Avenue St Andrew’s United Reformed Church Southampton
'CHRISTIANITY MUST CHANGE OR DIE'
'FINGERS CROSSED'
Murdoch MacKenzie
February 2002
Introduction
Today there are something like 6 billion people in the world. By the year 2025 there will be 8.5 billion people. Between them they share a myriad of world views, some more dogmatic than others, but each of which could be categorised as a 'faith stance' because, whether we like it or not, we live by faith and not by sight, even if we make sight our faith. These world views have to take account of both the 'beyond' and the 'within', the transcendent and the immanent. The big question is whether there is any 'beyond' either in space or in time or is the existential 'now' of our own lives all we have to deal with, with life being simply ' a walking shadow, a poor player, which struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. ' and is it true that ' all our yesterdays have simply lighted fools the way to dusty death ' ? (Macbeth)
I quote Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) because the other dimension in which we live is human history and whilst Shakespeare was, in a sense, a renaissance person, he could hardly be described as post-modern. Part of the way in which our thinking is being hijacked these days is the bland assumption that 'western' people in our deconstructed society are somehow intrinsically different from all other human beings who have ever lived. The ideas that man has come of age and that God is dead are not new but some of our contemporaries make the fatally flawed mistake of believing that they are and that therefore the wisdom both of those who live elsewhere in other cultures in the world today and of those who have lived throughout the centuries can simply be set aside. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) put his finger on it in 1733 when he wrote his famous words:
'Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man. '
But you will say this was a whole century after Descartes (1596 - 1650) with his 'Cogito, ergo sum.' by which time Europeans were well launched into the Enlightenment. But if you go into the Bible itself in Psalm 14 and in other places we read: ' The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God." ' There were plenty of people around in Jesus' day who were quite sceptical about his activities and were prepared to say: ' Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us? ' and who took offence at him, (Mark 6:3) whilst others queried whether any good thing could come out of Nazareth (John 1:46) and at Nazareth itself they rose up, put him out of the city, led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, and tried to throw him down headlong.(Luke 4:29) Even after the resurrection, it wasn't only Thomas who doubted, but amongst those who had actually seen Jesus, whilst some worshipped him, there were some who doubted. (Matthew 28:17) The letter of James wrestles with the matter of doubt. ' If any of you lacks wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you. But ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind; for the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord.' (James 1:5-8) Now, we may or may not agree with that, but the point I am trying to make is that the experience of doubt, as over against faith, was not unknown to pre-Enlightenment or pre-Post Modern people. Similarly the Letter of Jude written about 66 AD exhorts those who are called to 'convince those who doubt'.(Jude 1:22)
I say all this by way of introduction because it seems to me that some of those in what might be called ' The Christianity Must Change or Die ' school of thought lay far too much emphasis on the idea that we somehow know better and have a different kind of knowledge than other human beings who have lived on the face of the earth before us. Much of what they say, of course, is worth saying, and some of the conclusions they reach are very helpful, but they are not necessarily new just because they are supported by modern science or form-critical analysis, which in themselves are acts of faith.
CHANGE OR DIE
That Christianity must change or die is self-evident but it will only change by dying. Someone once said: ' Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it bears much fruit.' ( John 12:24 ) Ian Fraser has a prayer which says:
Lord God
whose son was content to die
to bring new life, have mercy on your church
which will do anything you ask,
anything at all,
except die
and be reborn.'
It has been said that Jesus preached the Kingdom and all that happened was the church to which we have given a capital 'C' in the mistaken belief that this was the Kingdom. Like Uzzah, who put out his hand to steady the ark (2 Samuel 6:6 1 Chronicles 13:9) we have become such control freaks that instead of the risky journey to which we are called of launching out into the deep, taking up our cross daily and following the man who had nowhere to lay his head, we have forgotten that he said that those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12:25). We have forgotten that the wind blows where it chooses, and that we hear the sound of it , but do not know where it comes from or where it goes. (John 3:8) We have forgotten that the love of God is broader than the measures of man's mind and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind. And instead we have created the sorry sight of the institutional church with all it's pride and prejudice, rules and regulations and plethora of platitudes so that the word 'theological', for most educated people, has come to mean 'theoretical' and not that which leads to truth.
TRUTH
So let's think about truth. Karl Barth, whose Church Dogmatics occupy a fair amount of space on some of our study shelves, when asked to sum up the common faith in one sentence, quoted the opening line of the hymn by Anna Bartlett Warner:
'Jesus loves me ! this I know,
for the Bible tells me so.'
The theological niceties with which some people in the church seem so strangely fascinated often mean very little to those at the grass-roots of our churches, who would simply like to love one another with the love with which God in Christ loves them, the Christ who warned against the hypocrisy of the scribes and pharisees, who were so little conversant with what we now call the hierarchy of truths that they strained out a gnat whilst swallowing a camel ! (Matthew 23:24) When Jesus was asked for his 'text message' on the hierarchy of truths as far as summing up the Law was concerned, he suggested that they try loving God on the one hand and their neighbour on the other.
