Article
- Date:
- Sunday 16th July 2023
- Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Evensong
- Readings:
- Nehemiah 8.1-12
1 Corinthians 15.50-55
Our First Reading comes from the not often read Book of Nehemiah which, together with the book of Ezra whose author appears in our Reading, celebrate the return from exile in Babylon of what is left of the Chosen People to the territory of Judea with the purpose, under the patronage of the new conquering Emperor Darius of Persia, to rebuild their Temple. It is one of the misfortunes of the Biblical record that this is where it stops. What we know of the subsequent five Centuries up until the coming of John the Baptist is contained in books which have been relegated to the Apocrypha and so, curiously, nearly half of the story of the Chosen People from the beginning of historical record, around the time of King Saul, is missing.
But I often wonder whether part of the reason why we overlook Nehemiah is that the religious temperament of Western Christianity, so obsessed with sin and its supposed connection with salvation, is so downright miserable; what Saint Augustine began, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation completed; when it comes to serious religion we have a history of long faces and short hair; there is nothing that so strongly conveys loyalty to our risen saviour as dark clothes and a solemn face.
So this is why I have chosen our celebration reading from Nehemiah; the returned Chosen People are assembled for a day of celebration; they are to be reminded of the Law which is the centre of their religious lives; and then there is going to be a party to end all parties, going on for eight days.
You couldn't say that the Chosen People, from the time of Saul to the time of Jesus, had wonderful lives but nor did anybody else; apart from the top9 rulers of Empires and Kingdoms everybody lived from hand to mouth; farmers were subject to the weather, day labourers were subject to the vagaries of the economy; fresh vegetables were strictly seasonal and meat was confined to festivals; so no wonder these liberated people enjoyed their party of meat and wine. We who are so much better off, I fear, are not so good at parties any more because most of us eat heartily every day. We even eat well during Advent and Lent prior to our two great Christian Festivals.
Our Second Reading from Saint Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians reminds us of our ultimate existence; in the words set immortally by Handel: The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. That's not some strange other tribe of people, that's us. We are the Easter People and although there is a proper place for penitence, our default colour should be white not black, our default expression should be a smile and not a scowl, our trajectory should be forwards and upwards, not backwards and downwards, our news should be the good news of the Resurrection of Jesus not the bad news of damnation. We should be the ambassadors of encouragement, not of judgment. And we should see in our children not just the hope we have for our own family descendants but for another cohort of happy believers.
I am not calling for an excess, nor am I asking us to ignore what is amiss; but what I am saying is that Western Christianity has completely misunderstood the purposes of God in humanity; so let me remind us, for the last time before our Summer break.
We were made to love God in worship and to love each other in word and deed. We were not born with original sin, as Saint Augustine says without any Biblical warrant, but we were born to exercise free will which necessarily involves making wrong decisions; if it did not involve the possibility of wrong choices it would not be free will, just as love would not be love if it were not the fruit of our choice. So we lead a good life fulfilling the purposes of God because that is why we were made and to do otherwise is to go against our created nature. Not to love God and each other is unnatural.
So what about salvation? Well, the idea that we lead good lives in order to obtain salvation is simply heretical. Whether or not you believe in Saint Paul's doctrine of justification by faith alone, or whether you don't, the idea of contractual salvation, that if we do this or that or refraining from doing this or that we will be saved, is wrong.
What the Western tradition has tried to do is to focus on personal salvation through personal conduct but it does not work. We live well because we should live well. As to whether we shall be saved, the theology is coherent: the consequence of our wrong choices was death so Jesus died and rose again so that we should be saved from the consequence of death, that in spite of our wrong choices we should not die forever. So here is Paul proclaiming that the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and here are we promised an eternal life in the company of God; and who is anybody, be he or she the most eminent moralist, to say that it will be otherwise. OU doctrine of eternal damnation and punishment is at best very insecure. At a mundane level, we do not know where the line is to be drawn between sin and sickness; we do not know how the relationship works between our nature and our nurture. At a moral level we do not accurately know how we are to understand our collective moral responsibility. And at a theological level we cannot fathom the depth of God's love and mercy. As David Bentley Hart puts it: can any of us think of a sin so bad that it merits eternal damnation? I think not.
Much of what passes for moral judgment, particularly inside Western Christian Churches is the ruthless and unacceptable exercise of hierarchical power.
So as we celebrate the end of another cycle of worship, what I want us to think about is the ways in which we need to fulfil the purposes of God for us, not because it will save us, because it won't, but because there is nothing more wonderful than loving. So here are five very different ways of loving that we might want to focus on during our Summer break:
- First, for all its faults and its woes, let us thank god for the diverse wonders and beauty of creation; and, in valuing it, let us be more determined not to spoil what we inherited but to enhance it, to leave the earth a better place than we found it
- Secondly, and within that first charge, let us be more sensitively conscious of beauty and respond to it not only with appreciation but with creativity; let us add to the beauty however we might rather than just appreciating it
- Thirdly, let us be mindful of tiny things, not thinking anything too small for our attention, whether that is an act of kindness or an act of restoration; big things will go wrong in the world over which we have little control so let us at least do what we can we dedicate and attention to detail
- Fourthly let us, in viewing the ills of the world, not give up hope but be brave and persistent in our efforts to secure a better world for our children;
- Finally, let us use our gifts and our freedom for the mutual building up of all our different communities; it may be easy to condemn and to belittle but it is so much more skilful and rewarding to support and to praise.
In summary, let us make the world a place where it is easier for more people to smile, and doing so, let us smile ourselves, not only in the world, but even in church.