Article
- Date:
- Sunday 23rd November 2008
The Forth Sunday before Advent - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- BCP Evensong
- Readings:
- Matthew 28.16-end
Last week I talked about the future of mission in a postmodern world and today, bearing in mind the Commission at the end of Matthew's Gospel, I want us to think about the substance of our mission. We are, says Jesus, to take the message all over the world, baptising people in the name of the Triune God. And so, the three questions I want us to think about are:
- To whom should we take this message?
- What should the message be? And
- How should we take it?
bearing in mind that the three are inseparable.
On the first question, for many years I was terribly worried about mission because I could not work out how to connect with people who lived in social housing; I saw our middle class church struggling with the concept of outreach. What I was actually doing was thinking of mission as something which is delivered to people outside our usual comfort zone, to people on sink estates or to foreigners. Then it dawned on me that the period of the most intense Christian missionary activity sponsored by the United Kingdom overseas coincided with the steepest decline in Christian adherence in the UK. My conclusion, then is simple; it may well be that there are some of us who have the gifts to take the message of Jesus to developing countries or to run-down estates in the United Kingdom but our primary task is to take the message of Jesus to the people we know, to those with whom we share cultural assumptions and activities. We should not consider mission to be an alien activity but, rather, part of our routine; we may all agree that youth and the socially alienated need the message of Jesus but I would argue that in the past two decades those who have needed it most are comfortable people like us - or at least among us - unbridled free marketeers who have exalted greed from its former position as one of the seven deadly sins into a public virtue; we are the people who bought the policies, de-mutualised the building societies and sat content while the value of our houses rocketed with no effort on our own part; and we are the people whose community and class produced the stock brokers, insurance agents and bankers that have been our ruin; the vandalism of the poor is nothing to this and it will be the poor who will pay much more than we will ever pay for middle class greed and our reluctance to redistribute income and wealth; for every unemployed banker there will be scores of unemployed humbler folk. And so our missionary task is, overwhelmingly, with our own people. And out of this there arises a crucial principle: mission is not what other people do, it is what we do ourselves. We cannot continue to enjoy cosy liturgy in our cosy churches and expect other people to get on with the missionary work.
And what should our message be? Last week I said that we were on the verge of a steep decline in doctrinal adherence because people relate authenticity to their own experience rather than to a theory. We won't, then, be promoting the Nicene Creed or any other creed. What people want is a God of their own experience and this means bringing them the very things which are at the core of our Church, Word and Sacrament. And in saying this, the first charge on ourselves must be that we have faith in the Holy Spirit, not to help us formulate some kind of collective response to Scripture - which we call doctrine - but faith that The Holy Spirit will fill people with what I call incarnational perception, with a clear apprehension of the nature and purpose of Jesus. This, in a sense, was the whole point of the Reformation which shifted the emphasis from the church as a Spirit-inspired mediator between the individual and Scripture to a direct, Spirit-inspired relationship between the individual and God. Perhaps the best way of thinking about this is to alter our geometry of the Holy Spirit from being 'out there' and 'descending' now and again to be manifested in a mighty wind or tongues of flame to being 'within' us, generating our response to God's self-communication with us. We have surely spent too much time and effort discerning what the Bible should mean to everyone and not enough on what it means to us as individuals. Of course this Protestant impulse was immediately compromised by Reformation leaders, such as John Calvin, not unjustly tagged "The Pope of Geneva", who said, in effect, that we were free to interpret the Bible as long as our interpretation coincided with theirs. In this respect the Church should be an enabler and not an arbiter; as I have said before - but it bears frequent repetition - human speech about God is metaphor and there is no point arguing about metaphor except in the sense that literary critics argue about texts; very few of us would accept that the views of a literary critic should automatically over-ride our personal experience of a text but we recognise critics as enablers.
