All Saints' Sermon Notes: 3rd November

'I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love towards all the saints.'

Saints are a strangely controversial topic, especially for Anglicans. Should we offer prayers to the saints, or should we do away with their festivals altogether? You will find a breadth of opinion in the Church of England. In the liturgy we are to mark their festivals, but do not make any explicit petitions to them. Is this a sensible middle of the road route or the path to confusion?
 

But the fun does not finish there, after all we have not even begun to consider who might be a saint. Obviously there are the superstar saints like Mary or the apostles, but what of the others? What about the obscure sixth century monk canonized by locals about whom we know virtually nothing? What about the ragbag collection of people in the Church of England calendar that often combines those on both sides of the argument? Who was right, and can both sides really be saints?
 

And in the modern context, what of saints today? A few years ago we were asked to consider the relative merits of Mother Theresa and Princess Dianna, as if one could compare their sanctity. And the papal visit to Britain two years ago has again raised the issue of who should be a saint. At a time when the Roman catholic church is looking to welcome conservative married Anglican clerics, with a love of all things Tridentine, into its midst, surely the previous Pope had more in common with Cardinal Manning than Cardinal Newman, and so why is the liberal Newman in favour? Answers on a postcard please.

If you are feeling just a little confused, then you are not the only one. Reformation and historical awareness make us a little wary of the saints. Even great saints like Saint Athanasisus or St Cyril of Alexandria can now be seen as both great theologians, and political schemers who were not above the use of violence. Whilst St Wilfrid of Ripon emerges from history as a megalomaniac and ruthless rogue.

Which directs me to my central question: what is it to be a saint? That might sound like a frivolous question, but it isn’t. In fact it goes to the very heart of Christian theology, and the answer you give is likely to influence your religious views and practice.  Who should we regard as a saint on this feast day of All Saints’, is not just a question of iconography on stained glass windows, or on the reredos behind the altar because it is a question about who is holy, what is holy, and how that holiness gets transferred. It is to ask the question ‘Who then is saved?’

This is because the saints are not just a severe looking bunch in gothic vestments, like those we see in Victorian stained glass, but rather the concept of saint refers to all of us. Saint as a word does not really work for us any more because it is hard to peel away all our cultural assumptions about what saints look like and do. A saint in the modern mind is either someone with a halo in a picture, or is some sort of random do gooder.
 

If you go back to a bit of middle English and talk of All Hallows, with the saints being hallowed individuals, we begin to get a better idea of what sanctity might mean. The saints are those who are holy. This then raises the question of what do we mean when we talk of holiness. If you think of the prayer in which you are most likely to use hallowed, you begin to get an idea of what holiness is about. ‘Hallowed be your name’ is a description of the idea that God’s name is holy, as an attribute of God, and therefore holiness is something we participate in by offering God’s name the recognition it deserves.
 

The saints are thus those who share in the attributes of God, those who participate in something that describes the author of all things. This is why Saint Paul uses the term agios to describe all those who are members of the church; they are the holy ones of God, his chosen people. It was not about how much good they had done, but about their status as members of Christ’s body.
 

The saints to the early church were the entire corporate body of believers. To join the church was to become a saint: the people of God shared in Christ’s holiness and were redeemed by it. Only through process of time was the name restricted to those who were considered to posses a certain special sanctity and so were separated off from the rest of the common believers, and thus the concept of saint as we have inherited it was born.

So enough history, now for some theology. I want to address two questions that are raised by the comments I have made. Firstly, what is it for us to be saints? What is it for us to share in God’s holiness? Secondly, I want to think a little about what we might do with the special individuals to whose names we preface with Saint.

So now I have cut off a fairly large section of systematic theology, at least enough for a few tomes, you might be thinking ‘well, how is he going to answer that one in five minutes?’ Thousands of theologians have pondered similar questions over two thousand years and haven’t got us very far, so how will tonight help?
 

But first, a health warning. Where I am not going to get to is an exact explanation of who is saved and who is not: a clear division of sheep and goats. This is because I am, like St Augustine and the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, profoundly agnostic about knowing the full mind of God about these things during this life. Those who believe that they know who is saved, and who is not, are normally rather scary individuals; and it is rare that they will ever place themselves amongst the goats. This is not to say that God cannot judge between the good and the evil, but that he who can judge the hearts of all is doing something that is beyond human capacity to do, and something that we should indeed be wary of doing.
 

