Words on the Word
Erik Varden is a monk and bishop, born in Norway in 1974. In 2002, after ten years at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.
Please find below a selection of homilies:
Desert Fathers 39 
You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Abba Cassian said that a Read More
Abba Cassian said that a Read More
Sts Cornelius & Cyprian Homily given at the beginning of a retreat for the clergy of the Prelature of Tromsø.
1 Timothy 3.1-13: Let him live a worthy life.
Luke 7.11-17: Young man, I command you: Rise!
Today we commemorate two holy bishops: Cornelius and Cyprian. We Read More
1 Timothy 3.1-13: Let him live a worthy life.
Luke 7.11-17: Young man, I command you: Rise!
Today we commemorate two holy bishops: Cornelius and Cyprian. We Read More
Exaltation of the Holy Cross Genesis 21.4-9: Make a fiery serpent and put it on a standard.
Philippians 2.5-11: Put on the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ.
John 3.13-17: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
A sermon is no history lesson, but Read More
Philippians 2.5-11: Put on the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ.
John 3.13-17: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
A sermon is no history lesson, but Read More
Migration to Nidaros This evening I was part of a panel debate, co-organised by the University of Trondheim, NTNU, and the city, on migration. Having been asked to speak about religious migration to Trondheim, medieval Nidaros, I wished to say something about what Read More
Hemingway and AI Hemingway on the creative process: ‘I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true Read More
Desert Fathers 38 You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Another brother asked [Theodore of Read More
Another brother asked [Theodore of Read More
Nativity of Mary Today’s feast invites us to consider that God, who entered history as male, with a gendered specificity that cannot be abstracted; that this God who became man and a man, in whose image and glory we are called to have Read More
23 Sunday C Wisdom 9.13-18: What man can know the intentions of God?
Philemon 9-17: I am sending him back with a part of my own self.
Luke 14.25-33: None can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.
Tomorrow is election day in Read More
Philemon 9-17: I am sending him back with a part of my own self.
Luke 14.25-33: None can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.
Tomorrow is election day in Read More
Desert Fathers 39
You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Abba Cassian said that a brother once came to Abba Serapion, and that the elder had invited him, as was his custom, to make a prayer. The other fellow, though, professing himself a sinner and declaring himself unworthy of the monastic habit, would not hear of it. [Abba Serapion] then wished to wash his feet, but he did not consent, saying the same sort of thing. When [the elder] let him have some food, he began, while they were eating, to exhort him in charity saying: ‘My child, if you want to profit, remain in your cell. Mind yourself and your manual labour. Being out and about does you no good; it is much more beneficial to stay put.’ When [the brother] heard this, he was irritated. His expression changed so much he could not keep it hidden from the elder. Then Abba Serapion said to him: ‘Up until now you have been saying: “I am a sinner!” You have been declaring yourself unworthy of life itself. But then, when with love I admonished you a little, you got very cross! If, then, you truly wish to become humble, learn to bear bravely what others say to you, and do not be full of empty talk.’ Having heard these things, the brother prostrated himself before the elder and retired, greatly profited.
To speak of high ideals is delightful. It is easy to assume that by talking of virtues I acquire them, rather the way we might think that by purchasing a book we have read it.
The profile of the recent convert who holds forth endlessly on subjects of ascesis and theology after picking up a few bits here and there from sermons and books (or, these days, YouTube videos), is a type we can recognise; we may even see in it a previous version of ourselves, and blush a little.
The man who came to see Serapion was not necessarily a hypocrite. Serapion was a giant among the Fathers. A friend of Antony’s, he was mentioned in his will: when Antony lay dying he bequeathed a sheepskin to Athanasius, another to Serapion, likewise a bishop, entrusted with the Church of Thmuis in lower Egypt. Jerome says of Serapion that ‘on account of his cultivated genius he was found worthy of the surname Scholasticus’; in addition, that he wrote several excellent books and was renowned as a confessor of the faith.
Any young monk would have felt overwhelmed in this august presence, thinking it unseemly to adopt a posture of prominence by presiding at prayers. We can imagine why such a one would wholeheartedly protest when the old man proposed to bow down and, like a servant, wash his sand-encrusted feet. As Queen Gertrude in Hamlet might have said, though, the monk ‘doth protest too much, methinks’. There is too much self, and a certain satisfaction, evident in all this professed selflessness.
Serapion picks this up. He resolves to use the occasion to help his visitor grow up a little. Amiably, at table, in a dynamic of fellowship, he suggests that what this man needs is to focus on essentials, practising stability and perseverance in his cell. Why run around collecting the signatures of famous people when the one thing needful is to learn quietness, gainful work, and the art of holding one’s tongue?
On hearing this, the visitor’s face underwent visible change. Like Cain on seeing his sacrifice rejected, ‘his countenance fell’. He felt angry and hurt. Clearly he had expected commendation on account of his humility, congratulations on his effort to seek out a holy man. Instead he was asked: ‘Why aren’t you at home plaiting ropes?’ He ‘could not keep [his displeasure] hidden from the elder’, try as he might. We know how useless it is to stop ourselves blushing in public when something upsets or embarrasses us. An inward conflict is revealed at Serapion’s table. What it shows up is this: pride has a deep hold on this visitor who professed himself so humble.
Serapion’s rebuke is courteous but firm. He is concerned to let the other man see he lacks integrity. His words are not in concert with who he is. He is caught in a web of pretence. This is a trap into which people who profess faith in public may readily fall. Think of the reaction of those who heard Jesus proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount. When he finished, having evoked the fearful fall of a house not founded on rock, they were astonished at his doctrine: ‘For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.’
The Greek word for ‘authority’ is exousia. The preposition ‘ex’ means ‘out of’; ‘ousia’ is the word for ‘being’ — it comes from the same root that yields ‘ontology’. What impressed people in Jesus was the fact that his words came from what he was, an outwardly compelling, credible expression of inward truth. He was of a piece, so dependable. There is pathos in the remark, ‘not as the scribes’, a caste of religious professionals who had made the spouting of religious certainties their livelihood. Let us think twice before we look upon them with scorn. They have much in common with devout people of every age.
This story challenges us to weigh our words before we speak them. It recalls a counsel St Benedict gives in the fourth chapter of the Rule: ‘Not to wish to be called holy before one is, but to be so first, whereby one would be so called the more truly.’ It is also a story that brings me to smile wistfully. When I think back over my experience as a religious superior, I ascertain that no letters I received were more predictably obnoxious and out of touch than the ones signed, ‘Yours humbly’.
