Loving God & Neighbour

Loving God & Neighbour
(Boys' Brigade Founder Day - St Paul's Cathedral)

“Above all, clothe yourselves with love which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” (Col 3.14)

To dwell above with those we love
O that will be glory;
But to dwell below with those we know
Is quite another story.

You would think from the press over the last few weeks, that all Christians ever do is squabble and fall out with each other. Of course there are genuine issues to debate. And it is no use pretending that we all agree when we don’t.

But the attitude of Christians, even when they disagree, must be that of love. So Paul reminded the church in Colossi, in the part of his letter that was read earlier, that they should ‘clothe themselves in love’.

Today, the last Sunday in October, is Founder’s Day for the Boy’s Brigade. William Alexander Smith was born 149 years ago tomorrow, in Scotland. In 1883 he formed the first company in Glasgow. By 1909 it was a world-wide movement and Edward VII knighted him for his work among young people.

He died just around the corner here in St Bartholomew’s hospital in 1914, and although he was buried back in Glasgow, there is a memorial plaque here beneath us in the crypt. BB officers will lay a wreath there after this service.

In the 1950s and 60s I was one of the thousands of boys, mainly from large working class families like my own, who was in the Bruin Boys, the Life Boys and then the Boys Brigade.
The uniform was a very important part of belonging. I can still remember having to whiten my landyard with blanco; brasso my badges and buckles, and spit and polish my shoes.

The uniform was to remind me that although I was just a snotty nosed schoolboy, I belonged to something bigger, with high Christian ideals.

So Paul tells the Colossians that they should be clothed, uniformed, in love. This was to cover all their natural human failings and petty jealousies. It was their mark of belonging to Christ.

As our Lord himself said - “by this shall all know that you are my disciples, in that you love one another”. (John 13.35) Paul adds, that it would bind them together in perfect harmony. Love is the uniting principle of Christian living.

Our Lord makes this the central plank of his ethical teaching, and like Paul, he gives it practical content.

In Matthew’s Gospel we read of the Pharisees testing Jesus by trying to pose such a question about The Law that any answer would put him in the wrong.

They ask “What is the greatest commandment?”.

Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, bringing together two well known Jewish commandments. He replies: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (22.37f)

Christ turns this sterile academic wordplay into a lesson on practical religion and life. And then later, he turns the same weapon of sterile academic wordplay back on the pharisees and silences them.

In fact the account ends with a verse which must be every Prime Minister and certainly Ian Duncan Smith’s dream: “neither from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”

There was to be no more trying to catch him out.

So what do these two great Judaeo-Christian commandments mean?

Loving God with all our heart. In the Anglican tradition in Britain we’re not very good at fervour and enthusiasm. Like the man at Evensong who kept shouting out ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Praise the Lord’. Eventually an exasperated verger sidled up to him and asked him if he wouldn’t mind being quieter. The man replied: “I can’t help it, I got religion!” To which the verger responded: “I don’t know what you’ve got sir, but you didn’t get it here!”

The very word ‘enthusiasm’ was originally an insult, meaning ‘possessed by a god’. The church has usually expelled the lovers of God who display too much emotional zeal for the faith, like Luther and Wesley.

Sometimes we need to recapture that enthusiastic love for God which is a hall mark of the saints, and of many of the growing parts of the church around the world. We will do it in a way that is culturally appropriate, but we should love God with all our heart.

But on it’s own, emotional, enthusiastic love without content and depth produces simply sentimentality. God falls into the same category as puppy dogs, old church buildings Harry Secombe and Cliff Richard. And this is not enough.

So we must love God with all our soul. “Out of the depths my soul cries out to you” says the psalmist. De profundis. Profound love of God can come out of those experiences of life which furrow deep into our psyche, into our very being: extreme pain, or mental anguish; inconsolable grief. The suffering which CS Lewis called ‘God’s megaphone’.

But also existential moments of bliss; the unbearable lightness of ‘being’; the palpable pain of overwhelming beauty; the moments of supreme well-being flowing from human love and affection.

But this too has its dangers. Deep love which never looks outward produces introspection and self-absorption. It can even induce pride and a sense of superiority.

That’s why, on its own, however profound the love of God, it is not enough. So we must love God with all our mind.

Some of us are more at home here. We enjoy discussions about the existence of God and the finer points of doctrine. Although as Lady Bracknell reminds us in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, it is not quite respectable in polite society to be too intelligent. Perhaps Britain is the only country in Europe where the expression “too clever by half” is an insult.