You may remember that in 1973 Fritsche Schumacher published his famous book called 'Small is Beautiful' which was sub-titled ' A Study of Economics as if People Mattered ' (1) and as far as we are concerned in 2002 that means the 6 billion people whom I mentioned at the beginning of this talk. In the same way we must do our theology as if those people mattered and in fact rediscover with Ian Fraser (2) and with John Drane (3), not to mention Paulo Freire (4) and Ivan Illich (5), that theology is the people's work and not simply that of those who sit in theological colleges on the one hand and church bureaucracies on the other. Perhaps like the tables of the money-changers some of this must be swept aside and die in order that real change can happen. In Jesus the Word became flesh and as someone once said; ' The problem is that we have turned him into words again.' He never wrote a book and the only record we have of his writing anything was when he wrote in the sand as recorded in John 8:6, a passage much loved by Australian aborigines, but no doubt the wind came and blew what he had written away. For Jesus and his contemporaries, as for the aborigines, it was the oral tradition which mattered, person to person, the accuracy of which, and by implication the truth of which, is now questioned by its post-modern critics. It was Kierkegaard who said that even if someone had followed Jesus around with a shorthand notebook and written down verbatim every word he said it would have made no difference. Just as for his contemporaries in his lifetime it would still be for us a matter of person to person faith.
As Christians we have spent centuries endlessly filling theological libraries with books and papers, constitutions, canon law, summa theologicae and annual reports. Some people vividly remember the occasion when a commissioner to the Church of Scotland General Assembly waved the famous blue book of reports above his head and asked: ' Moderator, what has all this to do with Jesus of Nazareth ?' The members of Anglican General Synods have their bags bulging with papers and the most recent book of Canon Law of the Latin Rite Catholic Church has 1752 canons. When Pilate asked Jesus: 'What is truth?' it wasn't that Pilate didn't stay for an answer as suggested by Francis Bacon, he had the answer standing incarnated before him in the person of Jesus of whom, shortly afterwards, he famously was to say: 'Ecce homo!' 'Behold the man!' Behold the man. Jesus could have given Pilate a propositional answer in the form of an aphorism or creed but instead he was silent and simply presented himself.
T.K. Thomas once told the story of a Japanese missionary in Thailand entering into theological discussion with a few deeply religious Buddhist monks. Thinking that St John's Gospel would be the right place to start he opened the first verse of the first chapter and read: ' In the beginning was the Word.' 'My' said one of the Buddhist monks 'even in the beginning you Christians didn't have a little time for silence.' (6) We all know that actions speak louder than words and if the church is to die and thus change we need to stop flagellating people with endless doctrinal statements rather than with love in action or loving action. Because that is what Jesus is about and what life is about and what truth is about and what the church should be about, especially if it is to be truly ecumenically involved with the lives of our 6 billion sisters and brothers who inhabit the household of the world with us. In UT UNUM SINT the Holy Father says: 'Love for the truth is the deepest dimension of any authentic quest for full communion between Christians.' (7) But surely that truth is personal and not propositional. St Thomas Aquinas summed up the personal nature of truth when he wrote:
'What God's Son has told me, take for true I do;
Truth himself speaks truly or there's nothing true.' (8)
If we believe in the freedom of the Spirit and that the wind blows where it wills (John 3:8) then ultimately that truth cannot be equated with the teaching of the Church but can only be equated with Christ himself as we really meet him, encounter him in real bread and wine, in the beggar at our door, in our sisters and brothers of what we call other denominations, in our 6 billion contemporaries on planet earth including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea and hopefully in the teaching of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church to which we confess to belong. Otherwise we will fall into the trap of which we are warned by Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he says: ' He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.' (9) ' I am the way, the truth and the life ' says Jesus (John 14:6) and adds that no-one comes to the Father except personally through himself.
