ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon preached by the Fr. Gerald Beauchamp at Evensong and Benediction on 27th January 2008

Readings: Ecclesiastes 3. 1-11; 1 Peter 1. 3-12

At some point in the early 1930s the German philosopher Martin Heidegger stood before a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. It was a picture of a pair of shoes. It's a famous painting and today hangs in a museum in Amsterdam. The well-worn shoes are painted in dark browns against a luminous, golden background.

The fruit of Heidegger's contemplations are to be found in his essay The Origin of the Work of Art written in 1935. In his essay Heidegger is concerned ultimately with the nature of poetry which for him was the supreme art form. What he says is this.

In his painting Van Gogh calls our attention to something we take for granted. We all wear shoes and most of the time we don't even think about them until they leak or they begin to pinch. In foregrounding, in bringing our attention to this everyday item (a pair of shoes) Van Gogh makes us aware of two things: firstly, their sheer physicality - their colour and their texture; and secondly, their context i.e. we can imagine the wearer of these shoes; we sense (in Heidegger's wonderful phrase) her toilsome tread. So Van Gogh demonstrates the dual purpose of art. It reminds us of what Heidegger calls the earth by which he means our physical surroundings and the world i.e. the realm of human culture - the place in which we work, suffer and hope. Art performs this function because it is both physical (paintings have colour, music has sound) and yet also goes beyond the utilitarian. At a practical level we don't need to have paintings on our walls. We could leave them bare. We don't need music. We could just listen to the wind.

But the higher and necessary function of art is that because it transcends the earth it enables us to see the material as it truly is and indeed for the first time.

The reason that poetry is so important is that it makes the earth comprehensible. Language names things. It gives form to the earth in human consciousness. Language makes things understandable and graspable, and poetry makes them memorable. Language isn't just private it's something we share. So language, and especially poetry, brings people into an affiliation with (the) truth happening in the work (of art).

But poetry does even more. Because it's concerned not just with the earth but also with the world (us with our dreams and visions, horrors and hopes, fates and fantasies) poetry is seeking to interpret experience. So language as description gives way to language as commandment

. Here we smell a rat. Heidegger was writing in 1935. This was the year he became Rector of the University of Freiburg. He found favour with Adolf Hitler and Heidegger's future reputation was to suffer as a result. On this Holocaust Memorial Day it's sobering to recall how even great intellects can be harnessed to the forces of evil.

But let's use Heidegger's ideas and the final weakness of his argument to think about what we're doing here this evening.

Our first lesson was a poem, an ancient poem. The book, Ecclesiastes, (or in Hebrew Qohelet meaning The Gatherer or The Teacher) was compiled around 450BCE although it contains writings that are much older.

For everything there is a season ...
a time to be born, and a time to die;

These couplets are like Van Gogh's shoes. We know that there's a time to be born and a time to die; we know that there's a time to weep and a time to laugh. We know these things but we are rarely fully conscious of them. And yet when we foreground them - when we hear them, when they are enshrined within the scriptures and read in church - they become not mere facts but mighty truths.

And these truths challenge our preoccupations. Let's face it even in church (perhaps especially in church) we get sidetracked: the servers are wondering if the incense has gone out; the choir members are thinking about a drink down at The George and the congregation is wondering how long the preacher is going to bore on for.

It's because we find it so difficult to attend that ultimately God stopped addressing humanity with words through the prophets and invited the persistent Word to become flesh. God sent the Christ among us. It's when we don't simply hear Him but see Him that our attention is focused. What were we told as naughty children? Look at me when I'm talking to you. Look!

The early church that received Peter's first letter was preoccupied. The members suffer(ed) various trials; they were being tested by fire like gold in a furnace. But their hope is in revelation and this revelation is paradoxical. Although you have not seen him, you love him. There's a textual problem in the Greek. Some ancient manuscripts read Although you have not seen him while others say Although you have not known him but the writers' explaining that faith, like art, is first and foremost about the transcendent. It's only from this higher perspective that we see things as they truly are. In this is our salvation.

But the problem with religion is that it can become dogmatic. It gets mixed up with the world's ideologies. It becomes a series of commands. Commands are sometimes necessary in human life. None of us should pick and choose which traffic light to obey. Running a red light is dangerous. But religion is about freedom in the Spirit not the tyranny of commandments. It's about being more human not less which is why Heidegger could have saved his reputation (and perhaps a great deal of destruction) if he had gone on to consider symbolism instead of sticking with language, even poetic language.

Here in a few moments we'll have Benediction. Once again we foreground the ordinary - not a pair of shoes or couplets spelling out the poles of human experience - but bread. And not just any bread but bread that has been hammered, pinned and nailed to the Author of Creation.

In the celebration of the Eucharist Christ's presence is realised supremely. The material and the divine are fused together. The consecrated host declares that physical matter (the earth) as well as human culture (the world) is the focus and locus of God's revelation of himself. Our noisy ideologies are silenced. We are called not commanded to pass on this blessing to others.

Its powerful stuff! No wonder we cloak Benediction with incense and lower our eyes as the bell rings. But ultimately, it is through the most ordinary thing in the world - bread - that God is revealed. Benediction is poetry in motion.