Category Archives: sermon
Carrying our wounds with us
A sermon on John 20.19-end
We have this morning the familiar story of doubting Thomas – which is a story that means a great deal to me personally, as I too have moved in my life from doubt to faith, and I am greatly encouraged that it is Thomas who is privileged to give the climactic statement of this gospel ‘my Lord and my God!’ There is a natural sermon there… but I talked about Richard Dawkins last week!
There is something very important about this story which occasionally gets missed. First, and this is very important, it shows that the incarnation was not an illusion, that it wasn’t just Jesus putting on flesh like we might put on a coat – he really was flesh, and he has raised that flesh up – you could say, what this story tells us is that Jesus wasn’t pretending when he suffered
But there is something else here too, even more important, about the nature of resurrection itself – and it says something about what we have to hope for. Jesus is resurrected and I have a question for you, is he happy? [pause]
Of course he is, he has entered into glory. Now what is crucial is that he shows us what the resurrection body is like – full of mystery of course, but still we know some things – we know that he bears the marks of his crucifixion – he is happy, but he is still wounded.
I feel this is worthy of much reflection, and I would like you to take this image with you home today and ponder it – he is happy, but he is still wounded.
A few thoughts about what this story means for us and our Christian hope of resurrection.
First, we carry our wounds with us.
Second, the wounds are no longer painful but they do define us, we are the sort of people that these things have happened to. Our stories, those things which make us who we are – these are honoured by God.
Finally, the wounds are redeemed and healed – but they are not forgotten.
What this means is that what happens in this life is important – God doesn’t wipe the slate completely clean and begin again (the resurrection is not like the flood at the time of Noah); God takes what we have and changes it without destroying it. God takes the broken pieces and makes something new out of them.
This means that what we do today is of eternal significance. What we do in this world matters for ever. How we treat each other, how we treat our world, our environment – these things are invested with profound meaning. This doesn’t mean that things that go wrong cannot be redeemed – it does mean that just as we carry our own wounds with us, so too those with whom we interact will carry their woundings from us with them, and our world will carry its wounds as well.
I was pondering – should God be gracious enough to me to bring me into the kingdom on the last day – I wonder whether I will still be half-deaf, or whether that part of my nature has so profoundly shaped who I am that I couldn’t have full hearing and still be me. Yet I wouldn’t want to mislead you either. In the Kingdom there will be no hearing aids, there will be no spectacles, there will be no crutches or wheelchairs. Yet we will still be the people formed by such things, of that I am sure.
This is one of the deep mysteries revealed in this story of doubting Thomas. For the story is not just about Jesus but also about ourselves, about what we can hope for – that we will still be who we are – that everything that happens to us in this life will matter forever – that when God redeems us, he heals us – he heals, and he heals us; he will, in deed, raise us from the dead. Amen.
Thou shalt not shop at Tesco (a sermon)
Evensong: texts Micah 7 & James 5
Those who know me appreciate that I tend to refer to certain texts and principles from Scripture more often than others; I particularly like the prophets, and I particularly like the prophetic teachings denouncing economic injustice and promising God’s terrible wrath upon it. I refer to these principles when, for example, I go off on one of my rants about Tesco. The trouble is, I can start to sound like a stuck record – and I don’t really want to become a caricature of myself – so I’ve tried to avoid preaching on the topic too much, not least because I really don’t want to end up in the pages of the Daily Mail again – although those of you who read my blog will be well aware that my views, especially on Tesco, have become even less moderate as time has gone on! But those good intentions rather fail when faced with the sorts of texts that we have tonight. So, with just a little heaviness of heart, I’m going to get up onto my soapbox again.
“Now listen you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you.”
I should say early on that the problem isn’t really Tesco – Tesco is simply an extremely well-run company that is operating within a certain context and playing the game according to the “rules” it finds in operation. The problem is that basic context, and it is that basic context which God will soon act to destroy – but I will come back to that. For now, let’s run with Tesco as an example of what I feel needs to be named and shamed from a Christian perspective.
James 5.4-6: “The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered innocent men, who were not opposing you.”
What James is criticising here is the exploitation of the weak by the strong – the abuse of power undertaken in order to increase financial wealth at the cost of the lives of those being exploited. This is not a new insight for James – he is drawing on the insights which run consistently throughout the prophetic literature, as with tonight’s reading from Micah which points out that “the powerful dictate what they desire”.
Now how might this apply to Tesco? Well, let’s think about invoices. Normal business practice would be to invoice a company for goods and services rendered, and for those invoices to be met within a certain time period. Once upon a time I worked in the finance section of Anglian Water and it was my job to process the sequence of invoices, and I would have got into trouble if an invoice wasn’t paid on time. Now, according to a survey by Accountancy Age magazine, Tesco only pays 67% of its invoices below the value of £5000 within standard terms. Think about what that means. If the invoice is below £5000 then we are dealing with a small supplier, someone whose livelihood may well depend upon a prompt payment. On the other hand we have Tesco which, given that it makes billions of pounds of profits in a year, can certainly afford to pay bills promptly. Yet it doesn’t – and the high rate of non-payment – a third of their small bills – suggests that this is not an occasional accident. What we have is an example of a large company squeezing the supply chain in order to maximise its own cash flow and the income that can be generated from it. “The powerful dictate what they desire”. Essentially what happens is that the supplier is forced to lend money to Tesco, and Tesco doesn’t even have to pay interest. The trouble is that Tesco has become so good at practices like these that, according to one critical book I read recently, Tesco in the financial year ending in 2006 was able to ‘borrow’ over £2bn from its suppliers, at no cost in fees or interest payments.
Now as I said, the problem is not particularly with Tesco as such – they are simply the biggest player in this particular market and to a greater or lesser extent the criticisms apply to all the major supermarket chains. I just believe that we need to start somewhere, and not using Tesco is a good place to start. After all, it’s not a great hardship for most people, and if a committed Christian cannot achieve that then most areas of Christian discipleship will also be too much for them.
“Now listen you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you.”