CHRISTIANITY AND RELIGION
Jesus said: ' You will know the truth and the truth will make you free. ' (John 8:32) St Paul said: ' For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast then and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.' ( Galatians 5:1) The word 'religion' means the opposite of all that, the opposite of freedom. It's root is in the Latin verb 'religare' which means 'to bind'. On the Cross of Calvary Jesus said; ' It is finished ' , bowed his head and gave up his spirit at which moment, as recorded in all three synoptic gospels, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. This meant that religion, all religion, was at an end that people were set free to be true worshippers to worship God in spirit and in truth neither on Mount Gerizim nor on Mount Zion. A people's movement untrammelled by priests and precepts was soon to be inaugurated in spirit and in truth at Pentecost which was to be known as The Way, for which John the Baptist had been the forerunner or pacemaker, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ' Prepare ye the way of the Lord. ' (Mark 1:3) The Acts of the Apostles bears witness to the fact that the early followers of Jesus, with their alternative lifestyle, were known as the people of The Way. (Acts 9:2, 19:9, 19:23, 22:4, 24:22). It was in Antioch that they were first called 'Christians' (Acts 11:26) and at Caesarea, King Agrippa said to Paul: ' In a short time you think to make me a Christian!' (Acts 26:28) whilst in 1 Peter 4:16 we read: ' yet if any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name. ' Within 300 years what began in people's houses around a real breakfast table as a people's movement under God, was to become a religion called Christianity which after the battle of Mulvian Bridge across the River Tiber on October 28th 312 AD became part of the establishment on the order of the Emperor Constantine. At this point the veil of the temple was reinstated and the institutionalisation of Christianity had begun in earnest. If we take the Eucharist as an example. The family meal round a real breakfast table in someone's house moved to a church building which was the beginning of the end. As William Barclay puts it: ' There can be no two things more different than the celebration of the Lord's Supper in a Christian home in the first century and in a cathedral in the twentieth century. The things are so different that it is almost possible to say that they bear no relationship to each other. The liturgical splendour of the twentieth century was in the first century not only unthought of; it was totally impossible.' (10) It also moved from being a real meal into being a symbolic meal. As Barclay says: ' The idea of a tiny piece of bread and sip of wine bears no relation at all to the Lord's Supper as it originally was. It was not until the Synod of Hippo in AD 393 that the idea of fasting communion emerged. The Lord's Supper was originally a family meal in a household of friends.' It also moved from being an act of the heart's devotion to being a centre of theological debate. The quite simple ' Look what he did for you!' ended up in complicated questions about the real presence of Christ in the elements and of whether or not it was a propitiatory sacrifice, questions which in the early days it would never have occurred to anyone even to ask.
According to William Barclay it also moved from being a lay function to being a priestly function. ' In the New Testament itself there is no indication that it was the special privilege or duty of anyone to lead the worshipping fellowship in the Lord's Supper. In the Didache (date uncertain - possibly first century) again there is no mention of any special celebrant. In fact the prophets are to be allowed to hold Eucharist as they will. (Didache 10.7) In Justin Martyr (AD 100-167) the person who presides is the president of the brethren, and it is pointed out that the phrase so translated could quite legitimately be translated 'that one of the brethren who was presiding'. (Justin Martyr, First Apology 65) To all this there is one exception - Ignatius.(AD 98-117) In the Letters of Ignatius the bishop has acquired a place of paramount importance. ' We must regard the bishop as the Lord himself.' (Ignatius, To the Ephesians 6.1) 'Let that be considered a valid Eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop, or by one whom he appoints......It is not lawful either to baptise or to hold an agape without the bishop.' (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 8.1ff) The plain fact is that in this matter Ignatius stands alone. In the early period of the Church there is no other evidence that the celebration of the Eucharist was confined to any one person. But in Ignatius the celebration of the Eucharist has become the function of the ministry.' (11)
If ever there was a place where we need to walk by faith and not by sight it is in the Eucharist. Some of the incredibility of the church in the world centres round this sacrament of unity which has become the sacrament of disunity. Perhaps you know the little book 'The Millennium Jubilee' issued by CAFOD. In the chapter 'Towards a Just Millennium' Ed O'Connell SSC writes: 'The year 2000 is to be intensely Eucharistic. During this year, the Church around the world should work to overcome the dramatic gaps between people and bring divided people around the same table: wealthy and poor, North and South, employed and unemployed, peoples divided by cultures, fears and discriminations...the list could be endless.' (12) Of course it could and I wonder if in any way it might just include Catholics and Protestants gathering around the same table because until it does the 6 billion people, who are divided by cultures, will never believe. We seem to live in little worlds of our own forgetting that there is a big wide world out there which God loves and for which Jesus died. It is amazing just how insensitive, how exclusive (even at the point of trying to be inclusive) each of our denominations can be and we could each give our own examples. The church must die to all of this and become so incarnated in the inclusive love of Jesus for the world in order that people may begin to believe that these Christians both love one another and love them.
Those who defend exclusivity at the Lord's Table sometimes quote Jesus as saying: ' So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.' (Matthew 5:23-24) Well, if that is so, and who could doubt that it is so, then we would have no more eucharists, a moratorium on Communion and the Mass, until such time as we were sure that we had so spoken the truth in love that we were at peace with one another, and then and then only, dare we utter the words and declare that we who are many are one body because we all share the one bread. Perhaps then we will hear the voice of Jesus from the shores of the Sea of Galilee issuing his personal invitation to each one of us to come and have breakfast, something of which we were reminded so movingly a few years ago at Swanwick by our own Bishop Crispian.
THE ECUCOMICAL MOVEMENT
In the light of all this is it any wonder that many of our educated contemporaries use the word 'theological' to mean theoretical. I suppose I may have been asked to give this talk as a kind of ecumenical voice crying in the wilderness of a divided church. Indeed a friend of mine who had served in the Church of North India on his return to Scotland described the experience as ' having been in the promised land and returning to the wilderness. ' An atheist friend in Edinburgh knowing my interest in Christian unity but seeing the state of the churches used to speak of what he called ' the ecucomical movement. ' It was Rabbie Burns who wrote:
'O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!'
