Sermon Archive
Changing the world
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 14 August 2005
I must admit I didn't know what to expect when Donald Reid, our Associate Rector, invited me to chair a 'conversation' yesterday, here in St John's. For those of you who may be visitors or who have just got back from holiday, perhaps I should explain. Among the many festivals going on in Edinburgh this month, St John's is hosting a Festival of Spirituality and Peace. It includes exhibitions in (as you can see) and around the church, a variety of musical and meditative events, and a series of conversations with invited speakers on some of the big questions about life in the world today. The question for the conversation yesterday was 'How do we - that is you and I, ordinary people like us - achieve change in a world of global power?' The two speakers invited to discuss this were Peter Tatchell, a human rights activist who specialises in sexual human rights, and Isabel Losada, a writer whose most recent book is entitled 'A Beginner's Guide to Changing the World: For Tibet, with Love'.
'How do we - ordinary people like us - achieve change in a world of global power?' Well, as Isabel Losada told us, that's a question that we often immediately respond to by pointing out the enormous obstacles to ordinary people like us achieving any real change at all. But that frame of mind, she said, was precisely what she wanted to shake people out of, with her 'Beginner's Guide to Changing the World'. I can't hope to repeat all of her advice on this, which began with the instruction to lock up your television in a cupboard! But much of it was summed up in the well-known prayer which she quoted - about having the serenity to accept the things that cannot be changed and the courage to change the things that can be changed. Yes, we should have that serenity, she said, but we also should have that courage, and the imagination to see how things can be changed. Her great inspiration was the Dalai Lama. When she asked him how to change the world, he replied with the one word, 'Experiment!' The Dalai Lama's message of love and non-violence, she told us, held the key to how to change the world. Much of the time, even the best motivated people, in peace and justice movements for example, seemed much surer of what they were against, than of what they were for. Blaming politicians whose policies they opposed for the world's ills, they demonised them, and so fell into the same self-defeating trap as those politicians who demonise their opponents. It was more effective, she said, to realise that politicians are human too, and to disarm them with the kind of human warmth, wit and wisdom that the Dalai Lama shows.
Peter Tatchell, our other speaker, agreed with much of this, but in rather more serious tones, resulting from his own experience of trying to change the world. If you've heard of Peter Tachell, it's probably in connection with his occupying the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral, or attempting a citizen's arrest in Brussels on Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe; and if you read of this in a certain kind of newspaper, you may not have been impressed. But these actions of his belong to a long tradition - a tradition which includes the many dramatic acts of the Old Testament prophets, and of course Jesus himself, overturning the money changers' tables in the Temple. These too, are only the best known of Peter Tatchell's efforts, over nearly forty years now, to try to prevent the rest of us from ignoring injustice wherever it appears in the world. Currently, he told us, he is engaged in campaigning for the human rights of men and women in Palestine, in Iran, and even in this country, who are persecuted and in some cases executed or murdered, because they do not conform to the fundamentalist sexual morality of the more conservative members of their community.
Now for many of us, perhaps, this is a difficult area, especially if we hold liberal views and as a result do not want to criticise people of other cultures. But listening yesterday to the calm and committed way in which Peter Tatchell argued his case, and learning of the many death threats and actual physical attacks he has suffered from those who in turn suffer from homophobia, it became increasingly clear that the inspiration of his love for justice, is the same as that which inspired the Old Testament prophets and Jesus. As the conversation yesterday lunchtime broadened out to include the audience, one of them recognised that, and speaking of the attacks Peter Tatchell has suffered, recalled Jesus' words to his followers, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.”
In our conversation yesterday however, while Isabel Lodosa often expressed herself in Buddhist terms, Peter Tatchell did not use explicitly Christian or any indeed other formally religious language. His arguments for human rights were expressed rather in terms of ordinary human experience. He spoke of the experiences of ordinary human beings, no different from you and me, who are treated unjustly, and who who feel as we would do, if we were treated unjustly. And what for me made the comparison with the prophets and Jesus I have been suggesting so compelling, was that when he was pressed on the question why he went on campaigning for human rights, he admitted that it was for love - love of justice, but also love of people who, when treated unjustly, feel as he and all of us would feel if we were treated unjustly.
