Life, you know, is rather like
opening a tin of sardines. We are all of us looking for the key. And I wonder
how many of you here tonight have wasted years of your lives looking behind the
kitchen dressers of this life for that key. I know I have. Others think they’ve
found the key, don’t they? They roll back the lid of the sardine tin of life.
They reveal the sardines, the riches of life, therein, and they get them out,
and they enjoy them. But, you know, there’s always a little bit in the corner
you can’t get out. I wonder is there a little bit in the corner of your life? I
know there is in mine!
From
Alan Bennett’s Anglican sermon in Beyond the Fringe (1981)
Sunday
last, the first Sunday of Advent, might be called “the Christian New
Year”. The endlessly repeated
liturgical cycle of the Christian year does not begin with the birth of
Jesus. The early Christians
regarded that event as so stupendous as to require at least a brief period of
thoughtful preparation, and this became the penitential season of Advent, which
begins with the fourth Sunday before Christmas.
The
Scripture readings for the first Sunday of Advent, established in ancient
times, are particularly solemn and impressive. They include the stirring passage in the letter to the
Romans (cap 13) in which Paul likens
the coming of the Christ to daylight breaking through the darkness of night, an
archetypal image shared by many religions and philosophies, but here used distinctively
by Paul as an appeal to action and the reformation of moral life. This is the very passage on which the
eyes of the young Augustine fell as he brooded beneath the fig tree. The text changed his life, and with it
the intellectual history of the Western world, in an instant.
tolle, lege
Many
of the great preachers of my tradition have dealt masterfully with this
passage. I think particularly of
John Donne’s sermon before the Prince and Princess Palatine on June 16, 1619. So naturally I was eager to hear
what my own rector would have to say about it. Of course I knew in advance that this man’s homiletic style
tended less to the Pauline than to the Victorine—recognizing in this term his
penchant for the striking domestic metaphor. In the seventh chapter of his second book (Pantagruel) Rabelais gives an extensive
catalogue of the theological titles that Pantagruel supposedly found in the
famous library of the abbey of Saint-Victor, including such masterpieces as The Codpiece of the Law and The Mustard-Pot of Penance.
Even
so I was startled to hear that the anticipation of the coming of Christ was to
be understood in terms of the way a viscous blob of red condiment slowly oozes
from a bottle of Heinz ketchup. The
image, we were told, related explicitly to one of the old glass bottles, before they came up with a squeezable plastic
model, as squeezing considerably accelerates the flow. One of the geniuses of Madison Avenue
had summed it all up in a TV ad of an earlier age (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_uDta6cLPk). It takes a long time for the ketchup to
flow, but “It’s worth the wait.” That’s the way to understand what Paul
means when he says “now is salvation nearer to us than when we first believed”! It takes a while to get here, but it’s
worth the wait. For the slow oozing of divine grace eventually builds to the crescendo poetically described by the theologian Richard Armour:
Shake and shake the ketchup bottle
None'll come, and then a lott'll.
Historically, the sermon is actually a fairly late addition to Eucharistic worship. The sermon was of course a common enough literary genre, but most of the famous sermon collections of the Middle Ages—those of Augustine, Caesarius of Arles, or even Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century--were perhaps never actually preached. They were instead passed around in manuscript for pious reading in religious houses. They were like “closet” drama.
Shake and shake the ketchup bottle
None'll come, and then a lott'll.
Historically, the sermon is actually a fairly late addition to Eucharistic worship. The sermon was of course a common enough literary genre, but most of the famous sermon collections of the Middle Ages—those of Augustine, Caesarius of Arles, or even Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century--were perhaps never actually preached. They were instead passed around in manuscript for pious reading in religious houses. They were like “closet” drama.
While
preaching as the actual center of a religious service appears only with Protestantism in the sixteenth century, the
beginnings of the weekly parish sermon will be found in the evangelical revival
of the thirteenth century and the coming of the friars. The real name of one of the two largest
orders of friars, the Dominicans, is Ordo
Praedicatorum, the Order of Preachers. The Dominicans had some really great preachers.
Berthold of Regensburg, without mechanical amplification of any kind,
could command an audience of thousands in the open fields for his three-hour
harangues. He attached a pennant
to his portable dais so that people on the periphery could see which way the
wind was blowing and station themselves downwind of his bellowing. If you are architecturally savvy you
can often tell a medieval Dominican church by its distinctively wide nave
designed to serve the acoustical needs of large auditory. Some art historians have called these
buildings “preaching barns.”
Barns
are surrounded by barnyards.
The famous Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) usually
stayed indoors, but one of his specialties was the scripturally based barnyard
metaphor. We are told that on
occasion he did not scruple to supplement his theological point by braying like
the ass on which Jesus entered Jerusalem, clucking like a mother hen, or
grunting like the Gadarene swine.
It was, of course, an agrarian age. Animal husbandry was everywhere the normal extension of
human community; and human community was mostly small villages surrounded by
cultivated fields, grazing pastures, and untamed forest. It is not too surprising, therefore,
that some of the earliest Franciscans took the logical step toward indiscriminate
zoological homiletics. Who has not
seen at least a reproduction of Giotto’s depiction of Francis preaching to the
birds? Assisi is of course a
land-locked place. The next great
Franciscan Saint, Anthony of Padua, actually came from Lisbon, a famous
seaport. Anthony preached to
the fish. With such an awesome precedent as Francis’s to compete with,
he perhaps felt he had to play ketchup. But
these days if you come up with a sermon that is strictly for the birds, it’s
probably best preached in an aviary.
Franciscan homiletics: (a) avian; (b) piscine
