Sermons for Ordinary Time Year B
Weeks 1 to 9
Ordinary Time Week 6: How can we know God?
Audio file
Of the four questions that I would put to a contemporary Paul, the last I phrased in an almost lighthearted manner: tell us how to understand God today? A nice, concise answer would be appreciated, please, Paul. The flippancy was a response to the sheer weight of the question.
I have just come way from hearing an excellent sermon delivered by one of the lay preachers at the parish church where I worship. (The liturgy – just to rub it in for my listeners enduring a northern winter – was conducted in a park beside the sea, in the shade of trees, with birds singing and a cool breeze). The preacher drew an analogy that stuck a powerful chord with me. He drew a comparison between knowing all the facts about a boat and boating, and actually being out on a boat, experiencing the sea and sailing. It brought vividly to mind a moment I will never forget of taking the helm of an ocean-going yacht under full sail. The wonder, the exhilaration – the sheer terror – transcended anything I could have imagined.
So with God, as was the preacher’s point. There is a world of difference between having facts and theories and models about God and knowing God in the immediacy of life and relationship. Incidentally, there is a terror in that relationship with God as there was terror in the 20 minutes or so that I spent at the helm of the yacht. Is it pursuing the image too far to draw a parallel between the skipper who was by my side and the Holy Spirit, the comforter?
So to the question. But the analogy to the sailing is appropriate, because in speaking to you, though I don’t know you because of the anonymity of this online relationship, I am as one sailor speaking to other sailors. I don’t have to convince you of the power and joy of knowing God. I doubt whether anyone of you needs convincing of the need to know God.
Yet even so, at least if you are anything like me in this matter, the question of what it means to know God is always surfacing – often at the most inappropriate and inconvenient moments. I can almost say this: that it is at the times when I most need to ‘know God’ and place my trust completely in God, that the scepter rises up before my eyes – it’s all an illusion. There is no God.
As we try to answer the question, it resolves itself into three distinct questions. The first is this: within ourselves, individually and as church, what is it that we can say, we know God? The second question: how do we understand and make sense of God, this God that we know? How can we relate this God to the universe we also know?
And the third question: how are we to bring the rest of the world to know this God? Most particularly, how can we make the knowing of God part of global culture?
I am not going to attempt to answer the second and third questions at this point. Apart from the sheer scale of the issues, any answer we might develop is built on how we arrive at the answer to the first question. Everything rests on how and what we know of God within ourselves.
How, then do you and I know God? When we still lived within the old traditional culture – and for those who are still in that place – the answer was reasonably straightforward because a belief in ‘ God’, even if theologies and practices differed widely, was a fundamental assumption and foundation of traditional culture. This is true of all traditional cultures if we allow for the immense variation in understanding. In classical Western culture, theism was intrinsic to its entire perception of the world and its whole value system. Even today, all the values of modern liberal Western people, even when they deny any religious connection, are rooted inextricably with values derived from theistic belief. Those who denied theism, until very recently, put themselves outside all the norms of the culture. To live in Islamic societies, and not to be an outcast, involved a full acceptance of the Islamic embrace of their theistic vision. To be part of Buddhist society required an embrace of its philosophy and teaching. So “God’, however understood, became part of the air that was breathed by anyone growing up in the culture.
That is what has changed so radically in our world of global culture. ‘God’ is no longer in the air we culturally breath. The pathways by which people came to know God have become lost or at least so overgrown and tangled that passage is difficult if not impossible. Fences have been thrown across the old roads.
One pathway was authority: the church says, the Bible says. That pathway has gone. Another pathway was that of following a process: do this and you may end up finding God, or Enlightenment, or attain heaven or Paradise. That pathway is closed. A third pathway was religious experience: conversion experience, glossolalia, mysticism, meditation or psychedelic drugs. Pathway closed. Or we find God by attending church, singing hymns, following Lenten fasts or raising our hands in praise. Or by being good and keeping the Ten Commandments. Pathway closed.
None of the paths that were so trusted and utilised in the old cultural environment work any more in the new culture. This does not mean that God does not meet us if we attempt to walk these paths. It is that we can no longer trust them as being true routes to knowing God.
So how is it that we can say today that we know God? To find the answer to that question, we need to go back to the earlier ‘question to Paul’ in which we explored what salvation means today. We know God in the immediate, concrete and practical encounter with grace. God is known not in ecstatic or mystical experience, not in any form of ‘out of world’ encounter, and not as something that is put off to after death. God is known in the day to day, moment by moment engagement with grace, and in the discovery of the way grace transforms everything in life into positive and creative power and ministry. God is known in the act of thanksgiving for grace. In my experience, it is in the little things, the small and seemingly insignificant events of life, that we most ‘find God’, and it is in finding God here that we lay the foundations for finding God in the big, even the global, events of life. Always the perspective is this: God is known in the moment you ask the question, wherever you are and whatever your circumstances.
This is why the practice and discipline of daily prayer, time set aside every day as the overriding priority, is the crucial foundation for knowing God. The essential core of our daily prayer is thanksgiving. Sometimes, it is true, the thanksgiving is into the face of darkness, even despair, yet the core power of prayer lies in review of the day and seeing the grace of God at work in all things, great and small, and giving thanks. Even when the outward form of the event is painful and negative.
At the community level, this is what we do when we gather week by week in Eucharist. We give thanks, and it is in this act of giving thanks that we see God at work in our lives and in our world.
