As part the London Diocese’s partnership with the German protestant church in Berlin, Anders visited and preached at Jesus-Christus Kirche in Dahlem. We are looking forward to his counterpart, Cornelia, the parish priest of Dahlem joining us and preaching at our Harvest Festval on 13 October. In the meantime, here is the text of Anders’ sermon from last week…
“I must begin by saying what a privilege it is to be allowed to preach to you this morning. I bring you warmest greetings from my congregation in St John’s Wood. We think of you often, we thank God for our partnership in the Gospel, and on the first Sunday of every month we pray for all of you at our main Sunday service, as well as for your Pfarrerin. To be able to stand here and to be a part of your own worship is very special, and I thank you for it. Truly, I may say in the words of Psalm 16, “The lines are fallen for me in pleasant places.”
And we will stay with that Psalm, which is this morning’s Predigttext. It is an unusual Psalm in the biblical Psalter, because it is such a direct statement of the psalmist’s loyalty to God. It seems that he has made a choice; he might have chosen to follow another god, but he has chosen the Lord. It may even be that some of those around him have actually chosen to follow another god. This is one way of reading the first few verses of the Psalm. To be honest, the Hebrew text is uncertain and difficult in verses 3 – 4. Robert Alter, the Jewish American literary scholar who produced a wonderfully fresh and interesting translation of the Psalms about twenty years ago, says simply, “Any translation here is guesswork.” But the likeliest interpretation is the one I am following this morning. Others, important people among his contemporaries, people who matter, have decided to turn away from the worship of the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God who brought his people out of wilderness, and gave them the law on Sinai, in favour of other gods. Who exactly they are we are not told, but there is plenty of evidence in the Old Testament that people in the land of Israel and Judah did worship Canaanite gods, and set up sanctuaries and high places to all sorts of deities. But our Psalmist is not one of them. He will stay faithful. He chooses the Lord.
What is it to choose the Lord, and not other gods? I mean, what is it for us, in our time and our own lives? The world we live in does rather obviously propose false gods for us to follow. There is the false of god of material success and prosperity. To draw attention to that seems almost banal, but it is extraordinary how people do strive after wealth, even though there is plenty of evidence that wealth and happiness are not connected. There are even Christian churches in which it is promised God will reward your worship of him with business success – the so-called “prosperity Gospel”, and a false god has been smuggled in in place of the God revealed to us in scripture and in Jesus Christ. To turn aside from such easily recognizable false gods is not too hard.
But there are subtler false gods to draw us aside. There is the false god of individual self-fulfilment, the striving to “become your true self”. “I’m sorry,” says someone to their partner of many years, “It’s no longer working for me. It’s not your fault, but I’m finding that I can’t realize my true self while I’m still with you, so I have to continue my journey without you.” In our present western culture, with its insistent individualism, this sort of thing is often said, and it brings much heartache. We might make the point even more fundamentally. The primal idolatry to which every one of us is drawn is the idolatry by which we make ourselves, rather than God, the axis around which our universe is built. That is, after all, how we start life. For the newborn child, there is hardly any world outside the child’s own self. The child quickly develops a sense of its mother as a distinct being – perhaps it already starts to develop that sense while it is still in the womb – but it understands this other person primarily in relation to its own wants and needs, for milk and comfort. Then, in a way that is extraordinary and wonderful, the baby goes on to construct a whole world, but it is always a world of which it is the centre. Bit by bit, as we reach out of ourselves in love, we discover how other people can be the axis around which our world revolves. And to choose the Lord is, quite simply, to make the Lord the axis around which our world revolves. This is what we see Jesus do in the Gospels. His world revolves around his consciousness of his heavenly Father, in whom he places his trust, on whom he recentres himself through the practice of prayer in lonely places long before anyone else is awake; and, centring his existence on his Father, he is able to go out from himself in endless acts of compassion and attention to all those people who cross his path. This going out of himself in love turns out to be the strongest force in the universe. When, in a supreme act of self-gift at the end of the Gospel, Jesus surrenders himself to death on the cross, he sets loose a power so strong that death itself is broken by it, and on the third day he rises gloriously from the dead.
For us, then, to choose the Lord is to strive to turn away from the primal idolatry of the self, to strive to shift the whole axis of our being so that it centres on the Lord, and on the people that the Lord has given us to be with. This takes constant effort. It is not one moment of special conversion, though there may be moments in a life that do feel decisive. The idolatrous self constantly tries to reassert itself, and constantly has to be resisted. This is why prayer is so difficult. You sit down somewhere quiet by yourself, and you try to be as still in your heart and mind as possible, so that you can attend to God, and come before God with other people on your heart. Almost immediately an endless chatter starts up in your mind to distract you. When I go shopping, I need to remember to get this. How am I going to answer that difficult email that arrived this morning? I mustn’t forget to arrange for my daughter to be collected from school by someone else tomorrow. It goes on and on, and all this chatter revolves around me, my responsibilities and my thoughts and my preoccupations. It’s like having a film running on a screen inside your head, a film in which you are the central protagonist. To stop this film running is incredibly difficult, and requires constant and patient discipline. But to stop the film running is what it means to choose the Lord.
I really should get back to the text of the Psalm. If the first verses, obscure as they are, show us the Psalmist choosing the Lord, the rest of the Psalm shows us some of the things that follow from his choice. He feels security, and joy, and delight. He tells us in verse 7 that when his conscience troubles him at night, the Lord gives him guidance. The word that Alter translates as “conscience”, and which the German Bible translates as [?], in Hebrew literally means “kidneys”. How and in what way the faculty of moral judgement ended up being located by Hebrew in the kidneys, we do not know; but the verse expresses very well the sense that being faithful to the Lord provides a moral compass – that in the making of moral choices that may be agonizing, and over which we are deeply troubled that we might not be right, simply trying to centre our being around God and not around ourselves will help us to see the way ahead more clearly.
But the Psalm takes us steadily forward to joy and to delight. And that is where the Psalm ends: “In your presence there is fullness of joy, and at your right hand there are pleasures for evermore”. Let us dwell for a moment on that phrase “pleasures for evermore”. I am deeply interested in the writings of a fourth century theologian called Gregory of Nyssa. He speculated about something he called epektasis, “reaching-out”. The love of God is infinite, and so the exploration of the love of God must also be unending. Our human death marks only a significant moment of transition in our life’s journey into the mystery of God. Beyond death, there is not a static contemplation of a static glory, but an endlessly dynamic exploration of the infinity of God’s beauty and truth and holiness. It will be like travelling ever more deeply into a landscape which becomes more and more beautiful the deeper you journey into it – and of course we do not travel alone, but in a company of joy. I don’t know if the Narnia books of C. S. Lewis are popular in Germany. (Maybe the films made from them are better known). At the end of the last book in the Chronicles of Narnia, which is The Last Battle, there is a magnificent passage about just this theme. At the end of the book, the Pevensey children are killed in a railway accident. The book shows them entering into heaven, which is imagined as a landscape. Aslan the lion (who is of course an allegory of Christ) bounds along in front of them. “Higher up, and further in; higher up and further in” – further, that is, into the beauty of God, the never-ending goodness of God, the inexhaustible self-giving love of God, the sheer delight of God in each and every one of us his creatures.”