Introduction
I see that I have not blogged since September. Perhaps that does not really matter, I have after all written and communicated in other ways, but I did intend to try to keep a discipline about it. So I (like a lapsed dieter once more eating salads and slogging on the treadmill) am at the blog page once again. My thanks to the hardy Cathedral regulars who have asked that I lodge some recent sermons here.
We resumed normal Choral Services on the Sunday following the Conversion of St Paul and, of course, celebrated our patronal festival. The informal barbecue in the Cathedral grounds on a brilliant hot Sunday was a delight.
A sermon for the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul
This year our
Feast of the Conversion of St Paul coincides with what might be described as
the Summer of Les Miserables. I saw the
film last week – and enjoyed it immensely. As we talked about it afterwards,
Christine rightly observed that it was a deeply religious film. On the occasion of the Conversion of St Paul,
one character in the musical comes immediately to mind, the policeman - Javert.
As you will
recall, Javert’s way of understanding himself and the world is that there is an
absolute order, it is a moral order from which there may be no deviation and which,
for any lapse, offers no forgiveness or mercy: it is an absolute and Javert
clings to this certainty with all his being.
The great song known as ‘Stars’ expresses his code – the stars order the
cosmos, and their patterns and movements speak of this cold and indifferent moral order: He says…
And so it is written
On the doorway to paradise
That those who falter and those who fall
Must pay the price!
And those who follow the path of the righteous
Shall have their reward
I should have perished by his hand!
It was his right.
It was my right to die as well
Instead I live, but live in hell!
And my thoughts fly apart
Can this man be believed?
Shall his sins be forgiven?
Shall his crimes be reprieved?
And must I now begin to doubt
Who never doubted all these years?
My heart is stone and still it trembles
The world I have known is lost in shadow.
Is he from heaven or from hell?
His whole
hope in life is that he has never faltered in his inflexible obedience to this code. He says
But mine is the way of the Lord
This code psychically
anchors him in the chaos and darkness of the world he inhabits, Paris in the
year of the Commune. But of course the
great theme that runs through Hugo’s novel is of something else – of
forgiveness and selfless love. So when
Javert finally and inescapably encounters this love and forgiveness, and cannot
flee from it or deny it any longer, his world falls apart. The realisation simply destroys him. He has
what we might call a psychotic break – and he throws himself into the Seine.
Now I have
spent this time talking about Les Miserables and Javert because the dilemma of
Javert could so easily have been the dilemma of the man who was first known as
Saul of Tarsus. Long after his
experience on the Damascus Road Paul boasted of his credentials as a Jew …
If
anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised
on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin,
a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a
persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. (Philippians 3:5)
Paul’s
background, his whole mental world and his understanding of himself was
anchored in that strongly centred and robustly framed world of strict
Judaism. This culture and creed
absolutely formed him – to be outside it was unimaginable; to conceive that it
could be altered or amended in any way – unthinkable. Intellectually and emotionally it would
appear that Paul was so formed that any departure from this way of being would
have been utterly traumatising and alienating.
If we think about the character of the man who appears in his letters we
sense an utterly driven and focused personality; a man totally committed. For someone like this a complete turnabout
could have mentally and spiritually destroyed him.
So, what
happened to Saul the zealous Jew on the road?
Certainly something very odd and that seems to evade all explanations. In Acts, despite Luke’s smooth and polished
account of the mysterious event on the Damascus road, one senses that the
actual events were complex and more chaotic and inexplicable than the narrative
suggests. If we look at what is
presented (rather than how it is framed) the recorded facts seem to hint at
something like a dramatic and sudden psychic disintegration: Paul falls, he is
incapacitated, blinded, and has to be led and cared for. While those with him heard something they saw
nothing. What has Paul experienced? It is hard to imagine but it seems that he
has come up against something that is so utterly different from everything he
has previously believed or experienced that it is unnerving; mentally
shattering; alien (not of the world as we know it); it annihilates everything about
which he has ordered his life – and it is not surprising that he crashes – and
experiences what might have been a psychotic break. What other alternatives are there to such an
experience? Hugo has Javert commit
suicide; Shakespeare has Lear descend into madness.
In short, I
suggest to you that Paul’s conversion was an immensely traumatic event. He encountered something not of this world –
and there is no language or conceptual structure for that absolute otherness -
and in the horror and awe of that mind-bending experience it was as if he
died. A new and very different man was
to appear – after 3 days.
Can we face
the questions Paul’s conversion puts to us?
That it was no easy thing and that at its core is this terrifying
encounter with the Holy – something so other, so different? This tests our vocabulary of faith; it bursts
the naïve and simple constructions that we call ‘God’; it takes us beyond our
comfort zones and into the unknown space and utter strangeness of the empty
tomb.