Having said this, we also need to recognise and acknowledge that every experience of grace is ambiguous. It can be interpreted in more ways than one. During the course of this last week, I have been through a period of crippling and excruciating pain that seemed to have no end: and disappeared within a period of 24 hours. What happened? Something purely physical, explainable through the science of the body? Or an act of God, a healing gift of grace? I certainly know that people were praying for me. The answer is that it is not either/or but both/and. The change in my physical state can be interpreted either in purely physical terms or as an act of grace and both interpretations are true. The essence of ambiguity is not that we do not know which of alternative interpretations of an event is true but that both are true, the answer depending upon the question we ask.
So here is the key principle. There is nothing that happens physically, whether we are talking about the universe in its wholeness or the flick of a finger, that cannot be also seen as an act of grace. Grace fills the universe in every part. Equally, and this is very important for our religious understanding, there is nothing we interpret as grace that does not have a physical cause. Grace does not violate the seamless cause and effect of the natural world. Grace does not suspend the laws of nature. Miracle is not the overriding of nature by supernature. To think that we might find God by looking for something that cannot be explained by physics is and always has been a delusion. Religion built on such foundations is a house on sand. God is known within the natural world, not through any form of supernatural myth.
By the same token, God is not known by looking at nature, except in the ambiguity of all things such that we can see grace in all things. A sunset or a butterfly says nothing about God in themselves. The worship of nature is another illusion, shot through with sentimentality.
But we can look at the universe, the whole sweep of nature and, without discounting natural processes in any degree, see grace in everything from the Big Bang, the birth and death of stars, the extraordinary story of our planet, the origin of life right down to what we had for breakfast, and see grace and give thanks.
To give thanks for everything, seeing grace in everything: this is what it means to know God.
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Ordinary Time Week 5: Can we be Christian today?
Audio file
Isaiah 40:21-31
I Corinthians 9:16-23
Psalm 147:1-11,20
Mark 1:29-39
Is it possible to be a Christian today?
Last month, when I focused on four questions we might put to a contemporary Paul, I did not then have in mind that over the subsequent weeks I would address those questions: yet that is what has happened. These are questions that we need to reflect upon deeply as a church, all of us, for we do not have a ‘Paul’ to whom we can look for definitive direction, nor would we want, today, such a director.
The first of the four questions that I identified as what I would ask addressed the issue of the emerging global culture and asked if it was possible to be faithfully a Christian in this new cultural environment. This was first on my list and it was in that place because I think it is the most critical question facing the church in our day. In fact, it is the critical question facing not just Christianity but every religion. This is essentially what the rise of religious extremism and violence is all about, and though it is Islam that is grabbing the headlines and is taking the dynamic to its furthest extremes, the issue being played out in the Islamic world is seen in every religion, including Christianity. The culture change that is taking place is global and the religious threat is being experienced globally. If we find ourselves asking the question as to whether we can be faithful as Christians in this new mental environment in which we find ourselves, spare a thought for how anxious Islam feels. On the surface, at least, it may appear utterly impossible to sustain Islam life in the context of the new global culture. Traditional Hindu and Buddhist cultures are just as deeply affected and threatened, as are all the many indigenous religions.
What humanity is experiencing today is a cultural shift on a scale and depth never before experienced in history. Culture is the way we humans adapt to our environment, physical, political and social. Culture is how we survive and thrive – or fail to achieve either. It is the sum of everything we do and think. Over the millennia, different parts of the world developed different cultures in response to different environmental challenges that required different cultural responses, and these differences, together with relative isolation from other pats of the world, meant that cultures became broadly stable. Chinese culture has been around for over five thousand years; our Western European culture for a thousand. Over time, these regional cultures rose and fell; some left their mark on the future while others disappeared without trace. In other words, cultures come and go, though many stay around for thousands of years. While they assist their societies to survive and thrive, they are strong; the tragedy that afflicts every culture is that it stays around long after it is effective and a real force for survival and strength.
One thing every culture has in common is religion, because religion, in whatever form it takes, is the reverse side of the coin to cultural strength and vitality. Religion never exists except as the reverse side of culture: culture never exists in any enduring and stable form without religion as its reverse side. This is not the context to argue the sociology of this assertion, nor what is says about the nature of religion itself.
What is happening in our time is that humanity as a whole, everywhere, is confronted with a common set of challenges that threaten us all, requiring a common global response if we are to survive. Such a global response requires a common culture, a globally embraced way of thinking, valuing and acting. If we do not achieve this, humanity is finished. Period. Most probably extinct. So this is the one driver of global culture: its overriding imperative, and in the end, no one, no society, in any part of the world, can exist outside this culture because any rogue state or community threatens the whole.
The other driver of global culture is what we might simply call, ‘data’. All our thinking about life is based on the data we have to work with. When new data arises that challenges old ways of thinking and acting, the new data undermines the old and creates change. We then have to face the question as to whether we cling on to the old and ignore the data, or face the fact that the data commands change, change that may completely overturn the old. The last century delivered to the world, the whole world, an avalanche of new data and that new data is shaking the old cultures, and the old religions, to their core. The effect on religions has been like an earthquake, because all religions, Christianity included, dealt in absolutes that the new data has called into question.
We are living today in a period of massive transition, happening on a global scale. The future of humanity rests entirely upon the emergence of this global culture because it is the only hope we have or surviving the tsunami of threats bearing down on us. But this shift in culture is creating havoc everywhere because it is challenging and changing the entire mental and spiritual foundations in every society, giving rise to intense emotional reactions, often exploding in violence. That is what we see being played out every night on our TV screens.
So it is that we, too, are confronted with the critical question, can we continue to be Christian in this new cultural environment? Many Christians are saying ‘no’: and in saying ‘no’, the majority are walking away totally from anything to do with Christianity, while many others are saying that they are compelled to live counter-culture lives, rejecting the new culture and insisting the we can only be Christian in the context of the old culture. This is the essence of what is happening overtly in Islam and all forms of Christian fundamentalism.
