As I go about the daily business of being a priest, I quite often have the chance to meet and talk to people who don’t usually go to Church. That gives me the opportunity to find out both what they think about the Church and the Christian faith and also what some of the prevailing attitudes towards the Church and the Christian faith are in society generally. Perhaps one of the most surprising things about this is that I never have to bring the subject up. Invariably, it’s the people I’m speaking to who want to talk about the Church and the faith.

Usually these conversations start in one of two ways. Sometimes they start when the person I’m speaking to tells me that they used to go to Church.  People who start the conversation in this way usually then go on to tell me what the Christian faith is all about and they often end when I tell them that being a Christian is about a bit more than they’re saying it is. (These are the people who often use that old chestnut ‘You don’t have to go to church to be a Christian’ which they often do to end the conversation). Or the conversations start when people ask how things are in the church? By that, people almost inevitably mean how many people are going to a particular church. When I tell them, I usually get a response that goes something along the lines of how much the world has changed and quite often something about how the Church needs to change its ideas and ways to fit in with the world. Another thing people who start conversations in this way often say is how many other things people can do on Sundays now that they couldn’t do in years gone by when going to Church was pretty much all you could do on Sundays. The implication being, it seems, that people only ever went to Church because there was nothing else they could do on Sundays. 

I know, that in the vast majority of cases, the people I have these conversations with are very well intentioned. Occasionally I do come across people who have some kind of issue with the Church and who want to have a bit of a rant and rave at a vicar about it, but those people are few, and far between. Some people who tell me what they think being a Christian is all about are perhaps trying to excuse the fact that they don’t come to Church, or don’t come anymore, by saying that they’re good, nice people, nonetheless. But most people I have these conversations with, I’m sure, mean well and are perhaps even trying to be helpful. But, in the vast majority of cases, they’re also quite wrong in much of what they say.

One way in which people get things wrong is in believing, as many seem to do, that being a Christian is about having good morals, about doing right, doing good, and, as many also say, about being nice. But what are good morals? What is right? What is good? What does being nice entail? The problem with trying to express the Christian faith, and especially the Christian life, in these terms is that they’re far too subjective to be of any use at all. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

At the moment, the coronavirus pandemic has been ousted from the news headlines by events in Afghanistan and the return to power of the Taliban. From our western, democratic and at least nominally Christian outlook, the Taliban are seen as wrong, bad, perhaps immoral, and certainly not very nice. But I’m equally sure that to the Taliban and people of a similar outlook to them, it’s us in the west who are wrong, bad, immoral and not nice. And if that example is too extreme, then simply look at it this way: if we were to come across anyone doing something that we thought was immoral, or wrong, or bad, or just not very nice, and especially if what was happening was hurtful and causing harm to someone else, we would probably think the moral, right, good and nice thing to do would be to stop what was going on. Those we were looking to help or protect would probably agree, but would those whose actions we’d interfered with or stopped agree? I’m sure they wouldn’t and that they’d rather see us as interfering busybodies, at least, and to them we’d be the ones who were in the wrong and they’d hardly be likely to regard us as nice people.

As the saying goes, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and so morality, right and wrong, good and bad and perhaps especially niceness, are far too subjective to be the basis of faith. Those things are far too closely linked to the society we live in, the way we were brought up and the people we associate with to be of any use to us in describing how to live as Christians. In fact, being a Christian, living out the Christian faith, is about one thing and one thing alone; it’s about following the teaching and example of Jesus Christ. And if you think that’s all about being moral, right, good and nice, then just look at a crucifix. The priests, Pharisees and scribes of Jesus’ day sincerely believed themselves to be moral, right, good, and probably very nice people too. So if you’re ever tempted to think that being a Christian is about these things, look at a crucifix and see just what moral, right, good, nice people can actually be, and do.

Another way in which I think people get what they say and think about the Church wrong is in attributing the low number of people who go to Church nowadays, to the fact that there is much more to do on Sunday now than there used to be in the past. There’s no doubting that the world has changed nor that, as part of that change, people can do much more on Sundays now than they could in years gone by. But whilst that has had a negative impact on Church attendance, I don’t think that’s all there is to it. The world has changed but so has people’s attitude to life, and I think that has had just as much, and perhaps even more impact on Church attendances than the increase in what we can now do on Sundays.

