COLIN SEMPER

SERMON 1of 5 – 09/12/007

THE DESCENT INTO SECULARISM

My newspaper this week had commissioned a MORI poll on religious belief. The results had prompted the paper to say that there had been a slide into secularism, deep secularism. The evidence for this was that a third of our population could assent to a humanist agenda – trust only in human beings. Half of us, they said, believe in some sort of God though I can tell you from experience of our broadcasting surveys there is often more religiosity about than religion.

Now the purpose of this series of addresses is to tell you of my belief that we have committed 4 or 5 mistakes over the past 40 years, which have been responsible for our present state. And to say, even as an old man, that if the future agenda of this church contained the righting of these, it would rejoice my heart and bring with it growth - and there is nothing wrong with that.

First – put simply, but crudely, we have diminished God. There are far too many Christians who would confess that they do not know what is going on in the mind of their pet parrots but they are surprisingly confident that they know what God thinks about the economy, the public service borrowing requirement and the Grimethorpe Colliery Band.

Now, when we diminish God in this way, we devalue his attributes so that his love is degraded into sentimentality, his power shades into benevolence and his holiness becomes prissiness. In the past years, we have allowed it to be that there is no severity in God, no sense of God being against us. And being against us because God is unconditionally for us. We have allowed it to be that there is no sense – as the great French mystic Simone Weill put it – of the distance God crossed to come to us. God’s love and mystery is so great because the distance is so great.

It is a mistake that many crucial figures in the Old Testament never made. To them the mystery of God had an electrical quality about it – as one of the saints put it, he emerges out of dazzling darkness. And so there is a strangeness about God that mocks all our cocksure God talk.

If you imagine for a moment a pool of light in a sea of darkness, the further you push the rim, the circumference of the circle of light, the greater the vastness of the darkness beyond. In other words, religion begins with an admission of failure. We do not have the images, the words, to encompass the essence of God. God can only be known if God chooses to disclose something of himself, and the possibility of religion depends on the belief that God has done just that.

So God has chosen not to be complete mystery. After all, if God was complete mystery, we could not bear the intolerable reality of God – and that is why God said to Moses – “No man can look upon me face to face and live.”

But God has chosen to have mercy on us, to let us in. As St. Paul said – we know in part, prophesy in part. We can know about God, and there are things we can only guess at.

We often talk about creation as though its purpose is to reveal God. In fact, you could argue, couldn’t you, that the purpose of creation is to invite God to save us from the impact of a reality that would destroy us. Demosthenes said “if you can’t bear the candle, how will you face the sun”. We can’t bear the candle.

In our church we sing a hymn – much quoted. “God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.” But there is a verse that says – “Behind his frowning providence, he hides a smiling face.” Now the God we have presented only has a smiling face, a Cheshire cat grin. And our motives for presenting a God devoid of mystery have been utterly honourable. We want to confront a godless generation with a God who is easy to believe in. We want to make him credible. So we engage in spiritual multiplication – take the selflessness of Mother Teresa, the magic of John Paul 2, the brainpower of Rowan Williams, the patience of my saintly mother and multiply by a million. This is what God is like.

It is honourable but fundamentally mistaken. God is not a projection to infinity of the nicest person we have ever met.

When Plato wrote of God, as you know, he wrote of flickering images on the wall of a cave. There is a lovely image of God passing by – if you listen carefully you can hear the rustle of his garments as he passes. St. Paul speaks of baffling reflections in a mirror. R. S. Thomas of a curtain being pulled back. All of these images offer the promise that the hem of the curtain might be pulled up so that we can have some idea of the reality behind it, some of the mysterious nature of God that was in reach. Jesus is in reach – said the early church. Jesus shares the mystery of God and is within reach – they said.

But – I tell you – Jesus does not dispose of the mystery of God. Jesus deepens it. St. John said he WAS the mystery of God. Look at the gospels and see – he WAS the mystery of God in human flesh. He brought the mystery to a burning focus. The place where he drew back the curtain was the cross. In the cross is the core of mystery that is love – THERE is the heart of God, exposed. That is why I cannot run away (I have tried) – I cannot run away from the mystery of it.

Amen.