The other great theme in the prophets is that the injustice of the rich will provoke God’s wrath: “because I have sinned against him I will bear the Lord’s wrath” as Micah puts it. The truth is that we cannot avoid sinning, we cannot avoid playing a part in the sins of the world. If you are a single mum struggling to survive on benefits, or a frugal pensioner, and Tesco is in walking distance then shopping there is the only reasonable option. It is the lesser of two evils and it is not at all part of my plan to heap yet more burdens upon the shoulders of those who are already vulnerable. Yet that simply points up the truth that what is needed is systemic change – and that is what God is bringing about. The way in which this systemic change is going to take place – the way in which we are going to experience God’s wrath – is starting to become clear. You will, I am sure, be aware of the rise in the oil price to a new all-time record high; part of the rise due to the peaking of oil production throughout the world. Yet what has now started to happen are the secondary effects from that. The price of wheat has gone up by 46% in the last two months, corn by 20%. This is because significant parts of the American mid-west have shifted their agricultural land to the production of corn-ethanol. In other words, the farmers can make more money – as a result of government subsidies – from providing fuel for cars than food for people. The consequences of this are frightening. How will our economic system cope when the fuel that it relies upon is taken away? Our transportation system – not least the transportation system – is entirely dependent upon liquid fuels, and as that system breaks down all our assumptions about economic life will be challenged. And what will we do when the car drivers of the west out-compete entire nations in the third world in the demand for food and fuel. Are we really prepared to stand by and watch the wars and mass human migrations that will result? The system has entered into a time of crisis, and God knows how it will end.
It is our entire way of life that needs to change, and that will change. What we need to do is to start living in the light of the change that is coming. There is a particular Christian language that refers to this, and that language is “living in the kingdom”. We are children of the resurrection. The resurrection shows the nature of God and the nature of humanity, it shows the way of life that we are to follow. Yet we are not there yet. What we are called to do is to live by that different understanding, to walk towards the light and to keep faith with it, even when it seems utterly absurd by worldly standards. What that means in this context is that we need to begin disengaging from the globalised production of pre-packaged food, and return to the sort of system that was universal as little as fifty years ago, where there is the possibility of a much more direct relationship with local food and local food suppliers. The implications extend into our entire habits of life. This is what the Transition Town movement is all about, and I am so glad that Mersea now has an organisation dedicated to pursuing that objective.
God is in this process. It is one of the principal places where the Spirit may today be found. For one of the other abiding themes of the prophetic writings is that God’s love will not always be eclipsed, that there will always be the possibility of redemption. Micah writes “Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, the LORD will be my light. Because I have sinned against him, I will bear the LORD’s wrath, until he pleads my case and establishes my right. He will bring me out into the light; I will see his righteousness.” There is a way out, a way that God will bless. That way, for us as a community, lies in turning away from highly efficient and soulless corporations and returning to the resilient, the local and the organic – in every sense. There is a challenge in the book of Deuteronomy which encapsulates this message, and which we would do well to meditate on: “See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live…”
May the Lord guide all our choices that we may do his will, that we and all God’s children may prosper in this land.
A sermon on the Virgin Birth
I preached this three years ago, on the texts that have come round again for tomorrow morning. After the service I was told that I was ‘very brave’, but reading it through again I’m not sure that I was…
20041219A virgin shall conceive
I like to think of myself as quite a conservative sort of Christian. That is, although I came into the church through the liberal door, I have found that the more I study the faith, the more comfortable I find myself with the classical formulations, and the greater weight I place on the Church Fathers and how they understood what Christianity is all about. However, although I’ve come quite a long way from my liberal beginnings – to the extent that I would now find it quite an insult to be labelled as a liberal – there is still one area where I can’t quite overcome that liberal inheritance. And our readings this morning bring my one remaining qualm directly to the surface.
Let’s begin with Isaiah. In our Old Testament reading this morning the Prophet Isaiah is predicting the birth of a child to a young woman. The political context is quite fraught, and I shall give a rapid explanation – those of you who have been coming to the Learning Church sessions will recognise some of this. Isaiah is writing in the 8th century BC, and this is a time when the united kingdom under David and Solomon had split into two Jewish kingdoms, Israel in the North and Judah in the South. Assyria was the rising local superpower, and Israel and the neighbouring state of Damascus were seeking Judah’s assistance in fighting against Assyria. The king of Judah, called Ahaz, didn’t want to go along with this, and so Israel and Damascus besieged Jerusalem, to try and engineer regime change and the installation of a more favourable ruler. Now the issue confronting Ahaz is whether he should seek a political alliance with the Assyrians, to defend his own position, or whether he should trust in God for protection – and as you can imagine, Isaiah is quite clear about the choice that should be made. Isaiah says to Ahaz that a young woman will give birth to a child, and before that child has come to maturity, the powers that threaten Ahaz will have been defeated. What Isaiah is doing is setting a time frame for how long Ahaz would have to wait – and, indeed, less than twelve years later, before such a child would have reached maturity, the kingdoms of Damascus and of Israel have been defeated by Assyria. So in Isaiah, there is no sense of the birth-process being somehow miraculous; indeed, had Isaiah wanted to make a point about virginity, he would have used a different word. That is, he uses the word ‘alma, meaning young woman, instead of the word betula, which would have specifically meant virgin.
So where has Matthew got his text from? For clearly, in verse 23 he is quoting Isaiah as referring to a virgin conceiving a child. The answer to this is quite straightforward. In the third century in Egypt, following the expansion of Greek culture after Alexander the Great, the Hebrew bible was translated into Greek, and it was the Greek text that Matthew was quoting from, not the original Hebrew. And the Greek text translated the word meaning ‘young woman’ with the word parthenos, meaning virgin. So, in the translation from Hebrew to Greek, the element of virginity has been brought in, and it is this which underlies Matthew’s text. For it is very important to Matthew to establish the way in which Jesus is the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies. Five times in these early chapters Matthew uses the expression ‘this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the prophet’. Matthew is talking to an audience of Jewish Christians, and he is very concerned to establish the connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament – think of the Sermon on the Mount echoing Moses on Mount Sinai for example – and this is guiding his interpretation here.
So where does that leave the doctrine of the virgin birth? Well, within Greco-Roman culture the story of the origins of an heroic figure was quite a well-established form. Hercules, for example, was given the story that his mother was impregnated by Zeus, and this accounts for his superhuman strength. And of course, in our own day, the same understanding can be seen in children’s comics. Think of Superman – his wonderful powers require an explanation, and that is given by his origin on the planet Krypton. The real truth about Superman is that he is not one of us.
