I Jeremiah 11 & Romans 13
Do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them…
Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities…Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect….Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another…
First Jeremiah: The Lord said to me: Do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them.
God has spoken to Israel. But Israel has not replied. Or rather Israel has replied to every god of every one of the surrounding foreign powers. Israel likes to give itself away to every conceivable nonsense. Israel sells itself very cheap – changes gods with the season, always rolling out an improved model, a tragic fashion victim – that’s what we heard from Jeremiah last week. Who knows perhaps the people of Israel are secretly convinced that, once they had thoroughly wasted themselves and one another, the real God will still be there to come home to.
Jeremiah is God’s pray-er for Israel and to Israel, who has to point out that if we don’t talk to God we address our petitions, hopes and prayers to the latest re-launched updated contemporary God-image. Now the Lord makes Jeremiah tease and provoke Israel into reclaiming its pride and joy in being God’s beloved, in returning respect for respect and love for love. If we peek ahead to next week we find Jeremiah admitting that he cant not pray ‘If I say ‘I will not mention him or speak his name any more in his name, his word is in my heart like a fire, too strong I cant hold it in…..’.
Well, I cant think that that is like our society at all. We’d never do that. We wouldn’t waste the inheritance given to us, or wouldn’t exchange the love of God for us, and the truth of this love, for a series of lesser products just because we told that these other divinities are more exciting or contemporary.
But it was for us that this was written, Saint Paul tells us. Israel went through all distress this so we can see how huge and demanding is the life with God in order to make us want this life and ask for it. It is for us that Israel is different, has suffered all these indignities, recorded them and passed this record to us – out of love.
And it is for the world that we are different. We are the pray-ers and intercessors, and witnesses of God for this society of ours. We gather here to receive the love and truth of the God who let Jeremiah go through the mill for our sake, who sent us gentiles Paul the apostle, who taught the English to pray to the right God, who heard the prayers of the church that wrote the collects in this Prayer Book and built and re-built this building.
II Spirituality in the City
I have been asked to say something about Spirituality in the City – the book the theological discussion group has been reading, and to set out some questions. Let me just remind you of what is in the book, so two broad questions to kick off:
What do we mean by spirituality and what do we mean by city? Spirituality first.
In his chapter Rowan Williams tells us that:
1. ‘We need to rescue spirituality from some of the ways in which it has been domesticated,. …. It becomes only a code for techniques of making people feel a bit better about themselves… where the Spirit makes people ‘uncomfortable about themselves and their environment, critical and creative. (p. 24)
When the New Testament speaks of the life of ‘spirit’ it speaks about the virtues gifts of life together. It assumes that to grow in the spiritual life is to become free to give others what has been given to you
Spirituality cannot be treated as a separate issue, it is about the life with Christ and so discipleship as whole. No spirituality without the Spirit of the Son sent into our hearts whereby we call God Father. And the Spirit is engaged in the business of making us human, which of course means being in relationship with God.
2. The Church might open a way to the story of that city whose founder is God, and to citizenship in that community,… ready to explore their own ‘citizenship of heaven’ and to open it up to others in such a way as to transform the citizenship and the cities of this earth. (p.26)
The archbishop says what several contributors say –
3. The church is obliged just to be there speaking a certain language, telling a certain story, witnessing to certain non-negotiable things about humanity.
The contributors point out that spirituality does not mean escaping our grotty urban reality, and that even when polite society has given up and left it, the church does not leave the bad bits of town. Archbishop Williams is concerned by the poverty of imagination of the generation growing up in front of Play Station. He wants a Church to know it has something distinct from the surrounding culture of consumerism and endless re-validated ‘choice’. To be this distinct thing, in which other criteria, those of discipleship, operate. Then we have something distinct to offer this society.
The chapter I chose was ‘Spirituality in Everyday Life, by Andrew Davey. He tells us:
4. ‘The call to enter the new Jerusalem is one to participate in its maintenance, and to practise human formation in the presence of God… it enables us to celebrate and engage with, the life of the city in our quest for the ‘new ordering of God’ on earth as it is in heaven.’ (p. 106)
I think ‘practise human formation in the presence of God’ means that God’s presence, here amongst us in the worship, forms us human beings, on God’s definition, and that in all our worship and life together we practice being human together. Is that right?
What do we mean by City? Every contributor to this book refers to London then points out the inadequacy of this definition of city, for by city we also mean our Society. Our identity is not given only by our location in London, but also by the calendar..
According to Andrew Davey the calendar of the Church year gives us an alternative identity. We are located by the Scripture set out through the church year. Each reading, of Old testament, psalm, epistle and gospel, adds something and by a process of triangulation the sermon tells the result of all these readings of Scripture for who we are, where we are, which way we are facing and what is coming up.
5. Through the offering of the Eucharist, the offices, prayer and the sharing of Scriptures, Christians have a collection of tactics through which they can begin to reimagine and reshape the communities and context of which they are a part.
6. Liturgy in the city becomes a counter-cultural activity … the means through which Christians stake their interest in a place by creating events, new histories – concrete, historicized acts that proclaim God’s new order’.
