Christian Resilience and Heroic Faith in Action

A sermon by Darian Murray-Griffiths (Undergraduate Historian, 3rd year), Christ Church Chapel, Sunday 23rd October 2023

‘May the words of my mouth and the songs of my heart be ever pleasing to you, O Lord, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’

Readings:

2 Timothy 4. 6-8, 16-18

Luke 18: 9-14

⁶ As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. ⁷ I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 

2 Timothy 4.6

It is only because St Paul’s story is so familiar to us that we perhaps forget just how radical it is. Few people have enough humility or self-confidence to abandon beliefs and principles that experience has proven to be wrong. We are all terribly guilty of this. Pride and the opinions of others but, perhaps I think even more powerfully so, our own self-image and perception prevent us from changing that which needs changing. So, rotting away in a prison, deserted by all his friends and neighbours, seen not only as a radical heretic but also as a sell-out, a turncoat, and a traitor, St Paul the former persecutor turned persecuted withered away in flesh.

But something else arises from this, phoenix-like. And that is the Spirit, not of Man, but of God, of the Holy Trinity itself. Because not only does he say with proud conviction that he has finished the race and kept the faith, despite the naysayers, the deserters, the persecutors. He says something which one might easily skip over in the reading:

‘May it not be counted against them’.

2 Timothy 4.16

St Paul perhaps consciously evokes that famous passage of Christ: ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ (John 8.7) and ‘Father, have mercy upon them, for they know not what they are doing’ (Luke 23.34).

Wow. I stand back, in full contemplation of this, and think what a saint, what a man. And yet as I turn to my own life, full of its complications and its multiple ups and downs of varying significance, I ask myself humbly: but could I do it? I think many of us can share this same feeling of awe mixed in with a tint of inadequacy, a sense that such heroism is not for us, but for the famous, the great and the good who walk perceptibly across the stage of life and indeed of Biblical stories.

For those who follow the news and feel often that sinking feeling of despair and of hopelessness, the world as we know it today can feel a very bleak and dark place indeed. We often feel that we are at the mercy of events and of the powers that be; tiny, inconsequential cogs in a faceless machine. We often tend to think that the problems of the world are too great, too complicated, too much effort for us. A standard response might be a slide into cynicism and nihilistic indifference to that which goes on around us.

Or, as we see in today’s Gospel Reading, we may envelop ourselves in the cocoon of proud self-sufficiency and contentedness in self. If the world seems astray, at least I am morally pure and uncorrupted, or at least like the tax collector in our Gospel Reading, more so by comparison with others.

We commit grievous sin and wrong as much by unassuming inaction and by accident than we do by wilful design. The Gospel Reading points to this. The Pharisee does not think as he does by design but by intuition and habit. A man so proud and so smug that it is his habit to look down upon others, to obey the Word of God, but not its Spirit.

What is our path out of the seeming darkness? How can we emulate or approximate to the example of those like Saint Paul? I would suggest Christian resilience. To me, Christianity pursued with a Christian resilience makes sense because it is not the shoestring faith that relies rationalistically upon certain proofs and discovered truths but on the exemplars and injunctions of a wider standard of morality. Not just a philosophy, one might say, but more a way of life. Much composes this Christian resilience, but I shall focus today on Balance, Dutiful Love, and Dutiful Service conducted with Humility.

Firstly, the sober, unexciting virtue of Balance. We hear so often as a modern cliché that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. I dare might add that God too abhors imbalance and excess. The Christian story is one that calls us to look towards the promises of a different, better world whilst remaining firmly planted and daily invested in the earthly world as we presently know it. We are called to be Marthas and not just Marys. We tempt fate and God alike, when we display that unshakeable, devil-may-care dogmatism, in whichever form it may come, that we see in the self-exaltations of the Pharisee. Balance is important.

‘Dutiful Love’ – Which brings me onto the next remedy: to see in the face of all the face of Christ. A tough injunction, I readily concede. But not an impossible nor an insurmountable one either. This onward march of goodness, of seeing in the face of Christ the face of all, is one which comes unstuck in even the most do-gooding of Christians when we encounter not the faces of strangers, but the faces of those in our midst. The faces of those who have hurt us, spurned us, oppressed us, who have acted contrary to that higher Spirit which we are called to abide by. Anyone can distribute to strangers, to the unknown faces in our midst. But can we turn the other cheek to those that we know? I read over the summer a wonderful book of sermons by Dr Martin Luther King entitled ‘A Gift of Love’. He preached about how we are commanded to love not just our neighbour, but our enemies too. Yet, and I found this personally quite healing, he pointed out that God did not command or ask us to like our enemies, to like all. It takes tolerance and goodwill to be able to use one’s energies for the positivity of Love, rather than the negativity of Hate and disavowal. It may never translate into a personal like, but we may act dutifully if we confer that peculiar form of Christian Love.

And so, I turn to the final part of Christian Resilience as I see it: a life of Dutiful Service conducted in Humility. This is the dutiful service of one who accepts that they cannot go on always alone. We need one another, we depend on one another – that is not always a comforting thought, nor one entirely appealing either.

At the beginning of this year, I had come out to my friends as a pessimist. But, in one of those paradoxes beloved of a life of Faith, I remain optimistic still. There is a way out of the morass that we see around us. Sadly, it is not instant, it is not cheap, it is not one which can be handed to one and all on a golden plate.

The hope is in ourselves. That may sound inadequate and puny. But God, inscrutable, perplexing, even frustrating as we mortals may find Him, has never worked his way merely through magic spells and lightening flashes, he has imparted to us all the power to act for good, to indeed act at all. The powers lie in our hands, uneasily yes, but there, nevertheless. I personally cannot, like some, wait for someone else to come along to fix what we know and see to be broken. I cannot agree that whatever talents and gifts God has given me can only be used to the pursuit of mere material baubles that glitter only at night.

The question now is whether we are ourselves to take up the mantle, whether we are to make the differences needed, individually or collectively. One of my personal inspirations, the late Queen, famously said on her 21^st birthday that:

I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.

Her Majesty the Queen on her 21st birthday, 1947

But, perhaps even more poignantly, she said soon after,

But I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone, unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do. God make good my vow and God bless all those who are willing to share in it.

This powerful speech was one of dedication. One which many can agree she lived faithfully to for the rest of her life, long indeed as it was. As I ponder turning 21 soon, I am moved strongly in my own heart to make a similar dedication. But we should not look back fawningly on what a young woman freely committed herself to do and think how wonderful she was because she did it. Because we ignore what Queen Elizabeth’s message also was: an invitation for us to commit ourselves to the service of all, under the auspices of God. The late Queen may have departed, but her message and inspiration of service and duty is one that has been inherited from throughout the ages, stretching right back to the sacrifices of Abraham and forwards to us today.  

In devoting ourselves, we show up what Heroic Faith in Action is – it is pursuing the onward march of goodness, whether it be in fashion or not, because to do the right thing is never easy, never straightforward, and oftentimes begs us to wonder if it was ever worth it all. It is not, contrary to popular belief, a binary decision between serving all and serving ourselves. God knows that many compromises will be made – the question is will we remember that there is a purpose beyond getting through to the next day?

Jesus said in today’s Gospel Reading,

all who exalt themselves shall be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.

Luke 18.14

So, let us pour ourselves out like libations, let us never waver, never despair, never fear. We may not get, like Moses, to the Promised Land. But if we act with Christian resilience against all that earthly struggles might throw at us, then as Eliza says in the Hamilton play, ‘that would be enough’. Then, when the day finally comes, we may say in earnestness with St Paul,

‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith’.

Amen.