Which brings me to what my real qualms about the virgin birth consist in. For the standard liberal argument against it is to simply say ‘that sort of thing doesn’t happen’. That doesn’t carry much weight with me, largely because I don’t give science and scientific explanations the importance that our culture does – they are much too partial and prejudiced to be substituted for religious truth. If the living God could raise Christ Jesus from the dead – which is something, let me be clear, I’m quite happy with – then I can’t see any reason why the much less difficult matter of a virgin birth should be beyond Him. No, my worries come from a different direction.
One of the images in the New Testament which means the most to me is the tearing of the curtain in the temple. I read this as the abolition of the dividing line between God and humanity, that in Christ, the one who is both fully human and fully divine, this division is overcome, and all of the religious obstacles that had been put in the way of a living relationship with God – all of the Pharisaic legal traditions, the money changing in the temple, the religious purity laws – all of these have been overcome through Christ who is, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. But Jesus can only do all this if he is in fact human in the way that we are human. The church father Gregory of Nazianzus put it like this: what he has not assumed, he has not healed. In other words, if Jesus was like Superman – who appeared to be from earth but was actually from the planet Krypton – then he cannot save. He cannot take on the burden of our sins and he cannot show us the way of life. For where Supermen can go, mere mortals cannot go. So my worry about the virgin birth is not at all that it was impossible. My worry is that it diminishes Christ’s humanity, and that means that he is no longer my friend, he is no longer the one who can speak to me as a brother; instead he is an alien, totally other. I can’t reconcile my faith with that.
However. I should reiterate that my worries on this score make me unorthodox, and that means that not only am I officially wrong on this, but, if the past is any guide, in a few years time I will, through God’s grace, have gained understanding of the mystery of the virgin birth, and accepted it. If that proves to be the case, I promise to come before you again and explain the how and why.
But in the meantime I struggle with texts like the one we had this morning from Matthew. I wrestle with my doubts, I try and reach some sort of understanding that will make the texts come alive with meaning for me, in the way that the tearing of the curtain in the temple speaks to me. What gives me joy is that I work in a church which isn’t afraid of this sort of exploration, that instead teaches us that our reason is a gift from God, which, if we let it, will lead us further into the mystery of our salvation, and the truth of the Incarnation of the Son of God, whose festival we shall be celebrating together at the end of this week. And surely that is the right way, for in Christ all truth finds its expression, and if we hold fast to truth, we will always come back to him. For Jesus Christ is our Saviour, the one ‘declared to be Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead’. May he guide us into all truth, throughout this Christmas time, and always. Amen.
Possession and Depression
My sermon from Sunday, talking about mental illness, depression and salvation. Click full post for text. (Texts: Luke 8.26-39 and Galatians 3.23-end)
Doctor, doctor, you’ve got to help me, my brother thinks that he’s a chicken! Well why don’t you bring him in to see me then? We can’t do that, we need the eggs!
We have in our gospel today the story of the healing a man possessed by demons. I would like to say something about mental illness in general, and depression in particular. As a society we have virtually lost the language of describing certain forms of behaviour using spiritual categories – not necessarily “demonic possession” – but the realisation that theology is an essential component of understanding human life. I’m a bit of a sceptic about “mental illness” as such (see this post), and I’m greatly sceptical about pharmaceutical involvement unless there are exceptional circumstances – in my view much of what we describe as mental illness is most often a spiritual issue, and it requires spiritual treatment; that is, at root, much so-called mental illness is resolvable through faith; it is caused by bad theology and it is cured by good theology. I wouldn’t wish to deny the existence, in some situations, of an organic basis, which requires medication – but I think it is vastly rarer than the current medical practice would allow for. To flesh this out I want to talk about depression in particular.
To begin with, some forms of depression can be very healthy and right and necessary – not an illness at all, it is a time of spiritual adjustment to new realities. For example, if someone you love dies then it is both natural and necessary to experience loss – to expect someone newly widowed to be all bright and bubbly is manifest nonsense.
Other forms of depression can also be a response to a great sin, where the conscience cries out for release, and it needs a process of confession and absolution. The trouble with this is that it rests upon a robust account of sin, the idea that some actions are wrong and some actions are sins. In our wider culture sin is not named and people can flounder in great confusion and anguish until they are able to see clearly the situation that they are in – the naming is important, and the truth sets free.
Depression can also be born from a refusal to change to new realities in life, and is therefore about an inner dishonesty. In my experience this normally resolves around anger – anger is seen as illegitimate, it is therefore buried, and the soul is poisoned. The cure for this sort of depression is to let the anger out, to discover more about our own souls and pursue the path of honesty with oneself. The most helpful thing here is to remember that Jesus gets angry – and if the new reality is something toxic, which destroys life, which is injustice – then anger is precisely what is called for to confront that new reality and fight it. Anger has two children, hope and courage – and they are both very healing – for the poison is no longer internalised, it is no longer seen as part of the identity of the sufferer. They are no longer to blame. However, I should note that there is a problem with anger. I think anger is always a gift from God, and a sign of falsehood and injustice – but anger by itself does not say whether the problem, the falsehood or injustice, is on the inside or on the outside. Prayer is still needed.
There is another form of depression which is just as often about transference from a community, where somebody is kept “ill” – the community ‘need the eggs’ – and I believe that this story of the Gerasene demoniac is an example. Note carefully that the demoniac is kept chained in place – he is not allowed to wander into the desert and separate from the community, but is kept as one who is ‘living dead’, unclothed (no social standing) and living amongst the tombs. The demoniac is a scapegoat – note the name of the demon is ‘legion’ or ‘mob’ or ‘crowd’ – it is precisely the mentality of the mob that has infected him. In the description of this story in Mark’s gospel the man is stoning himself, which is such a potent symbol of internalising the standards of the wider society. How many people do we know who spend their time stoning themselves because they feel that they deserve that punishment? The demoniac is functioning as a scapegoat within the social system – remember the description of the rite in Leviticus, where the High Priest lays hands upon the goat and transfers all the sins of the community onto it, and it is then driven out into the wilderness. This is a very widespread cultural phenomenon, we can see many examples of it in our own time – the one serves the many by being excluded, and then the group feels better – the scapegoat is the lynchpin of the system. What is remarkable is the word for scapegoat in the Greek rite – pharmakos – you could say humans are addicted to the drug of scapegoating, and that in our society we are no longer so vulgar as to stone people, we simply give pharmaceuticals to the pharmakon instead.
