ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
ADVENT 3, 2005
High Mass, All Saints Margaret Street.
Fr Alan Moses
A venerable national institution has been going through a hard time. It
has been losing touch with its customary support group. Confidence has
been ebbing away. People have still looked to it for some of the basics,
but have gone elsewhere for more excitement. Wasn’t it time, people
thought, for someone else to take over.
You might think I mean the Church of England, but in fact I am referring
to Marks and Spencer. In fact Marks has been undergoing something of a
revival recently; showing a capacity to fight back while its rivals are
looking a bit tired.
As part of its new image Marks has been engaging in some aggressive TV
advertising - just as Jesus drew his parables from rural life, so as the
Vicar of part of Oxford Street you would expect me to take an interest
in these things. One advert uses Irving Berlin’s “There’s
no business like business” from the show of the same name. It’s
not on today’s music list but I want to consider it for a few minutes.
One of the lines Marks & Spencer uses is:
“There’s no people like show people
They smile when they are low.”
The traditional name for this Sunday midway through Advent is Guadete
Sunday from the Latin of the Entrance Chant “Rejoice ye in the Lord
always…” taken from the Letter to the Philippians. We will
be reading it again at Evensong tonight. And our Epistle this morning
from 1 Thessalonians echoes the same call: “Rejoice always, pray
without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances”.
This Sunday used to be a midway break in a penitential season. This was
before December simply became the festive run-up to the Christmas holiday.
When Advent was observed with fasting and prayer. So, like its twin -
Laetare Sunday in Lent, the Church had a wee break, a little relaxation,
fun even. So in traditional minded places like this we have some less
retrained music and the clergy wear these rather jolly, indeed camp, pink
vestments and Our Lady gets a bouquet.
“for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation,
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.”
There is a sense in which we as Christians are like the staff of Marks
& Spencer and “show people” of the song. We have to keep
smiling through what Mr. Berlin calls “The headaches, the heartaches,
the backaches, the flops.” even when we fear that the show is a
turkey about to fold.
But, we say, isn’t St. Paul’s advice just impossible? How
can we rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances?
Now there are brands of Christianity which demand that you look relentlessly
cheerful; that every word we utter must be positive and upbeat. Everything
is a success, a victory. Revival is just around the corner. This approach
is just exhausting and guilt-inducing. We don’t always feel like
that positive. Can we give thanks even for bad things? Well perhaps it
is difficult but we can find things in even bad situations, the milk of
human kindness in the midst of disaster and tragedy. There are times when
we have to “weep with those who weep”.
Well, as individuals we cannot be giving thanks every minute of the day,
although most of us could be doing it more often than we do. But the Church
as a body is always giving thanks in its daily round of worship.
So let’s think about one of the other texts which the Church gives
us in its worship this morning: the Psalm with its refrain
“The Lord has done great things for us, and we are glad indeed.”
Like the passage from Isaiah, Psalm 126 reflects Israel’s faith
in hard times, destruction and exile. It celebrates what God has done
for them in the past,
“When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
then were we like those who dream.
Then was our mouth filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy.”
The Psalter, the hymn book of Israel, is also the first song book of the
Church; both in date and in continuing importance. In the worship of the
Church of England, we sing or read the Psalter every day at the office
and mass. The psalms come in various lengths and styles: rejoicing or
lament, praise and penitence. We can say of the Psalter that, like a certain
Sunday newspaper, “all human life is there”. The Psalter contains
not only exalted devotion but human grumbling and the deepest and most
hateful thoughts we harbour; the kind of stuff we would usually keep out
of a polite conversation with the Almighty.
The Psalter in fact shows a way to “rejoice always” which
does not evade reality; the way things are, the way we feel.
There are psalms which celebrate the world as well-ordered and reliable
because God who creates and sustains it is reliable and trustworthy. There
is a profound trust in the daily working of the world and gratitude to
God for making it so. There is a given-ness about the world on which we
can rely and the psalms give us language to express that.
