Sunday, 24 November 2024

"Love Him in the World of the Flesh": a sermon for the Feast of Christ the King

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:

Those words begin WH Auden’s great poem “September 1, 1939”. Written in America by the exiled Auden they are a direct response to the news of the invasion of Poland by the German army on that date. An act which, as we all know, precipitated the beginning of the Second World War in Europe.


For a poem which is so rooted in its very specific time and place, it has had an extraordinary afterlife. Many young Americans reached for it in the weeks after the attacks of September 11th. Finding in it a sense of shock and loss at the sudden crumbling of a seemingly naive and comfortable consensus. One could imagine similarly idealistic young Americans looking to it again in the last few weeks as the re-election of Donald Trump means that his political life was not, as they hoped, a seeming aberration but a setting of a new, and for some, strange political landscape.

The poem also carries in it a reflection of human experience as our expectations of our world and life suddenly change. Returning to the original context of the poem Auden sees the fault of Europe's moral and political crisis in careless enlightenment ideals of his time. 

The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

As things he thought he knew were coming dramatically to an end one can recognise in Auden’s words both an anger and resignation to the lot and life that lay ahead of him in these newly uncertain times.

The book of Daniel, which we heard read in our first reading today, could be seen to pre-echo some of the sense of human dislocation and uncertainty that colours Auden’s poem. On first look the book of Daniel tells of the prophetic ministry of Daniel, exiled to the court of Babylon, who through his ability to interpret dreams comes to be one of the leading players in the court of Kings Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar. 

For a short book it includes some of the most well-known biblical images which have found their way into our common language. It is, of course, Daniel who is thrown into the Lion’s den. It is also where King Belshazzar great feast is cut short by the sight of a disembodied hand and the “writing on the wall” and where he is weighed in the balance and found wanting.


We can find in the vivid stories of Daniel the same human experience of uncertainty and dislocation that we find in Auden’s poem. Although set during the time of the Babylonian exile in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, the text we have now was formed and brought together later, possibly in the second century before Christ where the experience of the people of Israel was dominated by the conquests of Alexander the Great the later Maccabean revolt and the looming threat of the Roman Empire.

Like Auden, like Daniel, we live in uncertain and unsettling times. Just in the last few months there have been momentous elections in America. We are coming to terms in our own world with large and significant decisions made by our new government which will affect many people’s live and homes – not least in the farming community. Within the life of the church the repeated failures in safeguarding have made many question what the true future of the church in our national life could and should be. This list could go on and on.

In the face of this we could all be tempted to be like Auden in his poem and reject those old certainties which he tags as the impossible hope of “universal love”. Instead, Auden says we must look to the small things we can hold onto – almost literally – in family and loved ones. As he says towards the end of his poem:

For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

Despite the deep popularity of this poem its focus on a limited hope troubled Auden as his life went on. Over the years he tried to edit and change this poem which, as one critic has said, offers “simple answers to difficult questions, which is not necessarily a good thing.”

And with that insight we might return to the book of Daniel. Faced with a world of uncertainty and dislocation Daniel’s response is not to turn in on a simple more limited hope. Instead, the hope he looks for draws from the largest and possible canvas. The reading we heard today comes from the second part of the book where, faced with the experience of dislocation and uncertainty, Daniel sees in dreams and visions the great apocalyptic landscape of God’s promise and hope for creation.

As I watched,
thrones were set in place,
   and an Ancient One took his throne;
his clothing was white as snow,
   and the hair of his head like pure wool;
his throne was fiery flames,
   and its wheels were burning fire.
A stream of fire issued
   and flowed out from his presence.
A thousand thousand served him,
   and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him.

On this Feast of Christ the King, standing as we do at the end of the great cycle of prayer and praise we have followed through this year, we are called to lift our eyes from the troubles and dislocations of our present time and place them in God’s time.

As we look to that promise and hope we find it coming to us again in the journey of Advent that we will begin next week. That deep promise that through all the changes and chances of this fleeting world the God of Daniel, the Ancient of Days, will come to be with us in a baby born amongst us and a man who will walk with us.

Moving away from this one poem this was, in truth, a reality that Auden himself knew. In 1941, possibly in the darkest days of the Second World War, Auden began work on his long poem For The Time Being which had the subtitle A Christmas Oratorio. In that great work Auden finds a hope which he could not see in 1939. It is a great hope that we begin again to look to. It is that great hope and promise of the incarnation.

As his oratorio ends, we hear him lift his eyes from the present and place his hope again the promise of that universal love. That promise which we should set our hearts to again at this turning of the year.

He is the Way. 
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness; 
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures. 
 
He is the Truth. 
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; 
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years. 
 
He is the Life. 
Love Him in the World of the Flesh; 
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

Amen




Sunday, 3 November 2024

Chronos and Kairos: a sermon for All Saints'

Time and tide, they say, waits for no one. 