The reasons are not hard to find. The new culture has an intellectual core that makes traditional Islam and Christianity impossible. That intellectual core is that we know nothing absolutely and finally. This is not some passing post-modern philosophical fad: it is the living heart of the new culture, inalienable from its being. This is the central challenge to Christianity, to Islam and to all other religions from the past, whatever they are. No knowing is final and absolute and beyond question or change. Both classical Catholicism and its foundation in magisterium, and classical Protestantism with its foundation in sola scriptura become unsustainable in this new culture. No value, no belief or dogma, no narrative, however sacred or embodied in scripture, no practice or moral judgement is beyond question or abandonment. All knowing is provisional, ambiguous and dynamically open to change.
The other challenge that global culture poses to all religion is the centrality of adaptability. This is allied, of course, to the provisionality of all knowing, but is driven more directly by the need to change to adapt to dramatically changing physical circumstances of our world. In half a century time, whatever we do from now onwards, the physical environment of the planet is going to be radically different to what we know today. We are going to have to learn to live differently in every facet of life – or we die. Just as the intellectual core of the new culture lies in how we know, the entire outward forms of life, for everyone, everywhere, is now governed by adaptability, and that adaptability is without limit. Nothing is unchangeable. The challenge to all forms of traditional religion doesn’t have to be spelled out. What we are seeing played out in the Islamic world is phosphorous being plunged into the water of the new culture.
When we see riots and acts of violence being carried out in response to images or questions about the prophet Mohammed, this highlights the third way in which the new culture is challenging our old religious ways and thinking. Behind all effective religion lies narrative, but this is especially true of the tradition of Islam and Christianity that arose out Hebrew roots. We tell a story and our faith relates intimately to that story. Global culture does two things. First, it has called all our traditional narratives into question, both by relativizing them out of its new way of knowing, and, second, because it brings data to bear on the old narratives that undermines their credibility. The new culture calls the whole Islamic narrative into question, which is why it is being defended so fiercely. For us, it is the entire fabric of the Christian narrative that is being challenged, from creation through to consummation. Not one single part of the traditional Christian story remains unshaken by the new culture. What is also happening is that a new narrative is emerging, filling the vacuum and that new narrative, if embraced, leaves no room for anything identifiably Christian.
So we come the core question. Is it possible for us to be Christian and also be a citizen of global culture? And if classical Catholicism and classical Protestantism are unsustainable in the new culture, even if we say we can still be Christian, what form can our Christianity take?
These are crucial questions for us, questions that are certainly not going to be resolved in one sermon, perhaps not even in our lifetime. There are four ways we can respond to the question. We can say, “No, we cannot remain Christian”. In saying no, that may mean we walk away altogether from our Christian faith, and that is what the majority in our society is doing. Or in saying, “No, we cannot remain Christian”, we may say that we are going to dig in as counter-culture, the pathway of sectarian life. Truth is truth and there is no changing. The moral rules are laid down and there is no changing. That is one option.
A second is to compartmentalize, and this has become a very popular option, relegating spirituality to the ‘private’ and ‘personal’ area of life while in every other respect living the new culture. ‘Public’ life has no connection to anything religious.
A third option is to bury our heads in the sand and go on doing our church thing as if nothing had changed in the world. Anglicans/Episcopalians are particularly adept at this.
The fourth option is to recognise that God is in the change, that God is the driver of the new cultural environment, and we embrace it as our new spiritual home even as we realise that it changes everything. The answer to the question becomes, yes. We can be Christian in this new culture.
Now all I can do in this moment is leave you with those four options and the question, which is a question the entire church has to face, but each of us, in our own heart and mind, has to face it for ourselves. Whatever choice we make, individually or as a church, involves consequences and those consequences are not only for ourselves but also ultimately for the whole future of humanity. Can we be Christian in global culture? I know what my answer is. Where do you stand?
In thinking about that, we may well reflect on today’s lections from Isaiah (the so-called ‘second’ Isaiah), Paul and Mark. Each of these writings and their writers represented in their day a radical development of the tradition and a departure from the accepted norms. Each confronted a question not dissimilar to that which confronts us today. Think upon that.
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Ordinary Time Week 4: What is the Gospel today?
Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Ps 111
I Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28
Recorded live in the Church of St Francis, Titirangi, Auckland, New Zealand on Sunday 1 February 2015.
Note: The recording was inadvertently made through the internal microphone of the computer
Audio file
What is the gospel, the good news, in today’s world?
In our liturgy readings over these first few weeks of Ordinary Time, the epistle lections are from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. As some of you are aware, I deliver an online sermon every week and two weeks ago I asked four questions. When Paul wrote this letter, he was replying to a series of questions put to him by the elders of the Corinthian church. The question behind today’s reading was what should happen around the issue of food offered to idols. This was a pressing issue for the early gentile church but not one with any relevance to us, even if Paul’s answer contains nuggets of wisdom we can apply more widely. So two weeks ago, I asked what questions we would put to a contemporary ‘Paul’, about issues of paramount importance to us and the church in our day.
Among the four questions that I identified as being addressed to our ‘Paul’ was this: in a world that no longer believes in an after-life, how do we present a message of salvation? What is the gospel today?
Now, in reality we don’t have a ‘Paul’ to whom we can address these questions. The answers have to come from within ourselves. Nor do we find these answers by quoting Paul’s original words and thoughts. Paul’s genius lay in the recognition that the message of Jesus as understood by the Jerusalem leadership would not communicate at all to the gentile world, so he radically reinterpreted and reconstructed the gospel message into a framework that would, and did, communicate to the world of Greece and Rome. We face today a parallel situation.
