A Sermon I gave [4]

If we accept that to be human is, whether we like it or not, to have ‘gods’ – whether they are microscopes or electrons or chromosomes, as in the case of the scientistic fundamentalists I have been describing – or football players, popstars or film actors, as in the case of many of the rest of us, it’s worth entering seriously into the business of thinking about the kind of God or gods we in our heart of hearts really want to have. And here, I think, the Christian Gospel offers us some vital insights. Crucially, it insists that the thing about most so-called gods is that they are dead. Not dead in some bare physical sense: David Beckham is very much alive and well, of course, as are many of the other gods of stage and screen whose lives we are tempted to mould ours around, both in terms of the money we apportion to them and in terms of our efforts to look and be more like them. But they are certainly dead nonetheless, and it is important to appreciate how this is so. They are dead, I think, because what they offer to their devotees is so often offered only in exchange for some reward: it is a form of pay packet, in other words, or some other form of gratification for an ailing sense of self esteem.

The radical thing about the Christian God is that he is not motivated by these things – he doesn’t need a paypacket and his self-esteem does not need to be bolstered. And gods who need paypackets or bolstered self esteem aren’t, I would suggest, in spite of appearances, particularly powerful or even interesting gods. It’s not that such gods are wholly bad or evil or conceited: that’s not it. It’s just that what they really are is human, all too human, just like us: which, to be clear, is not to say wholly bad or evil or conceited but just enough of each to make worshipping them a morally dubious activity, curiously similar in character, I would wager, to worshipping oneself or one’s own sense of ‘Reasoning’. And even if these ‘human’ gods can be very good at singing a song or bending a football over a wall, they’re still not – in the big scheme of things – worth climbing trees to see.

For they would let you look at them for a while but sooner or later would demand a pay packet or some words of eulogy to enhance their deficient senses of self esteem. They might, it is true, tell you that you’re worth a million dollars and that you ought to think more of yourself – even deserve to do so – just like they think they do; I’m thinking here of the Gok Wans and Trinny and Susannahs of this world – people who despite the best assurances and their brash and confident public exteriors nonetheless exude – at least in the eyes of the more perceptive media commentators – a real and nagging lack of self esteem. If some of us find ourselves being taken on board by the message of self fulfilment and self realisation of a Gok or a Trinny, do we really find the gospel they offer, upon reflection, a satisfactory one?

Would Trinny advise us to hold off on the expensive hand bags and necklaces and embrace us in a new light for having sold half our goods to the poor, as Jesus does in the story of Zacchaeus? Would Gok advise us to seek out the needy – as opposed to the local John Lewis – in our search for a renewed sense of life’s meaning?

Even if Gok and Trinny profess to care about the decisions we might make in the absence of their involvement (and here, I think, we can reasonably doubt their sincerity), there is no reason to suppose that the decision to do things such as these – which play no discernible part in their self improving teachings – would be regarded as anything other than at best strange, at worst stupid. For Trinny and Gok, giving your money and attention to them and to designer shoemakers and store managers, rather than to the poor, the outcast, the sick and the spiritually weak and vulnerable is how best to reach a satisfactory sense of self love.

The gospel these celebrity gods most usually preach is the Gospel of the cultivation of self, without reference to or emphasis on the importance of the cultivation of others. That this gospel stands in ideological contradistinction to the Christian gospel is so obvious as to be hardly worth saying. But it can nonetheless never be said enough that the Christian gospel’s leading idea is that the most pressing concern of humans is the love of God and the love of neighbour. And the love of self, insofar as it is important, is important only insofar as these other loves are in view. The kind of self love, then, which separates itself off from the business of loving God and of loving one’s neighbour on this view radically misses the mark. As, for that matter, does the kind of neighbour love which separates itself off from the business of loving God. For it is only through attempting to love our neighbours and attempting to love God at the same time in our innermost being that we can experience the love of God for us.

