ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
THE SECOND SUNDAY BEFORE LENT, 2010 - HIGH MASS
Genesis 2.4b-9,15-25; Revelation 4; Luke 8:22-25
"And the Lord planted a Garden in Eden in the east; and there he put the man he had formed."
On the north side of Goodge Street stands a symbol of the financial folly which has beset our world over the last couple of years. Where the Middlesex Hospital used to be there is just an empty space. Standing alone, wrapped in protective cladding, is the chapel, waiting for better times. The scheme to build Noho Square - daft name for a daft project- collapsed with the Icelandic bank which was putting up the money. Who knows when anything will be built. But in the meantime, as you can read in the Parish Paper, Rebecca Hosack, the gallery owner and local councillor, has come up with a plan to turn the area into a temporary allotment space; in other words, to make a garden there.
Green spaces are few in this relentlessly urban parish. The only one, apart from a few trees in Market Place, is our courtyard. We can be thankful that my green-fingered predecessor Canon David Hutt took what had been the clergy car park, - now there was a symbol of the petrol-driven, automobile-obsessed 20th century for you - and planted a garden. Guy Pritchard took it over the care of it and since his death, the gardeners' gloves have been donned by Janet Drake and Craig Williams. Gardening gloves are a necessity in case someone has abandoned a hypodermic syringe. Like most gardens the courtyard does not look at its best at this time of the year, but Spring will be here before too long and it will come to new life and be place of peace and recreation for many who work around here.
To come into All Saints, this place which is "none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven", we must walk though a garden; unless like me you get to use the servants' entrance. There is a biblical pattern to that. We walk through a garden because Holy Scripture starts with a garden in the book of Genesis. When we pass through the door, we enter a space and worship which reflects the Book of Revelation's picture of heaven, which is where the Bible ends.
Our reading from Genesis comes after the account of creation in the first chapter - if you come back for Evensong tonight, you will hear it read as the first lesson. The two accounts of creation differ and clearly come from distinctsources and have been edited together in the one volume. Neither is meant to be an historical or scientific record. They are theological meditations of the source and meaning of life.
Few of us, I suspect, would regard ourselves as biblical fundamentalists; wedded to a literal six day creation. But that we are not "Creationists" does not mean that we do not sometimes still make unconscious assumptions about these texts. One of the principal differences between the two passages is that in the first we hear that God created humankind in his "own image, male and female he created them", while in the second, man is made first and then woman is created from man - the Spare Rib version whichgave its name to a famous feminist journal.
Our reading this morning is part of a four act drama which continues with the story of the fall and the expulsion of man and woman from paradise. A one-sided interpretation, by men, of this passage, almost certainly written by a man, has supported thesubjugation and often the abuse of women. They have been regarded as temptresses who are somehow worse sinners than the poor innocent males they lead into sin. Of course, the reality is that men can find their way into sin quite unaided by women. They have been regarded as items of property.
The second creation story is trying to explain why things are the way they are with us. It sees the pain of childbirth, the shame about sexuality, the unrelenting toil of human life, as facts of life. But they are not how things were meant to be. They are the consequences of sin, of our fallen state. It was different in Eden. God said that, "It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner". First of all, he made the animals and birds and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. But none of these could really be a partner. Some pet-owners might disagree with this view!
When the man saw the woman, he said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh". This was someone with whom he could have a relationship of equals which that phrase suggests.
That the animals and birds are created to be our helpers and partners suggests not that we are to dominate and exploit them, but that were to live in partnership and harmony with them. We are to be stewards and custodians of creation.
If we are Christians who believe that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has made the ultimate difference to the fate of our world, that it has begun the reversal of the effect of evil, the recapitulation, the remaking of human life so that, as Irenaeus, taught, the glory of God is to be seen in a human being fully alive. So then our life, our relationships, with creation and with our fellow-human beings, relationships between genders too, must reflect paradise, heaven; not just the way things are.