This warning is not incidental to the actual answer to the question, how to I partake of God’s holiness. The classic Protestant answer to how I partake of God’s righteousness is a feeling of assurance that I have within me that marks me off as one of God’s elect. In Luther’s hands this was the answer to his spiritual traumas. However, such an answer immediately leads to the question, who else then feels this saving grace of God? If those around me do not demonstrate this awareness, we can take it that they are the damned. This was the classic popular Protestant world view until the rise of liberalism in the nineteenth century.
 

Now there are a number of things about it that we might want to question. Can we really rely on our feelings of assurance as an adequate guide to our eventual fate? We could be complacent or doubt could drive us mad. Is it really correct that we should go around judging whether others share our saved status? Christ didn’t seem to be terribly keen on the idea. And if all that matters in this view of Christianity is a warm feeling in my heart, what is the point of being a member of the church and partaking of the sacraments?
 

Instead more catholic Christianity has tended to emphasise the different ways in which we can partake of God’s sanctity. These things should not be thought of as ways in which we gain brownie points for heaven, but ways in which we partake of the divine. In the sacraments we can meet Christ and partake if his grace. In church services we can receive his forgiveness and blessing. In scripture we can meditate of God, and be conformed to his likeness. This it appears to me is the sort of sanctity that St Paul speaks of when he talks of people being chosen to belong to a corporate body of the church that is bound together in sacramental fellowship.
 

For us to be saints then is less about us and who we think we are, and rather more to do with those things that God freely gives to us. We are called to be saints because we are given the things that allow us to be called by him.

What the of those who are called ‘saint x’? In some ways the answer to this follows as an immediate corollary to what I have just said. If we regard the saints as those who lived perfect lives, we will probably find most of them pretty lacking, but if we see that the focus of their lives was sharing in the sanctity of God, we get some indication as to why the church regarded them as holy. Wilfrid of Ripon may have had a small army of feudal retainers, an appetite for promotion, and a tendency to be quite bold in asking Rome for it, but he was canonised because he made a case for Christian unity at Whitby and strove to spread Christianity in northern England.
 

If we find the saints a mixed bag, that is because they reflect us, a mixed group who make up the church of today. Yet they also speak of a call to holiness, regardless of how mainstream or eccentric you are, a holiness that inspires others to do great things for God.

And so as we honour the saints today, both known and unknown, we ask that God will bless our lives and make us his holy people.

 

Bible Sunday Sermon Notes: 27th October

It is Bible Sunday again, and so I suppose it is fitting that I offer you a good bit of Reformed theology on this Protestant version of Corpus Christi.

In order to do this, I want you to cast your mind back to your encounters with Holy Writ. Perhaps the word Bible conjures up images of an old family bible, a dusty Authorised Version in a charity shop, or a Good News Bible with its 1970s style logo that you encountered at Sunday School. Whatever your last encounter with the Bible as an artifact entailed, it may have been, and probably was, quite a marginal event in your life; something that may have evoked a sense of the past, even nostalgia for another age, but probably did not result in a sudden wish to thumb through the pages, or read it from cover to cover. If it did I am pleased, but I think that for most British people the idea of the Bible at best indicates a heritage object, and at worst stands for sabbatarian moralistic dullness.

The apparent disengagement, even disenchantment, with the Bible marks us off from our predecessors. At the time of the Reformation vernacular scripture was very exciting and peasants had to be banned from reading it in case they got ideas above their station, or at least it was that fear which plagued Henry VIII's thought. English society after the Reformation was built on scripture: it was painted on church walls, and referred to in poetry, prose and legislation.
 

The printed word in the form of the vernacular Bible was the thing that set the sixteenth and seventeenth century alight, even if the main issue was the footnotes and commentary rather than the text itself. Such was the feeling of liberation that the vernacular scriptures gave to people, that they were willing to risk their lives to obtain them.
 

Even when non-conformist disenchantment with the established church was at its height in the mid-nineteenth century, scripture remained a key factor in the English identity: we were a people of the ‘good book’, and scripture remained relevant to many who only had a very marginal relationship with church. It was precisely that world that the 1944 Education Act supposed when it obliged community schools to offer non-denominational RE and worship: the Christianity of the bible.
 

From 1538 to 1944 it was assumed that the vernacular scriptures were at the core of our nation’s life. We were the people of the Elizabethan Settlement who felt that they were God’s chosen people knew that scripture was central to their cultural and religious identity.

Yet much has changed in our present society, and this is not a matter of simply being unfamiliar with the stories of the bible. Many primary school children still learn about Noah and his ark, Moses and his plagues, and Mary and Joseph trooping along to Bethlehem. In fact many of them know these stories better than us. The problem is not that the contents are completely unfamiliar, but that they are considered to be irrelevant.
 

