Pentecost: A Christian nation before God

Pentecost

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Based on readings: Genesis 11:1-9, Acts 2. 1-21, John 14.8-17, 25-27 

The late eighteenth century philosopher Hegel wrote that “newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers”.  The comment reflects the secularising of society, but at the heart of what he is saying is that the thing that binds the nation together, the people’s common interest and experience, is the daily practice of reading the paper.  Reading the paper, or however else we catch the news, forms us in our personal and social identities. The two, I might add, are not mutually exclusive. Justin Welby at the start of his reign repeated the theologian Karl Barth’s dictum that we should have a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, if our faith is going to be relevant to the world.

Part of what is troubling about the rise of Social media is that we are no longer reading the same news, which leads to a confused and divided nation. But what I’d like to reflect on this morning how this little book gave us a new benchmark for the English nation, the English language and the modern individual.

The Prayer Book, obviously, holds God in high esteem, but the monarch comes a pretty close second. Not a service goes by without a prayer for her and usually for her family as well. Eddie Izzard was quite right in noting that, as people go, behind her big house and people with guns, she is one pretty saved queen.  This last week I have prayed and sung for her to be saved at least 20 times, so I’ve certainly done my bit, but it’s important to remember that praying for the queen is at the same time understood as praying for her government and people.

The gunpowder plot, used to provide one of the more colourful services of the 1662 Prayer Book, which was duly to be remembered each year, including the prayer to God, “who on this day, didst miraculously preserve our Church and State from the secret contrivance and hellish malice of Popish conspirators; and on this day also didst begin to give us a mighty deliverance from the open tyranny and oppression of the same cruel and blood-thirsty enemies”. The service was cut - presumably as Father Jack would have said - as an ecumenical matter.

Aside from the no doubt sincere piety of Anglican liturgists in wishing their monarchs well, the force of the Prayer book is deeply conservative, quietist and nationalistic, intended through lifelong repetition to uphold social structure that ‘we may be godly and quietly governed’.  And no surprise here. The 16th Century was still recovering from the bloody Wars of the Roses, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation sparked political and religious wars and revolts across all of Europe. Rebellion was the great fear. 

But now for the first time, since the prior Latin rites were innumerable and diverse and incomprehensible to the ordinary folk, the people had services which would have been identical no matter where you were in the country, in a language you could understand. It was an end to parochial differences. Even the rubrics were written out so you would all be standing, kneeling or sitting at the appropriate time. It is the ideal form of ideology, even more than cricket and afternoon tea, the prayer book united the people in a common language and religion; thoroughly English.

It is particularly appropriate then that the prayer book was launched on Pentecost 1549.  The preface of the day celebrates ‘the gifte of diverse languages’ the tool of evangelism, suggesting that truth is to be pursued through the vernacular and understood by the people; against the tyrannous opacity of Latin. Being called Brutus that is a very difficult thing to say. It also brings to mind all those bad Latin jokes, like how you can decline Brutus but you can’t conjugate him. 

The point is that while in our Old Testament reading Zephaniah wants the undoing of the curse of Babel in a new ‘pure language’, the book of Acts, read through the Reformers, celebrates the gifts of different tongues praising God as the gift of the Holy Spirit, and so the hankering for a barely understood single holy language of Latin is read as the denial of the Spirit.  The use of Latin in liturgy was outlawed from Pentecost 1549. 

The nation state was not the only winner from the Prayerbook, however.  As part of the Reformation movement, a significant impetus in the new liturgy was to make the individual accountable before God. Under Catholic Latin it is the Church that is the guardian of Truth.  It is a matter beyond the competence of ordinary people. The inability of the majority to understand what is being said maintains a sense of transcendence and the radical difference of the divine. The Prayer Book, on the other hand, has a rubric that it must be “read distinctly with a loud voice”. It demands that it is understood and transparent before the people. No more secret prayers and cult practices.

