Sermon at St Matthew’s, 16th January 2011; readings: John 1: 29-42, Romans 8: 12 - 17
The theme of my sermon today is ‘Look up’. Steve [our vicar] chose this theme when he was devising the term card because of two verses in today’s set reading from John’s gospel. This describes two occasions where John the Baptist is talking to his disciples; Jesus approaches and John says, ‘Look, the Lamb of God!’
I am going to talk about both words in the theme of ‘Look up!’: firstly ‘look’ and secondly ‘up’. So first: ‘Look!’
Well hopefully that woke you up and secondly it might have actually made you look. If you were looking at me you would have looked at where I pointed and where I myself looked. Look is what is known as a performative word. In other words it’s one of those words which makes things happen rather than just describes something.
There are in fact lots of performative words. We tend to think of words as merely describing states of affairs and some words do indeed have this purpose. So when I say, ‘this pew is brown’, I am merely describing something – something rather self-evidently true in this case. Those of you at the back, who can’t see this particular pew I am pointing to, might want to come out and check for yourself that I am telling the truth, but I guess you won’t bother to get out of your seat.
There are lots of words that don’t describe things so much as do things. A very good example is, ‘I promise’. The two words means nothing until you actually utter them and then they change everything (particularly during a marriage service). Commands are a particular class of performative word.
When John describes Jesus as the Word of God – in that famous verse at the beginning of his Gospel - ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God’ - he doesn’t just mean that Jesus is the truth: here to tell us how things are. He means that Jesus - the Word of God – has come into the world to change everything. The Living Word is a peformative word.
And when John the Baptist says ‘Look!’ he doesn’t mean, ‘I think, Andrew and Philip, you might find that this man Jesus is the Lamb of God’. He says, pointing to Jesus, ‘Look, the Lamb of God!’ He is commanding them to see for themselves that Jesus is the Lamb of God.
‘Look!’ as well as being a command is a word which re-orientates the person who obeys the command. Those of you who were awake when I shouted ‘Look!’ just now hopefully looked up from whatever you had been looking at previously: perhaps at your fingernails thinking that they might need cutting, or at the notices at the back of the service sheet (which are sometimes more interesting than the sermon I find), or wherever. If you did look you presumably looked at me to see where I was looking. Then you would have turned your eyes away from me to see what I was looking at or pointing at, which was, incidentally, the lit candle on the altar, which you then might have noticed, even thought about for a while, before turning back to look and listen to me (or to reading the notices in the service sheet).
So the word ‘Look!’ reorientates us to a new state of affairs. It’s a bit like the word ‘Repent!’ in that regard. ‘Repent!’ is a word that John the Baptist was particularly fond of. But unlike the word ‘Repent!’, ‘Look!’ doesn’t involve thinking about ourselves before we change our orientation. It just involves focusing on something other than what we have previously been looking at.
So to the second word in our theme of ‘Look up!’ What do we mean by ‘up’ here? Well traditionally we think of God as up. Heaven is up and God resides in heaven doesn’t he? And I guess that’s what Steve had in mind when he came up with this theme. And of course when John the Baptist says ‘Look!’ he is telling his disciples to look at Jesus: Jesus the Lamb of God. I don’t personally think heaven is up above but I think it is useful to think of God as being somewhere other than where we personally are. Nowadays people seem more inclined to find God within themselves or within other people, and of course there is good biblical support for this idea but it has its drawbacks as I hope will become clearer.
Now a definition of spirituality that I find helpful is that it’s about connecting firstly with God, secondly with other people and thirdly with ourselves. I mean connecting and not just loving. For a start connecting is as much about being loved as much as loving. Moreover connecting with persons has to involve communication and this can involve other things besides love such as criticism, rebuke, complaint, thankfulness, promises, etc. But of course love is the most important thing involved in connecting with God, with other people and with ourselves and without love those other things are like a clanging cymbal.
This Jesus makes this clear in his answer to the lawyer who asks him ‘What shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus says (quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus), ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and your neighbour as yourself.’