There is a sense in which biblical narratives have moved from being the narrative of life to being certain narratives of childhood which feature alongside Snow White, Robin Hood and Toy Story. Fascinating though scripture may be for a good yarn, or as a historical artifact for A-Level students, what it is essentially lacks is any real sense of meaning for the lives of the individuals that study it. The bible is seen as fragmented stories without any sense of overall scheme or meaning. Earlier generations might have been convinced that it had its meaning in morality, but this looks increasingly unlikely when one considers stories of adultery, polygamy, and ramming tent pegs into the skulls of others.
 

The problem is not just about cultural plurality, and that there are other scriptures on offer, but that scripture often seems irrelevant even to those who consider themselves to be Christians. ‘This is the word of the Lord’, we confidently affirm after we have heard about God’s wrath over Saul sparing some Philistine’s lives, or after a very difficult reading that has attempted to excuse David from killing his son Absolom. Is this really the word of the Lord?

So what then to do with the Bible? Why consider it to be the ‘good book’? To claim that the Bible is primarily about putting forward a good non-doctrinal code for living, which no doubt was in the minds of the creators of the 1944 education act, will not do. Are the good people of England to lay waste to lands without mercy? Are they to tell dubious lies to thwart their political enemies, marry several times, and seduce other people’s wives?
 

To regard the Bible, and indeed Christianity, as simply providers of morality is to debase them both, and rather ignore the point that faith in God is central to Christianity, and morality a corollary. I want to pause and rewind, and consider the elephant in the room that so many ignore: what is it that traditionally made scripture so important to Christians, and so why should we care about its seeming irrelevance to this generation?

The answer lies in doctrine. In order to establish why the Bible might be important we have to ask what it is there for. Traditionally this is where systematic theology began. Read Aquinas and you will find him start with the idea of Christianity as a revealed religion; look to Calvin’s Institutes, and there you will find an explanation in the first book of why God has chosen to reveal himself to humanity.
 

For a more modern example, consider the great German theologian Karl Barth for whom theology is about the study of God’s revelation of himself. Scripture is not that properly revelation itself, but is the channel through which we learn of the revelation of God in the person of Christ. The person of God is communicated through the incarnation, which is passed on to us through scripture, and explained through the inadequate exegesis of persons such as myself.
 

The missing piece of theological data in our society is the idea that the Bible is revelation: it is about God telling us who he is. To say this is to claim that despite its complexities and contradictions, scripture is about an attempt to record God’s revelation of himself to humanity in history. As such it has a structure of creation, fall, and redemption: a gradual call back to faithfulness to God, which culminates in the life of Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit, as a token of the world to come. This meta-narrative is the only one that will allow Christians to understand the reason why scripture should be significant for them. If we break it down into small chunks and stories, we are rather in danger of failing to see the wood for the trees.

 

Without a sense of the revelation, it is rather difficult to see what sense it makes to tell the story of Noah and his ark. As entertaining as songs and lists of animals may be for children, it is little more than a nursery story unless it is considered in terms of a greater story in which it marks the first point of redemption: the promise that God has chosen not to destroy what he has made, even though it is fallen. Without a meta-narrative of redemption the only moral to draw from the story of Noah is that it is good to have a boat if you should find yourself inundated with water: something vital to note if you live by the sea, but not perhaps that earth shatteringly interesting.

A critical awareness of the Bible is not fundamentally threatening to this idea of revelation. To claim that St Luke was primarily concerned with Jesus as a revelation of God is fairly obvious. He was not primarily interested in recording every last detail of Jesus’ life like some dreadful episode of Big Brother. Instead his view of himself as a historian was theological: he had to convey what Jesus revealed about God. A good deal of time and energy is spent on rather fruitless debates about finding the historical Jesus or sorting out the truth from the dross within scripture, with one side arguing that every detail is right, and the other seeming to want to carve it up. The danger in all this is that we forget what scripture is meant to be for: a faithful witness to the revelation of God.

So today we come to scripture as something far greater than a good and moral book. Instead we come to this book because in its narratives we find the revelation of God.

Harry Potter and Religion in Britain in the Twenty-First Century

Religion in the Harry Potter novels may seem a frivolous topic upon which to write a paper for a blog. Many of the articles on religious blogs are about placing serious and new ideas in front of the reader: how do we interpret a text, or what do we think about the morality of cloning or globalization? Rowling's works cannot be classed amongst these topics for they are unapologetically children's novels and, even if they are popular, they scarcely represent innovative deeply philosophical works. I therefore need to explain why these books are worthy of theological analysis.

