Superman | hughdbryant

Sermon for Evensong on 30th July 2017, Seventh Sunday after Trinity
1 Kings 6:11-14, 23-28; Acts 12:1-17
See http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=368280207 for the readings

On Tuesday, the people of England will start to turn to Europe. August is not just the time when Paris, and Rome, and Bologna are deserted, and those delicious little cafés in the back streets have the shutters up and a small card in the window telling you of the ‘fermeture annuelle’, that the family will be back at the beginning of September: now something rather similar affects our own City of London and the great commercial centres of Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol, among others.

It’s holiday time! There are hardy perennial indications, of course. Where have the great and good gone on holiday? Ah, there’s Theresa May and her hedge-fund husband, looking relaxed in dark glasses and what her office assures us is a Marks and Spencer knockoff of a nice designer top, striding forth into the pedestrian zone in Como in search of the perfect cappuccino.

And perhaps – especially since she’s a churchgoer, (at least at home), Mrs May might step into one of those lovely Italian churches. Perhaps she will be tracing the work of Piero Della Francesca.

And what she could be seeing, I feel sure, (from my intimate knowledge of such people on holiday, of course) is cherubs. Putti, cherubim and seraphim. ‘To thee Cherubin and Seraphin: continually do cry’. (The Book of Common Prayer, Morning Prayer, Te Deum Laudamus – We praise thee, O God)

Actually in my mind’s eye there’s a range of possibilities, where cherubs are concerned. On the one hand I do think of putti, those little stone carved babies that you find decorating churches and holding up the vaulting in cathedrals. Definitely babies, not grown-up angels – ‘cherubic’ is an adjective that you wouldn’t use for a grown-up, except perhaps for a smile.

The other angels are seraphs, of course.

‘Thus spake the seraph, and forthwith
Appeared a shining throng ..’

[Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, carol, ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night’, music by Georg F. Händel]

Again, what the seraphs look like is hard to say, except again that the adjective derived from their name, ‘seraphic’, is usually applied to a smile. So whatever they look like in general, seraphs are, typically, smiling.

All this angel-stuff is all very well if you are happy with a vision of heaven which is like a special palace, a paradise above the clouds, where God lives surrounded by his holy saints and angels. Of course it’s what the artists and sculptors whose masterpieces fill those Italian churches – and to some extent also our own churches and cathedrals – depict. Any decent picture of the Ascension has Jesus being helped to lift off by angels, and indeed, by cherubim, by cherubs, little angels.

So understandably, when Solomon wanted to build a house on earth, a temple, for the One True God, in Jerusalem, which his father David had conquered, he built something like his idea of heaven, including cherubs. But these cherubs were statues representing rather major architectural structures, not angelic babies. The two cherubs here are ten cubits high. A cubit was the length of a forearm, 18 inches: so they were about 15 feet high. And their wings – they’re definitely angels, because they’ve got wings – were ten cubits wingspan: ‘from the uttermost part of one wing unto the uttermost part of the other’. 15ft wingspan. Bigger than humans.

St Peter certainly had good reason to thank an angel, who rescued him when he had been put in prison by King Herod – not the Herod who condemned Jesus, but Herod Agrippa I, a grandson. This Herod is reported to have had a shaky relationship with the Jews over whom he reigned, as client king, for the Romans. This may explain his persecution of the Christians, so as to curry favour with his Jewish subjects.

There are apparent parallels between this story of Peter’s imprisonment and the actual Passion of Jesus. Both stories took place at the time of the festival of Unleavened Bread, the Passover. Also, Herod intended to ‘bring Jesus out to the people’ after the festival, much in the way that Jesus was brought out for the people to choose between him and Barabbas to be pardoned.

But this ‘angel’ is called an ‘angel of the Lord’, αγγελος κυρίου – which also, and perhaps more naturally, means a ‘messenger of the lord’; yes, a messenger. The business with wings and heading upwards to heaven is perhaps something extra which we could get, infer, from the Old Testament story: but perhaps these days we should be a bit cautious about doing that.

What we have in 1 Kings is a description of Solomon’s Temple, the first Jewish temple. In it we have a description of two statues or structures in the sanctuary: ‘within the oracle he made two cherubims of olive tree’. It wasn’t whatever the cherubs were supposed to resemble or stand for which was being described, but rather the representations, the statues.