When I took some time out from full-time ministry and returned to the secular workplace, one thing I found very noticeable, and very different, about the workplace to that I’d known before I was ordained, was the change in people’s attitude to being told what to do. I was very surprised at the number of people, especially younger people, though by no means only younger people, in the workplace there were who seemed to think that they could do what they wanted to do, when they wanted to do it, that they didn’t have to do anything they didn’t want to do, and that no one could make them do anything they didn’t want to do. Again, this is something I’ve also picked up on in conversations I’ve had with people, especially people in supervisory or managerial roles. So it would seem that this is a prevalent attitude, perhaps especially amongst younger people, in society generally. And it’s an attitude that spells trouble for the Church.

I’ve already mentioned that to be a Christian is about following the teaching and example of Jesus Christ. But the two things we need to do that are obedience and discipline. To put it very bluntly, we need to do as we’re told, and we need to do as we’re told even when we don’t want to. In other words, to be Christians, we need two attributes that seem to be in very short supply in our society. And if this is a problem that’s particularly prevalent amongst younger members of our society, it’s a very big one for the Church because it’s amongst the young that we need to find our future congregations.

I think we all accept that to attract new, younger people into the Church, we probably need to change some of the things we do so that younger people will want to come to Church.

But what we can’t do, and must never do, is change what we teach and that includes the need for Christians to have obedience and discipline.

The Christian life isn’t an easy one, but Jesus never said it was. This morning’s Gospel is an example of Jesus teaching his followers something that was hard for them to accept. It was so difficult in fact, that many of them couldn’t accept it and stopped following him. Reading between the lines of this Gospel story, it seems that Jesus may have thought that everyone was going to desert him on account of what he was teaching because he asked the twelve if they wanted to leave him too. But, as Peter said,

“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”

And that, I think sums it up in a nutshell; if we don’t follow Jesus, to whom shall we go? He has the words of eternal life and so we have to follow him no matter how difficult what he asks us to do might be. And so, whatever we change in and about the Church in an attempt to fit in with the world and attract new, younger people into the Church, we cannot and must not change Jesus’ words. We cannot and must not change his teachings to make them easier to follow. And if what the world, or at least our part of the world, our society, or any individual in our society thinks is moral, right, good and nice doesn’t comply with Jesus’ teaching then we’ll just have to let world and society and those individuals make of that what they will.

Neither the world, nor anyone who follows what the world says has the words of eternal life, but Jesus does. So let’s have the obedience and discipline to follow him, no matter how difficult that might be and no matter how much we’d rather follow the world. And let’s make sure too, that we tell people that this is what being a Christian means. Because if we don’t, we’re leading them astray and away from the words and path of eternal life and, however nice and easy that may be in worldly terms, it is not the moral, right, good, or nice thing to do in Christian terms.

Amen.

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The Propers for the 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time can be viewed here.

One of the things that I’m sometimes very surprised at are the things that people, committed Christians, say about their faith which betrays either a lack of understanding of the Christian faith, or at least a very strange understanding of the faith. As a priest, I’d like to say that these comments come from the laity, but I must admit that over the years I’ve heard some rather curious things being said by the clergy too.

For example, in one diocese in which I served, a Lenten leaflet was produced, by the diocese, for distribution to the parish congregations during Lent. The subject of the leaflet was the difficulty of finding God in a graceless world. When I read that, straight away, my hackles were raised. We may say that God’s grace often goes unseen and unrecognised in the world, but we simply can’t say that the world is graceless because to say that is to imply that God is not present and active in the world and that the Holy Spirit is not present and active in the world. To be blunt, to say that the world is graceless is heresy. But what made that statement even worse was that it was endorsed by a bishop.

On another occasion, I heard a priest, in his Midnight Mass sermon, say that God sent his Son into the world so that we could love him, love God that is, because God needs our love. There’s nothing wrong with the first part of that statement but to say that God needs our love, or anything else for that matter, is to imply that there is a deficiency in God. It’s to imply that God is not whole or complete in himself but needs something from outside himself to be whole and complete. We may say that God wants our love because he wants us to be saved, that’s why he sent his Son into the world. But to say that God needs our love is to imply that God is in some way diminished if we don’t love him. Again, this is heresy and heresy made all the worse because it was preached by a priest of the Church.

