THE FEAST OF STEPHEN (a couple of days late)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)

A friend sent me some thoughts on St Stephen, the first martyr, celebrated the day after Christmas. Here is my reply:

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” This is an old, old proverb, and it shows us how close old Christianity was in some ways to current (I erased “modern”) Islam. A “màrtys” in Greek is a witness: originally in a secular sense, later someone who testified to a religious truth. And in controversial situations, one who held nothing back, who was ready to affirm his faith out loud even when facing the barrel of a gun or a team of torturers. There have been martyrs, in this sense, in my lifetime: Dietrich Bonhoeffer for instance, one of the leading lights of Nazi Germany’s “Confessing Church”, a church that opted to speak out against the barbarity: a deeply civilised man who wrote some lasting texts of faith and was hanged with piano wire. And, of course, anyone willing to die for his faith tends mightily to impress bystanders.

On the other hand, said Oscar Wilde, “an idea is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.” This statement, true in itself, is also deliberately provocative and thus a lie on another level. But in today’s Western world, the idea of the martyr is seriously uncomfortable. It smacks of hysteria, of over-dramatization, of Cecil B. DeMille, or alternatively of bearded Muslim fanatics with explosive vests.

So what do we do with Stephen? He was not subtle. He was all of a piece, a good speaker, and spoke out when it was a damn fool thing to do. And he was stoned to death for it, which is not a pretty way to go. (Google it and see some horrid things.) I can’t really write about this, as I have not (and I thank God for it) have been in such a situation, and know not what I should do if I got there. I have dire suspicions about myself.  So in one sense, obviously, I admire the ones who find themselves in the situation and have the courage.  

But if life has denied us Stephen’s fate (at least so far), what conclusions can a meditation on martyrdom lead to? One: it is a healthy church consensus that it must never be sought. If it happens, if the person facing the situation has the courage to persevere and die for the cause, well and good; but my own feeling is that while it can be an inspiration if it happens, it should not in itself and for itself be glorified.

Secondly, the Church has another interpretation, beyond the simple story. For the Church, the Feast of Stephen, coming directly after the Nativity, is a bridge upon which to look forward already to Easter. A reminder that birth leads to death, but that death leads to resurrection. For what we have not mentioned, so far, is what Stephen spoke out about, what he witnessed to. And that, of course, is the Risen Christ.

So the Feast of Stephen is a celebration of witnessing, of carrying the story of the Resurrection out into an unbelieving world. In 1615, in 1715, in 1815, this would have chiefly meant taking ship for unknown parts and preaching to “natives”; for the world at home was one in which every village had a church (sometimes two) and every church had a priest or minister. Now, however, the unbelieving world is all around us. It may not stone us if we talk about the Risen Christ, but it is quite likely to turn away in vague irritation and wonder if we have gone a little soft in the head.

Moreover, this same unbelieving world is periodically assailed by strident “witnesses” who purport to proclaim the Risen Christ but do so in loud, tactless and simplistic ways. They make a number of converts, but for every convert they make they alienate one or two other listeners, some definitively. Perhaps a modern Stephen in the Western world is well advised to learn what the Church calls “discernment”: the application of (prayerful) intelligence and tact to faith and its situations.

    

ALL TOGETHER NOW:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Rembrandt van Rijn, 'Head of Christ', ca. 1648

SSSSSHHHHHH............

On this night, if you are very, very quiet; if you can shut out the traffic and the canned music and the roar of champagne bottles being opened; if you can shut out the much greater roar of your own distractions; and especially if you are not too far from the animal world -- living in the country, or even around pets;

-- then, on this night of the year alone, you may be able to hear the animals talking.

