Tag: Celtic Christianity

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Ash Wednesday

Readings: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-18; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Sometimes, when I take my dog for a walk, he lingers behind, locating scents that only he can smell, and I wander ahead. He likes to come running after me and, like a good rugby player, to make a feint and dodge me just as he reaches me. It is a joy to see his ears flapping in the wind. But there are times when I turn around that he has disappeared, and I call to him. Has he followed some female? A golden retriever, perhaps? I stand, wondering whether I should retrace my steps, go looking for him. And then I realize, as I face forwards, that he is only five feet away, not behind me anymore, but by my side, discovering a new scent. I don’t know what the locals must make of me, this strange Englishman calling out to a dog that is right beside him. When I look back at the landscape behind me, it is as if he is invisible. He is unseen.

This is how we are to perform acts of charity, according to today’s reading from Matthew. When we give to the needy, when we pray, when we fast, we are to do it in secret and our Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward us. We are not to seek the praise of those around us. We are to do it for our Father, who is unseen.

Lent is a strange journey from glory to glory. Let us not forget the previous Sunday’s reading was about Jesus’ transfiguration on Mount Tabor, when he appeared alongside Moses and Elijah, the Old Testament law and prophets, and shone dazzlingly white. But as we are reminded, this is not a moment you can hold onto. Peter was mistaken, Luke tells us (Lk 9:33), when he suggested building shelters for the three of them. They had to go on from there – Jesus to the Cross, but ultimately to the Resurrection and Emmaus, where he accompanies us on the road; Peter to Rome; James and John to their places, not the least of which was for John to write his Gospel. If they had stayed behind to witness to one event, to try to grasp water, none of this would have happened.

We also are on this journey. Joel tells us that “the day of the Lord is coming”, but it is not a day full of wonder, as we might expect, it is “a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness”. We are to “rend our heart”. As the Psalmist says in Psalm 51, “a broken and contrite heart, you, God, will not despise”.

We express our repentance. We are sorry that things are not how they should be. People suffer, are ill, are exploited. Others lord it over them. The journey as expressed in Psalm 51, a very important psalm which is part of Orthodox Morning Prayer (except that there it is numbered Psalm 50), goes from being “sinful at birth” to purity of heart.

Celtic Christianity would have a problem with the phrase “sinful at birth”. In their view, we are intrinsically good, just as the creation around us is good, and what we have to do is rediscover the sacredness within. But the journey is the same. To “be reconciled to God”.

I like to think of it in terms of language. The I, the ego, is a straight line, a kind of barrier. This word, I, sounds the same as the organ of sight, eye, and if we rotate the line by ninety degrees, indeed it looks like a closed eye.

So, we breathe air into the line and make a circle, the letter O. We open it out. “O” can be an expression of realization – “Oh!”. We become aware of God’s presence in our lives. It can also be an exclamation of repentance – “Oh!”

This realization, and repentance, is what opens our spiritual eyes and enables us to reach spiritual maturity. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” This is the doctrine of theosis, deification. St Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in his work “On the Incarnation” that “God became man so that man might become God”. He wrote this in 318, as a young deacon, before going on to help draft the first version of the Creed at Nicaea in 325. He also came up with the first listing of canonical New Testament books.

God became man so that we might become gods – gods by grace, not by nature – so that we might inherit eternal life, enter the land of paradox where truth resides. We are “genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything”.

It is this recognition – realization, repentance, return, it doesn’t matter – that enables us to fix our eyes, open now, on heaven. And this, for me, is the most important line in today’s readings, the line that we can take with us through Lent: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” We have rediscovered God, come to a realization, but there is a change in us. We do not return to the Garden of Eden, we do not try to hold onto the moment of the Transfiguration, to store it in a shelter or on film. We return to a state of innocence – a lack of willingness to do harm – but this time with knowledge. We must pass through the stage of physical knowledge in order to reach spiritual maturity, not only because it enables us to have children and so to be co-participants in the creation of man, but also because it teaches us what it is to hurt and not to want to inflict hurt on others.

Lent is a journey of endurance – troubles and hardships, yes, but also truthful speech and sincere love. We are poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything. Deep inside us is a flame that, like the disciples of St Brigid or the inhabitants of the Hebrides, we must keep burning through the long winter’s night in the expectation that it will blaze up in the morning.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Sermons

The Nonduality of Christ

Readings: Isaiah 6:8-13; Psalm 138; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11

The Creed, which we will recite in a moment, the Church’s Symbol of Faith, was the result of two ecumenical councils in the fourth century, the first at Nicaea in modern Turkey, and the second at Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Right belief, what the Church believes, took more than three hundred years to be written down. It was not a given. That is, it had to be defended, fought for, and there were several viewpoints, later declared heresies when they were seen to be inaccurate, that threatened the integrity of the early Church.

One of these is that Christ didn’t really become human, didn’t really suffer on the Cross, he only had the appearance of being human. This heresy was known as Docetism, from the Greek dokeĩn, meaning “to seem”. He only seemed to be human. On the other side of the coin, there was the false belief that Jesus was just a man – a very good man, to be sure, a man who reached an unusual stage of spiritual enlightenment that made him appear more advanced than others and become so spiritually advanced that God adopted him. This heresy was known as Ebionism.

