Alison Hudson's Homily (9 June 2011)

A homily from Alison Hudson (MCR) at our Choral Eucharist celebrating St Columba of Iona....

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In the Gospel reading this evening, Jesus helps Peter to catch a lot of fish, and then promises to make him a fisher of men. This is a story we often hear in Western culture.  A brief and informal survey of my friends this morning revealed that almost all of them were familiar with it, including the non-Christians.  However, because this story is so comfortably familiar, it might be easy to overlook how very uncomfortable and challenging the message of this reading can be.

Well, at least for me—your average, over-confident, self-assured Oxford student— the passages we have just heard make for uneasy reading.  For at root, these passages are about obedience, about admitting somebody else knows best.  It doesn’t matter that Peter is a skilled fisherman who has plied his trade for years: God, in the form of Jesus, a carpenter from Nazareth, can beat Peter at his own game by telling him to fish in a place it never occurred to him to fish.  The learning of Jewish leaders in the second reading doesn’t matter in the end, either: rather, according to the passage from Acts, their partial knowledge and understanding actually hinders them, to the extent that they will choose damnation for themselves.

For these readings suggest that not only does God know best, he knows so much better than rest of us that it would never occur to us to do what He proves to be possible.    It had not occurred to Peter to keep fishing, or to fish in that place: yet he finds a great many fish.  Similarly, Paul and Barnabas share God’s love with the Gentiles, even though they were not the most obvious heirs of Abraham (at least to human eyes).  And the Gentiles rejoice and are saved. Obedience to God—particularly the call to share God’s love with all you meet— can lead to some totally unexpected outcomes.

As someone who resents all advice, even from all-too-present supervisors and parents, the idea that God knows best—and that we humans often aren’t even close to solving our own problems—is a difficult pill to swallow.  Indeed, the idea of trusting God so completely and loving even the most unlikely people seems so difficult that it is tempting to claim that God is asking the impossible.  However, as we heard at Oriel heard last week, Jesus is a human and ascended as a human, and is perfectly aware of what humans can and cannot do.  He never asks the impossible.  And indeed, there are some remarkable historical examples which suggest that obedience to God is possible. 

These examples are the Irish peregrini, or pilgrims.  One ‘pilgrim’ was St. Columba, or Colum Cille, whom we celebrate today.  As far as we can tell, Columba was born around 521 into an aristocratic family in the north of Ireland.  However, he gave up his status, privilege and wealth in an attempt to serve God and follow his commandments, particularly God’s call to preach his Gospel and share his love with all peoples.  Indeed, he even gave up his home and his family, traveling with a band of followers to the island of Iona, off what is now the coast of Scotland.  Despite attempts to rationalize Columba’s move—linking it to his family’s defeat in battle or to the aspirations of the kingdom of Dal Riata, which was near Iona—it cannot be denied that the inhospitable Iona was not the sort of place you’d expect to find an Irish princeling.  Columba’s move seems to have been acting out of obedience to God’s will (or what he perceived God’s will to be), in order to preach the Gospel and the message of God’s love to new regions. 

Nor was Columba unique in his dedication to and focus on God.  He was part of a larger movement of peregrini, who exiled themselves, leaving their homeland and their familiar comforts to serve God.  Some trusted God’s judgment to such an extent that they would cast themselves adrift in a boat without any oar, so that God would have to decide where they would land.

I’m not suggesting that any of us should cast ourselves adrift.  Nevertheless, the readings we have just heard call us to obey God, and the peregrini’s example shows obedience is possible. So what is the will of God, which we are supposed to obey? 

I think the two passages suggest that one way to be obedient to God is to share his love in unexpected places with unlikely people.  Just as Peter followed Jesus’ instructions to fish somewhere it hadn’t occurred to him to fish, so too did a later fisher of men, Paul, look to a group of people—the Gentiles—who were not the most obvious candidates to inherit the promises which God made to Abraham.  Similarly, even later fishers of men—the missionaries at Columba’s monasteries of Iona—also shared God’s love with unlikely peoples.  In particular, missionaries from Iona went to the Anglo-Saxon Northumbria even after a plague caused many to apostasize from Christianity.  This may have seemed singularly unpromising turf, and, according to Bede, their early attempts to set up a monastery were singularly unsuccessful. Nevertheless, their work in this unlikely place was not in vain: many Northumbrians became Christian and Northumbria eventually even produced a church father: the aforementioned venerable Bede. 

We Oxford students, too, should try to love everyone.  Like Columba, we are the royalty of our own little realms.  Like the intellectual leaders in the passage from Acts, we often think we know better than God; or at least, we think we can rely on our own, partial knowledge and skills to solve all the problems in our lives.  However, this very learning often blinds us to the fact that all humans are equal: all are loveable, all are God’s images, from bedraggled Big Issue sellers to annoyingly clever tutorial partners.  We should not rule anything or anyone out as too unlikely, too unworthy of our attention: for throughout history, fishers of men, from Paul to Columba, have been proving that it’s just those people whom we humans would consider the most unlikely who are actually the most promising in God’s plan.    

The Nation's Church: more than a postcard?

The Revd Sarah Eynstone, Chaplain and Minor Canon at St Paul's Cathedral in London, continued our Choral Evensong series on Faith and Public Life this past Sunday with an excellent sermon entitled 'The Nation's Church: more than a postcard?'

