Sermon given at Sung Eucharist on Sunday 22nd January 2012

22 January 2012 at 11:00 am

The Reverend Professor Vernon White, Canon Theologian

One feature of having flu’, or depression, is the inability to imagine ever being better.  Like being in a long winter when hot summer days seem simply unimaginable.  Old joys seem gone for ever and new joys or satisfactions seem impossible.  As the preacher of Ecclesiastes said, all seems vanity and it seems there can be nothing new under the sun.  Happily, some are blessed with a more optimistic temperament. But many feel this sort of depression at least from time to time, probably many more than dare to admit it.

 Society can be depressed too, as well as individuals.  Western democracies are currently prone to it - or at least to anxiety, which is close to depression.  The old ways of a Christian society, or the more recent ways of rational scientific social optimism, or the more recent ways of completely de-regulated capitalism, no longer seem to convince or satisfy: they seem to be, precisely, old ways which are unrecoverable, no longer believable – but with nothing new to replace them. So we don’t know where we are going.  What we get instead is just feverish activity: in politics, more and more laws, more intervention overseas; and in domestic life, the relentless shopping around for new goods, new lifestyles, new partners, new entertainment.   In short, an empty activism which, I suspect, is mostly just to stave off this sort of collective depression and anxiety: a vain attempt to mask the fear that perhaps there is nothing really new under the sun to aim for, to hope for.

 A cheerful start to a sermon!   So let me quickly move on.  First, just to make clear that if we are personally depressed or anxious this isn’t something to lash ourselves about or feel guilty about.  To feel like this is almost certainly not our personal fault. What is often remarkable is how bravely many such people ask for help and struggle on even when suffering under this cloud.

 But second, I want to shift the focus away from what we may feel - and ask not ‘what do you or I feel?’, but what is true?    Is there as a matter of fact, not just feeling, anything new under the sun to hope for and work for and live for, as individuals or a society?

 Look at history, or at science, and they do not give a clear answer.  Some look at history and believe they do see real development, change, progress. Others look at the same data with more baleful eyes, and like the old Greek philosophers see only endless cycles of repetition, bounded by the same old human nature: history repeating itself, especially its mistakes.   Looking at science doesn’t settle the question either.  Some see the universe expanding with exciting new possibilities, infinite potentiality.   Others see it predestined by its own laws to collapse back into itself. It is the same with the science of human nature.  Look at the recent mapping of human gene: because the complete map has shown we have relatively few genes overall, some take this to mean that genes are not all we are, and other factors must be involved which do give us a measure of choice and new possibilities; whereas to others the complete map of genes merely confirms their prior sense we are wholly determined by genes, without possibilities of real choice or change. Neither history nor science  seem sure if there’s anything new to hope for.

 But Christian faith is sure!  The great Jewish-Christian story of the world and of our lives is convinced that God is bringing about new things.  In one way or another, in and through all the complex processes and mechanisms that history and science uncover, God is bringing new things about, in this world and the next.   The common theme of our readings, which was of feasting and abundance, climaxes in the Gospel precisely with the promise of newness: out of the abundant gallons of water Jesus makes new wine.  Indeed, there is a constant refrain in Scripture of new things promised – ‘a new covenant, a new commandment, a new spirit a new creation, a new song in our mouth, the promise to make all things new - even, in the end, a new heaven and earth’. 

 This ‘new’ that is promised is not sheer novelty for the sake of it - the sort of novelty which always has to disown and destroy the past. No - the newness that God promises, transforms and redeems what is and has been  - but always out of the abundance and potentiality of what already is.  This just what is symbolised by the way the wine was made out of water set aside for Jewish rite of purification.  It was a symbol that the new wine of Christian faith, the free flow of divine love and generosity and forgiveness, was being made out of its Jewish roots, not by destroying them.  In the same way the new heaven and earth promised at the end of the book of Revelation has at its heart a tree for the healing of the nation - an echo of the original tree in the Garden of Eden: once again, the new made out of the old.

 Yet it is still real newness we are promised.  God’s future is not just going back: it is a real transformation of past things, not just repetition.    You may know this in your own experience: to re-connect with someone we thought we had lost, or fallen out with, to reconnect with some of our old dreams, or to re-connect with God himself after we had lost Him, is to experience something new in the relationship, not just to go backwards.  A society can do this too:  we will not return to our Christian past in the form it had then, but we can go forward to re-find it in a new transformed way.  The end of our exploring may well include the journey back where we began, but it will also be, as TS Eliot realized, to know it in a new way. This is what, in faith, we can always hope for.

 And this is the truth of faith, whatever you or I may feel.   Indeed, sometimes it is just when our feelings are lowest or blackest that this truth of something new is actually being worked out.  For its surest basis is Christ on the Cross -  the point of Christ’s greatest despair (‘ my God why have you forsaken me?’) was also the very place where God was beginning to work a new thing: making a new free-flowing source of faith and forgiveness for the whole world, a truth finally vindicated in the resurrection.

 So there is always something new under the sun ahead of us.  Our task is simply to keep faith best we can.  And if and when anyone is just too paralysed by the weight of the clouds, as can happen to anyone, our task is also to keep this faith alive on their behalf; this faith that the new & best wine is always still to come…in this world or the next.