Four Addresses in Santiago: 1 Pilgrimage and the Offering of Life

This week I’d like to offer four Bible readings on the theme of pilgrimage. That sounds a bit obvious, given that we are here in Santiago, one of the world’s greatest pilgrim destinations. While we are here, we shall I’m sure learn a lot about the significance of the Camino and the pilgrimage to Compostela. But what’s particular to this and every other pilgrimage also represents what’s true of our human existence as a whole, which is why the symbolism of life as a journey or pilgrimage is universal.

Something of this is what I’m hoping we shall explore through the biblical texts I’ve chosen. They will, I hope, help us to reflect on pilgrimage in its relation to different aspects of life. Tomorrow I want to look at our search for meaning and truth, how pilgrimage represents “faith seeking understanding” as we try to make sense of the world’s life and our own. Next day we shall explore the ways in which pilgrimage takes us into dark places of suffering and pain, and how the actual or metaphorical journeys help us to respond to these acute questions life throws at us. Finally on Thursday, I’ll say something about recognition and hope, how pilgrimage brings disclosure, expresses God-given hungers and longings - for fulfilment, for illumination and for God.

As we are travelling through the Year of St Luke, I’m taking as the basis passages from that gospel. Of all the four, Luke is most clearly organised around the theme of the journeys Jesus makes – as a child, as the Son of Man, as the risen Lord. Indeed, I want to suggest to you that Luke’s image of Jesus is that of the archetypal pilgrim. I hope passages in the Hebrew Bible will shed light on Luke’s story. We shall use these readings in the daily offices before my talks.

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Let’s begin by looking briefly at our readings at evening prayer. My reflection is that pilgrimage is transformative because at its heart it is about the offering of life to God. And the offering of life has two outcomes: a deeper wisdom, and a renewed reverence that translates into our commitment to walk before God in our own life and immerse ourselves in the world’s life not as bystanders but participants.

In that snippet of liturgy from Deuteronomy, the worshipper is instructed to bring the offering of first fruits to “the place that the Lord your God will choose”, the text’s way of referring to the central shrine of Jerusalem where the people were commanded to journey at the three pilgrim feasts every year. It’s a symbol of acknowledging the source of all that is good about the land they have inherited, and recognising God’s mighty acts of deliverance and protection. They have made a safe journey, like we have today, and their first duty is to demonstrate their thankfulness by making this symbolic offering that stands for the good earth on which they stand, their life together in this place, the memory of how they got there, and their acknowledgment that God is the source and end of it all. The offering of life is the offering of everything that we have and are and aspire to be. No doubt all this is enfolded in the acclamation at the start of the pilgrim psalm we recited: “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’”.

Going to the house of the Lord brings us to our reading from St Luke. The pilgrim feast this time is Passover and the holy family are doing what the Torah commanded and going up to Jerusalem. This isn’t Jesus’ first visit to Jerusalem, Luke tells us – his parents have already brought him to the temple to be presented after his birth. Then, the infant of forty days is compared to those two people of great age, Simeon and Anna, who receive him so gladly. Now he is twelve, and here he is again in the same place with others who are his seniors, “sitting among the teachers listening to them and asking them questions”.

Like the other pilgrim feasts of first fruits or Pentecost, and Tabernacles, Passover is a celebration of God’s words and works whose story brings memory into the present and transforms the future. In all three, the whole of life is gathered up and offered in gratitude and hope. I wonder whether this isn’t part of what Luke is getting at when, alone among the gospels, he gives us this precious narrative of Jesus’s childhood, this unique window on what one writer called “the hidden years”. Spanning as it does the interval between Jesus’ birth and his baptism, is Luke telling us something about the vocation of Jesus to be in his Father’s house as the representative human being who is already acknowledging that his life is not his own but must be offered up? Is Luke inviting us and all humanity to find our welfare and peace by following Jesus in that journey, that sacred pilgrimage into God’s very presence?

