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.