The time is out of joint: A Halloween Sermon

 Act 1 - A Spectre is Haunting Canada

Rest, rest, perturbèd spirit.—So, gentlemen, 

With all my love I do commend me to you, 

And what so poor a man as Hamlet is 

May do t’ express his love and friending to you, 

God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together, 

And still your fingers on your lips, I pray. 

The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite 

That ever I was born to set it right! (Hamlet, 204-211)

This week, in an appearance on Radio-Canada, former Prime Minister Jean Chretien commented on his role in overseeing the latter years of Canada’s genocidal residential school system, declaring “The problem was never mentioned when I was minister. Never.”

The backlash was immediate and outraged. Academics, activists, and journalists, all pointed out that during Chretien’s tenure as Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, the abuses of the system were well known in the department and well documented. Within a couple days, CBC news had uncovered a letter written by Chretien, responding to problems at St. Anne’s residential school which read in part, “You may rest assured, however, that we are aware of the problems which exist at that location and are doing what we can to correct them.”

Whether Chretien knew what and when may be an interesting debate for the chattering classes, but why bring this up from the pulpit? It seems to me that Chretien’s response, whether a product of ignorance, dishonesty, or old age, captures perfectly that sentiment that Hamlet so eloquently enunciated to his friends, “The time is out of joint.”

This evening we observe All Hallow’s Eve. Tomorrow is one of the principal feasts of the Church, All Saints Day, a day for the commemoration and celebration of the lives of the saints and their witness to the One God’s saving acts in History. Yet before we get to the feast, the church has learned that there is a need to pause on its precipice to acknowledge the uncanny aspects of memory. What stories are we remembering, and which ones are we practicing to forget? Gearing up for a great public act of remembering is unsettling, because it risks bringing with it all manner of spectres that haunt us. Things we’d rather not remember. People and deeds we’ve tried hard not to know.

It feels as if this year, this “out of joint” Halloween time began at the end of May with the recovery of those first 215 graves. As an Indigenous student of mine reminded me this week, “Those were our family members, we knew who didn’t come back, we knew their names, we knew how many there were.” 

Yet while some communities were prepared for these graves to be recovered, many more Canadians proclaimed their surprise, shocked that this country had been built on the graves of thousands of children. Understandably, these exclamations of surprise only fueled angry responses from those who had been faithful to the remembering of these dear ones for decades. After all, it is not as if Canadians could say that we had not been told. As early as the 1920s, Dr. Peter Bryce was blowing the whistle in widely circulated publications about the abuses and crimes of the residential school system, an act that would see him fired and ignored as the Residential school system not only carried on, but expanded in the following years.

But let’s assume that most Canadians never read the Bryce Report and lived on in ignorance. After all, knowledge was much more easily gate-kept in a pre-internet age. Yet even that carefully maintained ignorance must surely have ended with the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission right? The reports were quite clear that there were many unmarked graves to be recovered, this was known despite the loss and destruction of official records, because of the loving and painful remembering that survivors and family members had done for generations. But here we are, in 2021, six years on, and as the number of recovered graves surges into the thousands, we continue to be surprised and to hear practiced rhetorics of forgetting and unknowing from our leaders. Hamet is right, we live in times that are out of joint, O cursed spite, that ever we were born to set things aright.

Act 2 - A Spectre is Haunting the Church

Of all the many accidents of history, one of the most humorous to me is the coinciding of Halloween with Reformation Day. If you were listening carefully, you might have caught a subtle nod to Reformation debates about the relationship of law and gospel in the lessons for this evening. Although I have always been Protestant, “Reformation day” was not something I knew anything about until I met some Dutch Reformed kids in university. For those who don’t know, it is the custom of some Protestant communities to observe October 31st as Reformation Day, commemorating Martin Luther’s apocryphal nailing of the 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church, and thus, as the story goes, kick-starting the Protestant Reformation and ushering in the recovery of the gospel and the true church. This version of events may be too Prot-triumphalist for an Anglican congregation, especially for those of us who are taking Bonnie and David’s excellent course on the History of the Church in England. But, it should be noted that it is precisely in how we practice remembering this history that gives rise to how we understand who we are today. For the church, whatever else it may be, is at minimum, a community that gathers in collective rites of remembering. Yet while this remembering confers an identity, it can simultaneously summon ghosts of suppressed events and histories that haunt the edges of our sense of ourselves, nagging at our subconscious, prompting us in times of lapsed concentration to ask, is the time out of joint? At times, it may even prompt us to a nostalgia for a future that, though promised, never actually arrived.

