Sermon preached by the Revd Neil Fernyhough, 4th Sunday of Advent (December 20, 2009).

Readings:  Micah 5: 2-5; Hebrews 10: 5-10; Luke 1: 39-55.

One of the nicest times I had preparing for Christmas was the year I was unemployed.  Not having much money to spend, I decided that instead of buying presents for close family and friends, I would give them homemade goodies, instead.  And so I prepared rum balls and mini loaves and shortbread and chocolates and pferfferneuse and jam and other things, boxed them up, and – not without some trepidation – presented them to my loved ones.  Any worry I might have had about not having bought them CDs, books, clothing, and the rest of the raft of the usual Christmas present suspects was soon put to rest by the depth of gratitude expressed.  The people to whom I gave the gifts told me how grateful they were for all the time, effort, and care I put into my baking and cooking.

Truth be told, I found all that baking and cooking a lot less stressful than my usual Christmas shopping.  I’m one of those people who is guided by the philosophy of trying to get it all done at once, as quickly as possible, preferably on a weekday afternoon when there will be a minimum of shoppers.  I adhere strictly to a list, and even anticipate a geographical route: “I’ll start at point A, and work my way westward until I get to point B.  Once upon a time, I even had a dollar figure next to each name, to ensure a rigorous fairness in spending no more nor less on niece or nephew, godchild A or godchild B.  I could then, if necessary, produce the receipts, and say: “You see, Uncle Neil doesn’t love him more than he loves you!”  Is it any wonder that the shopping for presents alone was enough to bestow upon me a singularly jaundiced view of the holiday?

Change is in the air, I think.  This year, my close friends and I agreed that we’d make charitable donations in one another’s names instead of giving each other presents; and I think I might do that and the homemade presents with my family next year – and limit the gift purchases to the kidlets, who’d probably cut my jugular if the Christmas present train suddenly stopped!

“Don’t we have enough stuff?” I keep asking myself.  And indeed, in a society in which personal desires are increasingly kept afloat on the buoyancy of debt at the expense of social and environmental sustainability, the ethical question of our time is surely “how much is enough?”

With that great sacred-slash-secular festival of Christmas steaming towards us later this week, with its twin messiahs of Santa Claus and, well, the Messiah – it is a question as timely as it is inconvenient.  But that event, seen in the context of the chief reading of this day, almost demands that the question be asked.  That chief reading is the Annunciation and the Magnificat.  In my opinion, the Annunciation is the pitch, and the Magnificat is Babe Ruth hitting it out of the park.  This song of Mary is one of the most famous passages of the New Testament; and is perhaps the one most frequently transcribed into music, with the obvious exception of the Lord’s Prayer.

Why is the Magnificat such a big deal?  Well, there’s a reason why it’s the last Gospel we hear before Christmas; and it’s not just because it announces Jesus’ imminent birth.  The Magnificat does nothing less than set the whole scene for the incarnation of God.  Using the evocativeness of poetry, it describes, in striking – and dare I say enthusiastic – language the nature of what God intends by coming into the world.  And let us once again savour the enormity of that, our claim – that God came into the world manifest as a human being, in order to impart a message about what is required of human beings to attain a state of godliness, which he called the “kingdom of heaven.”

And so what does the Magnificat tell us about God’s intentions?  It tells us that the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is, first and foremost, of ethical significance.  I can recall an epiphany I had as a seminarian, so profound that I burst into a friend’s apartment across the hall – the inimitable Eric, of whom I’ve spoken in the past – and exclaimed, “Eric!  Ethics!  That’s what it’s all about!”  “That’s what what’s all about?” Eric asked.  I looked at him wide-eyed.  “Why, Christianity, of course!  It’s all about ethics.”  And that was the genesis of my fateful decision to pursue an academic career in ministry.

Of course, like a lot of epiphanies, this one was just a little too sweeping and neatly tied up to be true.  But I have remained convinced that ethics – which essentially imparts a right way of living – is the cornerstone of Jesus’ teaching.  And the Magnificat is the introduction to Christian ethics.  As we listen to its words, we discover why it is as much a sharp commentary on the character of our society, as it was of Jesus’.  With the coming of the Messiah, Mary says, the proud and powerful are scattered and toppled, the lowly are raised up and the hungry are fed, and the rich are sent away with nothing.  As I said last week, when the valleys are raised and the mountains and hills brought low, your opinion on that circumstance depends very much on your starting elevation.

The great social reversals of Luke’s gospel remind us that issues around social status form the prominent element of Jesus’ ethical teaching – which will perhaps come as a surprise to those who thought it was sex!  Of course, Jesus would had no knowledge of sociology, a discipline only about a hundred years old.  But he did know social status, because it was such a prominent feature of his world – far more stark than the ones we see today.  Jesus also knew that it is so integral to ways of being, that we do not only see it expressed across time and cultures, but we see it expressed in other mammals, where status is determined by the size of one’s harem, or one’s antlers.  But social hierarchy becomes a feature of Jesus’ critique because it creates divisions from God, from creation, and from others.  The prevailing medium of social exchange becomes material, and the primary motives affecting relationships become desire and envy – all to bolster a false belief that one can stave off the total loss of everything which is the fate of all creatures.

When I was in Vancouver a few weeks ago, I walked by the Hudson’s Bay Company, the official merchandiser of the 2010 Olympic Games.  It is impossible not to notice that the outside of the building is festooned with banners hanging from the roof down to the awnings, with photos of athletes.  Next to one is printed the words:  “This is what we were made for.”  From a Christian perspective, that’s an interesting assertion, inviting the question, “What is it, exactly, that we were made for?”  Shopping?  Buying into a corporate enterprise peddling an athletic myth?  Buying into a nationalistic enterprise peddling a corporate myth?

Ethics emerges from the intersection of evolutionary impulse with social responsibility. As Christians, we believe that ethical imperatives are as much a reality as anything in the physical realm: we live in a universe that is as moral as it is material.  Jesus understood this, guided as he was by his mother’s song.  He knew that hierarchical social systems maintained through inequity stand opposed to a moral universe in which all are equal in the eyes of God.  And so Jesus proposes an alternative – one of  kinship, in which people treat one another as though everyone were part of the same family, due the necessities for survival we would extend to family.  We are meant to perceive that this is the way God sees humanity, and Mary sets us up for this understanding going forth into Christmas.

And so let us approach that festival of the Incarnation of God with joy, fully embracing that through Jesus, we have the tools to change the rules.  Individually, as a parish, and as a Church, may we find ways to be bold and articulate in speaking and living this ethical imperative of equality, of self-emptying, and of taking no more than a sufficiency.  In that way, we can turn the world upside down.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

Sermon preached by the Revd Neil Fernyhough, Third Sunday of Advent (December 13, 2009).

