COLIN SEMPER

SERMON 4 of 5 – 09/03/008

THE DESCENT INTO SECULARISM

So far in this series I have said that we have been guilty of diminishing God for the excellent reason that we have wanted to communicate God to a godless generation – and it’s been a mistake.

I have said that we have failed to proclaim a distinctive God-centred Christian spiritual life in the face of a religion of self-realisation – and it’s been a huge mistake.

Last time I said that we have engaged in endless political machinations instead of telling one another our stories of faith – and it’s been a great omission that could have enriched our lives.

Now – today. Our Christian language is worn out, bankrupt, might as well be an expletive not deleted for all it matters. Where shall we go when even God is a swear word.

I shall go to my grave, wrote a friend, feeling that Christian thought is a dead language – one that feeds many living ones, to be sure, but one which I would no more use openly than I would speak Latin. I suppose this is more right than wrong. If the language that clothes Christianity isn’t dead, it is, at least for most, dying. And I think it’s surprising that it’s lasted as long as it has. Take my word and repeat it endlessly and it becomes stripped of meaning. And when you take the great works of Christian faith and repeat them for 2000 years, much the same happens. There was a time when such words as faith, sin, redemption, atonement, justification, sanctification, had great meaning, great depths, great reality. Now they have become empty banalities and just to mention them is to turn off peoples’ minds with a switch. And I wonder why we should continue to use them. But I do use them. I keep plugging away at the same old words. And the reason why I keep on using them is because some of them are not dead. They are very real. They explain the very depths of my humanity. For example, (I don’t wish to be melodramatic), I have a tendency to live in the moral gutter so salvation (or as I prefer to say, rescue – it’s the same word in Greek) has been deeply important all my life. Or atonement – I have tendency to want to run away from even the western remnants of our faith but the love of the strange young man on his cross pulls me back – a love so great that most of us, all of us, would have fled before he was abandoned by his Father.

Now – why am I bothering with words, language. It’s because of an insight from Hebrew. In Hebrew the word for word means both word and deed. So to say something is to do something. I love you, I hate you, I forgive you, I am afraid. Who knows what such words do but whatever it is, it can never be undone. Something that lay hidden in the heart is irrevocably released into time by speech, is tossed into history, if you like. So words are powerful. They are the power of creation. By our words we discover, we create, who we are. By what I say, I elicit a word from you. Through our converse, we create each other like we’re beginning to do in the group after this service. So, when St. John wrote “In the beginning was the Word maybe one of the meanings is that before the beginning there was something like silence. Then the Word was God. God made himself heard, made himself HEARERS. Then the Word became flesh and God manages to say what God is and what a human being is.

So – words are mammoth important. It’s not that I feel love and then say “I love you”. It’s not UNTIL you say “I love you” you haven’t fully loved because it is the essence of love to make itself heard and make itself hearers.

So, I repeat, words are mammoth important because they are so powerful and yet they are so dangerous because they are weak – weak because they can’t say all that there is to say about anything. Shakespeare, not even he, can say everything there is to say about tragedy.

So what shall we do about our words, our Christian language.

Well, we could say that the words may be dead, but the realities they point to are far from dead. So we could struggle to point to the experiences that the great words are describing. In fact, when you carry me out of here and bury me in the good earth of Frensham you could put on my grave – he tried to unpack a few theological words.

We could replace our words. For example, certain branches of psychology point to them. There is a new department at Cambridge, founded by the novelist, Susan Howatch, which is doing just that.

We could gather together the poets and get them to do it for us – after all our religion is the language of poetry not science or journalism.

We have to do something because much of what we use is boring, banal and from the railway timetable. . Whereas our words, as Anthony Trollope put it, have to tell of virtue and nobility, they have to move us to that truth and greatness of spirit by which we become fully human. Words are holy and are full of grace and truth. We need to leave church the better for using them, like the music of John Williams from Schindler’s List played by Mary.

Amen