidding,’ “We shall not cease from exploration,” and that is right because if we stop searching, if we stop questioning, then we get stuck and stagnate. We only have to look at nature to see the way in which all growth involves change; the caterpillar and butterfly being one of the most dramatic examples. Our own bodies are constantly changing throughout our lives with many of our cells being replaced as we progress through life. Growth involves constant change and if we apply this same principle to our thought life, our emotional life and our spiritual life then, as Eliot wrote, we must not cease from exploration.

The Magi’s journey found its immediate conclusion when they knelt before the Christ-child and worshipped him. They had no independent verification that this child was the King that they were seeking; they simply had to trust that this was so because they had arrived at the place to which the star had led them. Once again, T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ describes this well:

“If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel …”

The answer to our questions is a person, not a fact, and the person who is the answer to our questions turns out to be God himself. Because God is infinite, he cannot be fully known or understood by human beings. With God, there is always more for us to know and understand. Knowing God is like diving into the ocean and always being able to dive down deeper therefore are ultimately only three responses we can make to the wonder and majesty of God. The first is, as we have been saying, to keep exploring and the second is this, to express our sense of awe and wonder by kneeling in worship.

The third is to give gifts. The Magi gave gold, frankincense and myrrh; each being costly gifts expressing aspects of Christ’s nature and purpose. Christina Rossetti expressed the significance of the Magi’s gift-giving beautifully in her beautiful carol, ‘In the bleak midwinter’:

“What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.”

She understood that the costliest gift we can give is our life and that our life is given to Jesus when we express through our lives and actions something of who Jesus is.   

Kneeling in worship was the end of the journey that the Magi took when following the star but it was also the beginning of the new journey that they were now to make; the journey home. Eliot used the phase, ‘In my end is my beginning,’ at the end of his poem called ‘East Coker’ and, in ‘Little Gidding,’ he writes:      

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

The Magi journey home but their home is no longer what it once was because they have been changed by their journey. Eliot’s poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’ ends with these lines:

“were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.”

The Magi are no longer at ease with their old way of life because they have been changed through their searching and journeying. Now they see life differently because of what they have seen and heard; the answers they give to life’s big questions are no longer the same as before – their worldview has changed.

Are we asking the big questions? Are we constantly questioning and exploring yet also kneeling in awe and wonder to worship? And are both our answers to life’s big questions and to the way we live our lives changing as a result? If we wish to be wise like the Magi then our answer to all those questions will be, “Yes.”

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Florence & the Machine - What The Water Gave Me.

Beyond 'Airbrushed from Art History' (4)

The latest Image Update features Daniel Siedell, among others:

"Daniel Siedell is a cultural ambassador for a new age. His 2008 book God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art offered a suspension bridge over the old culture war-era chasm between Christians and the art world, inviting Christians to release the old understanding that contemporary culture is godless and destined for self-destruction, and suggesting instead that we can listen and learn from much new art. In an Image web interview, he said: “It is a cliché, but I would suggest that one must approach contemporary art with an open mind. There is an ethical component here. Attending to those details, looking closely, is a useful discipline for us as Christians, who are supposed to see Christ everywhere, especially in the faces of all people. If we dismiss artwork that is strange, unfamiliar, unconventional, if we are inattentive to visual details, how can we be attentive to those around us?” More than a critic, Siedell also participates in the making of art, and in making art accessible: for over ten years he has worked collaboratively with painter Enrique Martinez Celaya, whom he profiled for the current issue of Image. Siedell has recently set aside an academic career in order to head up Martinez Celaya’s Florida studio, Whale and Star, where he’ll work on a number of interdisciplinary projects involving books, lectures, music, artist workshops, and more."

Siedell writes: "Although he is not personally religious, Martínez Celaya has written in his sketchbook that “Art is either religion or it is nothing at all” and often quotes Wittgenstein’s observation that although he was not a religious man, he could not help but look at the world from a religious point of view. He takes the ethical dimension of artistic practice seriously. For Martínez Celaya to speak of art as religion is not an excuse for art to illustrate or promote religious faith or to indulge in self-referential talk of the spiritual, which, like Stepan Arkadyevitch’s newspaper and cigar in Anna Karenina, provides the pleasurable sensation of a slight fog in his brain. Rather, to push art toward religion is to move it away from the confines of white-walled galleries, their air thick with theory, where art is autonomous from the rest of life—and toward the bracing atmosphere and harsh light of the real world. It is the structural framework of religion, as a comprehensive worldview, that shapes Martínez Celaya’s understanding of artistic practice. Religion functions as a standard, a test. “I want painting to function in my life the way most people want religion to function in theirs,” he writes. When curator Klaus Ottmann placed The Boy Raising His Arm in Saint Mary’s Church in Limerick, Ireland, at the biennial A Sense of Place for OPEN ev+a 2007, Martínez Celaya regarded it as “a circumstance capable of generating new insights...[that] would recreate the work of art”."