But if there is a fundamentally Protestant requirement for a personal relationship with God through The Word, there is a need for a revival of a catholic understanding of Sacrament as the symbolic manifestation of inner Grace; but, again, this understanding needs to be seen in a much more personal way. There was a controversy during the English Reformation as to whether the priest effected the presence of Christ in the Eucharist or whether our individual faith was the agent. We now recognise this as a totally false dichotomy: whether we accept priestly agency or personal faith, these are both 'driven' by the Holy Spirit in Epiclesis or within us; and we should think carefully about Sebastian Moore's formulation that it is not the priest that turns bread into the body of Christ but that Christ turned himself into bread for us; it is a difficult idea but it changes the concept of priesthood, as does the realisation that there is no logic behind the clerical monopoly on baptism. In summary, then, the message is personal and the agency is universal rather than priestly; we will all have to start taking Peter's concept of the Royal Priesthood seriously. In the past the criticism has been that our hierarchy only pay lip service to this idea but perhaps that is because we only pay lip service to it.
So how should we approach our priestly task. The first and most obvious requirement is for study and prayer but in a postmodern world our behaviour and the impact we make on people will be more important than what we 'think'; people will want to know how God affects our personal conduct and the way we react to the conduct of others; and a good starting point at the moment might be the affirmation of the duty to pay tax and a denial of the hair splitting which distinguishes illegal tax evasion from legal tax avoidance. In other words, we need to establish a much stronger case for ethics in general and Christian ethics in particular, ethics, in the words of Richard Harries, that respond to God's self disclosure in Christ. We may not be better people than our non believing peers but our lives have a purpose which drives our ethics and that purpose is to realise the Kingdom of God on earth, proclaiming the Good News that we were made in love to love and that it is our greatest pleasure to 'give pleasure' to our creator into whose perfect love we will be enfolded when we die. After the Crucifixion of Jesus the Apostles were moved by a tremendous recognition, generated by The Spirit Within them, that the Incarnate Word had overcome death, that the world would never be the same again and we, as Christians, are not so much called upon to make the same response but rather to recognise that response within us which is struggling for articulation. Sometimes I wonder whether our problem is that the news is too good to be true or too true to be said; we lurch between the glib and the arcane. This is another reason why our personal narrative is so important. In 21st Century Britain the test for those who hear us talking of Jesus will not be whether we have a coherent Christological theory but what he has done for us.
I suspect that our difficulties largely stem from a down-grading of the Holy Spirit. We are all pretty clear about the Creator whom we call 'father' and Jesus whom we call 'son' but these two concrete ideas overshadow the insubstantial Spirit without whom we could not recognise them. If we free the spirit within us so that we recognise the courage to take theological risks we will receive the inspiration to enliven others: and, of course, the paradox is that in the ultimate sense it is no risk at all because it is in our nature to be imperfect and to strive to approach the mystery that is God. Being in Christ is therefore a process and not an end product which is, perhaps, the most postmodern statement we could make.
Prayers
Can: Lord of our Pilgrim Way
Res: Be with us on our journey.
- 1. Lord of our Pilgrim Way, we thank you for the whole world and for our creation as creatures made to love you and to carry the message of your love. Help us to overcome the worship and action of fear so that we pray and live as a response to your love.
Can: Lord of our Pilgrim Way
Res: Be with us on our journey. - 2. Lord of our Pilgrim way, send us out in the power of Your son that we may spread the Good News in the thoughts, words and deeds of our daily lives. Help us to overcome the apathy and cowardice which makes us live in fear of the strange and the secular so that we may enliven your image in everyone.
Can: Lord of our Pilgrim Way
Res: Be with us on our journey. - Lord of our Pilgrim way, fill us with the power of The Holy Spirit so that we may live as Easter children in the unlimited discipleship of love. Help us to walk alongside as Paracletes of all those who need our care and need to feel your love so that we may together enjoy Your Kingdom on Earth.
Can: Lord of our Pilgrim Way
Res: Be with us on our journey. - Lord of our Pilgrim way, save Christ's church from its self inflicted wounds, from its preoccupation with hierarchies and formularies, its love of doctrine and discipline, its exercise of power and risk of presumption. Help us to respond to all those who need the comfort of your love with compassion, humility and open-mindedness so that we are means and not obstacles.
Can: Lord of our Pilgrim Way
Res: Be with us on our journey. - Lord of Our Pilgrim Way, we thank you for your saints who have given us inspiring, unlikely and idiosyncratic examples of how your creatures live to love you. Help us to cultivate and not stifle the growth and creativity of all of those who love you, no matter how strange their way of loving may seem to us; and help us never to forget the radical response of Mary to your call.
Can: Lord of our Pilgrim Way
Res: Be with us on our journey. Amen.