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 7: Connection and belonging

7th Sunday of Easter

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Based on readings: Ezekiel 36.24-28, Acts 16.16-34, John 17.20-26

“May they be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me.”

Today’s Gospel reads strangely. It’s a prayer. But it’s written in very formal language. It’s almost like a philosophical treatise in its phrasing. As such it seems quite unemotional, withdrawn. Despite the fact that Jesus is praying that his disciples be one; that they love one another like he has loved them. The translation doesn’t necessarily convey that this is a heart-felt speech, made on the eve of execution, that his vision be carried on and his friends look after each other. 

Unless you have completely withdrawn from society; having heard the same news stories every day for the last three years and with the optimistic billing of the England cricket team, you may have decided you cannot bear the inevitable disappointment, and cut yourself off from the world; but not completely. After all you’ve still made it to church. So if you haven’t gone Crusoe, or retired to senility in the attic; you will be a member of certain groups.

At street level it might be a playgroup, a lunch club, or a poker night; a dysfunctional family; but you might still work or have ties to your old company. You might belong to a club on Pall Mall, or a book club, or the Society of Charles King and Martyr. You might, and perhaps contrary to your actions on your last trip to the polling booth, belong to a political party; or formerly belong to a political party; or be a patron or trustee of some charity or foundation. Your balloon is likely attached by several such strings. We are social animals. We belong. And belonging tells us who we are. 

But belonging seems less fashionable today, loyalty less a la mode. Institutions are in decline and in constant suspicion of abuse, corruption and being out of touch. Perhaps the French President will not go to the D-Day commemorations on Juno Beach.  How very French I hear you say. And even to say you’re English suggests colonial paternalism. Thus Elton John’s recent tweet: ‘I am a European — not a stupid, imperialist English idiot’. To be a “woman”, I’ve always said, is to participate in an outdated, binary, oppressive normativity.

And we could easily imagine Jesus walking into the Conservative party HQ right now and declaring: “Father, I wish that they might be one, even as we are one,” Or bringing together Jeremy Corbyn and Alastair Campbell and praying, “May the love with which you have loved me be in them, and I in them.” It seems more likely that he might offer some other just counsel like: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The desire to belong, to have a social mooring is as strong as ever, but in a culture, addicted to the heady cult of individualism, and a political situation which has abandoned collaboration, where is it that we come together?

I talked some weeks back about the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and his book I and Thou. I’d like to bring it up again because it very neatly encapsulates two very different ways we inhabit the world, and the difference between worldly relationships and what Jesus calls us to.

So there are two sorts of relationship. I-it relationships: where we treat others as objects; an instrumental view of the world. And I-thou relationships: where we treat others as a relationship in which we’re involved; where I’m less sure where I finish and you begin.

So if you walk into a room and you’re thinking, what can I get out of this, how can these people help me, which people do I need to avoid, what is the most I can get from this. That is the I-it relationship. A room full of bumper-cars. 

If you walk into a room and you’re asking yourself, how can I connect with these people, how can we understand each other better, how can we grow together, how might we together benefit the world, then we’re somewhere closer to I-thou.

Now even the most generous minded person cannot be fully engaged all the time. The queues in Tried and True are long enough. And actually having a little professional distance from your dentist is usually a good idea. But to merely treat people as objects would lead to a very lonely and very cold life. But this is not just about dealing with other people.

So perhaps you run. A few years ago I had the delight of a 5 week running course in the Yorkshire hills. Every day was a somewhat uncomfortable test with every conceivable pressure to keep up. For the most part it was mind over matter. My body was an object. Fill it with fuel, give it ice baths, exert my will over it. But every runner will know — and there were moments in those 5 weeks — when mind and body are in harmony, and running is suddenly a joy. It’s actually thrilling and you feel the endorphins rushing about in your brain like performing dolphins. mind, body, spirit, the world all in sync.  That feeling of connection within yourself is I think like a religious experience.

Or if you’ve ever moved from that stilted experience of a first-date, where the boundaries of where each of you end are so clearly miles apart that you wonder how you will ever find anything to say to this person, to that seductive rapport where you could talk all night and you’re finishing each other sentences; that intoxicating infatuation is like a religious experience.

And even if it’s more measured there are those moments where you realise there is a matching curvature between your long term partner and yourself, where your faces fit together, such that to lose that person would be to lose yourself. It has become inconceivable that you would be truly separate objects again.

Or perhaps out on a mountain top, or in a summer rainstorm, in the absolute calm of an ocean or lake; or watching the dawn send a matrix of light through the dense canopy, you have felt within the animality, the createdness of your being an absolute connection and rootedness in this planet.

Or perhaps it’s just watching your first nature documentary after the birth of a child, seeing the polar bear with her cub and realising with uncontrollable sobbing that this is your battle. You are the polar bear. That connection has the nature of a religious experience. 

Or finally in church, it may be the collective act of singing, perhaps in today’s gradual remembering the Dunkirk scene in Atonement; perhaps singing in school or college, or through 40 years of vicars coming and going, or in speaking words a realisation of their weight, spoken over 2000 years, 160 years in this building where prayer has been valid. Perhaps it is simply in a quiet moment, a breaking down of the barriers we place around our souls to find that connection with God, with the person in the next pew, the birdsong, the Putney foxes asleep in the garden. That connection is the basis of all religious experience. That is the opening of the soul to the Thou of the world. This is what Ezekiel spoke of: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you;”

The basis of almost all horror movies is to isolate each member of the group and pick them off one by one. Christianity is founded in reconciliation and this prayer that God’s people might be one, as God is one in unity, and that as one they might love each other. Britain, as a country, and as part of Europe has not looked so fractious and isolated in a long time. As Christians it is our vocation to be points of connection, and through prayer and action find ways of making our connection with nature, our neighbours and our God deeper and more numerous. It is that point of connection that fuels our charity and our impact upon world. It is that depth of connection that is the source of a living faith. 