Find out more about Siedell here or read his essay on the work of Enrique Martinez Celaya in Image issue 70. My review of God in the Gallery can be found by clicking here.

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Peter Case - Colours of Night.

Living the story

From earliest times human beings have told stories. The stories we tell, either explicitly or implicitly, seek to answer questions such as, “How did we get here?”, “Where are we going?”, and “What is the meaning of our existence?” We call these overarching stories metanarratives or worldviews and we live within the meanings which they provide. So, for example, a humanist may tell a story of a universe which comes into being by chance leaving human beings free to create their own meanings for life and society. By contrast, the church is founded on the premise that the creator God decisively calls and forms a people to serve him through the history of Israel and through the work of Jesus Christ to bring about the redemption of the creation.

We must constantly remember that we are a story formed community and that story is what defines our existence. Our story reaches us through the Bible which has been described by the former Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, as being like a five act play containing the first four acts in full (i.e. 1. Creation, 2. Fall, 3. Israel, 4. Jesus) and the writing of the New Testament as forming the first scene in the fifth act which also gives hints of how the play is supposed to end. We are then called to live in this story improvising our part in the play on the basis of what we know of the story so far and the hints we have of how it will end.

Living the story in this way is something that artists and writers have done throughout Church history and continue to do today. For example, the art historian and curator Daniel A. Siedell has noted that: “the Bible … is a dynamic and powerful cultural artefact, a library of powerful stories, within which we in the western tradition have lived and breathed and have had our being. And for centuries it has been the engine that drove art and literature.”

As a result, in Living the Story we will be examining a selection of mainly contemporary uses of the Bible and the Christian story in popular culture and considering whether or not they can be said to be 'living the story’. We plan to cover film, music, novels, poetry and visual arts. Living the Story runs at the Diocesan Office, Chelmsford on Friday mornings from 10am-12pm on March 4,11,18, 25 and April 1.

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Athlete - Chances. 

Literary reflections

Here are a few brief literature-related reflections taken from a discussion I've been having on facebook:

The strength of our response to authors often reflects the moral judgements we make on the worldview underpinning the fiction of these authors. This is, I think, a major reason for the existence of storytelling in human culture; that we share and test ways of viewing and inhabiting the world through the stories we tell. This is not a didactic exercise (at least, not in great literature) as we are invited to inhabit one or more worldviews through the story's unfolding rather than being told about those worldviews, as would be the case in an article, essay or sermon.

I think therefore that we all instinctively make moral judgements about stories and veer towards literature and art which reinforces or develops our worldview while tending to reject work which expresses worldviews to which we don't subscribe (because the characters and narrative in these don't seem credible). We aren't comfortable acknowledging this, however, as we like to think our literary judgements are dispassionate and objective rather than passionately moral (although coming from differing moral bases).
 
As a result, while I think that texts exist in their own right once completed and can be addressed in their own right, I don't think that the life of the author then becomes irrelevant as a result. The relationship between author and book is similar to that between parent and child. I can know and relate someone's child without knowing anything of the parent but, through knowing the parent, I am likely to appreciate aspects of the child which I might not acknowledge otherwise. This additional knowledge does not define the child, who exists as someone more than simply the son of daughter of the parent, but can provide extra insight into his/her character or personality. I think the same is true of authors and books.


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My Chemical Romance - Desolation Row.

The meaning of Jesus (5)

These different approaches to sources lead to a different handling of the other key difference between Borg and Wright, their handling of story. There are two important aspects to story in relation to Jesus; the stories that we tell about him and the story that he told himself. The examples given earlier of the “many faces” of Jesus within twentieth century art are evidence of the multiplicity of stories currently told about Jesus.

In many respects, it is the quest for the Historical Jesus that has opened up the possibility of this multiplicity. This is ironic because the quest was an attempt to pin down the person of Jesus one way or the other. To demonstrate that the historical figure of Jesus either was just a man or was the Son of God as orthodox Christian belief states. Instead, far from establishing truth, it has led to pluralism of personal opinion about Jesus. As with all pluralism, the question is raised, are all stories/beliefs relative or is there a shared understanding to be gained? Both Wright and Borg would seem to argue for the latter. Wright argues for the centrality of the story that Jesus told, and within which he saw himself, as the common core to which we can turn. Borg, despite its ironic result, argues for identification of the actual words of Jesus through source criticism.