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Yesterday, just before the evening Eucharist, one of the Canons called me into the vestry and urged me, in excited tones, to look out of the window. Cycling past the Cathedral was a steady stream of some one thousand naked cyclists, all involved in a campaign to draw attention to the vulnerability cyclists face as road users. The canon and I then had a conversation along the lines of ‘would you ever do that?’. Both of us felt you needed to draw the line somewhere and we would draw the line a long way before we reached naked cycling. In short we felt that nudity belonged to the private sphere not the public one. I wonder how many of those naked cyclists, had they looked up to the vestry window to see two priests looking down at them, would have felt the same about us? That what were about to do, pray to and worship our God, is an activity that is more appropriate to the private, than the public sphere?

There is a lot of talk today of Britain being an increasingly secular society where the public discourse is one free of religious involvement or input. The reality of course is not so straightforward -as the intense media interest in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s commentary on the government during this last week illustrates.

Rowan Williams, preaching on faith and public life has said “I believe we are living in a society which is uncomfortably haunted by the memory of religion and doesn’t quite know what to do with it…”

The piles of flowers and toys which mourners leave on the site of a fatal road accident seem to suggest we are a society with a vague sense of the religious but an unclear idea of what to do about it. The mourner who is struggling with issues of loss and bereavement may have both genuine theological questions and a burning desire to mark publicly that someone they loved deeply is no longer alive, because of an accident which seems both cruel and banal.

Religion provides a space and a language to ask serious questions and says that these are legitimate, indeed crucial, questions to ask.  This is why a cathedral in the heart of the city is still the place where people of different faiths and of no faith gathered in the days following the 7/7 bombings.

Given both our unease and interest in questions of faith, buildings and places of worship like St Paul’s Cathedral might be seen to occupy an ambiguous place in this context; St Paul’s was built at a time when the Church of England was a dominant force in society and the best resources, the most able people, were used in the creation of this place of worship.

The size and grandeur of the building of St Paul’s means it automatically has a place on the public stage- it is a visible icon on the London skyline and can be seen nightly on television on the South East News. St Paul’s is also the location for services which commemorate or celebrate big events in the national psyche. Next year the Queen shall celebrate, God willing, the diamond jubilee of her Coronation by having a service at St Paul’s Cathedral. Westminster Abbey was of course the location for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton – an event watched by billions of people throughout the world.

Winston Churchill dubbed St Paul’s the ‘Nation’s Church’ and his own state funeral took place there. In this way we could be seen to do public religion very well but because we currently live in a time when faith has come to mean so many different things to different people, we cannot reside in a false belief that we are seen as a sign of God’s presence in the world. Not for the first time, but now perhaps more than ever, we might also be seen as an English heritage site or the place where members of the Establishment go to dress up and find a sense of belonging and identity.

Today we rely on the income generated by tourism to continue as a place of worship. This means that the 20,000 people who come through our doors each week during the summer season will have a very different set of motivations for entering the building. Some will have travelled thousands of miles and St Paul’s will be one more venue on their list of places to go to in London to prove they’ve been there and done the English thing- they may be interested in the history of the city, the beauty of the architecture or St Paul’s as the church where Prince Charles and Lady Diana were married; the existence of St Paul’s as a place of daily worship might not even have occurred to them. They will go the cathedral shop and buy postcards and other St Paul’s memorabilia. This of course creates tension and unease for those of us who regard St Paul’s primarily as a place of worship, as a sign of God’s presence in the world- our desire is that people who enter the building as tourists might leave as pilgrims- that in some way they will be touched by the beauty or by symbols of the Christian faith and find something which connects with their own questions and stories and which points them to the God who creates and loves and redeems us.

The prophet Jeremiah was of course living in a culture where the place of faith in public life was a given. The temple was the place where God had chosen to reside and this gave the people who entered it immunity to misfortune or suffering- or so they had come to believe. Jeremiah, himself a priest in the temple, speaks out against the complacency to which this belief had given rise. The people are caught up in patterns of idolatry, worshipping themselves rather than God and Jeremiah warns them of the destruction that awaits them.

The gospel writer Luke has a very different instinct toward the temple- it is the honoured place for public worship. Luke’s gospel begins with Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, going about his duties in the temple; very early on we are introduced to Anna and Simeon who have been in the temple for years, waiting for the coming Messiah. In the reading we heard in today’s New Testament lesson, at the very end of Luke’s gospel, on Jesus’ instructions the disciples return to Jerusalem, to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit before they can live out his commissioning. They go to the temple- to the place of public worship, to await and pray for God’s power. We are not told they each go to their own homes- they gather together in a public space- it is in community  that they expect to encounter God.

Today the church celebrates Pentecost, to which this evening’s New Testament lesson points. The Holy Spirit comes to the disciples who have gathered in Jerusalem and empowers them to be witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and to be the agents of the forgiveness of sins offered to all nations. The Holy Spirit doesn’t come to the disciples privately but in the public square exploding onto the world stage in order to equip them and us to become the people God calls us to be.

A phrase I hear often, from people who perhaps feel uneasy in the presence of a priest is ‘I’m spiritual but not religious’. We have come to believe that spiritual and religious are distinct and different modes of being. We also, I think, tend to associate the spiritual with the private- I can be spiritual all on my own, when I have a sense of the presence of the divine or transcendental. Religion on the other hand is often regarded as something which muscles into the public world telling us what we should do or believe. For the disciples and for much of the church’s history, this would have been a meaningless distinction. The spiritual is located in other people and in the ways we practice our beliefs and sense of belonging to a community.

As Jeremiah argues so strongly, public religion does not guarantee us God’s blessing; rather, public religion is an invitation for believers and seekers to come together to encounter God in whatever way God chooses to reveal himself to us.

The Christian faith is permeated with a vision of different people, different cultures, coming together and finding their unity in God. God himself is both three Persons and one God- the very nature of God overcomes the distinction between public and private by being both one and three.

