I want to name something this morning that I feel like naming before every sermon. It is what the twentieth-century theologian, Karl Barth, called that ‘strange world of the Bible’. As late moderns, as those sitting in the legacy of what we call the Enlightenment – the form of empirical thinking that led to the scientific and technological explosion of the past 400 years – when we read the Bible, we moderns are entering a very unfamiliar world, a world in which something/someone we call ‘God’ speaks and acts, a world in which people encounter a luminous, awesome, overwhelming presence that is so much greater than they are, almost beyond what they can bear. This is a level of experience that is beyond most of us. Who here has been up the mountain and encountered the living God face to face, as it were?
So, I want to start this morning by naming the gap, to say ‘Mind the Gap!’ I want to ask the question the philosopher and sociologist Charles Taylor asked – how did we get to this secular age? You can see this is not a simple question from the size of the tome he wrote in attempting to answer this question. How did we travel from 500 years ago, where belief in God – perhaps what we would now call a naïve belief – was part of the ‘taken-for-granted’ framework of reality, to today, where belief is a contested, fragilized, privatised and often sidelined pursuit? Belief is now hard won. It requires much more work and commitment on the part of the individual. It is no longer part of the cultural waters in which we swim. We each have to engage, wrestle and try and work out where we place ourselves on the landscape of belief and faith. And perhaps this is a good thing, that Christian faith is no longer an assumed, easy passenger ride. That to choose to baptise your child requires an active decision and choice. To raise your child in the Christian faith will mean strange practices like going to church, praying, and reading the Bible. Today, to be a Christian is to actively ask oneself – how do I make sense of this, and how do I apply this in my own life? The church as a community requires a much more active and participative membership. I can’t do all the work for you.
It’s why we need safe spaces to explore and question together, such as I am offering in the Lent course this year, when we are going to be looking at the Apostles’ Creed together. We need spaces where we can name our cognitive dissonance, our bafflement concerning these ancient statements of belief, and yet also acknowledge our hunger for something more than the reductive materialist dogma of our everyday world, what Charles Taylor calls the immanent frame. The immanent frame that we are all living in in the West is a world that is closed to the transcendent, that fears a God that it does not know, that has decided to keep the lid on that box firmly shut, although God seems to be increasingly leaking out, spilling out into our public discourse in interesting ways. I think our culture is now starting to admit that our myopic focus on efficient and material causes is not adequate to meet our quest for meaning and purpose. Human beings need to know what being a human is, beyond the nuts and bolts of our DNA. What kind of being is a human being, what shape or form are we made to inhabit and grow into, what is our final destiny and purpose? In whose image are we made? We are perhaps starting to question that long experiment of the Enlightenment in which Noah Harari says we gave up meaning in exchange for power.
Of course, we can’t just go back to a pre-modern medieval worldview. I am not suggesting that; but we do need to undergo a massive course correction as a culture and society. We have now to balance our focus on the scientific and technological, our worship of money and materialism, with a recovery of attention to the bigger questions of who we are and what is our purpose and end.
To baptise a child, as I am going to do this morning, is to keep open these questions in our memory and culture; it is to say we are not finished, we have not arrived, that for some of us there is a growing need to re-inhabit our faith tradition, to recover a meaningful expression of Christianity. The quest before us is to do this in ways that don’t abandon everything the Enlightenment brought us but do recognise the urgent need for a great re-balancing, for an active attending to these older forms of wisdom and spiritual truth that we too easily threw out. Some of us in the church are seeing a new enlightenment, a humbling, a repentance, a desire and need for a greater sense of encounter with the One we have pushed aside and ignored for too long; we are pushing against the limitations and restrictions of the taken for granted immanent frame we are all living in.
When we look at Christ on the mountain of transfiguration, we see a human being shot through with the glory of God. We see a person of human flesh and blood, just like ourselves, soaked through with that radiance and brightness which is God’s own freedom and brilliance. We see something no human being could ever manufacture or invent or control.
We are just about to enter the season of Lent, where we prepare ourselves to follow Christ’s journey to the cross. The mystery of Christ is that God shows God’s self to us in this way that strangely, wonderfully combines both weakness and power, both glory and sacrifice. To quote +Rowan Williams: ‘at the other end of Lent we see that that radiance, that glory and brightness and liberty, is exercised and made real in accepting the pain of the cross for the love of humankind. We see that the blinding power of God is exercised not in crushing and controlling, but in the sacrifice of love…not in crushing and controlling, but in the sacrifice of love.’
It is the most compelling and powerful vision of what it means to be a human being made in the image of God. It is in that image that we baptise Caspar today, to say this is what you are made for, it is in this image that we want you to grow, this ultimate combination of glory, service and love that every human being is made to uniquely reflect, embody and manifest.
The world would like to bottle, control and sell this glory if it could. But this glory can only ever be received and encountered as a gift of grace by those who are humble in heart and mind. Those who are open to receive such a gift. The disciples are told to keep silence, and not to speak of the vision they have seen. We cannot speak of such things until we are ready and prepared for them. Let us take this coming season of Lent to ask God to help us, to send out God’s light and truth, to lead us up the mountain, as it were, into a glimpse of that much greater transcendent brightness and glory that is all around, but which we have lost the capacity to see.
Amen