The traditional gospel message was that salvation was to heaven after we died, or Jesus returned. In its classical form, salvation was from the terrors and eternal punishments of hell. The way to obtain salvation to life in heaven after death was to believe that Jesus was the Son of God who died to save us from our sins. If we accepted this message, we would be forgiven all the sins that would otherwise consign us to hell. After death, so saved, life would be in the eternal presence of God, worship being all in all.
As much as the Christian Church today might think that it proclaims the traditional gospel, the reality is that this gospel message died out over two centuries ago and exists today only in the preaching of some hell-fire and damnation sects. Just ask yourself whether you believe in eternal torment for every unbeliever and you will know that the traditional gospel message is dead – and long dead. Two centuries long dead.
The Victorian era replaced that traditional gospel with a message that it invented for itself: that after death we enter into a better life, one in which we will be reunited with lost loved ones who are waiting for us. The life to come will be free of suffering and pain, loss and death, ambiguity and evil. In the nineteenth century, this new concept of salvation was still closely tied to believing in Christianity and going to church but it soon became separated from church and gospel and became something that happened to every “good” person, with “good” being so elastic an idea that in effect no one was excluded. Everyone had some good in them, and that would be sufficient. The church became unimportant in the process of getting to this ‘better life’: the church might continue, as still happens today, to link the gospel and this ‘better life’ but the world sees no such link so the gospel falls on deaf ears.
This Victorian idea survived until the last half of the twentieth century when it died out as a living reality. Today, this notion of a better life to come after death, and being reunited with loved ones, plays no real part at all in our lives except when trotted out at funerals or when we don’t know what to say to someone in grief. I have spent the last three weeks as a hospital chaplain going from bed to bed, all kinds of people but I can honestly say that only one single person expressed the slightest concern or interest in what might happen after death. Only one person, including the many active Christians. That one person, incidentally, was reading about judgment and looking sad and weighed down, not strengthened. The Victorian idea survives only as folk religion that has no bearing on actual life and no connection at all to the gospel or the church.
What is happening in the twenty-first century is that the majority of people are frankly and openly turning their backs on any notion at all of survival after death. I hear this time and time again: there is nothing after death. Now we can say that these people are wrong and assert strongly that there is heaven to come after death for those who believe. We can dismiss those who reject this message as unbelievers who do not know God. If we continue to assert that our message is that salvation is to heaven when we die, what is the vision we are offering? If we reject as fantasy the Victorian idea of heaven, are we really going to reassert the traditional idea, which necessarily involves the idea of hell? Or do we have some other concept? If we are honest, what we do is fudge the issue by saying that people are “at peace”, which actually says nothing but gives the appearance of being appropriately religious. Like the Victorians, however, we apply the description indiscriminately, independently of whether or not the person has had any Christian connection. It is a meaningless statement. Simply something to say. It certainly does not proclaim a gospel of salvation.
The reality today is that there is no gospel power any more to be found in the proclamation built around what happens after we die. Whether we are talking of the traditional, classical message of heaven and hell, or the Victorian idea of better life and reunited with loved ones, the message is dead.
What does our message of salvation mean, then? Does it have any meaning at all?
We have a massive problem. You just have to think of your immediate neighbours or workmates and how you might convince them to be active Christians in the church to know the size and nature of the problem. What gospel message can you bring them that would cause them to respond by saying that they will commit their lives to Christ and join the church? My guess is that if you try telling them that they will go to heaven if they believe the gospel, you will get a blank stare – at best. I am also going to say this: I doubt whether many of us here (I am tempted to say, any of us here) are genuinely motivated to living as Christians by any kind of focus on what happens when we die. We might sing hymns about heaven, and sing with gusto, but I would venture that we could agree with all those who say that there is no heaven after death and it would not make one itoa of difference to the way we live our lives or our Christian commitment. Whatever we might say in liturgy and hymn and creed or assert in conversation, we do not live our lives on the basis of a salvation message to heaven or anything else beyond death. Our assertions to the contrary are theological, not actual truth. The world, incidentally, recognises this in us and discounts anything we say as Christians.
What gospel message, then can we bring to the world that the world hears as real – real salvation?
To find the answer to that question, we have to look within ourselves. The only answer that can be real is an answer that comes from within our experience of knowing what salvation means in our own lives. I am not talking about any kind of specifically ‘religious’ experience such as a conversion encounter or charismatic tongue. I am not talking about something you might wish to happen in the future. Salvation is now, or it is not at all. Salvation is within this world, in the conditions and ambiguities of this life, or it is not at all.
Salvation is knowing that in every situation, every circumstance, however destructive, however painful and loss-filled, the grace of God is given to us and is sufficient, and always sufficient, to enable us to meet the challenge of that moment. We may certainly celebrate the good and positive things in life and give thanks to God for them, but there is no salvation in that. Salvation is known when we face what may appear to be catastrophic disaster, the loss of what we think as the greatest value in our life, and know that God gives us everything we need to cope. In the power of grace, we can confront anything, even death itself, and still celebrate the goodness of God. This is not some fatalistic acceptance of “God’s will”. That is not any part of the Christian message. First, it is the recognition that we lack nothing to meet any challenge.
This is good news to our world. It is a gospel addressed not just to individuals but to our global society, a world confronted with ISIS, with global warming and all the rest of the threats to humanity in our day. We have the grace-gifts necessary to meet every challenge. This is part of our gospel of salvation but it is only real if we live it ourselves. We cannot speak it if the way we live our lives as individuals and as church denies the words we speak. If there is a single, central imperative lying upon the life of the church today, it is to rediscover grace and how to live grace-filled lives.