And how do others see us ? They certainly think the church must change or die. The editorial in The Guardian on Easter Saturday 1999 appeared under the heading: 'EASTER IS DYING' This brilliant double entendre was followed by these words:
' Like it or not, Easter is only saved from the fate of Pentecost, another crucial Christian feast which requires a huge leap of faith and which has disappeared from the secular diary, by an unholy alliance of the confectionery industry, DIY chains and garden centres. Who ever talks of Whitsun now ? Perhaps in a few more decades, Good Friday will sound similarly dated. '
More recently on 5th September 2001 we had no less than the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster in an off-the-cuff remark declare that Christianity 'is nearly vanquished in Britain'. The next day the Daily Telegraph had the picture of a stern looking Cardinal juxtaposed with that of a young girl in tears and all because Catholics and Protestants cannot go to school together. Is it any wonder that my cousin, who as far as I know doesn't have much time for religion, although she is married to the son of an Archdeacon, says in her Christmas letter from Alice Springs in Australia: ' It's been a horrid year world-wide hasn't it? And far from over. When will Peace ever come to Israel - Ireland: let alone the traumas let loose by bin Laden. And all the conflict is religion-based...make of it what you will.' Is it any wonder that my son-in-law, a refugee Muslim from Bosnia, having seen what he had to live through in the midst of ethnic cleansing, has no time whatsoever for religion and what do I as a follower of Jesus Christ say to my grandchildren, who are a quarter Scottish, a quarter English and half Bosnian, what can I say to them about religion other than that it must die and did in fact die, nailed to a cross on a rubbish tip outside the institutional walls of Jerusalem, until we reinvented it again and let it loose upon an unsuspecting world.
Interestingly enough the Editorial page in The Independent on 7th September contained two large headlines which read: ' The collapse of organised religion should not cause hand-wringing despair ' and ' Don't ask me to weep if Christianity is "vanquished" '. The burden of their song was quite simply that it is not true to say as the Cardinal does that moral values have disappeared and here I quote: ' Many of the fundamental values taught by Jesus Christ are so deeply embedded in the assumptions of our society that it is impossible to believe that they could ever be "all but eliminated" - another colourful phrase of his. The ideals of love, of forgiveness and of treating others as of equal worth are as valued now as they ever were; it is the secondary issues of abortion, gay rights and the role of women, on which Jesus did not pronounce directly, which are disputed within and between churches, and in the wider society. ' and we might add are certainly pronounced upon by Bishop Spong. One of the only good things that David Aaronovitch had to say about the church was about third world projects: ' I have no wish to see the churches die. You will find an internationalism in your local church, with its exhibitions of projects in the third world, that you won't discover anywhere else. ' But then comes the rub. He goes on: ' I like to see the vicar walking from the vicarage to the church in his robes. I enjoy the sense of continuity, and it makes a change from estate agents. ' How irrelevant is the whole paraphernalia of our outward garments, our vested interests, in both senses of the word, as over against our inward devotion to the man whose only piece of property he had on earth was his cloak and who had nowhere to lay his head.
But September 7th was just four days before September 11th the day, which some people say has changed the world. You would have thought that it would have so concentrated the minds of our church leaders that they could have picked up on the words of Phyllis and Orlando Roderiguez of New York who, the moment after the attack on the World Trade Centre, said publicly:
' Our son Greg is among the many missing from the World Trade Centre attack. We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet..... We suspect that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son's death. Not in our son's name.'
But instead of adopting the faith stance of Jesus of Nazareth, who trusted in God alone and would never meet evil with evil, Christianity or the church, has remained as irrelevant as ever in the face of the systematic bombing of innocent people in Afghanistan and judging by today's announcement the possible bombing of Iraq, Iran and North Korea on the basis that they have nuclear and chemical weapons which we wish to inspect. I doubt if we would allow them to come and inspect ours if they asked to do so.
I heard someone interviewed on these matters and when asked about the future of the world that person replied: ' O, we'll just have to keep our fingers crossed. ' Jesus' fingers were crossed, crucified, with the nails of high priests and politicians but as he walked by faith and not by sight he forgave them all in an act of supreme non-violence and love. He died that we might be forgiven. He died to set us free The church must learn to do likewise in order that the 6 billion people in this world may believe that vicars really are different from estate agents and that the transcendent is actually immanent.
