Sunday Sermon
Sermon for Autumn
25th October 202
Sermon for Autumn.
In Nehemiah, Ezra reads the law of Moses to the crowds. He asks for three things: their attention, their understanding, and their response - an “amen”. In order to elicit this great “amen”, the Scriptures are interpreted for the crowds. Understanding, Ezra thinks, will give rise to an amen which has integrity.
Taking up this task, some of the Church Fathers asked what might seem like a strange question: from where do we “understand”? And they found that there were various seats of understanding. The head, the seat of intellection, or discursive reasoning, the place that understands through logic, ideas, and concepts. And then there was the heart, what they called the “nous”, the eye of the soul. The heart, for them, was not primarily the place of emotion or feeling. It was an organ of perception that could see into the heart of reality. And when we look with the eye of the soul, they said, the sensations of seeing move away from the head and into the core of our bodies, the heart. In other words, this organ of perception seemed to have its physical home in the torso.
Being attentive to the word of God from this place allows us to experience the world in all its profundity. When Paul writes, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly”, he is recognising that you can tell that you are perceiving from this place by a sense of “richness”. Reality becomes a cathedral of mystery and bliss. We discover that God is life abundant. It’s what Christ is alluding to when he uses the language of power and glory.
And this brings us to the end of our dependence on religious law for our entry into the reality of God. In the language of the Gospel, it brings us to the end of the age.
Notice Christ’s central metaphor, what he’s asking us to attend to. “From the fig tree learn its lessons: as soon as its branches puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.” This is an organic metaphor – it’s one of dynamism and growth. It requires not an attention to a set of static laws, but a flexible attention to God’s word as it emerges organically in each situation before us, in our daily lives, between us and in our hearts. Paradoxically, this kind of attention is given to us the moment we turn to God and say “amen”. Only then does our consciousness drop from our heads and into our hearts, the place from which we can finally
see and enter the Kingdom of God.
But in our spiritual cultures, the language of amen has become the language of acceptance. We “accept” those things we don’t like, or that we find uncomfortable. We accept thedifficulties in our lives, the problems we have with our loved ones, our aches and pains and nightmares. Acceptance, for us, means putting up with things. We see this as an act of love. We accept that the man is skipping the queue at the post office. We hide our despair and anger from ourselves, and pat ourselves on the back. It isn’t the end of the world. We do not judge. We are mildly annoyed. We want to cry. We do not fight. We do not judge. We are in despair. We hate the world. We hate ourselves. We accept things as they are. In other words, we are middle-class, British, and Anglican.
But Jesus wasn’t meek and mild. He was free, and wild. And the mystery of his freedom was grounded in his continual “amen” to God. That is, he didn’t simply accept what was happening to him, what God gave him in his life. He chose it. He turned his whole being to God, to the whole messy reality that stood before him and in him, and which he knew would lead to his death – he turned towards every difficulty, and pain, and horror, and nightmare, and he said “Yes, I chose you”. This is not acceptance as we know it. It isn’t standing gently aloof. It isn’t an attempt to avoid engaging with the painful aspects of our lives, or to hide our intense feelings about it. It is a conscious act of will springing from the place of the heart. It is to will the will of God with integrity.
In fact, Jesus didn’t accept a lot of what he encountered in his life. He raged in the temple, he cast out demons, he ran for the hills, he healed on the Sabbath. He refused the narcotic on the cross. He was utterly dedicated to the galaxies of experience inside us and out. So having within ourselves “a continual yes”, as Madam Guyon has it, doesn’t mean putting up with injustice, or failing to protect ourselves. Strangely, it doesn’t mean not saying “no” (We must say “yes” to our refusals, too). It simply means to consciously embrace what is happening to us, and in us, as the word of God, not only with our heads, conceptually, but with our hearts, the seat of our soul – the torso, here, where Christ was pierced, from where
the blood flowed into the chalice. This is what it means to say “amen”.
And whatever follows “amen”, we say yes to, too. For the crowds in Nehemiah, it was grief. (The authorities didn’t much like that. Grief is quite radical you see). We say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, until we realise that we have already fallen into the unbelievably wild love of God. So how do we practice seeing from the place of our hearts? Well, we sit still, and in that rich silence, we wait for the word of God.
Sensation, emotion, thought, sound, interruption. Whatever. We attend.
And whatever arises, we choose it, and allow it bring on the end of the world.