The God of Jesus Christ exemplifies this divine love, which takes the form of the gift of salvation to those who don’t have it. This gift is not an empty one: it is above all a gift of freedom from dead gods and an introduction to life with a living one through his forgiveness and our repentance, and the interchange of these in the life of the church. God’s gift is an invitation to experience and participate in a creative energy which works remorselessly and creatively in and through people – not for its own gain, but gratuitously, for their sake. It can be a guide as we proceed in the difficult, challenging and uncomfortable directions it leads us in, directions which defy even our most earnest attempts to impose regimes of ‘order’ on what is going on. And in the context of the gratuitous relationships which it opens up, we begin to discover that we are known and loved in ways we previously had not thought to know and love ourselves. For God comes to our houses while we are tax collectors and sinners, before we have begun to understand what his love is really like and before we have begun our attempts to exemplify it in our lives.

And as the third chapter of the book of Revelation, my other text this evening, asserts in the plainest possible terms, when he comes to our houses, God says: ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me’. As for dead gods, they don’t knock. They are themselves, like us, the unwilling subjects of this true God’s saving action: for like us, they are unwilling to open the door to let in true love, as opposed to the merely self gratifying and misguided love which they can find already inside their houses. The tragic pedicament of these gods is that they and their followers have not yet found outside the love and life which Zacchaeus, the tax collector who wanted to see and know the truth and who climbed his tree and opened his door, found there.
Amen.

A Sermon I gave [1]

I post here, in case anyone wants to read it, the text of a sermon I recently gave in my college chapel. It's rather long, but I hope not too rambling, and was a joy but also a challenge to write. I have split it up into 4 posts.

Revelation 3:1-6, 14-end; Luke 19:1-10
May I speak to you tonight in the name of the Father, the son and of the holy spirit. Please have a seat.

A fact which often escapes the notice of those who bemoan the celebrity obsessed culture which we 21st century westerners live in today is that people have always had their icons, their heroes, their gods; fellow human beings whom we can look upon, compare ourselves to, admire and venerate. A recently published book argues not altogether unconvincingly that what we now call celebrity culture was a very familiar theme a very long time ago in the ancient Graeco-Roman world – one of the few significant differences between the mental landscape of their world and ours being that we today are perhaps a little more particular about the dividing line between human and divine than they were back then. David and Victoria Beckham may look or seem divine to some of us today, just as Alexander the Great and the emperor Augustus seemed to many back then, but in our wisdom we know better to think of David and Victoria as gods in any serious sense of the word. That seems about right. They aren’t immortal or omniscient or anything else we customarily ascribe to divinity. But even if we’re hesitant to invoke the language of divinity too readily when we refer to the likes of the Beckhams, it is nonetheless certainly true that for many of us they play the role of objects of intrigue: beautiful (perhaps), fascinating (to some), removed (on occasion); glamorous (in the eyes of many), stylish (to a degree), even mysterious (when they aren’t talking). Something about them, at any rate, captivates rather a lot of us. And yet we know better – or so we think – than seriously to think of David and Victoria as ‘gods’. If pushed, we might remark that they’re far too fraught, human, unintelligent and even boring truly to deserve the label. And that we know this is evidence, I think, of at least some idea on our part of what we think – and perhaps implicitly understand – God is really like: not so fraught, not so human, not so unintelligent, and not so boring.

And yet. In other ways, it seems to me that the ways in which we talk about the Beckhams and other celebrity figures whom our culture produces, celebrates and critiques is less obviously suggestive of sophisticated theological awareness. For it’s not uncommon, after all, to hear people bandying about phrases like ‘he or she is a god’, or ‘he’s my god’ or ‘he’s God’s gift’ or – more popularly still – ‘he’s a legend’ when talking of such people or even in respect of lesser lights still in these blasphemous days of ours. Certainly one accepts that when people use these phrases, they are not meaning to subscribe to their full and complete sense: when we talk of ‘playing God’, for example, a pejorative meaning is still possible. But our intellectual alarm bells might nonetheless ring when we hear this language: since it’s certainly the case that the boundary between the words we use to express ourselves and the thoughts we think and the feelings we feel is not in every context an obvious and altogether secure one. By speaking in a certain way, that is to say, we may open up a space for ourselves to think and feel in precisely that way. And in the concrete example I have mentioned, that may mean that if I say to myself and others every Saturday afternoon that David Beckham or some other human is a God or a legend, it may be that I am opening a space in which such propositions become in a sense true both for myself and for others around me. And this would be at the very least ironic, and at the most tragic, if at heart I know better than to subscribe to such a crude idea of divinity.