Now this could simply be the worship of the comfortable and well-off;
those who can say with the psalmist “the lot has fallen in a fair
ground”. But there is more to it than that. The spiritual power
of the such psalms is there too for the ‘have-nots’; those
who have little or no share in the world’s goods, but who hope and
believe that God’s good intention for creation will finally triumph
and there will be equity and a Sabbath rest for all God’s creatures.
Such psalms are motivated by a deep conviction that God’s purpose
for the world is resilient, that it will not yield until creation is brought
to fulfilment.
The problem with a hymnody that focuses exclusively on such an order and
coherence and symmetry in creation is that life is not always like that;
as the Archbishop of Canterbury says in his Christmas message this year,
we look back on a year which began with the Tsunami and continued with
Hurricane Katrina. If the Church only sings ‘happy songs’,
‘feel-good music’, there is a danger that we retreat into
unreality.
There is a positive reason for continuing to sing such psalms and hymns.
It is an act of bold defiance to fling these hymns of order and reliability
in the face of disorder. They insist that nothing shall separate us from
the love of God. Songs of law and wisdom, creation and retribution, speak
truly - even if the world is experienced as otherwise.
But this is only partially true. All too often it can be a frightened,
numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge the disorientation
of life.
The tradition of our Prayer Book has been to sing or recite the Psalter
straight through in course without missing bits out. Using the whole Psalter
gives us things to say which we do not always like. But this is better
than editing them out and only having the positive and up-beat. We are
tempted to miss out the Psalms of Lament because they sound like acts
of ‘unfaith’ - as though speaking or singing this way is to
concede too much about God’s loss of control.
The use of these psalms of darkness may be seen by the world as acts of
unfaith and failure - but for the trusting community, their use is in
fact an act of faith; one which insists that the world must be faced as
it is. It is an act of bold faith because it insists that all such experiences
of disaster and disorder are a proper subject to talk to God about. Nothing
is out of bounds, inappropriate. Everything belongs in this conversation
of the heart. To withhold parts of life from it is to withhold them from
the rule of God. It is important that we sing such songs in an age of
denial and cover-up. They provide a healing honesty and candour.
These psalms speak of a God who is present in, participating in attentive
to the darkness, weakness and displacement of life: a God “of sorrows
and acquainted with grief”; the very kind of God whom we celebrate
at Christmas. Such psalms speak to us of God who is not so much immutable
and unchanging as “faithful”. “The one who calls you
is faithful”.
The Psalter is not escapist religion. It speaks of life as a pilgrimage
through the darkness that is involved in being human. .
The Psalter takes us repeatedly from serene and ordered faith into disorientation
and unknowing; from an ordered reliable life to an existence that somehow
has run amok. but it does not simply leave us there “in the Pit”
(Ps. 88) . The Psalms stay with the experience to bring us to a new orientation.
They bear witness to the surprising gift of new life just when none had
been expected. We are surprised by grace, a new possibility which cannot
be explained or predicted or programmed.
It tells us that in is in dark places and death that new life is given
by God. We do not understand rationally how this can be or why it is so
but it is in such places that we see newness breaking through unexpectedly,
in ways which do not depend on us
The psalms are not the only poetry in Scripture. and our reading from
Isaiah this morning is another poem addressed to people without hope.
It too speaks of the faithfulness of God; of how he has acted in the past
and how he can be expected to work in the future to bring about his purposes.
“For I the Lord love justice,
I hate robbery and wrongdoing;
I will faithfully give them their recompense,
and I will make an everlasting covenant with them”
In St. Luke’s Gospel, Jesus comes home to Nazareth early in his
ministry. He goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath, as we have come to
Church this morning. He is given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah an reads
from it the words which we heard this morning:
“the spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord had anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn;
to provide for those who mourn in Zion -
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.”
This is not just comfort religion and escapist piety. It is so that they
will have the courage to carry out the task which God has given them,
to “build up the ancient ruins” and “raise up the former
devastations”.
We put on “the garments of salvation” and “the robe
of righteousness”, or rather God clothes us with them, to sing the
Lord’s song and tell his story, because it is there that we will
find the courage and hope and strength for our part in that task which
is both God’s and ours:
“so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise
to spring up before all the nations”.