The Robes That Clothe Us

February 25, 2018

Cate Thorn

Lent 2     Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16     Mark 9:2-9

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Last week we began our Lenten series of paying attention to liturgy and how it expresses and shapes our identity as Anglican. Helen opened by inviting us to use each and every one of our senses in our encounter with the divine. Asking how that would be, stretching us sideways and inviting us to a full bodied embrace of God encounter. For in liturgy, this very particular communal act we join together in, we participate with all of our senses. In posture and word, music and ritual, unlike anything we do anywhere else, together we speak into being an understanding of divine presence alive among us. Our liturgy provides us a framework to express ourselves within, our building gives us a place to be held and housed within. In the workshop that followed the service we explored further, took a quick glimpse of the history from which our liturgy has emerged. Of shifts and changes in theological and social landscapes that have had profound effect on our understanding of how we enact liturgy together, of what we do. Profound effect even as the structure of the liturgy remains, we continue to be obedient, if you like, to tradition, to liturgy’s structure and form. Just as this wonderful building housing us expresses a theology from a time and social context quite different to now, it is still a place we can belong with integrity and relevance to these times. So the liturgy we inherit has a shape and form from a tradition predating us yet still can house words, music, action, colour and drama with integrity and relevance to the context of our time.

Perhaps an example might help to illustrate the influence theological understanding, contextual world view has on what we make real, visible, express publicly in our set aside sanctuary spaces we name church. Holy Trinity Cathedral is a building that reflects in its structure both theological change and contextual application. I came to know a bit about the building when I was in ministry there. Those of you who know the building will recognise in the chancel, the older, first built part of the Cathedral a structure and style of building not dissimilar to St Matthew’s in its form. With high reaching arches that draw the eye skyward literally upward toward the heavens. The altar is at the far reach end, long way from the common people that gather. The walls are thick and impenetrable, with little natural light, seats are in choir formation facing one another and so sideways to the altar. The newer part of the Cathedral is entirely different, it was once explained to me thus, as it happens by an architect. The intention was to create a sense of a roof that floated with walls of glass porous to the outside world. The coloured glass of those walls reflecting, expressing the world in this place, Aotearoa, NZ, the Word in this place. Rather than shut itself away it was to be a place that mingled with the life of the everyday where people gathered, a market place of intersect where world and Word, the real life of real people gathered in the embrace of divine presence. As you can gather it is an image, an ideal, an idea the stuck and stayed with me. Since my time there more changes have taken place, removing the divides between old and new, integrating the building and constructing another chapel with transparent walls to the outside. It provokes a confidence to dare say we too can find and know God as revealed in this place, we are responsible to speak, make real with the things of this land that experience.

But to return to us to liturgy as expressing identity, seeing it as a framework to gathering us, let’s now look into the colour, the fabric we use to enhance the liturgy we receive. Pay attention to the garments or vestments as they’re known within church context. Peculiar to churches that align themselves to practices of tradition through time, vestments also carry a story and trace a history of continuity through change. Some of the vestments are coloured and change colour according to the season of the church year. Seasons determined by the cycle of the liturgy, patterned by the story of Jesus life, rather than cycle of nature’s seasons. Even so, the colours of vestments, the motifs and symbols that may appear on them reflect not just religious motifs but symbol and sign of divine presence experienced in creation’s seasons. As inheritors of a tradition grounded in the Northern Hemisphere our experience of seasons is inverted. This season of Lent for example gains its name from the lengthening of days experienced from winter toward spring. New life and light of Easter from darkness experientially makes much more sense when you’re moving from winter to spring. Whereas shortening days, a journey from light into darkness is the Lenten journey to Easter we in the Southern Hemisphere take. It changes the experience assumed by much of the material of liturgical tradition. The journey’s no less powerful, yet the potency of symbols and colours perhaps require some translation from that first intended.

Vestments, these garments we wear now almost only in or for liturgical context do seem strange, especially without a frame of reference. How many of you have been to a big church occasion, say consecration of a cathedral, ordination of a bishop, the sort of occasion that attracts archbishops, bishops and other people of hierarchical significance all kitted out in beautiful regalia, with mitres and copes and all manner of things? If you take a step back, imagine yourself as a bystander from the street it’s the strangest sight to behold, truly appears as if you’ve stepped back in time, without code to interpret it might appear as if some arcane ritual is being enacted and everyone so serious!! Yet these garments we wear that may now seem strange in fact have very humble origin. Vestments that have become almost works of art were once common workaday, ordinary garments, the alb an undergarment, the chasuble an over garment. Garments at first kept plain so to conceal identity in a persecuted church came to be retained after threat was gone. The garments of everyday from that time remained even when fashions changed but that is a story for the workshop.

