Article
- Date:
- Sunday 17th September 2023
Year A, The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Cuckfield
- Service:
- Evensong
- Readings:
- [passage=Ezekiel 20.1-8,20.33-44/]
Acts 20.17-38
Ever since I heard the extended harangues of radio preachers when I first went to America half a century ago, I have been deeply suspicious of the tendency to take huge chunks of complex text and reduce them to some simple message. We can take any of the prophetic books of the Old Testament and we will find a mass of contradiction, of God's vengeance and reconciliation, usually jumbled up with no sequence or conditionality. Even the largely optimistic and uplifting text of Second Isaiah (Chapters 40-55) has its jarring moments. In some cases deeply agonising Books end with a few comforting verses, the Biblical equivalent of "And they all lived happily ever after" but most of the time the texts are lumpy and deeply equivocal, like our passage from Ezekiel today, with no sense of the benign arc of time which is the experience of Christians who live with the fixed idea that there is a sequence from Adam, via the death and Resurrection of Jesus, to a final reconciliation with and in God. This forging of a salvific perspective is what distinguishes the New Testament most from the Old. Scholars make heroic attempts to see that arc within the Old Testament but except for uncertain flickerings, primarily in Second Isaiah, it just is not there; which is why it is dangerous to extract what appear to be grand prophetic statements from small passages of the Old Testament and to marry them with the New Testament.
Saint Paul was the first to articulate the nature of the salvific arc from Adam to the end of time but he was by no means certain of the faithfulness and robustness of the new Church. Our Reading finds him departing for Jerusalem, certain of a hostile reception from the conservative hierarchy. The global enterprise of bringing the good news of salvation to the world is already being hampered by internal divisions which largely boil down to control: the powers in Jerusalem have become trapped in their own history and culture and cannot comprehend the revolutionary power of the Holy Spirit unleashed in Paul. The issue here was not the fundamental promise of God in Jesus but who was going to be the gate-keeper of salvation; who was going to decide who was in and who was out; and we have had that problem ever since.
On this issue of control, I want to make four large statements.
- First, there are no deals to be made with God on the issue of salvation and therefore there are no deal brokers. So if you hear me, or anybody else, or the Church, telling you who will and will not be saved, and why, and how, take no notice.
- Secondly, then, the role of a servant Church is to make collective, provisional statements about God and our relationship with God which help us to do God's will in worship and living a holy life. How do we design liturgy that will express our love of God in a way that brings us closer to God; and how can we love each other in the context of conflicting demands, particularly when we are faced with a choice between two apparently unfruitful courses?
- Thirdly, loving God and each other is God's purpose for us in creation, it is not a means for attaining eternal life which takes us back to the importance of getting away from a bogus contractual model.
- Finally, and most difficult in many ways, there is the need to understand our relationship with time. This takes us back to my earlier remarks about the Old Testament. For just as the relationship between the Chosen People and God is garbled, not least in today's Reading from Ezekiel, so our lives may have illusory shape but in essence they are far less stable than we would like; neither the Church, nor earthly powers, nor pundits, nor self will have adequate power to shape existence. The point on the axis of time over which we have most control is the present. So that we might live tolerably, our brains re-shape the past to heal wounds, blunt culpability and give meaning to what might otherwise seem random; and in spite of our gift for pattern recognition and planning which is what makes us human, trying to design the future is just another, the most powerful, illusion. There are, of course, elements of predictability and stability in our lives, but nothing that is guaranteed. In that sense, the existentialism of the lilies of the field which neither toil nor spin is matched by the maxim that we know not the day nor the hour.
And so in spite of all our instincts to control the past and the future, we should live for the moment. There is a time for grand resolutions but even more so every moment provides an opportunity for constructiveness, kindness, self-awareness and self-sacrifice; it also facilitates a recognition of beauty and affirmation. And so instead of harping on past glories or future prospects, we should give acute attention to the present where we can make a difference and where it can make a difference to us.
In this context, our Church has too often been concerned with grand schemes and rules of doctrine and conduct which define and justify its existence rather than concentrating on the fundamental humility of living in the face of divine mystery and in the humility of tiny existential affirmations of God's purposes in creation.
Let me end by saying that all that I have said is just a rather elaborate way of exploring a simple truth: that we have grown to aspire to creating a whole life perspective, embracing our past and our future, but the aspect of our lives over which we have most control is the present; so live for the moment, for God, for others, and ourselves.'