I am alarmed sometimes when talking with students to find that their understanding of Christian theology has not gone much beyond their understanding of Father Christmas and the Teletubbies. And what they do know they have learnt from the Vicar of Dibbley or Father Ted.

My Church Primary School children know more about Pokemon than they do about the Christian heritage that founded their school.

Part of our Christian devotion to God is to read, to study, to think hard about our faith and love for God. But loving God, purely as an academic idea without emotion or depth simply produces a sterile formula, devoid of spiritual power. And at worst, dogma to be fought over.

Plato did great damage to the development of Christian thought by his splitting of the human into two parts - body and spirit. For the Jews at the time of Christ, any one of these three things - heart, soul, mind - would have sufficed to indicate the whole person. We are one complex, integrated human being.

The command, then, was to love God with our whole being: the affective, reflective and intellective; heart, soul and mind. Strong love with checks and balances.

If we love God in this way, then we cannot but help love our neighbour as ourselves.

This is the second commandment, inextricably linked with the first. And it is not an easy command to keep. CK Chesterton once remarked that the Bible tells us to love our neighbours and to love our enemies - because they are generally the same people!
This love of God means we will care for the homeless and the refugees; we will protect the weak; we will look out for one another. As William Smith did, we will reach out to help children and young people to grow up into mature and loving men and women.

And we will build societies and churches which do this. If we do not, then we deceive ourselves, and we do not genuinely love God, with heart and soul and mind.

John adds a further dimension to this in his epistle where he writes ‘perfect love casts out fear’.

I have always remembered this verse in 1 John 4.18. ‘Perfect love casts out fear’. At a wedding where I was best man a pious absentee sent simply that reference in a telegram. But without checking, I quickly turned to John 4.18 and read out: “Jesus said to her, ‘You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband!’"

The result of loving God and neighbour in this way is freedom from fear: the irrational fears that haunt us. As Paul reminds the Colossians in the next verse, when they clothe themselves in love, then the peace of Christ will rule in their hearts.

In our troubled and uncertain world, if we would be free from fear and full of inner peace, then we must love God and neighbour. Or as St Paul puts it:

“Above all, clothe yourselves with love which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts” (Col 3.14)

Deep Church

Deep Church

From today’s Epistle: “ that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 3.17-19

In America - this could never happen in England! - there was a feud between a good Catholic priest and his very evangelical organist, who loved Moody and Sankey Gospel hymns.

The first hint of trouble came when the priest preached on the need for change and the organist chose to sing "I Shall Not Be Moved."

Trying to believe it was a coincidence, the priest put the incident behind him. The next Sunday he preached on the need for increased giving, and was not amused as the organist led them afterwards in the hymn "Jesus Paid It All."

Sunday morning attendance swelled as the tension between the two built. A large crowd showed up the next week to hear his sermon on the sin of gossiping. The organist struck up with "I Love To Tell The Story?"

There was no turning back. The following Sunday the priest told the huge congregation that, unless something changed, he was considering resignation. The atmosphere was electric as the choir set out on the old Gospel standard "Why Not Tonight."

Other local churches were empty the following week as people crowded into the church to hear the resignation sermon. The priest explained that Jesus had led him to the church and now Jesus was leading him away. The organist could not resist it: "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."

Divisions in a church and divisions between churches are all too common and, despite the jokes, are really very sad. They are a major hindrance to the mission of the church.

In 1952, CS Lewis wrote a letter to The Church Times standing-up for the supernatural basis of the Gospel which he felt strongly was being undermined by what was then called modernism.

To a layman it seems obvious that what unites the Evangelical and the Anglo Catholic against the "Liberal" or "Modernist" is something very clear and momentous, namely, the fact that both are thoroughgoing supernaturalists, who believe in the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, and the … Last Things. This unites them not only with one another but also with the Christian religion as understood ubique et ab omnibus.

The point of view from which this agreement seems less important than their divisions … is to me unintelligible. Perhaps the trouble is that as supernaturalists, whether "Low" or "High" Church thus taken together they lack a name. May I suggest "Deep Church", or if that fails in humility, Baxter’s "mere Christians"’.

Lewis's understanding of ‘Deep Church’, or ‘mere Christianity’, was not limited simply to a concept of supernaturalism.

The Latin tag ubique et ab omnibus alerts us to the fact that to talk of Christianity as believed ‘everywhere and by everyone’, is to appeal not only to the miraculous foundations of the Christian faith, but also to a common historical tradition of belief and practice that has been for centuries normative for Christian experience.

