ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

First Sunday of Lent, 2010
Sermon preached at Evensong in the Lent series "Passionate about Novels".

Marilynne Robinson

"The word is very near you, on your lips and in your heart" Romans 10.8b - from today's mass

Western culture has been described as suffering from "boredom with language", in contrast to the excitement that words generated in Europe at the time of the Reformation. Political propaganda, public relations spin, and commercial adverting have made us suspicious of truth claims. Critics speak of a "hermeneutic of suspicion" - which assumes that texts are being used to manipulate or control. Thinkers described as "post-modernist" often say that words only mean what we want them to say: they cannot express objective truth; they are only used to manipulate and control.

This Lenten series of sermons on novels is based on the premise that words matter; that they are about truth. This is true not only of factual accounts but of fictional writing. We need think only of this evening's two readings, the story of Jonah and the parable of the two men praying in the Temple, so see how such creations can convey truth.

Much or literature these days either ignores or despises religion. Writers often seem to be in rebellion against a religious upbringing; be it evangelical or Catholic or, in this country, the Anglicanism of their public school chapel.

I am not suggesting that we have nothing to learn from what rebellious or disenchanted voices have to say about the Church and the faith. But theirs are not the only voices; nor should we assume that writers with a positive take on faith are going to be bland conformist and saccharine.

Neither of the authors I will be looking at this Lent; the American authors Marilynne Robinson and Flannery O'Conner could ever be described as that. They are, quite the opposite: pugnacious even contrarian. But they do not take these positions from ignorance. They address religious themes explicitly in their books and take theology with utmost seriousness.

Robinson teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. It is clear that she does not think that creative writing and literary mass production are the same thing. There was a 23 year gap between her acclaimed first novel "House-keeping" and its successor "Gilead" which I will be concentrating on tonight. Her third "Home" which treats the same characters as Gilead, came along much more quickly. But her writing is not, Doris Lessing says, something to be hurried over; it has a quality which makes you stop and go back and read something again. Reading Robinson requires something like the Christian practice of lectio divina, a slow rumination on the text rather than speed reading.

She has written a series of essays on contemporary issues called "The Death of Adam" in which she addresses faith, science, the environment. As a Christian she is rooted in the Reformed tradition - represented by Congregationalism and Presbyterianism in the US. She has written in defence of the Puritans against caricatures which portray them solely as joyless, repressed and repressive. As one who has studied Calvin deeply, she has defended him against those who distort his teaching, without ever having read him. She wants to remember him as a human theologian who stressed the dignity and equality of every human conscience and who helped advance Western culture, pushing for universal education for women as well as men.

On one occasion she took the famous TV historian Simon Schama to task in public, asking how he had managed to write a history of 17th Century Netherlands "The Embarrassment of Riches" with barely a mention of Calvinism. He admitted that he did not know very much about it. In a review of "The God Delusion", she gives Professor Dawkins a drubbing for his partial and sanitised account of science which omits all the darks bits. If he is willing to condemn religion because of its dark figures, he ought at least to be fair-minded and do the same for scientists. Being a Reformed theologian, she is aware that original sin infects even the good.

Gilead" is set in a small town in Iowa. It takes its name from the biblical place famous for the healing balm to which the prophet Jeremiah refers, but was also a place of conflict and death - where King Ahab died.

Its narrator and central character is Jonathan Ames, a Congregationalist pastor. Apart from his years away at seminary, he has been there all his life; preaching to his flock Sunday by Sunday for more than 50 years. His sermons, written out by hand, thirty or more pages each, are stored in boxes in the attic.

Ames's had married a local girl he had known all his life but she and their daughter had died in childbirth casting a shadow over his life. Most of his ministry had been spent as a widower until, late in life, a younger woman had come to Gilead, joined his congregation, and been baptised by him. They married and had a son when he was 70. Ames develops angina and knowing that he is unlikely to see his son grow up, he writes an extended letter, a meditation, a testament, a sort of journal of a country pastor, to his son for him to read when he has grown up.

Relationships between fathers and sons run through the novel. Ames is a son and grandson of the manse. His grandfather came west from Maine in the1850s as a crusading abolitionist evangelical preacher taking part in the struggle to prevent the expansion of slavery into the west. Evangelical preachers were often on the side of political radicalism in those days: unlike many of those who claim that label today and who espouse political reaction and a toxic mixture of phobias. Grandfather Ames had even preached brandishing a pistol. Years later the son finds pistol, and first buries it, then to make doubly sure it is really gone, breaks it in pieces and throws it in the river.

The old preacher persuaded many of the young men in his church to volunteer for the Union Army and followed them as a chaplain. Many of them did not return, others did with limbs missing or health ruined. He came back having lost an eye - although he preferred to say that he had kept one. This gimlet like eye seemed able to pierce through his grandson who tried to avoid it by staying on the old man's blind side.

After the war he came home to live with his son who took over the parish. The domestic economy of the manse was always precarious because grandfather would give away anything from the household, without asking, to people who came to him in need.

The old firebrand's son was very different. He reacted against his father's bellicose Christianity with a hatred of war. This led to a breakdown of relations between them. One Sunday morning, the old man walked out of church during his son's sermon and stalked off to the black church, as he said later, "to hear some real preaching". After a frosty exchange over Sunday lunch, the old man took himself off back to Kansas, the scene of his earlier battles.