So these garments worn were primarily made to be usable and functional, to protect and enable the person wearing them to carry out the tasks of their day, they needed to be fit for purpose. Retained as garments for liturgical purpose it’s perhaps interesting to ask about the purpose they serve. They are identifiers, for sure. They’re worn by people doing certain functional tasks within liturgy, often around the sacrament of word or bread and wine, a liturgy that is breathed into life through the presence and participation of us all. In this place those in the serving party wear an alb, the white garment, over this is laid stole of office if a person is ordained and a chasuble is worn by the person who gathers and leads us as we re-enact the drama of Jesus’ last meal with his friends, in breaking bread and pouring wine. The white of the alb is intentional just as is the seasonal colour of the stole and chasuble. They tell of a continuity of practice through time, they remind us of the changing seasons in life, in our journey with God, in our world. We’re people creating liturgy as we participate grounded in space and time. The vestments identify the purpose of a role within liturgy, a role intended to enhance liturgical flow, not to interrupt but to complement our movement of worship.

Vestments provide us a visual focus in liturgy. In so doing in a curious way they teach and inform, for they reflect something of the identity of a place. Imagine, well in a city church such as this it’s easier to simply observe, when people wander in to have a look around during a service, say on Sunday morning, what do they see? Perhaps you too have done this when overseas, maybe unknowingly. What you observe tells you quite a lot, your interpretation, of course, but the language of body posture, action, sound, colour, smell, all of the senses as Helen said last week, speak to and of the people in that place. Liturgy is our act of worship, our actions, words, participation, building, all speak they, we are of a piece in expressing our faithfulness as wanderers of the Jesus way in our place and time. I wonder how intentional we can be about this, engaged in our activity with understanding?

Let’s consider this day. We exist in this historic time and this geographical location. We’ve physical place in specific city and building, and we have a particular religious lineage with its unique story. Right now the unique religious story is speaking in the season we call Lent, the colour is purple, Alleluia and Gloria are not spoken, the music is more sombre, the readings are of repentance, insisting we’re to be and act differently. Today’s gospel can be uncomfortable especially if we hear it filtered through a tradition that interprets it as advocating the merit of self-denial for self-denial’s sake, of rejection of the world as place of temptation and turmoil. Such tradition of interpretation does exist, we could choose to listen and enact faith and life this way. Today’s gospel does tell that choosing to follow for this Jesus way will change us. From the outset Jesus call to disciples is, “Come and see” or “Follow me.” We can choose whether to accept this invitation. There’s risk in accepting such invitation for we don’t know where it will lead. “When we yield to the invitation of another to come and see, in the very act we give up our own plans, our own direction and our own aspirations.” [1] Remember we’re invited to choose by a God made real in life who’s character Mary Jane Miller thinker and iconographer writes, “does not force us to drink from the well of life, walk the path of freedom, or take on a life of prayer. God does not demand we build communities of love and inclusion, or journey in the desert. God does not insist we look into our neighbour’s eyes with compassion and understanding, or gaze into a pool of water and see the beginning of creation. God does NOT demand we see ourselves as loved without question.

How, in our liturgy, do we speak this, see this, taste and touch, invite participation in this? Our colour for this season is purple. Our liturgy reflects such choice to follow, to live in a world that reveals we’re beloved of God and that will ask something of us in return. To raise our eyes from only self-concern, to risk opening our hearts and lives to learn of divine presence that turns us in turn to open our hearts and lives to the world in which we live.. Our faith is of a piece it would seem, we’re asked to choose, we’ve only the stuff of this creation, these amazing bodies, this most marvellous creation with which to speak and act and bring to life, to reveal and make present in this time the faith we each and every day are learning of. In this place where we gather to share, to strengthen, to listen, taste, touch, see, experience that which is other and in us, we together make real in time the God we are coming to know.

[1] L. Cunningham and K. Egan, Christian Spirituality: Themes from the Tradition (Paulist Press: New Jersey, 1996), 109.