The answer is rooted in the wide circulation of Rowling's books: Harry Potter represents the fiction of the masses. These novels have been popular throughout the western world and, whilst they have provoked a certain amount of protest from some Christian groups, they have generally been regarded as uncontroversial. Therefore I wish to consider them not as important radical literature, but rather as literature that tells us about contemporary popular belief concerning the role of official religion and the divine.

As a historian I have engaged in debates concerning the nature of popular religion. Many of these debates concern not the sophisticated scholastic theology of the medieval universities, but rather the crude arguments of the mass circulated woodcut and broadsheet: the propaganda material that was seen by the mass of the population. Harry Potter is probably the most similar work today, and its wide circulation has led me to speculate that it can be handled in similar ways to reveal the popular beliefs of our society. It seems that these novels are the nearest thing that we have to an expression of how the majority of western people view the world, and therefore reveal their philosophical and theological beliefs.

There is one important facet of the works that makes them particularly suited for this role. They represent a romantic engagement with the past and present of European culture and society. Nearly every detail that can be found in the books represents an almost iconic view of the past: writing is with quills, lessons take place at Victorian desks, the buildings are gothic, and the railways are run with inter-war steam locomotives. Rowling very cleverly picks out the elements of British culture that our imaginations most clearly engage with. She tells us much about the values, lifestyle and ambitions of middle class England. It is this that makes the books so popular: they represent the dreams of society.

This congruence with social aspiration answers the major objection that could be placed against the use of Rowling's novels as an expression of popular belief: there are other stories that have particularly caught the public imagination, but tell us little about the state of religion in the modern context. The most obvious of these is the 'Star Wars' films, which were based on Hinduism rather than Christianity. However, my argument does not force me to claim that Hinduism is prevalent in English society because many of the dualistic themes in Star Wars could be explained through Hellenistic ideas inherited from classical literature. Further, it should be noted that Star Wars presents an alternative universe to our own, one which is not representative of the history of European society. Therefore Rowling's books can be taken as a measure of religious consciousness in a way that Star Wars and other science fiction fantasies cannot.

This article examines two particular aspects of the Harry Potter books. Firstly, the disappearance of official religion from the popular consciousness. Secondly, the theological and philosophical assumptions upon which Harry's world is built.

The lack of official religion in these books is possibly one of the reasons that might make my choice a strange one for considering the nature of contemporary popular religion. The genre of fantasy could be a significant problem, as the spiritual realm of the books might be so different from ours as to make any reference to real religion difficult. However, Rowling's construction of the magical world is such that this is not the case. Various references are made to Christian feasts and festivals, and to Christian history, so a historic Christian society seems to be the one from which both magical and non-magical worlds originated. Therefore if the society she describes seems very familiar, it is because it is really a description of present British society, which also has a Christian past.

It must be granted that there is an obvious historical problem with the relationship between witchcraft and Christianity, which partly explains the disappearance of religious practice from the course of the story. However, whilst this might potentially have represented a problem, a problem that was commented on when Rowling discusses 'muggle' ways, and the burning of witches, there is little reference here to religion as a possible cause of persecution. Given that Rowling's account of magical powers as a purely natural phenomenon would fit with a medieval Christian world view of alchemy and medicine, there are obvious ways in which her account of the conflict between 'muggle' and 'wizarding' worlds need not exclude religion. It is notable that she neither takes religion as hospitable to magic, nor rejects it as the evil 'muggle' led oppressor of wizards, but instead she excludes descriptions of official religious practice from the narrative, as if it were irrelevant to the story.

The rejection of both of these options can be explained through the romanticism of the novels. Rowling wishes on the one hand to agree with the myth of medieval heresy hunt, which places the church as enemy and oppressor, but on the other hand knows that if pursued this would lead very easily to a rejection of all that is traditionally Christian, and so create a very unfamiliar fantasy world. She is no doubt also aware that allowing religion to be a force either for or against magic would involve discussion of unfamiliar religious belief and tenets that could alienate many readers. Thus Rowling places herself quite firmly in the predicament in which our society so often finds itself: wishing to freely criticise faith and the church, but on the other wishing to retain a form of folk religious memory. This similarity to society is probably why her books are unchallenging reading for so many.

