Christmas with Rachel

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

It’s been a wonderful year for babies born to the daughters of people we know. Working backwards, in July to a girl we know very well indeed – her name is Katie – she’s my daughter – she gave birth to a girl named Scarlett. Angie and I – grandparents finally. I can’t tell you how much I can’t wait to begin undermining everything her parents tell (though from the single-mindedness she is already demonstrating daily, I suspect I will be surplus to requirements). Then in April, a boy named Mason was born to Lisa Gammon. And back in February, Carla, née Cavali, the daughter of two close friends of ours, had a little girl, Sophia Marie. But there was an even earlier arrival this year, earlier in February: Rachel Hamlyn, née Beynon – yes, our organist’s daughter – she gave birth to James, who was baptised here exactly two weeks ago.

But it’s not that Rachel I want to talk about this morning. The children of Katie and Lisa and Carla and Rachel, I am quite sure, will grow up surrounded by a tonne of TLC, and there is every hope that they will blossom and flourish. But of the children of another Rachel, and mothers like her, we can have no such hope. For this Rachel there is only a grief that refuses all consolation. As St Matthew records it, quoting the words of the prophet Jeremiah: 

A sound was heard in Ramah,

weeping and much lament. 

Rachel weeping for her children,

Rachel refusing all solace, 

Her children gone, dead and buried.

(Matthew 2:18, The Message)

We first hear of this Rachel in Genesis 29, when Jacob meets her by a well where she is watering a flock of her father Laban’s sheep (vv. 16-20). She is stunning. Boy meets girl at well, it’s love at first sight, and after courtship and marriage they will live happily ever after – it’s a venerable folktale, and we wait for the story to develop in the ensuing narrative. But it is not to be. Jacob works for seven years for Laban to get the girl of his dreams, but on their wedding night, under cover of darkness, Laban slips Rachel’s older sister Leah into the nuptial bed. Leah is veiled, and it is not until morning that Jacob recognises the deception. He confronts Laban, who re-promises Rachel to him, on condition that he works another seven years on his father-in-law’s farm. Done – such is Jacob’s passion for Rachel.

But the newlyweds’ problems are just beginning. They try and try, but Rachel, unlike Leah, is unable to bear children. “If I do not have children I will die!” Rachel cries. God finally hears her cry, and eventually she conceives and bears a son, Joseph, her husband’s favourite child, who will become the link between the origins of Israel in Canaan and the liberation of Israel from Egypt (not to mention becoming a West End stage star with an “amazing Technicolor dreamcoat”!). Rachel will go on to have another son, but this birth will not be the subject of a musical: Rachel dies in labour. With her last breath she names her boy Benoni, “son of my sorrow”, which Jacob changes to the more hopeful Benjamin, “son who will be fortunate”. Jacob then buries his beloved and sets a pillar by her tomb, which, the Bible says, “is there to this day” (Genesis 35:20). And Genesis makes a further observation, more than salient to the Christmas season: the tomb is “beside the road to Ephrath, now known as Bethlehem” (Genesis 35:19).

But Rachel’s role in the Hebrew Scriptures does not end in Genesis. There is another Old Testament reference to her, the one Matthew cites from Jeremiah. Here again Rachel is a figure of pain, but not the pain of death in childbirth. In Jeremiah, Rachel symbolises another kind of suffering, the suffering of injustice, the suffering of those who lose their freedom at the hands of violent power. When Babylon conquered Israel, Israel’s leaders and intelligentsia – the people most likely to cause trouble – were taken into exile. The captives were paraded along the highway that led past Rachel’s tomb. It was a road of humiliation and sorrow. Jeremiah has just prophesied Israel’s ultimate return home from Babylon, replete with anticipated scenes of singing and dancing, rejoicing and rebuilding. “I will turn their sorrow into gladness!” says the Lord. But then, in the next verse but one, the Lord says, “A sound is heard in Ramah” (Jeremiah 31:15) – that sound, the sound of inconsolable weeping and grief.

Finally, biblically, we hear that sound a third and conclusive time, Matthew’s recapitulation of Jeremiah’s lament, yet again near a town called Bethlehem, in yet another time of tears and trauma. “Perhaps no event in the gospel more determinatively challenges the sentimental depiction of Christmas than the death of these children [at the hands of Herod]. Jesus is born into a world in which children are killed, and continue to be killed, to protect the power of tyrants” (Stanley Hauerwas). In Genesis, Rachel is an icon of the suffering of childbirth. In Jeremiah, Rachel is an icon of the mother of victims of oppression. Here in Matthew, Rachel combines both traditions. How grim can grief get?