So the question arises how reliable any of the pictures of cherubs really is. Are we to think of Superman, or at least Robin to Jesus’ Batman? Or is an ‘angel’ just a messenger?

‘Just a messenger’ probably won’t do, as an explanation. What sort of a messenger? The angel might say, ’I bring a message from God.’ Can you visualise that, in your mind’s eye? How would you react? Here’s St Peter’s prison escape story again.

‘All at once an angel of the Lord stood there, and the cell was ablaze with light. He tapped Peter on the shoulder and woke him. ‘Quick! Get up’, he said, and the chains fell away from his wrists.
The angel then said to him, ‘Do up your belt and put your sandals on.’ He did so. ‘Now wrap your cloak round you and follow me.’

He followed him out, with no idea that the angel’s intervention was real: he thought it was just a vision.’ (Acts 12:7-9, NEB)

That was the exciting bit of our New Testament lesson. On the face of things it was a bit more than a simple courier service that St Peter benefitted from.

I worry a bit about the Richard Dawkins faction here. On the face of things, if one really thinks of St Peter as being rescued by some divine Batman or Superman, I think it might lay us open to scientific scorn. The Dawkinses might say, with some justification, ‘But that’s not how things work!’ They know how flesh and blood operate, and that we can be sure that Superman & Co couldn’t do some of their more spectacular stunts except in computer-generated images in the cinema – or with obvious technical assistance such as one of Yves Rossy’s jet-packs. I slightly worry that such people’s simple faith is vulnerable to a scientific challenge – that, if God is understood as everything we believe in but don’t understand, as we get to learn more and more, so God becomes less and less.

But even so, there are many people, even today, who do say they have been helped by angels, who either don’t worry about the luxury residence above the clouds – for them it doesn’t have to be literally true – or who have an idea of God which allows for cherubic or seraphic interventions. This is how I think they do it.

Just as we may understand God’s Holy Spirit as being in us, in the way that St Paul did, as he put it in Romans 8:9, ‘You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you’, so if God is in us, we could argue that God’s messengers, his angels, are likely to be round about us too, personified by our friends and fellow-Christians. You might have an angel in you, and you be that angel’s eyes and ears.

So when we say to someone like me (when I have done my annual washing-up duty,) ‘You are an angel’, there might just be a bit more to it. We can all play host to an angel. Some of us are, of course, more cherubic than others.

Sermon for Evensong at All Saints, Penarth, on the 6th Sunday after Trinity, 16th July 2023

2 Samuel 7:18-29

Luke 19:41 – 20:8

See https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=556283310

When I was little, my folks, especially my Dad, were very fond of a TV show which I think went out on Sunday nights, called the Dave Allen Show. It featured an Irish comedian called Dave Allen. I remember the way the shows always ended. Dave Allen would be sitting on top of a high stool, nursing a glass of Irish whiskey and, somewhat improbably, smoking a cigarette. He would say some warm words of farewell to his audience, and as the applause died down, he would sign off with the same greeting every week: – “May your God go with you”.

I’ve always found that rather intriguing. It seemed to me that Dave Allen had this picture of everyone having their own private God in their pocket, almost like some kind of super talisman or a piece of ‘Kryptonite’, if you prefer a Superman analogy. Maybe he just wanted to acknowledge the fact that, in his audience of millions, there would be people who had many different beliefs, followed different religions – which is perhaps another way of saying that they followed different gods.

And certainly, when we look at the story of King David making his prayer to God, after he had asked the prophet Nathan to consult God about whether he should make a house for God, now that he himself as a king had a nice house made of cedar wood, in that context, in those days, it looks as though when David was thanking him, for all that he had done for him and the people of Israel, that he was their God, and not a god for anyone else. Indeed it did look as though your religious belief then was all about finding a god who was stronger than your enemy’s god or even your neighbour’s god.

The people of Israel had come in to the promised land out of Egypt; and they had quite a lot of fighting to do against the indigenous people whom they displaced. I don’t want to get involved in discussing Zionism on this occasion, but I did want to point out that people have seemed to have understood what it is to be a God, or to be God, in a fairly local, parochial, sort of way. So they worshipped the one true God partly, we could say, in a Dave Allen sort of way. He was their God, and it was the foundation of their success, or at least of the survival of Israel.

