9th July 2006

Christ Church
 

Morningside
 

on Political Holiness

 

In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. Amen.
 

Climbing the steps of this pulpit to address you for the very first time, I am reminded of the advice the mother whale gave to the baby whale:  ‘Remember, my dear, its when you are spouting, that you are most likely to get harpooned.’  So God help me
 

Once upon a time there was a great preacher called Nasrudeen, who travelled the length and the breadth of Persia with his extraordinary message.   He was so popular that wherever he preached the place was always bursting at the seams and so people would come early to queue for the best places in the Mosque from which to catch his pearls of wisdom.   One day he came to preach in a small village in the middle of nowhere which couldn’t believe its luck in being able to host him.   The great moment arrived and as the wise and holy man mounted the steps to begin his sermon, a deep hush fell over the eager congregation.   ‘Dear people!, he began, ‘Do you know what I am going to tell you?’ The people looked at each other, shook their heads but said nothing.  He asked them again, ‘Do you know what I am going to tell you?’ ‘No, we have no idea’ ventured a few hecklers from the back.   (Every faith has them).  ‘Well’, said  Nasrudeen, closing his book in anger, ‘If you don’t know what I am going to say, what’s the point of talking to you’ at which point he descended the pulpit steps and stomped off home, indignant that such ignorant people should waste his precious time.
 

Well as you can imagine, the mosque authorities were speechless.  Nasrudeen’s visit was meant to be the highlight of their year and yet his sermon had ended before it had ever really got started.  Trying to save the day and, more to the point, trying to save face, the Iman sent a little delegation to find Nasrudeen and to persuade him to give his listeners another chance.   Still sulking from what had happened earlier, Nasrudeen wasn’t keen but reluctantly gave in and returned to the mosque. 

 
Once again the place fell silent as he climbed the pulpit steps and began all over again. ‘Dear people!  Do you know what I am going to tell you?’   Having been well primed, the congregation shouted out unanimously ‘Of course we know, of course we know.’   ‘Oh, in that case’ said the preacher ‘there is no need for me to detain you any longer.   So lets call it a day.’ And once again he left the pulpit and walked out of the mosque.

 

By this point the Mosque council were at their wits end and the people who were cramped together in the hot, sticky hall were getting restless.  Eventually the officials prevailed upon the most tactful and diplomatic member of the Mosque to negotiate a third and final attempt to persuade the distinguished man to preach.   After much tooing and froing, the mission was accomplished and Nasrudeen returned for the third and final time.  ‘Well dear people’ he began, ‘do you or do you not know what I am going to say to you?’   This time the congregation was ready.   ‘Some of us do, and some of us don’t,’ they replied in a very Anglican sort of way.   ‘Excellent’ said Nasrudeen, ‘then let those who do tell those who don’t’.   And off he went home leaving everyone astounded.

 
I love that story.   Its amusing.  Its shocking.  Its cheeky and yet it is also rich in meaning.   It says something about the unpredictable ways in which the clergy behave – but I guess you know about that - and the even more surprising things that they say.  But at a deeper level it makes plain that unless an individual or a congregation is continually listening to what is really going on both in themselves and in the world around them, then all the sermons in the world will make little difference whatsoever. 

 
And that’s how it seems to me today.  With all that is going on around us, the blurb in the magazine and the display on the board outside the church you either do or you don’t know what I am going to say to you. Friday was 7/7 – a year to the day when terror struck the streets of London leaving 56 dead and 700 people injured and blowing to pieces the security and personal safety of countless people living much further afield.   And of the course the timing was not arbitrary but intended to distract attention away from the G8 summit which was being held in Gleneagles and which was trying to find ways to tackle the scourges of global poverty, debt and trade justice. 
 

Twelve months on the media has been full of it with Bob Geldolf, Bono and Nelson Mandela awarded gold stars for good behaviour and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown sent off to stand in the naughty corner.  But although I depend upon the Scotsman, the Guardian and Channel 4 to keep me up to date with the news, I need more than cheesy grins, sound bites and political point-scoring to help me understand what all this has to do with being a Christian in the world today.  And as someone who is kept awake at night by unanswered questions, I have spent Monday to Saturday of this past week trying to work out what acts of terrorism and the campaign to make poverty history have to do with what you and I are doing here in church today.  To some extent, if I am honest, I would rather not bother even trying to work it out. 

 
I know the subtle attractions of living a split existence – in which church on Sunday becomes a refuge from the grottiness of daily reality and God something I can hide behind.  I know the seduction of religion as an escape especially at those times when my own life is in such turmoil that I can’t bear to watch the news or hear about other people’s troubles.  But on a good-enough day, when I can face getting up in the morning, I know in my heart of hearts that I need more than political, economic and social analysis to help me understand the world that God loves so much.  And the more I ponder the life and work of Jesus, the more certain I am a Christian’s face must be turned towards and not away from the world.  I would go even further and say that a church which does not engage seriously with the messiness of the world has actually turned its back on Christ and is living in heresy.