For Wright, human life can be seen “as grounded in and constituted by the implicit or explicit stories which humans tell themselves and one another”. Stories are “one key element within the total construction of a worldview”. Worldviews are a vital part of the historical hypothesis, both the worldview of the society/culture and the mindset of the individual within that culture. In searching for the aims of Jesus, Wright argues, “we are looking for a particular mindset within a particular worldview, quite possibly challenging that worldview in some ways, but with intentions that make sense in relation to it”. He sets Jesus and his mindset within the story of the coming kingdom of Israel’s God arguing that “the crucial element in his prophetic activity was the story, both implicit and explicit, that he was acting out”. This was “Israel’s story reaching its climax”.

Borg may accept the approach but not its conclusion. His reconstruction of Jesus’ mindset is built from a smaller pool of material than that of Wright. One effect of this approach is to divorce Jesus from much of the Gospel materials that explicitly link him to Israel’s meta-narrative, the story of salvation history. Borg views material from the Gospels that either makes an explicit reference to an Old Testament passage or prophecy, or material that is constructed to echo an Old Testament story, as history metaphorised. In this way, Borg isolates the historical Jesus from a key element in his context.

As well as taking this significant step away from the first-century context, Borg also sets the historical Jesus in the context of another story - the story of the history of religions. Aspects of this story could be told in terms of the first-century Jewish context. This would involve debates about syncretism, worship of idols and purity codes, but this is not the story that Borg tells. Instead Borg’s storybook is William James’ 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. The story within which Borg sets the historical Jesus is not a first-century one at all instead, it is a twentieth century history of religious experience. The categories that Borg uses to describe the historical Jesus are not first-century Jewish categories that Jesus and his contemporaries would have recognised and used. Instead, they are twentieth century categories used in academic cross-cultural religious studies.

In choosing, through his methodology, not to engage with Israel’s meta-narrative Borg loses not just valuable data for his hypothesis but two important dimensions of faith - revelation and relationship. Salvation history is where God communicates and interacts with human beings. The quest for the historical Jesus, like the history of religions, has a human starting point and is predicated on the basis of what is knowable through reason and empiricism. Salvation history, however, has a divine starting point and is predicated on the basis of God’s revelation of himself.

It is not a question of one being right and the other wrong, an either/or. That would be dualistic. It is a question of both/and. Without salvation history to provide its context, the quest for the historical Jesus is open to personal bias and restricted meanings. Without the kind of grounding in historical, cultural and psychological data that the quest for the historical Jesus has attempted to provide, salvation history exists solely as an internal hermeneutic and cannot effectively be communicated to those outside the Church.

We stand at a point in the history of Christianity where we no longer have to have the either/or, of saying either that it is all literally true or that none of it is literally true. We stand at a point in time where we can combine natural theology and revelation and where historical re-construction can be set within the meta-narrative of God’s acts in history. To do this, we need to examine all the source data with all the tools available, within the over-arching context of the story of God’s self-revelation within history. Only then will the radical Jesus emerge. The Jesus who “used the language of his time to give the old war cries a totally new and broader content”. The Jesus of God’s narrative, not the Jesus of our personal preferences.

The story that we tell about Jesus and the way in which we tell that story is vital because it is not simply about a theoretical set of our beliefs but about the story within which we will live out our lives. The story that Jesus told and within which he lived has to operate for us, as Christians, as a regulative narrative. We cannot do that if we extract Jesus from his context within the story of God’s dealings with the world in history through Israel (both the Jewish people and the Church). This is why Wright’s emphasis on the importance of faith knowledge in relationship with historical knowledge is spot on and to be defended against the arguments of Borg.

In Sophie’s World, the philosopher Alberto Knox hopes that Sophie’s religion teacher will “succeed in showing what a exceptional man Jesus was”. Knox’s letter continues:

“With Jesus we see how dangerous it can be to demand unconditional brotherly love and unconditional forgiveness. Even in the world of today we can see how mighty powers can come apart at the seams when confronted with simple demands for peace, love, food for the poor, and amnesty for enemies of the state.”

It is easy, in this debate over sources and story, historical knowledge and faith knowledge, understanding Jesus in context and Jesus’ self-understanding, to lose sight of the point that, in knowing not just the meaning of Jesus but the man himself, “Jesus [will] inspire us to prolong the logic of his own ministry in an imaginative and creative way amid changed historical circumstances." We must tell and act out our story within the story that Jesus told and lived, as opposed to telling the story of Jesus from within our story, our understanding and our sources.

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Gavin Bryars - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.