‘What have you to do with me?’ says the man to Jesus. It’s as if he is expecting Jesus to be on the side of the established system, but Jesus is different, he is transformative and he breaks the system. He heals the man – not by transferring his sense of wrongness onto somebody else within the community (that would have kept the system in place) but by transferring the demons into a group of pigs who then die. The possession comes to an end. And what really reveals the complicity of the community is there is no relief, there is no delight in the curing of the man – instead there is fear, a sentiment repeatedly affirmed in the narrative. For how can the society carry on functioning without its lynchpin? The possessed man is healed but the community are most explicitly not healed – they are still possessed by the scapegoating process and do not know how to live without it. So the first thing they do is ask Jesus to leave – another scapegoat!
Christ is always acting to stop the process of scapegoating. And Paul has something to say about this too. His teaching from Galatians that we have just had is a powerful call to unity. He abolishes the three most important ways in which the human community separated out the clean from the unclean – racism, sexism and economic oppression – and he claims that for the Christian that is now irrelevant. Nobody is outside our circle – we are all sinners, therefore we are not kept clean by excluding the mad the bad and the dangerous – and the mad the bad and the dangerous are not isolated from us. We are all in this together, and so we can none of us be understood separately from the system within which we are a part. For the Christian, we no longer need a lynchpin – for the one who forms us was himself lynched.
The cure for possession is possession, “until Christ is born in us” – Jesus is the way the truth and the life, his burden is light, he sets us free… but hang on. There is a DANGER here, a danger that the Christian community hasn’t always avoided. We could simply set up a new system, where the depressed are blamed for having a lack of faith – then called more and more strenuously to really convert – it really is still all their fault and we are still not really to blame, we are still separate and pure whilst they are unclean: a new system with new lynchpins. No. That is not the faith. The whole point of being filled with Christ is that we no longer define ourselves over against other human beings – ‘we’re not like those atheists/ catholics/ baptists/ 9.30 people/ 11 o’clockers/ those who haven’t been born again – fill in your own definition here….’ We define ourselves solely by reference to our relationship with Christ – until Christ is born in us.
This is not an experience, a special holy moment, but a dawning awareness that beneath our wrongness which occupies the dramatic front of stage in our minds, we are right with God. That God loves us, that God likes us, and that God is working to heal us and drive out our demons – that is what a living faith does – it slowly takes up our wounded hearts and minds and it brings them to Christ that they might be healed. Our destiny is to sit at Christ’s feet, clothed and in our right mind, and when that happens – only when that happens – we are to follow Christ’s command: ‘go and tell what God has done for you’ – for then the whole community is healed, and the Kingdom shall come.
Revival
This is a substantially expanded and amended version of my sermon yesterday, based on Luke 7.11-17 & Galatians 1.11-end (in particular, West Mersea worshippers will find it of interest). Click ‘full post’ for text.
The story of the widow of Nain has great human impact: a sorrowing widow; a son that dies; and then – revival.
One of the first things to bear in mind about this story is the social and economic context – that is, unless there was an economically productive male around, you were incredibly vulnerable. So a widow is vulnerable without her husband, but even more than that, a widow losing her son is doubly vulnerable, not simply in economic terms but because the son was her link to the future, a source of meaning as well as means. It is precisely this concern for the vulnerable that is the Spirit behind the prophetic teaching, calling the faithful to provide for the widows and orphans. And here Jesus’ compassion and prophetic stance is clear – “his heart went out to her” – and just like Elijah with the widow of Zarephath the man of God revives the son from the dead, and gives him back to his mother. The family is reunited, means and meaning are revived.
There are a number of aspects to this story to explore. A first is simply to wonder: does Jesus experience a premonition of what is to come as he takes part in this tale? Does he consider that before too long his own mother will be outside the city wall, grieving for her dead son?
But going a little deeper than that, is there something here about our faith, about what it is to pursue that faith within a church community – and perhaps, is there a message here specifically for this church in West Mersea?
To explain what I mean by that, I’d like to talk about St Paul’s conversion experience, on the road to Damascus, and in particular how he describes it in this passage from Galatians – where he describes the sort of person that he was before he met the risen Lord, and the sort of person he became after, which allowed the good news to spread. Paul says that in his former life he was extremely zealous for the traditions of his fathers – but then he began to disbelieve in them. In other words, meeting with Christ began to generate disbelief in him, a disbelief in what had gone before.
The thing is, being human, we surround ourselves with customs and habits and traditions – they are useful in helping us to negotiate our way through life. And they come up in all areas of life – think of how you make a cup of tea, for example. Yet when these habits and traditions enter into our ways of worship we call them ‘sacred’, and these form our religions. It seems to me that part of what being a Christian means – part of what coming to know the living Christ involves – is precisely that we become less concerned about the sacred, less concerned about being religious, just in order that we might concentrate on something which is even more important – the new life offered in Christ, which relativises all of our religious traditions and sacred arts. This is the process of redemption – the light of Christ entering into all the darkest corners of our own hearts as we slowly attain to the full stature of the risen Christ.
The thing is, in so many ways, Christianity is still a very young faith. We may have been going for some two thousand years, but we are really only just beginning to get to grips with what it means to say that this man Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God incarnate upon earth. We still have so far to go on our pilgrimage; we are still discovering the depths of faith. You could say that the faith is this young man outside the walls of a town.
Do I mean that the faith is dead? Hardly that. But I do wonder how far the church is in the position of the widow – disconnected from the future – and beginning to despair.
“Young man I say to you get up.” It is through being addressed by the word of the living Word that the dead come to life, that the dead are revived.
A few years ago I was told a story about one of my predecessors as Rector of Mersea, Reg East, who was a rather Charismatic individual. He had a dream, or a vision, of the island of Mersea catching fire, and the fire spreading, which he understood to be a promise of revival. I have pondered this a lot, along with a comment from a colleague that an upsurge in musical creativity is often associated with a revival – and that we are presently experiencing just such an upsurge.
Is a revival coming? I really don’t know. I do know that a revival is not something that is in our control; it’s not something that we can achieve. We are not called to produce a revival; we are called to be faithful. In other words, to give right glory to God, the Son who is raised from the dead. That’s what being orthodox literally means – right glory. That is our task, that is our witness and that is the only true revival we can seek – to praise the God who gives life to the dead. We must worship the risen Christ, and always be aware of the danger of being caught up in our religion instead.