I have come to a time in my life where time, all of a sudden, seems to be a real and palpable thing. This last week I was visiting my parents in the house and village I grew up. Just in conversation with people I met there I realised that our family association with that place now stretches over half-a-century; that my memories of living there are now better counted in decades rather than years; and even my young children speak of the years they have been visiting there.

Time is, of course, something we all focus on more that we realise. Who here is still adjusting the time on clocks and forgotten watches after the clocks changed last week? Who of us, as the schools return tomorrow, will be focusing on the time needed to get organised an out of the door in the morning? Which of us is secretly counting down the shopping days till Christmas? We live lives and, in a world, where time, well at least one sense of time, dominates everything. An understanding of life and the world where value is measured in time and motion studies, where time is money and our lives are calibrated to the minute and even second.

But does it have to be this way?

Many of you will know that in the Bible, and particularly in the teaching of Jesus, time comes to us in two distinct senses. The first is chronos-time. This is the type of time I have been speaking about so far. This is clock-time. In the New Testament, when the Magi determined the time when the star in Bethlehem appeared they were speaking of chronos-time. When Jesus spoke with certainty of the time he has left with his disciples, he is speaking of a clock-time we would recognise.

There is a second, richer sense of time known as kairos-time. Unlike chronos-time this is now about the measuring and calibrating of time. Kairos-time is about the quality of the time we have. This is the time of the right season, the fullness of time. When, at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus declares:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Jesus is not saying that that is a promise or time to set our watches by, or mark in our diaries. He is saying that the kairos-time is fulfilled, that this is kingdom time.

On this All-Saints’ Sunday, and as we enter this season or remembering, we are called to be in kairos time. As we remember the saints today, give thanks for the faithful departed at our All Souls’ Service tomorrow, and remember those who have died in time of war next weekend, we are not setting them against the time-lines of our lives, rather we are being drawn into their time beyond time.

As I have heard it explained elsewhere, if our chronos-time is a like a string stretched along a table, then kairos-time “loops around, crosses, and intersects at unexpected junctures.” kairos-time is, as the writer Madeleine L’Engle has written “that time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy”.


When Jesus went up the mountain and began to teach the crowd that sat at his feet this was the kingdom promise he was making in the great Beatitudes we have just heard in our gospel reading. In these timeless words Jesus was giving them a vision of that joy, that blessing, that will come to them, burst into the tick-tock of their lives.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

As we use this richer sense of time to frame what the church has come to know, in these weeks between All Saints’ Day and Advent Sunday, as Kingdom Season, we can also use this wisdom, I think, to re-frame one of the most pressing debates of our time.

In the coming weeks Parliament will debate a bill to legalise assisted dying for the terminally ill. I am no expert in the details of this debate, but I am concerned by the way in which aspects of this debate can and are being framed. As Lord Falconer, one of the strongest advocates for a change in the law has said:

the last few weeks and the last few months [of someone’s life] are a period where there is plainly nothing but an imminent death – the person retreats more and more. And all that they’ve got to look forward to is more indignity, more pain, more struggle.

There is in this view a deep sense of compassion and care for those who are dying. But it is also a view which, for me, is measured through chronos-time. But as we have seen in our reading today, as many of us will know in our own lives, there is a richness to the time we are given beyond the hours and minutes we might live.

One of the great privileges of ordained ministry is being able to spend time with those who know that their lives are coming to a close. In many of those cases there is, naturally, a desire not to waste the chronos-time they have left. So, whilst they are able they will use the time well and to get things in order. But there is also a palpable sense of the richness and uniqueness of that time. That when the right and fitting end of life and palliative care is in place there is a sense of joy and blessing in the gift of that time. 

I remember a woman in her fifties in my last parish who died of motor-neurone disease. Through the sacrifice and care of family and friends she was able to receive first rate palliative care, and when I asked if she would want to choose the time of her own end, she said didn’t. All she wanted was to be able to open her eyes and see her family. She wouldn’t have used these words, but what she treasured was the gift of that kairos-time.

For me we can find in this debate, in sharp-relief, a challenge which exists in all our lives. That in the pressures of our modern world, in our lives dominated by the utilitarian cost benefit analysis our time, all our time, can so easily become yet another commodity for us weigh and balance and barter. 

But as we sit in this season, surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses; as we still ourselves from the busyness of our lives and pressures that rain in on us from every angle, we need more now than ever to treasure the time we have. To cherish that time where the poor, the hungry, the merciful, the persecuted are given the time to know that they are blessed in the sight of God. To understand in our hearts that time is not primarily thing of utility, but chiefly a gift of grace. To know that our time is not just precious, it is sacred.

Because it is by knowing this deep truth that we can see the rich blessings and true joys of the kingdom-time which all the saints now enjoy.