ALIVE TO GOD: A Sermon for St Andrews’ University, 7th November 2010
If you have been following St Luke through the liturgical year, the Gospel tells us a lot
about the political storm in Jerusalem gathering around Jesus in the last week before his
passion. At another level, of course, it has much to tell us about marriage. The tease in
the question the Sadducees ask works because of seeing marriage, an understanding
that Christianity receives from Judaism, as a sign of God’s eternal faithfulness to his
covenant, and the demands marriage makes in consequence as exclusive. Jesus accepts
that, while also pointing out that, as a sign, it is only relatively important; marriage can
only be understood in relation to a way of seeing ourselves and our relationships,
married or not, as betokening relationship with God. For each of us, this calls for a deep
sense of the human person, of who I am, how that is something I owe, above all, to
others, and of how, in and through all that, I find myself in relation to God. These are
questions that draw men and women into monastic life.
There is a further point, which is the foundation of Jesus’ whole argument in reply to the
Sadducees: Now (the Lord) is God, not of the dead but of the living; for to him everyone is
alive. Our idea of life is just too small, too thin, too poor, if we do not have a clear sense
of how our human being is orientated towards God, and how we live and grow to what
the Gospel calls the fullness of life by living in the dimension I call Godwardness. Monks
and nuns are people who want live for God, and who try to let him shape the space they
live in, the time and pace they live by. Whatever we do, and a lot of it is incredibly
ordinary, we try to find God in everything and everything in God, what George Herbert
called ‘heaven in ordinary.’
St Paul makes the same point in Romans: living or dying, we are not here for ourselves,
but for the Lord. He makes it as part of a discussion on charity. Because we are
Godwards, other people count, not on my terms, but on God’s, the Lord of all life. For if
life is a gift, we live by giving; not just of what we have in abundance; we live by giving
life, giving our own lives. Being alive to God goes with being alive to others. This is the
community dimension in monastic life; and it is what gives it its place in the life of the
Church in the various ways our communities serve as witnesses to the saving new life of
the Gospel. Costly service, costing not less than everything; but I believe this is the kind
of sacrifice needed if we are really concerned about justice and peace in our world, let
alone for God’s Kingdom.
We need not just a change in priorities, we need a change of heart. This is where the
personal struggle in monastic life comes in, the need for discipline, firm, but patient and
gentle, in order to open our hearts to God’s merciful love and grace. Jesus told us to love
God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. It is normally not easy truly to love
ourselves; and God usually takes a life time teaching us how to let go, how to be
vulnerable, how to be generous. To go back to Jesus’ reply to the Sadducees, we need to
think, with our hearts as well as our heads, not in terms of life defined in terms of death
but in terms of life that reaches through death to its fullness beyond death. We need to
learn the mind and heart of Jesus.
Now I don’t know what your idea of nuns or monks is. But what I am saying is true of
any attempt to live a radical and integral Christian life. And I guess that is about it. We
are only trying to be faithful to Christ, like any of his disciples; trying to make his
presence felt in the world, so that people can find him, the Way, the Truth and the Life.
St Gregory the Great commented that St Benedict was like a lamp set on a lamp stand so
that people could walk in the light of Christ. That is a good way of describing the place
of monastic life in the Church. But I think there are three specific needs that monastic
life tries to address.
In the first place we need to recover for the world today a real sense of human being.
We keep hearing the lists – there are simply so many factors today that corrode a real
appreciation of human being. There are two dimensions to this, our own personal being,
and our being for others. Monastic life explores the relationship between the two and
how God himself is disclosed opening us up to the third dimension I call Godwardness.
Monastic wisdom teaches that it is in this third dimension that we learn intimacy, how
we grow in love and friendship. Our difficulty with intimacy seems to me to be one of
the great poverties of our time. There is something Pope Paul VI said that has lived in
my mind over the years as what monastic life is about. It is a simple idea, a huge and
beautiful vision. He said the Church is called to build a ‘civilisation of love’.
Today there is a desperate need for community and for a shared understanding of moral
life, grounded on the fact that human beings need each other to live fully. So this is the
second thing monastic life tries to offer the world. Pope John Paul II once called monks
and nuns ‘experts in community’. Wishful thinking, I am afraid. But we do try to witness
to what it means and what it takes to live together: where we do not choose our life
companions, but where faith in God who has called us to his service commits us to build
each other up in love; places which are able to make people welcome, to raise up and
restore to fellowship, places of healing and forgiveness. In very elementary human
ways, monasteries are laboratories of the Spirit.
It is an exciting experiment, to create a culture where the fruits of the Spirit flourish, and
to explore what, to borrow St Paul, the human feel of being ‘in Christ’. The community is
how Jesus discloses himself to us and how, in our mutual service, we can make Jesus
known to each other. St Aelred of Rievaulx called it ‘spiritual friendship’: ‘here we are,
you and I, with Christ as a third’. What an abbot of Downside called an ‘experiment in
living’ is offered to all as an experience of living as Church. I know people who are shy
about faith, who have had a bad experience of the Church, or feel rather detached from
it, find a monastery offers a place to find God who does not threaten or make them feel
bad; a place where they can feel welcome. So here is the third need. Young people
especially may be seeking God, or just seeking, but a monastery is a place of orientation,
to consider the path they have come by, and the journey they are being invited to
undertake, where they can here the voice of the Lord showing them the way.
In the end it is all about Jesus. Monastic life is, above all, a life of prayer. It is a witness
to the overriding priority of God and to letting nothing stand in his way. It calls for
integrity, single-mindedness and wholeheartedness. But we seek the God who has
found us in Christ. Prayer does not start with us but is a response to his invitation to
follow him; one that we hear as we listen with the ear of our heart to the Bible. But as
we listen we do not hear the Bible, we hear Jesus and want to live by his word. I am
going to stick my neck out, be bold, and just say: monks and nuns are people who have
fallen in love with God, and want to give their lives to him.