Sermon Archive
To forget, or to forgive and be forgiven
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Matins on 15 June 2003, Trinity Sunday
Jeremiah 10.1-16 ; Revelation 1.1-8
In his essay On the Natural History of Destruction, the late W G Sebald wrote searingly about the terrible devastation of the towns and cities of his native Germany during the last years of the second world war. A few days after the destruction of Hamburg, he tells us, some people returning to the city saw "a woman cleaning the windows of a building 'that stood alone and undamaged in the middle of the desert of ruins... We thought we were looking at a madwoman'" they said. "We felt the same when we saw children tidying and raking a front garden." Sebald comments: "People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time. The population decided - out of sheer panic at first - to carry on as if nothing had happened."
That observation, on events over half a century ago, is no less true of today. We hear or read about the events of September 11th, the Bali bombing, the wars and their aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq, the suicide bombings and reprisals in Israel and Palestine, the devastation of the Congo, and we 'carry on as if nothing had happened'. We forget what we do not want to know. Perhaps we need to forget, because otherwise we would be overwhelmed. 'Human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality', T S Eliot wrote. Sebald quotes what the German Jewish social critic Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940, about what he called the 'angel of history', whose 'face is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.'
If that truly is the nature of human history, then perhaps the only sane option, today as in the past, is to forget and 'carry on as if nothing had happened', cleaning our windows and tidying our garden, as Voltaire recommended. Certainly it is difficult to dispute the view of history portrayed in Benjamin's image of its angel, hurtled backwards as the debris piles up before him. But Benjamin's is not the only image. Let me suggest another. As the angel is driven backward, a man stands in his way, asking anyone who will listen, to see things differently. 'This is the way things are', he says, as history hurtles toward him. 'But this is not all: there is another reality hidden in, with and under history. Let those who have ears to hear, hear.' The man says this, and then the irresistible force of history is upon him and crushes him. He is no more.
Or is he? That is the question which has refused to go away, ever since the events, two millennia ago, which the Church annually commemorates at Easter and Pentecost. Today, on Trinity Sunday, the question remains open. Is the man once crushed by history, the man whose spirit was the original inspiration of Christianity, is he alive in, with and under history, the human face of the one ultimate reality? Despite all the centuries of theologising and philosophising, this is not a question to which, on earth, we will ever receive an intellectually uncontestable answer. It is, rather, a question each of us can only answer for ourselves, by deciding in which of two ways to live our lives. One of these ways is to accept the picture of history portrayed by Benjamin's angel as the ultimate picture, and then to forget and carry on as if nothing had happened, cleaning our windows and tidying our garden till night and sleep come. The other way is not to deny Benjamin's picture, but not to accept it either as the ultimate picture - and walking with the man whom history crushed, to seek another way of seeing things, not by forgetting, but by forgiving and being forgiven.
To forget. Or to forgive and be forgiven. In order not to be overwhelmed by the storm of reality, we need to take one or other of these two ways. Much of the time, no doubt, because we are all-too-human, frail and fallible, we will take the way of forgetting, and history will roll on regardless. History will roll on too, when we forgive and are forgiven. But in forgiving and being forgiven, we are enabled to bear more of reality than before, and in becoming more realistic, we have a better chance to play our part in healing the wounds of history. In that respect, of course, what most of us can do, through friendship, practical caring or political action, is quite limited, and may not seem very significant. But in faith, it belongs to that growing exchange of love symbolised by the Trinity's openness to humanity, which is our ultimate hope. And that hope - that forgiving and being forgiven leads us into ultimate reality - is not to be confused with mere optimism. As the Chief Rabbi puts it in his book on The Dignity of Difference: 'It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope.'
Since I have just quoted the Chief Rabbi, it would be wrong to end without acknowledging that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity has often been a stumbling block to others of different historical faiths, especially Judaism and Islam. Part of this problem has to do with the way in which theologians, using technical philosophical language about the three 'persons' of the Trinity, created a mistaken impression that Christians worship not one God but three. But at the root of the problem, I think, is the equally mistaken idea, sometimes too dogmatically asserted by Christians, that any human formulation in language can capture what theologians are trying to express when they speak of the Trinity.
Perhaps indeed we come closest to understanding, when we confess that we do not understand. Here again, 'Human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality'. All we are able to articulate is human testimony, to the fleeting, fragmentary and fallible experience of what we reach out to, but cannot hold in our intellectual grasp the personal reality we glimpse in the human face of Jesus, greet in one another, and sense as the ultimate mystery. That living personal reality, at the heart of everything, is not something we can catch and pin down in a web of words; and if words have any part to play in relation to the Trinity, they are those of prayer, forgiveness, and human kindness. Let me end therefore with words that express that. In his threefold lines, on Trinitie Sunday, George Herbert prayed:
Lord, who hast form'd me out of mud, And hast redeem'd me through thy bloud, And sanctifi'd me to do good;
Purge all my sinnes done heretofore: For I confesse my heavie score, And I will strive to sinne no more.
Enrich my heart, mouth, hands in me, With faith, with hope, with charitie That I may runne, rise, rest with thee.
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