May 10, 2015

Jeremy Younger

Easter 6

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Love one another. As we know that’s easier said than done. Love one another. OK look around at all the people here in the pews today. Love one another. Look at the people you’re sitting next to, the people in front and behind you. We are the raw material of God’s love.

Yes. We are told in no uncertain terms to love one another. We are not told to love the nice ones, the respectable ones, the progressive ones, not even the Anglican ones. No, “love one another”. With all it’s difficulty! And Only, that is, if you dare.

Look – We are the evidence. This motley crew.

When we look at the evidence we are confronted immediately with passion – the passion of the Christ. Look at the people here now whom we’re told to love. The writer of John’s Gospel asks us simply to take a chance, to open up to those around us and risk loving. We are the evidence of God’s love hard though it is to see it in each other most of the time.

And this evidence of passion – this passionate evidence – is what we’ve tidied up – tidied away – leaving only the familiar thoughts and feelings and the discomfort of embracing our faith in Christ passionately and inevitably uncomfortably. Keep looking at all the people we’re called on to love.

As Swinburne, the 19th century poet said – “for their comfort’s sake they served up only half a Christ”.

And how tempting that is – to serve up only half a Christ!

I want to think about passion today and I’m aware that faced with that it’s easy to become shy, reserved and embarrassed – to look for easy words and trite ideas that don’t take us over the top or too deep down – that sidestep the full demands of the Gospel and send us home with our sensible sensitivities in tact.

But that won’t do.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, talking about how we make meaning in our talking and in our living, said that ultimately the only thing that has meaning is what we are prepared to die for.

So what does it mean in our living out of our Christian faith to be prepared to die for what we believe.

Here I believe is the context of the passion – passion in all its varied and rich forms: passion from its root passio meaning pain and suffering, passion meaning the crucifixion of the Christ, passion meaning the orgasmic, ecstatic energy of loving abandon and sex.

Pain, death and sex have always sat close together and even embraced each other; it’s no accident that, in the Middle Ages in English and, still to this day, in French, the metaphor for orgasm is “the little death”!

Pain, sex and death then – passion’s trinity.

• Are we, when we try and hide our pain, rather than see it as giving us information about ourselves and our God, are we dumbing down our faith to nothing more than a harmless religious sit-com – an Anglican, Coronation Street – that helps us pass a pleasant hour or two each week but keeps the reality, that we tuck out of sight, from disturbing us?

• In turning the pain and suffering of the death of the Christ into hot cross buns and family services, who are we protecting from the passion, the children or ourselves?

• In keeping sexuality out of sight – when we ignore and repress the glorious sexiness that is part of Christian worship and Christian experience and history – when we ignore the sexuality that informs us and excites us whenever we get together intimately, closely, with each other – in doing all this are we shutting off a vital part of God’s incarnation at the very heart of each of us. After all we all have sex lives, whether it’s in our heads or our beds?

How easily, I reckon, that can happen – passion gets destroyed – without guile, without manipulation, in good faith, in so many ways, but destroyed none the less.

I know how much of a temptation this is in the work I do as a psychotherapist, the temptation to help people fit into a passionless world – the temptation to meet the desire of my patients for help to survive an unsatisfactory, dull, painful life – unsatisfactory, yes, but so familiar – rather than risk the unknown, the unfamiliar chance of a life of passionate intensity and creative living.

How easily we do that in the church as well – offering people an anodyne, safe, exorcised experience where people can belong because little is demanded of them and little is celebrated other than the sanctification of the normal – the passionless – where inclusive means anything safe – where acceptance means no one is ever challenged to tell their real story and be their real selves.

What I am suggesting is that we look for that place in ourselves, that part of us as a community and as individuals where passion lies hidden, where we can feel it tentatively, an echo of how things once were and still might be, and rather than hide the pain and the ecstasy, risk showing it, encouraging it, letting it live, letting it transform us into the passionate, ecstatic people we can be.

Amen.