Eugène Delacroix, Hamlet and His Mother. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Abba Cassian said that a brother once came to Abba Serapion, and that the elder had invited him, as was his custom, to make a prayer. The other fellow, though, professing himself a sinner and declaring himself unworthy of the monastic habit, would not hear of it. [Abba Serapion] then wished to wash his feet, but he did not consent, saying the same sort of thing. When [the elder] let him have some food, he began, while they were eating, to exhort him in charity saying: ‘My child, if you want to profit, remain in your cell. Mind yourself and your manual labour. Being out and about does you no good; it is much more beneficial to stay put.’ When [the brother] heard this, he was irritated. His expression changed so much he could not keep it hidden from the elder. Then Abba Serapion said to him: ‘Up until now you have been saying: “I am a sinner!” You have been declaring yourself unworthy of life itself. But then, when with love I admonished you a little, you got very cross! If, then, you truly wish to become humble, learn to bear bravely what others say to you, and do not be full of empty talk.’ Having heard these things, the brother prostrated himself before the elder and retired, greatly profited.
To speak of high ideals is delightful. It is easy to assume that by talking of virtues I acquire them, rather the way we might think that by purchasing a book we have read it.
The profile of the recent convert who holds forth endlessly on subjects of ascesis and theology after picking up a few bits here and there from sermons and books (or, these days, YouTube videos), is a type we can recognise; we may even see in it a previous version of ourselves, and blush a little.
The man who came to see Serapion was not necessarily a hypocrite. Serapion was a giant among the Fathers. A friend of Antony’s, he was mentioned in his will: when Antony lay dying he bequeathed a sheepskin to Athanasius, another to Serapion, likewise a bishop, entrusted with the Church of Thmuis in lower Egypt. Jerome says of Serapion that ‘on account of his cultivated genius he was found worthy of the surname Scholasticus’; in addition, that he wrote several excellent books and was renowned as a confessor of the faith.
Any young monk would have felt overwhelmed in this august presence, thinking it unseemly to adopt a posture of prominence by presiding at prayers. We can imagine why such a one would wholeheartedly protest when the old man proposed to bow down and, like a servant, wash his sand-encrusted feet. As Queen Gertrude in Hamlet might have said, though, the monk ‘doth protest too much, methinks’. There is too much self, and a certain satisfaction, evident in all this professed selflessness.
Serapion picks this up. He resolves to use the occasion to help his visitor grow up a little. Amiably, at table, in a dynamic of fellowship, he suggests that what this man needs is to focus on essentials, practising stability and perseverance in his cell. Why run around collecting the signatures of famous people when the one thing needful is to learn quietness, gainful work, and the art of holding one’s tongue?
On hearing this, the visitor’s face underwent visible change. Like Cain on seeing his sacrifice rejected, ‘his countenance fell’. He felt angry and hurt. Clearly he had expected commendation on account of his humility, congratulations on his effort to seek out a holy man. Instead he was asked: ‘Why aren’t you at home plaiting ropes?’ He ‘could not keep [his displeasure] hidden from the elder’, try as he might. We know how useless it is to stop ourselves blushing in public when something upsets or embarrasses us. An inward conflict is revealed at Serapion’s table. What it shows up is this: pride has a deep hold on this visitor who professed himself so humble.
Serapion’s rebuke is courteous but firm. He is concerned to let the other man see he lacks integrity. His words are not in concert with who he is. He is caught in a web of pretence. This is a trap into which people who profess faith in public may readily fall. Think of the reaction of those who heard Jesus proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount. When he finished, having evoked the fearful fall of a house not founded on rock, they were astonished at his doctrine: ‘For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.’
The Greek word for ‘authority’ is exousia. The preposition ‘ex’ means ‘out of’; ‘ousia’ is the word for ‘being’ — it comes from the same root that yields ‘ontology’. What impressed people in Jesus was the fact that his words came from what he was, an outwardly compelling, credible expression of inward truth. He was of a piece, so dependable. There is pathos in the remark, ‘not as the scribes’, a caste of religious professionals who had made the spouting of religious certainties their livelihood. Let us think twice before we look upon them with scorn. They have much in common with devout people of every age.
This story challenges us to weigh our words before we speak them. It recalls a counsel St Benedict gives in the fourth chapter of the Rule: ‘Not to wish to be called holy before one is, but to be so first, whereby one would be so called the more truly.’ It is also a story that brings me to smile wistfully. When I think back over my experience as a religious superior, I ascertain that no letters I received were more predictably obnoxious and out of touch than the ones signed, ‘Yours humbly’.
Eugène Delacroix, Hamlet and His Mother. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sts Cornelius & Cyprian
Homily given at the beginning of a retreat for the clergy of the Prelature of Tromsø.
1 Timothy 3.1-13: Let him live a worthy life.
Luke 7.11-17: Young man, I command you: Rise!
Today we commemorate two holy bishops: Cornelius and Cyprian. We remember them not least for the common front they formed against a heresy that’s still alive and well today, anno 2025. In their day it was associated with the Novatian schism. The context for it was the persecution of Christians that had raged under the Emperor Decius.
Not all Christians were heroes back then either. Some gave in to pressure and took part in rites reckoned as idolatrous. How was one to deal with such persons retrospectively?
Cornelius and Cyprian had high expectations. They presupposed years of penitential discipline. But they did maintain that a human being can, in a Christian perspective, make up for wickedness; and that God, the patient and endlessly merciful One, enables this to happen.
Novatian, by contrast, regarded a fall as final. The Church, in his view, was for the immaculate. Novatian’s standard was heroic, but terrible. It proclaimed: ‘Oh man, you’ve a single chance. If you miss it, you must manage on your own. No hand will be extended towards you.’
Such an attitude is not Catholic. That is what Cyprian and Cornelius established. The Catholic Church is not a fellowship made up of faultless paragons of virtue. The Church consists of fallible folk who know from experience what it is to fall — and to be raised up again; folk relieved of the illusion of their own perfection, who thereby have learnt to nurture hope for others, too.
For if God has shown me such kindness, why should he not likewise embrace my neighbour?
Our times are Novatian. They are prone to idealise, but also happy to see the downfall of idealised people. We gladly throw to the lions people who have let us down, or whose behaviour or mindset is distasteful to us. We like to form small, protected conventicles in which we fancy ourselves members of a select few — until, of course, we are chucked out ourselves and experience what it is like to err in the night, freezing, finding that no one opens when we ring their doorbells.
Cornelius and Cyprian remind us that mercy is a crucial category of Christian, Catholic living. Mercy is not about taking things lightly, about shrugging our shoulders and saying, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter’. Mercy is the divine quality that sees a life not just for what it is or has been, but for what it might become, and that lets God, the Almighty, loosen what is rigid, melt what is frozen, straighten what is crooked — even raise the dead.
Paul in his letter to Timothy shows us how this quality is realised in a specifically priestly life: by means of self-control, gentleness, hospitality, resistance to evil talk and diabolical snares.