Now that, I think, is why, while Peter Tatchell's language was not formally Christian, it also was deeply Christian, at least if the hallmark of being Christian is being like Jesus Christ. The gospel we heard today is richly suggestive in this respect. Jesus, St Matthew records, was on a mission 'to the lost sheep of the house of Israel'. In his gospel, John the Evangelist tells us that Jesus is God's Word made flesh - truth so far beyond us, yet speaking to us in terms we can understand. This meant that among 1st century Jews in Palestine, the eternal Word was expressed in their language and their concepts. So, speaking to his immediate band of followers in the terms they know, of the history they know, Jesus speaks of his mission 'to the lost sheep of the house of Israel'. The universal Word, wishing to be heard, speaks in the local language of a particular time.
But then along comes this woman, who also is speaking in the language of that historical time, in this case about her daughter being possessed of a demon. She is a Caananite, a Palestinian not a Jew, and she is getting in the way of Jesus, who is focussed on his mission 'to the lost sheep of the house of Israel'. Why should he get involved, at the risk of being distracted from his task? Why, except that she has the courage to engage the human sympathy of the Word made flesh by a human appeal and human persistence, and even the kind of humour that Isabel Lodosa told us yesterday to employ with politicians. She is an ordinary human being, whose love for her deeply distressed daughter is one small reflection of the love that moves the sun and the other stars, the love that speaks through the Word made flesh. She has faith in him, which is also to say she has faith in love. How could Jesus have responded other than he did? '“O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.'
We today, perhaps, have difficulty with that 'healed instantly', and maybe even more with the idea of demon possession, especially when we hear some of the recent stories of little children being cruelly exorcised in Africa and even in this country. And we are right to have difficulty with this. The Word made flesh once expressed itself in the historical language and concepts of 1st century Palestine, in order to be heard in the only way possible at that time. But that same Word, the Spirit of Christ alive in the world today, is not tied to that language and those concepts. If it had been, after all, Jesus would have sent the woman away unsatisfied, and the gospel might never have been preached to all nations
Now that is not to say, of course, that the language and concepts we find in the gospel records are simply out of date and that we now know better because we live in the 21st century. The Spirit of Christ is not the same thing as the Spirit of the Age, this age or any other. The Spirit of Christ, rather, is precisely that - the Spirit, not the letter of the gospel, and the Spirit is recognised not by talking about it, but by loving 'in spirit and in truth'. Honesty should compel many of us to acknowledge how far off we are from doing that. And that should persuade us that, in order to hear the Word, we need to become the kind of people who are capable of hearing the Word - which on this earth we are educated into by learning to love and forgive ourselves and one another.
Let me end with two further reflections on yesterday's conversation. The first concerns the sexual human rights Peter Tachell was talking about. As we know, the Anglican Church at present is getting itself into all sorts of tangles over same sex partnerships, and the ordination of gay clergy. If these developments simply reflected the spirit of the age, there might be no problem about opposing them. But many Christians now believe that, despite those texts and traditions which seem to oppose these developments, these are areas in which the Spirit of Christ is leading the Church into deeper understanding. This however is not a question which can be settled by abstract debate. The question rather is this. Just suppose we had become the kind of people who were sufficiently mature in faith and hope and love, to really hear what the Word made flesh is saying to us. What then would we hear that Word saying to us through our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters? Since I haven't got there yet, since I am not sufficiently mature in faith and hope and love, I can't say anything authoritative on the subject. All I can say, from where I am, is that I strongly suspect what the Jesus of today's gospel would have said to those brothers and sisters: “Great is your faith! Be it done to you as you desire.”
And the final reflection. One of the audience who participated in yesterday's conversation was a very wise Buddhist psychotherapist. She was responding to the question of how we, ordinary people like us, might sustain our attempts to change the world for the better, without getting angry or depressed by our many failures. What we all needed, she said, was 'spiritual practice', and she mentioned that there were some helpful ways of doing this in her own Buddhist tradition. But then, speaking with me afterwards, and looking round this church, she remarked that the spiritual practice of Buddhism was only one way, and that Christians nowadays, at least those who were not fundamentalist, were perhaps too reticent about sharing their own rich spiritual traditions with others, for fear of being seen to impose on them.
I am beginning to suspect that she may be right. The great delight of yesterday's conversation was hearing, in non-religious human terms, some of the profound truths that the Word became flesh to teach us. These truths, the poet Coleridge wrote, are by Christians 'too often considered as so true, that they lose the power of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors'. At a time when fanaticism and fear are on the warpath, at a time when it sometimes seems that 'the best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity', we need, not only for our own sake, but also for the world's need, to allow the Spirit of Christ, in the language of our time, to reawaken us to the eternal and loving truths, taught by the Word made flesh.