A Mirror To Society, not a Mirror Of Society

A sermon by Darian Murray-Griffiths, 3rd year student of History and Politics, Christ Church. Given on 5th February 2023.

Isaiah 58: 1-9
1 Corinthians 2:1-12
Matthew 5: 13-20

Lord, mercifully grant that I may speak your Truth and be ever pleasing to you, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

In today’s readings, we hear of St Paul at pains to communicate that he speaks and preaches not on his own terms or of his own wishes, but on God’s power and wisdom. He asks them to elevate the considerations of their minds above the conventional wisdoms of the age, above the stereotyping, frivolities, dogmas, and petty judgements of conventional human beliefs that we sometimes quite arrogantly call ‘wisdom’.

We also hear in the Reading of Isaiah of those who, outwardly, performed the acts ordained by God, who almost buy into the ancient Greco-Roman ideal of theology, that the gods are but jealous hagglers, purely transactional in the hope that a sacrifice and a vain appeal to their memory may produce the divine favour which they feel they are owed.

Why should the Christian God be any different? Why does our conduct matter? Why should it matter when, as Isaiah says:

‘on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarrelling and strife’ (Isaiah 58:4-5)

Today, if the congregation would allow me, I shall be slightly more personal, in answering the broader question of what role can faith and the Church play in the life of a 21st-century young adult, in a world increasingly secular and sceptical of all received wisdoms?

I think that, amidst all the trials and tribulations, the perpetual vortex of agitation within which our modern world and society seem to dwell, it is incumbent on the Church which comprises us all, to act not as a mirror OF society, but as a mirror TO society. What’s the difference, you might ask?

Well, to be a mirror OF society, is simply to reflect whatever is going on in the world beyond the church walls, to accept with good-humoured capitulation, all the mores and fads that come and go with ease.  Instead, the Church must act as a mirror TO society, to show up the real face of humanity in the present and to provide a pathway to a more enlightened and better humanity of the future.

This is the harder path of the two, the one that may involve collisions and disputes. But the Church must be emboldened, I feel at least, to lead by example, a process harder than the words may imply.

But, amidst the swirling debates of hair-splitting, contested human wisdom, scandals, and egocentric reasonings, I fear very much that the Church has somewhat lost sight of its overall purpose: to bring the light of Christ, the enlightening wisdom of God, into this all-too-fallible, all-too-contemptible, all-too-pain-ridden world.

The Christian faith is, in some way, a noble, social mission which will require every ounce of our energies, our faith, and our commitment. This is not my modern take on Scripture, but one which has lain at the heart of it, as we heard of in the Reading of Isaiah: the ‘true fasting’ we were commanded to do was not the one of mere outward appearances but of being able ‘to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke’, ‘to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter’. This simple mission is the hardest of all, that’s why it demands resilience and perseverance, not faltering apathy.

I am fully aware of my own essential flaws and frailties, as a person and as a Christian, but it is the deep faith which I have in the teachings of the Christian religion which have ever been my constant guide, the personal rampart and communal bond against the multiple attacks of the world.

I understand entirely that all are at different stages in their journey of life and faith, and I know that God can often seem an inscrutable, rather remote concept and being. One that we earnestly hope is there, one whom we cannot disprove nor prove, yet for whom we seek the little touches and signals in our day-to-day life. But, I readily admit, it was often in times of deep pain, loss, and loneliness that I found the reassurance and the strength that came from outside of myself. My beliefs have not always been without some trepidation and sometimes frustration.

I remember around the time of my Confirmation in 2018 when a friend asked me whether if I was told that God did not exist, would I still think that being a Christian was worth it? To that, I simply said: Yes. This is not just a faith but a moral framework, one that shapes and conditions my life so that, like so many others, every day I wake up not a better person all round or a better person than others, but someone who is prevented from being much worse. One that fears not whether I shall ever even awake from nightly sleeps.

Faith is a complex thing, sometimes we struggle to even explain it. But in the joint prayers and hymns of a service, or the quiet of a church when tourists, pilgrims and congregants have departed, in the times when we Cross ourselves in times of suspected difficulty, or times when we feel ourselves unequal to the measure of a given task, it is that feeling of not being alone, of being rescued by a benevolent yet inscrutable Being which gives us the stayed fortitude to move on with our lives.