So let us pray that this community at Oriel College and the community at St Paul’s Cathedral might be true to the breadth and depth of this our great vocation; to find God revealed in the public sphere and our private lives. Amen

Losing faith in public life

At Choral Evensong on the Sunday after Ascension Day, Dr Matthew Grimley, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Merton College, continued our series Faith and Public Life with a sermon entitled 'Losing faith in public life'.  In it, he examined the career and witness of the controversial Canon John Collins (1905-82), who, among much else, served as Chaplain at Oriel both before and after the Second World War (1937-48).

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I’ll start with a line from our Old Testament reading:

‘The God of Israel has spoken, the Rock of Israel has said to me: One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.’

The very idea of ‘one who ruleth over his people justly,’ as described by David in the first lesson, seems a very distant one for us. When we open our Guardian or Times, we don’t expect to see David Cameron or Ed Milliband hailed as being ‘like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.’ If we did, we’d just laugh. We’ve become very cynical about politicians of late. This cynicism is not new, but it has become more acute in recent years because of episodes like the Iraq War, the financial crisis, and the MPs expenses scandal. And its not just restricted to political leaders – we might also cite controversies within the leadership of the Christian churches, like the child abuse scandals or arguments about gay bishops. Though very different, all these episodes have left many of us feeling (in different ways) betrayed by our leaders. We seemed doomed permanently to be disappointed by them.

Three particular critiques of those in public life have developed in recent years:

• They’re only in it for what they can get – for vainglory, or for cash
• They all end up selling out – they become corrupted, either financially or in sacrificing their values and beliefs

The third criticism is particularly beloved of academics:

• If only it were so simple – in other words, public figures over-simplify, or present issues as black and white when in reality they are more complicated. As scholars, we’re trained to look for nuance, and we’re thus particularly suspicious of glib slogans or promises.

In this sermon I want to explore some of these charges by looking at the life of a political leader whom you’ve probably never heard of. He wasn’t a professional politician, but fifty years ago he was one of the most famous political campaigners in Britain. He also has an Oriel connection, which is why I’m talking about him today. His name was John Collins, and he was a Church of England clergyman who became Chaplain of Oriel in 1938, just before the Second World War. His education and early career had been quite traditional, but in the 1930s he joined the Labour Party out of concern for the unemployed. His radicalism grew when he became an RAF chaplain in the Second World War, and on returning to Oxford at the end of the war, and becoming Oriel’s domestic bursar, he was horrified to discover how poorly paid the staff were, and persuaded the other fellows to put up their wages.

But Collins had his eye on more global injustices, too. In December 1946, he held a public meeting in Oxford Town Hall to set up a movement called Christian Action.  Christian Action sought to get Christians to carry their faith into political action. It pioneered a number of campaigns in the 1940s for victims of famine in Germany at the end of the war, for the homeless and refugees, and against the death penalty. But it was in the mid-1950s that Collins found his two great causes – apartheid and nuclear disarmament.

In 1956, Collins visited South Africa, and became preoccupied with the evils of apartheid. He set up a new body called the International Defence and Aid Fund to raise money for the legal fees of those dissidents (including Nelson Mandela) who were arrested by the South African government. The following year, 1957, Collins was one of the founders, and the first chairman, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which argued that Britain should unilaterally give up its nuclear deterrent. It was CND that really made Collins an international celebrity.

It’s easy to forget now what a huge threat nuclear war was felt to be in the late 1950s. The invention of the H-bomb had led many people to fear that Armageddon was imminent, and this fear was to some extent borne out by the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962, when the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war. This fear meant that Collins’ CND soon gained massive popular support, especially among young people. Collins had a good instinct for eye-catching gestures, leading the series of famous Easter marches between the nuclear research establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire and Trafalgar Square in London. CND became the prototype for a whole series of later protest movements in the 1960s and beyond, on issues like race relations and the environment.

So Collins achieved a lot, but he was also a very controversial figure in national life. His prominence as a political activist meant that Collins was the subject of all three of the criticisms of politicians that I’ve outlined. All three criticisms contained a grain of truth in Collins’ case. Take the first – that he had sold out. Collins was that recognisable English type, the establishment rebel, who spent most of his career in very comfy berths – first Oriel, then for 36 years, a canonry of St Paul’s Cathedral. His establishment mindset caused problems in CND, which hadn’t been going very long when a split opened up between those, like Collins, who wanted its protests to remain within the law, and those who favoured direct action, or civil disobedience. As a moderate, Collins found himself conflict with more radical CND luminaries like another Anglican priest, Michael Scott, and Bertrand Russell, who saw it as their duty to break the law and get arrested, and who felt that he had sold out. Eventually, the split made it impossible for Collins to carry on as Chairman of CND, and he was forced to step down in 1964. Some of his CND colleagues also complained that Collins behaved too much like a politician, not enough like the clergyman that he really was.

The second criticism, ‘they’re only in it for themselves’, was also levelled against Collins. Here too, there was some justice in the accusation. Collins was a bit vain; if you read his or his wife’s memoirs you get a sense of a naive egotism. Like many public figures (especially senior Anglican clergy), he was also sometimes tempted to make outrageous comments in order to get into the papers. He was also ambitious, and never quite got over not being appointed Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, the job he really coveted. The Labour politician Denis Healey said he reminded him of that other Mr Collins, the oleaginous and ambitious cleric in Pride and Prejudice.

