30/10/05 All Saints Christ Church Morningside         Responsibility and Freedom It’s good to be here.   It doesn’t seem like 21 months – more like 5 years!   Thank you Simon for inviting me.  Simon and I haven’t met a lot so I’ve no idea whether he will approve of things I say – but some of you may remember my going on about “The Dignity of Difference” after reading Jonathan Sacks’ book – I believe it is healthy for people to have different understandings of our faith. I’ve just been reading another of the Chief Rabbi’s books – “To heal a fractured world – the ethics of responsibility”. A good deal of this morning’s sermon arises from ideas developed there. I want to claim that the Christian faith does not primarily demand obedience but the taking of initiative.  God does not want to be obeyed but to be responded to. We were not created slaves, but children ‘in the likeness of God’.  We have genuine freedom – not simply to obey or disobey, but to create, to make something new. I’m saying this on All Saints Day. Almost all the great saints were creative, innovative, challenging the accepted views and practices of their time – and usually not only those of their society but also of their Church.   Let me headline three areas of our present culture where not seeing our faith as creative is dangerous – and then give the most important reason for my concern which is our understanding of God. Richard Dawkins wrote that human beings are a genes way of producing another gene.  This may be an excessive form of deter-minism but there are times we all feel a temptation to believe our fate is fixed in the stars; that human choice is a mirage; that we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control and that none of us have real responsibility because we have at most very limited choice.   Our genes determine our responses. In the world today, so large, where so much appears to be beyond our ability to influence, we desperately need to keep alive the belief that we can choose, and that what we choose can, and does, make a difference.   This surely is at the heart of what it means to be human – to be able to choose – to affect the future. . . . .              Adam said, It was not my fault, the woman gave me the apple to eat.  Even when we do accept we have a little choice, it is often easier to put the responsibility on someone else. We have raised this to an art form in our world. We sue the restaurant for serving coffee so hot it burns our mouth.  When things go wrong or we fail, we can blame poverty, discrimination, a difficult childhood, the educational system, globalisation, psychological abuse, the media, government, the Church, junk food – the list in endless.   And this way of seeing things is not all bad – it can arise (especially if we are considering the failings of other people) from the highest motives – sympathy, compassion, a desire to help, an urge to understand, a reluctance to be judgemental and so on.  It arises from sound knowledge we have acquired about the causes of human behaviour.  But given too much emphasis, it turns us into being objects rather than subjects.  We become put upon, helpless, pitiful – and that is unhealthy. In the world today, while welcoming all these insights from psychology and so on, we still need to accept responsibility, to celebrate our independence, our strength - we need to retain our status and value as people created in the image of God. Dawkins talking about genes, Adam shifting the blame - and religion can reinforce, undergird this slide to irresponsibility. Marx claimed religion was an opiate – it reconciled people to their condition – their poverty, their disease, their death, their station in life, their subjection to tyrannical rulers – it helped them accept without rebellion the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short life Thomas Hobbs described.  This was in spite of the fact that the great event of the Hebrew Bible was the freeing of the slaves; or that the cry of the prophets was for justice to the weak, the widow and the orphan; or that Jesus described his ministry as bringing good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind and freedom to the oppressed. Nevertheless I think Marx had a point:  Institutional religion has been, and is, authoritarian and power-hungry. It demands obedience to Pope or Bible. It sees as dangerous any encouragement of development or initiative.  In return for this obedience it offers comfort – a lifting of responsibility and a guaranteed happy ending. And this is sad, for far from being an opiate, religion should be adrenalin. It calls us to action: to see things as they could be; to recognise that they can change; to work sacrificially to bring into being the possibilities of the creation – to justify the risk, and the suffering, of God. So I’m asking, in the world today, so complex, where so much appears to be beyond our understanding, whether is it sensible just to accept things as they are?  Faith in the creator says NO. Living in faith is believing in the possibility of a developing future.  We need to retain our belief in ourselves, our ability to distinguish right and wrong, and our responsibility to make things different. What I’ve been trying to say is that I believe deterministic philosophy (which clearly contains some truth) and the blame culture (which admittedly has many genuine excuses at hand) and religion itself – each can take away our personal and corporate responsibility. Together they are a real threat to our future.   The one I feel most responsible for is religion. I believe the Church should try to behave like God – the God for whom we use many metaphors, all inadequate, but the central one is the parent – the one who brings us into being, loves us, and raises us through childhood to responsible independent adulthood.  I believe in the God who risks everything, even God herself, or himself, to give freedom to the creation – to you and me. The temptation of all parents is to keep their children protected, safe:  but the responsibility of all parents is to give their children increasing freedom, to allow them their full humanity.  We learn this from God’s treatment of us.  Sacks argues that throughout the Hebrew Bible there is a movement from divine initiative to human endeavour, from the supernatural to the natural, from a controlling to an empowering presence of God.  I kept thinking all along as I read, of how this movement received an enormous boost in the story of Jesus and the promise of the Spirit.  There isn’t time to review how the Christian institution through the centuries has massaged the message of the life of Jesus and imposed its authoritarian rule which so often diminishes people, making us see ourselves primarily as sinful, weak, inadequate and helpless – saved only by the blood of Jesus from being sacrificed to the ogre who would otherwise smite us with our just deserts.  Yes, we are weak and sinful; but we are also courageous and generous and loving.  Yes, we feel inadequate as all young people do growing up in a very challenging world - God has given us an enormous and difficult task.  We certainly need one another; we need to learn from the wise experience of the past; we need to know that God’s Spirit is with us into the future. What I’m trying to say is that God’s call to us is to be heroes, to be like the great saints – people who, as modern scholarship delights to tell us, were not perfect but who went out with courage to make a new and better world.  I don’t need to be continuously told I’m a sinner.  And being a sinner it is not helpful to be told that I had no choice, it was not my fault, and anyway God will sort it all out. I need to be told I am forgiven and can be a saint, I need to told the responsibility I feel as a human being for my family, my friends, my society, for the whole world ecology – that this is not the ridiculous dream of an overblown ego but a realistic assessment of what we are all called to, and what is possible in this incredible creation of God. God has given us freedom, and that means we have responsibility. Very frightening, easier to be without, let the Bible or the Pope tell me what to do, it’s more comforting to think that God up there has all the answers, will sort it all out.  But we are daughters and sons of God, heirs, given responsibility, and our duty is to use that responsibility as well as we can. That is what millions, billions, of saints have done through the ages.  It is the challenge we, everyone, is faced with in our time.  We Christians, who know the world was created with purpose, with meaning, with love, are not alone but we can be in the forefront.  We have hope because God has created us to be creative - and to affect the future.  That is our faith – and even little Christ Church has a significant role!   God bless you.                           Jim Mein                                                                    Pentecost XXIV.   30th October 2005 Home