I do believe that, as I said in my first ever sermon in this place, the tide of unbelief has turned, that the Spirit is abroad in this country, and that we will see a resurgence of belief. I interpret the renewed squeals on the part of the atheists as being an acknowledgment, deep from their bowels, that their argument has been lost. For so long it seemed unarguable that as you matured as a person, so you left behind the childish blandishments of sentimental faith. That lie has been nailed, and we are seeing the consequences rippling down into the wider culture.
But more than this: I am certain that God is doing something special in this place: here, in West Mersea. I reflect upon the remarkable gathering of strength that is occurring here – the associate priests, the retired clergy (with some more on the way), the musical team, the way in which vocations are prospering as with pastoral assistants and lay evangelists being called forward from our midst, the lay leadership in all its forms. I reflect on the fact that, according to Bob Jackson, we are one of the fastest growing churches in the country. We do have a remarkable story to tell in that regard.
I also reflect on Saturday morning when the PCC gave a unanimous endorsement of my proposals to rearrange the sanctuary. I wasn’t expecting this – I had thought that the PCC would be split, and although I thought it would be in favour, I was expecting that the majority would be insufficient to carry the proposals through – for this sort of change, it is not enough for there to be a bare majority, there needs to be a much stronger sense of widespread consent. In the end there was unanimity – even amongst those members of the PCC who couldn’t be present, four expressed a preference, and all four were in favour.
This was strangely humbling. I think in part it was humbling because there has been pain associated with the change, and undoubtedly – related to this and to other emphases that I have brought to my ministry here – some cannot participate in the process, and they choose to leave.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me.”
I am still digesting everything that happened on Saturday morning. It is as if there was an endorsement not simply from the PCC but from the Spirit also, saying not just ‘keep going’ but ‘go further, do more!’ There is a cost to this; the challenge I face is how to ensure that the old testament heart remains a heart of flesh and doesn’t become a heart of stone.
And yet; the Lord is with me. I have felt very close to Him these past couple of months – to the extent that colleagues have remarked upon it. And He has given me the ability to see farther than most. This doesn’t make me infallible (hardly that!!), it doesn’t mean I won’t get some things completely wrong, especially with regard to details. But I have this vision of what is possible. And I must pursue it. It’s been creeping up on me slowly, and it isn’t something I fully understand, or can even describe. I feel frightened, and nervous, and excited all at the same time. What I am convinced of is that something remarkable is happening here in West Mersea. My task, my prayer, is that I can work out what God is doing – and then get out of the way.
O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvellous things.
His right hand and his holy arm have gained him victory.
The Lord has made known his victory;
he has revealed his vindication in the sight of the nations.
He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel.
All the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God.
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth;
break forth into joyous song and sing praises.
Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre, with the lyre and the sound of melody.
With trumpets and the sound of the horn
make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord.
Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who live in it.
Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills sing together for joy
at the presence of the Lord, for he is coming to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity.
(Psalm 98)
Prayer, friendship and Christian Unity
Reading this post at one of my favourite blogsites reminds me of the sermon I preached last Sunday. I’ve gone off posting sermons on the blog – it’s a bit like drinking left-over beer the morning after – and these days my sermons tend just to be a list of bullet points anyhow – but writing this one up into something coherent might have some merit (and I can make some things even clearer in the rendition). Click full post for text.
In our gospel reading this morning we have the climax of Jesus’ teaching at the Last Supper (John 17.20-end) and it takes the form of a prayer. I’d like to begin my remarks this morning by repeating some general points about prayer, because it is something that I get asked about a lot.
The first point to make about prayer is that it is about a relationship, the relationship that you have between you and God. As with any relationship it requires time if it isn’t to wither, and the more time that you give to it, the deeper the relationship will become. What keeps the relationship going is communication, and communication needs to be a two way thing. If you had a relationship with someone who spent all their time talking and never listening to a word you said then that relationship would need some fairly fundamental repair work if it was going to have a future. The same thing applies to your relationship with God – you need to spend at least half the time listening, even more than 50% if you think that what God has to say is more important than what you have to say.
The second thing that I would emphasise is honesty. There is absolutely no point in offering up a piety which isn’t rooted in your own heart. If what you really desire is a bright red Ferrari, or to win the lottery, it is absolutely pointless to spend your prayer time asking for world peace or an end to hunger. God isn’t deceived by this – the only person being deceived is yourself. So if you want a red Ferrari – pray for a red Ferrari! The whole point about prayer is that it is a process of learning to be honest with ourselves – and therefore to become more intimately acquainted with our deepest desires. For as Augustine put it, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God – and nothing else will satisfy us. Prayer is the way in which we learn this truth about ourselves, as we journey inwards and find God within.
A further aspect about prayer – about listening to God – is bound up with the notion of obedience and submission. Now this is difficult. It isn’t something to be attempted half-heartedly, for it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. It is terribly difficult to follow God’s will – much easier to follow our own – and we know this because even Jesus found it hard. Think of Gethsemane, when Jesus was sweating blood because it was so difficult. Yet it is very much the point of prayer – of conforming our will to God’s will.
And when we can do this – on those occasions that we do manage to do this – then our prayers are rewarded and we develop a fundamental trust in God and his purposes for us and for the world. The thing is, God is in charge and his purposes will be accomplished. When we spend time in prayer; when we nurture our relationship with Him and listen to His will for us; when we finally start to see that God is God – then we receive a gift, the peace which this world cannot give. We don’t have to take all the burdens of the world upon our shoulders; we can simply get on with being obedient, and leaving the big questions to Him.
My heart is not proud, O LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.
But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, put your hope in the LORD both now and forevermore.
So why am I talking about prayer today? Well, my fundamental point will become clear in a moment, but surely if ever someone’s prayer is going to be answered, surely Jesus’ prayer will be? And what is Jesus praying for?
My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.
Jesus is praying that all who believe in him might be one, that there might be Christian unity, and that this unity is not simply the witness to the glory of Christian truth, but that this unity is how Christ is within us – that it is how we share in the life of the Trinity.
Surely some mistake? How can Jesus’ prayer have been answered, when we just look around us at the ways that Christians accuse each other and break with each other?
Let’s return to what prayer is about. It is about developing a relationship, and it is about submitting our will to God’s will. That is, it is not about our feelings but about aligning our desires and choices with God’s desires and choices. For God’s will shall be accomplished, and we either fall in with that or we resist it.
