History – Sentimentalize or Weaponize?
History – Sentimentalize or Weaponize?
Sunday 29 September 2024
A sermon by The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos
Readings: 1 Peter 2:1-10
John 10: 22-29
‘But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people’.
A Dedication Festival compels us to examine our relationship with history.
I am conscious that I have long been prone to nostalgia – to a wistful dwelling on and longing for places and people and moments that are in my past. Earlier this month I returned to Rochester, where I first went to school fifty years ago. I walked along Minor Canon Row, just as I did when I was a boy, savouring the memory of countless walks to the bus-stop, carefully treading on the cracks between the paving slabs – until I came to one which was then and is now too long for one single step. Only, I didn’t jump, as I would have done when I was wearing short trousers and a school cap.
Nostalgia is necessarily selective about the past. I didn’t think much about the deplorable behaviour of some of those who taught me. Nor did I linger over the sheer agony that adolescence often was. But if nostalgia is necessarily selective about the past it does not seek to recreate the past in the present. It does not attempt to turn back the clock. Meeting up with some of my contemporaries and looking at our greying hair, sensible outfits, and expanding waistlines I was reminded of just how impossible that is. The past is indeed a foreign country: they do things differently there – they suit slim-fit trousers, for starters. Nostalgia may sentimentalize the past, but it does not weaponize it.
Jesus walks in Solomon’s portico during the festival of the Dedication. That festival recalled the day, less than 200 years earlier, when a Jewish priestly family had reclaimed the temple from the hands of the Hellenistic king, Antiochus. They had cleansed it from its defilement, relit its lamps, and reconsecrated it for the worship of God. The festival of the Dedication dwelt on that moment in history when Jews had changed their relationship with history, taken charge of their holy place, and restored it to its rightful use.
And the rightful use of that place remains one of the most bitterly divisive and fiercely contested struggles in which humanity has ever engaged. The site of the ancient temple, in the Old City of East Jerusalem, was occupied by Israel and annexed to it after the war of 1967. Muslims know the site as Al Aqsa. For them it is the third most holy place in the world, the place from where the prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. It is in the care of an Islamic trust, or waqf, and under the protection of the King of Jordan. But Israel controls all access to it – a situation rife with contradiction and ripe for weaponization.
When I was there earlier this year, I met Awni, a member of the waqf and the facilities manager. The end of Ramadan was approaching, when thousands of Muslims flock to Jerusalem and spend the last days of the holy month in the compound, praying and readying themselves to celebrate Eid- al-Fitr. Awni was in a state of high anxiety. No announcement had been made by the Israelis as to how many of the faithful would be allowed into the Old City. He was responsible for buying toilet paper, soap, drinking water – all the provisions needed to care for a mass gathering. But he didn’t know whether it would be a gathering of fifty or of fifty thousand. And he was also worried about health and safety, that bugbear of facilities managers the world over. The current structure of the Al Aqsa Mosque is older than that of Salisbury Cathedral. But the security around the compound makes bringing in building materials almost impossible. The backlog of repairs was growing, and he had no means of addressing them. The windows were at risk of falling onto the people praying below.
Jesus celebrates the restoration of the place to its rightful use; today, to question its rightful use is to enter a tortuous web of relationships with history which epitomizes the conflict that overwhelms the region. It is a Muslim holy site whose entries and exits are controlled by the Jewish state; there are Muslim voices which deny it was ever a Jewish temple; there are Jewish voices calling for the temple to be rebuilt on it and preparing red heifers for sacrifice. The past is weaponized in the service of the present.
Our vocation today is to celebrate the dedication of this place as a place of Christian worship. ‘Alhamdulillah’ (as the Palestinians say); thanks God: unlike the Al Aqsa compound, and unlike every other building in the Close, the Cathedral’s principal purpose has not changed since its dedication in the mid-thirteenth century. There is a place for gratitude for history’s work, which we continue to enjoy; but there is no place for its imprisonment of the present. Turn back the clock in Salisbury Cathedral and there would be no amplification, no electric light, and no gas-fired heating; there would be no girls in the choir or women at the altar. There would be an untidy jumble of buildings in the churchyard, where the air would be punctuated by the noise and stink of the grazing livestock and we would be reminded daily why Marsh Close is so called.
So to what relationship with history are we called? Jesus walks in Solomon’s portico. His people’s troubled past is the ground upon which he stands. It is not the cause in which he fights. For in him the promise of the temple – the promise that God will dwell with his people – has been realized, as it is for us today and in every celebration of the Eucharist. When God dwells with us it’s not that the past is unimportant: it is, for God is the one from who we have come. But the call of Jesus is ‘Follow me’, out of darkness and into light, as Saint Peter puts it. ‘Follow me’ – in seeking the God to whom we will one day return.
When Lebanon was engulfed by war in the 1970s the American Palestinian poet Lisa Suhair Majaj wrote these lines:
‘Days were punctuated by static and news
nights by the brilliance of tracer bullets in flight.
We huddled on campus steps,
transistor radios pressed to our ears,
straining for some echo of the future’.
Isn’t it that to which we’re called to on the feast of our Dedication? Not to over-indulge in fond recollection; not to allow what has been to confine us its dead grip; but to give thanks for the ground beneath our feet and to strain for an echo of the future – of what God wants for us, and of us? Today; tomorrow; and the day after. Amen.