So we are commanded to love, to connect with God, but we also need to love, to connect with other people and with ourselves. I don’t really want to talk about connecting with other people today and its relationship with connecting with God, but I do want to talk about the similarities and differences between connecting with God and connecting with ourselves.
On the one hand – as Jesus reminds the lawyer – we do need to love ourselves otherwise it’s going to be difficult to love others and perhaps even God. We are made in the image of God, God loves us so there is something good about us which is worthy of love. We are not just ‘miserable offenders’ despite what the Book of Common Prayer might be taken to suggest. And so there is a sense in which we need to connect with ourselves if we are to become whole, fully functional human beings in the way God wants us to be.
On the other hand this proper regard for ourselves can become unbalanced. It is easy to become obsessed with ourselves. Sometimes we become obsessed with our qualities, but much more commonly we become obsessed with our faults and inadequacies. This is illustrated by the titles of self-help manuals which in the old days might have given you tips on relationships with other people – ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’, etc. - but are now increasing concerned with our relationships with ourselves. And in particular our self esteem and self confidence.
In preparing for this sermon I did a quick search on Amazon for ‘self help books’ and here are four titles from the first 20 of 104,578 results:
• At number 6 The Little Book Of Confidence;
• At number 10 Healing Your Emotional Self: A Powerful Program to Help You Raise Your Self-esteem, Quiet Your Inner Critic, and Overcome Your Shame;
• At number 16 The Girl's Guide to Loving Yourself: A Book about Falling in Love with the One Person Who Matters Most...You ;
• And at number 17 Instant Confidence
Now I haven’t read any of these books and you might say I therefore have no right to criticise them.
Here is a book I have read: Eat, Pray, Love by Liz Gilbert. Or rather I am two thirds of the way through it. Some of you might have read the book or seen the film. According to the Sunday Times, ‘Eat, Pray, Love has been passed from woman to woman like the secret of life’. Err well yes perhaps.
It’s not a self-help book though I guess it does aim to provide advice. It’s an account of one year in the life of its author who has until recently been settled in a large house with a husband who wanted to start a family. But she finds she doesn’t want any of it. A bitter divorce and a rebound fling later, she emerges battered yet determined to find whatever she has been missing. She begins her quest in Rome where she indulges herself in Italian restaurants and gains nearly two stone. Next she travels to India, where she lives in an Ashram scrubbing the floor of the Temple and meditating. Finally she ends up in Bali, where - according to the blurb on the back - a toothless medicine man reveals a new path to peace, leaving her ready to love again (but I haven’t got to that bit yet).
Liz Gilbert is clearly on a quest but it’s very unclear whether this is to find herself or God. She talks about God throughout the book but it seems to me she also confuses God with herself. Here is an extract from the beginning of the book where Liz Gilbert is reflecting on the time when she first prayed.
“Of course I’ve had a lot of time to formulate my opinions about divinity since that night on the bathroom floor when I spoke to God directly for the first time. In the middle of that dark November crisis, though, I was not interested in formulating my views on theology. I was interested only in saving my life. I had finally noticed that I seemed to have reached a state of hopeless and life-threatening despair, and it occurred to me that sometimes people in this state will approach God for help. I think I’d read that in a book somewhere.
“What I said to God through my gasping sobs was something like this ‘Hello God. How are you? I’m Liz, It’s nice to meet you.’
“That’s right – I was speaking to the creator of the universe as though we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party. But we work with what we know in this life, and these are the words I always use at the beginning of a relationship. In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself saying: ‘I’ve always been a big fan of your work…’.
“‘I’m sorry to bother you so late at night’ I continued ‘But I’m in serious trouble .’[I’ve missed out a bit here]
“‘Then I heard a voice. Please don’t be alarmed - it was not an Old Testament Hollywood Charlton Heston Voice, nor was it a voice telling me I must build a baseball field in my backyard. It was merely my own voice, speaking from within my own self. But this was my voice as I had never heard it before. This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate. This was what my voice would sound like if I’d only ever experienced love and certainty in my life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice, as it gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?
