Sunday 20th March
Last Saturday we Stood with Ukraine. Here in this Cathedral, we held the vigiL, at least in part, in answer to the commonly question, asked “What can I do?”
As a Christian Church we opened our doors. We demonstrated our solidarity. We expressed empathy. We said our prayers.
Many of us gave money. And plenty have expressed a desire to do more still. At the end a notable citizen of this County, said to me:
“Thank you. This is just what the cathedral should be doing. Just what the Church should be doing”
Sometimes it is good to hear reflected back what people think the Church is for. Though his words reformed as a question in my mind, which I put to us this morning:
“Is that just what the Cathedral should be doing? Is this just what the Church is for?”
And, I think we can see the church’s answer to these questions in these last few weeks:
First response. First week. We pray for peace. Okay. Of course.
But is that just what the Church should be doing in such a crisis? Is that just what the Church is for in time of war?
Second response. Last week, we stand with the suffering. We give and share.
Third response. This week, we pray harder we stand and we give and we campaign for refugee welcome.
But is that just what the Church should be doing? Is that all the Church is good for?
For me – I think that it is very good that the Church is doing all these things. And yet I believe that there is more we have to say and do in service of justice and peace.
In fact, I want to encourage us to remember that the great promise of the Christian life is that it does not rest at one remove but steps into the challenge and speaks out of the crisis.
It is a strange thing but true that what the Church thinks its role is in times of crisis – and of war – is umbilically connected to what it thinks its vocation is in this world.
This has been true from the beginning. What it thinks it is and what it thinks it is called to do always come into starkest relief in times like these:
By the time of the great crisis of the fourth century when – after the siege and destruction of his own city – the north African bishop St Augustine began to write about what we now call just war theory – at least two very distinct phases had already been passed through.
The earliest church was a persecuted minority. It was apart from the world and prayed for deliverance and believed in an immediate or immanent Second Coming of Christ.
By decision or in effect this Church was largely pacifist, leaning into the promise that justice would be delivered by God himself.
By no means all modern-day pacifists are so for the same reasons, but often Christian pacifism shares with the earliest Christians a belief that the Church is called out of the world to be separate to it and a witness against it before God.
In the 310’s the Emperor Constantine converted and made Christianity the religion of his Empire.
The church that took shape after the third century- (from which (by the way) springs our Bible, Creed, doctrine and the large portion of our liturgy).
This church almost universally believed that the beginning of the end had now come the state had become the instrument of God. No longer pacifist, the Church regarded the empire as being the sign of God’s final victory, and came to regard the States violence as the instrument of God against evil.
I wonder if this is what the leaders of the Russian church think now…
Though they have little excuse for doing so because when Rome was sacked and the Empire itself fell, the Church, in the West at least, developed a yet another perspective through St Augustine, who I mentioned a moment ago…
A perspective that has largely held ever since.
This new view was much less triumphalist. And much less naïve about human perfectibility.
His view of the final redemption of the church was neither that it was coming soon nor that it was already here. Rather that we live in an in-between time.
In the words of the C20th American theologian, Reinhold Neibuhr, Augustine realised “that that reading of the New Testament vision was, at once, too naïve for a sophisticated world, and yet too sophisticated for modern men”.
Throughout that fateful decade Augustine reformulated a vision of the Church – with its vocation to peace and of the State- with its inescapable violence, existing within and amongst one another,
often confused and… sometimes confounded.
Augustine compared this in-between state to Christs parables of the sheep and goats, and the wheat and taresin which the good and bad are mingled, only to be separated at the final judgment, whenever that would be.
And in his commentary on todays gospel passage he makes the same suggestion:
That this one tree is that mixture of good and evil and cannot be spilt by anyone but the Just Judge, so the answer to our question what the Church should be doing (?) can never be simple or binary.
As it lives fully in the present world, where God has called it to witness to Him there may well be red lines that the Church cannot cross, but they are not obvious we need to do the hard inner work of judging what they are.
For the Augustine – it is not simple WHAT we do that ultimately matters, rather it is WHY and HOW we conduct ourselves that determines whether or not what we do is good, or even a justifiable evil.
‘What is required to be just’ he says, ‘is not a bodily action, but an inward disposition.’
This exercise of virtue in our decisions is the thread that links us to the City of God, and sets Christian action apart amidst the City of Man.
Thus Augustine gives the further example of two people at the base of the tree in our gospel both in the ‘dung’ of this in between time. They are praying – as we were.
Yet, though they look to be doing exactly the same thing – one prays for the death of his
enemy. One for his own sin.
For Augustine though they look alike their disposition is different. One is dwelling in the City of Man and the other in the City of God.
Well what has this got to do with us? Everything as it happens.
For just as in the seemingly small matter of personal prayer, so it is with the larger matters of life- including in crisis and in war.
For Augustine and most of the western church ever since, a forceful or even violent response to crisis is not always wrong because we are Christians, nor is it always right because we are Christians. It is a matter of judgement on the HOW and WHY.
So for any violent response to be just, for instance it must be shown:
That there is a just cause
That it is the last resort
That there is a right intent
That there serious prospect of success;
And lastly, that the means are proportional to the end.
Friends, I’m reminding us of this things – not because I think that the right answer at the
moment is a violent one – I pray that is not true even if such a thing could be just.
I’m reminding us of them because – being called to be in the World and for the World – we are obliged to have better, fuller answers to the questions, ‘What should the Church be doing?’ or when we are about our prayers ‘Is that just what the church is for?’
I’m reminding us to think beyond those practices that have become more comfortable to C21st Christians such as prayer, giving, and hospitality, because I believe we are called by God, not to answer the world’s fantastic claims, simply with the mere assertion of an even more fantastic hope.
I think we are called to even deeper lives of soberness and watchfulness, of faithful love and discernment amidst the dung of the world – that could– as Reinhold Neibuhr suggested elsewhere:
‘appeal to that world in its’ night of despair as having some gleams of light in it, derived from (that Easter) light that shineth in the darkness’ .
It seems to me, that even if our response begins with prayer and charity, as it should, if that is JUST what we do we are not saying all we can of Christ.
If the Christian response to this is simply to retreat into some eschatological frame, promising future hope – then we are not witnessing sufficiently to the most distinctive and brilliant characteristic of the Christian Way, in which is a willingness to enter into the darkness of the world, as Christ did.
As I say, friends, I am not trying to persuade you of any particular course of action. What I am wanting to persuade you of is that Christians can say more, do more, contribute more. I would encourage you to think, and read, and pray for yourself this week, so, that – even here – amidst the dung, in this field of wheat and tares in which we live, you are ‘always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you about the hope you have’.
And though we shouldn’t end in prayer, since it must always be beginning, let me invite
you to pray with me Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer, composed by him, seventy years ago:
Lord, we pray this day mindful of the sorry confusion of our world.
Look with mercy upon this generation of your children so steeped in misery of their own contriving, so far strayed from your ways and so blinded by passions.
We pray for the victims of tyranny, that they may resist oppression with courage.
We pray for wicked and cruel men, whose arrogance reveals to us what the sin of our own
hearts is like when it has conceived and brought forth its final fruit.
We pray for ourselves who live in peace and quietness, that we may not regard our
good fortune as proof of our virtue, or rest content to have our ease at the price of other
men’s sorrow and tribulation.
We pray for all who have some vision of your will, despite the confusions and betrayals
of human sin, that they may humbly and resolutely plan for and fashion the foundations
of a just peace between men, even while they seek to preserve what is fair and just
among us against the threat of malignant powers.
AMEN
(Reinhold Niebuhr 1892 – 1971)