So whilst the practice of religion and the knowledge of its doctrines has disappeared, the Christian past of Rowling's society is significant in shaping the chronologies of her books, which are built around a three-term year with its origins in the Christian calendar. The books assume knowledge of the feasts and holidays of the church, feasts that are the same ones that continue to be celebrated by the majority in the western world, even when their link with religion is tenuous. In the mind of students, the winter begins with the celebration of Halloween. Here the old Christian vigil fast has been transformed into a festival, with no feast of All Hallows to follow. This most manifestly relates to how this Halloween is treated in modern society, with emphasis lying on witches and the cutting of pumpkins rather than the fast. It thus has become a celebration of nothing in that it serves no purpose except to bind students together in entertainment.

Christmas likewise still bears its name, but is stripped of any Christian implications. Christmas has become a time to decorate the school, to have feasts, and to give presents. There is a great emphasis on how it gives the students time off with their families and how families are bound together by feasting and gift-giving: the life and worship of the family replaces the worship of God.

This deconsecrated year seems to demonstrate how the awareness of religion has slipped from the modern consciousness. It represents a real change in our society for the books seem to envisage a world in which festivals can be kept only for entertainment and family bonding. There may be something spiritual here, but it would be difficult to regard it as religious as the only transcendent ideal is that of the family. This change of meaning may be compared to transformation of festivities in the post-Reformation church, where for instance the feast of St Hugh with its associated bonfires became attached to the Accession of Elizabeth, and then to the Gunpowder Plot: the festivity remained, but its underlying meaning had changed.

This development represents a great challenge to the concept of vicarious religion that has been discussed in the works of Grace Davie. If society at large has merely a nominal memory of Christianity, so that whilst the majority of the population is not antagonistic towards Christianity it is also profoundly ignorant of the meaning of its life, then this implies that the wider population do not regard Christian practice as something that is done either for them or in their name.

It may be the case that the majority of the population continues to regard itself as Christian and name hospitals after saints, but does this mean that they like Harry mark Halloween, Christmas and Easter only by feasting and exchanging presents? If so, this implies that vicarious religion has broken down, and that so-called vernacular religion (the religion as practiced by the majority of the population) has been emptied of Christian content. It may be that others in Harry's world properly celebrate the Christian year and are interested in religious practice, and certainly no criticism is ever made in the books of such people, but they are an irrelevance to Harry and his world, which exists quite happily and independently of the religious sphere. Those in both the Hogwarts and the muggle worlds have no interest in anyone's vicarious action on their behalf.

Indeed, Rowling may be a pioneer in seeing the future trajectory of our society. Whilst it is true that the church has some relevance to some people in regard to issues of life and death, in Rowling's world we find descriptions of a world in which the Christian rite and practice of burial has been transformed so that it is no longer religious at all. At Dumbledore's funeral our society comes into contact with a rite that is wholly about the wizard and the congregation, and contains no religious message whatsoever about death or immortality. What is manifest, however, is that the service achieves little except that it acts as a social and psychological placebo: a decent way of letting go of the past. When we compare this to the pressures currently exerted on clergy by bereaved families, whose aim is to have a funeral for the deceased with as little reference to Christianity as possible, we see how Rowling has very accurately described our current situation. Societal habit may dictate that our end should be marked by officials speaking fine words in a gothic context, but this can scarcely be regarded as a sign of living religious consciousness.

Whilst some authors may wish to question the idea of secularisation as a simple process of religious rejection, Rowling's books demonstrate that although some elements of the romantic and spiritual remain present in our social consciousness, they are inadequate to sustain Christianity within our society; for these shards no longer convey enough of the Christian story to provide a Christian world view. Whilst it is true that many may continue to regard themselves as religious or Christian, it seems unlikely in the longer term that 'believing without belonging' is sustainable:  outward signs of religion will gradually become more disassociated from their Christian meanings until only a nominal religion remains that makes no claims or demands upon its members. The Harry Potter books demonstrate how this process is even now happening amongst those who are below forty years old.

The Potter books thus mirror many of the movements taking place in our society, and I would argue that the changes reflect an important shift in our historical consciousness. Whereas previous generations have seen themselves as existing in continuity and progression with a Christian past, the present generation has a historical consciousness that reaches back only as far as the birth of pop culture in the 1960s and the political disputes of the 1940s. Many debates now take place without reference to our past and are most deeply rooted in the ideas of the 1960s generation, whose experiences and attitudes are regarded as the norm. The same is true for the world of Harry Potter. The phenomenon of the disappearance of an alien official religion from the public sphere in Rowling's work significantly coincides with the very short historical memory of the wizarding society to which Harry belongs. In Harry's world history only really extends as far the lives of living wizards: Voldemort and Dumbledore represent a horizon beyond which everything is cloaked in a romantic historical mist.   

