wfn.org | [ENS] Presiding Bishop preaches at Belfast Cathedral

["Matthew Davies" <mdavies@mail.epicom.org>]

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Presiding Bishop preaches at Belfast Cathedral

ENS 022005-1

Belfast Cathedral
Second Sunday in Lent

The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church, USA

Genesis 12:1-4
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17

[ENS] The Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and
your father's house to the land that I will show you." Thus, the Lord
directed Abram: he told him to leave home. Home can mean many things. It
might mean a place that is familiar and secure. It might refer to a
pattern
of relationships that support and sustain us. Home might mean a
structure of
attitudes and perceptions that allow us to make meaning and determine
our
place in the world.

Conversely, home can be a place of continual unsettlement and dis-ease.
In
some instances home can mean a perpetual state of uncertainty, into
which
threat and chaos are free to enter at a moment's notice.

As well, home can be a national or cultural or ethnic or religious
identity
by which we define ourselves, often over against those whom we perceive
as
"other."

Home, therefore, can carry with it a wide range of both positive and
negative associations. Home shapes and forms us in ways of which we are
both
aware and unaware.

In today's first reading, Gods bids Abram to leave home -- to leave the
safe
and familiar and identifying shelter of his "father's house" and to set
out
toward a destination yet to be identified, toward "the land that I will
show
you." To be sure, Abram did not sally forth without family and "all the
possessions that they had gathered." He did not set out free of all that
he
had acquired -- all that had shaped and formed him. He took his past
with
him, into a future yet to be determined by the divine imagination of the
One
who called him forth. Trusting in the Voice who had called, Abram went,
as
he was bidden.

A willingness to leave home has been a characteristic of genuine faith
and
authentic discipleship down through the ages -- home understood not only
as
place but as attitudes and perceptions as well.

Here I am put in mind of particular saints. Because I have the joy of
being
in Ireland, for however brief a time, I am put in mind of a great saint
of
this land, Patrick. His story of call and resistance is recorded in his
own
words in his Confession. It is a story you quite likely know better than
I,
and one that bears repeating in the context of our thinking about Abram
and
his call.

Born into a Christian Romano-Briton family, Patrick was kidnapped at the
age
of 16 by Irish raiders and sold into slavery. For six years he tended
sheep,
most likely in the west of Ireland. Exposed to the elements and bereft
of
human companionship Patrick, until then a lukewarm Christian, was riven
through by the Spirit. As he tells us: "The land opened the sense of my
unbelief that I might remember my sins and be converted with all my
heart to
the Lord my God." With a profound sense of God's mercy and all-embracing
care, Patrick listened with the ear of his heart to the Voice of the
Spirit,
who like the wind blows with the sovereign freedom of the Trinity and
speaks
where it wills.

And so it is that Patrick is addressed, much as Abram was, and
instructed to
escape from servitude and return home. He does so and is warmly received
by
his parents. The story might well have ended here with the happy
reunion. As
we know, however, this was only the beginning. By virtue of his
encounter
with the Spirit in the hills of Ireland, the Patrick who returned to
Britain
had already left home.

His dis-ease increased when he had a vision. The Spirit took the form of
a
man and addressed Patrick in the name of the Irish saying, "We ask thee
boy,
come and walk among us once more." Overcome by self-doubt, and a
profound
antipathy toward those who called him to walk among them once more,
Patrick
resisted the insistent Voice. Finally, after 18 years, he relented, worn
down by the wind of the Spirit who had never ceased to blow through his
consciousness and to tell him that his true home was among those he
feared
and despised. The Spirit was attempting to speak a word to Patrick, a
word
such as this: Patrick, your true home -- where you will find your true
self
-- lies beyond your pre-occupation with your limitations of mind and
spirit
and rustic inadequacy.

The rest is history. And, through the strange and sometimes wild
workings of
the Spirit, faith overcame fear and love replaced disdain for the people
from whom Patrick had once so eagerly fled. Home is where the heart is,
and
in this case it was only after a long struggle, which involved
self-knowledge and surrender, that Patrick's heart found its true home
in
this land.

A willingness to leave home, to quit the known and familiar, and to go
where
the Spirit might lead, or where one might quite literally be blown, was
a
characteristic of early Celtic monasticism. In a text, probably from the
seventh century, that describes three kinds of martyrdom we are told
that
the first kind of martyrdom, white martyrdom, "is to man when he
separates
for the sake of God from everything he loves, although he suffers
fasting or
labor thereat."

It was this notion of martyrdom that caused stalwart souls to set out to
sea
in curachs or coracles, to be tossed by the waves and blown by the wind
to a
place of the Spirit's choosing, to live and pray among the puffins, or
to
preach good news to the poor in distant lands.

