Sermon Archive
Rejoice always
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 14 December 2008
Isaiah 61:1-4,8-11 ; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 ; John 1:6-8,19-28
One day last week, the chief minister of the Welsh Assembly was reported on the radio as having said four words which, the reporter remarked, ‘you don’t often hear from politicians’. The four words were “I do not know.” What Mr Morgan said he did not know, was how long and deep the current recession would be. He is not alone among politicians nowadays in saying that; and hearing them I have asked myself: how much of the anxiety about money and jobs many ordinary people will suffer this Christmas could have been avoided, if politicians, the media, bankers and business had been willing to admit much earlier how much they did not know about what they were so confidently doing and saying? But the honest answer to that question, I think, again is: I do not know. What might have been, might have been better, but it butters no parsnips on this year’s Christmas table.
Can any good come out of this current downturn in the world economy? I do not know. But as I was thinking about this I came across some helpful reflections by Martin Marty, the American historian of religion. When a scientific experiment goes badly wrong, he says, the scientists may be tempted just to give up on it. But if, instead, they carefully go over the records of what they have done, they may then find a vital clue to what has gone wrong, and that can open the way to a new and perhaps more promising line of investigation. It is of the very essence of science, in other words that it learns by trial and error; and this is also the case, Marty suggests, with politics. How do societies create a better life, healthier, wealthier and more peaceful, for their people, nationally and worldwide? They point to the bright sunlit uplands that may be achieved if this or that political or economic strategy is pursued. But it is only by putting one strategy or other into practice that we learn what works and what doesn’t work; and when a political or economic strategy doesn’t work, again it is necessary to look carefully, to find out where it has gone wrong, so that the clue to devising a better way may be found. ‘One way to approach human error’, Marty writes, ‘is to see it as a stimulus to the imagination.’ It is only by trial and error that societies, like science, make progress.
Now that of course is not much consolation to people personally suffering the ill effects of an economic downturn; and in Advent too we might want to ask what this talk of political and economic progress achieved by trial and error has to do with the prophetic vision, for example of Isaiah in today’s Old Testament lesson, about bringing good news to the oppressed. In response to these questions, what Marty goes on to say again is helpful. Political promises to create a better or even ideal world, he suggests, are often overblown; and when in the end they fail to bring about all or even some of what has been promised, they can be seen as illustrating the ‘vanity and illusions’ of so many human wishes and so much human striving. It is tempting then, to respond ‘with world-weariness and cynicism in the mode of those who groan: “Everything has been tried. Nothing works.”’ Yet to make that response, Marty suggests, is to fail to see, in even the most utopian political promises, seeds that were planted by the vision of prophets like Isaiah.
They shall build up the ancient ruins,
they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations.
Human political and economic striving to build better societies is rooted in that prophetic vision. But the problem arises when we forget that that striving is human; and that as Immanuel Kant observed ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’. There is ample evidence from the Fascist and Marxist experiments of the 20th century that forgetting that these attempts were only human led in the end to inhumanity. As Isaiah Berlin, echoing Kant, remarked, ‘To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity. We can only do what we can; but that we must do, against difficulties.’
Yet that larger vision, of course, again is of little comfort to people who lose their livelihood in an economic recession – or for that matter the people who are suffering even worse things in Gaza or Zimbabwe for example. ‘We must do what we can, against difficulties’. But what hope have we that even what we can do is worth doing?
To answer that question, I think, we need to go deeper than politics or economics. In the first chapter of St John’s gospel, a few verses after those we heard this morning, John the Baptist says about Jesus: “I myself did not know him: but I came baptising with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” Taken literally, it sounds strange of John to say that he ‘did not know’ Jesus, especially if he was his cousin. But what John is getting at here, commentators suggest, is the old idea of the hidden Messiah – the bringer of light and life who is nevertheless not recognised by those among whom he lives. Even John the Baptist himself does not know, does not grasp, the full significance of Jesus. All he can do is call on others to listen to Jesus as attentively as they can, and then decide for themselves what he means for their lives.
Now we today, despite centuries of Christianity, may grasp no more fully than John the Baptist did, the meaning of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, Immanuel, God with us. Ultimately, this is a mystery beyond our comprehension. But perhaps that should not surprise us, since who we ourselves are, is also ultimately a mystery beyond our comprehension. All we know about who we are is what we have absorbed from what others, from our earliest infancy onwards, have taught us about ourselves, by their words or actions towards us. All we know of ourselves is what we have become in relation to one another. And that perhaps is a clue to the greater mystery. Whatever confidence we have in life has been awoken in us by the encouraging words and actions of other fallible human beings towards us. But if the greater mystery of the Incarnation is true then our confidence can be confirmed. We are understood and loved, far better than we can understand or love ourselves, by what is at the heart of the mystery, enduring everything with us, in order that we too may achieve that deeper and more loving understanding of ourselves and one another.
If that is true, then it answers the question I asked earlier. Recognising all our human limitations, what hope have we that even what we can do, against difficulties, is worth doing? It is worth doing because we owe it to one another, each and all of whom are loved and understood by God, however inconceivable that may sometimes seem to our limited human imagination and sympathies.
But is it true? Is our confidence in life, now and to come, confirmed? Well, that is up to each of us to discover. But today’s Epistle gives us some good advice on how to begin and continue the journey of discovery:
Rejoice always,
pray without ceasing….
hold fast to what is good.
And that, surely, is more than enough to be going on with.
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