Sermon: Evensong - 23 Jan 2011

 

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

Preacher:
Victor Stock
Date:
Sunday 23rd January 2011
Service:
Evensong
Readings:
Ecclesiastes 3:1-11
1 Peter 1:3-12

‘A time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build up’ – cool, patrician, distant, passionless – words from Ecclesiastes and our first lesson at Evensong.  Dated probably round about 250 BC, the atmosphere is somewhat that of the disused Confucian temple I came across years ago in Bejing.  Two old men talking under a Mulberry tree, otherwise the place empty, stele, upright stones carved with the Analects of Confucius, a place of ancestral piety – elegant, patrician, passionless and, yes, dusty.  I wonder if it’s still there.  There are other Chinese temples on display in Bejing, but those are more an amalgam of a debased form of Buddhism with some forms of ancestral Chinese religion, passionate, superstitious, popular and part of the Communist propaganda to show that religion is not persecuted, which of course is not true, for true religion is always persecuted.

The other place for Ecclesiastes in the modern world might be a grand memorial service in the City, some recent Governor of the Bank of England or Chairman of the Stock Exchange, a successful merchant banker, and how his family feel the Book of Ecclesiastes strikes the right note – temperate, patrician, classical, passionless.  ‘A time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build up’ - go with the flow of nature, as Lao Tzu taught in Taoism, that other ancient, intellectual form of Chinese religion.  Don’t go against nature else it will come back to bite you.

Compare and contrast our first lesson with the second from the first letter of Peter.  Here we have something that couldn’t be more different from the early 60’s AD, and though bearing Peter’s name, it belongs much more comfortably with the Pauline literature.  We don’t know who wrote it, but it was someone with strong connections to Paul.  It’s full of practical advice to Christians under three headings.  First, suffering should come as no surprise when Christians remember what Christ endured.  Secondly, suffering should never be as a result of a Christian’s behaviour.  Thirdly, much can be learnt, even in the midst of suffering.  Scholars think this New Testament document pre-dates the fierce persecutions under Domitian and Nero, more likely this letter comes from local conflicts at Ephesus.

Here the Church is emerging from the synagogue, the old conservative world is being over-thrown by the radical insights of following Jesus Christ.  This is far from passionless, it’s from the market place rather than the palace, and it’s intensely demanding.  There is here a new community of faith, where inter-personal relationships are to be characterised by love and mutual respect.  Husbands and wives complement one another instead of the wife being the property of her husband.  Christian slaves are to give exemplary service, even in distress, and because Christ did not retaliate, neither should they.

The message of the first letter of Peter is that Christ will be a stumbling stone to many, but Christians are to revel in the truth that they are being built into a new building, at great cost.  The cool world of Ecclesiastes, that Confucian detachment and ancestral piety is here replaced, superceded, almost drowned out by a more urgent voice.  In John Bowker’s commentary on the first letter of Peter, he illustrates the message of this letter with four photographs: Elizabeth of Russia thrown down a mine shaft into which hand grenades were tossed in 1918, Martin Luther King shot in 1968, Dietrich Bonhoeffer hung from a meat hook in Flossenberg prison in Berlin in 1945 in the very last, terrible, cataclysmic agonies of the Second World War, and Archbishop Oscar Romero, gunned down at the altar whilst celebrating Mass in the Cathedral in El Salvador in 1980.  These illustrate the demands of Peter’s first letter: suffering should come as no surprise when Christians remember what Christ endured.

Persecution is a far cry from the ordered elegances of Ecclesiastes, where there is ‘a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build up’, yes, but here, because of Christ, a time to endure terrible suffering is actively chosen.  Christians today in Pakistan and in the Southern Sudan, and in the ancient Patriarchate of Baghdad in Iraq, and under the tyranny and oppression of the government in Iran, know the cost of discipleship.  And yet in their very martyrdom Christians dare to claim victory.

Last Sunday we looked at the experience of the Coptic Church, just having celebrated Christmas when they celebrated at Epiphany, and having endured terrible violence and massacre, that Christian community this very January surrounded and supported by the sacrificial, heroic witness of Muslim neighbours.  There young people on Facebook in Egypt, young Muslims posted the crescent embracing the cross, and at the Christmas Mass the Muslim community went with the Christians to Mass, to sit beside them, to line the streets for them; to, if need be, lay down their lives for their friends.

Scripture speaks with many voices: the voice of the memorial service, the voice of poise, the passionless voice of temperance, Ecclesiastes.  And then this other voice which certainly does not go with the flow, but moves heroically against the habits of self-preservation and self-concern.  The Grand Duchess Elizabeth dying in a mine shaft, Martin Luther King shot by a racist, Dietrich Bonhoeffer the victim of Hitler, Oscar Romero, an Archbishop, the victim of military fascism; all these speak with the blood that cries more loudly than the blood of Abel.  For here, not in Ecclesiastes, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.