The disappearance of religion and limited historical consciousness probably reflect the underlying philosophy of the books. The most obvious and also most interesting aspect of the book is that every aspect of the story can be attributed to the static laws of nature. This explains why there is such a lack of interest in history and religion: history is referred to for descriptions of past events rather than as a purposeful narrative, and religion is ignored so that natural explanations of individual events can dominate.

This emphasis on the natural applies to both muggle and magical worlds. Although Harry's classes are described in terms of magic, the word 'magic' can be regarded as a misnomer for activities which in his world are natural and scientific. Harry's supposedly exotic spells and potions classes are little more than learning key skills and methods of manipulating the principles of nature that are hidden from muggles. Magic is taught as a method that has to be found and practiced like a sport or a school exercise. It represents a human skill that can be learnt and mastered through certain movements, words, or thoughts. The wizard is the ultimate source of all his doings and he is not moved by any power beyond his own will, so that magic is reduced to the level of immanence.

It is no doubt because of this rather mundane account of Hogwarts magic that Rowling attempts to make it more mysterious by circumscribing those who are capable of magical action. This limiting she considers in a number of ways. The most logical way in which to describe such a distribution of those with higher powers, the chosen ones, without recourse to an explanation involving a transcendent magical power is to reduce it to a matter of genetics. The attempt to limit wizarding privileges to genetically pure wizards is the very antithesis of good in the books, and is precisely what Harry and friends are set to battle in the persons of Draco Malfoy and Voldermort, who believe that all magical powers should be restricted to wizarding families. It must be supposed that Rowling wishes to fight a genetic theory of magic because she regards it as analogous to a class, caste, or racial theory.

However, having rejected the idea that magical powers might be genetic, Rowling fails to give a coherent meaning to the selection of wizards. She neither invokes a transcendent power nor offers the possibility that magical powers are an act of the human will, although she is otherwise very fond of human will as an explanation of causality. Therefore she is forced to resort to the idea that abilities are merely a matter of chance: some old wizarding families produce non-wizards, and some muggles produce wizards. This method works, but means that the books lose an overall structure of meaning, for magic becomes a manifestation of nature and the ability to control it just a chance.

So where might one find the ultimate meaning of Harry's world? If there is a highest goal or source of good within Harry's society, it might be found in the act of choice and the freedom of will, as these are praised by Rowling as an alternative to Voldemort's insistence on purity of blood. Yet it seems that freedom is limited for it does not explain the chaotic distribution of magical skills that are fundamental to the story.

With such a philosophy, a heavy agnosticism hangs over all of the books. Indeed, at the surface level of the text, there is no God in Harry Potter's world, and I do not think that the word is even present: neither the muggles nor the wizarding community ever mention God in their interactions, which is unsurprising given their historical horizon and the philosophical assumptions that I have already discussed. Everything in the books is immanent, nothing transcendent, and there is no attempt to place Harry's story into a larger picture of good and evil beyond the birth and rise of Voldemort.

In these books, the only character that can be likened to God is that of Dumbledore. When we first meet him, he seems omniscient and omnipotent, the originator of everything that gives meaning to Hogwarts and to the story. He transcends Harry's world and has organised almost everything in it behind the scenes. Yet Dumbledore is not God.  This is demonstrated through the course of the narrative as we discover his murky past, his hiding of the truth, his fallibility, and his mortality. If Dumbledore is the God of Harry's childhood, he becomes an ever more ambiguous figure during Harry's youth, and dies in his adolescence. Once Harry has reached adulthood there is no God figure left in his world.

The most fundamental idea in the Harry Potter books is that parenthood and family represent the ultimate goals of life. The key concepts of good and evil nearly always seem to relate to friendship and the family unit. There is no real system of ethics within Harry's world beyond the goal of preserving one's own family and friends, and it is family life that is presented as the ultimate good or utopia. For Rowling, heaven is described at the end of the last book when she speaks of the adult Harry sending his children off to school: happy, reasonably well off, middle-class, and educated.

If the philosophical assumptions of the books mirror those of society as closely as do the historical and social ones, we face great difficulty in speaking about God to our society. The lack of meaning and purpose, allied with an identification of ultimate good with the good things of this world, make for a vast chasm between the theological language of Christianity and the popular thought of British society. Whether the answer lies in retelling a separate story from that held by society or in translating religious thought into the language of society is a matter of opinion that I leave for others to decide.