This is not just about abstract theology. Not long ago, I read an alarming statistic which suggested that more than 30% of young men thought it perfectly acceptable to hit their girlfriends.*One of my first jobs as new curate, one which I have never forgotten, was to take a young woman and her child to a place of safety where they would be protected from the violence she had suffered at the hands of her husband. Christian women who have been on the receiving end of abuse have even told me that their pastors have told them that this must submit to this as God's will because they must be subject to their husbands. If they were better wives, it would not happen. This is cruel and self-serving distortion of our faith, just as the theological defences of the enslavement of black people because they were the sons of Ham were.
"I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open!"
John's extraordinary vision bears the influence of Ezekiel's vision of God's chariot-throne, and of Isaiah's temple vision, of Daniel's vision of the Ancient of Days seated on a throne.
Prophets like Isaiah had been admitted to the inner sanctum of the heavenly court, to listen in on a session of the divine council; to hear the divine plan for the world so as to be able to announce it to Israel. John too is given access to the heavenly council as a prophet and seer; what he will see and hear there will form his message to the churches, the "word of prophecy" which the hearers of his book are bidden to heed.
Revelation uses the language of height, but depth might be just as apt for us: John's vision of heaven takes him deeper into reality, rather than removing him from it. Heaven is where God is acknowledged as King, and where true worship occurs. That worship is offered by angels and by human beings; the 24 elders may represent both: the angels of the churches and the patriarchs and apostles. It is offered too by all creation; the four living creatures symbolised in Jewish tradition the totality of God's created order: wild animals, domestic creatures, humans and birds of the air. Later Christian tradition would see these figures representing the four evangelists who together present the universal gospel sufficient for the whole world.
Far from being separated from this world, the vision is intimately connected with it, for what is seen in heaven has been or will be played out on earth. "Come up here and I will show you what must take place after this." John's access to the heavenly throne-room is so significant because what he sees will enable the churches to make sense of their own situation and see God's hand in it. The threat they faced as tiny churches in Asia Minor was from the might of the Rome whose emperors demanded the worship which belonged only to God. The threat we face us springs more perhaps from our capacity to destroy the world in which God has set us; either by weapons or by our ruthless and reckless exploitation of it.
John's vision, like Genesis, sees that world as part of God's plan and finding its fulfilment in him. Yet though John is presented as a privileged seer, ultimately the open door is accessible to all the faithful who continuethe witness that Jesus bore. Doors into heaven can be opened wherever God's people are: particularly where they are gathered in the Spirit for the Eucharistic liturgy represented by its three-fold hymn.
Worship is not a refuge from the reality of the world; but an entry into the depths of God's purposes for it. The Word we hear in it is not a counsel of despair but a message of hope. It tells us that God has not abandoned his creation.
This is not a matter of passively waiting for something to happen. As the man was placed in the garden "to till it and keep it", so God has placed us in the world with responsibility for it. As we share in the worship of heaven, so we are meant to live the life of heaven in anticipation through our relationships as partners and helpers with creation and humankind.
The government has just launched an advertising campaign to counter this.
A newspaper article published after I preached this sermon reported that the Revd. Angus MacLeay, Rector of St. Nicholas, Sevenoaks, a stronghold of the conservative evangelical pressure group Reform, had written in a leaflet on "The Role of Women in the Local Church" that women should not speak if asked a question which could be answered by their husbands and should submit to their husbands in everything. His curate reinforced the message in a sermon on "Marriage and Women" in which he blamed "modern woman" for high divorce rates. "We know marriage is not working. We only need to look at the figures...Wives, submit to your husbands." From my pastoral experience, I would have thought that the "old man" was at least as much to blame! These two clerics can of course quote the letter of scripture to support their arguments but, as I suggest above, this is not the spirit of the Gospel. Dozens of women have cancelled their standing orders to their church and vowed not to return. I would not claim that All Saints is the most feminist-minded of parishes but no one, male or female has cancelled their standing order as a result of my sermon. Perhaps we are more liberal-minded than we thought.