The Anglican church in London has grown fairly steadily over the past ten years, and the two major players are the broad Anglo-Catholics and the open evangelicals. As always, these groups have their fringes.

There’s the Black Mafia who carry out a weekly inquisition of the Catholic faithful over their gins and tonics, weighing up the relative unsoundness of All Saints Margaret Street compared with St Mary’s Bourne Street.

And there are those evangelicals who have such a perfect grasp on the interpretation of Scripture that they are happy to consign to the flames the majority of the church for the majority of the Christian era. They are definitely not sure about Holy Trinity Brompton, have serious reservations about All Souls Langham Place and would like Our Lord to clarify one or two points before they can accept him into the ranks of the faithful.

For many of us, like CS Lewis, all this seems nonsense: fiddling while Rome burns; rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.

Bishop Richard has encouraged Professor Andrew Walker of King’s College - a Russian Orthodox layman who grew up in the pentecostal church, and others of us from the Anglo-Catholic grouping and the evangelical constituency, to explore together Deep Church.
The name doesn’t really matter, although it is intended to be an evocative title, even if, as Lewis thought, it might suggest a lack of humility. Another name suggested is ‘generous orthodoxy’.

Professor Walker has written:

“Deep Church, as its name implies, is spiritual reality down in the depths – the foundations and deep structures of the Faith – which feed, sustain, and equip us to be disciples of Christ.”

It is about engagement with God, and not just engagement with forms of worship that we like. In our own Catholic tradition, it is the acknowledgement that ascesis, spiritual discipline and denial is part of the joyful mystery of our faith. As we said the Rosary yesterday, we were remembering the joyful mysteries of faithful Mary - all tinged by suffering and self-denial.

And it is about concern for those outside the church and for broken communities and hurting people. This is how and why all these Anglo-Catholic churches around here were ‘planted’ in the 19th century.

I remember visiting the first Vineyard Church in Anaheim, Los Angeles, back in the 1980s. It was a lively charismatic ‘new church’ that has since replicated itself around the world - there are a number in Locoman.

There were about 5,000 people in a warehouse, presided over from an electronic keyboard by the charismatic and loveable John Wimber; there was an excellent 5-piece band, made up of ageing hippy session musicians (not a bit like our own choir,,,); no Christian symbols (if you exclude the overhead projector); no sacraments at most services, no historic liturgy, nor hymns older than a decade.

It was ahistorical. Apart from a brief Bible reading there was nothing obvious to link this church with 2,000 years of history. It was deep in the Spirit and existential fervour, but shallow in its connection to the sustaining flow of God’s salvation history.

Many evangelicals, including Vineyard leaders and Holy Trinity Brompton church planters, have come to realise that there is an enormous reservoir of deep Christian experience in the fathers and mothers of the church; in the Celtic tradition; in the saints before and after the reformation; in orthodoxy; in liturgy and music.

But sadly, at just a time when we need them, too many within our own tradition have only kept these historical insights alive by becoming curators of a museum - rearranging the lace and polishing the thuribles. Anglo-Catholicism has lost its spiritual edge, and in many places, its spiritual nerve.

In other words, we need each other in this broad alliance of Deep Church. Not to merge into some lowest common denominator - Anglo-Catholics in designer jumpers will never work! - but to reinvigorate and deepen our distinctive traditions.

God has seen fit to suggest to us, that in the longer term - say 50 years from now - unless we move on together we will become but another footnote in history.

This has become increasingly clear to many Anglo-Catholics. Evangelicals, on the other hand, now account for over 70% of ordinands training for the priesthood in England. They are generally in buoyant mood.

But many of those evangelicals who have been round the block once or twice, recognise that this growth is unsustainable without a development in spiritual formation and without being more firmly rooted historically in the Christian story.

Unless all of us are part of the co-operative venture of Deep Church or generous orthodoxy - or whatever we call it - we stand in danger of missing the opportunities before us here in London, where there is at present an open door.

If we will move on and deeper into our faith, both Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals, then we have an exciting future as we fulfil our Lord’s mandate to take the Good News of the kingdom to all people.

This was the Apostle Paul’s longing for the church:

“ that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 3.17-19

Ecclesiastes

Introduction to Ecclesiastes
(Willesden Clergy Conference October 2003)

A church member who was a devout golfer came to talk to his priest one day and said “Father, I have one really Big Question about the faith. Are there going to be golf courses in heaven? I have to know."