Let us, then, called as we are to be fishers of men, live accordingly.
In the name of Christ! Amen.
1 Timothy 3.1-13: Let him live a worthy life.
Luke 7.11-17: Young man, I command you: Rise!
Today we commemorate two holy bishops: Cornelius and Cyprian. We remember them not least for the common front they formed against a heresy that’s still alive and well today, anno 2025. In their day it was associated with the Novatian schism. The context for it was the persecution of Christians that had raged under the Emperor Decius.
Not all Christians were heroes back then either. Some gave in to pressure and took part in rites reckoned as idolatrous. How was one to deal with such persons retrospectively?
Cornelius and Cyprian had high expectations. They presupposed years of penitential discipline. But they did maintain that a human being can, in a Christian perspective, make up for wickedness; and that God, the patient and endlessly merciful One, enables this to happen.
Novatian, by contrast, regarded a fall as final. The Church, in his view, was for the immaculate. Novatian’s standard was heroic, but terrible. It proclaimed: ‘Oh man, you’ve a single chance. If you miss it, you must manage on your own. No hand will be extended towards you.’
Such an attitude is not Catholic. That is what Cyprian and Cornelius established. The Catholic Church is not a fellowship made up of faultless paragons of virtue. The Church consists of fallible folk who know from experience what it is to fall — and to be raised up again; folk relieved of the illusion of their own perfection, who thereby have learnt to nurture hope for others, too.
For if God has shown me such kindness, why should he not likewise embrace my neighbour?
Our times are Novatian. They are prone to idealise, but also happy to see the downfall of idealised people. We gladly throw to the lions people who have let us down, or whose behaviour or mindset is distasteful to us. We like to form small, protected conventicles in which we fancy ourselves members of a select few — until, of course, we are chucked out ourselves and experience what it is like to err in the night, freezing, finding that no one opens when we ring their doorbells.
Cornelius and Cyprian remind us that mercy is a crucial category of Christian, Catholic living. Mercy is not about taking things lightly, about shrugging our shoulders and saying, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter’. Mercy is the divine quality that sees a life not just for what it is or has been, but for what it might become, and that lets God, the Almighty, loosen what is rigid, melt what is frozen, straighten what is crooked — even raise the dead.
Paul in his letter to Timothy shows us how this quality is realised in a specifically priestly life: by means of self-control, gentleness, hospitality, resistance to evil talk and diabolical snares.
Let us, then, called as we are to be fishers of men, live accordingly.
In the name of Christ! Amen.
Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Genesis 21.4-9: Make a fiery serpent and put it on a standard.
Philippians 2.5-11: Put on the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ.
John 3.13-17: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
A sermon is no history lesson, but today’s feast is so deeply rooted in particular circumstances that a little background is required. Please bear with me.
In the early seventh century, the century of Gregory the Great and Maximus the Confessor, the Persian empire, Antiquity’s Iran, was a mighty power. Persia fought against Byzantium, the continuation of Rome. The empires resemble two bulls fighting, horns interlocked. Byzantium was western in character, Persia was Oriental. Byzantium was Christian, signed with the sign of the Cross. Persia held on to its dualistic Zoroastrian creed.
In 614 the Persian Emperor Chosroes II invaded Jerusalem, then claimed as Byzantine. Chosroes was a Zoroastrian, but his wife was Christian. He understood Christian symbols, so knew what he was doing when he stole Christendom’s prime relic: the Cross of Jesus. For fifteen years the Cross remained in Persian captivity. Chosroes could have found no clearer sign of his supremacy. He displayed to his colleague, the Byzantine Emperor Heraklios, this message: ‘The crown jewel is with me!’
Only in the autumn of 629 was Heraklios able to get the cross back. He brought it to Constantinople and elevated it in Hagia Sophia. The faithful venerated the Cross, and sang. Thus the festival was founded that we keep still, with wonderful texts and tunes, like those we heard here in the cathedral at vespers last night: ‘O glorious Cross, O venerable Cross! O precious Tree and wondrous Sign! By you the evil one was conquered and the world was redeemed by the Blood of Christ.’
‘Well’, you might think, ‘that’s very nice. All worked out for the best in the end. But does this mean anything now?’
Oh yes, it does. Very much so. The story of the Cross that was looted, held hostage, instrumentalised politically; then freed and raised up in the Church, regained as a focus and criterion of faith, challenges us to think critically about how symbols of faith are used in public life. It has had that function for centuries.
Yesterday I was moved to look up the ‘Exaltation of the Cross’ in the Old Norse Book of Homilies, a collection written up in about 1200, when Trondheim, as ecclesiastical capital, was at the height of its influence and the old cathedral had acquired its own relic of the Passion in the form of a drop of Christ’s Precious Blood. The preacher takes it for granted that Norwegian churchgoers 800 years ago knew their way around the geopolitics of Antiquity. This is how he begins his homily:
[Chosroes] was the name of a heathen king of Persia. He pillaged all the way to Jerusalem, destroyed many churches, and brought away our Lord’s Cross and much other loot. Taking pride in his victory, he thought of himself as god. On a high mountain he had a glass dome built, with images of the astral bodies; there he had a seat of gold. He had water led there by means of hidden plumbing. He occasionally opened the holes in the pipes. It seemed, then, as if he provided rain from heaven, like God, and he let himself be worshiped as god.
This was what you might hear in a stave church in these parts at about the time when the first Cistercians came to Tautra. The homily lets Chosroes resemble the Old Testament King Belshazzar who, consciously blaspheming, profaned vessels pilfered from the temple in Jerusalem. He wished to prove himself superior to any institution, earthly or heavenly. You remember what happened to him. Once Belshazzar had committed abomination, ‘the fingers of a human hand appeared, and began to write on the plaster of the palace wall’. The message — mene, tekel, ufarsin — spoke of measurement, weighing, and division. It did not voice an angry judgement, simply affirmed that there are limits which for human beings are final. To transgress is to hurl oneself, and others, headlong into destruction.
According to The Old Norse Book of Homilies Khusrou ended up much like Belshazzar. It had to be. When a man thinks he is god, and makes others believe it, he falls captive to his own conceit, absolutising what is in essence pathetically finite. A painfully humiliating fall is predictable.
Belshazzar and Cosroes are recognisable as political typologies today. There is no shortage of rulers, real or aspiring, who vaunt their victories and think themselves god, who sit upon seats of pure gold and pretend to govern the heavenly bodies, squirting a little rain-pretence on the common crowd now and again.
The human model is unoriginal. What is new these days is that the Cross is again taken hostage in political discourse. This sacred sign, the image of our salvation is used (sometimes unknowingly, sometimes with cynical deliberateness) to manipulate and spur to anger, to nurture bitterness, to generate strife. This is an iniquity like that of Chosroes when from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre he stole the instrument of God’s Son’s timeless sacrifice, brought for reconciliation and the forgiveness of sin, that Adam’s fratricidal children might at last live in peace and not count as loot what is an expression of pure, unmerited grace.