And Collins was also vulnerable to the third criticism, ‘if only life were so simple.’ Many people, fellow Anglicans included, thought that he was deluded in supposing that if a waning power like Britain gave up its nuclear weapons, it would have any impact on the superpowers. Collins was accused of over-simplifying a complex international situation, and of proposing a kind of vacuous gesture politics. Worse, his naive willingness to attend Peace conferences and fraternal delegations to the USSR opened him to the accusation that he was a ‘useful idiot,’ a Russian pawn in the cold war game.

So Collins turns out to have been a rather complicated, fallible, political figure.  But did these faults matter? He was certainly irritating, not least to successive Archbishops of Canterbury, but he was probably a necessary irritant – the grit in the oyster, a thorn in the side to guard against Anglican complacency.. I’m not sure I’d have liked him very much, but that’s probably true of many saints too. Sometimes we need irritating people to challenge our values and priorities.

We also need to set in the balance the achievements of Collins, or any other political leader, against their failings. What ever else we think of Collins, he certainly displayed courage in challenging apartheid and the arms race, two of the great ills of the late 20^th century, and he forced other politicians to take those issues seriously too. We need to remember the achievements of public figures, as well as their flaws (and that’s particularly important if you’re a historian, like me). The dying figure of King David in our first reading reminds us of this. David’s last words on his deathbed extol the role of a righteous king, and that is how he himself is mourned, but David was, of course, one of the most extraordinarily flawed politicians in history. In his early career, he had seduced the wife of his colleague Uriah, got her pregnant, and then ensured that Uriah was bumped off. On this epic scale, Collins’ mild egomania, or the petty venality of modern MPs, all seem pretty small beer. But David is also - in spite of everything - a righteous king. He reminds us that leaders are flawed human beings, just like the rest of us. Sometimes we perhaps expect too much from them, demanding super-human virtues that they have no hope of living up to.

But as well as expecting too much from our leaders, we can also end up expecting too little of them, too, because we don’t want to be disappointed. In 1971, Pete Townshend of The Who summed up the disillusionment of many young people with the failure of sixties protest movements like CND when he sang ‘we won’t get fooled again.’ Townshend’s point was that the leaders of the protest movement had turned out to be no better the old politicians they promised to replace. ‘Meet the new boss/same as the old boss,’ he sang.  But, like someone vowing ‘I’ll never fall in love again’ after a bad break-up, there’s a risk that if we vow never to trust our leaders again, we deny ourselves the hope that they can actually achieve something good. Our lowered expectations can have a lowering effect on public life itself.

There’s also a danger that if we become totally disenchanted with public life, we end up withdrawing into a sort of comfortable quietism. A dose of scepticism of politicians and their promises is always healthy, but we need to be careful that it doesn’t become a cop-out for our own responsibilities as citizens and as Christians. The whole idea of public life has become so tainted that there’s a risk that we’ve thrown out the more laudable virtues that used to be associated with it, like duty and service. We need to recover those virtues, and to think seriously about how we are sometimes called to serve God and each other, by speaking out publicly against injustice or oppression.  We can’t – thank goodness - all be John Collinses. But perhaps we can all learn something from his flawed example.

James Crocker's Homily (12 May 2011)

At last Thursday's Choral Eucharist, James Crocker, first year graduate theologian here at Oriel, responded to Ed Watson's homily from the previous week.  A robust theological debate seems to be emerging!

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In the homily last week, we were told that faith is a state of being, or perhaps even better, an action, wherein the faithful one accepts that the world is as we often experience it: without hope, shallow, empty, and perhaps without some inherent meaning. In the face of this, ‘faith is the affirmation of life against despair’. It ‘admits of little more than shadows and dust, but dances still’, and perhaps most clearly: it ‘accepts that those things which naturally lead to despair are true, but rejects their logical conclusion.’ Faith is then the opposite of despair, but it attempts to oppose despair while simultaneously accepting the reasons for despair. It is related to Christianity, because the Christian story presents the reality of despair, even God-forsakeness, on the cross, but affirms life in the resurrection: ‘The world has done its worst, yet still life remains’. And for this story to be meaningful, we are told, it does not even need to be true! It illustrates the general point.

Of course, the problem is, if the resurrection is not true, the general point is a lie. Life does not remain. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul writes that ‘if Christ is not raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, then we are of all people most to be pitied.’ You see, I don’t think that we were offered a formulation of faith which opposes despair, instead we were offered a ‘hysteria of the spirit’, as Kierkegaard calls it, something which melancholy produces when it finds that it is living in despair, but sees no way out. This is not an alternative to despair; it is an intensification of it brought about by a futile attempt to avoid reality. It has nothing to offer those faced with the reality of death – what is the message for the recent widower, that he should accept his wife’s passing as a manifestation of the meaninglessness and pain of life, but keep smiling anyway? At least outright despair allows one to respond appropriately to what has been accepted as ‘reality’. I should add that this is not some throwaway comment. A friend of mine whose wife died recently after a long battle with cancer read last week’s homily on the Oriel chapel blog, and got in touch, clearly upset. Christianity is serious business: either we have something real to offer, something which faces up to reality, or we don’t. Either ‘love is strong as death’ (Song of Solomon 8:6), or it isn’t. There is no middle ground, and it is not helpful to suggest otherwise.

As should now be obvious, I would find it difficult to disagree with last week’s homily more. That’s not to say that there weren’t some things that I thought were interesting, or that sounded right. For instance, I agree that faith is the affirmation of life against despair – but I also think that the meaninglessness of the world is something like an illusion, brought about by sin.

So what is the alternative to this vision of ‘faith’? I believe that the hope offered in Christian faith is described in John 6. When Jesus says, “whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life…I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever,” we should take him at his word, and hold onto that promise.

