“On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage.”
The most significant event of 2008 for me was, of course, my ordination to the priesthood here on 4th July. And I was very grateful to many of you for the hospitality that you showed to my friends on that occasion, many of whom don’t regularly attend church and some of whom had never been to a church service before. They found the whole experience quite powerful and extraordinary. But the thing that most of them commented on or asked about was the point in the liturgy where we pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit as we sang the Veni Creator and I got down and prostrated myself flat-out on the floor. In fact as I was doing it I heard one of my friends whisper “where’s he gone?” Where indeed?
Prostration is something that has made a bit of a comeback since the revision of the ordination liturgy in the last few years but it’s a very ancient part of the rite where the candidates lie face down on the floor as a symbol of their submission, not to the authority of the Bishop (which is why the Bishop himself is kneeling at this point) but to God and to the vocation which he or she believes that God has ordained to be the path for their life.
As with virtually every part of the ordination liturgy then, it’s actually a particularly intense expression of what all Christian life is about. It’s about saying to God “Here I am, you created me, you have redeemed me, you are transforming me through the power of the Holy Spirit and I submit to that.” That’s not self-abasement; it’s liberating realism and the path to fulfillment. As Thomas Merton put it, we are “feathers on the breath of God” and any of the ways in which we take ourselves more seriously than that is a silly delusion. The Christian says to God, with joy as well as awe, “the fullness of your reality overwhelms me, and I bow down.”
We know very little about these wise men from the East who felt compelled to come and find the baby Jesus. But they are a sign to us that the glory of God revealed in Jesus is not for a particular group, at a particular time, but for all people of the world in every age. More that, they show us that our response to Jesus, before anything else is, as the wise men experience, to be overwhelmed by him – to see in him something so much greater than ourselves that we cannot control it or even comment on it, we simply prostrate ourselves before him.
We may then want to go on to find out more about him and understand him. We may want to consider the impact of his teaching and example on our own lives and our behaviour. All of that is appropriate. But the only way to encounter Jesus as he truly is, the only legitimate response we can make to this man who was at the heart of our faith, is to be overwhelmed and to get down on our knees.
It so often seems that this overwhelming nature of what God has done at Christmas is made limply banal by the rather tame carols we sing at this time of year where the baby is made to feel more domestic than glorious. But it’s there in the early 19th century French carol “Minuit Chrètiens” that we know as “O Holy Night”. In that carol we sing “Fall on your knees and hear the angels voices.” In fact, in the original French it’s much stronger “fall on your knees, await your deliverance” and then a later verse can be translated as:
“As in ancient times a brilliant star
Conducted the Magi there from the orient.
The King of kings was born in a humble manger;
O mighty ones of today, proud of your grandeur,
It is to your pride that God preaches.
Bow your heads before the Redeemer!”
There aren’t many of us who are not proud of our grandeur in some way or other, so my friends at my ordination are far from alone in being a little shocked by the idea of falling on our knees. So much of our culture is geared towards inflating who we think we are when a lot of the time that doesn’t ring true inside ourselves. We live in an age of supposed empowerment where we are constantly told that “we’re worth it” and the vulnerabilities that contradict that feeling just have to be suppressed rather than acknowledged. In that kind of culture, the very idea of worship, of getting down on your knees, flies in the face of what we say about ourselves. Heaven forbid that we should willingly humble ourselves before anything we consider greater than the striving human self.
But it’s not just people in the church who question that idea. David Foster Wallace was an extraordinary writer who tragically took his own life back in September. He thought that religious instincts and practices abound in our secular society and, as we prepare ourselves for the atheist bus poster campaign we shall see this coming year, these words from an at times irreverent speech he gave to Kenyon College in Ohio are rather pertinent:
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship… is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you… Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”
Wallace’s words remind me of something a professor of religion in Cambridge used to say: that human beings are made to worship and religions are merely schools of worship, training us to worship in such a way as will cause us to flourish as individuals and as a society.
2009 is set to be a very difficult year for a lot of people in many ways. And as several bishops have been quick to point out, a lot of that is to do with the fact that we have bowed down and paid homage to a lot of things that are not good for us. We are in the crisis of a society that has idolised money and consumption above love, community, wellbeing and the sustainability of our planet.
So Epiphany is the time when we think about what is truly to be worshipped, a time when we reflect on our own encounter with what St Paul calls “the boundless riches of Christ” within the epiphanies of our own lives. It’s the time when we ask, to whom are we bowing down?
One commentator said on Monday’s Today programme that the principle lesson of David Foster Wallace’s work is this: Mostly we’re asleep but we can wake up and waking up is not only possible it’s our birthright and our nature and, as Dave showed us, we can help one another do it.
I can’t think of a more perfect message for the church and for our society at Epiphany 2009. Let’s wake up, fall on our knees and await our deliverance.