The reality is that whilst great empires, all-powerful rulers, and dauntless ideologies have fallen away like flies, the Faith, sometimes weakened, sometimes faltering, has endured. And this is something St Paul was aware of as he wrote letters of encouragement to those who felt cut off, adrift, as their elementary churches were ruthlessly stamped out by the forces of Roman Caesars. St Paul, perhaps like many in today’s secular world, thought little of the wisdom of this age or ‘of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing’. As we heard in our Readings earlier, Paul himself pondered deeply the imponderable nature of God. What sense could we make from the stories we knew?

Often, the stories of the Christian religion have been told of so many times, that we lose sense of their magnitude, of their possibility in a world as crestfallen as ours. We think it impossible that a man would willingly take up the Cross on his bare shoulders, upon which he would be nailed for hours on end. We think it impossible that tax collectors and fishermen, at the very bottom of the contemporary socio-economic hierarchy, would risk what little prosperity and security that they had accrued in their short lifetimes, for a nomadic life of danger and persecution.

How can it be that the man whom we worship as the Son of God himself was a carpenter, born in the smelly hay of a ramshackle stable? These people were not half-mad firebrands, nor what modern parlance might call ‘clout chasers’. This is the faith which is life-giving. This is the faith of those mothers of murdered sons which inspires them to forgive, unreservedly, the killers of their children. The faith in which slaves in the weather-beaten sugar plantation fields rallied to at a time when slave masters cruelly tried to deny them salvation and liberty in this world as much as in the world after this one. Even as secular forces sought to deny what Scripture foretold of ‘not Greek or Jew… slave or free; but Christ is all, and in all’.

This is a faith which is worth defending, worth believing, worth practising.

And practising not in the style of just coming to worship in church, but of practising fully, in tending, like Christ, to the sick and the needy, the broken and the shunned, the naked and the hungry. This is the faith which I know to raise people, strangers, up, not cast them down. The faith which redeems.

I have been asked by curious friends of how godly redemption can simply be abused by those who profess faith only at the end of their life. I say to them and to all who think that: that you misunderstand this faith. In accepting Christ, in accepting Christianity, we are not merely accepting belief in his existence, or belief in his Resurrection. It is about ourselves being, as the Dean of Worcester said last Easter, the Resurrection incarnate.

We stand today delicately poised at the crossroads, on the brink of catastrophe too great to imagine and to accurately foretell, such as climate change and pandemics, and much else. We stand at the precipice, and it is incumbent upon the Church to guide the hand as society slowly retreats, if indeed society does retreat.

There are some words imparted to me by preachers at my home cathedral in Worcester and reinforced by the moral strength and candour of my own family, which have forever imprinted themselves firmly on my mind: from a visiting preacher from Magdeburg, ‘see in the face of all, the face of Christ’. And from a priest who has ever been a role model and a guide to me: ‘every day on this Earth, be the hands and feet of Christ yourself’.

Being a Christian is not easy, it often involves resigning our personal wants to the dictates of a higher Duty, a higher Calling, but the rewards are not, as some would suppose, simply a happier Afterlife, but instead to see the world in which we live transformed and resurrected. Often, it involves us accepting the terrifying reality that we are not in control, that we do not know all the facts. What separates this from the philosophical traditions of others is the profound godly insight that love of the brotherhood of man, in the world as it is rather than the world as we would wish it to be, is the sole motivating principle which demands that we foreswear or sublimate all others.

It was that great Houseman, Sir Robert Peel, who once said, timelessly, in the 1830s that ‘we should look to religion for support in tribulation, admonition in time of prosperity, and comfort in time of death’.

A short walk away from here is the Chapel of Remembrance dedicated to the fallen soldiers of past wars. Above the archway is a simple inscription that has inspired me ever since I first laid eyes upon it four years ago: ‘Fear God, Honour the King, Love the Brotherhood’.  This, along with so much more, is not just a philosophy, one might say, but more a way of life.

It is when the Church confidently, even daringly, looks outward, and seeks to be the mirror to society, not the mirror of it, that we find ourselves, as a collective, acting humbly but dutifully as a moral example to others, as much as to ourselves. Not often by braggart ways of showy self-promotion but by a quiet, unstinting example in which we ourselves fulfil the promises of Resurrected Faith through the piecemeal rebuilding of our own troubled world, contributing what we can, whenever we can, in whichever way we can. Then, like Isaiah and Paul prophesied so long ago, we may count ourselves to be fasting true to that ever-testing mission and Spirit which the God of the Holy Trinity imparted to us all.

Amen.