Years later, his son and young grandson set off on a hazardous pilgrimage to find his grave and effect some sort of post-mortem reconciliation. The youngest Ames preacher has an older brother Edward; a bright scholar who goes off to Germany to study theology but returns having abandoned his faith. So Jonathan is the one who inherits the family tradition of ministry:

My father left me a trade," he writes to his son, "which happened also to be my vocation. But the fact is it was all second nature to me. I grew up with it. Most likely you will not".

His best friend "Old Boughton" is the minister of the Presbyterian church in Gilead. While the two varieties of Reformed Church have their differences over church order, this does not stop them being close friends.

Boughton's family also has a problem between generations. His son Jack Ames Boughton, baptised by and named after his friend is the prodigal. After getting a poor girl in the town pregnant, he flees, refusing to acknowledge paternity or responsibility. The girl and her child die. His father continues to love him and longs for him to return. When this happens, his presence brings disturbance to the home of Ames and his younger wife and child who quite take to Jack. In the sequel, "Home" which looks at the same characters and events from the point of view of the Boughton family, Robinson shows that while the story clearly echoes the parable, there is no simple happy ending. Jack takes to drink again and tries to kill himself. Only the beginning of a new relationship with his sister Glory, who has returned home to look after her aging father after a failed engagement offers some glimmer of hope of reconciliation. Robinson is writing of the reality of human limitations, to a society which tends to think that everything can be fixed by the right technique. Things, she warns, are not so simple.

The link between earthly relationships and heavenly ones is made explicit when Ames recalls that "Augustine says the Lord loves each one us as an only child, and that has to be true. 'He will wipe away the tears from all faces.' It takes nothing from the loneliness of the verse to say that is exactly what is required." Heaven, says Ames and Robinson, will afford a special kind of amnesty, a sublime gratuity, in which those who least deserve forgiveness will receive it. Ames hints at this when the reflects on his own unspectacular filial piety: "I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father's house...I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained."

At one level, the novel seems to portray an America which is quiet and conformist; the prosperity of the Eisenhower years in the mid-50s. But there is a darker side. This issue which had driven Jonathan's grandfather, the dark stain of racism and slavery on American society and its claims to be the land of the free, has not gone away. With the rise of the Civil Rights Movement it is raising its head again. Jack's despair is in part because he cannot marry the woman he loves because she is black and inter-racial marriage is still forbidden in many states; despite a constitution which declares it a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Gilead may be a small town world; Ames can speak movingly of the balm and consolation of faith; but it is also a place into which the conflicts of wider world intrude.

Robinson is a defender of what in the United States are known as the "mainline churches" - the old denominations like the Congregationalist and Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians - much criticised these days by more strident voices. She often preaches in her own church. In her central figure she gives us a sympathetic portrait of a pastor who loves God, takes care over his sermons and pastoral care, thinks theology and ideas matter, is conscious of the blessings he has received in life and ministry, and thankful for them, regrets his imperfections but does not despair of God's mercy. She shows us him sitting up through the night over his books, although he says to his son he has bought more books than he has had time to read and read some books that were not worth reading - although you only find out that they are so by reading them: rather like listening to sermons.

He speaks of peoples' respect for their pastors; that sense that they are something special. They are expected to be able to open Scripture for people and to pray for them. He delights in memories of children baptised and communions administered. He speaks of studying scripture with his friend and fellow-minister Boughton, wrestling with the Hebrew and Greek texts.

There seems here to be a model. These were preachers in a small town where few people would have had all that much education. Yet they take their people seriously. They read theology and study the texts; they stay up late at night and wake up early in the morning, and like Robinson struggle to find the right words to express what needs to be said. "Now say something with a little meaning in it." You should be able to expect that those who are called and commissioned to preach to you should take both God and you seriously. Robinson reminds us of that.

Writing his sermons he says "has always felt like praying, even when I wasn't writing prayers, as I was often enough." He prays not only his sermons but his parish, telling his son of walking around it while it is still dark, praying for each household as he passes round his streets; seeing whose lights are on because someone is sick or unable to sleep. And then he would come to the church and unlock the door and just sit there and pray until the sun came up before going home to make himself a fried egg sandwich: a real bachelor dish that - although I can't imagine either of my colleagues breakfasting on them.

Ames' piety is not a world-hating one. "This is an interesting planet", he tells his son, "it deserves all the attention you can give it."

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all a mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely."

Let me end with three of Ames's thoughts which seem apt for Lent.

When thinking about the forgiveness of enemies, "it is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire."

Early in the book he writes to his son, "one great benefit of a religious vocation is that it helps you concentrate. It gives you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you, and also what you might as well ignore. If I have any wisdom at all, this is a fair part of it."

Then the book closes with its feet firmly planted on the Iowa soul and its eyes fixed on heaven, as a dying man daily pictures paradise but also learns how to prolong each day, to extend time, even on earth, into a serene imitation of eternity: "Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning". Gilead closes as simply as it opened, with words from "King Lear": "I'll pray, and then I'll sleep."