"Well," said his priest, "I'm not really sure, but tonight I'll say a special prayer and see if God will tell me the answer."

The next Sunday, when the service ended and the congregation was shaking hands with the priest on the way out, the golfer cornered him again. "Did you get the answer, Father? Are there going to be golf courses in heaven?"

Well, George," the priest replied, "I've got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?"

"Tell me the good news first," George said.

"The good news is that, yes, there are golf courses in heaven. Beautiful courses, where the sun is always shining, the rough is not too deep, there are no sand traps, and you never have to wait to tee off."

"Hey, that's great!" exclaimed the golfer excitedly. "But what's the bad news?"

"Well, the bad news is that St Peter has you down to tee off this coming Tuesday morning at 8."

Ecclesiastes deals with the one Big Question - the Meaning of Life, the Universe & Everything. (42 - v 42 of Eccles).

And it comes up with Bad News (quite a lot of it actually) and Good News.

There will be two parts to this Bible Study this morning: a general introduction; and a short sermon on one verse that attempts to recontextualise Ecclesiastes for the present Western culture.

The Offices - take you through the great sweep of Scripture: the good bits, boring bits, bloodthirsty bits - and the puzzling bits. Ecclesiastes is one of the puzzling bits that nearly didn’t make it into the canon.

Scholars have suggested a number of different authors (they would wouldn’t they) from Solomon (unlikely - no mentions of King of Jerusalem are probably a literary device to emphasise the wisdom of the preacher) to as many as 9 different authors within the book. (JEPD chant at Div Faculty.) Qoheleth - Hebrew root, to assemble. So assembler of wise sayings or (more likely) assembler of the people, the president, the one who calls the ecclesia together (hence Ecclesiastes).

Yet despite these supposed diverse authors and themes, at it’s simplest, there is an underlying unity to the book: Qoheleth looks at our puzzling, repetitious lives, that relentlessly and universally lead to death, and says: “Even if we do not clearly understand, there is something deeper going on.”

Or put in another way: the Bad News is that there is not much point looking for meaning “under the sun” (a phrase used 39 times); the Good News is that by implication there is a God and meaning “beyond the sun” (the unknown God, a common theme in ANE religion - talk to John Chapman about wife’s PhD) (Shemesh - Gen 1 etc)

Lady Helena Levy story from last Parish Mission: lady with cocktails answers door: “I’m afraid I’m an atheist.”
“O my dear, I am so terribly sorry.”

Qoheleth could not have been that modern and strange aberration, ‘the atheist’. He was a theist, trying to make sense of things.

Stephen Pinker & Fraser Watts interview in Third Way (Oct 2003) - still discussing Eccles (Pinker’s favourite Bible book - some have mischievously argued that Eccles 10.2 is Blaire’s favourite verse...) - Pinker & Watts trying to make sense of the brain and human consciousness. Pat of Qoheleth’s Bad News is that we are just like the animals (3.12-21). Pinker on the contrariness of atheism quote.

So in a way, Qoheleth is in a similar position to us - not dealing with people who don’t believe there is something else there
- but dealing with people who act as if the only important things are those that make them secure in secular society, here under the sun
- this he asserts is vanity, futility and a chasing after the wind.

But at the same time, like most of the Wisdom literature, Job and Jonah, Proverbs and some of the Psalms - he won’t let us get away with trite, easy answers. (5.1f)

My faith became more credible to my siblings when it became messier!

Qoheleth raises two other, ever contemporary problems:
The Problem of Knowledge & Wisdom (1.17f) He moves from enlightenment pursuit of knowledge to the madness and folly of Dada-ism, absurdism, the trippy 60s - drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll. And it is all a painful dead end.

The Problem of Evil - oppressors prosper! (4.1f) Postmodernity has no answer to the jackboot. One of the problems facing the West today, and Christians in particular - we do not know the answer of how to deal with violent evil. (Iraq & terrorism etc)

For Qoheleth, all these puzzles and mysteries, all these disturbing realities of life under the sun, leave no other choice than (12.13f): “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.”

Thank goodness that we have more to go on than Qoheleth; that like Paul we can say” “What a wretch I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God - through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom 7.24f)

George Herbert toyed with some of these issues in his poem The Pulley that plays on the Pandora’s box theme - but instead of chaos being unleashed and only hope remaining in the box, God keeps ‘rest’ in the bottle - there is never a complete and satisfactory answer to Life, the Universe and Everything - we can never be wholly at rest.

