Article
- Date:
- Sunday 14th July 2024
Year B, The Seventh Sunday after Trinity - Place:
- St Peter's, Twickenham
- Service:
- Evensong
- Readings:
- 4.11-31
Romans 15.14-29
It is, perhaps, a rare moment of tact, or even artifice, by Saint Paul to hand out compliments to his Roman audience after a very long, difficult and sometimes discouraging Letter but this does not eclipse our general impression of Paul as defaulting to misanthropy in spite of his hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13. What Paul wrote, even before the Gospels were written, was taken up by Saint Augustine and, in spite of the brief ascendancy of Thomas Aquinas, prevails to this day in a Western Christian community influenced by Martin Luther' John Calvin and, until recently, a grim Papacy. There was in the mid-11th Century a formal schism between the Western and Eastern Christian Churches but the split really came with Augustine in the early 5th Century.
So I want to begin by telling you something you have heard too little: the idea that we are fundamentally sinners is not Christian, it is a strand of Western Christianity which is contestable.
Let us think for a moment about our lives as we live them: we make countless decisions about what is for the best; we deliberate about how best to spend our time and our money; we worry about the way we rear our children; we are disturbed by images of starving, wounded and dead children; we wonder whether we are right to support the War in Ukraine; we have inklings about our very doubtful imperial past. We sometimes enjoy moments of pure, moral clarity but often we are muddled, contradictory or tied in knots. Sometimes, too, as shown in the recent General Election we are shockingly lazy and ignorant, not deserving any better than we get. We are not saints nor sinners but, rather, messy minor infractions. Now this is nothing to be pleased about but it isn't as bad as being incorrigible sinners.
The problem with the line of argument from Augustine and Luther is that it says that only faith in Jesus can save us which is true as far as it goes but which ignores the notion of moral agency, of the exercise of free will. It's all very well for preachers to tell us that we must do the will of God but what we need are the tools to work out what that will is in the context of moral agency, of the myriad of decisions I mentioned earlier, and here is where our First Reading from Ecclesiasticus comes in. By training I am a philosopher and a theologian but think it does not do to get too worked up about definitions such as what it means to be wise. I take the view that being wise is practising and refining being virtuous and being virtuous is living for the good of others, both those we know and the larger community of which we are a member.
For me, there are four steps:
- First, take some time to consider an issue, not to put it off because it is difficult but to ensure that we have looked at it from all angles
- Secondly, be particularly wary of not emphasising the angle which suits us best personally; the easiest mistake is to think that what we want is what God wants
- Thirdly, recognise that very few issues are black and white and often a decision involves two different good principles being in conflict; there are few rights that are not called into question by other equally legitimate rights
- Finally, remember that to be right might also be to inflict pain on those who are unprepared in being right we must not be cruel.
Most of us take these steps even if we are not strictly sequential and most of us are more practical than theoretical but it does no harm to spend some time thinking and praying about difficult moral issues.
Now contrast our human activity and the outlines of wisdom with what the Church tells us about ourselves. The Book of Common Prayer, written in the middle of the 16th Century at the height of Reformation fervour is obsessed with two basic ideas: obedience and helplessness. Obedience is an easy idea, we simply have to do what we are told by our rulers who also, incidentally, rule the Church; those who have the power to define sin and condemn sinners have a stranglehold over us, and they know it.
As for helplessness, this idea is based on a deliberate misunderstanding of Saint Paul's theology of justification by faith which does not mean, as the anti-Roman Catholics said it did, that human conduct does not matter. Of course we can't get to heaven through the exercise of human virtue but we can't get there without it. We were created imperfectly precisely so that we have moral agency which we will often misuse. In that sense, because we all make mistakes, deliberate or otherwise, we are all, for want of a better word, sinners; but this is just a truism. We were deliberately made imperfect so it is not our fault that we are. to cast ourselves as sinners is simply a wrong diagnosis.
Let us now turn the paradigm on its head and look at it again: e were crated as imperfect so that we can exercise free will without which there is no such thing as love and no such thing as art or creativity; we get things wrong, necessarily so, and if we are careful we learn from our errors and if we are not we fall into ever greater difficulty; but there is never such a great difficulty that we cannot escape from it within a faithful community and by diligent study, prayer and the practise of virtue we can regain our self-respect.
So here, on this Summer's day, it is time to lament our errors but, above all, to celebrate our goodness, to thank God for our world, to thank Jesus for His teaching and example and to thank the Holy Spirit working among us as the Church.