And do we believe that Jesus’ will was aligned with that of the Father? And if so, is Jesus’ prayer answered or not?
It seems to me that it is answered; put differently, it means that Christian Unity – when we are all one and the glory of the gospel is manifested to the world – is not something that we have to achieve or accomplish, it is something that we have to discover. It already exists. It is simply that the desires of our sinful and fallen world do a very good job of obscuring that reality from our vision.
The truth is that our salvation, our unity, this is not an individualistic thing. It is not a case of all signing up to the same doctrinal basis of faith, or all agreeing on the same form of words. That is the unity of a Nuremberg rally; it is not the unity of the Trinity. We are made in the image of God – and that image is fundamentally personal and relational – in other words our identity as human beings is found first and foremost through our relationships with one another.
So how then are we to discover this Christian Unity which is Christ’s bequest to us? I think there is a simple word which sums it up: friendship. No longer do I call you servants but I call you friends, for I have made everything known to you. It is through the pursuit of friendship that we discover our unity as Christians – a unity which is embedded much more deeply within us than our own self-image, for it is an essential aspect of being made in the image of God. Friendship with other Christians is, then, our duty and our joy.
Of course, another way of describing a friend is companion – the one with whom we break bread. I am sympathetic to the idea that sharing communion is not the final sign of the achievement of unity, but the principal way in which that unity is revealed. Yet that is a discussion all of its own.
I believe that friendship is the fundamental theological category – and imperative! – needed for exploring Christian unity. That is, it is precisely through forming friendships with others, not friendships with a hidden agenda, seeking to convert or dominate, but a friendship modelled on the pattern of Christ himself – without judgement, without condemnation, with love, with acceptance – it is this friendship, the gradual deepening awareness one with another, it is this which allows us to discover our unity, and which allows us to participate in the difference and unity of the Trinity.
I believe that friendship stands to Christian unity in the way that prayer stands to our relationship with God, and that they are the virtues which correspond to our keeping the two great commandments. Prayer is how we love God; friendship is how we love our neighbour; and it is through the pursuit of these two things that Christ’s image is revealed in us. So let us commit ourselves anew to prayer, to friendship, and to the breaking of bread. Amen.
Why it’s a GOOD Friday
I wasn’t sure I was going to post this, but… the notes for my Good Friday sermon are below the fold; they might be of some interest, if you can make head or tail of them
20070406 Good Friday
I would like to explore with you today the meaning of Good Friday – why did Jesus die, and why is today of all days a good day? what i want to say can be summed up quite simply – i believe that today of all days god is revealed as a god of love, a god who opens up his arms to us and wants to embrace us, and that with this god there is no place for fear or punishment
spend time exploring what I think is a very bad theory explaining what is going on, so before I continue, some sensible words from CS Lewis:
“We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself… “
that seems sane to me – i would not wish anything i say today to take away from that
prior question – who is it who kills jesus, who wants him dead?
religious authorities
political authorities
disciples – judas, but what about peter?
crowd
you and me
not jesus – gethsemane
not god
might sound strange – popular theory called ‘penal substitution’, derived primarily from Calvin counts as ‘doctrine of men’ – specifically calvin, via the american theologian charles hodge
– bear in mind that Calvin was a lawyer – goes something like this…
example used in alpha (miracle on river kwai)
question – who is the father in this scenario – the father is the lunatic japanese guard who can’t count
pagan understanding – king kong
bizarre reversal of story of Abraham and Isaac – yes I do want you to kill your son!
punishment in this life interpreted as god’s judgement
cursed be he that hangs on a tree
prosperity gospel – psalm ‘never saw a righteous man begging for bread’
change in understanding over time within scripture – not monolithic
bible is thoroughly opposed; jesus consistently opposes that
tower of siloam
beatitudes – blessed are the poor
isaiah and post-exile – ‘the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’
so what does the language mean?
1 Peter 2:24 – “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.”
christ bore our sins – by his wounds we are healed
i take it literally – jesus is crucified by our sin, when he is on the cross he is bearing the burden of our sin, not in a metaphysical or metaphorical sense, not in any sort of theoretical way – but really, and truly, and physically, and painfully – it is our sin that pounds the nails through his hands and feet
what of the language about sacrifice (hebrews)?
what is sacrifice? originally kopher – thank you – never about punishment
it is about giving back to god the things which are gods – the sacrifice of christians is a sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise
‘i desire mercy not sacrifice’ – jesus repeats this text twice in the gospels, surely many more times in reality, a core text for him
LC attendees will have heard me talk about the sacrificial rites of the day of atonement in the first temple period – don’t need to go into detail again now (but do come to the first session of the next LC sequence if you are interested) – the core emphasis to bring out is that the sacrifice in the temple is god taking the initiative to save us, because he loves us, not because he is angry – what most upsets god is not the transgression of a law but the suffering of his children – with god justice is about restoration, not punishment
crucial texts from the Johannine epistles 1 John 4 16-19, where God is identified with love, and living in love is seen as the core christian pattern – and this love is then opposed to fear and punishment – what the doctrine of penal substitution does is reestablish that fear and punishment at the centre of the trinity (and awful things follow)
whoever sees jesus sees the father – god is christ-like and in him is no un-christ-likeness at all – Rev 13 – lamb slain since the foundation of the world
god is love – in our god there is no place for fear or punishment
but what does the language of ‘fear of god’ mean then? shouldn’t think that we can put our concepts of fear and god together to get an adequate understanding of ‘fear-of-god’ – contrast between chased by tiger and standing on edge of grand canyon – fear of god is the latter – it is about awe and reverence – and yes the overwhelming sense of holiness which cannot be in the same place as sin, so if we sin we experience god as wrath – but that wrath is not of the essence of god
god is for us, not against us
as jesus says ‘life in abundance’ – what destroys that is our sin and our wrath
we want to be punished – we cannot conceive of a world without punishment – because we cannot accept forgiveness – we cannot bear the light of the living god – men turned away from the light for their deeds were evil – they are condemned because they do not believe in a forgiving god – ‘condemned out of their own mouths’ – compare with the parable of the talents
jesus is not reconciling an angry god to humanity – he is reconciling god to an angry humanity – by revealing the truth about god and man
ancient understanding
focussed on the overcoming of principalities and powers – the realm of this world – on this day the world speaks – the world kills – the world appears to triumph
the cross is not a divine punishment – it is a human punishment
resurrection is god’s answer – it is an invitation – the resurrection is above all god’s offer of loving forgiveness to all who will accept it – that we have executed him and strung him up on a cross – and yet god remains the same – offering the same love to us – he sends his rain on to the just and the unjust – will we repent of our just vengeance, our own lust for punishment and be reconciled with god?