These heresies – and there were others – served to force the early Church to delineate its beliefs. It took seven ecumenical councils in all – the first and last of which were at Nicaea in 325 and 787 – to establish what the Church believed. It seems that certain people could just not accept the idea that Christ might be both fully divine and fully human. And even when they did, there were those who claimed that he was fully divine and fully human in one nature. This is the Christological doctrine known as Miaphysitism, which is held by the Oriental Orthodox Churches and is the root of the far earlier schism between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox (six long centuries before the Great Schism between Catholic and Orthodox).

So, belief is not so easy. We find it hard to accept that Christ can be fully divine and fully human, and yet be one person. Either he isn’t really God or human, or his two natures must be subsumed into one. It seems we are unhappy with what we take to be some kind of contradiction – if he is fully divine, then he cannot also be human. He has to be one or the other.

I would suggest that this inability or unwillingness to marry seeming opposites is still very much alive and well today, in the twenty-first century. And this lack of ability to see unity in difference can be dangerous.

It is only two weeks since this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ended. Most of us have forgotten about it by now. It’s a nice idea, but impractical. Those people over there are never going to agree to it, and I’m certainly not going to change my position. There is some hope that Christians on both sides of the divide are going to be able to agree on a unified date for Easter, though most of us would be hard pushed to state simply how the two dates are arrived at (something about a spring moon).

Yes, but how does God see this? How does he see his followers, some saying the liturgy, others singing it, some with white walls, others with frescoes, some crossing themselves from left to right, others from right to left? Does he say, “You’re right, you’re in; you’re wrong, go back to the beginning”? Or does he weigh up the intentions of the heart, the faithfulness shown sometimes over years by ordinary Christians? I know what I would do in his position.

One of my favourite TV series is Battlestar Galactica, about a group of humans, reduced in number, who are attacked by the machines that they themselves have made, known as Cylons. After an attack on their capital, Caprica, the humans are almost wiped out. Only a few ships manage to escape the holocaust and they are then condemned to wander space, jumping from one set of coordinates to another, as they endeavour to dodge the Cylon menace. Their ultimate quest is for Earth, a planet – a dream, Admiral Bill Adama calls it – where they can finally settle down and breathe fresh air.

The humans regard Cylons as machines. They have a visceral hatred towards them. They refer to them as “it”, not “he” or “she”, and do not believe that they have any real feelings.

And yet it is apparent that they do. Even when they lose the ability to resurrect, something that set them apart from their human counterparts, they are still willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. And it is only in tandem with their now Cylon allies that the humans, what is left of them, finally make it down to Earth. One of the Cylons is Bill Adama’s closest friend and colleague, Colonel Tigh. But they overcome their differences, their different makeup, because their friendship is too strong.

I sometimes think in the Churches we see each other as humans and Cylons. We cannot accept that both black and white exist. Those on the other side, who do not believe the same as I do – or do not express their belief in the selfsame way – it is as if they are machines. We never attend each other’s services. It is the same with nationalities. When I am in England, I am shocked by how much people hate Russians – people who have never actually met a Russian or set foot in Moscow.

I am afraid that this continued entrenchment is good for business. I am also afraid that it is not good for our souls. How can we possibly be one body if we are constantly wanting to cut each other off?

There is a strand of Christianity known as Celtic Christianity, Christianity that spread to the north of England, in particular the Kingdom of Northumbria, from the small island of Iona in Scotland. It is linked very closely to the names of such saints as Aidan and Cuthbert (the latter’s bones were the reason for the founding of the city of Durham, the city was literally founded on his remains).

In an afterword to Michael Mitton’s book Restoring the Woven Cord: Strands of Celtic Christianity for the Church Today, Ray Simpson, the founding guardian of the Community of Aidan and Hilda, talks of “an act of unity with Jesus in various focal places”. He goes on to say:

I make an act of unity with Jesus in scripture (the Evangelical strand) and in Holy Communion (the Sacramental strand); in the poor (the Justice strand) and in the deep heart’s core (the Mystical strand); in the spiritual shepherds (the Catholic strand) and in the Living Tradition (the Orthodox strand); in nature (the Creation strand) and in the group process (the Community strand). These acts of unity do not require me to be unfaithful to anything I have learnt of Jesus.

This is a wonderful statement of faith. Different, yes, but I’m not your enemy. Before we condemn the others, should we not get to know them first? Should we not attend their services? My father liked to say, if it was left to the common people, there would be no wars. How much of human conflict could be settled by a bottle of brandy instead of a bullet? The truth must be defended. It is not subject to my whim. But there is room for all of us in heaven, and I do not believe that the Jesus who spoke so tenderly and fiercely to the Samaritan woman at the well, a double outcast (not only was she a Samaritan, but she had been married five times, she was an outcast to her own community), will reject the person who gets down on their knees, takes responsibility for their mistakes, and tries to do better.

Christ is one person, two natures. He became human so that we might become gods, not through our own efforts, but by the action of grace. He became human so that he could translate us into the language of eternity, a language we have yet to learn to speak.

Amen.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com