Sermon: Evensong - 8 August 2010

 

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford Photograph of Victor Stock

Preacher:
Victor Stock
Date:
Sunday 8th August 2010
Service:
Evensong
Readings:
2 Cor 1: 1-22

‘Our conscience assures us that in our dealings with our fellows, and above all in our dealings with you, our conduct has been governed by a devout and godly sincerity, by the grace of God and not by worldly wisdom.  Partial as your present knowledge of us is, you will, I hope, come to understand fully that you have as much reason to be proud of us as we of you’ – a few rather breathless words from the first chapter of the second letter to the Corinthians.  This is a strange New Testament document, an emotional staccato letter of deep pastoral concern, probably sent from Macedonia to the church Paul had founded at Corinth, and written to repair a damaged relationship. 

After Paul had left Corinth, newcomers to that city attracted local Christians to a style of faith Paul considered to be a serious distortion of the Gospel.  Corinth had been a difficult place for Christian faith to take root.  Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians addressed a host of problems in the Church; some of those problems had arisen from the pride and elitism that were part of the city’s culture.  Corinthians were confident and authoritarian, they spoke about their own credentials and spiritual gifts, and they deplored what they saw as Paul’s weak apostleship.  He wasn’t one of them.

Goodness, the resonances with our culture today, which looks for firm leadership and despises equivocation!  But not all of us appreciate assertive leadership, as the Corinthians didn’t appreciate Paul, though they did like rhetorical polish and were prepared to pay for cultured preaching, like the people who went to the great fashionable churches of London and Bath in the eighteenth century for elegant rhetoric and preaching with style.  We often like the outward appearance of a polished style, rather than the more difficult and gritty substance.  What a comfort it is that Paul fretted that his converts were being duped by a shallow and unsatisfactory version of Christianity, for it is against the shallow and the unsatisfactory that we must stand today.  The world today is full of assertiveness - within Hindu nationalism with its attacks on little Christian communities, Islamic Jihadism with its use of the suicide bomber, and the equally cruel and certain Evangelical Fundamentalist, denouncing and decrying. 

Tonight’s second lesson from the first chapter of the second letter to Corinth gives us an insight into the difficulties Paul had at the beginning of the church in the sophisticated milieu of the rackety seaside port of Corinth – a sort of Greek Pompei.  So it is in every age that the following of Christ and his way of losing life to find it, is deeply disturbing and demanding.  It is from this personal background in St Paul, displayed in this first chapter of 2 Corinthians that we come to a more sympathetic understanding of the struggles of the great Apostle, leading us perhaps to a more sympathetic acceptance of our own struggles to make ourselves heard above the clamour of strident assertiveness in the world bazaar of religion for sale today.

Some years’ ago I had a little cottage in Lewes in Sussex.  It was in the days when, working in a City church, I was free at the weekend.  (Oh blessed memories!)  I tried the local Anglican parish church but the sermons were too dreadful to be borne and I went further down into the town to try the more Anglo Catholic church where the sermons were as bad, and I decided that as my faith had not been able to sustain more than five years on the General Synod, my Christianity would not last long if fed on a diet of local Anglican parish churches in Lewes.  So I went to the Quakers.  To sit for an hour on a Sunday in a bare, whitewashed, eighteenth century room, light flooding through the plain glass, entering into silence was the most reviving experience.  It wasn’t that the struggles and pains of being human, the perplexities and sometimes battles of a week in the City were forgotten, it was rather that in the quietness one sensed the presence of another, of a great reality, a more profound depth.  For an Anglican who had been brought up on words and, like the Corinthians appreciated rhetorical polish and cultured preaching, it was good to be silent.

The other day someone in the Cathedral Community said, ‘Conversations are never finished, communication between two persons always a struggle to find words, to convey meaning, which we never finally achieve’.  It’s not avoiding the truth or taking an easy option to say that religion, true and undefiled, is always exactly like this.  Even Paul could only get so far in his letters, elicit only so much human sympathy from laying bare his soul.  But he has survived down the centuries to teach us the great truths of the faith because he led us beyond knowledge through that darkling glass, where we see a different kind of reality or are still enough to be for a while in that reality’s presence.  ‘My knowledge’, as he writes in the first letter to Corinth, ‘my knowledge now is partial.  Then it will be whole, like God’s knowledge of me’.