Salvation, however, is more than just knowing that we have the grace to meet every situation. It is also the faith recognition that once again we learn from within the circumstances of our own lives, that God takes everything, every circumstance, however destructive, and transforms it into creative grace. The ultimate test of faith, in my perception, lies in our ability to give thanks to God into the face of anything that appears an absolute denial of grace. For a start, try giving thanks to God for ISIS. If we think such a thing is impossible, read the prophets. They saw the hand of God in the destructive, cruel and oppressive powers of Assyria and Babylon. Whatever lies ahead for humanity in the balance of this century, Sunday after Sunday we and our successors will gather and give thanks in Eucharist – “Let us give thanks.” “It is right to offer thanks and praise.” We will do this into the face of the worst imaginable disasters that may come on humanity because we know God’s transforming grace. In just this act alone, we bring salvation to humanity because it is on this foundation that whatever can be built in the future will be built. This cosmic and global vision of God’s transforming grace arises out of knowing that this is what happens every day in our individual and local community life. That is why the powerhouse of the gospel is here, right here, among us, among you.
Salvation means that we have hope, an inextinguishable hope. Hope is not wishful thinking: it is not wishing for a better life, whether in this life or a next. That is not hope: that is wishful thinking. The paradox of Christian hope is that we know that the future will be the same as the present. Outward circumstances will change, for better or for worse. At a concrete, physical level, we cannot even begin to imagine or confidently predict what the future will hold, not tomorrow, not next year or next century. Only that is will be different. Hope, however, knows with absolute certainty that the grace that we have just spoken of will be exactly the same tomorrow, next year or next century. Grace will never fail us. The world seen through grace will be exactly as it is now. That is the nature of genuine hope. That, incidentally, is also the best way to approach the issue of death and what may or may not lie beyond death. We need nothing more than this complete trust in grace, even into death.
Hope brings salvation to the present, because it lifts from the present all the burden of anxiety and fear that can so cripple our lives. What is it that drives all the violence in the world but anxiety, fear and hopelessness? To live by wish, even when the wish is religious, is always to be anxious and fearful and therefore to have no peace. Hope, genuine hope, drives our fear and brings peace.
At the heart of the message of salvation, however, is to know Jesus. First, it is to know that in Jesus God definitively revealed the nature of all reality, embracing God and the physical world, as being love and grace. The cross of Jesus is the rock on which everything is built. We do not proclaim an abstract philosophy or an idea of reality. We proclaim that Jesus was God’s self-revelation and that revelation was grace. Jesus is the foundation, and there is no other. This is good news to a world increasingly held in the thrall of an ideology that says that everything is just physics.
Second, it is Jesus who binds us together in a community of love, a community that transcends all barriers and makes the whole of humanity one people. We, the church, are not a bunch of like-minded clubbers gathering every now and again to do our own thing. We are spiritually bound together by sharing the life of Jesus, the life we entered through baptism, the life constantly renewed in us in Eucharist. Salvation manifests itself primarily in community. That is why there is an enduring truth in the medieval adage that there is no salvation outside the church. They took it to mean that you only got to heaven if you belonged to the church, but our experience of salvation is that we are brought from isolated individuals into a company of love: brought from alienation into belonging; brought from a society that separates people by class, gender, economic and social standing, ethnicity and so much else into a community that embraces all. However imperfect the church may be in expressing the reality of the spiritual bond in Christ, it is the most powerful instrument in the whole of humanity to bring people together into one whole. If humanity is going to survive at all, the key is going to be in such a community and the church, alone, holds that key. That key is Jesus, whose living body is the church.
What I have said does not even begin to exhaust the meaning of the gospel of salvation in our world. We do have a message. It is a message that, if we proclaim it and live it and make it heard, will literally save the world. Our gospel is good news because without it, the world is really doomed. The power that will save humanity lies in our hands. And it begins here, in our midst. The gospel is only power if you and I live it. That’s what discipleship means.
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Ordinary Time Week 3: Facing our Global Future
I Corinthians 7:29-31
“What I mean, brothers, is that the time has become limited….Because the world as we know it is passing away.”
Third among the four questions that I proposed last week that I would put to a contemporary Paul was the question of what we need as spiritual resources to meet the future in this coming century. At the physical, factual level, we know we are heading, as global humanity, towards a crisis, or a series of crises, that has the potential for calamity. The latest warning to come from the scientific community only brings into sharp focus what has been clear since the 1980s, that the entire fabric of civilised life in every corner of the earth is in immanent danger of collapse. If that happens, the darkness that will descend on human life will not lift in a lifetime. It may not lift for centuries or millennia. It may never lift.
Paul’s letters spoke of an immanent end to the world, and that his generation, 2000 years ago, would be the last, the end of the ages. In that, he was wrong, being conditioned by the apocalyptic fashion that was widespread in his age. Over the centuries, there have been successive waves of apocalyptic thinking and they have always proved illusory as it is today when Paul’s words are quoted as supporting such an approaching end. Yes, Jesus is also reported in the gospels as having made apocalyptic predictions, but, even if the words do go back authentically to Jesus, then we have to confront the fact that in this he, too, was wrong. Jesus, fully human, was as much conditioned by cultural fashion as Paul – and ourselves.
Predictions about the end of the world are a mirror reflection of ideas about the beginning. For a generation conditioned to think of the earth, the centre of the universe, as being only a few thousand years old and brought into being by divine fiat, everything as it is today, it was a logical step to conclude that it would all shortly end with a divine fiat. However powerful the metaphor of creation and consummation as acts of God, the physical facts belie any attempt to impose this metaphor on the reality of the universe. We know the universe to be many billions of years old and the earth is far from being the centre of the universe. Likewise, I am equally confident that were I to find myself in a time warp tunnel, emerging a billion years from now, I would find the physical universe just as it is now, whatever may have happened to the earth, to life, to humanity in the intervening period. Thinking physically, I would like to think that ‘life’ continued and that it would be possible for me, a billion year’s hence, to see an unbroken link in a chain of sentient life right back to humanity of the 21st century. What I am certain of, physically, is that the fundamental laws of physics will be exactly the same a billion years from now as they are today, even if intelligent life at that time understands more about physics than we can even imagine. The physical world will be unchanged in essence.