7. In realising an urban spirituality those strategies come together as the Christian community becomes more aware of a memory that heals, redeems and transforms, of a narrative that, when told and prayed in community, allows the integrating principle to take root. (p. 111).
Finally Andrew Davey quotes Stephen Sykes:
8. ‘Would it not be consistent with the Anglican tradition to see our churches offering praise on behalf of a specific part of the world which God loves, the praise of which it has forgotten to express.’
In other words we have to pray for those who cannot pray for themselves. That is what we doing here. So when Andrew Davey talk about spirituality in everyday life, he says that this is about Christians worshipping God together in public. He says they speak for the whole city when they do.
A couple of questions – fair and unfair – about the book as a whole. Its editor Andrew Walker ‘is developing The London Centre for Spirituality at St Edmund the King’. Now wait a minute, we must say, this is the London Centre for Spirituality, here and now where we confess God, when humbled we ask almighty God if we may approach him with our petitions, meekly on our knees. This happens here and in the Sunday morning eucharist when we are all gathered together in one congregation. Just as that eucharistic loaf is lifted up high, so we are lifted up by the Son and just so in our prayers we lift up the whole world to God.
Isn’t St Mary’s Stoke Newington is the London centre for petitioning God, since it is God who petitions us? We do this when the whole congregation is present – made up as it is of all the unlikely and most contrary elements, the young, old, this and that class and ethnicity, this and that churchmanship, gathered and animated by the Spirit we pray and call on God and so become members of his Son. When the whole congregation is present we are the Spirit-filled, catholic people. Spirituality is not an add-on: it is our main and only business.
So there is plenty for us to extract from Spirituality in the City. But I think the best response to it comes from another little book. Actually it is the most immodest little book. It is the St Mary’s Church order of service for Eucharist and Holy Baptism. To read just one snippet:
‘For thou only art holy; thou only art the Lord; thou only, O Christ, with the Holy Spirit, art most High in the Glory of God the Father…’
You sing this without flinching. I am just amazed that the ideology police haven’t impounded this little book of ours, or don’t come running down the aisles blowing whistles and announcing that we can no longer make such claims in public. The most exciting book, the most controversial, is the very book we sing from, and it should be our next choice as book for the theology discussion group. We sing it – what do we mean by it? A Church that gave good answers to this would be doing its city a big favour.
III A catholic people
The most significant statement in this book is the quote from Sykes: We pray for those who do not pray for themselves. In two senses – we pray to God on their behalf. And we ask the leaders of society for what they should ask for themselves – chiefly some hope, aspiration and leadership.
‘Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities.’ This doesn’t just mean civil authorities. We are here under authority of Christ, who has given us the more gentle practices of his people the Church, of its worship, which we sing on behalf of London, but also to make London curious and envious. If do not follow this liturgy we will by default follow the liturgy of the many other counterfeit gods of the global marketplace and media.
‘Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities.’ The authority of Christ is made available to the whole Christian church, and the authority of the whole church is made available to us in the approachable figure of our own church leaders. They authority is good – let us tell them so until they become more convinced of it themselves. They authority is given by God for us, and it is good for us, and bad for us if we don’t receive it. Our priests and bishops are under the authority of the whole Christian church and tradition, the experience of many centuries. We must pray for them and encourage them to dispense that largesse to us. It is not only teaching, but it is discipline. By our praying to God for them and making requests to them we have to so change the climate that it is possible for the clergy to lead and give us the correction we need. But by the insistence of our prayers and petitions for them and to them, we have to give them the authority to speak to us in a new way.
I think we should illustrate the catholicity of the church in the eucharist is the hope of this city of ours. I have three suggestions:
1. We have to show that our congregation is not autonomous – not the whole Church – even in stoke Newington. So how would it be if we sent some (pre-sanctified) bread to every other little shop-front church in Hackney, and ask them to give us some word of encouragement, and perhaps even send us some bread back?
2. The economy of London is not autonomous, and the Church in London is not autonomous. So why don’t we send some (pre-sanctified) bread to one or two other cities in the world and ask them to give us some word of encouragement, and even send us some bread back that we can break in our eucharist? We are not a self-sufficient people: for example, in other cities all over the world people sew the clothes we wear in London, and I doubt we in London pay enough for them. How would it be if we sent bread, and whatever other tokens of encouragement we can think of, to whatever churches we can contact in one or two of those cities in the Philippines or South China where our clothes come from?
3. It is the job of this church to pray. I think the intercessions in the Sunday eucharist are one of the great things about this congregation. Here perhaps we could really hope to teach others. We should collect our intercessions and package them so we produce our own Lent course and discussion books in the hope that we can offer something distinct to our diocese and this city.
Every congregation worldwide and through out history is united by God with every other, and each prays for its part of the world, and speaks back to God in thankfulness. St Mary’s is the city on the hill, placed here so the rest of London can see our life together and say this is the people we want to become. This congregation is a city, a new society, inaugurated here. It speaks for those who do not know how to speak for themselves, and the poor and the voiceless can come and find their voice here. It does this because it itself is the product of the love and labour of the Holy Spirit who has placed us here before the world, gathered around Christ, in earshot of the Father so we can pray Lord hear us, Lord graciously hear us.
In the name of Father the Son and Holy Spirit Amen