And with the Prayer Book, services were laid open for the first time. The interpretation of Scripture and liturgy was suddenly open to everyone.  What had been sacred mystery and priestly power had become personal engagement and intellectual access.  This required the ordinary people to be involved in the service.  All of a sudden the service was actually about them. But all of a sudden they had to work a bit harder. 

The nation in worship moved from watching a transubstantiatory rite (try saying that after three gin and tonics) in a foreign language (1547), to a doctrinally ambiguous but inclusive and fully English service (1549), to forthright Protestantism in the second Book of Common Prayer (1552), back to Latin in the Catholic retrenchment of bloody Mary, before the compromise Prayer Book of the religious settlement of 1559.  A troubling couple of decades. The Prayer Book had two main purposes, to unite a nation in language, loyalty to the crown and uniformity of religion, and to legitimize the individual as a man or woman unmediated before God, able to work out their salvation in fear and trembling. 

The first Queen Elizabeth said “I would not open windows into men’s souls” and that has preserved a liturgy which might properly be called inclusive in its theology, and the good luck of the Church of England was to have for its liturgist a poet, Thomas Cranmer, who was able to lay the basis for a beautiful liturgy.  The same queen, however, was also to say, "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm."

And this is the other side of the Prayer Book, a fierce nationalistic ideology, built on the humble origins of a the troubling and ambivalent character of Henry VII and a generation of religious persecution. It's an historical and cultural document which is worthy of celebration, but it also is in perpetuity, the official Prayer Book of this land, and for all its faults incredibly important in being a Book of Common Prayer, the first book of prayer for the common people of these isles.

We too can enjoy its beauty in prayer and music, reminded that we are still (just about) a Christian nation before God, but also an individual before God, called to learn his love and participate in building his kingdom.

Easter 6: Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?

6th Sunday of Easter

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green
Based on readings: Ezekiel 37.1-14, Acts 16.9-15, John 5.1-9 

If you happened to be at church last week, you’ll be delighted to know that I’m sticking with the classic movie references. Only this week moving from Taxi Driver to the superb 1954 film On the Waterfront. The film is less famous than one particular line in it, spoken by Marlon Brando, a boxer who is convinced by his brother under pressure from the Mob to lose fights for money. You may have never heard of the film but you’ll know the line: [I think it works better with an English accent, but this is not an accurate repetition of Brando’s working American man:] “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.” Not ‘I coulda been a champion’, but just ‘I coulda been a contender’. Against his conscience, against his pride, with no support, Brando has become a bum, a nobody. It’s not that he failed — he never even got a chance.

I bring this up because there’s a tension throughout history, but most clearly in the twentieth century between — paraphrasing Mr Spock — ‘the needs of the many’ and ‘the needs of the few’. That conflict is at the heart of most human tragedy. For when ‘as logic clearly dictates… the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’, we are in to the language of ‘collateral damage’, of ‘necessary evils’. The evil of having to get up early every morning because the need of your partner to have half an hour more in bed, and your baby for his milk, outweigh your need to sleep. Necessary evils.

The great unsentimental wickednesses of Fascism and Socialism made no excuses here, but it also becomes the embarrassment of our own politics. Economic or ‘tough’ decisions are made regularly that even with every effort to be fair, require politicians, commanders, anyone making large-scale decisions, to set the needs of the few to one side. Decisions called ‘brave’, ‘statesmanlike’, ‘justified’. I’m sure, like me, most of you are very much looking forward to seeing which of the ‘statesmanlike’ figures, vying to be contenders, becomes our next Prime Minister.  

The novelist Arthur Koestler puts it concisely in Darkness at Noon, the book that signed him off from Communism.  He writes:

‘There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community — which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb.’

It’s not that having collective aims pursued at the cost of individuals is evil. That’s a principle inherent in all politics. But it is true that when this is pursued most rationally and ruthlessly, it’s led to some of the worst human catastrophes. Think of Javert in Les Miserables, of whom Victor Hugo says:

‘Probity, sincerity, candour, conviction, and the idea of duty, are things which, by deceiving themselves, may become hideous, but which even if hideous remain grand… they are virtues which have but one vice, error… Nothing could be more painful and terrible than this face, which revealed what we may call all the evil of good.’ 

