Sermon by Fr James Heard on Sunday 15 January 2017, Epiphany 2, United Benefice of Holland Park
Sermon by Fr James Heard on Sunday 15 January 2017, Epiphany 2, United Benefice of Holland Park
The c.17 mathematician, physicist, inventor, and
Christian writer, Blaise Pascal died in 1662. Upon his death, his servant found
a small piece of parchment sewn into his coat. At the top of the paper Pascal
had drawn a cross. Underneath the cross were these words.
In the year of the Lord 1654, Monday, November 23
From about half-past ten in the evening
until half-past twelve.
Fire
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob
Not of philosophers nor of the scholars.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy, Peace.
God of Jesus Christ,
My God and thy God…
…Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
That was Pascal’s record of an intense two hour religious
experience that he kept secret until his death. It was an experience of God
that gripped his soul and changed the course of his life. He stored his record
of it in the lining of his coat, close to his heart. For eight years he took
care to sew and unsew it every time he changed his coat. It was a clearly
a treasured experience, something he could return to again and again.
We also may have moments where we experience God’s
presence – perhaps over Christmas during one of the candlelit carol services,
or perhaps out on a walk. I know people who testify to the sort of powerful
encounter Pascal had. These experiences of God that we have – transforming
moments – we can hang onto as gifts from God to energise and motivate our
faith. It gives a strong sense of God’s presence, the burning fire of God’s
love, the certainty and passion it evokes. It certainly resonates with this
season of Epiphany – the immediacy of God’s presence or a vivid encounter with
God.
Now let’s turn to a film that has recently been released
called Silence, based on a novel by Shūsaku Endō. For Martin
Scorsese, the director most known for the iconic films Taxi Driver and Goodfellas,
this is the film he had wanted to make for several decades, but not dared risk
the £millions necessary. This is his Magnus Opus.
The story is set in c.17 Japan, about the same time
Pascal had his religious experience. Two young Jesuits go in search of their
former teacher, a missionary priest. He had become caught up in the savage
persecution of the 300,000 strong Japanese Christian community and who, it is
rumoured, had apostatised. To save some of his flock from dreadful torture, the
rumour is that he had stepped upon an image of Christ and (it is assumed) left
his Christian faith.
One of the Jesuit priests eventually finds him but in the
process get caught up in the persecution – scaldings, drownings, burnings,
beheadings, public torture. The film is certainly not for the fainthearted.
The priests in the film find themselves on a challenging
spiritual journey, where it isn’t always easy to hear God, where there isn’t a
clear epiphany, where there is no certainty. They are taken to a place where
they have to grapple with what they’ve been taught about Jesus. But in the face
of the most awful persecution, God is silent. They cry out to God to reveal
himself: why doesn’t God intervene to stop the persecution. Or even just show
in a tangible way that he is with them. What they get is a deafening silence.
Holding on to his incarnational faith – and the belief
that God is with us – Father Rodrigues says in prayer: “Christ is here. I just
can’t hear him.” But then he has doubts, asking, “Am I just praying to
nothing?”… but he keeps seeking God. Then he watches the martyrs die and
believes God heard their prayers, “But did he hear their screams?”
Let us now hold on to that thought – of God’s silence –
and return again to the theme of Epiphany. In Epiphany we hear stories of
shimmering revelation. We hear about Magi and stars. Jesus’s baptism includes
doves and a clear voice from the heavens. We marvel at the story of water
turning to wine, of transfiguration. Epiphany calls us to look beneath and
beyond the ordinary surfaces of our lives, and discover the extraordinary.
What I find challenging about these dramatic accounts is
that I’ve never seen a portentous star in the East. I’ve never seen the
Spirit descend like a dove, or heard a divine voice in the clouds. I've
never watched water become wine, or seen Jesus’s clothes blaze white on a mountaintop.
I haven’t experienced him in any of the ways the Epiphany stories describe. And
I don’t think my experience is unique. All of which leave me wondering, if God
spoke audibly in the past, why doesn't he do so now? If he does, why
haven't I heard him? Has he retreated? Changed? Left?
In short, why does God so often appear to be silent?
I don't know many Christians who complain that God talks too much. However, I
know plenty of believers who experience God as hidden or silent. God’s
silence tormented the Jesuit priests in the film. It’s something that Mother
Theresa struggled with most of her life. Perhaps you too have experienced this
hiddenness of God and long for some kind of response or revelation, for
epiphany.
I’ve presented two very different perspectives today –
powerful epiphanies of God along with the profound, life changing experience of
Pascal. And the experience of many people of silence, even a sense of the
absence of God. I would like to suggest that our pilgrimage of faith may take
us down a particular path, one or other of these dimensions, or it might
incorporate both.
These different dimensions are all held together in the
person of Jesus. His life included extraordinary epiphanies, powerful signs of
God acting through him; times when he was famous, popular, when thousands of
his followers wanted to take him by force and make him king. His life also
included times of solitude, of prayer, as well as the garden of Gethsemane when
he questioned his vocation, of feeling alone in that garden even amongst his
closest friends, who would soon betray and desert him. And finally, crying out
to God in agony on the tree at Calvary – my God, my God, why have you forsaken
me. My God, where are you? Silence.
Throughout the film Silence, the screen is often consumed
by a portrait of Christ by El Greco, staring right at us, into our doubts and
loneliness and hopes and fears. Scorsese said he picked the El Greco image
because it seemed to communicate to the viewer the message: “I will not abandon
you.”
How do we hold together the tension between the silence
of God, and the good news that Jesus brings, Emmanuel, God with us? RS Thomas,
the rather grumpy Welsh priest and poet, put it like this:
‘who is it who ever saw God? Whoever
heard him speak? We have to live virtually the whole of our lives in the
presence of an invisible and mute God. But that was never a bar to anyone
seeking to come into contact with Him. That is what prayer is all about…’
Silence, says RS Thomas, is God’s chosen medium of
communication. The silent God evokes our silence in his presence, but the
paradox is that in and through that silence, an encounter can occur. This is
not a passive waiting in silence but an alert kind of attention of God’s
presence. Its attempting to be still in the presence of God, and it requires a
lot of hard work. Because in our frenetically paced lives, we’re not used to
stopping and being still. Perhaps we’re frightened to do so.
Thomas put it like this:
‘Moments of great calm before an altar
of wood/ in a stone church in summer/ waiting for the God to speak/ the air a
staircase for silence.’
RS Thomas reminds us that our relationship with God
requires time, effort, patience, perseverance. It takes a lifetime and more,
and this relationship is not a relationship of equals. God is elusive, silent,
indefinable – because He is God. It is a timely reminder to our age when the
impression is sometimes given that God is easily understood, his mind easy to
read, and can be evoked at will.
Today, in this season of Epiphany, we acknowledge the
absence we often experience, but we also remember that God is there in the
silence as well as the noise, and we follow Jesus’s example in continuing to
seek him through prayer, in the hope that one day we will see clearly, and know
a little better the one who knows us and loves us.
Reference: Rowan Williams on RS Thomas