Some thoughts as the end of the liturgical year approaches.

The following is a sermon preached at Choral Evensong in Blackburn Cathedral on Sunday 17^th November 2013

At the beginning of the Confessions, written by St Augustine at the end of the fourth century, are some very famous words which became axiomatic for Christian people’s self- understanding in relation to the Creator: ‘Thou hast made us for thyself and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee’.  These words remind us that, as human beings, we are constituted in a certain way; we are reminded of our contingency, and that our true home is in God.  We have a built-in supernatural destiny which we cannot secure by our own unaided effort, but for which we have a natural affinity precisely because of the way we have been made.

Pope Francis said recently that, in western culture especially, human hearts have become anaesthetized – that they no longer search for God.  And it certainly seems to be a feature of modern secularised society that people live as if the present reality around us, and which we perceive through our senses, is all there is.  This means that this present reality takes on an exclusive significance – it is all that matters; the sum total, indeed, of all that is.

So powerful and all-pervasive is this tendency to effectively dethrone God in favour of human pre-eminence, that it would be naȉve in the extreme to imagine that Christian people, and indeed the institution of the Church itself, have been entirely insulated from it.  It is so easy to find that one has slipped into a kind of ‘practical atheism’, where we live most of the time as if we are self-sufficient and self-contained, as our culture would have us believe.  How different, really, are our lives, from the lives of those whose lives we share and interact with but who do not share our faith?  The danger then, of course, is that our faith easily becomes a kind of veneer over the top; an extrinsic, incremental add-on which is not actually essential to normal human functioning.  If this is so, then we have lost sight of something absolutely fundamental about ourselves as humans: namely, that we are oriented towards an eternal sharing in God’s own life.  To lose sight of this is bad enough, but then how do we possibly commend the faith to others when it is seen as not even ‘essential’ to ourselves?  Here, we set ourselves up, ironically and unwittingly, as agents of the secular default position which increasingly dominates us and actually polices the divine, so that faith claims are scrutinised and evaluated according to the extent to which they corroborate the preconceptions of society at any one time.

At this time of the year, when we reach the end of one liturgical year and prepare to begin another when we get to Advent, the scripture readings and the liturgical texts are timely.  They call us from indifference and complacency, from cultural compliance and worldliness, to a deep repentance and a renewed wakefulness.  They call us to recognise afresh that our fulfilment comes not ultimately ‘in the world’ but in union with God hereafter.  The collects – today’s for example - make reference to eschatological hope, to the appearance of Christ in glory, and our desire to be one with him.

This evening’s first reading (Daniel 6) is to do with the faithful Jew being ready to suffer martyrdom, if need be, rather than give up fidelity to God.  It is an example of what the scholars call ‘witness literature’, in which God comes to rescue his faithful servants, saving them from certain death, which is then inflicted instead upon those who would harm them.  The story ends with the pagan king acknowledging the power of Israel’s God.  Texts such as these provided solace and encouragement for those undergoing religious trials: God would protect them, even against apparently insuperable odds; for their part, they were to remain faithful; and, like the Christian martyrs of later generations, they would embrace the principle that God, rather than humans, must be obeyed, for ‘he delivers and rescues, he works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth’.  There was a more fundamental reality yet, than what they were experiencing in their trials; and God would secure their future, even beyond the present order of things.

In the second reading (Matthew 13:1-9, 18—23), it’s easy to miss its eschatological point, as indeed does the interpretation of the parable of the Sower provided in St Matthew’s text and which is generally reckoned to have originated in the primitive church.  What is important to recognise is that the beginning of the parable describes a different point in time from its end.  Initially, it is a description of sowing seeds; but at the end it is already harvest-time.  On the one hand, we have the frustrations of the sower’s labours; but then, we have the dawn of the Kingdom of God compared to the harvest.  The tripling of the harvest’s yield (thirty-, sixty- and a hundred-fold) signifies the eschatological abundance of God, surpassing all human measure.  To us, much of the labour seems futile and fruitless, but Jesus is full of confidence; for God’s hour is coming, and will bring with it a harvest of reward beyond all our imagining.  God brings from unpromising beginnings the glorious end that he has promised.  We are called again to look beyond, to a future reality far exceeding anything that we can conceive of.

The culture we now inhabit is a culture in a state of crisis.  In spite of the years of economic downturn, we still live in a situation in which life in this world, for most people in the west, is relatively amenable and pleasant.  It’s natural for people to want to hold on to it and, indeed, to become inured, blinded, to the Christian imperative to bear witness to a different set of priorities and values.  It’s natural for people to concentrate their efforts upon making life better for themselves, in the temporal sense.  But it’s also characteristic of our culture that, for all our advancement and apparently-increasing sophistication and material well-being, people do not seem happier; there is always something missing – something which this world can never provide and which always keeps people restless.  The Israelite people of old were urged to grasp that only God could satisfy their deepest needs and that they may well have to be prepared to look beyond the present reality.  Jesus’ parables similarly are parables of the Kingdom, which although already present among us is not as yet fully realised.  Our liturgical texts and readings over the next weeks, along with St Augustine’s famous insight, call us to look beyond ourselves and help others to do likewise.  This is, fundamentally, the mission of the Church.