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)
Today’s readings need little explanation. Jeremiah is about lying prophets, Romans about sin, and the Gospel about generous hospitality. God is against the first two and for the last one.
So that gives me time to think about our verse from Ecclesiastes.
Now it’s no secret that tomorrow is a significant birthday for Fr Alan. In fact I overheard a conversation the other day when a small boy, awed by his mature gravitas, asked him: “Were you in the ark?” “No” chuckled Fr Alan. The thoughtful young boy looked quizzically at him and asked “Then why weren’t you drowned?”
The last 40 years have seen a significant shift in the philosophical climate of our society. It is nearly 40 years since Alan Bennett wrote Forty Years On, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Fr Alan belongs to that demographic group called ‘Generation X’ who grew up in the 60s & 70s. I bought (for 1 shilling & ninepence!) the book ‘Generation X’ published the year before Fr Alan was born. The year Mandela went into prison on Robben Island.
Those 40 years also saw the emergence of ‘postmodernity’.
Although written two and a half thousand years ago Ecclesiastes is a fascinating book. Its famous opening words could be paraphrased: “Vanity of vanities, all is postmodernity.”
Postmodernity describes, not so much a movement, but a mood in 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, alcohol and other drugs; and lots of idle humour. Veni, vidi, velcro - I came, I saw, I stuck around.
“Yet” says the Preacher in our verse, “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 century or so, although the Judaeo-Christian faith has been around for at least 35 centuries.
However, “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 of Jesus Christ.
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. 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.
How then should we live? How carry out the Great Commission to make disciples of all?
Well, evangelism has never been easier; but discipleship has never been harder. This is why 70% of our population claim to be Christians but our churches grow emptier by the week. (Although the picture is more encouraging in London, where numbers are increasing and where yesterday in a completely packed St Paul’s Cathedral, 34 men and women were ordained deacon.)
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts,” says the Preacher.
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. Yet we still have a Gospel to proclaim, even if we must do so with confident hope rather than fundamentalist certainty. Faith is, as Kierkegaard put it, a passionate commitment made in objective uncertainty.
As Christians we assert 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 that 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 this music and liturgy - 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.”
Part of the tragedy of the rifts that have been dug deeper this week at the Anglican Consultative Council is in the animosity shown by some of the participants.
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, not more resolutions and rules - but a renewed love of God through our worship, and a renewed effort to love and serve one another.
We all get older, and the death of dear friends and our own failing powers remind us that although “He has made everything beautiful in its time,” as Ecclesiastes reminds us, its time to fade will surely come.
Yet “he has also set eternity in their hearts” and in its time, if we will let it, this will blossom into a newer and fuller life which starts now, and which will grow on into the eternity of paradise.