I think we can see a bit of this future nostalgia present in our lessons this evening. In our Old Testament lesson, we heard Moses give the summary of the law and promise that, if the people observed this “in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy… you and your children, and your children’s children, may fear the Lord your God all the days of your life, and keep all his decrees and his commandments… so that your days may be long.” The Law is given then, not as an institution by which folk’s consciences are crushed by guilt, but as a gift, as a promise of life lived well in the Land. Here the psalmist concurs, “Happy are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.” 

The promise of Deuteronomy - a happy people living faithfully with their God happily in the land - is a promise and a hope that sits uneasily with the lived reality of the disjointed history of Israel. If one considers that Deuteronomy was written quite late, either under the desperately doomed reforms of King Josiah, or from the vantage point of exile, the Mosaic promise of a happy inhabitation seems like little more than a longing for a future that never arrived. 

Our lesson from the Epistle to the Hebrews seems to pick up this future nostalgia, lamenting the incomplete sacrality of the sacrificial blood of goats and bulls, but promising that in the perfect sacrifice of our High Priest who offered his own blood, that there is at last a purified way to worship the living God. The Reformers were quite taken by the imagery of Hebrews, for if the promise of the One, Holy, and Apostolic Church to be the bride of Christ and people of God in this world had come to naught in the deformities and accrual of traditioned works righteousness in late medieval piety, here was a message of sheer grace based on the perfect saving work of the Priest who made redundant all other priestly mediators.

Yet, while the Reformers may have found useful rhetorical ammunition against their papist rivals by contrasting the perfect work of Christ’s saving grace against the alleged dead works of the law of Roman piety, they also reified an ancient Christian sin by reading a purified and allegorized Church into the text of Hebrews and a decadent and doomed Israel/Rome into the people of the Law. This ancient sin is known as supersessionism, and it is at the root of Christian anti-semitism, and as a growing number of theologians have argued, is the root of all Christian racism. 

The relationship of the church to Israel is a complex one, and it is an incredibly delicate subject given centuries of violent eruptions by Christians against the Jewish people in our midst. Yet Willie Jennings, in a recent interview in the Christian Century, sums up the problem well when he reminds us that at its root, supersessionism is the temptation by Gentile Christians to forget that we have been grafted into somebody else’s story. Supersessionism is a deformed act of remembering wherein the particularity of Israel’s election is forgotten and wholly transferred to the church. Luther fell prey to this temptation, writing a foul treatise entitled “On the Jews and their lies” but we Anglicans also engaged in this, in fact, it was only a couple years ago that General Synod finally removed the collect praying for the conversion of the Jews from their “ignorance and hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word” from the BCP.

While there is no simple or straight line from Christian supersessionism to the legacy of our Church’s involvement in the Residential school system, it is an important part of our Anglican history. Of the great achievements of the English Reformation, there are perhaps none greater than the creation of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. If there is a distinctive Anglican way of being Christian, it is in large part thanks to the genius of having the scriptures, and thus the history of God’s people, available in our vernacular language. In addition to this, the genius of the Book of Common Prayer was to take the scriptures that, thanks to early Reformers, were becoming more and more widely available in English, and teach the English people to pray with them. And so a nation emerged in the Early Modern period, a nation shaped by the praying of the language of Scripture in a way that fundamentally shaped the language and social imaginary of English speaking peoples. 

Religion is tricky business, for it is a series of practices, beliefs, and forms of life, that amount to our best human approximation of an appropriate human response to the God who acts in history to save God’s people.It is incredibly formative, but precisely because of its formative power, and because religion, strictly speaking, is a human endeavour, it is prone to deformity as it exists in the postlapsarian time we call human history. Sin is wily, and it is prone to cause the biggest mess where we believe ourselves to be the strongest. And so, for the English Church, the great achievement of having English scriptures and the powerful tool of common prayer would, at times, be liable to that ancient Christian sin of supersessionism. From time to time, English Christians would cast themselves in the role of Israel, thus making England the land of Promise and the English into God's elect.

