A sermon about liberty

Sermon on the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Llandudno and St Tudno’s Church on the Great Orme, in the Ministry Area of Bro Tudno

The Ministry Area’s order of service with the lections, including a poem in addition to the First Reading and the Holy Gospel, can be found here.

Words from Gwenallt’s poem: “We are lifted from the circle, above the fingers’ dictatorship”

My grandmother’s dementia made her mind, her personality, her character a kind of skeleton long before her body let her down. She had been a proud, dignified woman — and she would have hated what she became, had her mind been able to perceive it. Open-ness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability — those things that give our personality flesh and colour — were stripped away from hers, like a tree losing its leaves, some bare branches left, pointing at nothing.

My mother and I talk about it sometimes — how someone so dear to us became this hardened, brittle, diminished, sometimes very unpleasant version of their old self. We talk about it, without ever quite verbalizing the shadow that hangs over our conversation — the question, “Will this happen to us, too?”

Medically, in terms of our mental health, who knows — our minds, as our bodies, will be subject to forces, to dilapidations, we can’t control.

But seeing someone’s personality and character change so rapidly, and reflecting on that, has allowed my mother and me to develop a kind of pact — a sort of permission to ask one another, from time to time, “Are you — is your personality — hardening, or is it mellowing? Are you becoming more brittle, more closed, more at the mercy of some of the uncompromising, untrusting, anxious, unkind elements of your character; or are you able to ease, to slip into something loose, into the more expansive version of who you are, open, diligent, active, trusting, generous? Are we at risk, as we get older, of becoming too narrow, too confined by some of the stricter elements of our personality; or is there liberty still in our souls.”

“We are lifted from the circle, above the fingers’ dictatorship”

The Jesus we encounter in the Gospel of Saint Mark is impatient with all that confines him. In the Gospel of Saint John, as we’ve heard over recent weeks, Jesus will sit by the lake and talk and talk to the crowd about majestic, mysterious things — just as he will later talk and talk to his disciples in the Upper Room in Jerusalem over supper; just as he will, on his knees, to his Father, in prayer at Gethsemane. But the Jesus we encounter in the Gospel of Saint Mark is sharp, edgy, on the move, unconfined by expansive mystery. He’s a physical manifestation of the way he expects God’s ways to interrupt, upend and liberate our lives. He eats, teaches, heals, resurrects, where he wills, with whomever he wills, whenever he wills. His loyalty, as he tells the Pharisees today, is not to human tradition (with all its narrow confines) but to the expansive, transgressive, all-encompassing commandments of God.

“We are lifted from the circle, above the fingers’ dictatorship”

People who have thought about liberty — what freedom means for individuals and for societies — talk about negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty means freedom from external restraints on our actions — liberty from talibans and oppressors everywhere who seek to limit freedom of speech and thought and expression and movement, and to impose a narrow morality on our lives. Positive liberty means the possession of the power to fulfil our potential, to act upon our free will.

Being confined, following rules has its comforts. And we, religious folk, can easily become withholders of liberty — imposers of respectability, staying our hand of blessing. Churches, like people, can become brittle things, closed, at the mercy of some of the uncompromising, untrusting, anxious, unkind elements of our theology.

But we are lifted from the circle, above the fingers’ dictatorship.

Gwenallt, in his poem, knows that we are called by God to a liberty beyond all confines, even the confines of time and death.

Beauty, truth and love, bread and wine — the stuff of divine commandment that shapes our positive liberty — they do not limit or satiate or cloy — they widen and enlarge our souls; they keep the leaves on us; they make us mellow. “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”