Sermon Archive
The transfiguration of our lives
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 11 December 2005
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 ; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
Perhaps it's the imminence of Christmas, and all that needs to be done before it arrives, but in the past few weeks I seem to have heard more people than usual remarking on how quickly time goes. As the envelopes from far and near begin to fall through the letter box like a growing snowdrift, it's difficult to find any time to reflect on the passage of time, to see any pattern in the passing days. But last week, as it happened, I thought I might be seeing something of a pattern, a sort of symmetry. The week began with a welcome here in Edinburgh to a newly appointed young colleague, someone who, I believe, will make a notable contribution to an area of work we are both involved in. Then, as the week drew to a close, I had to go to meetings in London, which gave me the opportunity to attend the retirement party there of another colleague, who over the years has made just such a contribution to the same field. A beginning at the start of the week, and at its close an ending. Not a total ending perhaps, because the colleague in London, I suspect, has all sorts of projects in hand with which to challenge the concept of retirement. But as that remarkably young looking retiree ended his speech by telling those he had worked with to 'love and care for one another', I couldn't help feeling a deeper sense of continuity - and that maybe, beneath all the often apparently unconnected activities of our daily lives, a meaningful pattern was there to be discerned - had we the time.
The retirement party, as I've said, was in London. It was held in a vast new science building - all glass and steel and brightly lit. There couldn't have been a greater contrast with the building in which one of the meetings I had to attend was held, the Senate House of London University. That 'monument to academic bureaucracy', as someone described it, was built in 1936, and exudes the spirit of austerity of the years before and after the Second World War. That austere time was, again as it happened, made vivid for me by a novel I had just been reading, Youth, by J M Coetzee. Youth is the story of a young South African who arrives in London in the 1950s, longing to realise, in the great capital, his provincial dreams of poetry and romance, and to become a writer. He ends up however, as a lonely computer programmer, devoid of artistic inspiration, and deeply aware of his own failures in life, love and literature. But the great gift of Coetzee, the novel's author, is that he turns this unpromising material, possibly reflecting his own early experiences, into a work of art. He does this not by making excuses for his hero, or by eventually producing a happy ending, but by analysing the importance of human suffering and what can be learnt from it, with what one critic has called a 'passionate coldness'.
Now again perhaps there couldn't be a greater contrast - in this case between the meaningful pattern I sensed in the events I experienced last week, and Coetzee's transfiguration of the meaninglessness of human suffering into a work of art. Which of these is the more true to life - the lives of most people - my possibly sentimental, and certainly selective, portrayal of my successful colleagues and my desire to discern a meaningful pattern in that? Or Coetzee's clinically described, but also deeply felt, engagement with human failure and unhappiness?
The question doesn't need an answer. It's not devaluing the real achievements of the colleagues I've mentioned, to say that their successes are like a feather in the balance against the weight of human suffering elsewhere - including the failure and unhappiness that Coetzee transfigures into art. But most of us, of course, lack the literary gifts of a Coetzee. So, facing the failures and unhappinesses in our own lives and those around us, do we not also lack the possibility of transfiguring them into something better ? Most of us, like Coetzee's hero, either have known, or know, the high hopes of youth. But is the inevitable end that someone, someday, will say to us what David Cameron said to Tony Blair in the House of Commons last week: “You were the future once”?
Or are we leaving something out of the picture here?
One aspect of life that Coetzee does not mention in his novel, is what has brought us here this morning. Had he been writing a century or so earlier, religion would have been more difficult to exclude from the picture. But many novelists today, at least those with literary aspirations, do tend to ignore or caricature religion, and perhaps for understandable reasons. What has religion to say to the lonely young failed poet in Coetzee's novel? Dr Guthrie, the famous Victorian preacher and philanthropist, whose statue overlooks Princes Street Gardens a little to the east of this church, once remarked that while Robert Burns was a great poet, he would have been a better man 'if he had had the happiness at a certain point in his career to meet with an evangelist of the right sort'. But that is precisely the kind of religious advice - the advice of conventional Victorian middle class males - that the dominant culture of our time is no longer willing to listen to. In that sense, we now live in what is called a post-religious culture. So is it the case that what has brought us here this morning really has little or nothing to say to those who have known, or now know, the high hopes of youth?