So it’s not only lay people who say strange things about their faith but, as you might expect, I have heard some pretty strange things from lay people too. Such as the person in one parish in which I served who told me they wanted to ‘Come back as a horse.’ This person had been going to Church all their life, but it seems they thought Christians believe in reincarnation. I pointed out that we don’t, to which they responded, ‘Oh. What do we believe in then?’ ‘Resurrection’, I said. To which they replied, with a very puzzled look on their face, ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

But when it comes to misunderstanding the Christian faith, perhaps one of the most revealing things I’ve ever heard anyone in the Church say was about the person whose life and example we remember today, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and her son, our Lord Jesus Christ. What this person, again someone who’d gone to Church all their life, said is that the reason Jesus was so much better than us is because Mary was so different to us. And what that statement reveals is a complete lack of understanding, or complete misunderstanding, about the essentials of our faith, including the two great pillars of our faith; the Incarnation, the birth of God’s Son as a human being, and the foundational event of our faith, Jesus’ Resurrection.

To be fair to the person who said these things, they did go to a very high, extremely Anglo-Catholic church. If I were to tell you that, as you walked through the front door of that Anglican parish church, on the wall in front of you was a very big portrait photograph of the then Pope, John Paul II, I’m sure you’ll get the idea. And given what the Roman Catholic Church teaches about Mary, and especially what some elements within that Church would like the Church to teach about Mary, a misunderstanding like the one this person had is perhaps not so surprising.

As I’m sure you all know, the Roman Catholic Church teaches as dogma, that is, as irrefutably true and something that we must believe in order to be saved, the Immaculate Conception of Mary; that Mary, unlike the rest of the human race was born without original sin. The Roman Catholic Church teaches as dogma, the Assumption of Mary, that at the end of her life, Mary was taken, body and soul, directly to heaven and entered into glory. And there are those who would like the Church to teach other things about Mary as dogma too. Mary as Mediatrix, the mediator of all divine graces. Mary as Co-Redemptrix, which refers to Mary’s essential role in the salvation of all people through her acceptance of God’s call to be the mother of his Son. And Mary as Advocate, the one who pleads our cause to Jesus, her son, who then mediates between God and humanity.

As most, if not all of you will know, I’m a regular pilgrim to Mary’s shrine in Walsingham. That’s something I’ve been for the best part of 30 years now, and it’s something I’m keen to encourage others to do too. So I have a great personal devotion to Mary. But if we’re not careful, we can, I think, go a little overboard in what we say about Mary. Whilst the Church does teach Mary’s importance in the story of our salvation, the Church is also very keen to emphasise that she is subordinate to Jesus, her son. But popular piety, what people think and believe, doesn’t always follow what the Church actually teaches. A very good example of that is the number of people who think and believe that the Church of England is a Protestant Church when, in fact, the Church of England does not and never has claimed to be a Protestant Church. The Church of England claims to be, and has only ever claimed to be, a reformed Catholic Church. And if we take what the Church teaches about Mary simply at face value, don’t some of these teachings suggest that Mary has roles that are the same as those of Jesus? Mediator of divine grace, Redeemer, heavenly Advocate? So is it any wonder that people can start to think that Mary is very different to the rest of us?

But whatever we say about Mary, one thing we must always remember is that Mary was not different to us, except perhaps in her devotion to God. Mary was just as human as you, or I, or anyone else. She had to be because Jesus‘ humanity came from Mary and if her humanity was not the same as ours then neither was his.

In the Letter to the Hebrews we read that Jesus,

‘… had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.’

So if Jesus’ humanity was not the same as ours then our faith comes tumbling down in ruins. If Jesus’ humanity was not like ours, the Incarnation is meaningless to us because God’s Son was not made man. If Jesus’ humanity was not like ours his sacrifice on the Cross is meaningless to us because he didn’t die as one of us. If Jesus humanity was not like ours his Resurrection becomes meaningless to us because he wasn’t raised as one of us. If Jesus’ humanity was not like ours his Ascension is meaningless to us because he wasn’t raised to heaven as one of us. And if Jesus’ humanity was not like ours his role as our heavenly Advocate is at least severely limited because how can one who doesn’t know what it is to be human in the same way that we’re human possibly be a ‘merciful and faithful high priest’ for us, one who is able plead our cause to God the Father?