Although the reading for tonight begins with verse 44, I believe that the previous three verses give important context. The passage begins: ‘So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, “I have come down from heaven?”’

Jesus’s listeners wonder, how can Jesus claim to have come down from heaven? How can he claim to be a messenger from God, or the King promised by God in the Old Testament? After all, they know his parents! What he is telling him flies in the face of everything which they have known, everything they believed up to this point. The point which I am trying to emphasize is that what Jesus is telling them is simply not rational, and by rational I mean, it does not fit in with those things they know, which they have believed. When Martin Luther commented on this passage, he took the opportunity to indulge in a 20 or 30 page diatribe against human reason. It seems excessive, and makes him seem like a bit of an irrationalist – but this isn’t what’s going on at all. He somewhat sarcastically says that if you want to know that 10 is larger than 1, or that you should build a roof over the house instead of under it, use your reason there, show off your expertise, but if we try to evaluate Jesus’ claim to be the ‘bread of life come down from heaven’ by the standards of what we already think we know, we will run into problems.

In essence, this is the problem with faith as defined last week – we were told to simply accept that the world, or life, is ‘little more than shadows and dust’. If this is your starting point, then it is impossible to make sense of Jesus’ claim that ‘whoever believes has eternal life’. We were told that to have faith means to accept the ‘rational’ view that life is empty, but to make the illogical move to rejoice without reason.

There is another alternative, you can be ‘irrational’ and say that at times life may seem shallow, meaningless, empty: that injustice seems to go unpunished, that suffering goes uncomforted, that love is disappointed, and death will ultimately rule, but nevertheless God has promised that in the end Death will not rule, that God’s love will achieve its object, that mourners will be comforted, and injustice will be set right. Of course, I don’t believe that this belief is actually irrational, unless you have made a prior decision to take our experience of the world on its own terms, without reference to God.

Kierkegaard wrote in his journal “When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd — faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him. The passion of faith is the only thing which masters the absurd — if not, then faith is not faith in the strictest sense, but a kind of knowledge.” It is not always easy to trust the promises of God over what seems to be overwhelming experience to the contrary, but this difficulty does not make it irrational to do so.

But how does one come to have this faith? Jesus does not give us a direct answer; he simply says that ‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.’ Jesus’ position here is clearly that faith is not the effort of the believer. Luther explains what Jesus says here: he says that “When God draws us, He is not like a hangman, who drags a thief up the ladder to the gallows; but He allures and coaxes us in a friendly fashion, as a kind man attracts people by his amiability and cordiality, and everyone willingly goes to him … you hear that God is not hostile to you, but is your gracious and merciful Father, who gave his son for you, let Him die for you, and raised Him again from the dead. He directs you to the Son and has Him proclaimed to you. And if this is correctly taught, then we come to Him. That is meant by the expression 'to be drawn’.”

Luther’s point is that the Father draws us to his Son Jesus by offering us his grace – he shows us that life is meaningful, or rather, that God gives it meaning. That, as Psalm 30 says ‘Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning’ and later on ‘you have turned for me my mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness, that my glory may sing your praise and not by silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks to you forever!”

This is a pure gift of God. We cannot make God become incarnate in Christ, and we were not involved in raising Christ from the dead. Ed was right last week when he said that the resurrection is an affirmation of life – but this affirmation of life is outside of our abilities. God raised Jesus from the dead, as Jesus will raise those whom the Father calls. Faith is not our own ability to simulate a fictional resurrection in our own lives, but the result of God living, dying, and rising again for us. If Christ is not raised, our faith is futile and we are still in our sins. Those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, then we are of all people most to be pitied, but because of Christ we can say “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

 “thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Amen.

Can we really render what is due to both God and Caesar?

The Revd Dr Teresa Morgan, Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Oriel and a regular preacher in the Chapel, gave another excellent sermon at last Sunday's Choral Evensong as part of our term series 'Faith and Public Life'.

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Our readings tonight show us various religious leaders engaging with power. In 2 Samuel, the prophet Nathan tackles King David, who has just sent Uriah the Hittite to die in battle so he can seduce Uriah’s wife. In Luke’s gospel, agents of the Chief Priests ask Jesus a tricky question, hoping that his answer will sound like treason against the Emperor, but Jesus evades them with a conundrum.

How people of faith should deal with power - especially the different demands of divine and human power - has been a central concern of Christians since the beginning of the faith. People have come up, broadly speaking, with four responses:

You can reject this world and withdraw into the desert or the cloister to prepare for heaven. You can reject the world but stay in it, calling other people to reject it and prepare for heaven.

You can stay in the world and practise your faith quietly, relying on the way it changes you gradually to change the people around you. Or you can stay in the world and work actively to change it, to make it a bit more like heaven.

All those paths are recognized in the New Testament, and all of them have been taken by people of faith. Which one we take, depends on temperament, circumstances, and whether we believe that the Kingdom of God is a world apart, or is growing in this world. But today, I want to recommend the fourth way. Because I believe that we can serve both God and Caesar - with the proviso that Caesar will often need to be persuaded that God’s interests and his actually coincide.

I believe that, is because a key part of the Christian world view is that the creative power that shapes the world, breathes its own spirit into it to give it life. The world God made is the material world. And when it isn’t perfect, God response to its imperfection is not to destroy it or any part of it, but to come and be part of it: to share our human life and speak to human hearts. I don’t think one can be Christian and not affirm that God is profoundly interested in this world and cares for it. And as Christians are called to follow the Son of God, surely we are called also to care for the world.