But hang on. Is that it? Is there no hope? There must be, surely. Surely there is a future. Look at Benjamin: he will have ten sons, and generations hence from his line will spring the apostle Paul. Look at Rachel’s post-exilic children – they will indeed finally return home. And look at the one Herod was after, the one who evades his mass murder, Jesus of Nazareth himself. Yes, that is true. “There is hope for your future,” as the Lord says to Rachel (Jeremiah 31:17).

Yes, that is true. But it is not true as repression and cover-up. It is not true if it means that the desolate can simply forget their heartbroken past. It is not true if it suggests that immense loss does not irretrievably determine one’s very identity – it does. For the wretched of the earth, everything becomes a potential reminder of the eye that will never be dried, and the tear that will never be mended. Sorrows that were once the potholes of life now become the main road – the one that winds its inexorable way past Rachel’s tomb, bang into a stable in Bethlehem. Thus Martin Luther rightly saw in Rachel’s story a link between the Nativity and Good Friday.

Rachel refused to be consoled – and God blessed her in her refusal. God promised Rachel hope – but not a hope on which she might count on the basis of reason or resourcefulness, experience or expectation. That would be a false hope. True hope is always hope against hope, inexplicable, unjustifiable, and unsecurable. True hope is always but a razor’s edge from despair, because it cannot and will not close its eyes to the anguish, or shut its ears to the screams, that constitute the sordid story of the world – the murdered children, the massacred victims, the millions of tortured and disappeared. No, as the poet Emily Dickinson understood: “To relieve the irreparable degrades it.” Even Christ does not relieve the irreparable. Our Lord’s identity too is irretrievably bound to his wounds. His resurrection does not remove them. His scars mark him eternally. How should it not be so with all God’s children? 

The crib and the cross of Jesus are our hope – Rachel’s hope, the mothers of the infants of Bethlehem’s hope, the hope of the mothers of the twenty children murdered at Sandy Hook School – the hope of the mother of the murderer too – and the hope of the mothers, always and everywhere, of slain or suffering children. But the hope of the crib and the cross does not mean that the victims are any less dead, or their parents and families any less grief-stricken. We betray the Christian hope if we lie about the world of death and grief, for it is precisely this world that the born, crucified, and risen One has redeemed and is redeeming – this slaughter-bench of a world that he redeems. And for his followers that means that we do not live in denial of the one, even as we do live in affirmation of the other, and that we both accept that we do not know what the future holds – it is beyond our control – and insist that we do know who holds it. And it also means that we live in opposition and resistance to all that would demean and destroy any of the creation that God once pronounced good, and stand protectively but peacefully beside Rachel and her children. It means we cry, “Lord, have mercy!” – and then take responsibility. 

“Seeing ourselves honestly, seeing the world differently. That’s where faith begins,” as Rowan Williams put it on Wednesday. Thus may we go into to the New Year with two echoes resounding: the cry of those who will not be consoled, and the voice of Jesus who, on the precipice of despair, which is yet the brink of glory, says, “Fear not, take up your cross, and follow me.”

O boy, it’s Christmas

And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God observed them closely, these lovely creatures he had made, his masterwork, his image-bearers. God watched them reasoning and deliberating, laughing and weeping, falling asleep and falling in love, writing stories, building cities, inventing religions, feasting and drinking, making laws and making music and making love – and God loved it, loved all of it down to the last toenail and the last pubic hair.

And God said, Behold, let us go down among them and unite ourselves to them. Let us become like them in every way, just as they are in every way like us. For God wanted to show these image-bearers how closely they resembled him, how easily he could put them on like a familiar suit of clothes (and never take them off again: for so God loved them). Let us become bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh (said God), to show that human flesh and bone are not far from us but are our likeness, a perfect perambulating replica of our joy.

But what sort of human being should God become? That was a tough one. God inspected all the different stations and species of human life, trying each one affectionately, scrupulously, the way a person tries on many pairs of shoes to find the perfect fit.

Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers,

graphic designers and stolid bricklayers,

doctors and lawyers and unemployed surfers,

earnest young men and old women in burqas –

God saw them all and loved them. Each one of them was suitable. Any one of them would do fine. But somehow it was still not – quite – the thing God had in mind. God scratched his head, or would have, if God had had a head.

And then God spied them. A glorious little huddle of them. They were squatting in the dirt with dirty limbs and dirty faces, faces rapt as they hunted about for bugs, dug for worms, farted and belched and made agreeable little grunting noises. God watched them a long time, scrutinised them, sized them up and studied them from every angle, and God was very pleased, for this was just the thing. Yes, this would fit like a glove.

And so it was that grace was added to nature, creation was sanctified, the whirling worlds redeemed, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well and all that jazz. For it was on that day that God, the Lord, the master of the universe, became – a boy.


Merry Christmas.

Yes, it is true: sermon for Advent 4

by Kim Fabricius

Each year we hear again the ancient Christmas narrative. Each year we retell the story of how, almost unnoticed, God snuck into the world of Augustus and Herod, the “the movers and shakers”, to re-make history from below. We are astonished, touched, tickled, by our humble God’s predilection not for nabobs but for nobodies, for oddballs and outliers, for those whom the system chews up and spits out, the poor, the sick, the sad, the bad, the old. Something unimaginable and unpredictable happened, something original and fresh was revealed. God in his kindness decided to break the silence of centuries by giving himself away in the Word-made-fragile-flesh, whose first utterance was the hungry cry of a helpless new-born, whose last would be the desperate howl of a crucified misfit.

The mysterious Advent of God was focussed in a child; the breadth and depth of God’s love was expressed in a mite in a manger. God chose to visit the world not in Whitehall or Wall Street but in weakness, through an ordinary birthing by a peasant teenager in troubled times and awkward circumstances. The maker of galaxies and solar systems, mountains and rain forests, blue whales and dancing daffodils, revealed his glory in a bairn in a barn in the back of beyond.

Yes, the Christmas story we hear each year is the same, but our worlds, private and public, are always different. Joy and sorrow, success and failure, health and sickness – there are always annual alterations, good and bad, and, if we’re lucky, not cut down before time, we develop, decline, and die. But no matter what changes we negotiate, what achievements we celebrate, what losses we mourn, what tragedies overwhelm us, the Christmas story speaks to us again of The New – new birth, new life, new purpose. It tells us that things can and will be different, that the past need not and will not determine the future, that the God who met us once in Jesus will meet us again in Jesus, that the God of surprises is working even now, with unpromising material, in hidden ways, to create a new heaven and a new earth.

Angie and I had our first grandchild in July, and in a very real sense that we all feel intuitively, viscerally, the birth of every child is a small protest against the tired, cynical view that we are condemned to live lives of the same-old same-old, locked in a system of one-damned-thing-after-another. But in the birth of this child, a new adventure of faith begins, a new way of being human is disclosed to us, a new way of relating to each other is asked of us, and a new power of living is imparted to us. The Christmas story is an old story that is forever young, a story that constitutes a radical challenge to the trivial, the odious, and the squalid, a story pregnant with the possibility of meaning, decency, and beauty. Danger is not denied, threats are acknowledged, stupidity still stalks, vanity struts, and violence strikes. Nevertheless, because in Jesus grace and truth have pitched a tent, established an outpost in the world – indeed a colony: the church – the glorious advent of the peaceable kingdom is no longer in doubt. So as followers of the Wee One we can be confident and courageous, strong and tender. 

That is why we make the journey back to Bethlehem each year: to go back to the future by rediscovering our roots in this gift of God wrapped in a nappy. It is the time we relocate where we come from so as to re-orientate ourselves to where we are going. It is at once a time of homecoming and of setting out, of affirming the already and anticipating the not-yet. It is a time of deep, deep gratitude, magical joy, and indestructible hope.

In a famous Christmas poem John Betjeman asks, with deep, urgent longing:

And is it true? And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,

A Baby in an ox’s stall?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me?

Yes, it is true, it is true. For me, for you, for everyone.

Dharma doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ τὐεετος, καὶ ὁ τὐεετος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ τὐεετος. οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν. πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγνετο, καὶ χωρ

Six Christian koans

What is the sound of one happy-clapping?

Why a Vatican spokesman when he spins?

What is Menno Simons?  Three pounds of pax.