Readings:  Zephaniah 3: 14-20; Canticle 9; Philippians 4: 4-7; Luke 3: 7-18.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  This opening line, among the most famous in English literature, begins A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens.  His novel, set amidst the events of the French Revolution, portrays the brutality of the stark social divisions of eighteenth century France and Britain.  In this sense, it is a cautionary tale for Dickens’ British readers, for whom the events across the Dover Strait and their terrifying aftermath was very much a living memory.

In Dickens’ book, we see the oppression of the poor by the noble classes in the years leading up to the storming of the Bastille.  In one chilling scene, a French marquis explains to his nephew that “repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery… will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.”  It is indeed an evil disposition, but just as evil is the terrible, bloody, and often indiscriminate retribution that follows the overthrow of the ancien régime.  This culminates, in Dickens’ work, with the condemnation to the guillotine of that same virtuous nephew, whose only crime is that he has inherited his uncle’s title along with the collective family guilt for the cruel and violent acts against the peasantry committed by that family.

The condemnation to death of this virtuous man indicates that what one reaps is not necessarily what one has sown, but can often be what has been sown unwittingly on one’s behalf.  We see this all the time – whether it’s on the individual level, say a family condemned to a generation of poverty and dysfunction because of the dissolute living of its breadwinner; or on a global level, such as the aftermath of revolutions, or the challenges we face today as a result of two centuries of extreme human-generated environmental stress.

A Tale of Two Cities, and particularly its famous opening line, came unbidden to mind as I read those jarring words of John the Baptist extracted from the much longer account of his ministry and proclamation.  First of all, why exactly are the words jarring?  Well, look at what John says.  Calling his audience, “a brood of vipers,” he warns that the axe of God’s wrath lies poised at the root of their very lives.  Trees that do not bear good fruit will be hacked down and thrown into the fire.  In other words, people who do not act justly will be condemned to hell.  When his anxious listeners ask what they should do to be spared this gruesome fate, John replies that they must redistribute their goods, and behave as law-abiding citizens.

John concludes with the urgent message that the Messiah of God is about to be manifested.  He will be the metaphorical axe – or, employing another vivid image, a farmer with a winnowing fork, who will gather the wheat into the granary of heaven and throw the chaff into the flames of eternal fire.  And, after this moral and rhetorical punch in the gut, how does the passage conclude?  “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.”  Good news?!  Did I miss it?  What good news?  Perhaps the good news that forewarned is forearmed?  Because otherwise, on a casual first reading, John’s proclamation seems to be long on terror and short on “comfort, comfort ye, my people.”

But, if you reflect on it a moment, it is easy to see how the coming of the Messiah could be considered the best of times and the worst of times.  Like any shaking of the foundations, much depends upon one’s proximity to those foundations.  You might find that your world topples.  Or you might find that you have been shaken free from a crumbling edifice.  Or you may simply find that your mental and spiritual furniture has been unexpectedly rearranged.  Regardless, no earth-shattering event leaves one untouched – whether eager or unwilling, we all become participants.  How much more so when that event rips into time, and space; into history and thought; into your personality and character; into the very fate of our mortal and immortal existences, as does the coming of the Son of Man?

And yet it does.  As I have watched the nations gather in Copenhagen to once again discuss a global response to climate change, which they’ve been doing for over twenty years, I have wondered what the coming of the Messiah would mean to those negotiations.  And I have wondered what it would mean to so many challenges and crises the people of the world face at this moment – whether it is the growing divide between the rich and the poor here and abroad, the increasing use of forced displacement, sexual violence, and the recruitment of child soldiers in the intractable wars of Africa, or the restrictions on free speech and a free press in so many places around the world, including Canada.  For the metaphorical mountains and hills to be brought low, and valleys to be raised, there might be a good deal of fearful and joyful anticipation to go around, in equal measure…depending on whether one is a mountain, or whether one is a valley.

Our faith teaches us that we live in a moral universe.  This is the inevitable consequence of seeing things through spiritual eyes – which is our cross to bear.  Paula Sampson, who joined us last Wednesday for our Advent series, The Moral Roundtable, shared with us a quote from Jose Zarete that has stuck with me.  Zarete said that “a spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics.”  Nothing could be truer.  It is possible to distance ourselves from the inequities, prejudices, oppression, and – yes – evil done in your name and in my name.  But, when the King of Glory comes, what will our response be?  The harsh prophecies of John the Baptist sound more to my ears like the plaintive cries of one frustrated and anxious that justice delayed is justice denied.  And only the appearance of the author of the moral universe will quench the fires of hell that humanity stokes for itself.

In this sense, John’s proclamation is transformed into an invitation.  We are invited into a new life, one in which we are trees bearing the fruits of justice and righteousness and mercy; or are nourishing wheat gathered into the granary of God’s kingdom of abundance for the feeding of the nations.  For if you accept that we live in a moral universe, then you must accept that you live with the possibility – the inevitability – of choice.  This is the freedom that Christ’s shaking of the foundations has ultimately made possible – this is the possibility of redemption that is the theme of this time of preparation.  It is for this reason that John’s proclamation lies so comfortably beside Paul’s exhortation:  “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I say, rejoice.”

For those of you who have read A Tale of Two Cities, you will know that the story ends with a redemption, of sorts.  The virtuous nobleman is saved by an act of moral choice manifested as purely Christian heroism.  A dissolute young lawyer seeking some sort of salvation through personal sacrifice, substitutes himself for the condemned nobleman, and ends up with his own head on the chopping block.  The final words of Dickens’ novel are almost as famous as the first.  As the blade is cut loose, the lawyer’s final thought is this:  “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”  What choices are you being asked to make today?  To what heroism is God calling you today?  How hard do you want to shake those foundations…today?  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

Sermon preached by the Revd Neil Fernyhough, First Sunday of Advent (November 29, 2009).

Readings:  Jeremiah 33: 14-16; Psalm 25: 1-9; 1 Thessalonians 3: 9-13; Luke 21: 25-36

Jesus said, “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the seas and the waves.  People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the film 2012.  The unforgettable image of California literally sliding into the Pacific Ocean like a toy city off a tabletop – which, for all I know, may be what they filmed – came unbidden to mind as I read Jesus’ words.  These are, after all, the first two sentences of the first Gospel reading of this Advent 2009.  A literal disaster – not a figurative disaster, but a literal one – is about to befall the whole earth, one in which the whole cosmos is touched.

