FROM THE BOUNDARY: On sermonising creation – Part three
I’VE no doubt that all preachers, even those given to the lyricism of jokes, anti-LGBTQ-ism and other theatricals, have experienced their congregation’s collective blank face as I did when I delivered my ‘creation’ sermon. Perhaps we expect too much. And if the response from some is critical, that’s as it should be. For either it opens the door for ‘teaching’ to resolve doubts, or it tells the preacher there’s something wrong at a much deeper level which needs resolution. But either way, it’s a salutary experience, for it’s exactly what our Lord encountered.
When I was first ordained, I felt wholly unworthy. But as time passed I began to understand that if I had been truly called, it was as Clifford that I had been – me with all my faults, failings, vices, and virtues. Whatever I needed to do to restrain the excesses of my character, it was still as Clifford that I was here to serve. Above all, then, I had to be true, so far as possible, to myself. And it’s this, I think, this concern for truth, which in the Christian life is overarching. Jesus himself would expect nothing less. You can’t promote, in fancy vestments, what you conceive a lie. The consequence of that is that if there are real questions which require confronting, then in truth’s name they must be, openly and fearlessly, though with all the tact to be mustered. The very idea that truth – what one truly believes – must be suppressed or ignored in the interests of a quiet life, or the Church, the Diocese, or anything else, borders, it seems to me, on the blasphemous. To become a lie to yourself can’t be the Divine remit. That’s not an invitation to pig-headedness, an unwillingness to read more widely and listen to others with more experience. That would also be a lie to oneself. In becoming know-it-alls, we’d make ourselves con-artists.
Let it be all our prayer that the passion of Jesus be reflected in our preaching, our passion for justice, oneness, truth, compassion and love. Let there be worth in our words, and love in our hearts.
The idea that the pursuit of truth must be suppressed to pander to the sensitivities of some few, however powerful, is really not an option whatever it entails. What we refer to as ‘tradition’ can’t smother the nagging questions of NOW. It didn’t stop Galileo or Darwin, Bishop John Robinson in ‘Honest to God’, or Bishop David Jenkins in ‘Free to Believe’. Why then the rest of us in our small way?
No priest, certainly not me, surely wishes to gainsay tradition or authority for its own sake. Yet these are living things, not curios in a museum nor cloistered in a monastery. Jesus enjoined us to seek, to knock, essentially to become explorers. He had no time for the excesses of either authority or tradition. And so as priest explorers our role is also to adapt our belief system to a new age, to reveal new truths, to adapt old wisdom to new circumstances. To suggest otherwise at root reveals an unduly limited perception of the Divine, who apparently closed off communicating with us two thousand years ago. And that’s to make the Divine very small. Nor can ‘Authority’ really function merely to provide assurance, and not also to stimulate and create. The preacher must somehow reach those who seek to discover, to think for themselves, as well as those who seek mere reassurance.
So yes, of course we must expound our faith from our inherited tradition, but equally we must interpret it in a contemporary way. If that risks us being branded ‘troublemakers’, then we ask ‘What trouble and for whom?’, ‘Trouble’ for those with insufficient strength from their faith to confront new challenges? For fearful souls, priests or people, whose search for truth stops with Leviticus? How unlike Jesus we would be. Is that you?
Go safely, then – until the next time.
Lousy sermonising, from the boundary: “It is a poor sermon that gives no offence; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher” (George Whitefield).