What’s more, we see around us every day that that the world shares all sorts of instincts and values with Christianity.

1For instance, we know as part of it, that the world is a unity. At the most basic level we are physically one: made up of the same particles and energies. Every being comes together from the worn-out materials of other beings, miraculously re-engineered and resurrected. Whether we learn it through science or faith, we are one body. What is good or bad for others is good or bad for us. When one person is hurt, the whole world is hurt, because we are the world.

We know, moreover, how much we need one another: as friends, families and communities. And when our communities fail, as they do, we need to find ways of mending them, because as human beings we don’t do well in isolation - physically, psychologically or spiritually.

And we want to do well, because we love life. Unless something is very wrong, the instinct of all living beings is to go on living. We want to live fully, creatively: to have life most abundantly.

And on the whole, we think that’s fine, because we share a deep conviction that we, as individuals and as groups, matter. Our life, our fulfilment and happiness matter. ‘Because you’re worth it’ is a pretty bad reason to buy make-up, but it’s a profound statement about the meaning of life. You are worth it. You’re worth everything.

All those instinctive values - unity, community, love, life, value - are all deeply rooted in human beings. They are also the heart of the good news of Jesus Christ. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only son... Love one another as I have loved you... I am the vine and you are the branches... I came that so that they might have life, and have it more abundantly.’ And that means that in every person and every society there is something which resonates with the gospel - and which Christians believe the gospel can liberate and bring to fullest fruition.

Well, that sounds encouraging, but how does it help us in practice serve both God and Caesar? We all deal with all sorts of power in our everyday lives, from the government to the college, from the bank to the internet to our style icons. But I think there are some principles that apply to dealing with most kinds of power.

One is that we need to be positive, looking out for those instincts and values we share. ‘Walk cheerfully over the world,’ as George Fox said, ‘answering that of God in every one.’1 Those shared values are where we

1 Journal, 1656.

connect with worldly powers: they’re the foundation on which we can hope to build loving, life-enhancing communities and institutions.

We also have to be smart: to recognize the ways in which other people are different from us. You will know from your own experience that in any relationship, the other person is in some ways completely different from yourself. We have to learn to understand, and work around, and with, those differences to make a good relationship. The same is true when we engage with any form of power. We have to work out how it works, in order to work out how we can work with it. To be wise as serpents, as Jesus said, as well as innocent as doves.

And we have to be brave. The defining feature of power, and powerful people, is that they intend to do what they want, and they don’t intend for anyone to stop them. If you want them to do something else - something more just, perhaps, or more compassionate - you’re going to have to get in their way, and that takes courage. Think of any time you have stood up to any figure of power in your life: it can be daunting.

Nathan was brave, and positive, and clever. Faced with King David (an alpha male if ever there was one) Nathan knew that if he told him outright that he’d sinned, David would throw him out or worse. So he told him a parable - a story that started from values they shared - fairness, compassion, affection. It led David to sympathize with the poor man, and condemn the rich man. He deserves to die! David exclaimed. And then Nathan said, ‘The rich man is you.’ And let David work out the rest.

Last but not least, we have to be patient. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it wasn’t converted in a day either. It takes an age to create heaven on earth, and none of us will do it by ourselves or in one lifetime. Sometimes, of course, we feel we aren’t even making progress. (I find it helpful at those times to recite the 37th psalm: ‘Fret not thyself because of the ungodly; neither be thou envious against the evildoers...’)

Often we feel despondently that there’s very little we can do anyway - about the government, or the markets, or the media. And that’s in a liberal democracy. What if we lived under a dictator, or a totalitarian regime, or just a much more unequal society?

But if we feel that, we are wrong. Because if one thing is certain in this world, it’s that cultures and societies change. The Europe we live in is vastly different from the one in which Jesus advised us to render unto Caesar - largely because of Jesus himself.

The one thing we can’t do as living beings, is make no difference to the world. Because we are one fabric of creation; one body. Every single thing we say and do makes some difference somewhere. Staying in bed all day makes some difference somewhere! Our only choice is what difference we make.

And so with faith, and love, and hope - and courage and wisdom and patience - people of faith have set themselves and still set themselves to tackle kings, dictators and magnates, and markets and media and style icons, and work to bring what Caesar asks of us closer to what God asks of us. Remembering that even the Roman Emperor eventually found himself rendering his Empire to God. And that Jesus himself assures us he basileia tou theou entos humon estin: the Kingdom of God is within your grasp.2

Edward Watson's Homily (5 May 2011)

Edward Watson, finalist in Theology and Philosophy here at Oriel, delivered another thought-provoking homily at last night's Choral Eucharist.  

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In my homily last term I briefly argued that authority within Christianity could not come from scriptural sources, but that faith itself should be considered the ultimate source for and affirmation of Christian beliefs.  I would today like to properly flesh out what I believe faith to be and how it relates to the Christian story.  Almost none of the thoughts expressed here are original, being instead plagiarised from the work of various existentialist philosophers and theologians over the past century, going back I think to Kierkegaard.  I hope they bear repeating anyway!  Some of them are also somewhat on the depressing side, so I apologise in advance if this all gets a bit too heavy.

First things first, I would like to say what I think religious faith is not.  I do not think faith to be a cognitive or emotional state, an attitude held towards something: that is, I don't believe one can technically have faith in something.  One can of course have faith in God in some sense, but this sense is not the one I consider to be theologically relevant.  For one thing, I do not think God is the type of thing one could have faith in, for the same reason that I don't think it technically possible to believe in God like I can believe in my own existence, or that I am in Oriel chapel preaching.  In order to believe in something, to have faith in something, one must be able to grasp it, to stand in a cognitive relationship to it: one must be able to shape words around it.  But to expect to be able to genuinely grasp God seems to me as misguided as expecting to be able to physically grasp ahold of light.  It belies a misunderstanding of the thing with which we are dealing.