Murdoch MacKenzie
1. E.F. Schumacher 'Small is Beautiful' ABACUS 1974
2. Ian M Fraser 'Reinventing Theology as the People's Work' Wild Goose Publications 1980
3. John Drane 'The McDonaldisation of the Church' Darton, Longman and Todd 2000
4. Paulo Freire 'Pedagogy for the Poor'
5. Ivan Illich 'Deschooling Society' Harper and Row 1971
6. T.K.Thomas in 'Morning, Noon and Night' by John Carden pg 18 Church Missionary Society 1976
7. UT UNUM SINT Section 36 Catholic Truth Society 1995
8. St Thomas Aquinas quoted in Dictionary of Religious Quotations - Margaret Pepper pg 423 Andre
Deutsch 1989
9. S.T. Coleridge ' Aids to Reflection: Moral and Religious Aphorisms ' xxv
10. William Barclay ' The Lord's Supper ' SCM 1967
11. Ibid
12. The Millennium Jubilee CAFOD 1996 pg 12
February 2002
Introduction
Today there are something like 6 billion people in the world. By the year 2025 there will be 8.5 billion people. Between them they share a myriad of world views, some more dogmatic than others, but each of which could be categorised as a 'faith stance' because, whether we like it or not, we live by faith and not by sight, even if we make sight our faith. These world views have to take account of both the 'beyond' and the 'within', the transcendent and the immanent. The big question is whether there is any 'beyond' either in space or in time or is the existential 'now' of our own lives all we have to deal with, with life being simply ' a walking shadow, a poor player, which struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. ' and is it true that ' all our yesterdays have simply lighted fools the way to dusty death ' ? (Macbeth)
I quote Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) because the other dimension in which we live is human history and whilst Shakespeare was, in a sense, a renaissance person, he could hardly be described as post-modern. Part of the way in which our thinking is being hijacked these days is the bland assumption that 'western' people in our deconstructed society are somehow intrinsically different from all other human beings who have ever lived. The ideas that man has come of age and that God is dead are not new but some of our contemporaries make the fatally flawed mistake of believing that they are and that therefore the wisdom both of those who live elsewhere in other cultures in the world today and of those who have lived throughout the centuries can simply be set aside. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) put his finger on it in 1733 when he wrote his famous words:
'Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man. '
But you will say this was a whole century after Descartes (1596 - 1650) with his 'Cogito, ergo sum.' by which time Europeans were well launched into the Enlightenment. But if you go into the Bible itself in Psalm 14 and in other places we read: ' The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God." ' There were plenty of people around in Jesus' day who were quite sceptical about his activities and were prepared to say: ' Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us? ' and who took offence at him, (Mark 6:3) whilst others queried whether any good thing could come out of Nazareth (John 1:46) and at Nazareth itself they rose up, put him out of the city, led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, and tried to throw him down headlong.(Luke 4:29) Even after the resurrection, it wasn't only Thomas who doubted, but amongst those who had actually seen Jesus, whilst some worshipped him, there were some who doubted. (Matthew 28:17) The letter of James wrestles with the matter of doubt. ' If any of you lacks wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you. But ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind; for the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord.' (James 1:5-8) Now, we may or may not agree with that, but the point I am trying to make is that the experience of doubt, as over against faith, was not unknown to pre-Enlightenment or pre-Post Modern people. Similarly the Letter of Jude written about 66 AD exhorts those who are called to 'convince those who doubt'.(Jude 1:22)
I say all this by way of introduction because it seems to me that some of those in what might be called ' The Christianity Must Change or Die ' school of thought lay far too much emphasis on the idea that we somehow know better and have a different kind of knowledge than other human beings who have lived on the face of the earth before us. Much of what they say, of course, is worth saying, and some of the conclusions they reach are very helpful, but they are not necessarily new just because they are supported by modern science or form-critical analysis, which in themselves are acts of faith.
CHANGE OR DIE
That Christianity must change or die is self-evident but it will only change by dying. Someone once said: ' Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it bears much fruit.' ( John 12:24 ) Ian Fraser has a prayer which says:
Lord God
whose son was content to die
to bring new life, have mercy on your church
which will do anything you ask,
anything at all,
except die
and be reborn.'
It has been said that Jesus preached the Kingdom and all that happened was the church to which we have given a capital 'C' in the mistaken belief that this was the Kingdom. Like Uzzah, who put out his hand to steady the ark (2 Samuel 6:6 1 Chronicles 13:9) we have become such control freaks that instead of the risky journey to which we are called of launching out into the deep, taking up our cross daily and following the man who had nowhere to lay his head, we have forgotten that he said that those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12:25). We have forgotten that the wind blows where it chooses, and that we hear the sound of it , but do not know where it comes from or where it goes. (John 3:8) We have forgotten that the love of God is broader than the measures of man's mind and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind. And instead we have created the sorry sight of the institutional church with all it's pride and prejudice, rules and regulations and plethora of platitudes so that the word 'theological', for most educated people, has come to mean 'theoretical' and not that which leads to truth.
TRUTH
So let's think about truth. Karl Barth, whose Church Dogmatics occupy a fair amount of space on some of our study shelves, when asked to sum up the common faith in one sentence, quoted the opening line of the hymn by Anna Bartlett Warner:
'Jesus loves me ! this I know,
for the Bible tells me so.'
The theological niceties with which some people in the church seem so strangely fascinated often mean very little to those at the grass-roots of our churches, who would simply like to love one another with the love with which God in Christ loves them, the Christ who warned against the hypocrisy of the scribes and pharisees, who were so little conversant with what we now call the hierarchy of truths that they strained out a gnat whilst swallowing a camel ! (Matthew 23:24) When Jesus was asked for his 'text message' on the hierarchy of truths as far as summing up the Law was concerned, he suggested that they try loving God on the one hand and their neighbour on the other.
