Continued...
Growing up in Southampton, it was standard practice where I lived for the hero of the local football team at the time, Matt Le Tissier – a one club man who stayed at Southampton throughout his entire career – to be referred to as ‘Le God’. Not only was Le Tissier a brilliant football player who enabled the local team to flourish in matches against rival teams from across the country; he was also loyal to the people who had paid his wages from the time of his first arrival at the club in his early teens; he visited schools and hospitals; he opened bars and restaurants and promoted local businesses; and he repeatedly refused to leave Southampton for more lucrative deals in, dare I say it, more fashionable parts of the country; he really seemed to have a genuine affection for the people of Southampton and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity: as far as I know, he still lives there today.
In view of his perceived virtues, the name ‘Le God’ has seemed an entirely appropriate and uncontroversial one for the people of Southampton when they refer to Matt Le Tiss. And this was the case even when he took a walk on the proverbial wild side and left his wife and young family to begin an extra-marital relationship with an actress from that dreadful Aussie soap Neighbours who was passing through town with the pantomime. No doubt his personal situation had its complexities. And I do not want to give the impression of speaking glibly here about the broken home of a man who had two young children at the time. What I do want to dwell upon, however, is the fact that as far as Matt the hero, Matt ‘Le God’, was concerned – not much had changed at all, even in spite of his domestic difficulties. Just as they had always done, Southampton supporters continued to make bowing gestures to him when he went across to take his trademark corners. The stadium announcers still used messianic language to describe his achievement in ‘saving’ Southampton FC from relegation from the Premier League, year after year. Matt Le Tissier never once stopped enjoying what cliché obsessed football commentators call a ‘cult’ following among Southampton supporters: and he was and still is referred to as the ‘Messiah’ of the south coast. And while the metaphors begin to mix when he is referred to as Saint Matt, that too is no less appropriate a name for him at a football club whose nickname is ‘the saints’ and whose club crest features, amongst other things, a halo.
If what I have said so far seems as though it’s merely setting the scene for a wide-ranging polemical critique of what I, seeing things from a blithely Christian perspective, see to be some of the unfortunately ‘paganistic’ tendencies of the essentially misguided devotional lives of many living in the developed world of the present day, I want to state unequivocally now that this is not the simple message I have it in mind to preach to you in this sermon. For simple it is not. The dissection, and still less the dismissal, of major currents of talking and thinking in the contemporary world around us is, if conducted with due attention, inevitably a complex business. But the chief thought I have had over the past week, as I have been preparing to speak about the story of Zacchaeus in chapter 19 of Luke’s Gospel, has been of the difference between misguided devotion in this world of ours and the kind of devotion a Christian would think of as being guided by God. For what Luke’s account of Zacchaeus purports to offer its readers is a clear case of divinely guided and divinely oriented devotion. And it is a challenge to the reader of Luke’s account to enter into the risky and precarious task of defining what seems misguided about other kinds of devotion, both in Luke’s world and our own, if he or she is to make sense of the special qualities of Zacchaeus’.
The Gospel accounts, after all, are elsewhere more explicit about the distinction between guided and misguided devotion: indeed, a positive and apparently absolute distinction is offered. ‘You cannot’, we are told, ‘serve both God and Mammon’ – Mammon being the name of the false god of riches and wealth. And perhaps the most salient feature of the story of Zacchaeus is that we have the case of a man who had previously served Mammon coming full circle to serve God. Or, at least, that’s the subtext. But it is possible to draw out more from the story, I think, than just the idea of the absolute incompatibility of serving both God and Mammon.
Growing up in Southampton, it was standard practice where I lived for the hero of the local football team at the time, Matt Le Tissier – a one club man who stayed at Southampton throughout his entire career – to be referred to as ‘Le God’. Not only was Le Tissier a brilliant football player who enabled the local team to flourish in matches against rival teams from across the country; he was also loyal to the people who had paid his wages from the time of his first arrival at the club in his early teens; he visited schools and hospitals; he opened bars and restaurants and promoted local businesses; and he repeatedly refused to leave Southampton for more lucrative deals in, dare I say it, more fashionable parts of the country; he really seemed to have a genuine affection for the people of Southampton and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity: as far as I know, he still lives there today.
In view of his perceived virtues, the name ‘Le God’ has seemed an entirely appropriate and uncontroversial one for the people of Southampton when they refer to Matt Le Tiss. And this was the case even when he took a walk on the proverbial wild side and left his wife and young family to begin an extra-marital relationship with an actress from that dreadful Aussie soap Neighbours who was passing through town with the pantomime. No doubt his personal situation had its complexities. And I do not want to give the impression of speaking glibly here about the broken home of a man who had two young children at the time. What I do want to dwell upon, however, is the fact that as far as Matt the hero, Matt ‘Le God’, was concerned – not much had changed at all, even in spite of his domestic difficulties. Just as they had always done, Southampton supporters continued to make bowing gestures to him when he went across to take his trademark corners. The stadium announcers still used messianic language to describe his achievement in ‘saving’ Southampton FC from relegation from the Premier League, year after year. Matt Le Tissier never once stopped enjoying what cliché obsessed football commentators call a ‘cult’ following among Southampton supporters: and he was and still is referred to as the ‘Messiah’ of the south coast. And while the metaphors begin to mix when he is referred to as Saint Matt, that too is no less appropriate a name for him at a football club whose nickname is ‘the saints’ and whose club crest features, amongst other things, a halo.
If what I have said so far seems as though it’s merely setting the scene for a wide-ranging polemical critique of what I, seeing things from a blithely Christian perspective, see to be some of the unfortunately ‘paganistic’ tendencies of the essentially misguided devotional lives of many living in the developed world of the present day, I want to state unequivocally now that this is not the simple message I have it in mind to preach to you in this sermon. For simple it is not. The dissection, and still less the dismissal, of major currents of talking and thinking in the contemporary world around us is, if conducted with due attention, inevitably a complex business. But the chief thought I have had over the past week, as I have been preparing to speak about the story of Zacchaeus in chapter 19 of Luke’s Gospel, has been of the difference between misguided devotion in this world of ours and the kind of devotion a Christian would think of as being guided by God. For what Luke’s account of Zacchaeus purports to offer its readers is a clear case of divinely guided and divinely oriented devotion. And it is a challenge to the reader of Luke’s account to enter into the risky and precarious task of defining what seems misguided about other kinds of devotion, both in Luke’s world and our own, if he or she is to make sense of the special qualities of Zacchaeus’.
The Gospel accounts, after all, are elsewhere more explicit about the distinction between guided and misguided devotion: indeed, a positive and apparently absolute distinction is offered. ‘You cannot’, we are told, ‘serve both God and Mammon’ – Mammon being the name of the false god of riches and wealth. And perhaps the most salient feature of the story of Zacchaeus is that we have the case of a man who had previously served Mammon coming full circle to serve God. Or, at least, that’s the subtext. But it is possible to draw out more from the story, I think, than just the idea of the absolute incompatibility of serving both God and Mammon.
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