“‘The voice said ‘Go back to bed, Liz’”
Now it’s not clear to me whether Liz Gilbert thinks that the voice that she heard was God or her true, her better self or indeed whether she thinks the two might be the same thing.
And I guess that there is a sense in which we too can never be entirely certain that when we speak to God we aren’t speaking to ourselves. Furthermore when, as sometimes happens, I hear God speaking to me, I am never utterly certain that I’m not hearing from myself. This is where faith comes in.
But what I think we – as Christians - can be sure about is that we are not God. That God is a person – or rather three persons in one - that is entirely different from ourselves. This means that to look up, look towards God is to look away from ourselves. And if we are to believe and follow Jesus it means that it is, at least at times, essential to look towards God, rather than towards ourselves.
Obsessive concern for ourselves is called egocentricity and of course none of us are immune from the problem. It even, I think, creeps into our worship.
It was recently pointed out to me that the chorus of the song beginning ‘Light of the world you stepped down into darkness’ is just a tad egocentric. It goes, you’ll remember:
This sounds suspiciously like the prayer of the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector. You’ll remember Jesus tells this parable of two men who went to the temple to pray. The Pharisee prays one type of prayer and the tax-collector another and Jesus says that it’s the tax-collector’s prayer – which is simply ’God be merciful to me a sinner’- which is the one God wants.
Both the Pharisee’s prayer and the song start well. Both are addresses to God. ‘Light of the world you stepped down into darkness’ is fine. Similarly the Pharisee starts with the words, ‘God I thank thee.’
The problem with the Pharisee’s prayer is not particularly what he thanks God for: which is ‘not being like other men‘ - he may well have been that - but his obsession with himself. He goes on to tell God (as if God didn’t know) ‘I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all I get’. Is this very different from, ‘Here I am to worship; here I am to bow down’?
I am sorry if I have just spoiled this song for you. I actually rather like it. I like the tune and most of its words are OK. I think we just need to be a bit careful in how we address God when we sing to him.
And the remedy for egocentricity in our songs, in our prayers, in our lives? Well it’s the Lord ’s Prayer. I said earlier that in looking up we orientate ourselves towards God and this is precisely what the Lord ’s Prayer does.
Firstly it’s worth recalling there is not a single mention of the word I in this prayer. There are we’s and there are you’s but no I’s
Secondly In the original Greek the payer begins ‘Abba’ which is best translated as ‘Dad’. Now ‘Dad’ or ‘Abba’ - rather like ‘Look!’ - is a performative word that reorientates us by making us focus on the relationship we have with God. ‘Abba’, of course is usually translated with two words ‘Our Father’ which taken together sort of does the job of ‘Dad’ but not as well I think. ‘Dad’ makes you pause after you have said it and we often start and run into this prayer so fast that we don’t have the have to the chance to remember who we are saying it to.
Thirdly whilst there are five us’s in the prayer in this prayer there is only one we. Give us today our daily bread, forgive us our sins… who sin against us, lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from evil. The one we comes in the words ‘as we forgive those who sin against us’. This prayer is not about what we can do for God (except in this one instance – forgiving the sins of others) it’s about what God can do for us.
Fourthly before we get to the first us there are three you’s. After the initial ‘Dad’, the prayer makes us focus even more on who we are talking to though the words ‘hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come, your will be done’. There are then three you’s before we get onto the petitions: the things we are asking for ourselves. And after we have asked for daily bread, forgiveness of sins and protection from evil, the prayer brings us back to you again, with the words: ’For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and for ever’.
The Lord ’s Prayer is not just a model prayer, it’s a model for the way we should lead our life. The essence of the Christian life is that it’s oriented towards God. We too should obey John the Baptist’s command ‘Look, the Lamb of God!’ as often as we can. But we don’t have to do this solely in our own strength. As Paul says in the reading from Romans we heard earlier, ‘When we cry Abba, Father, it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our Spirit that we are children of God’. When we look up, God will look down on us and draw us to himself.
Thanks to Joanna Collicutt for some of the ideas in this sermon.
