The Church does this extraordinary thing. It declares that its confidence in all previous generations of Christians. This is what we mean when we declare in public each time we say the creed that the Church is ‘one’. It is indivisible through time. The ancient church and the modern church are not two churches. The earlier church has not given way to the later. The earlier church is not wrong and the modern church right. There is just one single church, present through all generations indivisibly. There is not the ancient Church of the first disciples and the contemporary Church of us – for this would leave us with the impossible task of deciding what parts of the gospel are essential and which we can abandon. Its confidence is complete. Our Lord placed his confidence in the faithfulness of his Church because he himself is behind it, and because ultimately the Church is the body of the Lord, and the ongoing work of the Lord.
So we pray that the Lord will defend us from every elite that does not want to be accountable, that does not believe it has to listen to us, which become angry at anyone who tells them what they don’t want to hear. Save us from every self-appointed elite that does not want to hear that there is a crisis, and which wants to push onto others the costs and consequences of its way of life.
Defend us Lord from those who know better. Defend us from those who set themselves up over all previous generations. Take away those who set themselves between us and all previous generations of your saints. Let us hear your saints again, and let us receive from them the full measure of the discipleship that we need. Do not let us refuse what these Christians have to give us. Let us take from them what they give us, and honour them, and hope to lead the some sanctified lives. They passed on the gospel for us. They are a message from you to us. Let us be glad of the churches and the worship, the hymns and prayers that are their gift to us. Let us understand these churches as their act of generosity toward us, and as a living scripture. They are your gift to us, and are intended to show us our way.
It is the calling of the Church always to hold itself as some distance from the regime of the day. We call this ‘secularisation’. There is a secular sphere, in which a wide range of ways of life and of discussion of ways of maintaining the common good are sustained, when the Church maintains its critical distance, stays cautious, and so is able to ask the questions that that sphere needs to hear. This is the prophetic office of the church. Christians are prophets, able to say how the community and government overreach themselves and exceed their authority. The Church says. The nation and its government can listen if they want to, take whatever advice they want. It is not the job of the government to become the body telling us what to think.
The clergy of the Church of England have created over these last decades a ‘gospel’ which is utterly unattractive and unrecognisable to the people of this country. They have removed all the elements that surprise and shock. They have removed the terror and delight of the gospel. They have bowdlerised it and rendered it harmless. But Christ cannot be domesticated. He is not harmless. Only we are harmed when we decide that we know better than all previous generations of the Church.
Defend us Lord from those who shush us up, who want us to be content with a lesser gospel, who do not want to put the whole gospel in our hands, who water down the wine that God intended for us. They deflect our questions and patronise and belittle. Defend us from those from those who know better, who set themselves over us and consider themselves superior to us. Give back to them what they deal out to us. Do not let us identify with them and set ourselves up in judgement. Pardon and give them grace to seek your forgiveness.