As Christians, we shall bow before Christ’s Cross alone, not before any powers claiming it as theirs.
We who would truly honour the Cross shall put on the mind of Christ Jesus, not that of any demagogue.
This is a contemporaneously relevant message.
In the name of Christ! Amen.
Adam Elsheimer, The Frankfurt Altarpiece of the Exaltation of the True Cross: Heraclius on Horseback with the Cross (1603–05)
Philippians 2.5-11: Put on the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ.
John 3.13-17: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
A sermon is no history lesson, but today’s feast is so deeply rooted in particular circumstances that a little background is required. Please bear with me.
In the early seventh century, the century of Gregory the Great and Maximus the Confessor, the Persian empire, Antiquity’s Iran, was a mighty power. Persia fought against Byzantium, the continuation of Rome. The empires resemble two bulls fighting, horns interlocked. Byzantium was western in character, Persia was Oriental. Byzantium was Christian, signed with the sign of the Cross. Persia held on to its dualistic Zoroastrian creed.
In 614 the Persian Emperor Chosroes II invaded Jerusalem, then claimed as Byzantine. Chosroes was a Zoroastrian, but his wife was Christian. He understood Christian symbols, so knew what he was doing when he stole Christendom’s prime relic: the Cross of Jesus. For fifteen years the Cross remained in Persian captivity. Chosroes could have found no clearer sign of his supremacy. He displayed to his colleague, the Byzantine Emperor Heraklios, this message: ‘The crown jewel is with me!’
Only in the autumn of 629 was Heraklios able to get the cross back. He brought it to Constantinople and elevated it in Hagia Sophia. The faithful venerated the Cross, and sang. Thus the festival was founded that we keep still, with wonderful texts and tunes, like those we heard here in the cathedral at vespers last night: ‘O glorious Cross, O venerable Cross! O precious Tree and wondrous Sign! By you the evil one was conquered and the world was redeemed by the Blood of Christ.’
‘Well’, you might think, ‘that’s very nice. All worked out for the best in the end. But does this mean anything now?’
Oh yes, it does. Very much so. The story of the Cross that was looted, held hostage, instrumentalised politically; then freed and raised up in the Church, regained as a focus and criterion of faith, challenges us to think critically about how symbols of faith are used in public life. It has had that function for centuries.
Yesterday I was moved to look up the ‘Exaltation of the Cross’ in the Old Norse Book of Homilies, a collection written up in about 1200, when Trondheim, as ecclesiastical capital, was at the height of its influence and the old cathedral had acquired its own relic of the Passion in the form of a drop of Christ’s Precious Blood. The preacher takes it for granted that Norwegian churchgoers 800 years ago knew their way around the geopolitics of Antiquity. This is how he begins his homily:
[Chosroes] was the name of a heathen king of Persia. He pillaged all the way to Jerusalem, destroyed many churches, and brought away our Lord’s Cross and much other loot. Taking pride in his victory, he thought of himself as god. On a high mountain he had a glass dome built, with images of the astral bodies; there he had a seat of gold. He had water led there by means of hidden plumbing. He occasionally opened the holes in the pipes. It seemed, then, as if he provided rain from heaven, like God, and he let himself be worshiped as god.
This was what you might hear in a stave church in these parts at about the time when the first Cistercians came to Tautra. The homily lets Chosroes resemble the Old Testament King Belshazzar who, consciously blaspheming, profaned vessels pilfered from the temple in Jerusalem. He wished to prove himself superior to any institution, earthly or heavenly. You remember what happened to him. Once Belshazzar had committed abomination, ‘the fingers of a human hand appeared, and began to write on the plaster of the palace wall’. The message — mene, tekel, ufarsin — spoke of measurement, weighing, and division. It did not voice an angry judgement, simply affirmed that there are limits which for human beings are final. To transgress is to hurl oneself, and others, headlong into destruction.
According to The Old Norse Book of Homilies Khusrou ended up much like Belshazzar. It had to be. When a man thinks he is god, and makes others believe it, he falls captive to his own conceit, absolutising what is in essence pathetically finite. A painfully humiliating fall is predictable.
Belshazzar and Cosroes are recognisable as political typologies today. There is no shortage of rulers, real or aspiring, who vaunt their victories and think themselves god, who sit upon seats of pure gold and pretend to govern the heavenly bodies, squirting a little rain-pretence on the common crowd now and again.
The human model is unoriginal. What is new these days is that the Cross is again taken hostage in political discourse. This sacred sign, the image of our salvation is used (sometimes unknowingly, sometimes with cynical deliberateness) to manipulate and spur to anger, to nurture bitterness, to generate strife. This is an iniquity like that of Chosroes when from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre he stole the instrument of God’s Son’s timeless sacrifice, brought for reconciliation and the forgiveness of sin, that Adam’s fratricidal children might at last live in peace and not count as loot what is an expression of pure, unmerited grace.
As Christians, we shall bow before Christ’s Cross alone, not before any powers claiming it as theirs.
We who would truly honour the Cross shall put on the mind of Christ Jesus, not that of any demagogue.
This is a contemporaneously relevant message.
In the name of Christ! Amen.
Adam Elsheimer, The Frankfurt Altarpiece of the Exaltation of the True Cross: Heraclius on Horseback with the Cross (1603–05)
Migration to Nidaros
This evening I was part of a panel debate, co-organised by the University of Trondheim, NTNU, and the city, on migration. Having been asked to speak about religious migration to Trondheim, medieval Nidaros, I wished to say something about what got, and still gets, people moving. Here is the talk I gave.
‘Migration’ is a word that these days is negatively charged, tied up with precarious circumstances. We associate it with removal necessitated by poverty, war, or climatic change.
Migration also has another aspect, though. It can be freely embraced in pursuit of a yearned-for, desirable goal.
Biblically speaking, measurable historiography, after Genesis’s archaic accounts of creation and the fall, begins with a scene of targeted migration. Abram, a Hebrew from Haran, is told: ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you’. The dream of setting out for a homeland still unknown saturates Scripture. That dream has left its mark on our whole culture.
Positively proposed migration occurs in Greece, too. While the Hebrews regarded the sea sceptically — preferring movement inland — the Greeks pined for the waves. Odysseus’s daring voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules is an image of an urge defining national sensibility.
Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings, unites these two tendencies (the Hebrews’ towards Home, the Greeks’ towards an open horizon) in his notion of the Sea-Longing that stirs generous hearts, like that of the Hobbit Frodo when, safely slumbering deep in the Shire, ‘he heard a noise in the distance. He knew that it was not leaves, but the sounds of the Sea far-off; a sound he had never heard in waking life, though it had often troubled his dreams. A great desire came over him to climb the tower and see the Sea.’