If Mark Driscoll shouts in a forest and (unbelievably) no one hears him, is he still wrong?

Why doesn’t the bearded archbishop have a beard?

Why can’t a penisless bishop?

Speaking with the authority of recent experience, the Church of England sends its Yuletide message to the nation: “Don’t take the Christ out of Christmess.”

Here is a picture of Rick Warren, from the cover of his new book The Porpoise Driven Life:

A Methodist friend of mine asked me if I would help him with a talk he was preparing on Arminianism. I said, “Only if it’s a eulogy.”

A Calvinist friend of mine asked me if I would help him with a talk he was preparing on double predestination. “Sorry,” I said, “I’m opposed to assisted suicide.”

With Proverbs 26:11 (cf. 2 Peter 2:22) as my text, I occasionally recycle sermons.

Deep down, every critic wishes they were an author. This explains both the pathos and the pathologies of that guild of textual parasites known as theologians, universally condemned to be producers of secondary literature.

What do you say about a genius like Tolstoy when he opines that King Lear is “beneath serious criticism”?  —“Marry, here’s grace and a cod-piece; that’s a wise man and a fool” (King Lear, III, 2).

And how do you respond to someone who doesn’t get Moby-Dick? —Be cool, count to ten, keep schtum, for as Starbuck said to Ahab, “To be enraged with a dumb thing … seems blasphemous.”

Have you ever noticed that Hamlet begins as a knock-knock joke in medias res? (Interestingly, in Macbeth, written 5-6 years later, a porter delivers a comic monologue which follows the form of a knock-knock joke [II, 3].) Or how its unfolding tragedy could have Romans 12:19 as an epigraph (cf. Anna Karenina)?

In Europe, God is dead. In the US, he’s in even worse shape.

A born-again Christian named Burke

Boasted, “No one is saved by their works!”

Ha! His faith served him well

When he found out in hell

That they make an exception for jerks.

What can one say of creationists but OMG (On Misreading Genesis).

Jesus was leading an Ethics 101 class which included Socrates, Buddha, David Hume, and Stanley Hauerwas.  Jesus said, “You must love your neighbour as yourself.”  Hume said, “Which self?”  Buddha said, “What self?”  Socrates said, “What is ‘love’?”  And Hauerwas said, “Who the hell is Niebuhr?”

The Sermon on the Mount without the resurrection is empty. And the resurrection without the Sermon on the Mount is – empty.

“Ought” implies “bought” (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:20).

In Christ we learn that it’s not “Where there’s life, there’s hope”, it’s “Where there’s death, there’s hope”, and “Where there’s hope, there’s life.”

Do you want to see your soul? Shave.

We have nothing to fear but nothing itself.

The problem is not that we are out of touch with our emotions but that we are in the grip of them.

The clever would rather be right than wrong; the wise would rather be kind than right.

A recent survey by the British Heart Foundation of the elderly finds that only 11% of the men regretted not having slept with more women. I suspect it would also find that that these 11% are either lying, gay, or suffering from severe memory loss.

A very good blogger recently ran a series on “The NFL and Christian Theology”. I kept waiting for a guest post by Screwtape.  (By the way, you know the guy, ubiquitous, who stands in the crowd behind the end zone waving the John 3:16 placard? That’s Wormwood).

“They are the custodians and initiators into felt intimations of open horizons, of well-springs of recuperation and self-surpassing for a constricted and worn humanity.”  That’s George Steiner on Gehrig, Williams, Mays, and Koufax. (Or was it Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven?)

Best books of 2012

I didn't read so many new books this year. To be honest I've been content to fritter away most of my time reading Augustine and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Augustine. So the best book I read this year I guess was Antony and Cleopatra, maybe The Tempest. But there were some terrific new books published in the past year, including some experimental works that altered the usual forms of scholarly writing. Here's my selection of the best of the year:

Theology

Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). If you only want to read one religious book this year, read this one.

Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton) 

Robin Jensen, Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity (Baker)

Medi Ann Volpe, Rethinking Christian Identity: Doctrine and Discipleship (Wiley-Blackwell)

Prayer and spirituality

Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers (Riverhead). If you don't want to read even one religious book this year, read this one.

Poetry

Louise Glück, Poems 1962-2012 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (Penguin)

Literary criticism

Maureen McLane, My Poets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Actually this book defies genre: it's a unique concoction of literary-critical memoir-poetical writing. Very good it is too. Perhaps my favourite new book overall this year.

