Some of you may remember that the first time I formally visited this church was when I came to preach at Pentecost 2006 before it was even proposed as my title parish. It was then I realised that a church where I could quote Wittgenstein from the pulpit to an appreciative congregation was a church where I would do just fine!
But that wasn’t actually the first time I had set foot in this church. Several years before I had come up to Hampstead one Sunday afternoon with a friend. And after a lazy afternoon on the Heath we found our way in here and I remember very vividly that we walked up to the front of the nave and looked up at the windows above the altar. And my friend turned to me and said, “Why is it that in Victorian stained glass, Jesus always looks like he has raided the wardrobe of the Royal Shakespeare Company and thrown everything on?!” He’s got great big velvet robes and a cloak and chains and he’s holding an orb as big as his head!
We know, of course, what the image symbolises. This is the glorified ascended Lord. This is Christ the King, triumphant over death and ruler over all creation. But the danger is that we forget (and forgive me for putting it like this!) what is underneath all that finery. Because John’s Gospel makes it very clear that Jesus’ risen body still bears the wounds of his death. The glorious resurrected body of Christ is still the flogged, tortured, crucified body that hung on the cross. The Victorians are famous for having wanted to cover the body. But there is perhaps a deeper reason why it was deemed more palatable to cover this body than to leave its eternal wounds exposed.
The central theme of the New Testament letters is how the fellowship of the church has become the Body of Christ on earth. Each Christian community with its diverse members and variety of gifts is to live out its vocation as the bodily manifestation of God to the world. And each church community, no matter how large or apparently successful, shares not only in the glory of Christ’s risen body, but also in his wounds. The wounds are numerous. There are the social wounds which we share with the society we are part of – wounds of social division, of victimisation and alienation, of poverty and exclusion. Then there are the personal wounds we all carry – wounds of insecurity and fear, wounds of loneliness and broken hearts. And there are the real physical wounds of pain and ill heath.
In the very competitive world in which we live – a world characterised by the rejection of any kind of dependence – we are trained in very meticulous ways to mask our wounds, in the first instance to others but more often than not to ourselves as well. We construct impressive and successful personas which mask our wounds in ways that make us feel more acceptable to others and to ourselves.
One of the principle ways by which most people do this is through the accumulation of wealth and material possessions. Jesus knew this very well. The collection of some of his teaching on this matter that makes up today’s Gospel is far too complex and confused for me to get very far into in my final sermon! But the core of his message that he expresses in the final verse “You cannot serve God and wealth” can be explained in these terms: we cannot really get close to God unless we are properly honest about ourselves. And we will not be honest about ourselves until we acknowledge those wounds that we hide and ignore through material accumulation.
And at the heart of this masking of wounds through acquisition is something that Jesus articulates so powerfully in the parable of the Rich Fool who constructs bigger and bigger properties to contain his possessions: “You fool, this very night your soul will be required of you”. Our denial of our wounds is ultimately our denial of our mortality, that core human resistance to believe in the reality of our own deaths. It’s very important to say in a parish like this that wealth is not evil in itself, it is simply dangerous because it is a means through which we can prop up some very unhealthy delusions about ourselves.
This Body of Christ in Hampstead has had the painful wounds of mortality exposed a number of times over the three years that I have been here. Death is ever present but it feels that we have been confronted with its painful injustice very regularly just recently. The very first parishioner I was introduced to was the radiant face of our former churchwarden Sarah Knight on the steps of St Paul’s after my deaconing. And so many other people who have been lovingly incorporated into this body over many years have suddenly been lost in ways that effects us all.
Well, this is cheery stuff for a valedictory sermon isn’t it! But what I think I want to say is that how we deal with these core realities is at the heart of the Christian journey and one of the biggest (and hardest) shifts that the Christian mind needs to make is in how we interpret the painful wounds we bear which point to our mortality. The most important thing about this Jesus we follow, the paradoxical man who was God, was that he embraced suffering in order that paradoxically his wounds might bring healing, he embraced the Cross so that his death might bring life. And so much of what is difficult and confusing in the gospels is the passages that point to the notion that the same is somehow true for us. Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn. If anyone would be my disciple they must take up their cross. Whoever shall lose his life for my sake will find it.
Sometimes things we read in the gospels seem so hard and challenging and alien. But at the heart of his Good News, Jesus is calling us simply to be ourselves, to give up this rather elaborate process of presentation and avoidance and just be honest about who we are and where we’re at. That involves journeying into some of the most painful and unpalatable aspects of ourselves precisely in order that we may allow Christ’s redemptive love to well up within them. This was the eventual conclusion of St Paul (a man with much to be ashamed of in his past) when he wrote that he rejoiced not in his strengths but in his weakness because it was there that the grace of Christ was made manifest in his life. We often think that God is present in the better, stronger, more wholesome elements of our character that we present to the world. This is to say nothing of the trend in the modern church to see God’s favour in growing numbers and material wealth. But the crucified God is, in fact, at work in the places where we are most wounded and most fragile; the light, as John of the Cross wrote, is at the heart of the darkness. That is what the doctrine of the resurrection means.
I don’t preach very much out of my personal experience. But part of the central narrative of my life has been responding to pain and turmoil that my life was thrown into when my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly in my late teens, a grief that is with me every day. Because I realised that you can either turn away from the pain and darkness that life throws at you and engage in certain kinds of displacement activity. Or you can embrace the fullness of human reality and recognise that by sticking with what is difficult you find an extraordinary new depth of strength and wisdom and even joy. I believe that if you acknowledge the place for loss and woundedness at the heart of life then you are given a new freedom to be fully alive, a new power to gaze into the heart of the world and perceive it to be beautiful as well as broken, created and loved in its frailty.
The reason for all this is that it is only in embracing our wounds and acknowledging our mortality that we truly allow God to be God, because we have given up on the subconscious fantasies that we are God, that we could live forever and have full dominion over our own destinies. And so we acknowledge ourselves to be dependent, to be held, vulnerable but ultimately safe, in this world and the next. Again, St Paul understands it so perfectly when he writes: “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” and that is fundamentally all that matters.
One of the things I have most enjoyed in my curacy was leading the Stations of the Cross in Lent this year, and I think the reason for this was that there were some very real encounters. Real encounters through words, silence and even tears with ourselves, with God, with the one who has shown us how wounds can be wells of healing, how pain can lead to joy. That was true, not least, for our artists to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for enabling that encounter and to whom, I suppose, I was particularly grateful for providing some counterbalance to this [point to window] beautiful but incomplete image of Christ.
Hampstead is, in some ways, a community covered in velvet and finery. But we all know that it bears the same wounds and darkness as everywhere else. And the ongoing challenge of evangelism here is to help people embrace more fully who they are through the letting go of illusions about themselves, helping them to let go of ever more of themselves in order to find themselves through dependence on the great Other who is the source of all life and all creation.
It’s been a privilege to journey with you along the Way. You have helped me to find more of myself and I pray that God has used my gifts and my weaknesses to enable this body to grow in strength, and so in faith, hope and love. Pray for me as I continue to pray for you and may we all come to know that in pain or in joy, in light or in darkness, in life and in death, we belong to the Lord.