February 21, 2016

Jeremy Younger

Lent 2

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Every month I get an experience of abundance.

Every month I get a vision of heaven and come face to face with the communion of saints.

I mean, of course, when my copy of Vanity Fair arrives with its smooth and shiny adverts for BMWs and perfume, jeans and dreams – with the mass of sexy, languorous young men and women – offering a taste, a smell, of abundance and possibility.

Sometimes, as I greedily thumb through my copy, my better self, always eager to get a word in edgeways and spoil things, whispers over my shoulders that surely I’m above all these things, surely I’ve put all these things behind me. But unfortunately my better self, as often as not, talks only humbug and anyway doesn’t know me very well.

The glossy magazine, I believe, provides much thought for the preacher who finds it just as difficult as the copy writer to tell the truth, especially in the face of the desire for abundance.

For yes, here in Vanity Fair is abundance,

where a certain fragrance can make a man, a woman, of you,

where strange things happen to you on a white horse after you use a certain sort of bubble bath!

where everything is transient – this year’s model –

where everything is new – the latest – and everything can change you.

And maybe the people who go out on a Monday to make their advert-induced purchases are the realists. They at least can count the cost before they begin and can see what they are getting.

Perhaps the people in the Porsche with the new clothes and the expensive smells are the truly humble people, for they accept the world’s valuation of themselves – they know they are nothing without this abundance of things that the world values.

They don’t want the permanent, the secure, the eternal; such considerations cut no ice.

After all who wants last year’s car or suit.

Impermanence is the whole point of it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to defend the values of Vanity Fair, but neither can I dismiss them or feel superior to them.

For the thing that’s wrong with the magazine is precisely what’s wrong with religion!

Look again at the glossy adverts.

They offer an abundant world of meaning, purpose and fulfilment, a world for us to enter and make our own. It promises to assuage our dissatisfaction with ourselves.

We will get a lover if we wear this fragrance.

Advertisers aren’t really competing with each other, rather they are conspiring together to make one single proposal: transform yourself, enrich your lives, be envied and above all find abundant happiness!

They offer us a transformed future, by purchasing this or that we will be transformed into the desired object, and we’ll be able to love ourselves – dissatisfaction will have gone.

They also offer us a transformed past; the past is used to give value to the proposal.

The BMW standing languidly outside the ancient mansion, the model photographed against a backdrop redolent of summer holidays in bygone days.

Our future happiness is always parasitic on the past – a dead embalmed, glamorised past which has been plundered and degraded to enrich our meanness of spirit.

In the glossy magazine only the past and the future have value – the present is merely a place of dissatisfaction.

Religion of course is offered to us in just the same way: so often it is presented in such as way that we feel dissatisfied and unhappy about our present state. We are not part of the elect, we are sinners, we are worthless, we are unsaved. The present is what we need to be absolved from.

But like the adverts, worry not!

Here is an offer – here is the possibility of a self transformed if we buy.

Buy now friends – and we will find peace of mind, serenity, wisdom, – one day – in the future!

Then, like the saints etched into the windows at the back of this church, we will be complete, fulfilled, able to live with ourselves and love ourselves.

That’s the future hope of religion, just like the adverts.

And just like the adverts the past is used to give value to it all.

All that great tradition that sets religion against a backdrop that’s ancient, traditional, and zipped up in a black leather bible.

There is an implicit contract here just as there is with the adverts.

If we clutch our bibles very tight with its stories of the past for the sake of security.

If we embrace the tradition of dogma and creed for the sake of wisdom.

then lucky us, we may be dissatisfied with ourselves now, we may be worthless now, but the future holds untold abundant glories, unmistakable joy and deep peace!

But thank God this is all heresy!

Thank God there are no bargains to be struck with God!

God makes covenant with us, God’s people, on God’s own terms.

Unlike the glossy magazine advert, unlike the over-easily peddled, Mickey-mouse religion of the TV evangelists and Alpha programmes, you cannot count the cost before you begin.

If we are to press the claims of Christianity – to commend it to the world – and we must for we are commissioned to do so – how can we avoid the religion of the advertiser where Christianity is traded as a range of spiritual benefits like so many heavenly motor cars of perfume bottles? If we are to avoid this trap what words can we find?

The difficulty is this: it is easy to talk about religion and in my way I can be as slick as the next person – as slick as the copywriters of the adverts.

But if I have to talk about the life of faith then I’m traduced to incoherence.

Religion is talked about everywhere – on television – on radio – in the papers – endlessly, confidently and eloquently and all this wash of religion that flows over us degrades Christianity, diminishes the Gospel and betrays faith.

Words distort and eloquent words distort eloquently.

Faith, hope and love then become commodities in the hand of the copywriter of religion.

There is a sense in which even to talk about the holy is to risk profaning it. As Isaac Williams said with Tractarian reserve: ‘Those who most value sacred things, will in general say the least about them.’

So the religion which is purveyed publicly – as I am purveying it now I suppose – is like the glossy magazine – a world of fantasy putting a falsifying veil over the reality, or the many realities, of faith.

That life of faith – our life, as people trying to be faithful – is as much a struggle to escape from the enchantment of this sort of false religion as it is to awaken from the dream of the advertisers. The work of Christ is to free us from both of these fantasies.

Faith is always about leaving things behind –

casting off from secure shores –

parting from particular friends.

It’s about banishment and bereavement,

It’s about glancing back with regret,

It’s about saying ‘this isn’t what I expected – this isn’t what I bargained for’.

It is a journey where I’m always beginning and have no destination.

It’s a pilgrimage without a shrine.

I believe notions in spirituality of progress in prayer, maturing in wisdom are part of the fantasy of religion, the dream not the reality. You do not approach God by degrees. You do not draw near to the transcendent by getting the code right. You cannot build towers to heaven.

When Christ bids us bear our cross there is nothing to commend it as a policy. When we have celebrated Good Friday and stood at the foot of the cross and made our way home, there is absolutely no reason to expect Easter Sunday – there is no guarantee – new life and old life look very much the same.

Faith is not about self-fulfilment, satisfaction or maturity. These things belong elsewhere. As people of faith we are not in the business of becoming human, but rather in coming to terms, in every moment, with not being God – putting away all hubris – coming to terms with not having a map, dying to the self that would be God.

“So therefore whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.”

The cost of this cannot be measured. There is no implicit contract to be made here. My dream self – my wordy religious self – cannot do it.

I do not know anyway what the all is that I have to renounce.

I do not possess myself in order to renounce myself.

I cannot count the cost wisely. I am all too affluent for the utter poverty of God – altogether too grand for the humility of God.

It is perhaps in this moment – and only in this moment – free from the religious salesman’s assurance about the future – that God can set us free – can speak of acceptance and love.

Perhaps in this present moment God reaches through the cracks to touch us, speaks through the unplanned silences of our chattering so we can hear.

This is perhaps where faith rather than religion is born, where God can hold us and caress us in this moment, not in the past or the future. Perhaps this now is all there is.

This then is where we are caught – fleetingly and mysteriously – no past, no future, no possessing, no buying or selling, no contracts or bargains, just love – lived out of God’s love NOW.

Here and now we are given God’s poverty and humility which are the gifts we cannot desire, cannot accept, cannot possess, but simply cannot evade.
 

Amen.