Sermon Archive
Coming into the presence of others
Sermon preached by Ken Boyd at 10.30 communion on 12 December 2004
Isaiah 11, 1-10 ; Romans 15, 4-13 ; Matthew 3, 1-12
For the past few weeks, in the Phoenix Gallery in Dundas Street, there was an exhibition of new work by Ian Hughes, whose painting of the Deposition of Christ hangs on the wall of the church behind you. I saw it only last Thursday, just before the exhibition closed, but perhaps some of you also visited it. If you did, you will know that Ian Hughes' new paintings are of the faces of former psychiatric patients and alcoholic or homeless people with whom he has worked and befriended here in Edinburgh. Each, as the exhibition catalogue says, is portrayed 'in searing reality and deep affection', and each is given the name of one of the twelve apostles. The exhibition is entitled 'The Apostles Testaments Betrayed'; and it is impossible to come into the presence of those deeply lined and sometimes scarred faces, without being deeply disturbed. By whom have the Testaments of the Apostles been betrayed, that it should come to this, on the streets of our city? Ian Hughes, who himself suffered much after being permanently injured by an attack from a crazed patient, does not allow us any easy response, either of guilt or pity. One of the Apostles is an unfinished self-portrait, forbearing to show Hughes' own physical injuries, and entitled Judas. Another, whom I recognised, is an evidently cheerful survivor - unlike three of his compatriots, who have died since they were painted. And each of the twelve is, as the mediaeval poet put it, 'noble even in his ruin'.
'Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been', said the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset. When you come into the presence of the faces Ian Hughes has portrayed, you begin to realise that that is true, not just of his subjects, but of all of us. As citizens of Edinburgh, incredibly privileged to inhabit such a breathtakingly beautiful place, it is right for us to feel both pity and guilt, when we are shown, so searingly, the debris of what 'ought to have been', among us; and nothing in Ian Hughes' paintings lets us off that hook. But these paintings call for an even deeper response. Who is the man (and in one portrait, the woman) into whose presence you are coming? If it is not also you, you have not understood.
Now not everyone who sees these paintings has had, or will have, the response I have just described. The exhibition will be shown again next year in London, where no-one may remember having once seen, or even spoken with, one of its subjects on an Edinburgh street. And even in Edinburgh, not everyone who saw these paintings was moved by them in the ways I have suggested. Some saw, and for whatever reason, moved on. But others stayed, not simply to see, to look at, these faces, but in the phrase I have been using, to 'come into their presence'.
To 'come into the presence' of someone is not the same thing as simply to see, or exchange words with them. To come into the presence of someone is to become aware of them as another 'I', someone who is not just 'him' or 'her', but also 'you' - a person, just as you are a person, and hence someone who silently asks you the unavoidable question: 'How are you going to be, toward me?' To come into the presence of someone, in other words, is to hear Shylock's question, 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?', and if we have the strength, Blake's also: 'Can I see another's woe, /And not be in sorrow too?'
In order to understand how we ought to behave towards others, the philosopher J Kellenberger argues, we need first to come into their presence. Clearly this is not something we can do always or even often in the flesh. There are countless people worldwide and even here in Edinburgh whose lives will be affected by our political, economic and charitable choices, but whom we will never meet. To know how we ought to act, we need to make an effort of the imagination, to try to understand how they might feel, how things appear from their point of view. And it is here that creative writers and artists may help us: in a radio play last week for example, you might have heard how the disaster in Bhopal twenty years ago felt from the point of view of a young Indian girl caught up in it, whose parents were killed and who was left to bring up younger children in great poverty. Having been brought into her presence by the playwright, you could no longer think of this as something that had nothing to do with you. And Ian Hughes' paintings tell you the same about his down and out Apostles.
But it is not just Ian Hughes' paintings or the radio play about the young girl in Bhopal. Almost everywhere you turn in today's world there are stories of lives ruined by war, famine, poverty and disasters, 'among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been'. To really use our imagination to 'come into the presence' of even a few of those lives, is to run the risk of being overwhelmed by pity, guilt, a sense of utter inadequacy and even despair. Perhaps it is not surprising that some in the West try to escape this by blaming those in developing countries as the authors of their own misfortunes, or that some of our media, despite their reliance for a living on telling us bad news, are selective in the bad news they tell, and fill so many pages with trivia. Yet the world is not so, and if we choose to airbrush the ruined lives out of our picture of our world, and pretend that they have nothing to do with our lives, we are self-deceived.
'Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality', especially the reality of ruined lives 'among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been'. But unless we are exceptionally self-deceived, most of us sooner or later begin to discover the debris round about ourselves also, and to realise that we have all-too-often foundered on the rocks of life, and failed to become what we ought to have been. Yet it is in this awareness of 'what we ought to have been', paradoxically, that we begin to learn how to bear more reality with fewer self-deceiving blinkers.
If ruined lives, others and our own, are all there is to reality, then honesty surely would overwhelm us with pity, guilt, a sense of utter inadequacy and even despair. But there is more. Our sense of 'what we ought to have been' also is part of reality, a reality larger than we see, but no less real than what we do see. It is because we are more than we know, that we know we ought to have been more, and that we know other ruined lives also ought to have been more.
This knowing, again, is not simply of what we see. (Isaiah reminds us of this when he speaks of the Messiah as one who 'shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear'.) Just as we may see the faces of Hughes' Apostles, but not come into their presence, so we may see reality, but not come into the presence of reality. To 'come into the presence' of a person is to let him or her say to you 'How are you going to be, toward me?' To come into the presence of reality, is to hear the same question. To answer it, if we are not self-deceived about, or to despair of, the ruined world we live in, the only realistic response is that called for by John the Baptist in today's Advent gospel - repentance. Repentance is turning from the darkness to the light. But in turning to the light, we affirm the light: we turn to the light because the light is there, illuminating what each and every person, however ruined, ought to have been.
Is that 'ought to have been', also what yet can and will be? Does the God who created, also raise to new life, and not in time only? That was the faith of the Church over many centuries and still is the faith of countless Christians and Muslims worldwide. But in Europe particularly, many doubt it, at least publicly. The reality we presently have is reality enough. And yet, as I have been suggesting, the reality we in the West think we have, is surrounded by very much reality into whose presence we cannot bear to come, lest we be overwhelmed by pity, guilt, a sense of utter inadequacy and even despair. In rejecting the reality of eternity, we may also have drastically reduced the reality of our present time, to what can be organisationally managed, technically manipulated and just about coped with by not thinking too far ahead or abroad.
Is what 'ought to have been' also what yet can and will be? To answer that question we need to come into the presence of a reality larger than we see; and there the question is turned back to us. 'How are you going to be, toward me?'
'How are you going to be, toward me?' Advent is a time to respond with repentance, but also, precisely because repentance is turning from darkness to light, with hope - the hope Isaiah sees emerging from a ruined stump and spreading till the earth is full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea - the hope that Paul prays for us to abound in. Those who abound in hope learn how to answer the question 'How are you going to be, toward me?' To abound in hope, and not for this life only, is to come into the presence of ruined lives, others and our own, without self-deception or despair. And to come into the presence of our own and others ruined lives without self-deception or despair, is to discover, in practice, Love's meaning - the meaning of that Love who 'now in the time of this mortal life ? came to us in great humility'.
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