Once you are possessed of Sea-Longing it is a costly business just to wander up and down along a furrow in a walled-in field. You yearn then to be away, your heart, soul, and body filled with a homesickness that makes any temporal or spatial belonging appear absurd. You wish not only to see the Sea from a high tower, but to immerse yourself in it and remain there, freed of limitation, drawn ever further towards what is open, eternal, absolute.
This perspective is needed, I believe, to understand faith-based migration to Nidaros through the centuries. People came as pilgrims here to pray before the shrine of St Olav, to venerate his relics, not because they thought of his remains as talismanic, but because they recognised Olav (not the idea of him, but the person, physically present) as a tool chosen by God to communicate divine power.
Olav, the seafarer, carried a rush of the Sea in himself across death’s boundary. People heard that rush here in the Christchurch, our cathedral, even as it echoed in the numerous Olav’s wells throughout the country. Pilgrims sought living water here. And found it.
The first migrant known to us who set out to honour Olav’s relics was no sailor. The text known as Passio Olavi, written in the mid-twelfth century, speaks of a blind man who, in the evening of 29 July 1030, the day Olav died, walked past the house up near Stiklestad where the fallen king’s body had been washed. The man turned up late, perhaps to examine whether there were things of value left on the battlefield. The king’s servants had poured the bloody water used for washing out in front of the door. The blind man slipped in it and fell. We can imagine him uttering words not found in a prayerbook. But as he lay there, struggling, he touched his face with his moist hands — and at once he, a blind man, could see.
This miracle fits into a genre well known to us from the Gospels. Jesus’s power reveals itself above all as illumination. Think of the man-born-blind in St John’s Gospel. Jesus takes dust from the ground, mixes it with spittle, materialised breath, and forms clay like that used by the Lord God on the Sixth Day to make Adam. Sight was given him who had never seen. Think of the beggar Bartimaeus who, sitting by the roadside, having called out to Jesus, bound for Calvary, ‘Lord, that I might see!’, could suddenly see and followed Jesus on his Passion-path. Think of the theologians, so sure of their clear-sightedness, who were told they were blind. And think of this: in the early Church, baptism, the gateway into Christian experience, was referred to as Photismos, ‘Enlightenment’, to designate, precisely, a definitive transition from darkness to light, death to light, blindness to sight.
Pilgrims sought out St Olav sure that he, recognised by the Church as a friend of Christ and a witness to death’s defeat, could effect for them illumination in the name of Jesus at every level. Many prayers were heard. As Sigvat Tordarson sang in Erfidrápa, a poem composed about 1040, ten years after Olav’s death: ‘The king is now with God; many a blind man come to him goes briskly away from the royal tomb, eyesight restored to him.’
Not only the physically blind turned up. Others, like Kristin Lavransdatter, sought a remedy for soul-darkness: they would atone for some unkind deed; they hoped for reconciliation after doing wrong. It is far from banal that places should exist where women and men might come without shame, though conscious of having comprised their dignity, to confess, ‘I am not, like the trolls, sufficient unto myself; I am wounded, imperfect’, in order, then, to be concretely helped to repair inward and outward damage, and to get courage required to set out afresh.
For hundreds of years Nidaros was a place where such things happened.
We now ascertain that the wave of pilgrims is rising again. It says something about awareness of fragility in our precarious world — also, I’d say, about a growing recognition that God might not, after all, be a fairytale, but supremely real. There is to this day a ray of dawn to be found in Nidaros, and the rush of the Sea.
In a late poem Tolkien wrote: ‘I sat on the ruined margin of the deep-voiced echoing sea/Whose roaring foaming music crashed in endless cadency’. He called the call he heard an ‘unfathomed breath’, sure that he would hear it ’till my death’, and even beyond.
Such luminous music resounded here in this place a thousand years ago. Listening people heard it, perceived it as a call, and followed. Some still do.
Wikimedia Commons.
‘Migration’ is a word that these days is negatively charged, tied up with precarious circumstances. We associate it with removal necessitated by poverty, war, or climatic change.
Migration also has another aspect, though. It can be freely embraced in pursuit of a yearned-for, desirable goal.
Biblically speaking, measurable historiography, after Genesis’s archaic accounts of creation and the fall, begins with a scene of targeted migration. Abram, a Hebrew from Haran, is told: ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you’. The dream of setting out for a homeland still unknown saturates Scripture. That dream has left its mark on our whole culture.
Positively proposed migration occurs in Greece, too. While the Hebrews regarded the sea sceptically — preferring movement inland — the Greeks pined for the waves. Odysseus’s daring voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules is an image of an urge defining national sensibility.
Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings, unites these two tendencies (the Hebrews’ towards Home, the Greeks’ towards an open horizon) in his notion of the Sea-Longing that stirs generous hearts, like that of the Hobbit Frodo when, safely slumbering deep in the Shire, ‘he heard a noise in the distance. He knew that it was not leaves, but the sounds of the Sea far-off; a sound he had never heard in waking life, though it had often troubled his dreams. A great desire came over him to climb the tower and see the Sea.’
Once you are possessed of Sea-Longing it is a costly business just to wander up and down along a furrow in a walled-in field. You yearn then to be away, your heart, soul, and body filled with a homesickness that makes any temporal or spatial belonging appear absurd. You wish not only to see the Sea from a high tower, but to immerse yourself in it and remain there, freed of limitation, drawn ever further towards what is open, eternal, absolute.
This perspective is needed, I believe, to understand faith-based migration to Nidaros through the centuries. People came as pilgrims here to pray before the shrine of St Olav, to venerate his relics, not because they thought of his remains as talismanic, but because they recognised Olav (not the idea of him, but the person, physically present) as a tool chosen by God to communicate divine power.
Olav, the seafarer, carried a rush of the Sea in himself across death’s boundary. People heard that rush here in the Christchurch, our cathedral, even as it echoed in the numerous Olav’s wells throughout the country. Pilgrims sought living water here. And found it.
The first migrant known to us who set out to honour Olav’s relics was no sailor. The text known as Passio Olavi, written in the mid-twelfth century, speaks of a blind man who, in the evening of 29 July 1030, the day Olav died, walked past the house up near Stiklestad where the fallen king’s body had been washed. The man turned up late, perhaps to examine whether there were things of value left on the battlefield. The king’s servants had poured the bloody water used for washing out in front of the door. The blind man slipped in it and fell. We can imagine him uttering words not found in a prayerbook. But as he lay there, struggling, he touched his face with his moist hands — and at once he, a blind man, could see.