This may be true even of politicians who have good intentions. But so much more when they do not. I hope you all voted last week.

When the mob who control the Waterfront in the Marlon Brando film start getting rid of those who threaten their control, Father Barry tells them: ‘Some people think the Crucifixion only took place on Calvary. They better wise up! Taking Joey Doyle's life to stop him from testifying is a crucifixion…  And every time the Mob puts the pressure on a good man, tries to stop him from doing his duty as a citizen, it's a crucifixion. And anybody who sits around and lets it happen, keeps silent about something he knows that happened, shares the guilt of it just as much as the Roman soldier who pierced the flesh of our Lord to see if he was dead. ‘

When the individual is crushed beneath the collective will, the powers that be, it is a crucifixion.

I was intrigued watching a 3 year old playing with some older children in the house yesterday. You could see this was very new to the 3 year old, but it was also exciting being with these older children. Despite being very unsure about the game he went along with it.  We are just naturally very sociable animals. Submitting to a group is something we do a little too easily. And a vicarage is an excellent place to play hide and seek.

It’s a theme that’s very clearly at work in the Gospel.  Power – that is – not hide and seek. As John’s Gospel moves to a close, it’s revealed to the High Priest that ‘it is expedient that one man die for the people’. He doesn’t understand why this has been revealed or what it means, but goes along with it because it seems to him a political truth. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

And we see it in certain miracles.  We’re told that the man is born blind in order that God’s power may be seen and Jesus revealed as the light of the world. Lazarus is allowed to die and Jesus delays his journey to this end, so that he may be raised from the dead and Jesus known as the resurrection and the life. Jesus’ divinity then appears to look past the plight of the individual to the higher goal of the revelation of God’s purposes.

And yet in today’s Gospel, we see Jesus, as he does so often, responding to individual need. Seeing someone struggling and not abstracting to the wider social or theological  issues, lamenting the NHS, or making a speech about social justice, but simply acting on the basis of the need in front of him. We see him breaking the Jewish interpretation of the Law, which is no respecter of the man or woman in crisis. And as with his compassion for outcasts, the vilified and unclean, and his emphasis on forgiveness, Jesus in his humanity puts the individual first.  He’s kind. So in the two natures of Christ, we see mercy seasoning justice, of the needs of the few held with the needs of the many.

This person-based ethics is infused in Christianity. In our reading from Acts we heard about the women of Macedonia and Lydia, hearing the Gospel and being baptised. And this is how Christianity went from a handful of people to a world religion. The simple sharing of stories and interpersonal relationships. The few caring for the few, despite the persecution of the many. As Lydia was baptised with her whole family, like last week, we baptise into the faith our children, as we promise to pass on the stories and bring them up with love and prayer. And as a parent loves a child, as the humanity of Christ speaks of God’s love for each of us despite our weakness and failure — so in baptism we’re reminded that nothing can separate a child from the love of God, and that we have this duty to try and replicate this love for one another, for our neighbours and those we share our lives with; despite early mornings, diva moments and an overabundance of bodily fluids. 

So yes we have collective goals, and we should pursue justice. But we also have to protect one another from the justice and indifference of the world. We have to encourage one another to become the persons we are meant to be. We can all be contenders, but not alone. We can all become collateral damage, we can all face crucifixion, if we don’t watch out for the person who has fallen the wrong side of the tracks. And as the Bible continually exhorts, we must do what we can for the widow, the orphan, the refugee, the sick and the dying. And as Spock learns, where there is love, there is no counting of costs.  Love will move time and space to meet the needs of the few, that one sheep gone astray, the prodigal and profligate, the outcast on the hill, whatever the purposes of the many.  Amen.