Sermão de Hoje

Eu acho que o padre Campbell não se importaria se eu replicasse o seu artigo do boletim da igreja aqui. O sermão de hoje foi na mesma linha.

The Radiance of God

Faith in God has many analogies and one of the most impressive is that of light, as we hear in today's Gospel (Luke 9:28-36). It is something which we are familiar with and one which is obvious in its power. We look at the sun and astronomers through the centuries have tracked its course and we realize that its power is immense; were it not for the sun, we could not see and we know that to be the case because we also know what darkness is like. This power of the sun was the object of worship in pre-Christian religions and divine power was ascribed to it as a result of its importance for life on earth. As the god of a natural religion, it has no worthy competitors.

Pagan and then Christian philosophy and theology took up to this theme of light and transferred it to the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The difficulty for many of these thinkers, however, was the invisibility of God. It was claimed by St John that Christ was the light that had come into the world but it was not an obvious light as the sun was. Certainly there was the illumination of His teaching but many things seemed to have been just the way they were before. The world on the surface had not changed even if the claim was that everything indeed had as a result of His Life, Death and Resurrection. If anything, it was darkness that appeared to hold sway. St Therese of Lisieux captured this well when she said, "There isn't just a veil; it is a great wall which reaches up to the sky and blots out the stars." How then could we speak of God as being radiant in light and in glory?

St Gregory of Nyssa was one who tackled this problem by appealing to the humility of mankind. His approach, taken up by others particularly of the Eastern Christian tradition such as St Symeon the New Theologian, was to remind us of the meagreness of our senses. They tell us that while we are able to detect many things, there is much that we cannot and, indeed, recent scientific discoveries have revealed what was always there but that with our five senses we could not detect.

We believe, as we say in the Creed, that God is everywhere and is the creator of all things - "seen and unseen" - so our faith tells us that God is a Real Presence in the universe. George Steiner's book of that name argues with great erudition for the existence of literature and art having to be underwritten by an unseen but necessarily present reference of meaning, and therefore, of God. This, however, is not what we see with our senses but lies beneath the surface of things.

Christian faith, too, believes in the radiance of God but it is a light which appears to us as darkness simply because we cannot immediately detect it. We look at the universe and all we see is darkness. We look inside ourselves and perhaps sometimes see the same. It is as if God has left us alone and gone away. Not true. There is a light shining throughout the whole of creation, a light so intense that we cannot see its glory, the radiance of God. It is there and is present to us and one day we shall see God who sustains all that He creates, including us. As the great Jesuit Juan Alfonso de Polanco in 1556 said, "The sun is not so ready to shed its light as God is ready to enlighten and fulfill our minds with the rays of grace."