the sanctuary church

Andy Harrison

Rainer Maria Rilke

On May 22^nd, actor Andy Harrison movingly presented The Way at the Sanctuary Church. Based on the story from Luke’s Gospel about two followers of Christ as they walk the wild road to Emmaus, The Way confronts life’s big contradictions – suffering, injustice, betrayal, death. Near the beginning of Murray Watt’s 2002 monologue, the protagonist quotes from the fourth of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1903), “Do not seek for answers, try to live the questions. And then, one day, without noticing it, you will live on into the answers.” I am reminded of Voltaire’s quip, that one should “judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers.”

If the stream of Evangelical / Neo-Pentecostal / Charismatic Christianity in which I have swum since my youth, and from which I continue to drink, has a great weakness it is the instinct to reach quickly for the certainty of a superficial answer without ever hearing the questions. Evangelicals, who embrace the Bible as a book of answers, tend to eschew mystery and often that means not being good at dealing with reality. Now, perhaps more than ever, we must embrace Rilke’s challenge. To quote him more fully, from a variant translation:

“Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

The Bible is full of questions. Some admit clear unequivocal answers; others elicit only more difficult questions; others terminate in silence – a silence that can only be lived.

Did God really say…?
Where are you?
What have you done?
Why are you angry?
Where is your brother?
Am I my brother’s keeper?
Why didn’t you tell me?
God, what will you give me?
How am I to know?
Where have you come from?
Where are you going?
Lord, will you destroy innocent people?
What were you thinking of?
What troubles you?
What does it all mean?
Who are you?
What is your name?
Is there no blessing for me?
How can God know?
What can God do to us?
How long will you chase lies?
Why have I bothered being wise?
What use is work?
What use is pleasure?
Can anyone be of use to God?
Does God care if you are righteous?
How can you be righteous before God?
What are human beings that you even think about them?

What is the greatest commandment? This admits a clear answer: Love God and love your neighbour. But still it raises a new question, an answer to which can only be lived, for it cannot be defined: Who is my neighbour? Only a story, an encapsulation of life will do: “A man was travelling…”

What must I do to be saved? Repent and Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ – follow him. But what does it mean to follow? How do I believe? How do I repent? How do I keep following that narrow road? The question still must be lived.

Jesus, the condemned prisoner, stands before Pilate, who asks, What is truth? But Pilate’s question receives no answer; the condemned prisoner continues to stand before him – living the question.

Then comes the hardest question of all – one that haunts all time and space; it is the agonized question of the crucified God, in answer to which there is only silence: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

The Jewish tradition is good at questions. Evangelical Christians prefer answers, because they would rather avoid contradictions. But contradictions will always come and when they do many lose faith or find it strained to breaking point; that is, unless we have learned to embrace the questions. As Nick Baines, Bishop of Bradford, puts it: “spirituality isn’t divorced from reality.” Intriguingly, and quite unexpectedly, I heard him say that in a radio broadcast today celebrating Bob Dylan’s 70^th birthday.

I have been a Dylan fan for 40 years. I have listened to his questions and heard the answers blowin’ in the wind. I have shared his mixed up confusion. I walked with him as the former Robert Allen Zimmerman was “saved by the blood of the Lamb” and embraced the jubilant and sometimes judgmental certainties of Born Again Neo-Charismatic Christianity. A few years later, less certain that he was right, but more at peace with life’s mystery, he sang:

In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.

Dylan has walked down many roads. He “Ain’t talkin’. Just walkin’”. But there are contradictions along the path:

How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone

Sometimes life is hard because:

In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell
I’m trying to love my neighbor and do good unto others
But oh, mother, things ain’t going well.

But behind all of this there is another presence:

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.

Bob Dylan

I will always retain great affection for this septuagenarian son of Israel. He has stumbled, walked and crawled down many roads and highways. He still has a voice. He is still living the questions.

Happy Birthday, Bob! I hope we meet one day – perhaps on some other shore. If not before, it is there that we will live right on into the answers.

I just received an email from Amazon about some books they thought I might be interested in. One was a special anniversary edition of the King James Version of the Bible, which first appeared in 1611. Celebrations on May 2nd, 400 years to the day after it was first published, were rather drowned by the excitement following a Royal wedding and the killing of Osama Bin Laden. There was a lot of news last week.

Anyway, this particular paperback edition of the Bible comes with its cover decorated with quotations from the great and the good endorsing “the book that changed the world.” Quotations are from all kinds of people from Alfred Lord Tennyson to Melvyn Lord Bragg – including Rosa Parks, the wonderfully brave black activist who many claim started the civil rights movement in America when she refused to stand for a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery Alabama in 1955. She said of the Bible (and I think we can be pretty sure hers was the KJV), “If you have no Bible, you have no way to live.”

Meanwhile, three of the quotes effuse about the influence of the King James on education and the English language. And then there is Abraham Lincoln, who said, “I believe that the Bible is the best gift that God has ever given to man.”

To Abraham Lincoln I would like to say, if it was such a great gift, why didn’t you read it properly? The Bible is a wonderful gift from God, but it witnesses to an even greater gift:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16 KJV)

The Bible is very clear – Jesus himself was very clear, “The Lord our God is one Lord.” (Mark 12:29 KJV). The founding witness of the nation of Israel was that God is one. In history, God gave himself to us in the person of his Son Jesus, who came in the power of the Holy Spirit to reveal the Father. Now God comes to us again in all the fulness of his power in the person of the Holy Spirit – revealing Jesus and the Father. God’s best gift is himself. God has given us God. He has come to dwell with us forever as Emmanuel – God with us.

Then there is the beautiful created universe all around us. But of this the Bible says, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” (Matthew 24:35 KJV). The universe and everything in it is temporary. If God’s words last forever, then God’s written word to us – the Bible – has more permanence and solidity than diamonds, rocks and planets.