In a poem entitled The Choice, Kuno Meyer captures something of the
interior
struggle occasioned by attraction to this form of martyrdom. Addressing
Christ, he asks:

Shall I choose, O King of Mysteries
After the delight of downy pillows and music,
To go upon the rampart of the sea,
Turning my back on my native land?...
Shall I launch my dusky little coracle
On the broad-bosomed glorious ocean?
Shall I go, O king of bright heaven
Of my own upon the brine?

The faith of the questioner is found in the question itself. Shall I
choose
to go? This could have been Patrick's question, and it can be our
question
as well. Shall I choose to go? There is faith in the willingness --
however
reluctant or questioning, to let go of the self we know -- the sum total
of
past experiences and past hurts. There is faith in the relinquishment of
our
need to control and to launch out upon the "broad-bosomed glorious
ocean" of
God's longing and loving desire for our full flourishing and that of the
world around us.

In the gospel reading for today Nicodemus, "a leader of the Jews,"
approaches Jesus by night, safe and unseen in the darkness in order to
query
this teacher and doer of signs. A conversation follows in which words,
as is
characteristic of John, have double meanings: born again also means born
from above; wind also means Spirit; sound also means speech. It is in
the
interplay of meanings and different levels of understanding that the
ways of
the Spirit are revealed. The wind blows where it chooses; the Spirit
speaks
and calls us forth in the loving freedom the Spirit shares with the
Father
and the Son, a freedom into which we are drawn as we are "born from
above"
by water and Spirit in baptism.

Though baptized into a Christian household, his father a deacon and his
grandfather a priest, Patrick's awareness of who he was in Christ as a
limb
of Christ's risen body developed over time, mediated by the
circumstances
and struggles and challenges that confronted him. His growing to
maturity in
Christ was a developmental process, as it is for us, in which nothing is
wasted. All can be used by the Spirit who forms Christ in us and
conforms us
to the image of the Son. Even our sins can be used to teach us wisdom,
compassion and humility.

Looking back on his experience of slavery, Patrick declared: "I Patrick,
a
sinner, was captured when about sixteen years old. I did not then know
the
true God." Looking back Patrick could see how even the most seemingly
inauspicious, if not hostile, circumstances can be used to break us open
to
the miracle of a grace which is always sufficient.

And as the risen Christ made clear to St. Paul, Christ's power, beyond
our
wildest imaginings, is made perfect, that is comes to full term, at the
very
heart of our limitations and weakness. A loss of freedom and home became
the
narrow door through which Patrick was obliged to pass in order to come
home
in grace and truth to himself.

We have here the gospel paradox, which only makes sense in the living of
it:
it is by losing ourselves that we find ourselves, and it is by clutching
and
clinging and trying to control that we lose.

Lent is a season in which we are obliged to ask ourselves personally and
as
communities of faith: how defended am I -- how defended are we --
against
the unrelenting yet loving gentle breeze and sometimes gale force wind
of
the Spirit? How defended are we against the Spirit whose work is to
guide us
into all the truth, as John's gospel tells us, by drawing from what is
of
Christ, who is himself the truth?

One aspect of "the truth as in Jesus" is love, love poured into our
hearts
by the Holy Spirit enabling us to pray with answering love, "Abba,
Father."
This love, which is the very life of the Trinity, is worked into us by
the
Spirit thereby making us fully alive and expanding our hearts to embrace
the
whole creation. We find ourselves overtaken by a compassion, which
because
it is of the Spirit and not the result of our effort or imagination,
knows
no bounds and can enfold all persons and all things. It is a compassion
which, in the words of St. Isaac of Syria, embraces not only humankind
but
the birds and the beasts, the enemies of truth, those who wish to do us
harm
and, he adds, "even the reptiles," which may be seen as representing
those
slithery aspects of our own humanity which we are loathe to admit to the
company of our "better" selves and therefore often displace onto others
as
evil.

What understanding of home might I, might we, leave behind? What
attitudes
and opinions and notions of truth are we perhaps being called to set
aside?
How are we being called forth, possibly into a season of vulnerability
and
loss? How are we being made ready, as Abram and Patrick were, for a
future
of God's own imagining - a new season of grace and truth, of healing and
reconciliation? Are we perhaps being invited in new ways - by the King
of
bright Heaven - to push off in a dusky little coracle upon the
broad-bosomed
glorious ocean of God's fathomless compassion? Are we perhaps being
drawn
beyond ourselves, and our anxious self-constructions, into the realm of
God's terrifying goodness, which the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews
can
only describe as a consuming fire? I believe the answer is "yes." Yes,
we
are so called. We are always so called.

Therefore, may we be given the courage to leave home, to push off, not
in
our own strength but in "the strong name of the Trinity" and may we
remember
always that God's power "working in us can do infinitely more than we
can
ask or imagine."

Amen.

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