Intensity

“For you say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked … Be earnest, therefore, and repent. Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” (Revelation 4: 17, 20).

One of the things that almost everyone remembers of the former Prime Minister John Major is his reassuring picture of an enduring England, where warm beer would still be drunk and spinsters would cycle to Communion through the early morning mist. Passing over his unacknowledged debt to George Orwell, from whom those words derive, we might notice a certain view of English religion, and specifically of Anglicanism, in that second image. The picture conveys a hiddenness, almost a secretiveness; veiled in a gentle fog, the spinster goes on her way, not in a four-by-four or even a venerable Morris Minor, but on a bicycle, old technology befitting old ideas and loyalties. She is on her own; the rest of the world is doing something else—having a lie-in, or getting the kids off to Sunday-morning football. The world has passed over her faith, just as she, a spinster, has been passed over in the defining engagement of modern society, that of sex. A harmless object of nostalgia, faith pedals its way around the margins of the ‘real’ world. There is nothing vivid here, nothing that comes across in strong colours; everything is pastel-shaded, even grey, unassertive, without intensity.

The link between this evening’s readings (not always easy to find) is intensity, or its absence. The passage from the Song of Songs celebrates the intensity of love: “Love is fierce as death, passion is mighty as Sheol; its darts are darts of fire, a blazing flame” (8:6). The love referred to is distinctly unspinsterish; despite the best efforts of Jewish and Christian commentators to find in this book a higher, spiritual truth, it is clearly, first and foremost, a poem of sexual love. The writer of the Revelation to John is looking for intensity in the life of the church of his time. In the second and third chapters of his book he sets out a balance sheet of the strengths and weaknesses of some of the churches of Asia. Ephesus has avoided heresy, but lacks practical love; Pergamum has in the past been ready to face martyrdom, but there are now some who compromise the truth. Most memorably, the church of Laodicea is rebuked for lukewarmness: “you are neither cold not hot … So, because you are luke-warm … I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (4:15-16). There is no intensity in its life; the Laodicean Christians are pretty happy with themselves as they are: “for you say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.”

Sometimes Anglicans like ourselves—mainstream, as we like to think, liberal Catholic as I recently heard a church-historian describe us—can feel guilty about a lack of intensity. We don’t, like the Evangelicals, shout and sway in the pews, wave our hands around, or buttonhole people about the state of their souls. Nor do we, like the Catholics of the Roman Church, understand Christianity in terms of strict dogma and discipline. We are not required to believe, as plain Christian truth, that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven. We sometimes have a sneaking feeling that those outsiders may be right who see Anglicanism as a very easy kind of Christianity, where little more than common decency is required. Perhaps we are the Laodiceans of the present age, neither hot nor cold, lacking intensity, whom the world and Christ will spit out.

If we agree with John the Elder that intensity is required, that faith should not be lukewarm, then the question has to be faced: what kind of intensity? Certainly not the intensity of fundamentalism, where truth is known absolutely and unchangeably and can be inflicted, through violence if necessary, on all who refuse to accept it. Certainly not the intensity of a faith that exists as a self-induced emotional high, that uses everything else—Bible, teaching, community—as a way of keeping up the desired feeling. Such intensities involve the denial of much of the humanity that God loves in us: reason, debate, thought, tolerance, patience, a willingness to grant others the freedom to be what they are.

We should not be ashamed of having avoided those intensities that diminish rather than fulfil our human nature. But we should still look to know where the true intensity lies. And the paradox, which this passage from the Book of Revelation brings out very well, is that it is an undramatic, an unshowy, an unassertive, undominating kind of intensity, but an intensity nevertheless.

Where does it begin? Let us go back to the Laodiceans: “You say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” It would not be forcing things too far to say that most of the modern church of the West, in the developed world, is in the position of the Laodiceans. By global standards we are rich, we have prospered. We can do a great deal for ourselves—feed ourselves, heal ourselves, have leisure, take holidays, live securely in our place—so that often it seems as though we need nothing. We do not see ourselves as wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. We easily forget that there are things that we cannot do for ourselves, that only God can do for us.

Some of the wretched of our earth are luckier than we are in that respect. During Christian Aid Week we have been thinking of those who do not have wealth or security, who have not prospered, who know from day to day how vulnerable they are, how dependent on God that what they are should not be snuffed out by a world beyond their control. Not all, or even most, of them are Christians; but the poor understand only too painfully that we do not make our being for ourselves, that our being is a gift which, in the end, only its Giver can sustain. Rich or poor, secure or defenceless, only God can keep our souls alive. When we know that, then we see ourselves as the writer of Revelation sees us: by ourselves we are “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked.”

This is something that our world does not want to hear because it seems to demean what we are. It seems to prepare the way for another false intensity, that of self-loathing and self-punishment, of hair shirts and the self-laceration made so much of in The Da Vinci Code. But to know what we cannot do for ourselves does not detract from what we can do. There is a God-given dignity of humanity; the God of Genesis makes humanity the commanding presence in his world. We are creative, imaginative, productive; we can shape and change things, and all that should be celebrated.

But because the soul is that within us which relates to God, it cannot live without God. And since that is the deepest part of what we are, only by making himself known to us does God keep our deepest being alive. That we cannot do for ourselves. There we are entirely dependent; without him we are wretched, pitiable, blind.

The writer of Revelation says: “be earnest, therefore, and repent.” “Repent” is another of those words that we tend to shy away from. Though we repeat it every week, it sounds too extreme, too dramatic for the conditions of our lives. There is too much intensity in it. We may have some things that we regret, but repentance? But John understands the word in terms of the argument that he has developed: not a listing of sins, but a recognition of our true position in relation to God. Repentance, for him, is the moment when we move out of complacency, when we stop saying “I have prospered, and I need nothing” to see that without God we are wretched, pitiable, naked, that we do not make or sustain our own being. Repentance is the recognition that we have misdescribed our world.

But the writer of Revelation does not stop there. He reports what may well be a genuine saying of Jesus, one that did not find its way into the Gospels: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” The consequence of repentance is not self-abasement or punishment but that we start to listen. Christ is already there; he has been standing at the door, he has been knocking all this time, but so gently, so unaggressively, that we didn’t notice it. But now repentance turns us away from ourselves, and we begin to hear his voice; we open the door, and the one who enters is not a hanging judge, not full of righteous intensity, but an equal: “I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” The true intensity of faith is the intensity of that moment, when we see the true structure of our world, and having seen it, admit to our lives the quiet certainty of Christ.

Sermon, 21 May 2006