But not people. People have eternal value too, which is why the greatest commandments – the ones which summed up the whole of God’s law – are to love God and love people.

Abraham Lincoln was wrong to claim the Bible as the best gift. But, after God himself and people, it is surely right to consider it God’s third best gift. The Bible is the map which points people to where all the treasures of God are hidden.

Love God. Love people. And love the Bible, too. Rosa Parks was right, “If you have no Bible, you have no way to live.”

ⓒ Chris Denne, 2011

Reading Psalm 98 this morning, I imagined contemporary equivalents for the array of musical instruments the psalmist suggested as appropriate for worship:

“Break into songs of joy, sing praises. Sing praises to the Lord with amplified guitar, with amplified guitar and keyboards. With trumpet and saxophone acclaim the presence of the Lord our King.” (Psalm 98:4-6)

Then it struck me just how narrow is the range of sounds that we have deemed appropriate in church today. To make room for the new, many have abandoned hymns – both ancient and modern – but now is the time to throw the Kingdom sound-net far far wider than this thing labelled “Worship” or the insipid, inauthentic child of Gospel that is “Contemporary Christian Music”.

I grew up in the Jesus People generation. Jesus Rock was part of the soundtrack to my youth. It was raw, vibrant, energetic. It may not all have been musically brilliant, but it  challenged the mainstream. It was counter-cultural. Most CCM, well I don’t quite know what it does. There’s not much to get excited about, that’s for sure. So what I offer here is a suggestion. The title I have appropriated from the 1966 album widely credited as the first ever gospel rock record by the LA band, The Crusaders: “Make a joyful noise with drums and guitars.”

Here come the drums!
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Praise the Lord, you 12-bar blues
Let punk and folk rejoice
Sing unto him, country, pop and jazz
Bebop before him all the earth.
Growl death metal
Let feedback cry aloud, you lead guitars
Break forth and dance – reggae, rumba, rock, baroque
Twist before the Lord
Garage, house, dubstep, drum and bass
Lift up your voice
Crooners, troubadours, string and barbershop quartets
Sing out, rasping lead vocalist with battered SM58
Shimmy you backing singers, shimmy before the Lord
Beat loud your drums – congas, djembes, kettles
Sing you easy-listening middle-of-the-roaders
Shout unto God, you rock ‘n rollers
All the world give him glory
Play ambient, afrobeat, arabesque
Hip-hop, prog, acid jazz, americana
Rejoice calypso, cantata, cha cha cha,
Chanson, classical, chant, charango
Chill out you gospel disco divas
Europop, freestyle fandango unto the Lord
Make a joyful noise with drums and guitars.

ⒸChris Denne, 2011

For years, we have been reliably informed monarchy is doomed. Irrational, it has no place in the modern world. But today is the day of the Royal Wedding and it is expected to be the most watched ceremony in history. Also, I note, that some of the most enthusiastic flag-wavers on the streets of London this morning are Americans – envoys of a nation, which abandoned monarchy 235 years ago. And not just any monarchy, but the very monarchy today’s bridegroom is heir to.

So why then is this such a global event? Is it all down to good organization and clever marketing – to the careful management of television rights? Or are we witnessing something altogether more profound, more primitive, more real and, at the same time, more fantastic?

The wedding of Prince William of Wales to Miss Catherine Middleton – our chums Wills and Kate – is surely the culmination of the meaning of royalty in the post-modern world. That is, royalty, not as political reality, but as the simulacrum of a fairy tale. This marriage is the as yet unwritten and largely unacknowledged (except perhaps by Americans) narrative of all our hopes. This is a story, which is already becoming myth. It transcends rationality and reaches for divinity. Just for one day we celebrate the union of a noble warrior prince and an ordinary girl. It is the re-imagining of the memory of a people’s Disney princess – Kate is Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and every girl. This marriage is the point in space and time where the personal and political kiss; here all our public and private lives intersect, for once not in scandal or tragedy but in hope. It is the moment of rebirth, where we can all, as dreaming children, believe in royalty, loyalty, dynasty and majesty as we witness a ceremony which (as in the Jewish tradition) has all the sombre joy of coronation.

And where is this kingdom over which good King William and Queen Catherine will reign? It is not merely England, nor Britain, nor even the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland along with the Commonwealth (so beloved of his Grandmother) or the former British Empire. Wills and Kate have come to rule another kingdom altogether – for just a day they will rule over the whole of Narnia. They are the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, heirs to David’s throne and to the whole world:

Your throne is like God’s throne, eternal,
Your royal scepter a scepter of righteousness.
You have loved right and hated wrong;
So God, your God has anointed you
Above your fellows with oil, the token of joy.
Your robes are fragrant with myrrh and powder of aloes,
And the music of strings greets you from a palace paneled with ivory.
A princess takes her place amongst the noblest of your women,
A royal lady at your side in gold of Ophir.
In the palace honour awaits her.

And all this on a tea-towel.

[29.04.2011]

ⓒ Chris Denne, 2011

[As I was making breakfast and listening to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme on the morning of November 11, I heard an interesting discussion about a book, first published in the US in 2009, which is about to be enjoy a UK release; it was Padgett Powell’s, The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? This book (which I have not read, apart from the few extracts offered by Amazon.com) is written entirely as a series of questions, some of which follow naturally from one another, whilst others, although they appear to be non-sequiturs, weave themselves into a pattern which becomes more clear as one progresses. The concept struck me as genius, and I was immediately inspired to try it myself, not, I hope, as mere pastiche but because it may also open possibilities for other genres. It is for this reason that I offer, Still in the Mood: A Sermon?] Continue reading →