The theme of my sermon today is ‘Look up’. Steve [our vicar] chose this theme when he was devising the term card because of two verses in today’s set reading from John’s gospel. This describes two occasions where John the Baptist is talking to his disciples; Jesus approaches and John says, ‘Look, the Lamb of God!’
I am going to talk about both words in the theme of ‘Look up!’: firstly ‘look’ and secondly ‘up’. So first: ‘Look!’
Well hopefully that woke you up and secondly it might have actually made you look. If you were looking at me you would have looked at where I pointed and where I myself looked. Look is what is known as a performative word. In other words it’s one of those words which makes things happen rather than just describes something.
There are in fact lots of performative words. We tend to think of words as merely describing states of affairs and some words do indeed have this purpose. So when I say, ‘this pew is brown’, I am merely describing something – something rather self-evidently true in this case. Those of you at the back, who can’t see this particular pew I am pointing to, might want to come out and check for yourself that I am telling the truth, but I guess you won’t bother to get out of your seat.
There are lots of words that don’t describe things so much as do things. A very good example is, ‘I promise’. The two words means nothing until you actually utter them and then they change everything (particularly during a marriage service). Commands are a particular class of performative word.
When John describes Jesus as the Word of God – in that famous verse at the beginning of his Gospel - ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God’ - he doesn’t just mean that Jesus is the truth: here to tell us how things are. He means that Jesus - the Word of God – has come into the world to change everything. The Living Word is a peformative word.
And when John the Baptist says ‘Look!’ he doesn’t mean, ‘I think, Andrew and Philip, you might find that this man Jesus is the Lamb of God’. He says, pointing to Jesus, ‘Look, the Lamb of God!’ He is commanding them to see for themselves that Jesus is the Lamb of God.
‘Look!’ as well as being a command is a word which re-orientates the person who obeys the command. Those of you who were awake when I shouted ‘Look!’ just now hopefully looked up from whatever you had been looking at previously: perhaps at your fingernails thinking that they might need cutting, or at the notices at the back of the service sheet (which are sometimes more interesting than the sermon I find), or wherever. If you did look you presumably looked at me to see where I was looking. Then you would have turned your eyes away from me to see what I was looking at or pointing at, which was, incidentally, the lit candle on the altar, which you then might have noticed, even thought about for a while, before turning back to look and listen to me (or to reading the notices in the service sheet).
So the word ‘Look!’ reorientates us to a new state of affairs. It’s a bit like the word ‘Repent!’ in that regard. ‘Repent!’ is a word that John the Baptist was particularly fond of. But unlike the word ‘Repent!’, ‘Look!’ doesn’t involve thinking about ourselves before we change our orientation. It just involves focusing on something other than what we have previously been looking at.
So to the second word in our theme of ‘Look up!’ What do we mean by ‘up’ here? Well traditionally we think of God as up. Heaven is up and God resides in heaven doesn’t he? And I guess that’s what Steve had in mind when he came up with this theme. And of course when John the Baptist says ‘Look!’ he is telling his disciples to look at Jesus: Jesus the Lamb of God. I don’t personally think heaven is up above but I think it is useful to think of God as being somewhere other than where we personally are. Nowadays people seem more inclined to find God within themselves or within other people, and of course there is good biblical support for this idea but it has its drawbacks as I hope will become clearer.
Now a definition of spirituality that I find helpful is that it’s about connecting firstly with God, secondly with other people and thirdly with ourselves. I mean connecting and not just loving. For a start connecting is as much about being loved as much as loving. Moreover connecting with persons has to involve communication and this can involve other things besides love such as criticism, rebuke, complaint, thankfulness, promises, etc. But of course love is the most important thing involved in connecting with God, with other people and with ourselves and without love those other things are like a clanging cymbal.
This Jesus makes this clear in his answer to the lawyer who asks him ‘What shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus says (quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus), ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and your neighbour as yourself.’
So we are commanded to love, to connect with God, but we also need to love, to connect with other people and with ourselves. I don’t really want to talk about connecting with other people today and its relationship with connecting with God, but I do want to talk about the similarities and differences between connecting with God and connecting with ourselves.