One can see how this might play out even here at St. Margaret’s. At the front of our church is a beautiful stained glass window. It depicts the Epiphany, that moment in liturgical time that is tells of the coming of the magi to present their gifts to the infant Jesus. The Epiphany is an important moment in the life of the church, for it is the first moment when the light of Christ is made visible to the Gentile nations - it is an early promise that in Christ, the promise that God made so long ago to Abraham to be a blessing to all nations, is finally going to be fulfilled. And so, in Christian art it is normal to depict the magi as representative of the various races of men known to the ancient world, usually depicted by one white European, one Black African, and one Asian magi. In this way, “all” the nations of the world are given to see the light of Christ. But in our stained glass, the Christ child is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. On the one hand, there is a sense in which Christ’s incarnation is eminently translatable in that it incorporates all peoples into his Resurrection life, so this depiction of an Anglo-Saxon Jesus in an English church makes sense. But it also carries with it the alternate, more nefarious interpretation, that in order for the nations to see Christ, they must see the British Empire. In the noble effort of Cranmer and the other English Reformers to create a Christian nation bound together in a common English way of praying the English scriptures, the materials and stories of Christianity became so familiar that it was incredibly easy to forget that the English, like all the Gentile nations, stand not on the side of the Jewish Christ, but on the side of the Gentile magi - as people given a glimpse of God’s very light and invited into a story that is not our own.

In forgetting that the history of salvation is one into which we Gentiles have been grafted as those untimely born, we have often sinned. In fact, it is largely this deformed act of remembering that insisted on the policies that shaped the history of the Residential School system, insisting that to be Christian was to get a haircut, learn English, and kill off entirely the Indian, in order that the child might be ‘saved’ and civilized. As this summer has tragically reminded us once again, the death toll of this deformed remembering was not metaphorical.

Act 3 - Of Hope and a Holy Ghost

And so we return to All Hallow’s Eve, poised on the edge of a great act of Christian remembering of all the Saints. But this remembering needs the discipline of this night of the uncanny. A straightforward act of remembering must necessarily create a narrative to remember. But in selecting one story to tell, we will be leaving many other stories untold. And it is these untold stories that lurk on the edges of our consciousness, casting a haunted pall over our sense of ourselves and our histories. These perturbed spirits will not rest, and every so often their spectral form will confront us as they did Hamlet and ask us to set this disjointed time aright.

No wonder Hamlet curses his fate, “O Cursed Spite” indeed! Are we lords of time? Can we reconcile these broken histories? Not three years after the conclusion of the TRC, a Saskatchewan farmer shot Colten Boushie dead in an altercation on the farmer’s property. When a Canadian court found the farmer not guilty, what had begun to be whispered by frustrated activists was taken up in a resounding chorus coast to coast, “Reconciliation is dead.” The delays had been too long, there was too much hedging, justice had been denied too many times. Perhaps history doesn’t, in fact, ark toward justice, maybe it’s just one damn thing after another. 

“But when Christ came as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation), he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with this own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption.” 

The time is out of joint and though our efforts may result in proximate moments of justice we stand just as accursed as the tragic Hamlet if ever we imagine that history is something that we can seize the reins of and make aright. But as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says elsewhere, we do see Jesus. And this Jesus has entered in where all human effort fails and secured an eternal redemption. This is the gospel, that God is who God has ever been, the one who is mighty to save and determines to be the God who intervenes for God’s people. This is why St. Paul can say elsewhere that in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, not because the Church replaces Israel, but because what makes the Church is what made Israel - they who were not people - into a people, it is always and only the saving work of God who acts in sheer grace toward God’s beloved.

So we stand on the precipice of this principal feast of the Church, celebrating and remembering the witness of all the saints, but not because doing so somehow secures our identity as Christians. Our memories are prone to deformities. They are haunted by the ghosts of that which we have done, and that which we have left undone. No, we do not celebrate the memory of the saints because in doing so we can set a disjointed history aright, we celebrate the memory of the saints because we know that every saint, every soul, is held perfect in the memory of God. It is, once again, always about the mighty saving work of God, and it is our hope that in this perfect saving love, that every ghost that haunts, every spectre that looms, and every uncanny sense that the time is out of joint has been and will be made right in the eternal redemption of the living God.