“Pity the soul for whom the absence of ‘alleluia’ is no chore, no bore, no pain…”
The sermon text is below the sermon audio…
Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Church, Goldsboro NC. February 14 2021 by the Reverend Alan Neale
“Why no alleluias?”
Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany, the last Sunday before Lent which begins on Wednesday (Ash Wednesday)… and so today is the day when you and I have opportunity to give voice to all the alleluias that lie within our souls for come Wednesday we enter an alleluia-free zone!
The Benedictine Dom Prosper Gueranger writes, “The church takes the song of heaven away from us; she forbids our uttering that Alleluia, which is so dear to us, as giving us a fellowship with the choirs of angels who are forever repeating it. How is it that we poor mortals, exiles on earth, have dared to become so familiar with this hymn of a better land?”. “Alleluia is like a stranger amidst our other words… its mysterious beauty is as though a drop of heaven’s overflowing joy had fallen on our earth”.
Oh my! Why is it then… that this angelic word with mysterious beauty, a drop of heaven’s overflowing joy, is to be liturgically removed, ceremoniously snatched from our lips for nearly seven whole weeks? Why?
Well I offer you three reasons… this Lenten silence is an act of discipline, and act of anticipation and an act of discovery.
An Act of Discipline. It is good that we learn to practice “hesitancy of tongue”, what the devotional writer Esther de Waal calls a quality that is missing in today’s society… “reticence”. It was said of Disraeli by Gladstone, “The man is inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity”. Sometimes, friends, we too much and too often out of the inebriation of our own pain and thoughtlessness and with such words we often do harm to others (as well as to ourselves). On the mountain, of which St. Paul speaks, Moses showed discipline of tongue… six days on the mountain nothing is said, and for another forty days he is alone. The disciples, we are told by Mark, “kept silent and told no one of the things they had seen”. And of course Jesus was “oppressed and afflicted, yet did not open his mouth… as sheep before shearers is dumb, so he did not speak a word”. And when on trial “Jesus made no reply, not even to a single charge… to the great amazement of the governor”.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, we too need learn discipline of tongue, reticence of words and in Lent we practice this discipline as we say no alleluias. Of course from time to time in worship an “alleluia” will slip out (if we had a churchful of St. Peter’s it would be happening all the time for he had this tendency to open mouth without engaging brain) (perhaps we need a box that we can pass around for fines for some flagrant liturgical crimes?) but it is our intent, in community, to let no alleluia pass our Lenten lips. And pity the soul for whom this enforced silence is no pain, no challenge, no hardship! Pity the mind, pity the heart, pity the lips for whom the silence of alleluias is no chore, no labour, no burden!
The Lenten alleluia silence is also An Act of Anticipation. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in his 2006 Easter Sermon, “I was always taught that that you should never under any circumstances say alleluia during Lent. It was like giving up chocolate or alcohol. Save it till Easter and then you’ll really enjoy it as it was meant to be enjoyed. There’s plenty of good sense about this… (for) Lent is properly a preparation for Easter, a reminder that we still live in a world in which Easter hasn’t quite sunk it and changed as it should”. It has become almost redundant to say that we live in a world in which instant gratification is required “as of yesterday, for most “want what they want when they want it”. And tragically this attitude seductively intrudes in the spiritual life… we want holiness now (especially for those around us!), we want prayers answered now (affirmatively of course!), we want to be Scripturally literate now (without commitment of time and prayer and study). In today’s Epistle St. Paul describes “the veil” that is over the faces of many… but this is an anticipation of greater things to come! And when St. Paul speaks of those with “unveiled faces”, he says even those “are being transformed from one degree of glory to another”… it is all about anticipation. And then St. Paul urges his readers (you and me today) “not to lose heart”… to keep alive pulsating anticipation within our souls.
Recently I watched “Something New” (a romantic comedy, not really my most favourite genre)… at one point Brian, a landscape architect, says to his lover, Kenya, “I take hard earth and from it make things bloom”… holy anticipation leads us to believe that from hard Lent, and from hardened hearts, things will bloom… one day!
And, thirdly, the Lenten alleluia silence is An Act of Discovery. The time comes for the three closest friends of Jesus (Peter, James and John) when they must leave the alleluia mountain and descend to the life of imagined divine absence and chronic human trauma. They had to learn to discover the presence and power of alleluia wherever they trod. I must share with you another quotation from our Archbishop’s 2006 Easter Message (it is rather long but terribly worthwhile), “This year (2006) I started Lent in Sudan. Ash Wednesday found me in temperatures of 40-plus sharing in food distribution in a school and refugee camp in Malakal. Pretty well everything, every aspect of that environment, seemed set to remind us that we still lived in a world where the cross was the immediate reality and resurrection hope was definitely a thing of the future. Hunger, desperate poverty, the traces of unspeakable trauma and violence, and the present reality of the same unspeakable brutality not too far away in Darfur – this, surely, was a world untouched by Easter. But one thing you quickly discover at worship in the Sudan is that there is no occasion free from alleluias. That Ash Wednesday service echoed with the joyful shouting of ‘Alleluia’ – from the children and the women especially as we came in, from every speaker who got near the microphone during the service, in hymns and songs throughout. My liturgical conscience had to resign and slink away. Lent it might be, but this was not an Easter-free zone. Yet they could not stop saying, singing, shouting, ‘Alleluia’. If they lived in a long-term Lent, they also lived in an unceasing awareness of Easter. They had come through the horrors of war and oppression with the confidence intact that God was always there on the far side or in the depths of what they were enduring. If everyone else forgot them, God would not and could not. Because he was alive, they could live too. The mystery of Christian faith is really something we can’t ever put into words because it is about so many things that are all true all at once, but we can only talk about them one at a time”.
You see, “you can take the Christian out of alleluias but you cannot take the alleluias out of the Christian”. This Lenten alleluia silence should be for you and me an act of discovery when we amaze ourselves, impress ourselves, that there are times when we wish to shout alleluia despite the Lenten season… for then we know that we have learnt that in any Lenten time of the soul there will be within us an alleluia voice, an alleluia hope!
I once heard of the Sunday School children that present “alleluias” they have made and then, at the end of worship, the church proceeds to a place where the “alleluias” are buried… ready to be dug up, re-discovered, resurrected come Easter. This Wednesday (Ash Wednesday) we come to “bury the alleluias” but we bury them in a place where we know where they lie and the time will come, we know, when they will be rediscovered and resurrected with potential, power, and passion.
Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. Amen.