The Pulley

When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by;
Let us (said he) pour on him all we can:
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.

So strength first made a way;
The beauty flow'd, then wisdom, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottom lay.

For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.

ETERNITY IN THEIR HEARTS

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (Eccles 3.11)

Why do so many 20 somethings still live at home with their mum? My two nephews, 20 & 23 are prime examples.

Well, there are probably lots of perfectly good reasons, but Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X has a little cartoon of a 20 something son talking to his clearly exasperated father: “It’s like this dad. You can either have a mortgage, or a life. I’m having a life.”

Although written two and a half thousand years ago Ecclesiastes is a fascinating book. It’s famous opening words could be paraphrased: “Vanity of vanities, all is postmodernity.”

This captures something of the mood of contemporary society. It is meaninglessness with attitude; emptiness covered up by all the good things money can buy. Tesco ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am. The loneliness and ennui is eased by friendships and music, sex and sometimes drugs; and lashings of humour.

“Yet” says the Preacher, “they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Postmodernity is one of the most exciting, painful, challenging, opportunity-filled, anxiety ridden, faith building, depressing, faith destroying, enjoyable and contradictory of times to be alive. Postmodernity is the cultural climate that is increasingly pervading the world, spreading like a virus through TV, the arts, popular culture, ‘new’ politics and designer religion.

What would the Preacher of Ecclesiastes make of it all?

He would most certainly speak from the point of view of identifying with, and being part of, the culture. This can be one of the church’s biggest stumbling blocks, because most Christians are firmly locked into modernism, the outgoing philosophical climate; yesterday’s weather.

Worse still, many of us feel that there is something inherently Christian about modernism, despite the fact that it has only been around for a few centuries, although the Judaeo-Christian faith has been around for at least 35 centuries.

“She who marries the spirit of the age is sure to be a widow in the next”. So we must not ‘marry’ either modernity or postmodernity. But we must be so in touch with our culture that we feel its pain and know how to apply the balm of the Gospel.

Increasingly in our society, purpose is giving way to play; design to chance; founts of wisdom to pools of knowledge; Reason to reasons; the metanarrative, the Big Picture, to the micronarrative, the local story - the soaps, Big Brother. My primary school children know far more about the world of Pokemon and Harry Potter, than they do about the Christian Gospel that shaped their culture and gave them their school.

Dominic Crossan puts it this way in The Dark Internal:

“There is no lighthouse keeper. There is no lighthouse. There is no dry land. There are only people living on rafts made from their own imaginations. And there is sea.”

But eternity is firmly set in our hearts, says the Preacher: a divine uncomfortableness, a dis-ease with what is.

Postmodernity is a way of coping with that dis-ease. It does not make sense of life, but it helps you cope.

Christianity is also a way of coping and making sense of life. Not complete sense, for now we see through a glass darkly.

So we need to let God grasp people’s hearts and imaginations before God can transform their minds. And we must learn to live with uncertainty. Evangelism has never been easier; discipleship has never been harder.

How then should we live?

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts.”

As Christians we believe that we are not alone in the universe, because the Bible, the Church and Reason call us to believe that there is a ‘transcendent’ God, who is before and beyond all things.

Many postmoderns are sick of themselves. But where can they look but to themselves if there is no ‘Other’? We must present clearly the intimations of transcendence which God has planted throughout his universe - the eternity in our hearts:

Beauty and love, order and satisfaction, suffering and meaninglessness, the mystery of the Mass, the splendour of music and liturgy, the depth of Christian fellowship - all point to an Utterly Other. We believe that the ‘eternity within’ is no less than ‘Christ in us’, the hope of glory, the imago Dei, the image of God.

God, the Holy Trinity, is community, and in that community of love we find our identity in the postmodern sea of shifting images and personal fragmentation. Jesus’ command has never been more relevant: “Love one another as I have loved you… by this everyone will know that you are my disciples.” If we cannot demonstrably love one another, then we are failing the Christ whom we seek to follow.

It is as we worship and love in our Christian communities that we mirror, albeit imperfectly, the eternal God.

At best, the Church’s response to whatever intellectual climate it has found itself immersed in, has been - not a renewed set of dogma - but a renewed love of God through our worship, and a renewed effort to love and serve one another.

The death of dear friends and our own failing powers remind us that “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” But it’s time to fade comes.

Yet “He has also set eternity in their hearts” and in it’s time it will blossom into a newer and fuller life which starts now and which will grow on into the eternity of paradise.