Article
- Date:
- Sunday 7th February 2021
Year B, Sixth Sunday of the Year - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Evensong
- Readings:
- Haggai 2.1-8
Romans 12.1-5
Who is there left, asks the Prophet Haggai, who saw the Temple in its former glory, before the dispersion and the exile. Given the length of the exile, the rigours of travel and the shortness of life spans, the answer must be, very few indeed. And if we ask ourselves this question about our Church, I suspect the answer would be, by percentage, even fewer. The story of Western Christianity, including the Church of England, since the 16th Century has been one of numerical, theological and cultural decline, with the exception in England of the twin upturns of the Evangelical revival of Wesley and the Oxford Movement of Keble and Newman in the second half of the 18th Century and first half of the 19th respectively.
This is a serious charge but since the Reformation, with Christianity increasingly split, the whole has been less than the sum of its parts. At the same time, we have been totally in thrall to a doctrinal obsession with sin, an extremely discouraging topic for potential converts. Who, I ask myself, standing at the door of a beauty salon, wants to be told that they are ugly? More likely they would like to hear that they have all the makings of a beautiful person and just need a little (expensive) help here and there. Who would believe the slogan on the door of such a salon: the only one in the world that can do the job!?
So it is that Christianity has passed from being integral and unquestioned to being marginal and either ignored or ridiculed. For this we should lament, not because of numerical or financial decline but because there are ever fewer of us to bring the good news that Jesus has saved us from the mortal consequence of death, has broken the link between human error and the grave, has under-written our share in the divine nature of God when his Realm and ours are joined in a United Kingdom of perfect love.
But, says Haggai to the people about to re-build the Temple, take courage, God's Spirit is with us and, as Saint Paul says in our passage from Romans, we are endowed with many gifts.
While it would be facile to draw some kind of parallel between the Exile of Judah in Babylon and our pandemic woes, it is much more appropriate to compare the exile with our loss of purchase within our culture over 500 years, but I would go so far as to say that the pandemic ought to help us to re-focus because, if anything, what we have learned is that the People of God, like everybody else, want embodied love rather more than disembodied doctrine. I say this as a theologian because doctrine is vastly over-rated by established churches when its only use is as metaphor for trying, vainly, to capture mystery for the encouragement of the faithful and if it goes further than that then it is vanity, or worse. For, if we were created in love to love God and each other and doctrine damages that objective, it must be firmly set aside.
There are deep chasms between our loving mission and our doctrinal concerns and although there are contemporary examples, such as our raging but trivial obsession with sexual and gender issues as they affect our clergy, the more instructive illustration of my point is the abolition at the Reformation of prayers for the dead, for there was no single aspect of the Reformation which wounded the faithful more deeply. The divines were perfectly right in rejecting the idea that prayer, let alone cash indulgences, were a way of projecting the tortured soul from Purgatory into Heaven; but to bring a summary end to such prayers was the beginning of the decline of Christianity in our land because doctrinal coherence was gained through pastoral cruelty. Could nobody bring themselves to say that prayers for the dead are, ultimately, prayers for ourselves.
In what, then, should we take courage? It seems to me that the important task before us is to subject our doctrine to the test of whether it promotes or detracts from a loving, inclusive community. Nobody, locked down and in need of consolation, asks whether the woman on the other end of the phone line should be a priest, or whether the priest is in a same sex relationship. We have learned so quickly that the pastoral out-ranks the doctrinal that recent debates look as if they took place in a different age.
This is not to say that there is no place for thoughtful people to try to capture some aspects of our mysterious God in words that should, literally, humiliate us because theology should be the humblest of arts but we have become terribly muddled by entangling the probing of the sacred with the human struggle to define sound, ethical behaviour, whatever that might be; not a mystery, certainly, but much more difficult than many preachers would admit. To arrive at a human conclusion and then to attribute this to God is somewhere on a spectrum between blasphemy and idiocy.
But we now have a chance to do better. We have a chance to return to physical church in due course and to see it primarily as a place where mystery is contemplated and love is practised, as a place where Jesus in Eucharist is our lifelong comfort not our life-deforming controversy, where we learn from our erstwhile isolation to value everyone as our sister or brother in Christ, forbearing to judge for who, ultimately but God, has the right to judge the children of God?
Finally, the root of my hope is that isolation will have taught us that the pastoral is fundamentally mutual, that we should no longer tolerate the power dynamic of the rich over the poor, the powerful over the weak, the clever over the simple, the clerical over the lay, no matter how good their intentions. Which one of us during the past 11 months has not wanted a kind word or a simple deed, paying no regard for the relative status of the giver? Which of us has not, if only fleetingly, feared sudden death and sought the consolation of the Psalms? And which of us has not longed for the simple human contact which makes us what we are? I believe that such experiences will make us a better community of love but, if they do not, we will be lost and Jesus will have to come and find us. Again.