This miracle fits into a genre well known to us from the Gospels. Jesus’s power reveals itself above all as illumination. Think of the man-born-blind in St John’s Gospel. Jesus takes dust from the ground, mixes it with spittle, materialised breath, and forms clay like that used by the Lord God on the Sixth Day to make Adam. Sight was given him who had never seen. Think of the beggar Bartimaeus who, sitting by the roadside, having called out to Jesus, bound for Calvary, ‘Lord, that I might see!’, could suddenly see and followed Jesus on his Passion-path. Think of the theologians, so sure of their clear-sightedness, who were told they were blind. And think of this: in the early Church, baptism, the gateway into Christian experience, was referred to as Photismos, ‘Enlightenment’, to designate, precisely, a definitive transition from darkness to light, death to light, blindness to sight.
Pilgrims sought out St Olav sure that he, recognised by the Church as a friend of Christ and a witness to death’s defeat, could effect for them illumination in the name of Jesus at every level. Many prayers were heard. As Sigvat Tordarson sang in Erfidrápa, a poem composed about 1040, ten years after Olav’s death: ‘The king is now with God; many a blind man come to him goes briskly away from the royal tomb, eyesight restored to him.’
Not only the physically blind turned up. Others, like Kristin Lavransdatter, sought a remedy for soul-darkness: they would atone for some unkind deed; they hoped for reconciliation after doing wrong. It is far from banal that places should exist where women and men might come without shame, though conscious of having comprised their dignity, to confess, ‘I am not, like the trolls, sufficient unto myself; I am wounded, imperfect’, in order, then, to be concretely helped to repair inward and outward damage, and to get courage required to set out afresh.
For hundreds of years Nidaros was a place where such things happened.
We now ascertain that the wave of pilgrims is rising again. It says something about awareness of fragility in our precarious world — also, I’d say, about a growing recognition that God might not, after all, be a fairytale, but supremely real. There is to this day a ray of dawn to be found in Nidaros, and the rush of the Sea.
In a late poem Tolkien wrote: ‘I sat on the ruined margin of the deep-voiced echoing sea/Whose roaring foaming music crashed in endless cadency’. He called the call he heard an ‘unfathomed breath’, sure that he would hear it ’till my death’, and even beyond.
Such luminous music resounded here in this place a thousand years ago. Listening people heard it, perceived it as a call, and followed. Some still do.
Wikimedia Commons.
Hemingway and AI
Hemingway on the creative process: ‘I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write the one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.’ An exercise AI could never accomplish. It matters to have ears attuned to the true.
Desert Fathers 38
You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Another brother asked [Theodore of Pherme]: ‘Abba, would you like that I eat no bread for a few days?’ The elder said to him: ‘You would do well; I myself have done likewise.’ The brother then said to him: ‘Right, I would like to take my chickpeas to the baker’s to get meal made.’ Abba Theodore replied: ‘If you are going to the baker’s, make bread! What need is there for such an expedition?!’
The Gospel tells us we are to be the light of the world. It exhorts us not to put our lamp under a bushel. On the contrary: ’Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.’ Need we be scrupulous about displaying manifestly good deeds?
To address the question, let us first note a few things about the Gospel’s words. They occur in Mathew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, just after the Beatitudes. They presuppose poverty of spirit, meekness, purity of heart, and so forth. They are linked to the new existence Christ came to enable. Jesus alone is ‘the light of the world.’ We are light in so far as we live in him. This decisive transposition must take place before we can reveal his light to others. That is why the Lord goes on to specify that our light is given in the form of a lamp whose brightness is not one with us but given us to carry.
Spontaneously we think of the parable later in Matthew, about the wise and foolish virgins. To be entrusted with a lamp is one thing, to make sure it keeps on burning is another. For that, the lamp requires fuel we cannot provide from our resources; we must get it from elsewhere. The fuel is God’s gratuitous grace, his gift of the Spirit. The more we are conscious that the light illumining our path, and through us that of others, is given freely, without any merit on our part, the more we shall carry it unselfconsciously.
Those whom the Desert Fathers designate as luminous are almost always people who have no idea that others see God’s light in them: it would not occur to them to look in a mirror. All their attention is oriented towards God’s gracious, gladsome bounty. If on occasion a monk is consciously blessed with a luminous visitation, he will strive to ensure that no one else suspects the graces vouchsafed to him, the way Arsenius did when a passer-by surprised him in ecstasy while he, beholding God, was ‘entirely like a flame’. The Fathers are coy about their graces. To God alone belongs the glory.
The story about the brother proposing to fast from bread is like a cartoon strip. It reveals how silly we make ourselves look when we try to be exalted. The brother’s inspiration is estimable. He does what St Benedict prescribes that monks should do when, during Lent, say, they ‘add to the usual measure of […] service something by way of private prayer and abstinence from food and drink’. Wishing to make his offering ‘of his own will with the joy of the Holy Spirit’, conscious of the risk of presumption inherent in merely private initiative, the monk is asked to make known to his spiritual father what he proposes, seeking his prayer and approval. If the father approves, he can go ahead. The monk does all this by the book. It is quite fine.
The mistake he makes regards the implementation of his scheme. Abstaining from bread, he has to eat something. Dried chickpeas will let him cook a tolerably nutritious mush, but he needs to get his peas ground. How better than by looking up the baker who normally provides his bread, asking him to run the chickpeas through his mill?
We can imagine the exchange between the two as the bakery doorbell tinkles. ‘Hullo’. ‘Hullo’. ‘The usual loaf?’ ‘Uh, not today, thanks. But would you grind these chickpeas for me?’ ‘Chickpeas!’ ‘Yes, you see my spiritual Father thinks now me ripe for advancement in mystical life, so I will fast more and forego bread.’ The talk is innocuous enough, yet a dark shade spreads over an initially generous proposal. There is self-congratulation in the explanation. It would be strange if the monk did not think the baker would think: ‘Blessed am I to have such holy monks as my clients!’ The chances, though, are that he would not think this at all, but rather: ‘Buh! Another blooming show-off!’ That is why Theodore tells him: ‘Stuff yourself rather with bread!’ Ostentation would make fasting worthless. If I wish to be generous, I should keep it secret, not letting even my left hand know what my right is doing.
Theodore rather specialised in counsels against vainglory. When a brother came to him asking for a word, he sent him away gruffly. Asked why, he said: ‘That man is a merchant wishing to gain glory for himself from the words of others!’ When another monk came to talk about things he did not practise, Theodore said, speaking like Antony in naval terms: ‘You have not yet found a boat or charged it with cargo, yet before having sailed you have arrived in town. First do the works, then you can broach the subjects you now prattle about.’ If Theodore kept stressing this point, it suggests he knew a thing or two about it from experience. That is encouraging. If we fight residual weaknesses, we shall gain wisdom that, with time, may benefit others.