Those of you who have had the dubious pleasure of watching 2012 (which, by the way, is so laughably bad it’s good) will know that it all ends quite badly for the planet.  It’s a disaster movie, so I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say that virtually everything and everyone is annihilated in a denouement that is not unlike the flood parable of Genesis.  And probably not un-coincidentally, either, since Hollywood has been recycling story-lines since antediluvian times.  They likely also know that a certain proportion of their audience will be made up Millennialists, Christian and otherwise, indulging in the guilty pleasure of seeing a fictionalized account of a deeply held expectation.

Millennialism is the belief that there will be a one thousand year period in which the heavens and the earth will pass away and Satan will be chained, after which he will do battle with God as a final and necessary prelude to the Last Judgement and a new, golden age.  It’s all right there, in the Book of Revelation.  It was a popular view in the early church, but by the fourth century it was rejected, mainly because it is so at odds with everything else the New Testament has to say about Jesus.  Wasn’t it just last week, after all, that we celebrated the Feast of the Reign of Christ?  The doctrine of Christ’s ascension to govern at the right hand of the Father would seem to trump the frequently suspect theology of the Apocalypse pretty soundly.  And it was chiefly for that reason the Fourth Century crafters of the Nicene Creed inserted the line that, having ascended, Christ’s “kingdom shall have no end.”

If we think about the end of time at all from the standpoint of faith, and if someone were to press us on the point, I think most of us would instinctively respond with the perfectly orthodox belief that the so-called millennial age is now – the age of the Church.  Everything we read in the Bible, proclaim from the pulpit, and experience in the sacrament of the altar, points to the reality that we exist at an in-between time, an in-between state, one in which the kingdom of God is already – but not yet.  This is a time of preparation.  And we prepare by paying attention to the Biblical blueprint of what a God-filled reality looks like; whether it be from the visions of the prophets and sages, the hopes of the matriarchs and patriarchs, the poems of the Psalms and the canticles, and above all in the teaching and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth and of his apostles.  We don’t prepare the kingdom by sitting back and enjoying self-satisfied fantasies about a cataclysmic battle between personifications of Good and Evil, followed by the descent from the sky of a perfectly dimensioned, gilded, and bejewelled ideal City of God.

The doctrine of passivity – yes, even of active destruction – preached by certain fundamentalist biblical idolaters is really the true Antichrist.  The idea of global cooperation, of peace between peoples, tribes, and – heaven forefend – faiths smacks a little too much like the Devil’s peace coalition to such types.  For them, “the dream of total victory cannot abide the nightmare scenario of negotiation,” to quote the theologian Catherine Keller.  The state can, and does, rain down omnipotent fire on whomever it chooses; and the handmaids of annihilation wish to have the final say over the handmaid of the Lord – whose child’s birth as the Prince of Peace we now prepare to commemorate.

Traditionally, it has been those at the margins who have most welcomed the idea of the apocalypse.  But beware of what happens once the elites appropriate the narrative of the end times.  When political edginess becomes political expediency, it is those very ones on the margins who will feel the all-too-real wrath of the almighty – with a small “a.”  When judgement day approacheth, how convenient a device its spectre can be made into, in order to instil fear and docility in a population that might otherwise pose a risk of exercising righteous power.  It’s easy to forget that it is precisely the powerful who are condemned and overthrown in the Book of Revelation, just as they are in every single Gospel of Jesus Christ, in the letters of Paul, in the prophets, and – oh, I don’t know – just about everywhere else in the Word of God.

In short, Advent is not about preparing for the end of days, any more than Christianity itself is.  It is about preparing for a new day – a day that is always dawning, a day that even now shines with hope for all those who would dare take the risk to step out into it.  It is simple to focus on the first two sentences of today’s Gospel and suddenly acquire that curious tone deafness of fear; the convenient fear of which I spoke.  But consider the real nugget – the gold coin embedded in the narrative meringue:  “Stand up and raise your heads,” says Jesus, “because your redemption is drawing near.”  The dark time he describes was a reality in which his hearers lived every day – their land under occupation, labouring under three levels of onerous taxation, their very lives under threat from the four horsemen of the very real Apocalypse that was daily life for the bulk of people in first century Jewish Palestine.  Their end times were upon them, and before them stood their redemption – and all of a sudden, their fig tree sprouts green shoots, and summer is upon them.

In the not-too-distant past, Advent was a penitential time for Christians; a sort of a Lent-in-miniature.  And so, the liturgical colour, like that of Lent, was purple – and the prayers, readings, music, and worship all spoke of a bondage that could only be released by the coming of the Lord.  I don’t want to discount that as an important element of the Advent message.  But I am concerned above all today with the things that obscure.  And so let nothing obscure our vision from what we already have.  Advent is a polite fiction in which we pretend that we’re waiting for Jesus.  In this sense, it is an exercise in collective imagination, as we ponder what it was like before liberation was made real in God’s incarnation.  And, in a similar sense, we reflect on what it is like for those who still feel themselves to be untouched by that liberation.

Apocalyptic thinking moves beyond the pretence of waiting for Jesus to actually believing he’s absent – which is why I find it so profoundly sad and unfaithful.  In a world in which Jesus reigns, we still prepare a realm in which the kingdoms of the earth are truly made into the kingdom of God.  This is the function of the Church, and passivity has no role in such an awesome responsibility, and in such awesome accountability.  My prayer for you as we begin this Advent season is that you will indeed stand up and raise your head, prepared to receive the redemption that is already yours.  Let this time be one in which you boldly proclaim in word and deed, Emmanuel…God is with us.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

In common parlance, the advent of something means that it is beginning, or coming into view.  Advent is therefore a very apt name to apply to this season.  In common with most major faiths, ours is a narrative tradition – we convey our beliefs, values, and hopes through stories.  And at the centre of those stories is the one about Jesus of Nazareth.  By reading about his life and teachings we learn unique things about God, and about our place in the grand narrative – a narrative Christians define in threefold terms as creation, redemption, and sanctification.

Advent is the first chapter of the Christian story, the prologue, really:  the coming of God into the world as a human being is foretold and proclaimed.  A bold proclamation like this carries equally bold consequences.  What we are saying when we profess God incarnate is that there is a radical identification between the human and the divine.  How empowering, awesome, and – indeed – frightening is that?!  That God decided to show such solidarity with the human condition by taking on the life of Jesus in order to rescue humanity from spiritual self-destruction, cannot help but create a sense in us of our awesome responsibility and accountability before the Almighty.