Well, certainly we live in what, in the sense I've just described, is a post-religious culture - there's no going back to the age of Dr Guthrie. But we live also, it's becoming increasingly clear, in what has been described as a post-secular culture. The earthly paradise of secular humanism seems as far off as ever; and while conventional churchgoing may have declined, what we now call 'spirituality' is alive and well, and so indeed are many forms of religion. The difference between this post-secular culture and the old religious culture perhaps, is that while many old religious answers have gone away - fallen, with Limbo, into Limbo - the eternal religious questions have not, and indeed in the modern multi-faith environment some have become even more pressing.
So what have the high hopes of youth, so often apparently blighted, to do with what has brought us here this morning? Well, that is the question, and we have no single one-size-fits-all religious formula with which to answer it. What we do have however, is an opportunity today to contemplate what, in our readings this morning, Isaiah and John the Baptist ask us to await - the One who comes to bring good tidings to the afflicted, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives. Isn't this just another way of saying, that the One we await is the One who vindicates the high hopes of youth, who tells youth and age alike that these high hopes are justified, despite all appearances to the contrary, because they are a response to the very nature of reality, to what is at the heart of all that is.
How do we know? We are drawn to this understanding of the heart of reality, someone has written, not by 'intellect alone, but will, will drawn by love; not reason, but a desire indistinguishable from need'. Our need, out of which the high hopes of youth are born, is for what nothing else can satisfy - not our mental concepts of God, which are all-too-easy to demolish, but our need to open ourselves and offer ourselves up, to the ultimate THOU.
How do we know? As our epistle today tells us: 'See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all.' And 'Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances.'
As these words clearly remind us, this is not some esoteric activity in a specifically religious sphere removed from everyday life. The whole point of what we await in Advent - the Word made flesh to dwell among us - is that it is in everyday life that the high hopes of youth must be vindicated, albeit not necessarily in the ways we first expected. Whatever else may await us - and why should our hopes there too, not be high? - it is in everyday life that our lives must first be transfigured.
Let me end with two examples of the transfiguration of everyday life. One, I suspect, is quite a well known story. It is widely considered that Beethoven's late quartets are his crowning achievement. Perhaps the most profound of these is his quartet in F major, opus 135, which vindicates hope far more eloquently than any words can do. But some words which Beethoven wrote on the score also are relevant to the story. In the final movement there are two motifs, the first sombre, the second cheerful. In his score, against the first motif Beethoven wrote 'Must it be?' and against the second, 'It must be'. Throughout the movement the two motifs interact, until at the very end, the 'Must it be?' motif is swept away, airily and triumphantly, by the 'It must be' motif. It's sometimes suggested that this resolution is the deaf and dying Beethoven's final comment on his own tragic destiny: 'Must it be?' - 'It must be'; and as we hear it, that indeed is what speaks profoundly to us. But the origin of these words in fact was much more prosaic, and almost comic. Apparently a wealthy music lover wanted Beethoven to give him a copy of the score so that he could have it played privately at his home and avoid having to go to its public performance. Beethoven refused however, and when the wealthy man was told that the only way he could hear the music was by paying a subscription to the public concert, his gloomy and miserly response was 'Must it be?' 'It must be', Beethoven cheerfully replied, 'pay up!' It was out of this low comedy that Beethoven soared beyond tragedy, his ultimate transfiguration.
Well, none of us is a Beethoven. So let me end with something even more mundane, which at least some of us can attempt. One of our first Christmas cards carried this message: 'Be the person your dog thinks you are!' The One we await in Advent is one with the One who created all creatures great and small. Perhaps that's a good thought on which to begin the transfiguration of our lives.
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