Living in God's Space

Living in God’s Space: A Sermon for All Saints Day

This week has been one of those occasions when I’ve wondered more than once if certain members of the Church of England actually have a brain.

Through all the goings on at St Paul’s – from the beginnings of the protest camp, through the temporary closure of the building and the resignation of Canon Giles Fraser, to the unedifying prospect of forced evictions from the Cathedral steps – the good old C of E has been painted as out of date, out of step, and out touch. As one of the broadsheets commented:

[A]t least the chapter [of St Paul’s] has proved to a doubting nation that the Church of England can make a fool of itself about a subject which has nothing to do with sex.

I don’t want to try to argue rights and wrongs of this case, or to try and make sense of a situation which, the more you look at it, the more complex and difficult to untangle it becomes. However I do want to say something about how the events at St Paul’s highlight the great challenge of Christian faith.

This is not the challenge – as painted rather too simply by the press – between the competing claims of the earthly and the spiritual, or a modern day telling of Jesus and the money lenders. Rather the whole debacle at St Paul’s has highlighted quite how hard it is to live as Christians with and through the mystery of the incarnation – where the grandeur and otherness of our creator God is revealed through our immediate relationship with the failed ministry of a carpenter’s son who died a criminal’s death.

Giles Fraser, the clergyman at the heart of the events of the last few days, pointed to this mystery in an interview he gave soon after his resignation was announced. In it he said:

“The interesting thing about the protest camp for me is that St Paul’s is very, very good at doing the grandeur and otherness of God. You can do fantastic sermons in it about creation, mystery, otherness, grandeur. But Christopher Wren's forte was not Jesus born in a stable, the sort of church that exists for the poor and for the marginalised.”

Too often in the life of faith we look at this mystery of the incarnation - of how, with our limited understanding, we can hold together the otherness of God through the immediacy of Jesus’ humble ministry - and choose one over the other. It might be simplistic to put it this way, but those who have argued for the protestors to be removed, those who have argued for the dignity and national significance of St Paul’s, appear to  have opted for otherness over immediacy; whereas the protestors - whose tents ask "what would Jesus do?" - seem to be making a claim for the immediacy of Jesus over God’s otherness.

Today’s Gospel – often known as the Beatitudes – is one of those passages which points us to the otherness and immediacy of faith. I certainly won’t be the only preacher in the Church of England trying to use this Gospel to make sense of the events at St Paul’s. Although I’d wager that those who begin with the immediacy of Jesus’ message will point to his call to all those who are blessed: the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful. This is a Gospel where God has a positive option for the poor and marginalised. This is a Gospel message in the present tense: “Blessed are the pure in heart”. But by doing this we are in danger of focusing simply on one particular issue over another, and not making sense of this call within the whole span of God’s plan for his creation. By contrast those who would begin with the otherness of God would point us to the future tense of Jesus’ teaching, of the future hope offered. For all those who are blessed, “theirs will be the kingdom of heaven.” The problem though with a focus simply on the otherness of God is that it can relegate the present troubles of the world to mere details within God’s cosmic plan.

On this feast of All Saints, and at the beginning of what has come to be known as Kingdom Season, we could say that we’re very much in the future tense; looking towards the final consummation of God’s promise in the Kingdom of Heaven. The problem with this view is that it seems to make heaven a place out there - or should I say up-there - a destination which we hope to get to in the future. Heaven, the Kingdom of God, though is so much more than simply a destination where all the saints greet us like a heavenly welcoming committee.

Heaven – The Kingdom – is God’s space.

God’s space is so great, so wonderful, so amazing, that it cannot simply be located out there, beyond our lives and our contemporary experience. In the person of Jesus, in the incarnation, God’s space erupts into this reality, into creation. That is why Jesus’ words in the Beatitudes mix the tenses. The Beatitudes show us “the now, but not yet”, of the Kingdom.

Our faith gives us the sure and certain hope that all will be gathered up into God; and so with that sure and certain hope we can begin to work now to create God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. We do not work for the sake of the marginalised and the poor because we think this will get us into heaven. Nor do we ignore the needs of the marginalised and the poor because we know that their cause will eventually be championed by God. Rather with the promise of the kingdom… heaven… God’s space ripples out into our reality, calling us to show the world a way of living, a way of being God’s people where the lowly are lifted up, as the powerful are brought down from their thrones.

As the Church, those called to follow Jesus Christ, we are called to be agents of the Kingdom, to work for God’s space on earth – to live as a community which lives by the future hope of the Kingdom. This is the constant challenge we have in our faith, to hold together in all things the mystery of the immediacy and otherness of God, to live with the mystery of the incarnation.

None of this is easy, and none of this is straightforward.

Jesus did drive the money lenders out of the temple; but he also worshipped his Father, the creator of heaven and earth, in the temple.

As the events at St Paul’s have shown us, the call to follow Jesus Christ, to dwell with the word made flesh, will always challenge us and present us situations which we could never have expected to be in.  As Church, as a people trying to make sense of what it is to live as a community of our incarnate God, we will more often than not get it wrong, and look stupid, and out of touch, and foolish.

But none of this will stop us striving to bring God’s space into our own. And perhaps if we go on striving to answer our great and awesome God by following the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, we might just find the way to the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven after all.