Sermon Archive
The Tabot
Sermon preached by Ken Boyd at Holy Communion on 3 February 2002
Micah 6 1-8; 1 Corinthians 1 18-31; Matthew 5 1-12.
The return of the Tabot - photograph and background information
After last Sunday, can St John's ever be the same again? Yet it doesn't look as if much has changed - no gorgeously embroidered sacred umbrellas, no lively liturgical dancing by the choir, no bushy beards sprouting on clerical chins, no ululating responses from the congregation. All these, in what the Scotsman called 'the normally sober surroundings of an Episcopalian church', no doubt were pretty exotic. But our guests, I suspect, found some aspects of our liturgy pretty exotic too, not least our female preacher, gospel reader and choristers; and if things have changed here as a result of their visit, maybe we should look for their significance in something deeper than liturgical haberdashery.
Since some of you may be visitors and wondering what on earth I am talking about, let me just give you the bare bones of the story. In the middle of the 19th century, a Scottish officer presented this church with a small wooden tablet, looted from the fortress of Magdala in a punitive campaign against the Ethiopian emperor Theodore, who had imprisoned some European missionaries. The tablet was in fact a tabot, which in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition has great sacred significance, similar in some ways to the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament, or perhaps the relics of a saint in the Mediaeval Christendom. But it had no real equivalent here, and St John's seems not to have known what to do with it. So someone put it in a cupboard, where it lay till last October, when John McLuckie, our Associate Rector, found it, and having been to Ethiopia, realised its significance. The Ethiopian Church, when it was offered back, was overjoyed, and a delegation of over a hundred Ethiopians, led by Archbishop Isaias, and accompanied by Rastafarians, came here last Sunday for the tabot to be returned to them. When they take it back to Addis Ababa, we are told, thousands of Ethiopians will line the way as it is carried in procession to the Cathedral.
The tabot's profound importance to the Ethiopians is clear enough. But does our returning it, which cost us so little, have lasting significance for us also? I think it does. But to explain why, let me say a little more about the historical context of what happened here last Sunday. The obvious thing to say of course is that this was the first time, in the nearly 200-year history of St John?s, that the liturgy of the 1600 year old Ethiopian Orthodox Church was celebrated here. That, clearly, is of historical significance. But to understand its full significance, we also need to recall another bit of history.
All of us here, whether we like it or not, are heirs of a movement in 17th and 18th century Europe known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment profoundly changed the way in which Europeans understood the world. It was an attempt to break free from traditional ways of thinking, especially those of the mediaeval church; an attempt, initially by philosophers, scientists and assorted intellectual rebels, to dare, as they put it, to think for themselves; and to replace mythological and theological accounts of the world, with rational and scientific ones. The Enlightenment thinkers were often less rational than they imagined, and many of their social experiments came to grief. But in the long run, much of European public opinion came to accept their view that it was necessary to grow out of religious ways of thinking, and to accept the impersonal scientific picture of the world as the ultimately true one. Despite much adverse criticism of this view, from the 19th century Romantics to many contemporary philosophers, it continues to retain its hold on public opinion today.
One aspect of Enlightenment thinking particularly relevant to last Sunday's events, is its assumption that modern European views of the world are superior not only to ?mediaeval? views, but also to those of non-Europeans. This attitude was openly expressed in 19th century Europe, not only by secular opinion but also in the churches, where the beliefs and practices of other religions were commonly regarded as ?primitive? or ?superstitious?. For Protestants (and in the mid-19th century most Anglicans as well as Presbyterians regarded themselves as Protestants) that also went for much Roman Catholic belief and practice; and as for Ethiopian Orthodox - well, perhaps it would not be too surprising if the reason why our predecessors in St John's consigned the tabot to the cupboard was because they were rather embarrassed by it. An object of ?superstitious? reverence by Christians of a ?more primitive? race, was hardly the sort of thing to put on display in a respectable modern Anglican church. ?A bit too much ju-ju and mumbo-jumbo about it all ? you can almost hear them saying.
Now that is just my speculation. But if it is what happened, it would fit with many ideas current at that time. The idea of Africans and Asians as ?primitive? and ?superstitious? was based on considerable ignorance of the ancient cultures of those continents, and not shared by many intelligent European missionaries and scholars with first hand knowledge. It was no more well-founded than the prejudice of some 19th-century Edinburgh newspapers which regarded my impoverished Highland forebears as ?an inferior and often useless race?. But it was widespread; and it seemed to be supported by the achievements of European science and technology. So it was very difficult for Europeans to shake off. Even today, many people still assume that the rest of the world is eventually destined, through the market economy, to ?catch up? with the Western rational and scientific world-view.