We have for too long treated the world as an ‘it’, treated women, people of different lifestyles, foreigners, the poor as an it. Sometimes even with a general will to do good to them. To follow Christ is to realise that the animal one pew over, the taciturn man serving coffee, the stranger whose eye you would not meet walking here, the chorus of birds that woke you up, the bright garden outside all have that spark of the divine. All can be reached by thoughtfulness; all are a touching point to eternity. And in feeling that connection, to widen our hearts. In finding the Thou all around us, to love them. Amen.

The Ascension: The end from which we begin

The Ascension

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Based on readings: Ezekiel 37.1-14, Acts 16.9-15, John 5.1-9

 The first question, the question that all theologians hate is about the Ascension itself: where is Jesus’ body? In its typically pictorial language the New Testament has him going up and off like a sky rocket into the night.  Is he perhaps then to be discovered with the Father and Spirit hanging out on Mars like one evangelical I knew used to aver? Well no.

The Bible is trying to give expression to the change that occurs between the Easter resurrection appearances and the gift of the Spirit in the birth of the Church. It takes the resurrection seriously - note that ‘he presented himself alive... by many convincing proofs’ - and we should not overlook that it is the concreteness of this resurrection experience that defines Christianity as something fundamentally new and unexpected. But the ascension draws to a close Jesus’ humanly embodied presence in the world.        

As for where Jesus’ body is, it is with God.  The early church from the time of the Gospels had witnessed in the resurrection the divinity of Christ and so understood him to be not simply up in the stars - contrary to popular belief very few religions have understood God in this way - but present in the way that God is present. It’s hard for us to get our minds around this because we’re so used to a materialistic view of the universe where the world of atoms, electrons, quarks and the rest push out God with their sheer weight of matter.

Now I’m no scientist and generally hate theologians trying to do science as much as I hate scientists who think they can do theology, but if science can talk these days about superstring theory and 11 dimensions (we usually only experience 3 dimensional space and time) then the idea of a multi-layered universe doesn’t seem so implausible. Jesus’ body, then, like God, is somehow still with us.

What then are we to make of the return of this Ascended Lord? Well, in a sense, this is something that we already have experience of. Jesus, as the Word made flesh, is a paradigmatic sacrament - a visible sign of an invisible presence. So, in every Eucharist as God is made present in bread and wine, we have his return.  And that is a return we physically take into ourselves as we ask to be more loving, more Christ-like, closer to God, more a part of Jesus’ body.  And the Eucharist itself looks forward to when we will be fully present to God, though as our first reading in Acts tells us ‘it is not for [us] to know the times or periods that the Father has set’.

The point is, though, that looking towards the end will help us see and so bring to being that peace and goodness that is the kingdom of God. By seeing our end we can orient our lives. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Celebrated life coach Martha Beck offers the following exercise: ‘Think of someone whose approval you covet.  It might be your lover, someone else’s lover, your boss, a celebrity who may never even meet you, [your favourite vicar, or even Jesus,…] Get all those needy feelings front and center.  Let them fill your whole mind.  Now imagine that you get to spend an hour with the person whose approval you seek. Can you feel the desperation, the grasping, the sick sense that this hour isn’t nearly enough? Excellent.

Now begin at the end.  Imagine that you already have this person’s approval, that they adore you, that nothing on God’s green earth could ever diminish their total approval.  You are awash in approval... Letting this mental position fill your mind, picture interacting with your hero again. Can you feel the freedom, the ease, the humour that’s suddenly available to you? Can you feel yourself start to smile without trying?  Can you tell this version of you is way more likely to get approval than the version who’s always desperately seeking it?’

It kind of works doesn’t it? Really it’s a confidence trick in which you help yourself to a place in which you really believe in yourself.  It requires, though, that you can picture and believe in a positive end.  And this is important.  Because if at any point we stop believing in positive outcomes to our lives and actions we will soon find ourselves in quick sand.  When our confidence really leaves us or when the narratives we have in mind for ourselves, for society, history, the world are bleak any motivation to keep going, to seek justice, love, peace will soon evaporate. Martha Beck is right in knowing that our faith in positive outcomes is essential to our success as a person.

Which brings us back to the return of the Ascended Lord.  History, it seems continues to turn and turn in the widening gyre.  We have moved from an Age of Optimism to an Age of Anxiety, a narrative which is also replayed in cycles through different times of our own lives.  But the Christian narrative promises a happy ending: that in Jesus’ return we will lay hold of the peaceful kingdom of God for ourselves.

This is the end from which we begin.  This is the hope and confidence that our faith should give us in seeking to build a world of love and justice. Even through the anxiety of Brexit, the seven last plagues and the four horsemen, by beginning at the end, which is the glory of the risen and ascended Lord, we can move forward with hope and confidence - not anxious about oddballs claiming the end of the world is nigh - or cynics with their Jesus is coming, look busy!  But in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection.

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.