If I project the future physically, I also project the future spiritually. It is impossible to even begin to imagine, if intelligent life exists in a billion years, how they would conceive their spirituality. That question is unanswerable (any more, incidentally, than we can answer the question about the spirituality of the 22nd century, or past generations could have predicted the nature of spirituality today). What I assert with complete confidence, however, is that the reality of grace that we know to be in the depth of the experience of God: this reality will be as unchanged as the realm of physics. Just as the law of gravity, even if differently understood, will then be as it is now, so grace will be then as it is now, and will be still when the universe finally disappears some pentatrillion years from today. If God is love today, God was love at the Big Bang and God will be love a billion years into the future. No less; no more. If human beings or our evolutionary successors are no longer around in a billion years, God’s grace will continue as it has done over the billions of years to this moment, manifest in the birth and death of stars, the great tides of life extinctions and regeneration, the movement of continents and the building of mountains. All is physics, yes: all is grace. Yes.
This is the fundamental physical and spiritual foundation out of which we confront what is happening to our planet and our human society in this century. The apocalyptic way of thinking about the future has not only proved consistently wrong down through the centuries; it is also unhelpful as a means of dealing with the issues we face. It is and always has been just wishful thinking; a wish that God would intervene dramatically and put right everything that is wrong. It becomes an excuse for not dealing with the problems, not confronting the issues and finding creative solutions. I would say that every escape into apocalyptic thinking, into expectations of Jesus’ return, the coming of a messianic age, however expressed and however much we may quote Biblical texts in support, is always the complete opposite of the real gospel message, the denial of what God is doing in the world and calls us to do and be. Apocalyptic thinking in any shape or form in our day is to be seen in the light of Jonah taking ship to Tarshish.
In a strange way, however, the apocalyptic vision of Paul is deeply relevant to our time. There is a real sense that we are indeed living in the last age, the end of civilised society in any form that we have known. It remains possible that we can collectively come up with a positive and creative solution to each and every one of the challenges that threaten global humanity, changes sufficiently deep and far-reaching that it turns around our prospects. This has to remain a primary goal of both Christian and secular service. One thing that intensely distresses me is the way so many Christians anticipate catastrophe with gleeful delight that all the ‘wicked’ will be destroyed leaving only themselves and those who agree with them in control of all the earth. The Noah story, I have to confess, always communicates itself to me as being told out of the anticipation that God will again soon wipe out all the ‘unbelievers’ in a genocidal act. I see no difference between Noah’s God and Hitler’s Final Solution. The spirituality that the Noah story engenders is cruel and loveless. Why we think it is an appropriate story to tell children is always beyond me. (The daily office readings of the last week haven’t been easy to tell).
We must never surrender hope in the creative power of God to bring about the changes that will enable humanity to rise to the challenges we confront. We also need to keep in mind that we may already be past the tipping point where nothing can stop runaway climate change, reverse the exhaustion of resources, stop the breakdown worldwide in society. The power of the Pauline apocalyptic message in our age is the message to prepare ourselves for what is to come. The issue is the same, essentially, as that which Paul thought he confronted: who can survive, how and what to?
For our generation, that is the question. At its extremity, the question is whether humanity as an entire species can survive and this is a real question that becomes more urgent with each passing year. There is a real and increasing prospect that the planet may become too hot to sustain complex life. More probably, the question is who can survive and how as the livable area of the earth shrinks dramatically, resources exhaust and all the structures of ordered life, political, economic, social and cultural, break down. We face the collapse of the economic system, health care, policing, social welfare, political life: no industry, no transport, no electricity, no running water. Is this real? Yes it is. Now it may turn out to be as wrong as Paul’s predictions. If there is anything to be learned from history is that nothing ever turns out the way we expect. I can clearly recall saying in the mid-1980s that thermonuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States and Europe was not a matter of ‘if’ but of ‘when’. Nothing seemed more unlikely than the events that transpired in 1989 and 1990 that changed that scenario utterly. Some science indicates that we are headed not for an overheated planet but a new ice age.
It is not for us to second guess the future. Our calling is to respond to God’s summonse and that call is to work for humanity’s survival. That is the prophetic word to our generation. That is our Jonah’s call. We are to prepare ourselves and human society to be able to confront and overcome the challenges this century delivers to us. We have to be ready, like the story of the bridegroom’s assistants with their flasks of oil. Paul’s message was that nothing was more important than to be ready to meet the Lord on his apocalyptic return. Our message is that nothing is more important than that we are ready to meet the physical ‘apocalypse’ that is bearing down on us. What does it mean for us to have spare oil for our lamps?
So how do we prepare for a future, when we cannot even accurately predict what that future holds? What we can say with almost certainty is that the future will be intensely difficult, threatening our existence and will involve the loss of virtually everything we hold dear.
We are all familiar with the concluding words of I Corinthians 13: faith, hope and love, these three endure: but the greatest of these is love. Paul’s words hold true across the centuries. These things endure. Everything else comes to nothing. Faith, hope and love: to have these three is to be prepared for anything.