For Luke, Jesus is the emblematic man who realises the destiny we were created for in God’s image. This is why he concludes this episode in the same way that he concludes the Presentation story just before it, by recording that “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in divine and human favour”. He might have said that the divine image went on being formed in him, not only as Son of God who must be about the things of his Father” (another way of translating “being about my Father’s house”), but as Son of Man too, the archetypal human being who is exalted in the vision of Daniel. And in the flow of the narrative, this embodiment of wisdom, stature and favour will be put on open display before God and humanity in his baptism, and then driven out to be tested in the wilderness. We’ll come to that tomorrow.

For now, and with the sense of still having only just arrived here in Santiago after our long journey, let’s stay with the image of Jesus himself arrived at the temple as the destination of that childhood pilgrimage. It would have been lovely if we could, so to speak, have recaptured our own childhood as we walked up the steps and entered the Basilica of Saint James through the Portico of Glory for the first time. I don’t know of any other church with such a marvellous sense of arrival. I was in tears the first time I came here. It was as if this mighty pilgrimage church was welcoming me home with its doors wide open, like the father’s arms open to his prodigal son, and inviting me to find my true self in God once again. I say “it would have been lovely”, because alas much of the Cathedral is under scaffolding at present and we can’t get inside through this great entrance. We’ll have to imagine it from the photos we’ve seen. But as we do, let’s also imagine the young Jesus coming into his Father’s house at that stage of life where he is becoming aware, can begin - I won’t say to find himself but certainly - to understand himself and articulate his own vocation. And to offer his life to God and glimpse how his destiny would come to be shaped as the Child and Servant and Pilgrim of God.

This, I’m sure, is the spirit in which we’ve come on pilgrimage to Santiago: like Jesus, to offer our lives afresh, to become more aware of the presence of God, how he is shaping our lives and destinies, discern and even begin to articulate the journey he invites us into and what he asks us to be and do. This is what we wish and pray for one another as we greet one another in the words of the ancient pilgrim road: Buen Camino! Ultreia!

Santiago, 13 May 2019
Psalm 122, Deuteronomy 26.1-11, Luke 2.41-52

Christmas Sermon: an acrostic on G-L-O-R-Y

What’s the big Christmas word in the gospel we have just heard? I think it’s GLORY. ‘We have seen his glory’ he says, ‘full of grace and truth’. Today we look into the crib and see a glory we can never forget, a great and mighty wonder, so mighty and so great that we can hardly take it in. So on Christmas morning let me be playful with that word and give you a five-finger exercise based on it. It’s an acrostic, G-L-O-R-Y: five words for each letter of glory, all drawn out of our gospel reading today.

G is for GOD. Where else to begin but where John begins, with the eternal Word who was in the beginning, who was with God, who was God? ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’: St John echoes the story of creation when the universe began the long march of aeons from chaos to cosmos and divine wisdom gave shape and form to it. Things don’t make sense without God. Yes, we look back across billions of years towards the origins of the cosmos, describe the equations that govern it, even predict its fate. But understanding is about purpose and value and meanings. This is what faith sees as it scans the immense complexity of the universe. Faith sees a God who is Word and Being, Alpha and Omega, the Origin and End of all things. He is Ancient of Days, the primordial Mind who is recognisable to reason and intelligence, who utters the word that brings creation into existence, who suffuses the cosmos with a wise and loving presence, who is knowable and invites created beings into relationship with him. This is the God Christmas shows us in the perfect image of his being, Jesus himself. In these last days God has spoken through a Son. In Jesus’s birth we see divine glory.