On the one hand – as Jesus reminds the lawyer – we do need to love ourselves otherwise it’s going to be difficult to love others and perhaps even God. We are made in the image of God, God loves us so there is something good about us which is worthy of love. We are not just ‘miserable offenders’ despite what the Book of Common Prayer might be taken to suggest. And so there is a sense in which we need to connect with ourselves if we are to become whole, fully functional human beings in the way God wants us to be.
On the other hand this proper regard for ourselves can become unbalanced. It is easy to become obsessed with ourselves. Sometimes we become obsessed with our qualities, but much more commonly we become obsessed with our faults and inadequacies. This is illustrated by the titles of self-help manuals which in the old days might have given you tips on relationships with other people – ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’, etc. - but are now increasing concerned with our relationships with ourselves. And in particular our self esteem and self confidence.
In preparing for this sermon I did a quick search on Amazon for ‘self help books’ and here are four titles from the first 20 of 104,578 results:
• At number 6 The Little Book Of Confidence;
• At number 10 Healing Your Emotional Self: A Powerful Program to Help You Raise Your Self-esteem, Quiet Your Inner Critic, and Overcome Your Shame;
• At number 16 The Girl's Guide to Loving Yourself: A Book about Falling in Love with the One Person Who Matters Most...You ;
• And at number 17 Instant Confidence
Now I haven’t read any of these books and you might say I therefore have no right to criticise them.
Here is a book I have read: Eat, Pray, Love by Liz Gilbert. Or rather I am two thirds of the way through it. Some of you might have read the book or seen the film. According to the Sunday Times, ‘Eat, Pray, Love has been passed from woman to woman like the secret of life’. Err well yes perhaps.
It’s not a self-help book though I guess it does aim to provide advice. It’s an account of one year in the life of its author who has until recently been settled in a large house with a husband who wanted to start a family. But she finds she doesn’t want any of it. A bitter divorce and a rebound fling later, she emerges battered yet determined to find whatever she has been missing. She begins her quest in Rome where she indulges herself in Italian restaurants and gains nearly two stone. Next she travels to India, where she lives in an Ashram scrubbing the floor of the Temple and meditating. Finally she ends up in Bali, where - according to the blurb on the back - a toothless medicine man reveals a new path to peace, leaving her ready to love again (but I haven’t got to that bit yet).
Liz Gilbert is clearly on a quest but it’s very unclear whether this is to find herself or God. She talks about God throughout the book but it seems to me she also confuses God with herself. Here is an extract from the beginning of the book where Liz Gilbert is reflecting on the time when she first prayed.
“Of course I’ve had a lot of time to formulate my opinions about divinity since that night on the bathroom floor when I spoke to God directly for the first time. In the middle of that dark November crisis, though, I was not interested in formulating my views on theology. I was interested only in saving my life. I had finally noticed that I seemed to have reached a state of hopeless and life-threatening despair, and it occurred to me that sometimes people in this state will approach God for help. I think I’d read that in a book somewhere.
“What I said to God through my gasping sobs was something like this ‘Hello God. How are you? I’m Liz, It’s nice to meet you.’
“That’s right – I was speaking to the creator of the universe as though we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party. But we work with what we know in this life, and these are the words I always use at the beginning of a relationship. In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself saying: ‘I’ve always been a big fan of your work…’.
“‘I’m sorry to bother you so late at night’ I continued ‘But I’m in serious trouble .’[I’ve missed out a bit here]
“‘Then I heard a voice. Please don’t be alarmed - it was not an Old Testament Hollywood Charlton Heston Voice, nor was it a voice telling me I must build a baseball field in my backyard. It was merely my own voice, speaking from within my own self. But this was my voice as I had never heard it before. This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate. This was what my voice would sound like if I’d only ever experienced love and certainty in my life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice, as it gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?
“‘The voice said ‘Go back to bed, Liz’”
Now it’s not clear to me whether Liz Gilbert thinks that the voice that she heard was God or her true, her better self or indeed whether she thinks the two might be the same thing.
