A homily for Pentecost 2, 18th June 2006
The Very Rev’d Michael J. Pitts
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
2 Corinthians 5:6-10 (11-13) 14-17
Mark 4:26-34
In physics– and I am even less qualified to talk about physics than about philosophy. “Dad”, I hear my eldest son saying, “you’re never going to get it. Just stick to theology!”… In physics there are two important forces. One is the centripetal force, the force which draws matter towards a centre. It is experienced in the form of gravity. The other is the centrifugal force, which sends things flying off from a spinning object. The spin cycle in your washing machine is the best example I can think of. I intend to use these two forces as metaphors, but just in case there are any experts out there, I need to mention that the centrifugal force does not really exist, it is merely an equation. But having said that, I am going to ignore it. It may also be worth pointing out the both forces are about spin, and maybe there is another metaphor there, but I am going to ignore that as well.
In our Christian Tradition there seem to me to be also two forces. The centripetal force is religion. Religion is not a New Testament word [i] , so let us start by noticing that its root meaning in Latin refers to binding or tying. Religion may be what binds us to God, but from a human standpoint it is what binds us to each other. Laws, customs, cult, traditions and stories form the glue which holds societies and communities together. This is true not only of Christianity, but of the other traditions as well. Religion is, or has been, an important component of the ties that bind.
The centrifugal force is faith. Faith is a New Testament word. Faith is what take us away from the past, our own past and the past of our society, and propels us along new trajectories.
we are always confident; even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord-- for we walk by faith, not by sight. …So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! [ii]
Both our Hebrew scripture reading and our gospel also speak of this propulsion along new routes and untroden pathways. [iii]
We can see the tension between religion and faith right at the very beginning of the history of our tradition. From the early letters of Paul (we have to pretend we have never read Luke’s Acts of the Apostles – Luke glosses over the whole conflict), we learn that there were two factions in the early church. There was the Jerusalem community, lead by Jesus’ brother, James. This was a community for which staying within the Jewish law and custom was of the greatest importance. Jesus was understood as the coming messiah of the Jews, and others could be admitted to the community only if they took on all the obligations of the Jewish law. Then there were the communities founded by St Paul. Their very foundation was a geographically centripetal activity, as Paul and his band span off through the cites of the Roman empire. But above all, Paul’s communities were founded on faith, faith which broke with the laws and customs of the Jewish temple state, faith which broke down the barriers of the ties that bound, and opened the communities to all comers.
We do not know which of these two visions goes back to the actual teaching of Jesus. The later written Gospels are equivocal, and scholars, who have worked so hard on the historical Jesus from such meagre data, have come up with equivocal answers. What we do know is that by the end of the first century Paul’s interpretation had won out. Christianity was about faith and Gospel, not about law. The future of the church was to be a gentile church. We can perhaps begin to understand how revolutionary this was, when we note that for the authorities of the Roman empire one of the concerns about the new faith was that it was atheist and irreligious. In other words it conflicted with the ties that bind.
This vision of Christ and Christianity lasted for a couple of hundred years, and then there was a flip. Along came Constantine and his successors and quite soon Christianity became the official religion of the empire. The laws of the Empire were Christian laws, the customs and traditions those of Christianity. The worship of the church was the worship of the state. The emperor ruled as vice regent of God. Christianity now provided the ties that bind, and faith became religion. During the time of the late Roman Empire and the Middle ages, this was how things remained. Christianity managed to incorporate into itself both aspects of Greek culture which had been lost, but were rediscovered from Islamic scholars, and aspects of pagan culture from the societies among which the church spread. The liaison of church and state survived the demise of the Roman Empire, survived the break up of the church during the reformation, and whether as church or as religion is alive and well today.
The Enlightenment, of course, challenged religion to the core and provided a new version of the centrifugal force. In the sciences, both physical and human, and in philosophy, that challenge remains for us today. The Reformation churches also put a new emphasis on the role of faith, but with some exceptions it did not last long, and the mainline churches soon became absorbed in the task of providing religion for the societies in which they found themselves. I believe that one of the results of the reformation, and particularly of the wars that followed it, was that faith, in its various new varieties, became a badge of identity. This function of faith required tight definition, and this in turn firmed up the fuzzy edges of medieval Christianity, so that outside elements could no longer be incorporated, and those which were recognised had to be expunged.
This, now tripartite, debate between religion, enlightenment and faith is still where we are at today, and I should like to look, in the final part of this meditation about three areas where it impinges upon us.
We had been asked today to incorporate the theme of National Aboriginal Day into our liturgy, but unfortunately the request came too late, and in the midst of too many other things, for us to be able to organise it. We shall try to arrange this in the fall. But my first reflection is à propos of this. The modern missionary expansion of the churches coincided with the imperial movements from Europe. And, as Christianity provided, as we have seen, the ties that bind, and as the edges of the definitions which that function required had been sealed tight, those who arrived in this continent and elsewhere were unable to understand that other cultures and other societies had different ties. They therefore found it necessary to attempt to convert, by force or persuasion, the peoples they met into accepting their version of the glue which held civilisation together. This is a problem which remains with us, and is deeply troubling our world. It is at the bottom of the residential schools issue, but it is a problem which is not unique to indigenous and aboriginal societies. It also at the heart of much of the religious and cultural conflict throughout our world.
Secondly, the debate in the world wide church about sexual orientation, being fought over, as we speak, in the General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, is , in my understanding, a debate about the extent to which Christianity is the centripetal force of religion requiring us adhere unquestioningly to the rules and understandings of the past, or whether Christianity is a centrifugal force encouraging us to find new paths of life and relationship between faith and community.
Thirdly, however, I want to reflect that in physics the centripetal and centrifugal forces are both required in the universe. If either failed this afternoon we should either fly off in tiny fragments into outer space, or we should be crushed into infinite smallness in a black hole. Is it possible that some such equilibrium could be found in the field of faith and religion?
Today we will baptise Samuel. Baptism itself is perhaps an example of that equilibrium. On the one hade it is about the ties that bind, the ties of family and kinship, the ties of membership of the Christian community. On the other hand it is about faith, about the call to experience the new creation of being in Christ, about having a discerning and enquiring mind, and joy and wonder in all God’s works.
[i] The greek yrhskeia, which occurs in Acts 26:5 and James 1:26, carries a similar meaning to what I describe below, but it is peripheral to any theological discourse in its context.
[ii] 2 Corinthians 5:6-7.17
[iii] 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 and Mark 4:26-34