FROM THE BOUNDARY: On sermonising creation – Part two
“Think of the geckos and lizards which hide behind the pictures in your living room. It’s their home and living room too.” If you remember, it’s a line from a ‘creation’ sermon I gave once. I guess it sounds a bit odd. But what I was trying to get across was the simple idea that as part of God’s creation, and so caught up in God ‘Himself’, we must ever remember with joy and gratitude everything that He’s made, the beauty and diversity of which enrich our lives beyond measure.
The consequence of that is that we must endeavour to live in harmony with the created order. I might have gone further and insisted that we should treat all that is ‘other’ than ourselves with the same respect we give ourselves, as if they ARE ourselves. But I didn’t, though for me our oneness with the created order is absolutely critical to our faith. Mind, nothing I was saying was unbiblical. Reverence for animals, birds and the rest of the natural order is firmly Bible-based.
Yet the sermon went down like a ton of cement in the careenage. You can always tell – the blank faces, the averted eyes, smiles which are only ‘polite’, if there are any!
The response didn’t faze me. And you never know who you’ve touched. It might even be the worshipper with the blankest face of all. There’s nothing unusual about ‘blankness’ anyway – but, if you have any sensitivity at all, it does make you wonder. Self-criticism is a positive thing. This is the pattern of my thoughts on this occasion.
Maybe what I said was so different, so unfamiliar, that people couldn’t fully ‘take it in’; at its basest, that they simply didn’t understand it. In my sermonising, I try to appeal to both head and heart, but I’m well aware that my style isn’t exactly story-book. It might have been that the sermon was misunderstood, that people really did think I was saying you shouldn’t kill to eat, or maybe that man doesn’t have ‘dominion’ over the creatures. It’s a concept, ‘dominion’, which spills over from our understanding of the sovereignty of God. We’re God’s ‘subjects’, the creatures are ours. It’s a very primitive understanding.
My love for the Divine has nothing to do with fear, placation, cow-towing, seeking rewards – in short, Divine ‘sovereignty’. What about you? But it’s just possible, I suppose, that since I wasn’t pushing ‘dominion’, at root my congregation thought I was being wayward.
Maybe they thought something like this. ‘Look Fr Clifford, you’re just talking for yourself, your vision of Christianity. What you should be doing is talking with the authority of the Church, and that’s those of us who keep faith with a fixed body of received doctrine. You are the guardian of our faith and the upholder of OUR tradition. As a shepherd, your authority rests on the trust of your flock, which must be gently led in non-controversial consensus. Yes, and you must uphold accepted moral judgments about things. Some of the things you speak on, your boat-rocking, leave us feeling uncomfortable. We don’t want you to cause trouble – and you do have that kind of reputation, don’t you? We’ve heard you preach that we shouldn’t judge Whitney Houston’s drug taking; that same sex intimacy shouldn’t be a criminal offence; that the Bible is a ‘book of silly words’. And even IF you didn’t say that about the Bible, you might have done. This is Barbados and nowhere else, so you have to be careful what you say, that you don’t offend us. Why don’t you tell a few jokes?’
Well, I don’t really think my congregation was saying all that – bits of it maybe. But if so, at least I’d have the satisfaction of knowing they hadn’t slept through it. And that can’t be bad, can it?
Go safely, then – until the next time.
On preaching, from the boundary: “A man who first tried to guess ‘what the public wants,’ and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave” (C. S. Lewis).