FAITH. What is critical is that we have a vision of grace, of God at the centre of all reality, even destructive reality, ultimately in control. Faith is the revelation of love and grace in Jesus, a revelation that is unchanging and unshakeable. Faith is the embrace of the Incarnation as God’s’ Yes’ to the significance of humanity in the universe. Faith is knowing the Spirit that empowers us to be, as the office Affirmation of Faith expresses it, “the gospel in the world”. Faith manifests itself primarily in thanksgiving and that thanksgiving is made into the face of every situation and every time and place, even when we appear to lose everything – and I mean everything. Thomas Ogden, the theologian, described God as the ‘Slayer of every value”. Faith is the confidence in God’s love as we experience every value being destroyed; when life appears remorselessly cruel, oppressive and meaningless. Faith confronts us with everything happening in the world around us, personal and global and yet we give thanks “at all times and in all places”. This is what we do in Eucharist. Faith has its supreme expression in Eucharistic thanksgiving.
HOPE. Hope is not about wishing for a better life to come, whether in this world or a next. Hope is not about longing for a life free from ambiguity, suffering, grief and moral dilemma. That is wishful thinking, not hope, even when it is wrapped up in Biblical quotes and doctrinal orthodoxy. It is wishful thinking and it is illusion. It has as much reality as wishing for a lottery win that will deliver unbridled happiness. It is also a denial of faith. The instant we take our eyes off the present and focus them on a wished-for future that will be better than the present, we take our eyes off God. We tell God that what grace is giving us in the present is insufficient for our needs. In effect, we tell God that at the moment he is stuffing up and he needs to get his act together and do things properly – and soon. Get off your backside, God, and act like you’re supposed to. In this framework, Christian hope amounts to a statement of confidence that one day God will indeed get his act together. In the meantime, we have to put up with the inadequate world he’s created.
Hope, real hope, is not wish. In essence, it does not either expect or wish for a world that is any different from the present. We do not expect or wish for a world where there is no ambiguity, no suffering, no death and loss and grief, no challenge to our survival and existence. We do not expect or wish for a world in which it is not a struggle to maintain faith and in which God is hidden even to the point where we doubt the very nature of God. The instant we wish for some state other than what we are in fact living, we blind ourselves to the grace of God given to us where and how we are in all fullness. The spiritual reality of our lives, whatever they are, is that we lack nothing. We do not even wish to know God more fully than we know God now, nor can we come to know God better than we know God now. No amount of Bible learning, no amount of religious exercise, churchgoing, good works or anything else we can imagine can add one dot to the knowing of God that we have at this moment. The Doctor of Divinity who can recite the New Testament in Greek has no more knowledge of God that the newly baptised infant.
Hope is not about a better future or a future radically changed from the present. Hope, rooted and grounded in Christ, is the firm and unshakable assurance that the future will be the same as the present, whether next year or a billion years from now. Whether we are talking about our personal future or whether we are talking about the future of humanity or the universe, hope is the assurance that the grace we know now, sufficient for all our needs, enabling us to meet every challenge, will be exactly the same however far we project into the future and whatever the outward circumstances.
Hope, then, is grounded in faith. Faith illuminates the landscape of our lives, pesonal and global, and shows us the power of God, the God of grace, transforming life, equipping life, stregthening life. Hope knows with absolute assurance that there is nothing in all creation that can separate us from this grace of God. Climate may change, civilisation collaspse, darkness descend on humanity, but we will continue, as now, to give thanks and praise for the grace we receive in abundance, grace that is sufficient. This is the hope and this the hope that will be the salvation of humanity.
LOVE. “These three things endure; but the greatest of them is love”.
We are speaking of how we prepare ourselves for the crises coming to meet us in this century. We have spoken of faith, because without faith we will not have the inner strenth to be resilient in the face of every challenge. We have spoken of hope – the hope that is sure that grace wil be sufficient whatever the future holds. Without hope, we are defeated by fear and despair, overwhelmed by grief at our losses. But the greatest of these is love.
What we are already seeing as our world enters the period of crises is that love flies out the window. The rich gobble up more and more of the earth’s resources and care little or nothing for those impoverished. It may seem that the terrible scenes we are witnessing in the Miiddle East is about religion, but the deeper reality is that is is about climate change, happening in that region faster than anywhere on earth. As the means of sustaining life break down, love vanishes and hate and conflict rise up to destroy. Greed and lust for power come to dominate exisstence. Justice, faithfulness, mercy and lovingkindness disappear. Religion itself becomes demonic. ISIS is the face of a world without love.
Love may be the greatest but it is founded on faith and hope. Without faith and hope there can be no love. I am not speaking, of course, about sexual love or familial love but the love that reaches out and embraces beyond family and tribe.
It is love that creates community that crosses the boundaries of family and tribe: community that will last the tests. If we project the worst scenarios of social breakdown that we can imagine happening to our world, one in which all the social institutions of state and public life break down and disappear, yet we know that the community of the church, bound together by love, will endure to the end. The core meaning of grace lies in the manner in which it creates community that transcends every barrier. The primary expression of the gospel life is such community. In the Affirmation of Faith used in the broadcast daily office, we declare “You empower us to be your gospel in the world”. Being the gospel in the world is expressed first, foremost and last in being the grace community of the church, bound together in Christ’s love. This is why every division in the church, every schism, every sectarian expression that splinters the fabric of the church, however well-meant and spiritually sincere, is a living denial of the gospel, a slap in the face of Christ.
It is this love that will be humanity’s salvation. First, because the body of the church will outlast all the collapse of state and social structures to form the foundation for whatever renewal can take place. Second, because the Chrsitian church can be, will be, the source of care when all other resources of care dry up. Love, the love of God for all humanity, for all the world, motivates the Christian community to care and go on caring, whatever the circumstances and whatever the personal cost. If fatih and hope are necessary for love to be real, it is love that keeps faith and hope alive. That is why faith and hope die out when people no longer connect to the community of the church.