The prophet Nathan told King David that he had consulted God and God did not want David to make a house for him, but David did bring the Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, to Jerusalem, to his capital city, so there was a sense in which God was local; the Israelites’ God, supporting them against the other people and their gods. But God told Nathan that up to that time he had never lived in a house, but rather had lived in a tent or a tabernacle.

There was a sense in which God and the king were tied up with each other. God wasn’t based anywhere, but He was with the king. It’s a very persistent idea, the idea of the divine right of kings, even in our history. So by having the Ark of the Covenant in his capital, David, in one sense, had God behind him, or possibly, in the Dave Allen sense, somewhere even closer.

But we might feel that’s not quite right, I think. Because surely God is much bigger than that. If he is all powerful, all knowing, the creator – and he may not be ‘he’ or just ‘he’ alone; for instance he could be he, she, they – or all of them. And indeed when David makes his prayer – which was our Old Testament lesson – you can see that he understands how much bigger God is than anything else.

‘Therefore you are great, O Lord God; for there is no one like you, and there is no God besides you, according to all that we have heard with our ears’.

But at the same time David also thinks that God is in his pocket too:

‘Who is like your people, like Israel? Is there another nation on earth whose God went to redeem it as a people, and to make a name for himself, doing great and awesome things for them, by driving out before his people nations and their gods?’

My God is mightier than you other people’s gods.

Then along came Solomon and built the first temple. So although God had told Nathan that he didn’t need a house, nevertheless eventually he got one. That temple lasted 400-odd years from 957BC till 587 when the Israelites were captured by the Babylonians and taken into exile. ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’ And the temple was destroyed. Fortunately, 70-odd years later, Cyrus, the Persian king, liberated them from the Babylonians and let them go back and rebuild the temple. It was finished in 515BC. It was God’s house, the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept; where worship took place and sacrifices were made.

We come back to it 500 years later, when we read in our New Testament lesson from Saint Luke’s gospel, which is a passage taken just after the Palm Sunday story, and Jesus prophesies the overthrow and destruction of Jerusalem. He went on to throw out the moneychangers and people doing business of one kind or another within the bounds of the temple. “My house shall be a house of prayer; but you have made it a den of robbers”. It was an accurate prophecy because the Romans destroyed the temple in 70AD.

The beginning and end of the story of the Temple, the House of God, and the two different ways of thinking of God, living in a house or being over all houses, not confined, were mentioned in one of the first great Christian sermons, when St Stephen went through the history of the people of Israel and their God in the Book of Acts chapter 7. He said,

‘Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands; as the prophet says,
“Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool.
What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord,
or what is the place of my rest?

Did not my hand make all these things?”’

He’s quoting Nathan, from our Old Testament lesson.

So where does God live? Is he defined by time and place? Today I don’t think we worry much about asking that question. It seems pretty obvious to us, I think, that the divine can’t be limited in time and space. By definition, someone who is all powerful, all knowing, eternal. But still, I don’t know whether we spend enough time – or any time really – thinking about who it is that we are praying to. Is it God who lives in a house, or is it that God who is characterised by those ‘omni’ words; omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent?

I don’t think people will necessarily fight you, these days, about whether God is a partisan God – whether our God is stronger than your God – as opposed to tackling you about whether he exists at all. If that happens, if you encounter Richard Dawkins, or one of his acolytes in the new atheists, then it might be tempting to say that your belief is divinely sanctioned; you, as a Christian, sense His real presence.

But how do you know? How do you know it’s God? It’s the question Jesus was asked. ‘Tell us by what authority you are doing these things. Who is it who gave you this authority?’ Jesus gave quite a tricky answer.

But we wouldn’t hesitate, surely, knowing what we do. We would say he got his authority from heaven. Then the question is the question Jesus asked. If you think that I get all this stuff from heaven, why don’t you take any notice?

Fortunately that’s not where we came in. Instead we are back with Dave Allen. Where is our God? Does our God go with us? I pray – I believe – that He does. The Lord is here. His Spirit is with us. Everywhere.

‘To thee Cherubin and Seraphin: continually do cry’

God in your Pocket