Month: January 2018

The twentieth century has been one long retreat from this God-given permission to love. We are not inviting people to be good. We know well that it is impossible to ‘be good’.  We cannot. Salvation is what we are hoping for. What we are saying is that there is a love that is true and real and lasting. There is this real love, and there are many fraudulent copies of it.  We are simply telling anyone who will listen that they have no need to content themselves with what is fake. They don’t need to be fake people with fake love, because they can have love that is lasting and real. They are not bound to live with any fraudulent love, always fearful that even that will be withdrawn by anyone who is even less confident than ourselves.

Marriage is our public acknowledgement that lasting love is reciprocal, consensual and productive. Marriage gives us public permission to suffer, to endure and to learn the character by which we can do so. We love truly by passing on the love we have received from God, who is the source of all love, and who is the only guarantor that this love will one day come good.

The baby-boomer preoccupation with equality may have served many of them through their careers in the first half of their lives. But it is going to undo that service in the second-half of their lives,  as they themselves become what they never imagined – passive and dependent. All the freedom they took for themselves is going to disappear, for there is no longer enough social capital or social fabric to sustain it. They do not live among their own people. They live among their own elderly age-cohort. For forty years that age cohort has acted as though it were a community of its own, and so has not been concerned to support relationships with the nation outside that cohort. They can enjoy no community-mediated freedom now, because they never bothered to build that community.  They took care to make themselves wealthier than those coming after them. As a result people twenty and thirty and more years younger than they, do not know them. Their children now live far away; they can visit, but they cannot stay, and since they are no part of the neighbourhood, they bring no one new into the house. In the absence of that social fabric, they lapse into immobile old age in a void. Their own friends are losing their ability to travel and disappear into infirmity as they are, all them committed to health appointments, first monthly then weekly until their health becomes their sole preoccupation.

They did not bother to keep family ties strong, because for much of their lives they substituted fake for real relationships. They adopted as their own the relationships and personalities portrayed to them by the media. In the evenings they gaze at these fictional characters presented to them by television with same fondness as though they were gazing at their own grandchildren. But relationships broadcast by the media are without reciprocity, more worship than friendship.  Our elderly baby boomers never worked or worshipped or ate or drank together with anyone who now passes their window. Those who pass them now, do so in cars, not on foot on the pavement, so there can be no exchange of greetings. Dog-walking is the only means of striking new up relationships in England now.  The social changes they started are now going to roll right over them. They are going to live, get old and die alone, in a society that presently consists only of their own cohort.  For each of them, the first of the many lurches down into housebound ill-health will push them overnight into a society of complete aliens, care workers who with whom they have no equal relationship, who owe them nothing and with whom there is no shared culture. The baby-boomers have had their own way. They have built the world in which no lasting ties, obligations or sense of place were acknowledged.

What can they do? They can repent. They can go to church, and spend the remainder of their time there, before the altar, saying morning and evening prayer, keeping the doors open and making welcome all those whom they used to be too busy to acknowledge. There is a choice to be made.  They can spend their last months listening to the secular liturgy of radio and television, sitting alone until the ambulance comes for them for the last time. Or they can kneel before the altar, spend their last year in church with the angels and saints and passers-by, praying for the world, being reconciled with those they once spurned and preparing themselves to meet their Lord. They need to choose to curl up before the altar of God if they do not wish to die before the Moloch they have created.

What is wrong with this Church of ours, that it makes no impact, that it is silent, has nothing to say or contribute to the world around us? What is wrong is that this church has muffled the gospel, and concealed from itself that this is what it has done. This suppression has been going on for so long that we are now only very tenuously connected to the true Church, the true Church that is created and sustained by the gospel. But we have to hear and return to that one, holy catholic and apostolic Church, the Church of all places and all ages, if the ‘Church of England’ is to be what its name claims.

