Sermon Easter 6: John 14.15-21;
Acts 17.22-31; Gen 8.20-9.17
‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments.’ If we’re not careful, we can hear this as the voice of emotional blackmail: ‘If you really loved me, you would do what I want.’ Perhaps you’ve heard this from an insecure partner, parent or pastor. Well, if that’s the voice you’re hearing, even faintly, then I want you to reset and start again. Hear instead the voice of a trustworthy teacher, bringing their students back to first principles, reminding them why they are learning the set of skills they are being taught, and what the correct approach is. In so doing, they help their students to let go of extraneous effort and anxiety about results, and come back to working with the right kind of ease, the right attention in the right direction.
The skill set being taught in today’s Gospel is how to follow Jesus, and the first principle is love. It’s about the orientation of the heart. My aim as a Christian is not to become a Christ-like person in my own right, which is coveting the skill set. This, incidentally, was I think a major fault line in the mind-set of the Soul Survivor culture, with songs like, ‘I’m gonna be history maker.’ There was altogether too much ambition mixed with the devotion. Too much pressure on ‘my vocation’. (This has been pointed out in a new memoire by Lucy Sixsmith.) My only ambition as a Christian is to love and be loved by Christ. Prefer nothing to it, says Saint Benedict in his Rule. It’s what Henri Nouwen would call ‘downward mobility’. I must not kid myself that I am here in church, in a monastery or a theological college, to be trained up for a prosperous career. (None of you students were labouring under that delusion, I’m sure – you know what a stipend is.) I am here to be saved. That is all. I am here to learn to receive God’s love and be transformed by it. It may then be that others are saved through me, but that is not my work, it is the work of the Holy Spirit. My work is to attend to Christ. The most important commandment, after all, is to love the Lord our God. Then we will love our neighbour as ourselves.
When we attend to Christ, our actions are transformed as our minds are transformed. Meister Eckhart, the medieval Dominican mystic, taught that in prayer we are to dig down beneath the faculties of the soul, our memory, understanding and will, to what he called the ground of our being. The ground of our being is there beneath thought. It is where we are nothing but created, nothing but communion with God. We are not aware of this place (because it is beneath thought) and so we cannot directly attend to it. What we can do is work to let go of our thoughts, to get them out of the Holy Spirit’s way so that He can attend to it. This we call contemplative prayer, or meditation. Then our memory, understanding and will, will be remade from the ground up, and so will our actions. This is the teacher retraining their students from first principles. Thus we are trained in obeying Jesus’ commandments: let him love us into loving him, and the rest will follow. Then, as he says in our reading, he will ask the Father, who will give us another Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, our teacher dwelling within.
Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in the 2nd Century, talked about orientation. Created beings, he said, receive their vitality and meaning by facing towards their Creator. This is like the covenant established between God and Noah in this morning’s Mattins reading from Genesis, from which all the ordering of the natural world falls out. When we turn and face other created things instead, our life force immediately begins to be drained, we lose our sense of meaning and become like the lesser things we worship. There’s nothing wrong with the world, of course: it’s God’s good and beloved creation and we’re part of it. But the world turned towards itself loses its reason. That’s why Jesus says that the world cannot receive the Spirit of Truth, because it neither sees him nor knows him. We can’t see God when we’re naval-gazing. The moment we try to be Christ-like by looking at ourselves, the moment we say, ‘I’m gonna be a history maker,’ even in the name of Christ, we’re doomed, and so is the world we’re trying to minister to. We can’t see the world by looking at it. We can only see it truly by looking at God.
In our reading from Acts, Paul is re-orientating the minds of the Athenians towards ‘the God who made the world and everything in it’. He explains things much as Irenaeus will do after him: ‘The Lord who made heaven and earth does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.’ God creates us, not vice versa. Therefore, says Paul, God serves us and not vice versa. This is scandalous to us who would be ministers. Surely our calling is to serve. But God wants to serve us first, and the challenge is to let him. This is what we work at in contemplative prayer, to let go of all those over-active thoughts that get in God’s way, the extraneous self-effort that boils down to pride, and let God do the work. Our minds want to resist this, because we are programmed to survive, so they throw up thought after thought, every second. ‘What can get us through these traps?’ asks Evagrius, the Desert Father. ‘Humility,’ is his answer. To look at our Creator is to know ourselves as created. To look at God is to perceive our own context: ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ says Paul. ‘He is not far from us.’ It’s like the cartoon shared with us here by a retreat conductor recently, with two fish. One says to the other, “How’s the water?’ and the other replies, ‘What’s water?’ Paul is trying to show the Athenians what they do not know they already know, but which they long for. They worship the unknown god. Paul is right to latch onto this. He acknowledges their devotion. ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.’ It is perhaps a mark of my own cynicism that I’ve always heard that line as being sarcastic. Maybe it is, knowing Paul, but it’s a playful, affectionate sarcasm. In the end it’s respectful. ‘You’re totally off track,’ he’s saying with a smile, ‘but at the same time you’re so close.’ And so it goes between Jesus and us. The teacher, teaching his students, loves them. He embodies what he is teaching, which is love. He loves us even as we’re getting it wrong, because it shows we’re trying. We at least want to want to know him. Every time we try to pray, get caught in a spiral of sinful thought and try again, it shows that we’re longing for the God we do not yet know, or even know how to know. Our God is merciful, just as Paul is merciful to the Athenians. ‘God has overlooked the times of ignorance,’ he says, ‘but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.’ Again there are echoes of Noah. There is mercy and there is urgency, because as Paul says, the day of righteous judgement is coming. And that’s precisely the art of contemplative prayer, and of the whole of this life of learning to follow Christ. It’s learning to hear the voice of the Advocate within, the voice of the same God who put the rainbow in the sky and who died upon the Cross, merciful and urgent, saying time after time, ‘It’s ok, now come back. It’s ok, now come back. Now come back. Now.’