L is for LIGHT. The first word God speaks in the Bible is fiat lux: ‘let there be light!’  That theme is basic to St John’s Gospel. He tells us about the life that was in the beginning: the light that enlightens all things, the light of humanity. It shines in the darkness and the dark has not overcome it, can never extinguish it. Jesus will say ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me shall not walk in darkness but will have the light of life’. This interplay between darkness and light runs through the ancient winter solstice rituals we still keep in our northern hemisphere with our candles and Christmas trees and starry lights. In dark days and dark times we can still be haunted by archaic anxieties and more contemporary worries: will the light return, will the world come back to life, will this winter of war-mongering nations and peoples ever give way to a spring-time of peace? Will the poor who are always with us have a summer harvest to save them? St John says to us: Christ the morning star is our light and our sun. He has come into the world to bring us life and love, even the most helpless and hopeless. In Jesus’s birth we see the light of God’s glory.

O is for OFFERING. Not our’s but God’s. ‘The true light was coming into the world’ says our reading. Not because of some inevitable deterministic chain of causation, but as a personal gift. John's gospel could not be clearer about this. Gift, he says, comes straight from the heart of a God for whom giving is his essential nature. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.’ And because this Word and this Light was God, the gift is a supreme act of self-offering, a pouring out of love so that the world can be reconciled to him. So when we gaze at the Infant in the manger, the Word made flesh now living among us, as one of us, it is love incarnate that we see, love that gives itself to the very end, kenosis, self-emptying, self-offering. The One who was rich abases himself and becomes poor so that we might become rich through him. It is a risky undertaking, this precarious way of loving. Every act of giving carries risks: we know this when we give away something precious. What if the gift were to be refused, or not liked, or abused? That makes this offering of God’s presence and his very self a thing most wonderful. In Jesus’s birth we see selfless, self-emptying love, and that is true glory.

R is for RECEIVING. Not God’s but ours. Receiving needs as much grace as giving. And our gospel reading acknowledges the risk that a gift could be unwelcome, not received well or even at all. ‘He was in the world, and the world was made by him but the world knew him not. He came to his own people, and his own received him not.’ In the middle of this string of powerful words - God, Word, light, life, glory, grace, truth - comes a ‘but’. Who sees incarnation for what it is? Who recognises the light and embraces it? Even when we come close to it as we do today, we can ignore it or forget about it or turn away from it. We don’t want to admit it on Christmas Day when we are filled with gratitude and love. But our experience tells us that our best moments can be fitful and transient. For John, the gift needs to make a difference. ‘To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become the children of God.’ If Christmas doesn't touch us in some deep place, make us want to be children of God, if it doesn’t challenge and change our thoughts and motives and actions, what is the point of keeping it year after year? Why tell the same old Christmas story if we don’t turn towards those who most need our help and care in the world? I’m thinking of those queuing up at food banks, or on the streets of our cities, or in some middle-eastern countries in fear of their lives on Christmas Day because they worship the Christ Child. Perhaps this year can be different. The carols and readings, the Christmas tree and crib, the sheer beauty of this season, could they speak to us anew so that our hearts are ‘strangely warmed’? Might receiving the holy Child help us to receive those in need? Jesus does not turn his back on them and nor do we. Giving and receiving is God’s way. We see it in Jesus’s birth and recognise it as glory.

God, Light, Offering, Reception. What will Y be?  A good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon monosyllable to end with. This word comes from both God’s heart and ours. For when heart speaks to heart, the word that rises up in each is YES. John is saying in his way what St Paul tells us, that Jesus is God’s Yes to his world, to every man, woman and child, to each of us. He has brought us his light, life and love. And we? What can we say to him, born this happy morning? Yes to Christmas, yes to the newborn child, yes to our redemption. Yes to all who need our love, our care, our friendship, our generosity, our charity. Yes to the pain of the world, yes to the cries of the desperate and destitute, yes to the longings of broken nations, yes to all who have lost their hope.  We embrace them as God embraces us all today. And we say yes to the glory of God who makes a home in our midst, the glory of self-giving love that we celebrate at Bethlehem on this day of days.

Durham Cathedral, Christmas Day 2013

Hebrews 1.14; John 1.1-14