A grand old baker, Michel Vallet. His obituary states: ‘Il aura formé de nombreux apprentis à qui il avait su communiquer sa passion, la fabrication du bon pain n’avait aucun secret pour lui’. I wonder what he would have said to a self-assured young monk turning up at his bakery in Rugles with a bag of chickpeas.
Another brother asked [Theodore of Pherme]: ‘Abba, would you like that I eat no bread for a few days?’ The elder said to him: ‘You would do well; I myself have done likewise.’ The brother then said to him: ‘Right, I would like to take my chickpeas to the baker’s to get meal made.’ Abba Theodore replied: ‘If you are going to the baker’s, make bread! What need is there for such an expedition?!’
The Gospel tells us we are to be the light of the world. It exhorts us not to put our lamp under a bushel. On the contrary: ’Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.’ Need we be scrupulous about displaying manifestly good deeds?
To address the question, let us first note a few things about the Gospel’s words. They occur in Mathew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, just after the Beatitudes. They presuppose poverty of spirit, meekness, purity of heart, and so forth. They are linked to the new existence Christ came to enable. Jesus alone is ‘the light of the world.’ We are light in so far as we live in him. This decisive transposition must take place before we can reveal his light to others. That is why the Lord goes on to specify that our light is given in the form of a lamp whose brightness is not one with us but given us to carry.
Spontaneously we think of the parable later in Matthew, about the wise and foolish virgins. To be entrusted with a lamp is one thing, to make sure it keeps on burning is another. For that, the lamp requires fuel we cannot provide from our resources; we must get it from elsewhere. The fuel is God’s gratuitous grace, his gift of the Spirit. The more we are conscious that the light illumining our path, and through us that of others, is given freely, without any merit on our part, the more we shall carry it unselfconsciously.
Those whom the Desert Fathers designate as luminous are almost always people who have no idea that others see God’s light in them: it would not occur to them to look in a mirror. All their attention is oriented towards God’s gracious, gladsome bounty. If on occasion a monk is consciously blessed with a luminous visitation, he will strive to ensure that no one else suspects the graces vouchsafed to him, the way Arsenius did when a passer-by surprised him in ecstasy while he, beholding God, was ‘entirely like a flame’. The Fathers are coy about their graces. To God alone belongs the glory.
The story about the brother proposing to fast from bread is like a cartoon strip. It reveals how silly we make ourselves look when we try to be exalted. The brother’s inspiration is estimable. He does what St Benedict prescribes that monks should do when, during Lent, say, they ‘add to the usual measure of […] service something by way of private prayer and abstinence from food and drink’. Wishing to make his offering ‘of his own will with the joy of the Holy Spirit’, conscious of the risk of presumption inherent in merely private initiative, the monk is asked to make known to his spiritual father what he proposes, seeking his prayer and approval. If the father approves, he can go ahead. The monk does all this by the book. It is quite fine.
The mistake he makes regards the implementation of his scheme. Abstaining from bread, he has to eat something. Dried chickpeas will let him cook a tolerably nutritious mush, but he needs to get his peas ground. How better than by looking up the baker who normally provides his bread, asking him to run the chickpeas through his mill?
We can imagine the exchange between the two as the bakery doorbell tinkles. ‘Hullo’. ‘Hullo’. ‘The usual loaf?’ ‘Uh, not today, thanks. But would you grind these chickpeas for me?’ ‘Chickpeas!’ ‘Yes, you see my spiritual Father thinks now me ripe for advancement in mystical life, so I will fast more and forego bread.’ The talk is innocuous enough, yet a dark shade spreads over an initially generous proposal. There is self-congratulation in the explanation. It would be strange if the monk did not think the baker would think: ‘Blessed am I to have such holy monks as my clients!’ The chances, though, are that he would not think this at all, but rather: ‘Buh! Another blooming show-off!’ That is why Theodore tells him: ‘Stuff yourself rather with bread!’ Ostentation would make fasting worthless. If I wish to be generous, I should keep it secret, not letting even my left hand know what my right is doing.
Theodore rather specialised in counsels against vainglory. When a brother came to him asking for a word, he sent him away gruffly. Asked why, he said: ‘That man is a merchant wishing to gain glory for himself from the words of others!’ When another monk came to talk about things he did not practise, Theodore said, speaking like Antony in naval terms: ‘You have not yet found a boat or charged it with cargo, yet before having sailed you have arrived in town. First do the works, then you can broach the subjects you now prattle about.’ If Theodore kept stressing this point, it suggests he knew a thing or two about it from experience. That is encouraging. If we fight residual weaknesses, we shall gain wisdom that, with time, may benefit others.
A grand old baker, Michel Vallet. His obituary states: ‘Il aura formé de nombreux apprentis à qui il avait su communiquer sa passion, la fabrication du bon pain n’avait aucun secret pour lui’. I wonder what he would have said to a self-assured young monk turning up at his bakery in Rugles with a bag of chickpeas.
Nativity of Mary
Today’s feast invites us to consider that God, who entered history as male, with a gendered specificity that cannot be abstracted; that this God who became man and a man, in whose image and glory we are called to have a share, began his existence in a woman’s womb. The biological process remains a paradigm for ecclesial life. Christ’s birth is both an historical datum and a continuous mystery of transformation. It was not by coincidence that Christians of antiquity adorned the apses of their churches, just above the altar, with wondrous representations of the Theotokos. The Church, Lumen Gentium teaches us, is Marian in essence. This, too, points to a gendered specificity that seeks coherent expression. Only therein will we as believers and members of the Church, whether we are women or men, find our true, essential form. In this symbolic, sacramental interaction of masculinity and femininity, fundamental to Catholic life, we shall find, of this I am convinced, the true response to painful perplexities present in our time. This response is already formulated, thank God; it needn’t be invented anew. From a homily for 8 September.
23 Sunday C
Wisdom 9.13-18: What man can know the intentions of God?
Philemon 9-17: I am sending him back with a part of my own self.
Luke 14.25-33: None can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.
Tomorrow is election day in Norway. We shall all exercise our civil right to vote. A month ago I got an SMS from the Election Department reminding me of my responsibility. It is healthy that the state does things like that. It shows that democracy is working.
What will be the result of the election? Even experienced journalists desist from speculation. We Norwegians have become unpredictable, politically speaking. Many of us vacillate from one party to another, speculating a little on various sides.
Voting has become a bit like shopping. We look for good offers, and expect good service, attention, and some fun along the way. I suppose that is why politicians have made such an effort, in this campaign, to try to entertain.
But is this how a society is founded and maintained?
I’ll leave that question hanging, should any of you wish to give it further thought.