You may remember that in 1973 Fritsche Schumacher published his famous book called 'Small is Beautiful' which was sub-titled ' A Study of Economics as if People Mattered ' (1) and as far as we are concerned in 2002 that means the 6 billion people whom I mentioned at the beginning of this talk. In the same way we must do our theology as if those people mattered and in fact rediscover with Ian Fraser (2) and with John Drane (3), not to mention Paulo Freire (4) and Ivan Illich (5), that theology is the people's work and not simply that of those who sit in theological colleges on the one hand and church bureaucracies on the other. Perhaps like the tables of the money-changers some of this must be swept aside and die in order that real change can happen. In Jesus the Word became flesh and as someone once said; ' The problem is that we have turned him into words again.' He never wrote a book and the only record we have of his writing anything was when he wrote in the sand as recorded in John 8:6, a passage much loved by Australian aborigines, but no doubt the wind came and blew what he had written away. For Jesus and his contemporaries, as for the aborigines, it was the oral tradition which mattered, person to person, the accuracy of which, and by implication the truth of which, is now questioned by its post-modern critics. It was Kierkegaard who said that even if someone had followed Jesus around with a shorthand notebook and written down verbatim every word he said it would have made no difference. Just as for his contemporaries in his lifetime it would still be for us a matter of person to person faith.
As Christians we have spent centuries endlessly filling theological libraries with books and papers, constitutions, canon law, summa theologicae and annual reports. Some people vividly remember the occasion when a commissioner to the Church of Scotland General Assembly waved the famous blue book of reports above his head and asked: ' Moderator, what has all this to do with Jesus of Nazareth ?' The members of Anglican General Synods have their bags bulging with papers and the most recent book of Canon Law of the Latin Rite Catholic Church has 1752 canons. When Pilate asked Jesus: 'What is truth?' it wasn't that Pilate didn't stay for an answer as suggested by Francis Bacon, he had the answer standing incarnated before him in the person of Jesus of whom, shortly afterwards, he famously was to say: 'Ecce homo!' 'Behold the man!' Behold the man. Jesus could have given Pilate a propositional answer in the form of an aphorism or creed but instead he was silent and simply presented himself.
T.K. Thomas once told the story of a Japanese missionary in Thailand entering into theological discussion with a few deeply religious Buddhist monks. Thinking that St John's Gospel would be the right place to start he opened the first verse of the first chapter and read: ' In the beginning was the Word.' 'My' said one of the Buddhist monks 'even in the beginning you Christians didn't have a little time for silence.' (6) We all know that actions speak louder than words and if the church is to die and thus change we need to stop flagellating people with endless doctrinal statements rather than with love in action or loving action. Because that is what Jesus is about and what life is about and what truth is about and what the church should be about, especially if it is to be truly ecumenically involved with the lives of our 6 billion sisters and brothers who inhabit the household of the world with us. In UT UNUM SINT the Holy Father says: 'Love for the truth is the deepest dimension of any authentic quest for full communion between Christians.' (7) But surely that truth is personal and not propositional. St Thomas Aquinas summed up the personal nature of truth when he wrote:
'What God's Son has told me, take for true I do;
Truth himself speaks truly or there's nothing true.' (8)
If we believe in the freedom of the Spirit and that the wind blows where it wills (John 3:8) then ultimately that truth cannot be equated with the teaching of the Church but can only be equated with Christ himself as we really meet him, encounter him in real bread and wine, in the beggar at our door, in our sisters and brothers of what we call other denominations, in our 6 billion contemporaries on planet earth including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea and hopefully in the teaching of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church to which we confess to belong. Otherwise we will fall into the trap of which we are warned by Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he says: ' He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.' (9) ' I am the way, the truth and the life ' says Jesus (John 14:6) and adds that no-one comes to the Father except personally through himself.
CHRISTIANITY AND RELIGION
Jesus said: ' You will know the truth and the truth will make you free. ' (John 8:32) St Paul said: ' For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast then and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.' ( Galatians 5:1) The word 'religion' means the opposite of all that, the opposite of freedom. It's root is in the Latin verb 'religare' which means 'to bind'. On the Cross of Calvary Jesus said; ' It is finished ' , bowed his head and gave up his spirit at which moment, as recorded in all three synoptic gospels, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. This meant that religion, all religion, was at an end that people were set free to be true worshippers to worship God in spirit and in truth neither on Mount Gerizim nor on Mount Zion. A people's movement untrammelled by priests and precepts was soon to be inaugurated in spirit and in truth at Pentecost which was to be known as The Way, for which John the Baptist had been the forerunner or pacemaker, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ' Prepare ye the way of the Lord. ' (Mark 1:3) The Acts of the Apostles bears witness to the fact that the early followers of Jesus, with their alternative lifestyle, were known as the people of The Way. (Acts 9:2, 19:9, 19:23, 22:4, 24:22). It was in Antioch that they were first called 'Christians' (Acts 11:26) and at Caesarea, King Agrippa said to Paul: ' In a short time you think to make me a Christian!' (Acts 26:28) whilst in 1 Peter 4:16 we read: ' yet if any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name. ' Within 300 years what began in people's houses around a real breakfast table as a people's movement under God, was to become a religion called Christianity which after the battle of Mulvian Bridge across the River Tiber on October 28th 312 AD became part of the establishment on the order of the Emperor Constantine. At this point the veil of the temple was reinstated and the institutionalisation of Christianity had begun in earnest. If we take the Eucharist as an example. The family meal round a real breakfast table in someone's house moved to a church building which was the beginning of the end. As William Barclay puts it: ' There can be no two things more different than the celebration of the Lord's Supper in a Christian home in the first century and in a cathedral in the twentieth century. The things are so different that it is almost possible to say that they bear no relationship to each other. The liturgical splendour of the twentieth century was in the first century not only unthought of; it was totally impossible.' (10) It also moved from being a real meal into being a symbolic meal. As Barclay says: ' The idea of a tiny piece of bread and sip of wine bears no relation at all to the Lord's Supper as it originally was. It was not until the Synod of Hippo in AD 393 that the idea of fasting communion emerged. The Lord's Supper was originally a family meal in a household of friends.' It also moved from being an act of the heart's devotion to being a centre of theological debate. The quite simple ' Look what he did for you!' ended up in complicated questions about the real presence of Christ in the elements and of whether or not it was a propitiatory sacrifice, questions which in the early days it would never have occurred to anyone even to ask.
