Bishops' Blog

Bane of All Sermons

Maybe I am just a grumpy old man who can’t work his phone! (Comments not welcome!). But a senior priest told me recently that, on a lark, he asked for an AI generated sermon which was, frankly, pretty good. He opined that some of our clergy may have, in a pinch, used one. I put my fingers in my ears and made noise as he spoke.  Why so? what’s so bad about an AI-sermon? My friend was historically astute enough to remind me that, in the 16^th Century, Anglican clerics would read from the Book of Homilies in lieu of writing a sermon. My retort to him was that only clergy not deemed up to the task of writing their own were required to do this. Be that as it may, what is the case against technologically enhanced homiletics?

It is true that content matters in a sermon- some insight into the Biblical passage, an orthodox point, an apt illustration or application. These are necessary conditions for a good sermon, but not in themselves sufficient.  Here I make appeal to what the linguists call the ‘illocutionary sense.’ In addition to the meaning of the words themselves, there is also the context in which they were spoken, the intent of the speaker, and the effect on the lived situation into which the words were spoken. Furthermore, the sermon cannot be separated from a Christian understanding of witness and testimony. Professing the faith is itself an imperative of the Christian life. Like all his or her fellow Christians, the preacher is a dying sinner, saved by grace, who gives voice to what matters most before other dying sinners with their own distress and hope.

The preacher speaks then first to himself or herself. They give utterance to what they need to hear, the word of the grace of God. Only if it matters that much, and that way, to the speaker does it have a chance to matter urgently to the hearer. Of course preaching must not swerve into self-involvement or public rehash of therapy!  What I am describing is the x-factor beyond content alone- strain it out and you lose the ‘one thing needful.’ For this reason a sermon as testimony might be disorganized and struggling, but still be compelling spiritually.

There may be such a thing as ‘artificial intelligence,’ but it isn’t human, but rather is alien. In the same way, the cyber-sermon may eloquent, but can’t be ‘kerygmatic’ (conveying the Gospel). Heed St. Paul, my friend: ‘  When I first came to you, dear brothers and sisters, I didn't use lofty words and impressive wisdom to tell you God's secret plan. For I decided that while I was with you I would forget everything except Jesus Christ, the one who was crucified. I came to you in weakness—timid and trembling. (I Corinthians 2:1). Amen!

 Peace,

+GRS

Easter Vigil Sermon

The trouble with my father was that he was quick with the quip, and a curmudgeon to boot. When asked a question, a non sequitur would follow, chalked up to ‘George being George.’ My mother warned us, but we didn’t want to listen. Finally he stopped the car at a toll booth and said ‘I don’t know how to negotiate this,’ and we knew. It was hard to see the towering figure who was my father vanishing. Someone told me about a book on the subject by David Keck, whose father, dean of the divinity school when I was a student, who was an Alzheimer’s sufferer. The book is entitled ‘Forgetting Whose We Are.’ I recommend it to you. But my point is really to meditate on that title, for it is saying two things. First, that we can and do forget profoundly, and are forgotten. But we actually belong to someone. God, and we are His regardless. He remembers us. The disease is a metaphor too, since humans wander from God and run their own affairs, and in so doing, forget whose they are, but He does not forget. In Isaiah the Lord says of His exiled children, ‘I have written your names on the palms of my hands,’ so that, lifting them, He sees the names there and cannot forget us, regardless of our remembering or forgetting.

This idea of God remembering is found throughout the Scripture. The Psalmist feels like a dead man out of mind of the Lord. God remembers his own from Abraham on. Even in Sheol, where memory is snuffed out, the Lord alone does not forget, Psalm 139 insists. Now at the heart of our faith is the Word of God. He is a God who speaks, and his Word is one with Him. That is where the Bible starts in Genesis, and that is the first and last thing to know of Him, says John. To speak, and to recall, as Word, are things we believe to lie at the heart of his being.  Both are entailed in the mind of God, which Paul tells us his own Spirit can plumb and understand. This an analogy to us, who have mind and words and memories.  Of course, but God himself has given us the comparison. At the same time God is not like us; he is as high above us as the sky from the earth, says Isaiah. When He speaks the thing springs into being. He says ‘firmament’ and it is, he says ‘human being’ and we rise up as well. He says ‘return from exile,’ and they are on their way, he says ‘ forgiven,’ and what you and I most fear is wiped away.

Jesus really died. That means he was gone, forgotten from being. Vanished. In Sheol the land of non-being. La tierra del olvido. It is a great mystery that we can say such a thing about God’s Son, but he was fully bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. Here the story of Lazarus serves as a kind of parable, a sign of the resurrection, his and ours. He has gone to that dark and far place, until Jesus calls him, and Jesus’ very word summons him back to life. That is how we are to imagine the resurrection. The Father calls out to us. It is the same voice that called you into being. ‘George come out,’ and so we will, stench and bandages and all.  And where does my tale of Alzheimers come in? We are forgotten out of mind, but not out of the mind of God, inseparable as it is from His memory and His Word, unique in summoning into being what he remembers and speaks.

If you think about the history of the Christian faith, sometimes we have been all cross, and sometimes all empty tomb, but it can be hard to put them together. Related to this is the question- how does what happened to him relate to what will finally become of me? So we are brought back to the first Easter, and what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. He is our brother. He descended into hell, as the creed insists, as we will too. As a creature of God, he is summoned back as we are. But the difference is this- He is, at one and the same time, also the word/mind/heart/memory of God himself. He is at once summoned and summoner. And in that he is unique. We can say more. Once we are remembered into being, we will all be standing before Him. Who we were is not forgotten, but how he sees us is in light of the prototype, of Jesus. The same idea is found in one of the great prayer for Good Friday:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set
your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and
our souls, now and in the hour of our death. Give mercy and
grace to the living; pardon and rest to the dead; to your holy
Church peace and concord; and to us sinners everlasting life
and glory; for with the Father and the Holy Spirit you 
live and reign, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

It is the placing in between I am interested in. He not only remembers us once more because of what happened to Jesus, but continues to sees us through the lens of Jesus’ love, for God and for us though we be in the wrong. We are not only remembered into being, but beings seen thereafter through Him. And again, what God says is so, and as he sees us through the new Adam, the true image of God, we come more and more to be so, since the mind of God will finally be seen to be how the world really is. The ‘should’ and the ‘is’ will finally meet, there, through the risen one. Remembered we are, not erased, even our trauma recalled, but now through the lens of the Jesus crucified, what we have been, and what we were meant to be, resolved, which is what the New Testament means by living ‘in Christ,’ healed, coming to ourselves, and not us alone, but with others who were a part of who we were, and with others we hurt and were hurt by, none of it forgotten, but repaired.

We walk as the burial office will one day say over us, ‘in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection from the dead.’ At some point, just as with my father, I will be forgotten, will fade into the mist of un-being. But our death, yours and mine, is no longer what death was, It is now the land to which Jesus has descended and been raised, the place he has ‘harrowed’ says the tradition. So it is, in addition to being a fearful place, the land of forgetting, la tierra del olvido, but now the place where was heard, ‘Jesus come out,’ and so will be heard your name and mine. Amen.