For on Christmas Eve, the animals are given human voices, and they whisper the news from coop to byre. Being smarter than us, they do not disbelieve or invent arguments; they just pass on the immense and astonishing story, from chickadee to rabbit, from boar to deer, from hen to cat:

--  it's happened. It really happened. And because He who made it happen is not bound by the silly rules of Time (he made Time, after all), not only did it happen but it is happening again. Tonight. Imagine the panic if Altair whooshed out of its position and came down into our solar system. So --- shhh --- here is the Master of the Universe, the Son of the Father of us all, whooshing down, or in, or up, to land -- not in a shopping mall, not in the Elysee Palace, not in the White House or the Kremlin, but in a perfectly anonymous stable or garage. And because of that ---

because of that, humans -- those silly sods who keep hunting us, eat our eggs and drink our milk -- humans are set free. Only, being far, far dumber than dumb animals, they don't know that, and keep saying Nah, forgeddaboudit, get back to the champagne and the Louis Vuitton bag. But we --

--we know, don't we. Only after tonight, we won't tell. They'll have to work it out for themselves . . . .

Did you hear them whisper? Are you tuning your ears? Does your dog look as if he has a secret? Sort of smug? Listen with GREAT CARE.

SO NOW WHAT?

Four weeks; four candles; four winds; four? Jung said that Catholicism was the most psychologically adequate form of Christianity because it had completed the Trinity (three: unstable, tense, male) with a fourth, and a female: the Blessed Virgin Mary. And today, Advent Four, in the RC church is a reprise of the Annunciation. We are so close to Christmas that one is unsure quite to do with Advent Four. Cranmer’s 1549 Collect simply reprises the whole of lurching, blocked human life and its need for direction:

LORDE rayse up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our synnes and wickednes, we be sore lette and hindred, thy bountifull grace and mercye, through the satisfaccion of thy sonne our Lord, may spedily deliver us; to whom with thee and the holy gost be honor and glory, worlde without ende. 
 

I like the “raise up thy power and come among us”; yet we mustn’t forget that when He did just that it was to an utterly unimportant couple in inadequate lodgings on a winter’s night far too close to the Solstice for comfort of any kind. He did succour us with great might, but surely not as we would have expected. His bountiful grace and mercy did indeed deliver us and will go on doing so; but once again, not the way we’d expect and probably not the way we should have chosen.

He did and does so per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. I have written on that “per” before and may soon do so again; for now, the point is that His intervention on our behalf happens, and only happens, by the mediation of His only-begotten Son, whose birthday we are about to celebrate. Which means that it can come to us only by our focusing our entire being on that person in whom God came into our stupid, fucked-up, messy, criminal world in order to begin setting it right in the only way worth doing.

No, the coup d’état we sometimes long for wouldn’t work. Try to imagine it. There would be mammoth opposition immediately, with media blitzes, tanks, and possibly nukes. No: He looked at what we had made of his experimental little jewel of a planet; He wept; and He decided the only way to rescue us was the hard way. Hard for us; far, far harder for Him. Tiny bit by tiny bit. A million relapses; a million and one gettings-up. Costing, said T.S. Eliot, not less than everything. The point is, He paid the everything first. Doing so, he showed us such staggering, such scary, such disconcerting love that we quickly killed him and have been embarrassed for over 2,000 years since.

As Fr Jean-Kamel said, the good guys among us keep wanting to do something for God. What we have to get used to is that He’s not interested in our gifts: He’s interested in us. He doesn’t want what we can give him: He’s richer than that already. But He wants us. He just wants us to shut up, stop prancing, and let ourselves be loved like the useless, miserable, incorrigible, repellent, only-a-father-could-love-them dickheads we are. And once we get to that remarkable point – knowing we are less than zip, yet flooded with His love -- then we can do something: not for Him, but for the idiot next door, who oddly enough is carrying His image.

Four candles: it’s coming awfully close. Up to us to let it be real: not a rough beast slouching to be born.

NOT THE DEATH OF GOD

Samuel Palmer, "Coming from Evening Church" (ca. 1827)

A few nights ago I heard an interview with a highly intelligent and perceptive woman, Monique Hébrard, who has written on “Twelve Urgencies for the Church”. One of the urgencies, she said, was for the Church to recognise that “Christendom is dead”. Not God, not Christianity: Christendom. Referring to the recent massive demonstrations in France against gay marriage, she said that many of the demonstrators were simply “nostalgic for Christendom”: a time when the Church dictated its morality to society at large. When the interviewer asked, “So, it’s gone? Isn’t that sort of sad? Haven’t a lot of good things gone with it?” Hébrard replied, “Yes, sure. Lots of good things have gone. But what are we going to do? Cry? No: we’re going to live.” A sturdy answer. And I thought she was probably right.

