2024-11-10
(Heb. 9:24-28; Mark 1:14-20)
The Kingdom of God has come near…
Over the past eight or so years, I seem to have opened a number of sermons and talks I’ve done by quoting the phrase, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ It is commonly claimed to be an ancient Chinese curse, yet any cursory Google search reveals that it probably has a more recent and complex history. Similar to the way the phrase, ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’, has also been ascribed to sources as various as ancient China, Genghis Khan or the Klingons from Star Trek. It does seem though that those of us living in the early 21st century are truly cursed to live in interesting times. This week has seen the re-election of a man to the U.S. presidency who seems to be able to weather any accusation, no matter how often they are proved. For some reason, over 70 million people have decided that a strange orange man is somehow going to be able to make their country great again.
This is despite the fact that the only lasting economic legacy of his last presidency was a tax cut for the mega-rich, at a time when the disparity between the richest and poorest in the so-called developed world is at its greatest since Victorian times. Similarly one of his other achievements was to ensure that millions of his fellow citizens in what is supposed to be the wealthiest country in the world do not have access to universal health care. I may be missing something but this seems like strange behaviour for someone who is supposed to be the champion of the common people against metropolitan elites – whatever they might be. Some of us had the erroneous impression in his first presidency that he was more interested in playing golf and Tweeting – or is it Xing now? And of course this time he will have in tow that strange South African, who role-plays as the richest man on earth, and who now owns Twitter. Apparently he is going to have some role looking at the efficiency of the federal government. One suspects that’s not going to affect the massive government subsidies he gets for his rockets, or the tax breaks purchasers of his electric cars get to buy them.
Apparently this will give the U.S. strong leadership as both gentleman are ‘alpha males’, whatever they might be. It seems to me an odd way to refer to someone who famously avoided the draft because of bone spurs, or to a computer geek who made his money by providing some coding for what became PayPal. But as I said we do live in interesting times. But what has all this got to do with the Kingdom of God? How can we see the Kingdom of God as being near to us in times like these? What has this Kingdom got to say to the kings of this world we see all around us in the 21st century?
Oddly I found some inspiration by going back to the 1980s. I am basically a child of the eighties, but I can’t say that I feel much nostalgia for that decade or my school years. Perhaps this is appropriately symbolised by the fact the comprehensive school I went to is now demolished. And while we did witness what we now know to be the false hope of the apparent end to the Cold War and our mutually assured destruction, we did also have to live through Margaret Thatcher and the end of industrial Britain. I am old enough to remember walking up to my grandparents’ house in the 1970s passing on the way 5 or 6 working shoe factories, all now gone, mostly by the end of the 80s. However, one thing I do find myself looking back on affectionately is the music from that decade.
As you can perhaps guess, I was not exactly into Wham!, or Spandau Ballet, or Duran Duran, or any other of the pop bands you may or may not have heard of from that time. I was one of those youths, who not as devoutly as some did, listened to the late John Peel in his then role as the nation’s favourite odd uncle playing strange music after hours on Radio 1. Among the things I heard then was the music of Nick Cave. I suspect for many of you, your only exposure to him may be the use of his song, Red Right Hand, as the theme tune to Peaky Blinders, a programme I’m afraid I’ve never watched. The song title characteristically for Cave derives from Milton’s Paradise Lost. What most of us didn’t know back in the 1980s, when Cave was fresh over from Australia, looking as gaunt as he does now but with a shock of 80s Goth hair, was that before being part of the Melbourne punk scene, he’d been a boy chorister at an Anglican church in Wangaratta in rural Victoria. Given the amount of Biblical imagery that has always run through his songs that perhaps shouldn’t have been surprising.
What is more surprising is that while he is still gaunt, he survived the heroin addiction he had in the 1980s, and has ended up sort of returning to the Church after the tragic deaths of two of his sons. An experience he discussed in a 2023 interview with Rowan Williams of all people – the photographs of the pair in the Church Times were a surprise for some of us, to say the least. As I said, Biblical imagery often occurs in Cave’s songs, though he is noticeably more New Testament these days than he used to be. I ended up following this train of thought after hearing for the first time in years Cave’s song, The Mercy Seat. In it a convicted killer facing his end on the electric chair compares it to the mercy seat on the Ark in the Temple we have heard about today in the letter to the Hebrews. It has been speculated that this killer is inspired by the protagonist from the film, The Night of the Hunter – the psychotic fake preacher with love and hate tattooed on his knuckles, played so memorably by Robert Mitchum (though I’m sure most of you won’t have a clue who that is), in what is certainly one of the oddest films produced by Hollywood in the 1950s.