According to William Barclay it also moved from being a lay function to being a priestly function. ' In the New Testament itself there is no indication that it was the special privilege or duty of anyone to lead the worshipping fellowship in the Lord's Supper. In the Didache (date uncertain - possibly first century) again there is no mention of any special celebrant. In fact the prophets are to be allowed to hold Eucharist as they will. (Didache 10.7) In Justin Martyr (AD 100-167) the person who presides is the president of the brethren, and it is pointed out that the phrase so translated could quite legitimately be translated 'that one of the brethren who was presiding'. (Justin Martyr, First Apology 65) To all this there is one exception - Ignatius.(AD 98-117) In the Letters of Ignatius the bishop has acquired a place of paramount importance. ' We must regard the bishop as the Lord himself.' (Ignatius, To the Ephesians 6.1) 'Let that be considered a valid Eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop, or by one whom he appoints......It is not lawful either to baptise or to hold an agape without the bishop.' (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 8.1ff) The plain fact is that in this matter Ignatius stands alone. In the early period of the Church there is no other evidence that the celebration of the Eucharist was confined to any one person. But in Ignatius the celebration of the Eucharist has become the function of the ministry.' (11)
If ever there was a place where we need to walk by faith and not by sight it is in the Eucharist. Some of the incredibility of the church in the world centres round this sacrament of unity which has become the sacrament of disunity. Perhaps you know the little book 'The Millennium Jubilee' issued by CAFOD. In the chapter 'Towards a Just Millennium' Ed O'Connell SSC writes: 'The year 2000 is to be intensely Eucharistic. During this year, the Church around the world should work to overcome the dramatic gaps between people and bring divided people around the same table: wealthy and poor, North and South, employed and unemployed, peoples divided by cultures, fears and discriminations...the list could be endless.' (12) Of course it could and I wonder if in any way it might just include Catholics and Protestants gathering around the same table because until it does the 6 billion people, who are divided by cultures, will never believe. We seem to live in little worlds of our own forgetting that there is a big wide world out there which God loves and for which Jesus died. It is amazing just how insensitive, how exclusive (even at the point of trying to be inclusive) each of our denominations can be and we could each give our own examples. The church must die to all of this and become so incarnated in the inclusive love of Jesus for the world in order that people may begin to believe that these Christians both love one another and love them.
Those who defend exclusivity at the Lord's Table sometimes quote Jesus as saying: ' So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.' (Matthew 5:23-24) Well, if that is so, and who could doubt that it is so, then we would have no more eucharists, a moratorium on Communion and the Mass, until such time as we were sure that we had so spoken the truth in love that we were at peace with one another, and then and then only, dare we utter the words and declare that we who are many are one body because we all share the one bread. Perhaps then we will hear the voice of Jesus from the shores of the Sea of Galilee issuing his personal invitation to each one of us to come and have breakfast, something of which we were reminded so movingly a few years ago at Swanwick by our own Bishop Crispian.
THE ECUCOMICAL MOVEMENT
In the light of all this is it any wonder that many of our educated contemporaries use the word 'theological' to mean theoretical. I suppose I may have been asked to give this talk as a kind of ecumenical voice crying in the wilderness of a divided church. Indeed a friend of mine who had served in the Church of North India on his return to Scotland described the experience as ' having been in the promised land and returning to the wilderness. ' An atheist friend in Edinburgh knowing my interest in Christian unity but seeing the state of the churches used to speak of what he called ' the ecucomical movement. ' It was Rabbie Burns who wrote:
'O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!'
