St Margaret's Day Sermon
Psalm 130 – de profundis
Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord :
Lord, hear my voice;
O let your ears consider well :
the voice of my supplication.
If you, Lord, should note what we do wrong :
who then, O Lord, could stand?
But there is forgiveness with you :
so that you shall be feared.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits for him :
and in his word is my hope.
My soul looks for the Lord :
more than watchmen for the morning,
more, I say, than watchmen for the morning.
De Profundis – out of the deep. It’s striking how captivated the world was by the missing submarine. Many other disasters ended more lives in the meantime, not least in Ukraine, but the submarine kept the headlines. I wonder if there’s something primal about the fear created by the deeps – The utter blackness, the concentrated pressure, the freezing cold, the monstrous weight of water above you. De Profundis is also the title of one of the most famous letters written in English, by Oscar Wilde from Wandsworth prison – His making sense of the awful fate that had befallen him. I say a letter, and it is – but it’s the length of a novel. Definitely not for the tweeting generation. TLDR
Amongst other things the letter is a meditation on sorrow. ‘Where there is sorrow there is holy ground’, he writes. That may surprise. Often suffering is quoted as the reason people don’t have faith. Wilde remarked: ‘there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to show that God did not love man.’ But he corrects himself: ‘I was entirely wrong… Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world… If the world has … been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love.’ Out of the depth have I cried to you, O Lord.
Not all suffering is redemptive. But sorrow has certain qualities, pointed out by those like Wilde who have been tried by it, that bring us to God. Sorrow very often brings to our awareness what is most important. I spoke with a friend this week whose child is very ill. We reassess our lives, our relationships, our way of life, our deep-seated beliefs. Sorrow can make us honest.
Sorrow may bring humility. The recognition of our need of others. The loss of our invulnerability. Wilde wrote: ‘One cannot acquire humility, except by surrendering everything that one has.
It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it.’
Sorrow may force change – where otherwise we stay within what is comfortable and easy, in the illusion that this middling life will continue forever. Last week I spoke about how we might look at the journey of faith, not as something in which we gain things, achieve things, do things, believe things; But one in which we let things go, and in the loss of what is cheap find what is permanent. Sorrow may be a means of cutting away life’s chaff.
Wilde demonstrates the difference between the atheist and the Christian, and it is in part an attitude to sorrow. The atheist might say that the suffering of the world makes a loving God impossible. The Christian says that love is the only explanation for the suffering of this world; Revealed by Isaiah’s ‘man of sorrows’; And as Wilde quotes Goethe:
‘Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow, -
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.’
Out of the depths have I cried to you, O Lord. Lord hear my voice.
I speak about sorrow, notwithstanding our celebrations today, because of this church’s dedication to St Margaret of Antioch. St Margaret lived through the Church’s worst persecution under the Roman Emperor Diocletian. Famously he prohibited Christian worship. And there wasn’t even a pandemic. And as St Matthew reports, echoing the experience of his own church – the inheritance of Christianity in these first centuries was punishments and executions, betrayal and hatred, ‘but the one who endures to the end will be saved.’
The favourite story of St Margaret is that she was swallowed whole by a dragon but escaped when the dragon’s digestion was irritated by the cross she was wearing. In St Margaret the dragon bit off more than he could chew. Like Jonah from the whale she was vomited forth. Qualities we might emulate, but not, please, in the barbecue later. [On a side-note, it’s presumably because of her safe delivery from the dragon that through the Middle Ages she became a patron saint of childbirth – Though this does seem somewhat perverse for a childless teenage girl.]
The story itself is interesting. Stories of saints often have a symbolic quality. Is St Margaret pictured as having entered into a hellish situation or a place of temptation to recant her faith – in the devil’s belly – and to have found release? Or is the dragon symbolic of the emperor? Is it a picture of the persecution of the early church, saved through fire? In any of these cases, in cells, in the belly of a dragon, Christians have found themselves calling out de profundis – Out of the depths. And the story is there to say that God is with us. When we walk through fire, we shall not be burned. It is her cross that irritates the dragon’s belly; Her faith – that brings her from death into life.
Talking to my friend last week, she spoke of the difficulty of prayer in times of difficulty – a feeling of being cut off. Sometimes in crisis – with one thing that is our heart’s desire, prayer comes naturally, easily. I told her what I believe to be true, that God never places any barrier between us and him. But in sorrow, our grief, our anger, our fear may keep us from God. We are as easily able to shut ourselves off from God as from our friends and family. And sometimes we’re not even aware of how angry, how frightened we are.
St Paul asks – what will separate us from the love of Christ? Hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakeness, peril, the sword?’ No – not even death, nor life, angels nor rulers, things present or to come, power nor height nor depth – Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God’. Ultimately, not even ourselves. Paul too is a man of sorrows – But Paul is able to turn his suffering into hope.
The anti-suffering atheists I have met, quite often have been some of the most moral people I know. They very often have impossibly strict views, being vegan, or teetotal. I bring this up because as well as having a strong focus on suffering, Christianity is also very concerned with sin. Not, though, with trying to create people who are proper and well-mannered. As Wilde writes: ‘The conversion of a publican into a pharisee would not have seemed to Jesus a great achievement.’ Rather sin and suffering are both moments that can turn the soul towards God. So in his analysis of the parable of the Prodigal Son, Wilde argues that when the prodigal son falls to his knees and weeps, he makes his having wasted his life and money with harlots, and his swine-herding and starving, ‘beautiful and holy moments in his life’. Because they are the means by which he learns repentance. By which he learns humility. By which he seeks forgiveness. By which he returns to God. Sin and sorrow may be redeemed.
You may have noticed that we confess our sins each week. It’s not in some vain hope that we eventually become unsinful people. It’s because it’s in recognising our weakness that we meet God. Wilde wryly remarks that this is a difficult idea to grasp: ‘I dare say one has to go to prison to understand it. If so, it may be worth while going to prison.’
De Profundis. Out of the depths. My favourite psalm is 42, which has the line: Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. ‘Deep calleth unto deep’ was read by the mystical theologians as the soul’s communication with God. It is in the depths, they felt, that we are closest to God. So whether today you’re in those deeps, Or if you’re moving forward into broad, sunlit uplands, May God be with you on this St Margaret’s Day And in your sin, your sorrow, your humility, your forgiveness, May you know the love from which you can never be separated. Amen.