We are living in an age when the future of humanity, as a species but certainly as civilised culture, is under threat everywhere in the world. The threat is real and it is immanent. The threat is not ISIS or terror in any other form. They are only the symtoms of what is happening, and happening everywhere.
The future of humanity lies uniquely in the hands of the Christian community. It is not the survival of the church or Christianity that is at stake. It is the entireity of human life. The gospel of faith, hope and love is the key that can enable the global community to emerge from the time of crisis.
Paul’s apocalyptic message may be heard by us in a very different frame of reference to his manner of thinking, yet in a way that is perhaps more intensely real than at any other time in history,the call is to the church to wake up, the time is near, indeed it is already at hand. The world as we know it is passing away.
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Ordinary Time Week 2: Questions for Paul
I Samuel 3:1-10
Ps 139
I Corinthians 6:12-20
John 1:43-51
Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. The letter was written primarily in response to a series of questions that the elders in the Corinthian church had sent to Paul, requesting his guidance and direction. These were issues that the elders saw as central to the life of the Corinthian church at that time.
Some of these issues, such as what to do about food offered to idols, are no longer even remotely relevant to us today, even if Paul’s exposition of his answer contains nuggets of theological insight that remain useful. Other questions such as rules around virginity are of marginal significance and the framework of Paul’s answer, governed by his expectation of an immanent return of Jesus, barely relate to us at all. Sexual morality, the question behind today’s reading, is of perennial significance because of the nature of sexuality but despite the concern of some Christian circles, almost to the point of obsession, it is not genuinely the central concern that it was in the context of Roman Corinth in the first century.
However, what sprints to my mind as I read Corinthians is not what Paul was asked (and therefore, of course, the content of his answers for the most part), but the question of what issues are uppermost for the church in our own day. What would we ask of the equivalent of Paul were we to create a set of questions today, seeking guidance and spiritual direction? What are the great and central questions of our age, and of our church life, that we would seek answers from our spiritual ‘father’? What would our I Corinthians look like?
We might be tempted to jump in with a request for direction on the issues that create such tension and controversy in our church: issues like gay ordination, abortion, women bishops and the like. If we asked those questions of a Paul today, many would expect a repeat of instructions echoing the earlier letters. I suspect, though, that ‘Paul’s’ response would be closer to the opening chapters of the letter where Paul tears the Corinthians to shreds for their meaningless factions. “I hear from what Cloe’s people are telling me that there are factions among you, some saying, “Ordain gays”, while others are breaking communion over the issue. I can almost believe it….” I am sure that future generations will look back in amazement and anger at the controversies that tore apart and devastated the church in our time, condemning our blindness and disregard for the real issues of our age, unable to comprehend that we were destroying the gospel by our zeal for what was not important, are in fact phantom issues. The world, meanwhile, sees the church engrossed in matters that don’t matter and dismiss the gospel as trivia.
So I found myself asking what four questions might the church of our age put to our ‘Paul’? What is it that we are desperately in need of fundamental guidance?
I am going to propose four such questions but do so in the awareness that these are no more that what I see as the questions of our age. The challenge I would put before each of you is for you to think also, what questions would you ask? The limit is four, so that we can focus on identifying what is of the uttermost importance to the church. In putting forward these four questions, I am not attempting to give any answers, to play the role of Paul. What is important, what is vital, at this point, is that we ask the right questions. What is important, what is vital, is that we identify the real and important questions. I suspect that a fundamental reason why the church today is all at sea spiritually and theologically is that we are asking the wrong questions and are focused on the wrong issues.
Here, then, are the four questions that I would write to our contemporary Paul.
First. Is it possible to be a faithful Christian in the new milieu of global culture, which has ‘not knowing’ as its intellectual foundation, and if so, how can we express the gospel in this new cultural environment? This to my mind is the central and most important question of the age. Behind this question lies all the turmoil of terrorism and religious extremism that is traumatising the world today. It is not just Christians, but Moslems and all other religions that are faced with this crisis because the cultural change is global.
As the theological, cultural and spiritual landscape changes all around us, where does the boundary of faithfulness lie? What so defines our membership of Christ that its loss puts us outside the realm of gospel and church? The world we live in is engaged in a massive cultural shift involving a whole new paradigm of reality, new ways of living and seeing. In this new cultural environment, a new spirituality is being born, one that is radically different from the past. Will we be able to identify ourselves as Christians within this new spiritual environment? Islam is seeing this issue more clearly than we are as Christians. Whatever it may seem, Islam is not in battle with the West. It is in battle with the emerging global culture because it fears that it will be impossible to be both Islamic and culturally global in the way that is developing. Will it be possible to be Christian?
Second. Is there any consequence that follows from believing or disbelieving the gospel? We are living in an age that has rejected the notion of life beyond death. That rejection is not a modern phenomenon but, in Western society, dates back to the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century replacement, the idea of afterlife as being reunited with loved ones, is no longer significant except in folk religion and is dying out even there. For a world that does not embrace an afterlife, is there any meaning to a gospel of salvation? I t comes down to the question, what is the gospel today?
Third. What are the core moral and spiritual values that we need to build into our communities to face the gathering crises of this century, that will enable us to face and overcome the challenges of our time and survive? Humanity faces the real potential for the collapse of all civilised life in every part of the earth. If we are going to survive at all, it will be from out of the resilience of a strong faith and with the power of hope. What do we need to do to establish this?
And one final question: just a little one. How are we to understand God in a way that does justice to both the revelation in Jesus and the whole realm of scientific knowledge of the natural world? A nice, concise answer would be most welcome, Paul.
These, then, are the four questions that I would want to put to our contemporary Paul. What would you ask?