Sermon for the 23rd of July - Seventh Sunday after Trinity
The Hebrew scripture reading today has Jacob’s fascinating dream. He dreams about a ladder reaching from earth up towards heaven, with angels ascending and descending. God promises to bless the world through Jacob. He awakes and recognises the place as sacred, naming it Bethel, which means, House of God. Next time you visit St Paul’s Cathedral, look at the glass doors as you enter, and you’ll find inscribed the quote from this passage:
How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.
Jacob’s ladder has various interpretations. Some Christian theologians view it as representing Mary as theotokos or the God-bearer. She carried the incarnate Christ in her womb whereby Christ obtains human nature and is united with humanity. Divinity and humanity are united with each other. It affirms that God is not distant, but present with us, as one of us. To each of us at the time of our greatest loneliness or trial, it affirms: You are not alone; you have a companion.
Another interpretation is Christ being crucified on the Cross, the cross being a metaphorical ladder that connects heaven and earth.
The theme of a ladder connecting earth and heaven was taken up by St John Climacus. In the 7th century, at the age of 16, he joined St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. He became a monk and wrote the Ladder of Divine Ascent. It has thirty chapters, each representing a rung of a ladder and Christ’s earthly life. In the icon on our service sheets depicts this.
On one side of the ladder are demons, they are trying to drag people off the ladder, and on the other side are angels supporting them from falling. And at the apex, waiting to welcome and receive pilgrims, is Christ.
The steps of the ladder include things like repentance – that’s what the Gospel reading is about, getting rid of the weeds in our life so we can flourish.
Other rungs of the ladder include struggles with our passions, prayer, contemplation and love. Love is the most important because it overcomes evil.
In short, the ladder of divine ascent, represented in this icon, represents our spiritual journey with all of its struggles along the way.
I would like to introduce a big HOWEVER to this ladder of ascent, particularly for us Western Christians. Because many of us acquisitive and ambitious westerners, like ladders. We like the idea of upward mobility, of improvement, of moral progress.
We speak of ‘career ladders’ and the ‘ladder of success’. It is the myth of personal power. And it expresses the hubris of the Tower of Babel, which is the story of humankind’s pride in trying to reach the heavens by its own power. Today’s skyscrapers are the modern day equivalent.
And it’s also seen in the church. Motivational preachers love the drive for excellence, of moral improvement, of achieving spiritual progress. The Orthodox priest, Fr. Stephen Freeman, questions this. He puts it like this… ‘the constant nagging voice demanding improvement and excellence is not the voice of God. It is often nothing more than the neurotic echo of modernity sounding in our brains. It drives us with the threat of shame.’
And it can be demoralising for many Christians, looking up at those scaling the high rungs of the spiritual ladder, the SAS Christians, and feeling like failures. But this is a gross distortion of the ladder.
We do not gradually improve and thereby leave our brokenness behind us.
Our dearly missed Tom Stacey, his favourite mystic was Meister Eckhart, and he makes a similar point. Eckhart said that the spiritual life has more to do with subtraction than with addition. But in the capitalist West, we keep trying to climb higher up the ladder of spiritual success. This is the theology of self-help Christianity and has more in common with spiritual consumerism rather than authentic Christian life.
It turns the Gospel into a matter of addition instead of subtraction. When we are so full of ourselves, we have no room—and no need—for God or for others.
When Carl Jung was an old man, one of his students read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he asked Jung, “What has your pilgrimage really been?” Jung answered: “In my case Pilgrim's Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.”
That is the voice of a free man. We aren’t really free until we are free from ourselves: our ego, our reputation, our self-image, our need to be right, our need to be successful, our need to have everything under control, even our need to be loved by others—or to think of ourselves as loving.
The topsy-turvy world of the Gospel, and the way of Christ, is not one of power, of human ingenuity, of will-power and glory – that’s the path of Machiavelli!
Rather, the path of Christ leads to the cross. And this is where God meets us – in our brokenness, in our shame. It’s something we can learn from those on the 12 step programme. It starts by humbly recognising our inability to help ourselves, and our need for the healing power of God.
When we acknowledge our failure and refuse to hide from its shame, we can call out for Christ. The cross, the key symbol of the Christian path, affirms how God meets us in our shame, and takes it upon himself. Rather than separating us from Christ, our brokenness unites us to him in the paradox that is at the very heart of our salvation.
God became what we are, that we might become what he is. God does not meet us in the middle. He meets us at the bottom and asks us to meet him there as well. And it's from there that we are drawn into the life of God.
Reference:
Fr. Stephen Freeman, https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2016/04/11/ladder-divine-ascent-moral-improvement/