Essays

Ali Smith, Artful (Penguin). Or maybe this one's my favourite: another genre-bending book, a wondrous quartet of fictionalised essays. This easily wins for cover of the year too (pictured above).

Memoir

Joan Didion, Blue Nights (Vintage)

Novel

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (Henry Holt). All right, it's a big book and I've barely even started. But I know a good book when I see it. Though as a rule I prefer small books to big ones.

Short stories

Alice Munro, Dear Life: Stories (Knopf). These small stories, for instance.

Sermons

Fleming Rutledge, And God Spoke to Abraham: Preaching from the Old Testament (Eerdmans)

Diaries

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Theological publishing: the best of 2012

I'll soon post my favourite books of 2012. But first, I'd like to nominate the three most important events in current English-language theological publishing. Each of these is a major series that's been running for some time now, with more volumes appearing this year:

New City Press: The Works of Saint Augustine. Not only the most comprehensive English edition, but the most comprehensive edition of Augustine's works ever published in any language. Highlights include Edmund Hill's translation of De Trinitate, Maria Boulding's wonderful Confessions, and the epic six-volume Expositions of the Psalms – an unparalleled Herculean achievement of early biblical commentary.

St Vladimir's Seminary Press: Popular Patristics Series. Over forty volumes are available in this wonderful series of new translations. The volumes are attractive, affordable, very accessible, nearly pocket-size. They're an ideal resource for classes, book groups, or devotional reading. Highlights include Basil the Great on social justice, Gregory the Great's pastoral rule, poetic exegesis of scripture from the Syriac tradition, Symeon the New Theologian's poems on divine eros, and the collected early treatises on the Lord's Prayer.

Fortress Press: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works. The new English translation of the complete 16-volume critical edition of Bonhoeffer's writings. A major feat of contemporary scholarship, and a massive resource for protestant theology. Highlights include the critical edition of Ethics, the huge volume of comprehensive prison writings, Theological Education Underground from the illegal Finkenwalde seminary, and that great work of protestant monasticism (and one of my favourite classroom texts), Life Together.

Note: Speaking of patristic texts, there's a new blog community for reading the church fathers, a few pages each day.

Prayer for Newtown, Connecticut, December 14

“But wherefore could I not pronounce Amen?” 
—Macbeth

God of liberty, we give you thanks for the many freedoms that we enjoy by your blessing.

For the freedom to express ourselves, we give you thanks! 

For the freedom to satisfy our urges and impulses, we give you thanks!

For freedom of trade, especially the freedom to buy and sell weapons and ammunition at competitive prices, we give you thanks!

For the freedom to bear arms, we give you thanks!

Save us, O God, from those who would threaten our rights;

Save us from legislators who would take away our freedoms;

Save us from those who would constrain the free expression of our feelings;
Save us from those who would compromise our free commerce in guns, weapons, and all instruments of self-protection.

Increase our freedoms more and more:

freedom to do as we please,
freedom to buy and sell,

freedom to possess handguns, semi-automatic assault rifles, automatic machine guns, stockpiles of ammunition, holsters, slings, scopes, and other accessories,

freedom against neighbours,
freedom against strangers,
freedom against children,
freedom against the unborn, 

freedom with our bodies and the bodies of others,
freedom to pursue our own interests,

freedom to gratify ourselves at any cost.
May the firstlings of our hearts be the firstlings of our hands,

and may we bring this freedom, O God, to those who lack it.

Fulfil us, O God!
Gratify our desires!
Validate our feelings!
Let us be free, though the world perish!

We ask it in the name of Jesus, your beloved son,
whose birth and infancy we venerate,
who came among us harmless as any child –

Marian hymn

Mary the dawn, Christ the Perfect Day;

Mary the gate, Christ the Heavenly Way!
Mary the root, Christ the Mystic Vine;
Mary the grape, Christ the Sacred Wine!
Mary the wheat, Christ the Living Bread;
Mary the stem, Christ the Rose blood-red!
Mary the font, Christ the Cleansing Flood;
Mary the cup, Christ the Saving Blood!
Mary the temple, Christ the temple’s Lord;
Mary the shrine, Christ the God adored!
Mary the beacon, Christ the Haven’s Rest;
Mary the mirror, Christ the Vision Blest!
Mary the mother, Christ the mother’s Son
By all things blest while endless ages run.
Amen.