This assumption however is not shared by many of the people about whom it is held. They tell a very different story about the arrogance of European, and more recently American, military and intellectual imperialism. At the heart of their story, it has been suggested, is a view of the modern West that draws on Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike. This sees the West as a modern 'Babylon.. the sinful city-state whose politics, military might, and very urban civilization posed an arrogant challenge to God'. In its most extreme form, particularly among people unable to escape from poverty and political oppression, this view provided propaganda for Al-Qaeda's attempt to create its own new world order through violence. But you do not need to condone that violence, to sympathise with what many non-Westeners feel. Clearly, something must be deeply wrong with the current world order, in which so many of the powerless perish in poverty, while we dwell secure in our affluence; and when our own people are attacked, strike back with a modern version of the Magdala campaign.
Is there any alternative to this? Our readings this morning all point to one. In reality, they tell us, the power-relations of our current world order are indeed wrong, because they are based on illusory values: 'the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men', Paul writes; and Micah tells us that what the Lord requires of us is not the passing moment of worldly success or celebrity, but 'to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God'. In the Beatitudes, above all, Jesus preaches a radical reversal of worldly values: 'Blessed are the poor, those who mourn, the persecuted'.
Now these, of course, are not easy sayings for us to accept, let alone live by. As heirs of the Enlightenment, we cannot in all honesty reject the knowledge gained by Western rationality, and the sayings themselves imply a duty to develop the benefits of our science and technology so that we can share them with the rest of the world. Yet so far we have been very slow to fulfil that duty, and that perhaps is where the ?Enlightened? West has failed to be sufficiently enlightened.
One reason why it has failed, is because in order to achieve liberation from those aspects of religion which impeded the progress of science and also plunged Europe into self-destructive civil wars, the Enlightenment demanded that religion itself should be rejected and replaced by self-sufficient human reason. But what caused religious wars and impeded science, surely, was not religion of the kind we heard in our lessons today. It was what human reason, playing ecclesiastical and power politics, made of religion. If Europe had taken Micah's words to heart - ?do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God?- there could have been no justification for wars of religion; and the true scientist's patient submissiveness to the facts is very close to a genuinely religious attitude. (The 'cleverness of the clever' criticised by St Paul was not scientific enquiry but manipulative ideological rhetoric.) The Enlightenment replaced religion's openness to transcendent reality with self-sufficient human reason. But in doing so, it risked replacing religion's call for unconditional love of one's neighbour, with a more ?realistic? but also more calculating and self-interested morality. Thereby it cut off, or at least attempted to cut off, something essential to human flourishing and solidarity.
Religion's importance to human flourishing and solidarity, I suspect, is too essential for this aspect of Enlightenment thinking to survive. Our current secular orthodoxy probably will eventually give way to the human need for deeper meanings to live by. Against this background, part of the significance of last week's events here in St John?s, may be that our visitors came from Africa. For many Europeans, Africa was the place which Enlightenment rationality could never ultimately penetrate - in Conrad's words, 'The Heart of Darkness'. But some years ago, in a novel called The Radiance of the King, the West African writer Camara Laye told a different story. It concerned a European stranded penniless in the African interior, who is slowly stripped of all his rational pretensions on a bewildering and often humiliating journey. Only at the end of this journey does he discover who he really is, when the king he has been seeking comes to him, and asks him 'Did you not know that I was waiting for you?'. Part of what Laye seems to be pointing to in this rich and strange novel, is that to find the truth, we need to go beyond what our rational minds can grasp, and in the darkness of our intellect and the poverty and powerlessness of our emotions, offer ourselves up to what is greater than ourselves.
That, surely, is the radiant heart of true religion; and here last week, I thought I glimpsed it. As an artefact, the tabot meant little more to me than it did to our 19th century predecessors. But in the liturgies and ceremony of handing over it had become a symbol, something which mysteriously shares the reality it represents; and in handing it over, we were not only giving, but also receiving. So when our Rector John Armes, addressing Archbishop Isaias, and both of them with tears starting at their eyes, spoke of the tabot's return as a moment 'in God's time, which is not our time', he was right. In the season of Epiphany, when the wise men brought their gifts, we too were receiving the gift of an epiphany, a momentary glimpse of the shining intersection of the timeless with time.
A week later, what is the continuing significance of that moment for us? Let me not try to explain further what I have already said is greater than our rational understanding. Let me end rather with a quotation from the theatre director Peter Brook ,which points the way forward for us, we who are heirs of the Enlightenment, but also heirs of Eternity.
'We can try to capture the invisible but we must not lose touch with common sense... The model, as always, is Shakespeare. His aim continually is holy, metaphysical, yet he never makes the mistake of staying too long on the highest plane. He knew how hard it is for us to keep company with the absolute - so he continually bumps us down to earth... We have to accept that we can never see all of the invisible. So after straining towards it, we have to face defeat, drop down to earth, then start up again.'
May the eternal God, with whom all things are possible, give us grace so to do; and to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be all praise and glory, in time and eternity. AMEN.
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