on the cross judgement is judged, condemnation is condemned
god does not overpower us – he woos us – and he woos us through the cross
today is good because our god wants us to be human – it is about transforming our relationship with him – not mechanical – not a theory – but a passionate embrace – arms reaching out to us all
today is good because our god is revealed as not a pagan god, of whom we must be terrified, but as a merciful and reconciling god, who calls us into a new relationship with him,
today is good because god is love, and there is no place for fear and punishment with him
so
let us give thanks to the lord for he is good
and his mercy endureth for ever
Peak Oil and Slavery
I was away overnight (hence no TBTM today) at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where I had been invited to preach on the theme of ‘Peak Oil and Slavery’ – part of a sequence that the college had on the theme of slavery, given the Wilbeforce anniversaries etc.
The ‘raw’ text (ie, very unpolished!) of my address is below the fold – it was delivered a little differently, as I let the Spirit move me.
Peak Oil and Slavery sermon
Texts: Hosea 4.1-9, Philippians 4.4-9
Hosea passage – one of my favourites – two key elements to bring out –
#1– one of the repeated themes in Scripture, in the Old Testament especially, is that the land, the environment, will reflect the state of society, especially with regard to the levels of social justice – where there is immorality, where issues of social justice are ignored: therefore the land mourns – that is one of the tools that Christians can use to assess our present environmental crisis – it cannot be separated out from issues of international justice, and to the extent that we fail at those issues, so too to that extent will we fail to heal the ecology of our planet – and of course, the claim of social justice is one of the two paramount emphases of scripture, running just behind that of worshipping God alone – there are literally thousands of references to the need to look after the poor, and a society which systematically ignores those commands has no claim whatsoever to be described as Christian
#2 – with you is my contention o priest – it’s all the fault of the religious community for not teaching properly – privatised faith, a faith with no discernible impact upon the operation of the public world – christian faith in British society has largely been reduced to functioning as the oil for the machinery of capitalism, designed to reduce the screeches of pain from those who are crushed in the cogs – [just by way of a sidenote, this is what is wrong with new age spirituality, and the half digested buddhism that so often lies behind it – what is the point of quietening your mind and gaining inner peace when there is tremendous suffering and injustice all around? That is the precise opposite of what Xn faith is about – we are to shout from the rooftops against injustice] – but the problem is that the religious leadership has acquiesced in this privatisation of the faith, they have accepted a role as domestic pet, allowed to mewl for its own milk, but only tolerated for as long as it stays within the home, and eradicates any rodents that come in – any sense that their might be more kinship between the rodents and the pets is to be stamped on as soon as possible
current anglican shenanigans – if religion is private then it is inevitable that religious leaders get obsessed with what we do with our privates – this is not what Christian faith should be focused on!
so: 2 things, the claim of social justice, and the necessity for the religious leaders to speak out on such topics – in other words, the political impact of Xn faith – I understand you have been discussing slavery – wilberforce – outstanding example of the political impact which a Christian faith is called to produce –
hosea – my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge – I want to share knowledge about a concept called Peak Oil, and what it means for the way we need to arrange our lives – so a quick tour of what Peak Oil is, and what the implications are
1. lives built on oil – in western europe we have the equivalent of 100 slaves working for us – that is the amount of work carried out by oil on our behalf, and providing us with the lifestyle we presently enjoy – or endure – oil stands beneath vast tracts of contemporary life, not simply in terms of what powers the transport system, which is the most obvious area of oil dependency, but through the various industries which manufacture petroleum products, from fertilisers to chemicals to plastics to clothing –
2. peak oil refers to the geological process whereby the quantity of oil from a well initially comes out slowly, builds up to a level of peak production, and then falls away over time – analogy of hot water tank – open the tap, water comes out, open tap fully, strong flow, as tank empties, flow slows down to a trickle – same thing happens with oil fields – so US peaked in 1970, britain peaked in 1999, we’re now declining at around 8% a year – around 54 of the 65 oil producing nations in the world have now peaked – and the question is when the world as a whole passes the moment of peak production – I’m fairly persuaded that it was two years ago, but that conclusion is by no means certain – we might have a few years yet to go
3. the impact of peak oil, however, has hardly been thought about, and it will be painful and chaotic – I think of it as a great dislocation as our society will be thrust harshly into a different mode of life – has been described in various ways, as the long emergency for example, for all the assumptions on which our modern way of life has been built will be removed – industrial revolution powered by access to fossil fuels, built up a transport system dependent on liquid fuel – and when that liquid fuel is removed from the system, the system will come to a juddering halt – some of you may remember the fuel tax protests of september 2000, and how rapidly the supermarkets were emptied of food – that was a brief window into our vulnerability
4. the trouble is that there are several levels of positive feedback built into the system, and in addition, there are several what could be called ‘non-linear’ or random factors to consider – for example, consider mexico, whose main oil field, cantarell, is now declining extremely rapidly – mexico’s own consumption is increasing, and in the next two or three years the mexican government will have to decide whether to continue exporting oil to the united states or reserve that same oil for its own people to use – and how long will a precariously elected government last that doesn’t look after its own people? Or consider iran, and whether the bush administration decides on the option of double or quits by attacking iran – that too will have an immediate impact upon the flow of oil, and the price of oil, within the world economy – there are just too many things that can go wrong, and
5. this is the context for my opposition to tesco – an extremely well run british company, which is paying a little bit more than lip service to environmental goals, but which is wholly dependent upon a modern system of just-in-time distribution, powered by liquid fuel – and when that liquid fuel first becomes phenomenally expensive, and then becomes impossible to find – the system will buckle and break – and then where will we find our daily bread? The economy that most of you students will live in for the majority of your working lives will look very different to the one that the rest of us have grown up with – one practical bit of advice, meant in all seriousness – learn to grow your own vegetables
Think back to that figure of 100 slaves working for each and every one of us. What peak oil means is that within the next twenty years or so that figure will be reduced to around 20, if we’re lucky, and if we have enlightened and responsible political leadership. Ahem. If we continue as we are, it may be much less
Now, strange as it may seem – there is in fact something joyful hidden here, something to be embraced and affirmed, and this is really what I want to leave you with – I think it was Mandela who said, in the context of apartheid in south africa, that no man is free until every man is free – that, in other words, slavery is something that destroys the humanity of the slave owner as much as the slave, it is something that destroys the humanity of the oppressor as much as the oppressed – you could say that there is a form of human life which allows us to flourish, to have life in all its abundance, which does not involve a dependency upon slaves