And I guess that there is a sense in which we too can never be entirely certain that when we speak to God we aren’t speaking to ourselves. Furthermore when, as sometimes happens, I hear God speaking to me, I am never utterly certain that I’m not hearing from myself. This is where faith comes in.
But what I think we – as Christians - can be sure about is that we are not God. That God is a person – or rather three persons in one - that is entirely different from ourselves. This means that to look up, look towards God is to look away from ourselves. And if we are to believe and follow Jesus it means that it is, at least at times, essential to look towards God, rather than towards ourselves.
Obsessive concern for ourselves is called egocentricity and of course none of us are immune from the problem. It even, I think, creeps into our worship.
It was recently pointed out to me that the chorus of the song beginning ‘Light of the world you stepped down into darkness’ is just a tad egocentric. It goes, you’ll remember:
Here I am to worship,
Here I am to bow down,
Here I am to say that
you're my God
You're altogether lovely
All together worthy,
All together wonderful to me
This sounds suspiciously like the prayer of the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector. You’ll remember Jesus tells this parable of two men who went to the temple to pray. The Pharisee prays one type of prayer and the tax-collector another and Jesus says that it’s the tax-collector’s prayer – which is simply ’God be merciful to me a sinner’- which is the one God wants.
Both the Pharisee’s prayer and the song start well. Both are addresses to God. ‘Light of the world you stepped down into darkness’ is fine. Similarly the Pharisee starts with the words, ‘God I thank thee.’
The problem with the Pharisee’s prayer is not particularly what he thanks God for: which is ‘not being like other men‘ - he may well have been that - but his obsession with himself. He goes on to tell God (as if God didn’t know) ‘I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all I get’. Is this very different from, ‘Here I am to worship; here I am to bow down’?
I am sorry if I have just spoiled this song for you. I actually rather like it. I like the tune and most of its words are OK. I think we just need to be a bit careful in how we address God when we sing to him.
And the remedy for egocentricity in our songs, in our prayers, in our lives? Well it’s the Lord ’s Prayer. I said earlier that in looking up we orientate ourselves towards God and this is precisely what the Lord ’s Prayer does.
Firstly it’s worth recalling there is not a single mention of the word I in this prayer. There are we’s and there are you’s but no I’s
Secondly In the original Greek the payer begins ‘Abba’ which is best translated as ‘Dad’. Now ‘Dad’ or ‘Abba’ - rather like ‘Look!’ - is a performative word that reorientates us by making us focus on the relationship we have with God. ‘Abba’, of course is usually translated with two words ‘Our Father’ which taken together sort of does the job of ‘Dad’ but not as well I think. ‘Dad’ makes you pause after you have said it and we often start and run into this prayer so fast that we don’t have the have to the chance to remember who we are saying it to.
Thirdly whilst there are five us’s in the prayer in this prayer there is only one we. Give us today our daily bread, forgive us our sins… who sin against us, lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from evil. The one we comes in the words ‘as we forgive those who sin against us’. This prayer is not about what we can do for God (except in this one instance – forgiving the sins of others) it’s about what God can do for us.
Fourthly before we get to the first us there are three you’s. After the initial ‘Dad’, the prayer makes us focus even more on who we are talking to though the words ‘hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come, your will be done’. There are then three you’s before we get onto the petitions: the things we are asking for ourselves. And after we have asked for daily bread, forgiveness of sins and protection from evil, the prayer brings us back to you again, with the words: ’For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and for ever’.
The Lord ’s Prayer is not just a model prayer, it’s a model for the way we should lead our life. The essence of the Christian life is that it’s oriented towards God. We too should obey John the Baptist’s command ‘Look, the Lamb of God!’ as often as we can. But we don’t have to do this solely in our own strength. As Paul says in the reading from Romans we heard earlier, ‘When we cry Abba, Father, it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our Spirit that we are children of God’. When we look up, God will look down on us and draw us to himself.
Thanks to Joanna Collicutt for some of the ideas in this sermon.