So Jesus’ humanity had to be like ours, and for his humanity to be like ours, Mary’s humanity had to be like ours too. That doesn’t mean we can’t venerate Mary for her very great role in the story of our salvation. It doesn’t mean we can’t venerate Mary as the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ and, by extension, the Mother of God. It doesn’t mean we can’t ask Mary’s prayers to aid and assist us in our prayers. It doesn’t mean that we can’t honour Mary in the way the Church has done throughout its history. But it does mean that we can’t say that Mary was any different to us as a human being.

Whatever titles we want to give Mary and whatever roles, attributes or greatness we want to ascribe to Mary, we always have to remember that she was every bit as human as the rest of us. But that doesn’t diminish Mary in any way. We know how hard it can be to be a Christian and to follow God’s will. But if Mary, who was just like us, could do that in such a great and exemplary way, so can we. Mary’s example to us then becomes all the more shining and relevant in and to our lives. And in that sense, remembering Mary’s humanity can actually her give even more honour.

Amen.

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The Propers for The Blessed Virgin Mary (The Assumption) can be viewed here.

Anyone who takes their faith seriously will know that to be a Christian, and especially to grow in faith and to be more Christ like, involves quite a lot of practice and self-reflection. I think that’s simply a matter of common sense. If we want to improve and be better at anything we do, the first thing we have to do is to do that thing regularly, in other words, we have to practice. And another essential part of improving at anything is to compare ourselves to those who are better than we are at what we’re doing. We do that both so that we can see how good we actually are at what we’re trying to do and so that we can learn from those who are better than we are at what we’re doing, how to be better at it.

So to be a Christian, the first thing we have to do is to try to be a Christian, in other words, we have to try our best to practice what we preach. But even when we do that, we also have to engage in some self-reflection from time to time. We have to take an honest look at how good we are at being a Christian and compare ourselves to those who are better at it than we are so that we know where we need to improve and how to improve. I’m sure we all know this because, as I’ve said, I think it’s simply a matter of common sense. The problem we can have though, is in putting these things into practice.

One difficulty we can have is in over emphasising our faults and failings, and under estimating, or even ignoring the good things we do and the things we do well. For example, an examination of conscience is a very useful tool that we can use as an aid to self-reflection. For those who haven’t used one, an examination of conscience is a step-by-step way of helping us to call to mind the wrong we’ve done and the good we haven’t done. But, if you think about it, if the examination helps us to do those things, it also helps us to do the opposite and recall the good we’ve done and the wrong we haven’t done.

Unfortunately, most people seem to use the examination in a negative way and see it as simply a means of identifying how bad they are at practicing their faith. I know that because it’s exactly what I did the first time I used an examination of conscience. I was given an examination of conscience by a priest who asked me to use it and then meet with him again to go through it with him. This morning, we read about Elijah asking the Lord to take his life because he was no better than his ancestors. And I can identify with that because, after I’d used an examination of conscience for the first time, I thought I must be the worst person, and the biggest sinner in the world. Later though, when I went to see the priest and discuss it, he said that whilst what I’d done with the examination was good in that I’d used it to pick my faults and failings, I’d completely ignored the positive side of the examination because I hadn’t used it to identify the good things I was doing and the things I was doing well. And I know other people do the same thing because, now that I’m a priest myself, I’ve had the same conversation with those who’ve come to me after they’ve used an examination of conscience.

So an examination of conscience is a good aid to self-reflection. It can help us to grow in faith and be better Christians and for that reason it’s something I do recommend that all Christians use from time to time. But it has to be used in the right way. It has to be used to pick up our good points as well as our bad because if it’s not used in that way, it can lead people to think that they’re worse than they really are. So terrible and sinful perhaps that they’re tempted, as Elijah was, to simply give up.

Another problem we can have, and one that’s far more common, and far more dangerous in terms of hindering our ability to grow in faith is in emphasising the good we do and under estimating or ignoring our faults and failings. In fact, people who do this can often give the impression at least that they think they don’t have any faults and failings!

As we know, we do find people in the Church who think, and say, that no one does as much for the church as they do. But don’t we also find that these are the people who are the most likely to be involved in arguments in the Church? The people who are most likely to fall out with and call and criticise other members of the Church? And this usually stems from a belief by the people who say they do so much for the Church that what they do is more important than what anyone else does. And by implication, doesn’t this mean that they think they are more important to the Church and in the Church than others?