What concerns me here, however, is not the question of voting boxes, but the Gospel we have heard. The text is a stern one. It speaks of radical departure, of perseverance, of the pain fidelity may bring. Jesus rarely speaks more austerely than when he explains what it means to be a disciple.
But is he not exaggerating? Yes, he is. When he says that ‘If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple’, it is in order to give us a good shake, to help us wake up to the importance of what is being said. These words must be understood in the light of the great, defining commandment: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’.
He does not ask us to literally hate; but to understand that to follow Jesus is a serious business. It must be our life’s priority number one.
We cannot be Christians just now-and-again, when we feel like it or find we have the energy.
For it is about more than just us, our needs and wants. The Lord calls us into his Church so that we may assist him in his great work: the world’s salvation. He needs people he can rely on, who do what they have promised to do; women and men whose ‘Yes’ means ‘Yes’, whose ‘No’ means ‘No’.
Precisely because we have so largely lost the notion of permanent engagement, be it in politics or in family or consecrated life, we do need Jesus’s words as a standard by which to measure ourselves. Am I faithful in my discipleship, ready to serve when the Lord requires me? Or do I prefer to keep busy with my own stuff, regarding the faith as a pastime?
Jesus gives us two parables to show what he means. The images are powerful.
The first parable compares Christian life to a building project. To start building something, we need a clear plan and sufficient resources. Few of us can afford, at the same time, to build a home in Molde and to holiday in the Maldives.
Any building project calls for sacrifice, whether we are constructing a tower, a romantic relationship, or a life of faith. Sometimes we shall be tempted to give up; it seems simpler to start afresh with something (or someone) else – but is there any joy in leaving a trajectory lined by an increasing number of monuments to keenly begun but swiftly abandoned enterprise? By building we mature. In this way our lives become an edifice, whose architect-in-chief is the Lord. There he constructs a home for himself; there we would hope to create a hospitable place where other people can find comfort, sustenance, warmth.
The second image Jesus uses provides contrast, but points in the same direction. It speaks of a king setting out for war. Is his campaign to succeed, he must have a strategic plan and a sufficiency of soldiers. Life is in so many ways a battle. It has sweetness, by all means; there is much to rejoice in and enjoy. But human existence simply isn’t a trip to the beach with deckchairs, parasols, and endless jugs of piña colada. Many voices round about us would like to make us believe that life is, or ought to be, like that. By holding forth such promises they mobilise (with not much trouble, it must be said) our most egocentric and childish responses.
The world, meanwhile, is on fire; humanity is ailing; hopelessness spreads. And we, we are called to be the servants and friends of Christ Jesus, with a great task to undertake in his name.
Let us use this Sunday to renew our Christian commitment. Let us remember that life, the way we understand it as Christians, cannot be reduced to shallow promises of more free time and more comfortable living. Life, as today’s collect reminds us, is about ‘true freedom and everlasting life’. We cannot be satisfied with less.
‘True freedom and everlasting life’! That is not, incidentally, a bad perspective to keep in mind as we prepare to vote tomorrow.
In the name of Jesus! Amen.
Philemon 9-17: I am sending him back with a part of my own self.
Luke 14.25-33: None can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.
Tomorrow is election day in Norway. We shall all exercise our civil right to vote. A month ago I got an SMS from the Election Department reminding me of my responsibility. It is healthy that the state does things like that. It shows that democracy is working.
What will be the result of the election? Even experienced journalists desist from speculation. We Norwegians have become unpredictable, politically speaking. Many of us vacillate from one party to another, speculating a little on various sides.
Voting has become a bit like shopping. We look for good offers, and expect good service, attention, and some fun along the way. I suppose that is why politicians have made such an effort, in this campaign, to try to entertain.
But is this how a society is founded and maintained?
I’ll leave that question hanging, should any of you wish to give it further thought.
What concerns me here, however, is not the question of voting boxes, but the Gospel we have heard. The text is a stern one. It speaks of radical departure, of perseverance, of the pain fidelity may bring. Jesus rarely speaks more austerely than when he explains what it means to be a disciple.
But is he not exaggerating? Yes, he is. When he says that ‘If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple’, it is in order to give us a good shake, to help us wake up to the importance of what is being said. These words must be understood in the light of the great, defining commandment: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’.
He does not ask us to literally hate; but to understand that to follow Jesus is a serious business. It must be our life’s priority number one.
We cannot be Christians just now-and-again, when we feel like it or find we have the energy.
For it is about more than just us, our needs and wants. The Lord calls us into his Church so that we may assist him in his great work: the world’s salvation. He needs people he can rely on, who do what they have promised to do; women and men whose ‘Yes’ means ‘Yes’, whose ‘No’ means ‘No’.
Precisely because we have so largely lost the notion of permanent engagement, be it in politics or in family or consecrated life, we do need Jesus’s words as a standard by which to measure ourselves. Am I faithful in my discipleship, ready to serve when the Lord requires me? Or do I prefer to keep busy with my own stuff, regarding the faith as a pastime?
Jesus gives us two parables to show what he means. The images are powerful.
The first parable compares Christian life to a building project. To start building something, we need a clear plan and sufficient resources. Few of us can afford, at the same time, to build a home in Molde and to holiday in the Maldives.
Any building project calls for sacrifice, whether we are constructing a tower, a romantic relationship, or a life of faith. Sometimes we shall be tempted to give up; it seems simpler to start afresh with something (or someone) else – but is there any joy in leaving a trajectory lined by an increasing number of monuments to keenly begun but swiftly abandoned enterprise? By building we mature. In this way our lives become an edifice, whose architect-in-chief is the Lord. There he constructs a home for himself; there we would hope to create a hospitable place where other people can find comfort, sustenance, warmth.
The second image Jesus uses provides contrast, but points in the same direction. It speaks of a king setting out for war. Is his campaign to succeed, he must have a strategic plan and a sufficiency of soldiers. Life is in so many ways a battle. It has sweetness, by all means; there is much to rejoice in and enjoy. But human existence simply isn’t a trip to the beach with deckchairs, parasols, and endless jugs of piña colada. Many voices round about us would like to make us believe that life is, or ought to be, like that. By holding forth such promises they mobilise (with not much trouble, it must be said) our most egocentric and childish responses.
The world, meanwhile, is on fire; humanity is ailing; hopelessness spreads. And we, we are called to be the servants and friends of Christ Jesus, with a great task to undertake in his name.
Let us use this Sunday to renew our Christian commitment. Let us remember that life, the way we understand it as Christians, cannot be reduced to shallow promises of more free time and more comfortable living. Life, as today’s collect reminds us, is about ‘true freedom and everlasting life’. We cannot be satisfied with less.
‘True freedom and everlasting life’! That is not, incidentally, a bad perspective to keep in mind as we prepare to vote tomorrow.
In the name of Jesus! Amen.