Cave changes the tattoos to the perhaps more Biblical words, Evil and Good, and as the killer reflects on his life while he is dying on the chair, he moves from an ambiguous affirmation of innocence to an equally ambiguous confession of his guilt. He says of the mercy seat – ‘In Heaven His throne is made of gold/The ark of His testament is stowed/A throne from which I’m told /All history does unfold.’ An affirmation that the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews would have agreed with, as he presents the mercy seat – the golden lid to the Ark on which the high priest offered sacrifice for the people once a year – as a sign that prefigured the sacrifice that was to be made by the Christ. That sacrifice that Christ made on the Cross at Golgotha, by which he transcended any sacrifice made in a sanctuary constructed by human hands, and entered into heaven itself to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.
This is a sacrifice that does not need to be repeated, unlike the high priest’s having to be offered year after year on the mercy seat. Instead Christ’s sacrifice has been made once and for all to remove our sins by the sacrifice of himself, until he will appear again at the end of the age, this time to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. And as the apostle Paul said in his letter to the Romans, the whole of creation is also waiting with eager longing for that time when it will be freed from its bondage to decay, and will know what he calls the freedom of the glory of the children of God. Presumably when we will be able to see our world as God originally meant it to be, when all things will be restored, and God becomes all in all. But what do we do in the meantime when we live in such interesting times?
Well, I remembered another Nick Cave song, one from the late 90s when he was beginning to be less Old Testament, and finding a place for the man from Nazareth in his lyrics. Incidentally it’s from the album that has one of the oddest, but perhaps most Anglican, openings to a love song you might find – ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God/But I know, darling, that you do.’ Anyway, the song I’m referring to is called There is a Kingdom, and it’s another love song, in which he compares his love and faith in his beloved to that for God – ‘And all the world’s darkness/Can’t swallow up/One single spark’. But it is the refrain to the song that I have found going around in my head this week. I’m afraid I can’t do Cave’s sepulchral croon, but he sings ‘There is a Kingdom/There is a King/ And He lives without/ And He lives within.’
When we find ourselves surrounded by so many kings of this world, in the Kremlin, in the violence in Gaza and Lebanon, in Sudan, and so many other places of violence, suffering and despair, it is important to reassure ourselves that despite appearances, the Kingdom is very near us. That we have a King who lives without and who lives within, because we can see that he lives today on that mercy seat that is behind me. Every time we celebrate the Eucharist that mercy seat in the presence of God is here with us again. The sacrifice that the Christ made on the Cross, the body and the blood he offered up for our sake, is with us again on that mercy seat as we gather together to remember what he did for us. The mercy seat from which all history does unfold.
At the Reformation, many of the Reformers effectively threw the baby out with the bath water by rightly noting that this passage from Hebrews means that the sacrifice the priest makes at the altar is not his own personal or a new sacrifice, it is not a new sacrifice that somehow imitates the sacrifice of the Cross – a misconception that did seem to have entered the popular mind of the Western Church in the Middle Ages. In fact, in the best of Catholic teaching, it was always clear that at every altar, at every mercy seat, it is the same Lamb, it is the same offering that is being made. The sacrifice that Jesus of Nazareth made for us at Golgotha on the Cross is here with us, and it is always bringing us into that heavenly sanctuary that God always intended us to know. So by gathering around this altar, no matter how interesting the times we may be passing through, we will know that there is a Kingdom, and that there is a King, that he lives without and within, and as Cave adds in the last line of the song, He is everything. Or as the collect for today puts it, Almighty Father, whose will is to restore all things in your beloved Son, the King of all, govern the hearts and minds of those in authority, and bring the families of the nations, divided and torn apart by the ravages of sin to be subject to his just and gentle rule. Amen.