“Mary the Dawn,” by an anonymous poet; audio recording here.

Doo-doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

How should the church respond to congregational decline, financial deficits, and vocational shrinkage?  The answer is obvious: make ministerial selection more stringent, theological education more demanding, and spiritual formation more exacting. And burn anyone who proposes a managerial or entrepreneurial solution. 

Who pastors the pastor? The pastored, of course – not least by exposing all our pathologies.

The names of almost all churches suggest a dreadful lack of theological depth, imagination, and audacity, and a failure to go ad crucem. Or can anyone point me to “The Church of the Two Thieves” (named after the first Christian congregation)?

Sanctification may be defined as the process of growth, coram Deo, in reliable self-narration.

The saint is a person for whom the gospel, once counter-intuitive, has become common sense.

I firmly believe in interfaith dialogue. Though it’s bloody hard work with American conservative evangelicals. Having a cultural anthropologist as a facilitator helps.

So Rachel Held Evans had A Year of Biblical Womanhood. My wife said she’d rather have 365 days of root canal. I told her I’d be up for A Year of Solomonic Manhood. She said I wouldn’t last a night.

Those who write, read, and review books on whether Adam and Eve really existed – there’s a chunk of your life you’ll never get back.

“Nor wonder how I lost my Wits;

Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!”  

That’s Jonathan Swift, in the concluding couplet of “Cassinus and Peter: A Tragical Elegy”, tracking the acute cognitive dissonance in Cassinus caused by the visceral realisation that his beloved has bowel movements. Thus do some Christians exhibit a theological pathology over a deity that defecates.

The C of E has insured that the English are, by and large, both a faithless and a decent people. If that’s what it takes not to have a Religious Right, it’s not a bad trade-off.

On the other hand … Monty Python answers the Psalmist (139:7) after the vote on women bishops: “Er, the General Synod?” All that was missing were ZZ Top beards and Elizabethan codpieces on the delegates with XX chromosomes.  

Stanley Hauerwas thinks that the US produces no “interesting” atheists because “the god most American say they believe in is not interesting enough to deny.” Which explains why the UK produces no interesting atheists either: no deity being available in the UK, the god they deny they have pinched from America.

“The United States is the greatest nation in the world” – the British would never declaim such bullshit about their own nation. Such swagger is not in UK DNA. But the statement is not so much hubristic as meaningless, for it presumes a judgement on the basis of a comparison with other nations of which most Americans are, in fact, pig-ignorant. Show a map of the world to, say, a Texan, and ask him to stick a pin in France. Well, you might just as well be playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey. (Sticking a pin in a Frenchman is an altogether different matter.)  

Part of the brilliance of The Sopranos and The Wire is the way they problematize the moral convention of “good guys” and “bad guys”.  So too Homeland. I mean, you’re rooting for the terrorists, right?

What is the difference between The X Factor and a presidential election? The competition in The X Factor is more interesting, and the voting system is more sensible. 

Reversing the biblical order, the Grahams, Franklin and Billy, demonstrated during the presidential election that the sins of the son may be visited upon the father (as if Dad wasn’t hauling around enough of his own tonnage from the Nixon years alone).

Don’t confuse pains in the ass with assholes. True prophets, for example, are pains in the ass, while court prophets are assholes.

No wonder the “Star Spangled Banner” is hard to sing: it sticks in the throat. Hence its near perfect rendition: Jimi Hendrix’s wretched Woodstock whine.

The Iraqis and Afghanis shouldn’t take American wars so personally. It’s just business, Yahia.

A says, “My sins cry out against me!” God replies, “What sins?”

God says, “Your sins cry out against me!” B replies, “What sins?”

That’s the difference between costly grace and cheap grace.

FOX News: it sure does.

If you want to make a point, don’t write a poem. And if you want to piss off a poet, ask him what it means.

Sigmund Freud

Got extremely annoyed – 

In fact, he went bloody ballistic.

He cried, “Carl, for Chrissake, you’re a mystic!”

And the “Hostage to Fortune” Award goes to – Bob Ryan, the guy who coined the nickname “America’s Team” for the Dallas Cowboys. Though just which is the hostage, America or the Cowboys, is debatable.

Tim Tebow fans, don’t worry: no more miracles but he’s still the Messiah, only now in the form of the Suffering Servant. New York will do that to you.