We have taken out the cross. We have a gospel without truth and judgement, a message of mere empathy and affirmation, an inoffensive gospel, no longer able to cut through any of the contrary claims it meets. Our church does not see how much trouble our neighbours are in and does not go to their aid. Its ‘gospel’ offers them no diagnosis, and no corrective, no medicine, no surgery. It does not challenge the thugs who hold them captive; it neither warns nor threatens them. It does not even identify what it is that ties people down and holds them captive; it does not point out what our troubles are or who is inflicting them on us.

We have divided the gospel into two gospels of love and of truth, and we have chosen love and given up truth. And the result is that our love is no longer truthful; it has no characteristics at all, and so no staying-power, no ability to form people so that they can continue to love no matter what happens. We have got used to half-truths and falsehoods, and do not notice the damage being inflicted on those around us. Without truth and judgement, there is no true love.

But the Gospel of Jesus Christ reveals what is true. It judges us, so we are able to see that we do not measure up to what is true. It shows this judgement by each, of all; it shows that none of us meets the criterion for a finished human being. It stops and confronts us and tells us that we are going the wrong way and must turn around and go back towards what we were running away from. It brings disagreement and controversy; it stirs up anger and defensiveness and brings hard words. It reveals that we have condemned ourselves and we have condemned one another.

No offence – no cross  – no gospel

No gospel – no Church

But thou art the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy….

The Church is holy, and holy is what it must want to be. Let us put it this way.

Christ is our husband. The Church is his bride. He provides for it and protects it. When it is glad about this and acknowledges him as husband, the Church is a functioning body of witness to Christ, who is the source and the truth of our humanity. When the Church does not acknowledge Christ as its husband, it becomes confused, anxious and divided, and its members are scattered and picked off by other predatory forces.

Now the Church is also the Body of Christ, the Lord’s mode of embodiment here and now, for the world. So in the same way, united to Christ, the Church is husband, and the nation is bride. The Church is here to provide for the nation, to protect it and give it its identity. The Church blesses, that is, talks up the nation, so that the nation can grow up to be a united communion of persons glad to belong to each other. Then each member of the nation recognises every other as a fellow member of this political community. But if the Church does not pass on to the nation what the Lord gives us, then its members will no longer remember why they should be glad to belong to it, the nation will become weak, confused and divided, and the Church will be responsible for this. The state of the nation shows the husbandry of the Church. It reveals when we Christians have not done our job. If the nation despises the Church, it is because the Church has not loved the nation enough to give it what it needs. The nation that despises the Church also despises itself.

For the nation’s sake the Church must remain holy and distinct, so that it always has what the nation does not possess, and so always has something to give it. The worst thing we can do for the nation is to stop being the holy Church, and become afraid of the world and conform ourselves to it. So, do not be afraid. Be holy. Stand out.

Common Worship is good, the Lectionary is good and the hymn book is good. They are faithful and they are powerful. With them we can joyfully follow the Lord around the Christian year, and we can take our worship outside the church through the seasons. With them we can worship in church and we can take that worship out with us so its witness is seen and heard in any public space, outside church or any other public building.  When we do this, we are doing the very best for our town and nation we can.

Any and every member of the parish can turn up and lead this worship.  This public prayer is our central unchanging act. By it we may defy the spirit of the age and disarm the powers. Our service to England is to tell it that it is not bound, it need not be afraid, it can keep its hopes as high as ever. We warn it that the nation is full of agencies intending to reduce our options in some way. They all want something from us, all intend to get their suckers into us. The world is full of little power-brokers trying to raise their own status until it is so high that they are no longer accountable to us. Though they will not admit it, they want our worship. They want to be our gods.

Each Christian congregation must spell out in its public worship that only the true God keeps all these fakes and frauds accountable, and so prevents them from acquiring divine status, and turning us into their worshippers. We reject them and withhold from them the worship they want. We publicly re-direct all  worship from the fake gods to the true God. That is the point of Christian worship.

So for you and me, the best thing we can do is to open the Hymn book, Lectionary,  and Common Worship and sing, read and pray our way through them, every day, sometimes in church, sometimes outside church, visible and audible to the world around us, until we become a common sight in town, and our neighbours start to desert their fake gods and follow the only God who will do them any good.