We are once again having an enjoyable and stimulating Patronal Festival at St John's Seven Kings. Our Celebration of Christian Poetry on Friday and our Sixties Night yesterday evening were greatly appreciated as the photos above show. This morning we heard from Revd. Alan Perry, Head Teacher at St Edward's Church of England School, who spoke compellingly about the theology of John's Gospel ending with a story about God's patience in accepting the level of commitment we are able to give while also challenging us to give more of ourselves to him.
What follows is my Patronal Festival sermon for our early morning Eucharist and this evening's Sung Evensong:
The film Made in Dagenham was released this weekend and it includes a famous scene which happened in the real life story of the 187 women machinists from Fords in Dagenham who campaigned for equal pay and whose story is told in the film which stars Miranda Richardson and Bob Hoskins. On one occasion they endured jeers when, on a picket line in 1968, a photographer snapped one of their banners declaring "We Want Sexual Equality" partly unfurled, so that it read "We Want Sex".
That was a classic example of miscommunication, of an incident in which a message was conveyed which was the reverse of that intended. When we come to the writings of John the Evangelist in the Bible there can be a similar issue of miscommunication.
The helpful little introduction to the first letter of John in the Good News translation of the Bible says that its writer was warning those who read this letter against following false teaching which “was based on the belief that evil results from contact with the physical world, and so Jesus, the Son of God, could not really have been a human being.” Such “teachers claimed that to be saved was to be set free from concern with life in this world” yet when we read this letter and the Gospel of John it is easy to come away with precisely the same idea that he was actually warning against when we read statements like:
• “God is light, and there is no darkness at all in him”;
• “Whoever follows me will have the light of life and will never walk in darkness”;
• “My kingdom does not belong to this world”;
• “I chose you from this world, and you do not belong to it; that is why the world hates you”;
• “every child of God is able to defeat the world”;
• “Who can defeat the world? Only the person who believes that Jesus is the Son of God”.
It is easy to hear such words and to think that the writer is saying that world, and contact with the world, is bad so in order to overcome the world we must be separate from it and have nothing to do with it. That way of thinking has been a feature of Church life and is encapsulated in the song:
“This world is not my home I'm just a passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
The angels beckon me from heaven's open door
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore.”
I can remember listening to Jim Reeves singing that when I was young on a LP that my parents owned. When Christians have thought like that about the world then they have seen no point in caring for or transforming the world because they think they are going to be leaving it behind altogether very shortly. It’s from seeing the effects of that way of thinking that we get the phrase, ‘he or she is so heavenly minded that they’re of no earthly use.’
Thinking like that is precisely what St John the Evangelist was trying to oppose, however. The confusion comes with the oppositions that we find continually in his writings between: ‘up and down’; ‘heaven and world’; and ‘light and dark’. What he means by these, however, is not what we automatically expect.
Stephen Verney, the former Bishop of Repton, writes that, when John is using these words, he is “describing two orders.”The order or way of life that is described as ‘down’, ‘world’ and ‘dark’ has its “ruling principle” as “the dictator ME, my ego-centric ego”, and “the pattern of society is people competing with, manipulating and trying to control each other.” By contrast, the order or way of life that is ‘up’, ‘heaven’ and ‘light’ has “the Spirit of Love” as its ruling principle and its “pattern of society is one of compassion – people giving to each other what they really are, and accepting what others are, recognizing their differences, and sharing their vulnerabilities.”
What John is writing about are two different ways of living life here on earth and not a separation between heaven and earth. When we know John’s writings well, we realise that this must be the case because he is so focussed on Jesus as both God and human being. In him, the heavenly and human are not separate but joined together and made one. That is what the incarnation of Jesus is all about:
“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven,
was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and was made man.”
This is not just an academic or theoretical belief for us to state each time we say the creed, however. Instead it is vital to our future as human beings. Stephen Verney writes that our survival depends on it because “we can see in our world order the horrific consequences of our ego-centricity”:
“We have projected it into our institutions, where it has swollen up into a positive force of evil. Human beings have set up torture camps where they torture each other for pleasure. We are all imprisoned together, in a system of competing nation states, on the edge of a catastrophe which could destroy all life on our planet.”
“The most urgent question, confronting each of us personally and humankind as a whole,” he writes, “is how these two orders can be reconciled.”
John’s writings contain the answer and the answer is Jesus who holds both together in himself. When we are in him, we too can become places where the earthly and the heavenly meet.
Sylvia Maddox has written that the Celtic tradition contains the idea that places which give us an opening into the magnificence and wonder of God’s presence are called “Thin Places.” There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the thin places that distance is even smaller. A thin place is where the veil that separates heaven and earth is lifted and one is able to receive a glimpse of the glory of God. A contemporary poet Sharlande Sledge gives this description.
“Thin places,” the Celts call this space,
Both seen and unseen,
Where the door between the world
And the next is cracked open for a moment
And the light is not all on the other side.
God shaped space. Holy.”
As we are in Christ and become more like Christ we can become ‘thin people’, not in the sense of being size-zero models, but by being those in whom the earthly and the heavenly are combined.
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The Script - Science and Faith.
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