Sermons

Heard a sermon today. It contained some insights and a lot that was weirdly-phrased but that I wouldn't really disagree with. Much of it just slid around inside my brain for a moment and then exited quickly; I couldn't get a grip on what it was supposed to mean. An oddly frustrating experience, like a dream.

Snarky comments occurred to me during the experience, seldom a good sign, although more my fault than the preacher-man's. But also, a thing that only fully occurred to me later and bothers me still was a sense of being marooned in time - as if the present day were an island and the past were a misty and bitter ocean. Per the sermon, there was a time the Apostles died off and the Christians had to ask, "what do we do now?", and our time is similar - we too have to grapple with the Gospels in the same way, asking the same question; just as did a group of Buddhist monks fleeing Tibet and no longer having a home, and the answer was, "on your own". The answers reached by the second-century Christians weren't mentioned, nor that Christians existed between then and now, presumably asking the same questions too. It was as if the early Christians had afterwards disappeared, translated to some other plane of existence, and we had dug up the Bible anew and were restarting the Faith. (Our answer, too, is "on our own", with the proviso that the Paraclete helps us.)

This impression of amputation from history was given by omission and not by clear statement, so I'm not sure what gave me it. I don't usually sit around being bothered that a preacher does not acknowledge twenty centuries of Christian history. I think it was that he treated Christianity as up for total reimagining, like some Emergent Church preacher, as if it were a new thing and we could make of it what we pleased; and that the wisdom of the past, the teaching of the Church, the traditions of theology, were irrelevant to this project. And this bothers me because if I wanted a faith where doctrine gets rewritten every generation as if the past had nothing to teach, and where most of history is just one huge blind spot, I could have stayed Protestant and pled my own parsing of Scripture against all comers, gothescalcus contra mundi, it's all about your own interpretation and relationship with the Divine, innit, guv? (N.B. This is not intended to be a fair generalisation of Protestantism, even the Emergent sort.)

(The second-century Christians' answer to "what do we do now?" was to look to the places where the Apostles had taught, and ask of the men the Apostles had placed as overseers there. This was the approach of what we now understand to be Christianity; the Gnostics thought differently, for obvious reasons - it wouldn't be gnosis, secret knowledge, if Jesus had just told all of his disciples. Why the Marcionites and Docetists thought differently, I don't know offhand.)

It should be a statement of the obvious, but we aren't isolated from history. We inherit our culture and all its complexity from previous generations (whether in agreement or reaction). Even the modern mythology as to where we got our values from ("in the 18th century, lots of people decided to replace religion and atrocities with rational thought and being nice to each other, in what we now call The Enlightenment") acknowledges this. We don't derive our values and customs from a void any more than we derive our language from first-principles. (The average ancient Greek spoke Ancient Greek and considered slavery acceptable. The average modern speaks no Ancient Greek and doesn't consider slavery acceptable. Incredible coincidence? You decide.) It's also a statement of the obvious that people in the past were human too, and maybe asked similar questions to us, or asked questions that we should be asking but don't. This makes us both indebted to the past and in need of its wisdom. An important aspect of humility is to recognise that "the word of God is in every heart and can speak through every tongue", and that we should regard no-one as (in R.A. Wilson's words) "people who have nothing to tell us that we need to hear." This includes the old and unenlightened fogies of the past, as well as the priest whose sermon perturbs me. (And yeah, it is right to say that the Faith is new every generation - St. John said as much in his letters - it's here and present, because God is here and present and so are we, and so is the world He gave us as gift. It's good not to grow too used to it, to find new angles, let God speak through the voices you hadn't thought to listen to.)

In conclusion, I guess I'd like to hear more sermons about the early church fathers. Or even sermons which just read their letters aloud. The past is full of buried treasures, gold refined in fires that have since gone out.