 

Harvest Sermon

This sermon was originally preached at St Barnabas, Jericho, Oxford in 2003 on the RCL readings for the day: Genesis 2 and Mark 6

'Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.'

I must admit to having always found harvest festival a little confusing. I can’t be the only one to have ever wondered what tins of baked beans have to do with harvest. A more natural image of harvest is the eighteenth century farm worker, with  his scythe cutting down the wheat in a field, but how many of us actually have any experienced harvest? The Victorians were so good at romanticizing the past, making the age of pre-industrial labour seem so good; making us pine for the good old days when you knew what was in your loaf of bread. It is thus no surprise that it was they who invented this festival of Harvest. Yet the truth was somewhat different from the pre-raphaelalite ideal. For our forebears harvest meant sweaty, hard and dangerous work, and not a happy man on top of a combine harvester. Harvest caused mass fatalities and injuries, and caused such pressure on the Tudor economy that all religious festivals during the period were abrogated.

Yet it was not only the time itself that was dangerous. Harvest was a moment of judgement. Would the seed have taken? Was it wet during spring? Was it dry during the summer? Had one waited too long before harvesting? Rain and drought could cause devastation to a crop and result in famine. Upon a successful harvest hung the lives of millions of people, and a bad harvest was generally seen as a pestilence sent by God for past misdemeanours; God’s wrathful judgement upon sinners. 

And this interpretation was not merely fondly invented, for the image of harvest is an important one in Christianity. From the appearance of John the Baptist in the wilderness we are confronted with the agricultural image of harvest. John threatens the people that the time of harvest is coming, when the wheat will be gathered into the barn, and the chaff will be burnt. Jesus sends his disciples into the world to gather the harvest from the white fields of ripe corn, and he like John before him, tells of how human society is like wheat and tares: the wheat to be gathered and the tares burnt.

For those theological liberals amongst you this is all rather worrying stuff: a manifestation of the God of wrath, rather than a manifestation of the God of love. For the non-liberals amongst you, these passages can also be used in a rather worrying way; that is to say, a Pelagian way. If we choose and do what is good then God will live us and gather us into the barn, whilst if we are bad then we’re for the eternal furnace with lots of flames and worms. 

The problem with all this imagery is that, to be frank, we might find it all a little distasteful. There is at least an implied threat in the use of this imagery that, unless things change, the hearers may well be amongst the chaff and tares, and not amongst the wheat. However, the imagery cannot simply be jettisoned or swept under the carpet, it is after all a vital theme within the gospel narratives, and it must be said, a rather more appealing one than the forensic idea of judgement according to law. The harvest theme is rather richer, containing the ideas of growth and fruitfulness, which are notably absent from the legal theme which concentrates on the misdemeanours of mankind. Compare Matthew 25 with the sheep and the goats.

And, in fact, if we take a second look at the harvest imagery divested of all its romantic Victorian trappings, then we see that it is a theme that we can readily relate to in our lives. It is the most vital description of both human and Christian life: it is about planting, waiting, growing and fruitfulness. It is an image that tells us that our lives do have a purpose: we are not left alone simply to wander through the valley of life. No, we have a reason to be. We are doing something. We are growing towards something, and that something is the harvest that God wants.

In the Old Testament lesson today we heard of the creation of man, of the creatures, and of woman. Regardless of any political incorrectness in the story, it is an important image for it tells of God’s purpose for his natural world. Things were not created randomly, but in due order, each one having its own purpose. And even if we think that species evolved by some process of evolution, that does not contradict the fact that such a process would have to be designed by God himself as creator. Men and women are made for each other; they are designed to be together and to bear fruit. This is God’s original intent, that man go forth and multiply, for this is pleasing in the sight of God. A man leaves his father and mother and cleaves unto his wife, and they become one flesh. And it is upon this dictum that Christ presents his teaching on divorce: that which hinders God’s plan for the good of humanity is wrong. Human relationships are meant to be fruitful and faithful, and it is not God’s wish that any should sunder those relationships.

But the matter of harvest goes rather deeper than that: natural growth is not enough for human beings: even if natural things in and of themselves are good, they are not the ultimate good. For natural growth has own one end: the growth of nature. Nature can but produce nature, natural things cannot transcend the created order: there good is strictly limited to their own sphere. But the letter to the Hebrews points out that the purpose of the ordering of creation is somewhat deeper than to produce mere natural growth.