The complete identification of the spiritual with the physical feels right for Christians.  It feels right when we see the Spirit at work in the wondrous beauty and complexity of creation.  It feels right when we perceive that God feels and shares in our grief, joys, struggles, and accomplishments.  And it feels right when we experience a keen sense of God’s presence as we pray and meditate, partake of the sacraments, chant and sing spiritual songs, and come together in fellowship.  Is it any wonder that the first hymn we sing of our New Year, Advent, is O Come, O Come, Emmanuel?  After all, the Hebrew phrase emmanu-el means nothing less than “God is with us.”

And so begins another cycle of the story, taking us through the birth of Christ (Christmas), his manifestation to the non-Hebrew community (Epiphany), his brief and dangerous ministry (Lent), his condemnation, trial, and execution (Holy Week), his defeat of sin and death (Easter), and his ascension to heaven and gifting of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost).  We then take several months (the weeks after Pentecost, or “ordinary time”) to meditate more deeply on Jesus’ teachings, the words of sages and prophets, and the continuation of the Christian story through the ages in the lives of saints and holy people.

Like the cycles of the seasons, or the cycle of a life, the cycle of the church year carries with it both regularities and unexpected surprises.  Our church life, our church seasons frame the events that happen within it – but we, the faithful, give those events shape and meaning.  Through our worship and ministry, our outreach and evangelism, our education and formation, and our fellowship and mutual care, we make the cycle come alive.  For, ultimately, the stories are not a one-way narration intoned to a passive audience.  Rather, they are an invitation to dialogue and to enter the story, to make it our own, and to adapt it to our lives as one might adapt a piece of literature to a screenplay, and a screenplay to performance.

May this Advent be for all of us an opportunity to enter the story anew and claim it as our own.  As God chose to walk with us as the human Jesus, may we choose to walk with Jesus as children of God, and as Christ’s own body in the world.  Let us, through our words and actions, invite the whole world into magical, miraculous, liberating story of emmanu-el!  Happy New Year!

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

The concept of Christian morality is evolving and dynamic, and something we ordinarily like to avoid talking about.  It can convey unpleasant images.  We may conjure up a stereotype of the hectoring, rule-bound preacher, telling his audience that they are damned to hell if they don’t meet certain standards.  Or, we may shudder as we recall vicious battles over hot-button issues like abortion, divorce, capital punishment, and homosexuality which have divided faith communities and destroyed relationships.

Yet if one accepts a divine being, or even a more amorphously-defined spiritual reality, then it is hard to resist the conclusion that we live in a moral universe.  In other words, our existence is one in which our thoughts, speech, and actions are judged according to fundamental, universal principles of right and wrong.  Whether it is Buddhist Dharma, Islamic Sharia law, or the Jewish Torah, all major faith movements teach a code of conduct.  Fashioning a “good life” in which personal fulfilment is joined with a standard of universal values is integral to religious self-identity.

For Christians, morality is informed by a number of often incongruent streams.  In our holy book, the Bible, a strict code of life enunciated in the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament) is by turns affirmed and modified (or even denied) by a uniquely Christian canon (the New Testament), which upholds an appeal to conscience as the basic arbiter of moral judgement.  Moreover, as a syncretic religion – that is, one that draws in people of diverse cultures and points of view, rather than a tribal religion like Shinto or Hinduism – Christianity has no “culture,” and has incorporated insights from many sources.  This is already seen in the accommodation of Greco-Roman thought and cultural beliefs about right and wrong found in the writings of St. Paul and the Acts of the Apostles.

In more recent times, Christianity has had to respond to the insights of science and modern philosophy.  It is no coincidence that the end of the Reformation roughly coincided with the birth of the Enlightenment.  In part, divisions in Christianity reflected increasingly diverse ways of understanding how to make moral judgements, and what those ought to be.  By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many Christian pastors and theologians were fighting an increasingly desperate rearguard action against moral relativism – the contention that ethical principles are not universal, but are socially, culturally, and historically contextual.

A main effect for contemporary Christians of both the complex foundation of Christian morality, and the ascendance of moral relativism has been the adoption of a sort of informal situational ethics, viewing all moral actions through the lens of Jesus’ love commandment.  But what does this mean in practical terms?  Is it workable or desirable?  How do we live the ethical aspect of our faith, and what sort of compromises do we make with a world in which ethics and morality are opaque concepts?

Through Advent, Wednesdays at 7pm, we will explore these issues by examining four areas:  loving our neighbour (presented by Bruce Morris); relations with indigenous people (presented by Paula Sampson, Director of First Nations Ministries at VST); aging and the elderly (presented by Linda Varin); and consumerism and consumption (presented by me).  Information about this program, called The Moral Roundtable: Christian Morality in the 21^st Century, is available in the bulletin, on posters around the church, and in the flyer accompanying this year’s Advent and Christmas letter.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

Sermon preached by The Rev’d Neil Fernyhough, Feast of the Reign of Christ (Nov. 22, 2009).

Readings:  2 Samuel 23: 1-7; Psalm 132: 1-19; Revelation 1: 4-8; John 18: 33-37.

About a month ago, Toby and I spent a few days visiting Los Angeles.  Now, I hadn’t been to LA since I was 13 – if by “LA” you mean Disneyland and Universal Studios.  So I arrived not really knowing what to expect, beyond the city’s legendary sprawl and horrible traffic – which indeed proved to be just as bad in 2009 as it was in 1978.  We stayed with a friend in West Hollywood, and on our first night there, he took us to his favourite frozen yoghurt place, a local fixture a few blocks away on Santa Monica Boulevard.

The three of us got our frozen yoghurt, and went to sit at a table on the sidewalk.  As we chatted and ate, a sleek, stately Bentley glided up in front of the shop.  A chauffer hopped out and opened the back door, and the from the car emerged a rather ordinary looking couple, who went into the store while the Bentley idled.  A few minutes later, they emerged with their frozen yoghurt, the chauffer hopped out again to open the door for them, and off they drove.  Toby and I, as the tourists, seemed to be the only people to look up and gawk.  Welcome to Los Angeles, where you are chauffer-driven in your limo to the local frozen yoghurt place.

West Hollywood and Beverly Hills are adjacent to one another, and it is not at all unusual to see Rolls Royces, Jaguars, and BMWs caught in the ubiquitous traffic snarls along Sunset Boulevard or Rodeo Drive.  Meanwhile, open-topped mini-buses climb the less jammed hills to drive by the homes of the stars.  In Century City, the old 20^th Century Fox back lot converted into high-rises, there is a street called the Avenue of the Stars, and along Hollywood Boulevard, red marble stars are embedded in the sidewalk, each bearing a familiar – or perhaps forgotten – name from some branch of the entertainment industry.  Some stars remain empty, awaiting the next big thing.  And brooding over all this, on an undistinguished hillside, is the famous sign bearing the name in large white letters of the subdivision that started it all – “Hollywood.”