As opposed to this view of faith, I prefer to think of faith as a state of being: perhaps the best way to draw out what I mean by this is to suggest that the most suitable contrast to faith is not doubt, or disbelief, but despair.  True, one can despair in things, but there is a readily available sense of despair where to despair is to be in a particular existential state.  It is with this existential state of despair that faith, as I understand it, is to be contrasted. 

Despair often follows, in my mind, from the acceptance that the existentialists were right about the way the world is: that in and of itself the world is shallow and meaningless; that it is filled with inexplicable and unjustifiable suffering, that what beauty there is is transient and destined for destruction, that we, individually and as a race are hollow, that one day we will die, undignified and impotent and one day all our greatest works will be annihalated.  On this view, we, even at our most exalted, are of less significance to the universe than a handful of dust is to us.

This is not a cheery picture of the world, and certainly not one to tell your children.  It is, however, a picture that has impressed itself upon many (though most of them have, it must be said, been French).  Somewhat bizarrely, however, it is only after this picture of the world is accepted that faith can manifest itself.

Of course, the natural (and utterly rational) response to this picture is to deny worth to existence.  This is despair: not to say that self destruction is worth-while, but to accept the far more harrowing proposition that it doesn't matter either way.  This is despair, apathy, and in the very deepest sense, spiritual death.

But despair is not the only response to this world view: there is a second reaction: faith.

Faith accepts that those things which naturally lead to despair are true, but rejects their logical conclusion.  Faith admits a world of little more than shadows and dust, but dances still.  It admits human insignificance but glorifies human love and nobility anyway.  It does not find meaning or justification in the finitude of wordly existence: instead, it rejects the need for the world to provide either.  This is the absurdity of faith: it is founded not upon reason, but upon reason's defeat.  Faith is the affirmation of life against despair.

You can find the kernel of much of what I've just claimed in any atheist existentialist tract you care to call to hand: the question now stands, what is Christian about it? 

The answer to this question has two parts: the first is the Cross.  In the Christian story, we are faced with the death of the Christ in the world.  This is not the death of a good man: it it not even the death of the best man: it is the death of the very best that man could ever be.  Nor is it a noble, gallant death.  Rather, it is small, pitiful, painful and slow, unnoticed by all but a few foolish disciples.  The Cross is that upon which the very highest brought low, and in this degradation of God despair finds its ultimate expression. 

But just as the Cross is the ultimate expression of despair, so the resurrection is the ultimate expression of faith.  The world has done its worst, yet still life remains.  Despite being brought low, the highest stands, not just untouched but higher still, elevated.  Life is not just affirmed against despair: it is rejoiced in, lighter and more beautiful than before.  In his wholly absurd victory, Christ emerges transcendent, the new being, and in him faith becomes indestructible: despair is vanquished; death is dead.

There is no other story that tells the victory of faith over despair like the Christian story.  Furthermore, the core of the story remains, whether or not you accept the historical reality of the resurrection.  That which is expressed remains: the victory of faith in Christ is its own reality.  This truth is transcendent, its absurdity its own affirmation.

What then of God?  God is, in Tillich's account, humanity's ultimate concern, nothing more, nothing less.  For Tillich this is the ground of our being, that in virtue of which we are something rather than nothing.  I would like to draw the notion of the ultimate human concern slightly narrower (though I believe Tillich includes this concept within his) and say that the ultimate human concern is not why we are, but why we should be.  And if faith is the affirmation that yes, we should exist, then God is, by definition, nothing more nor less than the root of that faith.  Ineffable, irrational and, in strict wordly terms, nothing at all, God is, to all intents and purposes, invisible: and yet as being after being embraces joy against despair, as love is formed in the face of all the world's desolation, God is affirmed. 

It is in this affirmation that we truly find beauty, hope and love.  In faith the beauty of the world is set free from any responsibility to gift worth to reality, and in its lightness it is more beautiful still.  Through God hope defeats the fear of reason.  Through faith, through our own lightness, we can love, unencumbered by doubt or reserve.  And it is through this love, drawn from the divine, that we arrive at the core of Christian teaching, truths which far from needing to be rooted down in dogma, need instead to be given flight in faith. 

Amen.

James Crocker's Homily (3 March 2011)

James Crocker, first year graduate theologian here at Oriel, delivered an excellent homily at last night's Choral Eucharist on our reliance upon God.  Please have a look...

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readings: James 5:1-6 & Mark 10:46-52

Tonight I’d like to set up a parallel, and then draw a contrast between the rich as described by James, and Bartimaeus, the blind begger, in Mark’s Gospel. I’d like for us to consider what the real difference between them is, and I’m going to suggest that the difference is that one of them realizes something that is generally true of life, which the other misses completely, that our security and joy does not ultimately lie in our own efforts.

In the passage from James, we see the brother of Jesus, and the very first leader of the church, echoing the prophets of the Old Testament in condemning wealth and power in the strongest terms. However, despite his strong language, it is clear that he is not simply condemning wealth for its own sake. Even though the New Testament often implies that “wealth can be a particularly strong obstacle to Christian discipleship,”[1] in and of itself wealth is simply passive and can be used for good or for evil.

In order to get to the bottom of James’ denunciation, we need to examine the text more closely. What is it that he actually condemns the rich for?