And how do others see us ? They certainly think the church must change or die. The editorial in The Guardian on Easter Saturday 1999 appeared under the heading: 'EASTER IS DYING' This brilliant double entendre was followed by these words:
' Like it or not, Easter is only saved from the fate of Pentecost, another crucial Christian feast which requires a huge leap of faith and which has disappeared from the secular diary, by an unholy alliance of the confectionery industry, DIY chains and garden centres. Who ever talks of Whitsun now ? Perhaps in a few more decades, Good Friday will sound similarly dated. '
More recently on 5th September 2001 we had no less than the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster in an off-the-cuff remark declare that Christianity 'is nearly vanquished in Britain'. The next day the Daily Telegraph had the picture of a stern looking Cardinal juxtaposed with that of a young girl in tears and all because Catholics and Protestants cannot go to school together. Is it any wonder that my cousin, who as far as I know doesn't have much time for religion, although she is married to the son of an Archdeacon, says in her Christmas letter from Alice Springs in Australia: ' It's been a horrid year world-wide hasn't it? And far from over. When will Peace ever come to Israel - Ireland: let alone the traumas let loose by bin Laden. And all the conflict is religion-based...make of it what you will.' Is it any wonder that my son-in-law, a refugee Muslim from Bosnia, having seen what he had to live through in the midst of ethnic cleansing, has no time whatsoever for religion and what do I as a follower of Jesus Christ say to my grandchildren, who are a quarter Scottish, a quarter English and half Bosnian, what can I say to them about religion other than that it must die and did in fact die, nailed to a cross on a rubbish tip outside the institutional walls of Jerusalem, until we reinvented it again and let it loose upon an unsuspecting world.
Interestingly enough the Editorial page in The Independent on 7th September contained two large headlines which read: ' The collapse of organised religion should not cause hand-wringing despair ' and ' Don't ask me to weep if Christianity is "vanquished" '. The burden of their song was quite simply that it is not true to say as the Cardinal does that moral values have disappeared and here I quote: ' Many of the fundamental values taught by Jesus Christ are so deeply embedded in the assumptions of our society that it is impossible to believe that they could ever be "all but eliminated" - another colourful phrase of his. The ideals of love, of forgiveness and of treating others as of equal worth are as valued now as they ever were; it is the secondary issues of abortion, gay rights and the role of women, on which Jesus did not pronounce directly, which are disputed within and between churches, and in the wider society. ' and we might add are certainly pronounced upon by Bishop Spong. One of the only good things that David Aaronovitch had to say about the church was about third world projects: ' I have no wish to see the churches die. You will find an internationalism in your local church, with its exhibitions of projects in the third world, that you won't discover anywhere else. ' But then comes the rub. He goes on: ' I like to see the vicar walking from the vicarage to the church in his robes. I enjoy the sense of continuity, and it makes a change from estate agents. ' How irrelevant is the whole paraphernalia of our outward garments, our vested interests, in both senses of the word, as over against our inward devotion to the man whose only piece of property he had on earth was his cloak and who had nowhere to lay his head.
But September 7th was just four days before September 11th the day, which some people say has changed the world. You would have thought that it would have so concentrated the minds of our church leaders that they could have picked up on the words of Phyllis and Orlando Roderiguez of New York who, the moment after the attack on the World Trade Centre, said publicly:
' Our son Greg is among the many missing from the World Trade Centre attack. We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet..... We suspect that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son's death. Not in our son's name.'
But instead of adopting the faith stance of Jesus of Nazareth, who trusted in God alone and would never meet evil with evil, Christianity or the church, has remained as irrelevant as ever in the face of the systematic bombing of innocent people in Afghanistan and judging by today's announcement the possible bombing of Iraq, Iran and North Korea on the basis that they have nuclear and chemical weapons which we wish to inspect. I doubt if we would allow them to come and inspect ours if they asked to do so.
I heard someone interviewed on these matters and when asked about the future of the world that person replied: ' O, we'll just have to keep our fingers crossed. ' Jesus' fingers were crossed, crucified, with the nails of high priests and politicians but as he walked by faith and not by sight he forgave them all in an act of supreme non-violence and love. He died that we might be forgiven. He died to set us free The church must learn to do likewise in order that the 6 billion people in this world may believe that vicars really are different from estate agents and that the transcendent is actually immanent.
Murdoch MacKenzie
1. E.F. Schumacher 'Small is Beautiful' ABACUS 1974
2. Ian M Fraser 'Reinventing Theology as the People's Work' Wild Goose Publications 1980
3. John Drane 'The McDonaldisation of the Church' Darton, Longman and Todd 2000
4. Paulo Freire 'Pedagogy for the Poor'
5. Ivan Illich 'Deschooling Society' Harper and Row 1971
6. T.K.Thomas in 'Morning, Noon and Night' by John Carden pg 18 Church Missionary Society 1976
7. UT UNUM SINT Section 36 Catholic Truth Society 1995
8. St Thomas Aquinas quoted in Dictionary of Religious Quotations - Margaret Pepper pg 423 Andre
Deutsch 1989
9. S.T. Coleridge ' Aids to Reflection: Moral and Religious Aphorisms ' xxv
10. William Barclay ' The Lord's Supper ' SCM 1967
11. Ibid
12. The Millennium Jubilee CAFOD 1996 pg 12