Toby’s not a churchgoer, so when I sang, “Who are these like stars appearing?” – the first line of a familiar hymn dedicated to the saints – as we walked along looking at the stars in the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, he didn’t catch the irony.  But I, in any event, was struck by the displacement of one pantheon of heavenly adoration by another, more earthly one.  Hollywood is the dream factory, located in a country in which the pursuit of the American Dream is a shared aspiration.  But of course, the thing about dreams is that they are not reality.  In the context of Hollywood and of the culture of consumption generally, the “dream” is essentially a metaphor for the pursuit and conspicuous display of wealth.

On a Sunday dedicated to the Christian belief that God is at the helm of creation and society, what can we say about competing claims for the title?  How do the royalty embedded in the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard compare with the peasant rabbi dragged before Pilate on the charge of being king of the Jews?  How do the multimillion dollar shrines in the Hollywood Hills visited by supplicants in minivans clutching “maps of the stars’ homes” stack up to the plain clay huts with the grass roofs visited by Jesus and his followers as they cured the sick and preached the good news of God’s kingdom of reversed fortune?

“You say that I am a king,” Jesus says to Pilate in answer to the charges brought against him.  “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world – to testify to the truth.”  Left out of today’s Gospel lection is Pilate’s enigmatic reply.  “What is truth?” he asks his prisoner, either rhetorically or with genuine interest, we do not know.  What we do know is that then, as now, truth had less value than a tub of frozen yoghurt, much less the Bentley one might eat it in.  For some, the only truth that matters is the truth that will get you these commodities, in denominations of tens, hundreds, and thousands – and the power those commodities represent.

I hasten to say that the issue is not one of money or possessions, but it is one of allegiance to a realm of power.  In this sense, allegiance comes down to what it is one values most of all.  In a world controlled by values so at odds with the charter of the spiritual realm to which we pledge our own allegiance, what is a citizen of that realm to do?  I don’t think that the answer is necessarily to shed our clothes and pick up a begging bowl in the manner of St. Francis of Assisi.  The answer is recognizing that everything we have – including the ability we have to produce it or purchase it – is a gift of God.  The bodies in which we move to experience creation; the air we breathe in and out, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the labour and skill we possess, are gifts over which God has ultimate sovereignty.  As Jeremiah says, the pot does not ask the artisan who fashioned it, “why did you make me this way?”  It simply gets on with fulfilling the purposes for which it was created.  And for us, those divine purposes abound within us in complex and munificent glory.

This is the message of the Feast of the Reign of Christ.  It is the coda of the twenty-four week season after Pentecost that is just ending, a season in which the liturgical colour is green, to remind us of the faithful growth it represents.  This message is the “therefore” at the end of a lengthy, sustained rhetorical argument.  This message is the picture that finally emerges when you connect the dots.  And unless you concentrate and pay attention you’ll miss it, and go back to taking for granted everything you’ve been given, beginning with your life itself.

Given this, how can our attitude be anything less than one of gratitude?  And yet, so often it is.  In his epistle, the Apostle James admonishes his audience, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money’…you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’”  To James, the human being is like a “mist that vanishes,” just as for Isaiah, we are like grass that withers in the sun.  For Jesus, the human being is like a lily of the field, beautiful, albeit ephemeral – receiving all that is needed for sustenance from the hand of God whose giving never ends.

As Christians, the trick for us is to live in the world, while refusing to cling to its values.  The risk, on the one hand, is falling into hypocrisy by proclaiming kingdom values even as we pursue lives of consumption and pride.  On the other hand, we risk turning our backs on a world so sorely in need of the liberating message of equality and inclusive love inherent in our faith, and rejecting the very gifts we’ve been given to accomplish that.  A life of faith is a life in which one is constantly striking a new balance, in order to live with integrity as a resident within a society, while directing our allegiance elsewhere.

As the story begins anew next Sunday with the new year of Advent, each of us will continue to refine the lesson and so to shape our lives in faithful citizenship to that other realm.  May we each discover a place in that realm – God’s realm, and may we be empowered to prepare places for others to join us there.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Remembrance Sunday (November 8, 2009).

Readings:  Wisdom of Solomon 3: 1-9; Psalm 116: 1-8; 1 Peter 1: 3-9; John 6: 37-40.

A common ritual for me growing up in Victoria was to accompany my father downtown for the Remembrance Day service at the cenotaph.  I should say that it was common once I was old enough to be on my own, since dad would leave me to join the other veterans and march behind the active service personnel to the memorial on the corner of the grounds of the Parliament Buildings.

I was always inordinately proud of my dad on these occasions, dressed in his crisp Legion uniform, his medals newly polished, and – more often than not – white-gloved and carrying one of the flags in the colour party.  In those days, the contingent included veterans from the First World War as well.  I think everyone’s hearts swelled with pride and gratitude as we saw these men and women marching ranked behind one another – those of my father’s generation followed by those of my grandfather’s generation.  And I sometimes realized, that, had they lived, indeed my grandfathers, great-uncles, and my uncle would have been there, too.

Of course, people choose to go to war – or submit to be sent to war – for a number of complicated and conflicting reasons.  Let’s not forget that these are almost entirely young people, many barely out of high school.  For sure, some are called by a profound sense of idealism to defend deeply held principles.  For others, war is an adventure – a chance to perhaps escape a humdrum life in a small town.  And still for others, signing up is simply what one is expected to do by the often unconscious forces of societal and peer pressure.  When I was 18, about the same age as my dad when he signed up for the Air Force, I vividly recall asking him why he went to war.  He looked a little surprised by the question, and replied simply, “Because there was a war.”

Around my apartment are scattered, sepia-tinged photographs of men in uniform of three generations on both sides of my family – dating back to a great uncle who went with a Scottish regiment to fight an imperial war in South Africa at the turn of the last century.  Given that legacy, I suppose I’m not the only one of my generation who felt that I dodged a proverbial and perhaps literal bullet having not been called into battle myself.  The threat of a Third World War was somewhat distant by the 1980s, when I was of that age, and, in any event, my friends and I thought that if it ever came, we’d all be fried in a nuclear holocaust before we’d get anywhere near a recruiting office.

After the massacre of the Second World War, it was evident to many people that another global conflict could risk a catastrophic collapse of civilization, in light of this new and horrifying spectre of nuclear annihilation.  After sixty-five years, the deaths of  up to 200,000 people by the detonation of just two bombs over Japan retains a fresh power to appal – and it is all too easy to survey the photographs and films taken of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the explosions and imagine Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal.  But, despite the ghastly number of fatalities inflicted by these two nuclear weapons, it is important to recall that over seventy million people died in the Second World War, almost four times as many as in the war to end all wars, just a scant generation earlier.