Then today I was preparing for Christmas, around family, after discussing what we were going to do on Christmas Eve, and listening to one of my favourite ancient Christmas vinyls: the glorious Austrian soprano Maria Stader singing German Christmas songs. And I thought of the death of Christendom. The faithful go on being faithful, and find ways to live with the perfectly valid pagan aspects of Yuletide. Angry atheists carry on being Grinches, growling at the season in their lairs. But what is vanishing is the wave that carried some beauty, some thoughtfulness and even some prayer into the ordinary deserts of the year’s dark. Singing “Silent Night” and “O little town of Bethlehem” was never proselytism: it was a way for thousands to touch the hem of a garment.

And it made me think of an urgency different from Hébrard’s: with what are we going to replace “Christendom”? What is the Church going to do for the thousands who are not ready to become active members of the Party, so to speak? In French politics, the parties distinguish between “les militants”, the full card-carrying members, and “les sympathisants” who will probably vote for you at the next election but still maintain some distance. What I see in the mainstream Churches at the moment is a sense that nowadays you need to be “un militant”, and the more militant the better: to be a “sympathisant” is simply not good enough.

But what happened to the five thousand who were fed in Galilee? How many became apostles, enthusiasts, constantly at Temple or synagogue, founding and running charitable organisations to help widows and orphans? Ten per cent., probably. But the other 4500? Did they continue worshipping irregularly, keeping what commandments they could but not scrupulously, and yet – and yet with a new question always behind their eyes, a new presence filling their prayers when they least expected it?

This is what “Christendom” did. I remember it, as I was part of the generation that saw it turn. Many people went to church because, yes, they believed, but also because it was what they were used to and because it was a good thing to do on Sunday mornings. “I don’t know why it is,” said Squire Letterby in Charles Morgan’s Breeze of Morning, “but church and sherry always seem to go together.”

Not good enough, perhaps. But the Church is in danger here of an insidious hypocrisy. The standard justification for “a smaller, poorer Church”, as Pope Francis says he wants, is that people are leaving in droves anyway, and that the Church should respond to that by being both smaller and far more activist, involved in social action and evangelizing at every level. What this justification occludes is the fact that a tight, coherent, highly activist Church may in fact participate in the process it claims to observe: the death of Christendom. Such a Church may in fact be helping to kill what was left of Christendom.

In the Hébrard spirit, facing up to things is a Good Thing. In that case, the Church should perhaps face up to that uncomfortable possibility. Is it what is wanted? Is the ecclesiastical reaction to Christendom’s wasting illness to be simply “Good riddance”? Do we prefer 500 militants on their own to 500 militants plus 4500 people who come for mixed and sometimes unworthy reasons? Would such a reaction be consistent with the claimed evangelical spirit, or even with charity? Or would it be whisking away the garment’s hem from their touch?

What could be done to save that remnant of “Christendom”? The Church can’t get its authority over the secular world back. But part of its claimed evangelism could be a gentler conversation with the “Yes, I used to go, but it’s been so long” people; a listening to their reasons for not going, both the ones they give and the ones they don’t give; a less strident tone in the Church’s pronouncements on itself and the world; a little more attention to prayer and spirituality; a less continual emphasis on change; a great deal more beauty in the liturgy; a recognition that nostalgia is an aspect of human nature that God can love also, and not necessarily a form of sin; and that, contrary to a certain Gospel pronouncement, some old bottles hold new wine quite well.

The villagers in my part of France, even the elderly, have taken to the Vatican II Mass quite well. They like the cheerfulness, and shaking hands at the Peace. But out of 48 villages, each main Sunday Mass (there are 3 in all, a Saturday night and two Sunday) has about 40 people, who drive considerable distances. And I personally know a number of people who stay away yet who might have been retained; those for whom the new régime has neither loaves nor fishes. It seems a pity. 

SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

With her permission I reproduce here the column my daughter the Rev. Tess Kuin Lawton, an Anglican priest and chaplain of Magdalen College School in Oxford, put on Facebook yesterday. I found it the most moving and pertinent comment I have seen.

It is rare to have an item of news so appalling that the instinctive human reaction is not to listen, watch or read about it at all; but in the story of the murder of 140 school children by the Taliban in Pakistan on Tuesday, that is what has been thrust into the heart of the pre-Christmas glitter and sparkle and the juxtaposition is impossible to bear.

Yet, the religiously minded among us cannot help hearing the echo of both Pharaoh and Herod and we find ourselves once more taking off our shoes as we wait for the Theophany. The religious narrative of our souls has shown that when God has come into the world, it has been a world of violence and horror. These things are not new. They are part of the human condition every bit as much as hope and anticipation and joy.

The Fall is not simply a colourful myth we can weave into carol services and set to beautiful music. It is reality of human nature which allows each one of us to sink to untold depths of depravity and paint a picture which can nevertheless justify our actions. There is a rationale behind every act of moral evil; a way to explain it, make sense of it. We seem to need to be able to do that somehow, in order to comprehend the darkness. So we have heard about revenge for the West honouring a teenage girl who champions education, we have heard of children bearing the punishment for the sins of their fathers in the army, we have even heard some try to suggest that education is un-Islamic.

Pharaoh feared the growing numbers of Israelite slaves and gave orders that the midwives kill all new-born boys. When the midwives could not do this, Pharaoh ordered that new-born boys be drowned in the Nile instead. The words used in Exodus for Pharaoh’s dealings with the Israelites are ‘shrewd’ and ‘ruthless’. Today, in a society where we are protected from reality by a screen, we are used to hearing these words used in a response to a budget report, not as a way of dealing with people. In the second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Herod works ‘in secret’ to ‘search for the child and destroy him.’ When his plan is thwarted and the holy family flee into the same Egypt of their ancestors, Herod’s fury leads him to ‘kill all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years or under.’

We read it out, we remember it in the Church’s calendar, but until this week, we have had no idea of the absolute horror of such an act. Turn off the radio, turn your faces away from the front page of the newspaper, change channels on the television. This blood is too much, these teenage faces caught in a moment of terrifying death is too awful for us.

How do we respond to the depths of sin in this world? What words can explain? None, of course. This is the season of watching and waiting. And sometimes what we watch is too much for us. ‘Maranatha’, come Lord. We have taken off our shoes, we have covered our heads, we have rent our clothes. Come into the heart of this evil. Gather into one, in your kingdom, the pain of all these broken lives. Lift up the souls of each child and never let them go.

This is what Christmas is about. The true light, which enlightens everyone is coming into the world. What we may have forgotten is how extreme the task of the Word really is. We know, because we hear it every year, that he is in the world but the world does not know him. This week, we have been reminded how far away from the light we have strayed. The reading which begins our carol services is not a nostalgic nicety, it is the painful and gritty truth. There is no health in us.

Advent is about facing this. In ourselves and in the world around us. We dress the Church is purple because it is a season of penitence. Have mercy on us, miserable sinners. At times, we forget it in the glittery rush for Christmas and in our desire to lift our spirits in a season of grey skies and long nights. At school, we were singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ in joyful parts as King and page, as soon as December 1st arrived. But for another school, the slaughter of the innocents was just around the corner.

One commentator on the radio shed some light on the subject when she pointed out that this act of murder by the Taliban was a sign of their weakness rather than strength. Like Pharaoh and Herod before them, they are fearful of the power which (in this case) one young girl might have. Luke’s Gospel begins each of his first three chapters with a ruler: King Herod, Emperor Augustus, Emperor Tiberius. Yet we know that in not one of these cases does the power really lie here and we urge the reader to tell us about John the Baptist, Mary, the shepherds.

The horror of the murdered schoolchildren must make us reflect deeply on our own sin, our own culpability in this world, in a way which perhaps the familiarity of the readings and carols have inured us to. It must take us back to the raw power of God as we await the greatest theophany of history and, in humility and awe, we must pray.