24 Feb Sermon for the 3rd Sunday before Lent, Year C

16th February, 2025

The Community here at Mucknell is, as with any group, made up of diverse individuals with varying opinions on just about everything! As such, sermons posted on our website represent the ideas of the preachers who wrote and delivered them, not necessarily those of the entire Community.

“Why are you here?”  – so began our Community Retreat a couple of weeks ago.

Why are we here? Why is each none of us here? It’s a good question to ponder from time to time.

As I sat in my stall for that first retreat address wondering why I was there, what came into my mind were the words of the Terce Office Hymn we sing five mornings a week:

Come, Holy Spirit, live in us,

With God the Father and the Son.

And grant us your abundant grace

To sanctify and make us one.

May mind and voice made strong in love

Your praise throughout the world proclaim;

And may that love within our hearts

Set fire to others with its flame.

We finish by singing, “AMEN” … ‘so be it’ … ‘I assent to this’. This is why I am here!

We sing the ‘Amen’, each of us giving our own assent, but we sing it together, giving our corporate assent. This is why we are here.

We sing it five times a week – not as frequently as we pray the Lord’s Prayer, but like the Lord’s Prayer, it’s very easy to sing it on ‘automatic pilot’, without weighing the meaning of the words we are singing and are assenting to.

To sit with those two verses can be quite mind-blowing. What an amazing aspiration! —- Repeat the verses.

 And after singing it so frequently for all these years, I feel that only recently have I begun to grapple, not only with the theology of these lines, what they say about who God is, and how they marry up – or not – with my various ‘working models’ of God, and how the implications work out in practice.

What do we mean by asking the Holy Trinity to ‘come and live’ in us? How can we think of the persons of the Trinity in such a way that would allow them to ‘live in’ us?  — As some of you know, I have been encouraged recently to think of God more in terms of a verb than a noun.

At the Burning Bush, when Moses asks God who he is – ‘What is your name?’ – the reply is simply, ‘I AM’. Again and again, particularly in the Fourth Gospel, we hear Jesus, as he is talking about himself, using that same ‘I AM’. The sanctifying work of God’s ‘abundant grace’ is to make that true of us, too, as we say ‘I am…’

God – ‘the Ground of our Being’ – enabling us to grow into the mature and grounded complete human beings we were made to be…our humanity at one with the divine life which, in turn, lights the flame in others.

At the moment my cell is being decorated, and I am camping in the cell we reserve for visiting Religious – and in the cell is a bookcase full of improving volumes. Yesterday I picked up Rowan Williams’ “Silence and Honey Cakes” a series of his talks on the Desert Fathers and Mothers. He tells how they went out into the desert in order to learn how to bring others to a saving relationship with Christ by becoming more and more Christ-like themselves, learning how to ‘die’ to themselves in order to make themselves one with their neighbour.

‘What gets in the way of us doing this?’ they ask. I quote Rowan:

The desert teachers are well aware that by fleeing to the isolation of prayerful communities they do not automatically leave behind the deep-rooted longing to manage the access of other people to God. This is why they insist upon an ever-greater honesty about the self; this is why the ‘manifesting of thoughts’ to a senior brother or sister becomes so crucial – because everyone is drawn almost irresistibly back towards this urge to manage. The instinct to exercise power over others in order to feel more secure.

Archbishop Rowan goes on: One of the most frequent ways in which this becomes visible, they suggest, is inattention, the failure to see what is truly there in front of us – because our own vision is clouded by self-obsession or self-satisfaction. we don’t see clearly the need of our neighbour. If we don’t really know how to attend to the reality that is our own inner turmoil, we shall fail in responding to the needs of someone else.

By far the longest chapter in St Benedict’s Rule comes almost at the beginning: the chapter on humility, on growing into the awareness of one’s own inadequacy and neediness; the Desert Mothers and Fathers would say ‘sinfulness’ – humility which can then open the way for us to be ready to welcome the Holy Spirit, with God the Father and the Son into our life to get to work on our sanctification – and gradually, oh so gradually, very often without our realizing it, our unity.

The closer to God we come, the more aware we become of the ways in which we pull back, aware of how much more work the in-dwelling Holy Spirit has to do in making us one. Our sanctification is not to make us feel good and self-satisfied, but to increase our yearning for God’s healing and indwelling, realising that there is only one God, who is the ground of the being of each of our neighbours, and it is the realising of that deepest unity that already exists – the one God in us and in each other that is what will enable Jusus’ prayer in John Chapter 17 to be answered – ‘that the world may believe’.

I give the last word to the Cistercian monk, Michael Casey for our encouragement. He is writing for monastics, but it is equally applicable to everyone who has neighbours!

Michael Casey’s “Strangers to the City”

“A monastery that follows the Rule of St Benedict aims to become a moral rather than a political utopia because those who live there strive to become fully alive human beings in a situation that draws the best from them. … This ideal community calls forth a cheerful complementarity of strong and weak, young and old, outstanding and average. The gifts of one complete those of another and belong to all. It is not merely a matter of having perfect structures; it is the quality of those who live in monasteries that creates a cloistral paradise, a reflection of heaven on earth.

Before I am howled down by those who consider monastic community closer to purgatory than heaven, let me add a qualification. The cloistral paradise is still in the stage of becoming. But it is conformity to the image of heaven that is the goal of the community’s corporate journey. But as we have mentioned, the primary characteristic both of the ultimate expression of the ideal and its imperfect realization on earth, is mercy. An earthly community approaches perfection in so far as it is a living expression of mercy, forgiveness, toleration, compassion, reconciliation. To implement these qualities there must be those who need to be endured, tolerated, forgiven, and reconciled. By the grace of God our communities abound is such persons. Without them we would have no hope of becoming more heaven like!”

Br. Stuart

Image: Schumacher, Joe. Burning Bush, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55954 [retrieved February 24, 2025]. Original source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jschumacher/6386697855