As we all know, warfare – what von Clausewitz euphemistically defined as “the continuation of political discourse, carried on with other means –  has not ended.  Indeed, it’s often all too easy to forget that we are at war right now, 132 Canadians having died in Afghanistan over the last eight years.  According to the United Nations, there are six active wars and as many as seventeen smaller conflicts currently underway, which have so far consumed as many as one million lives.  When we turn our attention to our own small country, 115,000 or so have perished in warfare since Confederation.

In services of remembrance at churches, it is not uncommon to focus on peace; and, indeed, we incorporate a peace theme here at St. Hilda’s today, as well.  But we need first to take note of the dead, for peace is really their memorial – and it is still uncompleted.  It is significant, as it is poignant, that the readings appointed for Remembrance Sunday are for the commemoration of the dead.  The readings speak to them, and they speak to us about them, those who “run like sparks in the stubble,” as the Book of Wisdom says, those who have received “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,” according to the First Epistle of Peter.  And from the lips of Jesus, the promise to these faithful dead that they will “have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”

Christians have reflected on the justness of war since Augustine first explicitly addressed the subject in the fourth century.  Christianity’s past complicity with secular powers, and perpetration of violence in conquests, crusades, and that oxymoronic condition known as “religious warfare,” has often made a mockery of Jesus’ promise that “in me, you may have peace,” and “peace, I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”  Given this, we ask, is pacifism the answer?  War is a manifestation of evil, of sin – in other words, of the darker recesses of human nature, a nature is not always pacific.  War exists.  It happens.  And we have to respond to it – sometimes theologically, and sometimes actively.

When we consider the dead, some of whom may have been our loved ones, it is sobering to reflect that one of the most important lessons of war is the one so frequently the first to be forgotten.  That lesson is the imperative of peace.  Peace is essential to progress, it is essential to survival, it is the necessary precondition to the fulfilment of human potential and spiritual sustenance.  Peace is a product of righteousness just as surely as war is the product of sin.  To ask whether Christians should be pacifist sidesteps the real issue.  Afflicted with illness, quiescence is nothing less than submission to its power.  The medicine to cure war is peace; and pacifism is the state of a collective, peaceful consciousness.

St. Paul teaches that one of the primary attributes of a Christian is to be a minister of reconciliation.  By professing this, he acknowledges that there exists a rupture to be reconciled.  Forces are always at work to create oppression, to plant division, and so to reap inequality, injustice, and conflict.  It is our Christian calling, and our Christian duty, to water the tree of life through completing that memorial of peace whose foundation is those countless graves.  Educating the young leads to their participation in society; participation leads to action; action leads to justice; and justice leads to peace.  These are the means to combat war, and defeat sin, which is really the most significant conflict people of faith can wage.  The only casualty of such a conflict is the darkness of evil that permeates human history, obscuring the light of God’s kingdom which we alone have the power to shine.  Let us leave here today committed to shine that light, and build the memorial worthy of our fallen:  the memorial of peace.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Feast of All Saints (Nov.1, 2009).

Readings:  Isaiah 25: 6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21: 1-6a; John 11: 32-44.

I was not charmed by my work during the spring and summer of 1993.  I had a number of difficult cases I was dealing with as a social worker with the Ministry of Family and Child Services, as it is now euphemistically known.  My personal life wasn’t going so well either.  I was bored and lonely in my little cedar shake cabin, located on three acres of broom and bramble north of Sooke on Vancouver Island.  Most of my friends had long since left the Greater Victoria area for other pastures, and my job was a daily drain on my energy and contentment.  My only real pleasures were my garden – a plantation for the deer, as I ruefully considered it – and hiking in the hills, often with the Book of Common Prayer tucked into my back pocket.

One of the few cozy, comfortable nooks of my life during those months was – and it’s a good thing you’re all sitting down for this – Saint Augustine (commemorated August 28^th).  I’d get home from work, crack a beer (in those days, I brewed my own beer, and consuming it was a constant chore), and curl up in a hammock strung between two pine trees to read his memoirs.  They are called – appropriately enough – Confessions.  For all that people in the church today deride Augustinian theology – even if they haven’t read any of it – there is little doubt that the scholar reluctantly made Bishop of Hippo was a deeply spiritual man.  He had undergone a very profound journey from Gnosticism to Christianity, guided by his mentor, St. Ambrose (commemorated December 7^th), and he detailed that evolution in his autobiography.

My encounter with Augustine changed my life.  I may not have made my own journey to ordained ministry had I not come across this book, along with John Dominic Crossan’s The Historical Jesus.  I mention this because it provides an example of how the saints – those people honoured and revered for their exceptional holiness – can work miracles in our lives.  And by saints, I don’t just mean the 157 individuals named in our yearly calendar, including our own Hilda of Whitby (commemorated November 18^th), I mean also your saints, and mine.  Beloved parents, brothers and sisters, children, husband or wife, friends, colleagues, and comrades, teachers, pastors, and mentors – we all build shrines in our hearts to the holy people who have changed, and continue to change, our lives.

So given this, why have we chosen today – the Feast Day of All Saints – to incorporate stewardship of creation into our worship?  If we consider the principles that animate our communion with the saints, it is, I hope, clear.  For those principles – continuity, connectedness, and veneration – are the same ones that animate our communion with creation.  Our hands reach back in time to clasp other hands, which in turn reach back until they touch those twelve pairs of hands – those of the first disciples – who touch the hands imprinted with nails.  This lineage – this web – is the superstructure of the saints which binds us together as a people called “Christian.”  Continuity, connectedness, veneration.

The heritage that has been entrusted to us is not an institution nor a set of dogmas.  It’s more organic than that.  It’s a movement – a movement for hope, for peace, for joy, for life.  A movement, in other words, of the Spirit.  And as a movement with those characteristics and this heritage of antiquity, we should be acutely concerned about its place in the fabric and fibre of the planet.  The message of Jesus is not words, it is action, beginning with a strong defence of the creation which makes life possible.  The first act of God was to bring being into being – the stage where the divine drama could eternally unfold and eternally enfold its creatures.  And whether it was St. Jerome (September 30^th) fervently translating scripture into the Latin vernacular, called the Vulgate, so that it could be read and understood; or whether it was William Wilberforce (July 29^th) exerting every ounce of his energy to ensure that human would no longer enslave human; or whether it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer (August 14^th) strangled with piano wire because of his opposition to Hitler’s fascist tyranny and race hatred; Christians have recognised that without creation, salvation and sanctification are meaningless concepts.