I believe that this applies even when the slaves are fossil fuels, the remnants of plants that died millions of years ago – in other words, that our dependency on oil to do all our work for us is not something that enhances our human life
As an example, let me tell you a story about my four year old son – living in a parish, often receive presents at christmas – got given a bow and arrow – one of those cheap plastic things made in the far east, which, inevitably, got broken after about ten minutes of use – but he liked having a bow and arrow – so off we went to a local wood, with a piece of old elastic, to make our own bow and arrows – much more fun, much more quality time with daddy, much more human – in other words, the use of oil to make such junk is not something which enhances human life
St Paul writes about things which are excellent in the letter to the philippians – whatever is worthy, whatever is honourable, noble, excellent – think on these things – all the things which are most essential for our common humanity are supplied to us; we don’t need this system of idolatrous growth to provide for our real needs – especially in our present context when our culture’s worship of the economy is proving that growth has negative marginal utility – in other words, that in our present context economic growth is a cancer, it is growth in one part of the organism without any regard for the wider body, and which is destroying that wider body
We have forgotten what it is to be human – and the culture instead embraces the manufacture of desires, in order to buy the widgets which pay for the widget makers to buy more widgets and keep this fantastic system of widget making up and running
the real political challenge that is going to be faced by this generation alive today is to withstand the temptation to use coal – if we use the crisis of peak oil to wean ourselves away from fossil fuels and embrace powerdown and renewables then global warming will be essentially solved – but if we try and give our present economic system one more generation of life by turning to coal then the planet will be cooked, it’s as simple and as serious as that. coal is the enemy of the human race
This system is going to come to an end, and very soon. It is built upon injustice, and it is structured around the denial of our common humanity. God will not allow it to continue. A passage from jeremiah ch 4: “‘my people are fools, they do not know me. They are senseless children, they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, they know not how to do good.’ I looked at the earth, and it was formless and empty… I looked, and there were no people; every bird in the sky had flown away. I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert; all its towns lay in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.”
We have a choice – and the call to christians is clear – we are to embrace the ways of human abundance, not material abundance, we are to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly before our god – if we turn to him then God will have mercy – and, frankly, in the context of what is looming above us, mercy is what we will need. But at the last, I take comfort from paul’s writings – the call to rejoice in the faith, that the lord is near, and that we are not to be anxious about these things, in order that the peace of god, which passes understanding, may guard our hearts, and our minds, in jesus christ. May God bless you all, and may your vegetables grow well. Amen.
Shockingly rich
(Sermon, Evensong 15 Jan 06 – Isaiah 60 & Hebrews 6-7)
We are shockingly rich.
I do not mean that as a criticism of any one individual here, but as something which applies to us all, as a community, here in West Mersea, in England, in the West as a whole.
Let me tell you a story which will bring out what I mean. A former tutor of mine used to work in Southern India, where he lived for seven years, before returning to England. On his return, on arrival in their new home, his wife went to purchase some basics – bread and milk. Yet she couldn’t complete the purchase. When she looked at the prices for a pint of milk she couldn’t help translating it into what it would have meant for her friends back in India – that this purchase of a simple pint of milk could have fed a family of four for many days. She was so staggered by the difference in wealth that she had to return home empty-handed, to give herself time to get over the shock.
We are shockingly rich.
So should we despise our wealth? I don’t believe that it is as simple as that. The Scriptures are really very clear that wealth in itself is a good thing. The vision of the promised land is one of a place flowing with milk and honey; our reading from Isaiah is clear about the materiality of the good things promised from God: “Instead of bronze I will bring you gold” God has a very positive view of material wealth – indeed of materiality as a whole – that’s what the Incarnation means. What he most emphatically does not have a positive view of is great wealth next door to great poverty. Think of the story of Dives and Lazarus, for example.
The Scriptures are crystal clear that we are to love our neighbour as ourselves, and that this means we are not to let anyone fall by the wayside, abandoned and deserted by the community. For the poverty which most shocks God is not the absence of possessions – hardly that – but social exclusion. The inability of one member of a community to share in the common life of that community. Scripture is clear that this is what offends God deeply, and Scripture is also clear about what follows when a society embraces that pattern of life: there is judgement, and calamity, and the walls of Jerusalem are broken down and the people of Israel are taken off to Babylon.
When I consider our shocking wealth, and the degree of poverty and exclusion experienced by so many in our world, I tremble at the thought of our coming judgement.
Scripture is also clear about what gives rise to social exclusion – idolatry. It is when the community ceases to worship the living God, and erects another idol in His place, that is when the right relationships between the members of the community break down. So what is the idol that has been worshipped in our community? I believe that the idol is wealth, or, more specifically, economic growth. What politician could succeed by saying ‘we shouldn’t concern ourselves with economic growth so much’? There are politicians who say such things – yet they are not listened to, for our hearts are fearful, fearful of a return to hardship and starvation and unemployment and breadlines and soup kitchens. So we do not trust in the living God, we trust in growth. Yet growth is an idol. Think of what it means to say that a part of our life (the economic part) must grow and keep on growing forever. That is not indicative of health, it is, in fact, the definition of cancer – a group of cells that just keep on growing irrespective of the needs of the whole. Our economy has turned into a cancer in our common life.
God says ‘you will drink the milk of nations and be nursed at royal breasts’.
We say ‘gizza job’.
Those of you who came to my talk about oil the other day will be aware that I believe we are headed for a time of extreme economic hardship. I do not believe that we need be frightened of this. We need to be weaned away from our shocking riches and come back to the promises of the living God, who promises us life, life in all its fullness. The riches that God promises to us are the riches of a human community, made in His image, and sharing his likeness. That is what is promised to us, and that is what we can trust in. Not in our possessions, our accumulations of wealth, but the promises of the one who made us and redeemed us. “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure”.
So let us resolve to work together through whatever comes – trusting in the one who is faithful to his promises, and who will lead us to the promised land of Christ’s kingdom.