Sermon Archive
Inclusive language and St Paul's social teaching
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 28 July 2002
1 Chronicles 29 9-30; Colossians 3 18-25 4 1-6
We had a lovely baptism this morning of a little boy who lives for most of the year in Hong Kong. In choosing an appropriate hymn I thought at first of the following:
In Christ there is no east or west,
in him no south or north,
but one great fellowship of love
throughout the whole wide earth.
Excellent, I thought, this emphasizes the worldwide nature of the church community into which every member is baptized. The second verse wasn't perfect, but its sentiments were OK:
In him shall true hearts everywhere
their high communion find;
his service is the golden cord,
close binding all mankind.
But then I looked at the third verse:
Join hands, then, brothers of the faith,
whate'er your race may be;
who serves my Father as a son
is surely kin to me.
Aargh! I know we can all sing this verse, rewriting it in our heads so that brothers also includes sisters, and son, daughter. And I'm sure that that is what the author intended. But I wonder if any of you find that this process of translation jars a little nowadays. It seems curiously ironic that a hymn written to express the inclusiveness of races should use language that now seems to some of us exclusive of one gender.
Probably some here will mutter darkly about the madness of political correctness and how it has no place in the church - but I cannot help my reaction. My liturgical sensitivities have been honed during a particular period in British Christianity, the last 25 years or so, when we have become aware of the significance of inclusive language. Language, we now realise, has within it certain assumptions about who is important in society, it works subtly to reinforce sexual stereotypes in which, women, for example, are less significant than men. The church must learn to be aware of this because its language seeks to speak of powerful truths. It must be careful not to reinforce and give theological credibility to sexual stereotypes and power-relations between certain groups of people.
And yet, others say, the church should keep itself free from modern fads and fashions. It should hold itself aloof from the transient spirit of the age. The trouble is if we do not adopt the spirit of this age which age do we choose instead? Our second reading makes very clear that even the bible, timeless though it is in some respects yet emerges from one particular milieu. Paul's social teaching in Colossians tells wives to submit to their husbands, children to obey their parents, slaves to obey their masters. How many of these requirements are still appropriate? Clearly they are culture-bound. And yet popular opinion assumes that, with the exception of slavery, the church still wishes to advocate these norms - and often the church does. This speaks of the conservative nature of our religion, a desire to cling to the past, a resistance to change.
And it is interesting that Christianity through the ages has preferred Paul's short-term ethic, short-term because he expects Christ's second coming very soon, rather than his more far reaching principles. Like those expressed in his letter to the Galatians: 'There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.' (Gal 3.28)
The truth is that Paul, historically conditioned though he is, is in many ways more progressive than the church that succeeded him. It took us until the nineteenth century finally to realise that slavery is immoral. It took until the 1990s for the Episcopal Church to recognise that women too can be priests and only this year has the process begun for them to become bishops. Even those Christian denominations that have had women ministers for many years still find it hard to place women in the most senior jobs.
In other words, far from being preoccupied with the spirit of this age, the church has tended to use its fixation with the spirit of a past age to avoid matters of justice. It has tended to be so preoccupied with the rear-view mirror that it has missed what is there in front of it. Of course, we can gaze all we like in the rear-view mirror if we are happy to remain parked in a lay-by, but as soon as we want to move forward we are asking for trouble if we fail to look at the road ahead.
One of our lunchtime speakers during the recent Festival of Spirituality was Kit Dollard who spoke about the Rule of St Benedict - a monastic rule from the 5th century - and how it still relates to our lives now. Benedictine monks, he explained, take three vows, of Stability, Obedience and Change. Stability means a holding onto our roots. For Christians that is a rooted-ness in the story that has brought us this far. But this is to be held in balance with a willingness to change and be changed. This implies that we are open to learning, alert to a continuing conversation with the Holy Spirit in the present and the future. The Benedictine also promises obedience to those in authority in their community, an authority which itself is attentive to the Spirit of Christ.
We may not be monks but we too must hold this tension between stability and change. To know where our road originates and yet willing to travel that road knowing that it contains adventures we cannot predict. We may not live in a monastery, be we do inhabit various communities, family, work, city and state that require of us certain duties and to whose well-being we are committed.
It may be safer to stick with the known and the familiar. But if we are serious about praying for God's kingdom to come and God's will to be done, then we must also be prepared to search out the answers to our prayers. This means being alert to the movement of God's Spirit in the here and now. So, Paul may have discovered the church to be one thing, we have discovered it to be that and something more. It is not wrong for Paul to teach the values of his day, but it would be wrong for us only to teach those values and to fail to have discovered that God may be found in the values of our day too.
This means that, imperfect though we are as a part of the Christian community here at St John's, we already contain seeds of what we are supposed to be. We are sacred, holy, not just because of what came before us but because of what we are and what we are becoming. And not just us. There is a sacredness in the everyday we must learn to discover as well. I don't mean that this is easy. We know too well how much seems to contradict that sacredness now, as it has done in every age. But just as God is not to be confined to one age, neither is God and God's activity to be confined to one place or one group of people. For us this means that God is alive and active in our Festival city: in the quest of human beings for truth through the arts, in the delight and happiness of individuals and families in the beauty, humour, grace and truth of the entertainments around them.
It even means that God is to be found in the deepest tragedies too. The terrible story of Holly and Jessica, for example, has been lived out by two grieving families searching for comfort in faith, and by countless millions of people pouring out their love towards them. In other words, we can see in this story a denial of the love of God because of the undeniable horror of what took place. But equally, we can find within it a confirmation of human love, vulnerable yet strong, that somehow discloses the vulnerable love of God. Are the flowers, messages of consolation, desire to join in a corporate act of mourning merely an expression of 'the spirit of the age', or do they teach us something about the Spirit of God?
In our first reading King David's prayer at the end of his reign encourages his people to recognise what God has done for them in the past, even though they were 'aliens and transients'. Yet he does not ask that they live in the past. As he dies he looks forward to the building of a Temple, to something new under a new king - something that will dramatically alter the nature of the Kingdom and its religion.
Stability and Change. There is nothing innately Christian about refusing to change, but neither does change itself necessarily mean progress. But God lives. God is active. God is sanctifying human society in ways we cannot imagine. This can mean that what we want to call sacred sometimes ends up being merely old, and what we call secular and new-fangled turns out to be the way in which God's will is done.
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