Our hands reach back in time in another sense as well – they grasp roots, paws, stones, talons, fins, soil, water; forming another sort of lineage, another sort of web, reaching back to our creaturely origins.  But this lineage and this web embeds us in the fabric and fibre of the planet as thoroughly as does the lineage of our human ancestors in the spirit; the saints.  In fact, and I hope this is not too heterodox a claim, the cloud of witnesses with whom we are surrounded include those rocks, earth, birds and beasts, water, trees and plants that truly make up this holy stage called creation.  This creation, sanctified by God’s original blessing of the Book of Genesis – “God saw it, and indeed it was very good” – abides indeed in the company of the saints.

Sanctification reminds us of the permanence of God’s original blessing in our lives, which seem so fleeting at times.  We are truly here in an instant and gone again, like a water drop vaporised in a hot frying pan.  But like the steam that thus rises, we don’t actually disappear, but are joined to that cloud of witnesses, to Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Wilberforce, Bonhoeffer, Hilda, and all those ones known to us alone, to smile benignly on the stage of nature where the divine show continues to play into the wee hours of eternity.

I invite you to step outside today prepared to breathe in the good air, to feel – perhaps – the rain and cold slap against your skin.  See the trees, these beautiful trees, rise up around us, and poking through them beyond, the vast, continuous ocean, to where it meets the vaster, limitless sky.  Breathe in and out and feel your heart beat and your blood pulse.  Experience the continuity, the connectedness, and the veneration.  And then think of those saints, those holy men, women, and children, who are bringing you to a state of greater spiritual maturity…and intimacy.  Recall their wisdom, and whet your appetite for further knowledge…and deeper love.  And again, experience the continuity, the connectedness, and the veneration.  So begin your week, and so begin your ongoing journey home to the saints above, even as you now abide with the saints below.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, 21st Sunday After Pentecost (October 25, 2009).

Readings:  Job 42: 1-6; Psalm 34: 1-8; Hebrews 7: 23-28; Mark 10: 46-52.

Have you ever cured a person of blindness?  Well, it’s a great feeling, I can assure you!  Of course, a lot depends on what is meant by blindness.  While I can’t remove cataracts, I do preach, teach, and write in an effort to help others see.  Well, and to help myself see, as well, if I’m being honest.  Whether it is a case of the blind leading the blind I cannot say for sure, at least until I meet God face-to-face and get a status report.  But I try…and any frustration is more than compensated by the feeling a physician must get when she removes the bandages from a patient’s eyes, and previously unknown colours, shapes, and perspectives come into view.

Now, I know that the theme of spiritual blindness is a somewhat tired trope that preachers regularly trot out, but it is absolutely necessary to do so if we’re to rightly understand the message of the gospel.  Miracles abound in the stories of Jesus, and they’re so familiar we often can’t be bothered to take the time to ask why.  What do they mean?

In many cases, miracles represent a straightforward suspension of natural law in order to make a point about Jesus’ legitimacy as an emissary of God.  Think, for example, of him stilling the stormy Sea of Galilee, or raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead.  Those miracles simply scream what was heard on the mountaintop at the Transfiguration:  “This is my son, the beloved, listen to him!”  But, in this instance, the message is more oblique.  It is about society, and about our response to Jesus.  Now sure, to a certain extent, it is – like the other miracles I mentioned – a legitimacy thing.  Note that the blind man uses a very specific title to refer to Jesus:  “Son of David.”  In one sense, this foreshadows the immanency of Advent, in which the identity of Jesus as the consummation of the kingly lineage of David and Solomon is fulfilled.  But in another sense, the story is about us, and about the kind of world we need to be living in.

It’s hard to make the leap from hearing this as a story about an encounter between a suppliant and the messiah.  But it helps if we realise that the individualism of these narratives function as illustrations of a larger societal message.  This is a standard rhetorical device, easily observed when, for instance, a politician attempts to explain revenue policy by telling an anecdote about someone deducting taxes from his income.  Here, a metaphorically blind man wants to see the messiah, and his faith heals him.  The message that is being illustrated is summed up by a pithy saying of Jesus elsewhere in the gospels that “there are none so blind as those who will not see.”

What don’t we see?  What are we wilfully blind to in our society?  Who will remove the film covering our eyes and show us the messiah?  What keeps us from perceiving God’s world in our world?  Well, I want us to consider just one source of blindness – one I alluded to in my sermon last week when I contrasted consumption with commitment.  This is a theme I hope to develop next week when our worship takes on an environmental focus in the context of honouring All Saints, as part of our “Communities Caring for Communities” stewardship campaign.

What does it mean to live as a spiritual person in a consumer society?  First of all, it means having to respond to a culture that is profoundly alienated from spiritual values.  When church folk like us talk about reasons why people are alienated from religion, they usually cite issues around doctrine, about whether we’re too liberal or too conservative, or whether insights from science have undermined the credibility of an Author of Creation.  But I think the real elephant in the room is that people already are worshipping a God – the God of consumption.  When you do that, you don’t have any room to experience the real God.  And you can’t believe what you don’t experience.

By and large in our society, material hunger is substituted for spiritual hunger, and yet the appetite is never satisfied.  We see it all around us.  Take, for instance, the news media.  What is news?  Well, if you were to drop down here from another planet, you might think that the main issues confronting human beings were such things as climate change, overpopulation, and radical inequalities between rich and poor.  So, you might rightly expect to see those as the top stories on the news, and top priorities for the governments of the world.  And do you?  The US government very quickly gave away a trillion dollars over the past twelve months, but it wasn’t to solve these crises.  It was to subsidise industry during a financial crisis.  How can we ever believe a western government again when they say that they don’t have enough money to bring clean water to dying Africans, or HIV medicine to sick people in southeast Asia?

Truly, there are none as blind as those who will not see.  And so, journalists ask hard questions about whether a family in Colorado perpetrated a publicity stunt; but when they even bother to ask public officials about environmental destruction, they accept insipid platitudes in return.  Why?  I remember as a child that advertisements were all about luxury – from the silky smooth taste of the lowliest addictive substance right up to the football-field of metal called the family car.  Now, it’s all about convenience, economy, and what we might be able to get away with environmentally.  How long until the ads will be for products that will help you survive in a ravaged world?  And will we still refrain from asking questions of our god Consumption?

Jesus is all about good news, and so I foreswear sermons that paint a dark future, or that take a cynical stance with regard to human beings.  But we need to have a clear vision about the future, and be clear-eyed about human nature…lest we become so blind that we cannot see.  Building the kingdom of God doesn’t begin anywhere but here.  And it doesn’t begin any time but now.  Jesus didn’t promise the blind man that he’d strike a panel to discuss his blindness, and, when he got the results at unspecified time, would develop a ten-year plan with an ophthalmologist to give him his sight.  Jesus healed him there and then.  As the living body of Christ, we owe our community nothing less.