 
At a time when so many people are looking towards other religions and philosophies to find wisdom for their lives, it means a great deal to me to know that Christianity takes the here-and-now of material reality so seriously that when God wanted to save the world he didn’t do it from a distance through  waving a divine scepter or through the intervention of some angelic spiritual being, but through the blood and guts and sweat and toil of a human being, born in time and history.  And if that is not about getting involved in human reality I don’t know what is.  The tragedy of course is that although flesh and blood and bodiliness were good enough for God to embrace, they certainly aren’t good enough for the church which has never quite forgiven God for his cheek.  You only have to listen to the debates going on in our own Anglican communion right now about same-sex love or about women as bishops to realize that many people would much rather that God had saved us by some other way – in fact any way at all so long as it didn’t involved skin and flesh and hormones and bodies. 

The flesh is immaterial many would say, the body doesn’t count, the spirit is the real thing.   And yet the Incarnation – God’s coming among us in the flesh – says that bodies matter enough to God to have one for himself and that God is to be found not somewhere else but right here and now in our own bodies and in the life of the world around us.

 
And if that is what holiness looks like to God – Jesus being at home in his own skin and engaging fully rather than avoiding the world around him – I, for one, would like to know how on earth we got to this stage in which the church is so anti-body and being a Christian has become so divorced from getting your hands dirty in the world.  I think the headlines are right, Christianity is indeed in crisis, but the crisis is not that numbers are falling but that the churches which are actually growing are advocating a neutered, domesticated, diluted and ‘fictitious Christ’,[1] a pale shadow of the radical, itinerant preacher who was hounded to his death by the religious elite of his day.

 
How to be true to an incarnate God and play your part rather than run away from everyday realities has dogged the church from the very beginning.  Its never been an easy thing to manage and the annals of church history are littered with casualties along the way.  But two responses emerged in the early years of Christianity.  The first came within a few years of  Jesus’ death when, under the very real threat of persecution, the question was asked: ‘How can Christians live with the political and social realities of their time while remaining true to their radical calling?’ The answer was not long in coming – martyrdom!  No surrender, no accommodating, no striking of deals but martyrdom, the ultimate defiant stand against the civil and social powers of the day.  
 

A couple of centuries later with the dubious conversion of Constantine to Christianity and the enforcement of Christendom, those who could not live with the compromised relationship between the church and the vested interests of the emperor, fled to the desert to live lives of solitude far from the corruption of the cities.  If martyrdom had been about dying to the world, then desert monasticism was about fleeing from it.[2]  But that was a long time ago and now that Christendom has come to an end and we find ourselves living in a post-christian society, ‘die’ and ‘fly’ are no longer adequate options for Christians like you and me.  Rather we need another way of being which takes seriously our own incarnation in the world.  And so just as the holiness of the martyrs gave way to the holiness of the monks, so fleeing from the world to seek God in the desert must give way to rolling up our sleeves to find God in and through the holiness of political and social action.

 
From my reading of the gospels, the kind of holiness that does justice, engages with politics and acts for the inclusion of all whose voices are not heard is characterized by attention to three doctrines:
 

First, the doctrine of the Incarnation.  Taking its cue from Jesus, political holiness is not only pro rather than anti-body in a physical sense – attending to issues of hunger, health, gender - but also pro history, pro locality and pro matter.  What God has joined together – faith and reality, personal belief and engagement with the world  – Christians cannot render asunder. It therefore follows that any spirituality, religious practice or congregation that does not seriously engage with public life cannot be termed Christian since it fails to uphold the central tenet of Christianity, the Incarnation.

 
Second, the doctrine of Redemption.   Following the example of Jesus, any truly Christian spirituality will never accept the status quo but immerse itself in the struggle against all that crushes individuals and communities and unlike so many alternative spiritualities will be less concerned with helping individuals feel at one with the world than with transforming the global picture until every person has clean water, adequate food, healthcare and education.   

 
And finally the kind of holiness I am talking about will take seriously the doctrine of the Kingdom not harping back to the good old days of the past but straining forward and gazing into the future in anticipation of the kingdom of God that is still to come. 

 
Incarnation, Redemption and Kingdom – three characteristics of the kind of holiness the world needs in the face of global injustice and inequality.  But what does this mean for us as individuals and as the congregation of Christ Church? 

Well the first thing to say is that we are all different and therefore no one size will fit all. 

·       Some by temperament or circumstances will be the marching, protesting, speaking up kind of people. 

·       Others will be more inclined to write letters to MSPs or sign ready printed cards to Gordon Brown or the Department for International Development. 

·       Some might consider taking out a standing order enabling an agency like Christian aid to act justly on their behalf

·       while others might make a difference locally by including something in their weekly shopping for St Catherine’s convent to distribute to the homeless
 

And thinking more widely as a congregation?   

·       One option could be to explore the possibility of establishing a link with a congregation in Africa or South America and of sending a team out to visit and see how we can help each other in sharing skills and resources

·       Another would be to look into making Christ Church an eco-congregation in which care for the environment and for the earth’s resources determines our use of energy, resources and buildings

·       And if we really want to put our money where our mouth is, and act justly even within our services, we could not only resolve to use fairly traded wine at communion but also take it in turn to cover its costs
 

These are only a few of my suggestions.  I very much hope to hear yours at the open forum which is being held after this service in the Church Centre to which you are all most warmly invited.  But whether you are staying for more or are dashing home to watch the Wimbledon or the world cup final, let those who know about Incarnation, Redemption and the Kingdom tell those who don’t and then not only the preacher but all of us can go home.  Amen. 

 

               Michael Paterson
                       9th July 2006

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