Citing Psalm 8, the writer points out that men were made little lower than the angels and all things were subjected to them according to God’s good purpose. And this was done for a reason: to crown them with glory and honour. In other words, even our growth in this life has a purpose and it is our exaltation above that which is around us as our fellow creatures. And the letter to the Hebrews states how this promise is fulfilled: it is made real in the person of Jesus condescending to become a man. God’s will for the increase of humanity is so that he can share his own divine life with them by sanctifying them through the incarnation of his only begotten son. Through Christ’s sufferings in this world he takes humanity into himself. He, as it were, partakes of our humanity, so that we may be partakers, through grace, of his divinity. We are blessed, sanctified and transfigured into a new humanity; we are the children of God and so fellow members of the household of God with our Lord.

 In other words God’s will for the increase of humanity, is a will to come into relationship with that creation, to transfigure and transform it by his omnipotent will. What God has made he tends and cares for like any good gardener, but unlike most gardeners he is willing to suffer even unto death to see that his creation comes to fruition.

Harvest for God then is two-fold. It is in the natural sphere the increase of his creation. But this first reason is really a mechanism for the second reality of the divine harvest: the fruits of redemption. Our redemption means that we are God’s harvest, his chosen fruit.

And this brings us back to our Gospel reading today; Jesus welcomes the children. Jesus welcomes the children and blesses them: they are to be his harvest of righteousness. As the eternal word, he made each one of them and, as the Son of God made man, he blesses each one of them and imparts to them his grace. We are those children. We are the children of God, he made us and he sanctifies us with his very self. We are God’s harvest, and with us he is very pleased.

So when you put your can of beans down the front here, remember that you do it not for sentimental reasons, or for the fact that by doing so you might win God over to counting you into the barn and out of the fire. Do it rather with the remembrance that like the can of beans you yourself are someone’s labour and you were not left sitting on the shelf, but were picked up, purchased, and sent to do something which was good. You all are God’s harvest, and you are sent out to produce yet more fruit.

 

 

Contemporary church and tradition

As many of you know, I have recently spent a week on holiday in Rhodes. I always enjoy going to Greece: there are so many ancient and medieval sites to explore. However, what always impresses me most, when I return to Greece, is the Greek Orthodox Church.

Orthodoxy has the same creeds as the Western Church, and yet in many ways it is so very different to the Western Christianity to which Anglicanism belongs. Its vestments, services and church decorations are different to ours. Even the attire of the clergy is so very different. One cannot help but feel that there is an age and depth to Orthodox spirituality that surpasses human reckoning. The rituals of the liturgy have been added to over successive generations, and seem to give a real insight into what earlier generations of Christians believe. When one opens an Orthodox liturgy book, one is suddenly aware that this service is in the language of the New Testament, and so the ancient faith is transmitted to modern day church congregations without any need of translation.

Most remarkable of all is the attitude that the Greek Church has towards church buildings. We build our churches where there are centres of population, but they build their churches on isolated islands and mountain tops, far removed from the cities. Here there is a vestige of the holiness of isolation that drew St Anthony's followers to the wilderness. The Greek Church hopes that its people will go on a serious pilgrimage to seek God, rather than popping round the corner as if the church were a local shop.

Although critics will point to the traditionalism of the Eastern church, and its reluctance to simplify any aspect of its worship life, the remarkable thing about the Greek Church is that it continues to have relevance to many of its people. I was heartened to see how many young people went into church to light a taper and reverence the icons, and take away the holy bread. Certainly it is possible to argue that there are issues on which the Greek Church could be more vocal, but they would probably argue that consciously trying to be 'relevant' to society is a false aim: it is from faithfulness to the God revealed in scripture that relevance springs.

The very visual and tactile nature of traditional Orthodox devotional practice accords well with the way in which our post-modern culture works because it transmits narratives, traditions and values that speak of the mystery of God. The success of Alpha and Emmaus in the West has also shown that what attracts people to church is it distinctive narrative, faith, worship and values. The church's inheritance of beliefs and worship is then something of great worth.

 

I think there is something here for us to learn: it is in faithfulness to God and our tradition that our relevance is to be found. Many over hasty attempts at modernisation have diminished the church rather than built it up and, when certain things are stripped away, a good deal of Christian tradition can be lost. This is not an argument for complacent conservatism: no church should sit where it is and ignore the developments in society around it. However, we should be aware that not all change is necessarily for the good, and we need to evaluate the benefits and disadvantages of change with care.