I think about Job, who was clear-eyed enough to realise that his punishment was unjust, but still needed to polish his spectacles to see the awesome grandeur of God in creation and salvation…and, just as significantly, the ultimate proprietary right of the Creator over that creation.  As stewards of God’s creation, we are uniquely called to bring sight to the blind, to bind up the broken-hearted, to let the oppressed go free.  It is a calling that is as breathtaking in its simplicity as it is in its audacity.  Let’s have the audacity to be simple, to get on with living this amazing gospel of miracles, and to touch the blind and make them see that faith will make them well.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist (October 18, 2009).

Readings:  Sirach 38: 1-14; Psalm 147; 2 Timothy 4: 5-13; Luke 4: 14-21

The Gospel of Luke, and its companion piece, the Acts of the Apostles, are accounts of a revolutionary spiritual movement in action.  Consider the gospel we heard today – “The spirit of the Lord,” says Jesus, “has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…release to the captives…to let the oppressed go free.”  He is quoting from the Prophet Isaiah, and his audience merely nod their heads in agreement, and commend him on his delivery.  In this sense, they are akin to so many congregations deafened by familiarity with an oft-repeated holy text.  It is only when Jesus sits down, pauses dramatically, and declares, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” that all hell breaks loose.

Many of us familiar with this account know how it ends.  Jesus informs the hometown crowd that God was perfectly capable of showing mercy to the faithful of the foreign nations, while scorning faithless Israelites – reconfiguring for them who exactly is the wheat in God’s eyes, and who is the chaff, and why.  His former neighbours in Galilee respond to the perceived affront by attempting to hurl this upstart young rabbi off a cliff.

This is the tenor of Luke’s version of the good news from Mary’s famous proclamation of social reversal in the Magnificat – in which the lowly are raised and the hungry fed, while the powerful are toppled and the rich are sent away empty – to Paul’s proclamation before a crowd of hostile Jews that God’s love embraces the Gentiles, as well.  Yet, like the dulled attention of his Galilean audience, the church today has grown so accustomed to the radical nature of this message, that we often treat it as hollow rhetoric, despite our best intentions.  Sure, they are very noble sentiments, but what of it?

I don’t blame Christians for lethargy in this regard.  In draining the Lukan message of any hint that overturning the social order might actually be a spiritual imperative, we are merely imitating a culture in which consumption is valued over commitment.  This sense of a society untethered from commitment, a society of dilettantes in which self-obsession is a noble pursuit, was a recurring theme at the symposium I attended yesterday, and helped organize.  The symposium, called Spiritual But Not Religious: Challenges for the Church in a Post-Religious Culture, critically examined the place of faith in our region in the 21^st Century.  What I took from that day-long event was that we don’t live in a post-religious culture, so much as we live in a pre-religious one.  Allow me to explain.

Luke is a message of hope to us, living as we do in a part of the world where religion has never fully taken root, as it has elsewhere in North America.  Ours is a culture of individualism, where autonomy is frequently valued over community, and the principles of self-preservation and self-fulfillment are considered important values – even if they are rarely stated in such ethical terms.  One of our presenters yesterday, Dr. Patricia O’Connell Killen, recounted a comment made by the recently appointed pastor of the largest African American congregation in Seattle, who had moved to this region from Baltimore.  Concerning the attitudes she found here, she declared that, in Seattle, “most folks care more about their dogs then they do about their neighbours.”

Is she right?  I don’t know enough to comment about Seattle, but I think she’s right about this part of British Columbia.  We live in a society that, if you judge by actions rather than words, unquestionably values consumption and personal fulfillment over commitment and care for others.  This is, unfortunately, not only reflected in the spiritually narcissistic smorgasbord enjoyed by many outside of the church, but also by the complacency of so many inside it.  You cannot, along with the Galileans, admire the “gracious words” of Jesus’ paraphrase of Isaiah, if you are not prepared to respond to the sting of its application – good news for the poor, release for the captives, freedom for the oppressed.  At a time in our own parish when there has been much discussion of what we euphemistically call “outreach,” but is really just our commission as the baptised, we need to ask ourselves not if we are doing too much, but if we are doing enough.  We cannot confuse church with a sort of Medieval chantry chapel in which masses are perpetually said for the dead – in this case, for dead understandings, traditions, and practices of a culturally mandatory Christianity that has long since ceased to exist.

Another participant in yesterday’s symposium was Sharon Betcher, a Lutheran pastor and Associate Professor of Theology at the Vancouver School of Theology.  She said that one of the most profound messages of Jesus was that “giving yourself, even giving your life for others is a safe thing to do.”  It is a deafening counterblast to a prevailing cultural ethos which is all about minimizing personal loss, maximizing pleasure, and denying the sometimes difficult realities of life.  As a community of action in the Lukan mould, we must always be considering ways in which we can help our society move beyond this spiritually immature state:  to move from being a pre-religious culture to being a religious one.

We live in a part of the world that is much like the world Paul confronted at Athens, which Luke describes in the Acts of the Apostles.  We live, in other words, in a culture that builds statues to an unknown God.  But, like Athens, we also live in a culture that is a crossroads of many faith traditions.  In acts of social and environmental justice – whether it is helping to ensure food security for the hungry, or build houses for the homeless – there is room for us to live faithfully, to witness to others, and to discover room to think about how our wisdom tradition intersects with other wisdom traditions around us.  In this way, we can truly think outwardly rather than inwardly.

Our one nonreligious participant yesterday, Kolin Lymworth, is the founder and co-owner of Banyen Books, a clearinghouse of spiritual literature.  He suggested that one reason why people resist religion is the perception that it requires buying into dogmas and doctrines at the expense of acting with justice, kindness, and intentionality.  Our bishop, Michael Ingham, responded that attention to doctrine is the first step in scrutinizing it.  Without a set of shared beliefs, he claims, there is no impetus to self-examination as a community, so that the beliefs can be constantly judged, refined, and reinterpreted.  In this sense, doctrine doesn’t become the defining characteristic of a religion, rather, community does.

On a day in which we raise up the teaching of St. Luke, let us remember his message of commitment over consumption.  Consumptions assumes the character of individualism, but commitment proclaims community.  The commitment we are proclaiming during this season of stewardship is, simply, communities caring for communities – in pastoral care, in outreach, in evangelism, education, and worship.  In all these ministries, may we never lose sight of the one prevailing endeavour.  That is to live out the commitment of Jesus that “today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.