Chelmsford Justices Service |
It is good to be back in Chelmsford and in company with two old friends, Bishop John and Bishop Thomas.
The connection between the Bishops of London and the city of Chelmsford, [city because it ought to receive the accolade if there is any justice in the world] go back many centuries. We read in the Chronicles that “Maurice, Bishop of London built the bridges here in the reign of Henry I and turned the London way thither.” Having diverted the road, Maurice’s successor the 58th Bishop, William de Ste Mere Eglise obtained from King John the charter for a weekly market which you continue to be hold.
They were hard headed men of business those early Bishops. The market privilege was not to apply to the other side of the river in the manor of Moulsham which was held by the Abbot of Westminster. There was no intention to enrich Westminster Abbey with the profits of commerce and the passing trade.
What a different world is conjured up by our second lesson. How blest are those who know their need of God, the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
Suddenly it has become urgent to distinguish in our country between healthful and lethal religion and to find the way to initiate the young into the former rather than the latter.
When I was rebuilding the church of St Ethelburga in Bishopsgate, a casualty of a terrorist bomb in 1993, as a centre for preventing and transforming those conflicts which have a religious dimension, I remember one hard headed man of business saying “Why do we need such a centre? No one takes religion seriously. The so called religious disputes in the past were about something else – usually politics or economics.”
You still hear echoes of that theory but we know, just a few short years later, how lethal religion can be. One version of the idolatry which the prophets spend so much time denouncing is the manufacture of gods out of our own rage and impotence. A bruised ego finds a surreptitious way to re-ascend by making a god in its own image.
The three Abrahamic religions are full of warnings on this subject but we are faced with a challenge that is evident from the lives of the 7-7 bombers. They were not poor; they were not marginalised; they were well educated but they were alienated having been assiduously groomed by the peddlers of lethal religion.
It is also a sorry truth that mere appeals for tolerance and moderation do not generate the energy necessary to counteract the appeal of what appears to those who fall for it, as self-sacrificing idealism.
Jesus Christ the human face of God was so aware of the dangers of lethal religion that his Sermon on the Mount begins with “how blest are those who know their need of God” and know how far away they are. In the letter to the Philippians it is made clear that any approach to the true and living God begins when we refuse to be a little god. “He made himself nothing taking the form of a servant.” That true humility which is close to the humus and which comes from following Jesus also shines through our reading from Piers Ploughman with its startling beginning as the Friar says “I will explain how the upright man sins seven times a day”.
Those of us who are appointed to teach and to judge must always make this our starting point. The more experienced we are the more we need to acquire the beginner’s mind and to recognise our own frailty. It is a great protection against making god in our own image.
But that is not enough. In his lecture in Regensburg, which has been so much misunderstood the Pope was calling for a re-alignment between faith and reason in what he sees as a post secular Europe.
What this actually means emerges from an earlier exchange between Cardinal Ratzinger and the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Conquest by any religion of the civic space is not a viable or desirable option for our pluralistic world built on justice and the rule of law. But at the same time to exclude faith from the universe of rational enquiry, to drive it from the public square as if it were some mere lifestyle choice like vegetarianism is also no longer a viable option.
We are beginning to understand for example how the ecological challenge we face is a function of a way of being in the world which lacks reverence and awareness and which arises from a false estimate of ourselves as masters and possessors of the earth rather than its stewards.
It is true that faith without a dialogue with reason degenerates into fanaticism. But rationalism that does not understand its grounding and its limits and limitations is also inadequate. In the end it produces the kind of messianic secular societies which like Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany in the 20th century created so much death. As Chesterton remarked “the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason”.
This dialogue and this realignment of which the Pope speaks is an unfinished project but it is an urgent one. Some bizarre aspects of the way we live now illustrate the urgency of the task, the first is harmless the other two are less so.
In the absence of an educated religious public there is a new credulity. The Economist recently carried a story about the travails of a tabloid newspaper where one day the authorised astrology correspondent did not report for work. A somewhat cynical hack was set to work confecting the predictions. To relieve the boredom he wrote under Cancer the following message – “All the ills of yesteryear are as nothing to what will befall you today.” He thougt it was a piece of fun but the switchboard was jammed with panicking readers and he was sacked.
There are more serious consequences of trying to do with out the wisdom of faith. We have rightly in recent years come to realise the dangers of child abuse. The penalties for touching the bodies of the young are now rightly severe as the Republican Congressman from Florida has discovered. But at the same time there is an extraordinary insouciance, a carelessness and unconcern about what goes into the minds of the young who are exposed unprotected to a sewer of pornography and violent images with predictable results.
Then again whereas number based truth has public currency and there has to be a professional body of economists at work putting monetary values on blue whales and beautiful landscapes, profound expressions of the wisdom traditions of the world like the beatitudes are regarded merely as the disputable views of some deceased sage. We certainly do need as the Pope argued a new correlation between faith and rationality.
We must also defend our pluralistic civic space. There must be limits on tolerance for those who seek to colonise this space in the interests of some monoculture.
At the same time there must be available in the public arena and open to the challenge of rational debate forms of healthful religion practised with the vividness and seriousness which can eclipse the allure of lethal religion. We need to practice a faith so confident that it is not paranoid or strident but is strong and attractive.
As it is of course, the prophetic words of Yeats ring desperately true in our own day. “The best lack all conviction and the worse are full of a passionate intensity. The centre cannot hold and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
My Muslim friends are not so much offended by expressions of Christian faith as they are saddened by the culture of irony and half heartedness which saps the energy of belief.
Attractive faith in dialogue with reason in the public square of our civic pluralism. Is it an impossible aspiration? Or is it even a recipe for disaster as Richard Dawkins suggests in his recent book, “The God Delusion” that “religious moderates make the world safe for fundamentalists”?
I believe that all the evidence points another way that lethal religion is free to flourish in a spiritual vacuum. How blest are those who know their need for God and who pursue their search in a gentle spirit but hungering and thirsting to see right prevail. How blessed are those who show mercy and whose hearts are pure, how blessed are the peace makers –they shall see God.
But if those who are called to be the salt of the earth become tasteless and the lights of the world hide themselves away, then what a betrayal is there and what a day of reckoning awaits.
This Cathedral Church and indeed this act of worship which gathers together people of goodwill from a great variety of traditions stands for that demanding aspiration - a firm faith open to the dialogue with reason and others in a civic space which is hospitable to all except those who plan to subvert it in the name of some monoculture.
Let the last word be with Piers Ploughman.
“I haven’t the wits to grasp all this, I said but if I live long enough I shall doubtless improve.
Then I commend you to Christ who died on the cross said the friar” May God bless all those who know their need of God and the real dangers of idolatry.