First, ‘Your riches have rotted…their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire.’[2] Of course, we know that gold and silver don’t actually corrode, but that isn’t the point. The point is that they have been gathered up and left in reserve – imagine someone stockpiling grain which then rots, and is of no use to anyone. I think that is the image we’re working with here, but applied to the riches that James’ targets have actually gathered. Rather than using their riches for good, to clothe and feed the poor for example, they have kept them as insurance for their future. This is why he says ‘you have laid up treasure in the last days.’ This is a warning very similar to Jesus’ parable in Luke 12 – a man has filled up his barn with grain, and he has still more, so he decides to tear down his barn and build bigger ones, thinking that in this way he will be secure for many years, and can simply lie back and enjoy life. Jesus says, ‘But God said to him, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.’

In fact, James has already made this point. The section we are looking at is written as a parallel to the section which immediately precedes it, where James says that it is foolish to be so confident about all of our plans for the future, in verse 15 of the previous chapter he says ‘you ought to say “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.’ In this way James, following Jesus (and, incidentally, the book of Ecclesiastes) shows us that planning for our future security can be foolish if we are not mindful of our own transitory nature.

The other two specific charges of James are intimately related: ‘Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and…have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and self-indulgence. [in short] you have murdered the righteous person.’

The social context which James is writing into had a great disparity between rich and poor. If a poor farmer could not meet his tax burden or his debts, he would end up having to sell his smallholding to a rich landowner, and then hope to be hired as a day laborer, even on the land which used to be his. These day laborers would be paid at the end of each day because that is literally all they would have, and without it their families would go hungry. There is recognition of this problem in the Old Testament law – in Deuteronomy 24 is written, ‘you shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy…You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets (for he is poor and counts on it), lest he cry against you to the LORD, and you be guilty of sin.’ This is undoubtedly what is in James’ mind as he writes this. The wealthy people that he is writing about have disobeyed this law, and in contrast to the desperate situation of the defrauded laborers, are living in luxury, but ultimately under judgment. ‘You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.’

So we can say that ‘the hoarding of wealth is wrong not just because it demonstrates utterly false priorities, it is doubly sinful because it deprives others of their…lives.’[3]

We will now turn to consider the story of Bartimaeus. He was a blind man who sat outside the city of Jericho begging. There are some striking details in his story in Mark. He calls Jesus by the messianic title ‘Son of David’. This is interesting because other than the demon-possessed and Peter, Bartimaeus is the only one to call Jesus by a messianic title. It is part of Mark’s acute sense of irony that as Jesus is surrounded by his disciples and a large crowd who follow him, it is only a blind man who sees that he is the savior of Israel. Understanding this, Bartimaeus cries out to him ‘Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!’ The crowd tells him to be quiet, but he can’t be stopped. Jesus stops and calls him, and when Jesus calls, he throws off his cloak and goes to Jesus. Some commentators suggest that beggars of his day would spread their cloak out around them to collect money given to them, so by throwing off his cloak, Bartimaeus is perhaps leaving behind all his worldly possessions at Jesus’ call.[4]

Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants, and Bartimaeus asks only for his sight. Jesus responds like this: ‘Go your way, your faith has made you well.’ What does it mean that his faith has made him well? That he believed Jesus could do it? That he saw that he was the Son of David? Maybe that he left everything he had behind to approach Jesus? Or something else? That’s not really what I want to focus on actually. Rather I’d like to consider his response to Jesus. Jesus tells him to go his way, and yet Mark notes that ‘immediately he recovered his sight, and followed him on the way.’ Through his faith, Jesus’ way became Bartimaeus’ way.

To sum up, I’d like to make the contrast between the rich one and Bartimaeus even more explicit. The rich are rich, Bartimaeus was not. Yet the rich James is talking about save in order to cling to absolute self-reliance, and steal from the poor in order to support their own lavish life style. Bartimaeus, at the suggestion of Jesus threw aside his worldly goods and received his sight as a blessing which not even the richest person could buy, and followed Jesus on the way. The rich one relies on himself, but ‘riches provide no spiritual benefit in the present, nor do they give grounds for hope’[5] in the future. Bartimaeus relies on Jesus, and is made complete.

What does this mean for us? We need to ask ourselves, do we resemble the rich, or Bartimaeus? Do we try to pretend that God is not real, that our only hope lies in ourselves, and as a result harm others in the pursuit of some sort of vain security, or passing pleasure? Or do we rejoice in God’s revelation of himself and of his love for us in the savior, Jesus, and so let go of our selfish and vain pursuits?

I suspect for most of us, and certainly for myself, it is the former. We are consumed by worry about our futures, about jobs, about funding, about all kinds of social activities, and family worries, and I will not deny that these are important. However, when this worry becomes stronger than our faith in God, we can be, as the rich in James are, doubly sinful, forgetting our true priorities, and willing to harm others, or even to withhold help, all for our own benefit.

Of course, most of us are not rich, but we still life a life of privilege. We should not forget God’s specific blessings to us in allowing us to be here studying or working in Oxford. This is why we thank God for our benefactors in the College prayer, and why we also pray that God would help us to use the benefits which they have given to us rightly – we should realize that we are responsible to God for how we use our time here in Oxford. And I suppose if you remember nothing else from tonight, I would hope that next time you hear the college prayer the words will perhaps have a greater weight of meaning to them.

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[1] Douglas Moo, The Letter of James: An Introduction and Commentary. (Leicester: IVP, 1985), 160.

[2] Scripture quotations taken from the English Standard Version.

[3] Moo, 162.

[4] Morna Hooker, A Commentary on the Gospel According to Mark. (London: A&C Black, 1991), 253.

[5] Moo, 161.