Revolutionary joy: audio sermon on the Magnificat

On Sunday I had the pleasure of preaching at Grace Long Beach. I spoke on the Magnificat: "Revolutionary Joy" would have been a good title, though I didn't think of it till afterwards.  Anyway, the audio is available here (the sermon starts at around 4:50). 

This is the second time I've done a sermon with a sung refrain; I quite like this approach, for three reasons. (1) It creates a moment of embarrassment while everyone's trying to figure out why the preacher is singing so badly, and whether they ought to sing along; and I think a bit of public embarrassment can be a wholesome way of building community. (2) It helps to remind the congregation (or more importantly the preacher) that the sermon is part of the congregation's worship; it's not a lecture or a Bible study or an outpouring of pious emotion or whatever. And (3) it lets you offer a cluster of small related vignettes, instead of a sustained monologue. This really appeals to me when it comes to a colossal text like the Magnificat, a text that I'd find it almost impossible to speak about directly. There are some texts that matter so much that the best you can do is to glance at them indirectly, make a few mute gestures, sing an awkward little song in a crowded room.

Dear light, clear light: Adam of St Victor on the Holy Spirit

One of my happiest discoveries at AAR last week was the new series of Victorine Texts in Translation, published by New City Press. These thematic volumes bring together annotated translations of mystical, exegetical, liturgical, and theological materials from the twelfth-century Augustinian community at the Abbey of St Victor in Paris. The Victorine school, with its contemplative piety and its pedagogical approach to theology, played a major role in the later emergence of scholasticism. It also produced some of the richest liturgical poetry of the Latin Middle Ages. There are two volumes so far, Trinity and Creation and On Love, with a third volume on Interpretation of Scripture: Theory coming soon.

I've been slowly devouring the first two volumes, and am especially impressed by the translations of Adam of St Victor's Sequences, liturgical poems that were sung before the Gospel reading in the mass. Adam wrote 47 sequences, and it looks as though each volume will include a few of these poems. They are very wonderful. Here's the poem on the Holy Spirit, included in the first volume. This ought to be a test of any theology: whether it can be sung!

Sequence for the Octave of Pentecost

1. 

You who proceed from both

begetter and begotten,

equally, Paraclete,

2.

give us eloquent tongues,

make our minds burn in you,

and enrich them by your flame.

3. 

The love of the Father and of the Son,

equal of both, and

equal and entirely similar to each,

4.

you replenish everything, you foster all,

you rule the stars, you move heaven,

remaining unmoved.

5. 

Dear light, clear light,

you put to flight the darkness

of the internal shadows.

6.

Through you the pure are cleansed.

You destroy sin and

every trace of sin.

7. 

You make truth new

and show the path of peace

and the way of justice.

8.

You shun the hearts of the wicked

and enrich the hearts of the good

with your gift of knowledge.

9.

You teach and nothing is obscure,

you are present and nothing is impure.

Under your presence

10.

the joyful soul glories,

the conscience – happy through you,

pure through you – rejoices.

11.

You change the elements.

Through you the sacraments

have their efficacy.

12.

You drive away the hurtful power.

You overthrow and refute

the wickedness of the enemy.

13.

When you come

you ease the heart.

When you draw near,

the darkness of the black cloud

takes flight.

14.

Sacred fire, 

heart of fire,

you do not burn,

but when you visit,

you clear away cares.

15.

You educate and awaken

minds formerly unskilled,

asleep and forgetful.

16.

You warm our tongues. You form the words.

Your charity given inclines

the heart toward good.

17.

O aid of the oppressed,

O comfort of the miserable,

refuge of the poor,

18.

give contempt of earthly things,

lead desire

to love of celestial things.

19.

Consoler and founder,

dweller and lover

of humble hearts,

20.

drive out evil. Wipe away filth.

Make what is discordant harmonious.

Bring us protection.

21.

You who once visited,

taught, and comforted

the frightened disciples,

22.

may you consider us worthy to visit,

and if it pleases, may you console us,

your believing people.

23.

The majesty of the persons is equal,

their power and

common divinity are equal.

24.

You, proceeding from two

are equal to both,

in no way dissimilar.

25.

For you are as great and

of the same kind as the Father.

May the humility of your servants

26.

return the praises

due to God the Father and the Son,

Redeemer, also to you.