And yet in the Beatitudes, the very first thing Jesus tells us is that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the humble, the poor in spirit. So pride, and especially spiritual pride, is one of the worst sins of all. And in this morning’s reading from his Letter to the Ephesians, St Paul says that we should

‘Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.’ 

Or, depending on which translation we’re reading, that we should

‘Never have grudges against others, or lose your temper, or raise your voice to anybody, or call each other names, or allow any sort of spitefulness.’

And in his preface to these statements, St Paul identifies them as things which

‘… grieve the Holy Spirit of God.’

In other words, all these are things that are incompatible with the Christian faith. They shouldn’t be found in the lives of Christians and must be ‘put away,’ they must be renounced and discarded from our lives.

I think what really lies at the root of this problem though, is a lack of honest self-reflection. If we’re unwilling to do something like an examination of conscience, we don’t pick up on our faults and failings, our sins, and so we don’t see ourselves as we really are. As we really are as measured by the standard of Christ’s example, that is. If we can’t do that, we can lose sight of what being a Christian is all about. We can become so wrapped up in what we do, especially if we do it well, that what we do becomes the be all and end all of what Christianity and the Church is all about. What it’s all about to us, and also what we think it should be all about to everyone else too.

I well remember one occasion, for example, when the enrolling member of the Mother’s Union in one parish in which I served, quite literally, ranted and raved at me in church one morning, in the presence of a number of other people, when I turned up in church to take a funeral. The cause of her anger, was that I had arranged a funeral in church that morning and she wanted to set out some tables for an afternoon tea party the Mother’s Union were having at 4pm that afternoon. In her eyes, I had been totally inconsiderate in arranging the funeral that day and she told me, in no uncertain terms, that I should have consulted with her before I arranged anything in church that day. She would have told me that we couldn’t have a funeral in church that day and I could then have told the funeral director and the bereaved family that they would have to have the funeral on another day. But, she said, as I had arranged the funeral, I needed to get a move on with it and clear everybody out of the church as soon as possible so that she could get on with setting up for the tea party.

There’s nothing wrong with the Mother’s Union having an afternoon tea party, and that lady did a very good job as the enrolling member of the Mother’s Union in that parish, but I ask you, as Christians, which was more important, conducting a funeral, commending a departed soul into God’s keeping and bringing some comfort and reassurance to a bereaved family, or the Mother’s Union having the sole use of the church for a whole day to set up a tea party? Which do you think was the right thing to do, in the Lord’s eyes, conducting a funeral in a dignified and respectful manner and leaving the Mother’s Union a few minutes less than the 5 hours or so that they were going to have to set up for their tea party, or rushing through the funeral and rushing the bereaved family out of church so that the Mother’s Union could have a few minutes more than the 5 hours or so they were going to have to set up their tea party?  

People can become so wrapped up in what they’re doing that what they’re doing becomes more important than anything else, and it can lead them to think that what they’re doing should be more important than anything else to everyone else too. But isn’t this a problem Jesus himself encountered? Didn’t he ask people to follow him but found that they were too concerned with other things to follow? And didn’t he tell the scribes and Pharisees that they were so concerned with the minutiae of the law, that they were neglecting it’s weightier matters? And isn’t that tantamount to saying that they were so wrapped up in their own particular concerns that they’d lost sight of what the law was really all about, and of what was really important about their faith?

In our Gospel this morning, Jesus tells the Jews, which in John’s Gospel means the religious authorities, to stop complaining to each other and to come to him to learn the teaching of God the Father. And that is what we are called to do too. The most important thing for us to do as Christians is to learn from Christ, from his teaching and example, and then to reflect on our own lives to see how well we measure up to his teaching and example. If we don’t measure up very well, we’re called to make our best effort to be and do better. Where we do measure up well, we can carry on with those things. But we can’t allow those things we do well to go to our heads and allow us to think that we’ve no faults and failings to address because we do, we all have. So we have to carry on doing what we do well without neglecting to do our best improve where we need to. And we have to remember too that the business of running the Church and all the peripheral activity that goes on around the Church in connection with that business, is not what being a Christian is all about, nor is it what the Church is all about. So no matter how much we do in that respect, we can’t allow ourselves to think doing a lot of that business absolves us from the need for that self-reflection that brings us closer to the teaching and example of Christ and to fulfilling what Jesus called the weightier matters, justice, mercy and faith, and above all, love of God and of our neighbour.

Amen.

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The Propers for the 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time can be viewed here.