Sermon given at Sung Eucharist on Sunday 9th September 2012

09 September 2012 at 11:00 am

The Reverend Andrew Tremlett, Canon of Westminster and Rector of St Margaret's Church

In 1986, at the age of twenty-two I was about to start training for ordination, quite by chance, I went by the studios of a scandalously famous local artist, Robert Lenkiewicz, in my home city of Plymouth in the south-west of England, and in the window saw a sign – ‘Student Sitters Required, Apply Within’.

In the course of our conversations Lenkiewicz naturally asked what I was studying, and could not contain his utter astonishment, despair, and incredulity when I said I was training for ordination. What on earth are you doing that for?

What a pointless waste of time, he said, religion will be dead by the year 2000!

I think the exchange came as quite a shock for both of us. I had been through a lengthy process of discernment, met with vocations advisers, and been asked for countless references of good character. But no one had ever been quite that blunt – what are you doing that for?

For him, on the other hand, the fact that I was about to commit my entire adult life to something he presumed was on the way out, was an uncomfortable reminder that religion persisted.

But there was, of course, a back-story, as there is with all of us. Lenkiewicz had grown up here in London, the son of Jewish refugee parents, who ran a hotel in Fordwych Road, where the early residents included a number of Holocaust survivors. For good reasons he was deeply pessimistic about the evil which had been perpetrated in the name of religion, and found his own spiritual expression both in the beauty of art and in his friendship with the friendless vagrants for which he became known.

He welcomed secular modernity with open arms. By the millennium, we would all have moved on, the Church would have withered and my own vocation would be rendered a pointless waste of time.

Now, I don’t tell this story out of some sort of smug triumphalism, as if the role of religion in public life can be confidently assumed.

Far from it: Cathedrals, Abbeys, black-led churches may well have seen significant growth in recent years. So have Mosques, Gudwaras, Temples. But in general ‘official religion’ – much as party political or trade union membership – has been and still is in persistent decline. Many feel that the place of religion in our national life is marginalised: employees have to take their cases to the European Court of Human Rights to be able to wear a simple cross.

But let me pause here for a moment and bring in some briefs insights from our Scripture readings to illustrate how expectations can be challenged.

The Old Testament lesson from Isaiah 35, comes from the early part of the prophetic work, written in the foreshadowing of Israel’s central and defining event, that of the Exile. The early chapters are filled with doom and gloom, a foreboding anger at the consequences of Israel’s faithlessness.

And then, quite suddenly, the tone changes in our reading. Israel will experience trauma: the people will be taken captive but that’s not the end of the story: God will reverse the expected outcome, and this is illustrated in creation – water will break forth in the wilderness, streams will appear in the desert and grass will become water-rushes. There will be new life.

If Isaiah portrays a picture of national renewal and the inversion of expectations, Jesus in St Mark’s gospel shows us what this look like with an individual. The Syrophoenician woman is an immensely significant figure in the Gospel. A woman willing to address a man; a gentile willing to address a Jew; a person whose faith is evident beyond culture boundaries.

In fact, Jesus’ reply could have come straight from the rabbis: it’s not fair to take the children’s food and feed it to the dogs. This is deeply offensive language. The children are the children of Israel; the dogs is a Jewish term of opprobrium for Gentiles. But she is sharp, challenging and faithful: ‘Even the dogs under the table may eat the children’s crumbs’. The boundaries of cultural norms are overturned.

And lastly in St James’s letter, what Martin Luther called derogatively, ‘the epistle of straw’, we see a challenge both to culture and to Church.

The prevailing Greco-Roman culture on the New Testament era was deeply self-conscious of status. Every human act was determined by your standing: did you prepare the meal or did a slave? Did you stand aside in the street to allow a ‘superior’ to come through? Where did you sit in the pecking order at table?

The Christian Church in its infancy had to make a stark choice: would it blend with its social environment or would it follow Christ’s example with the Syrophoenician woman? What would determine the relationships of this new community – male and female, Greek and Jew, slave and free – rich and poor!

For St James the answer was clear and simple. To be part of this resurrection community, the community of new life, means not just to share the faith but to live the life. Rich, poor, make, female, Jew, Greek, slave, free.

So, he concludes, faith by itself without works is dead. No wonder Luther hated it!.

So, the challenging of expectations, dare I say it, the challenging of stereotypes, is what today’s scriptures are about.

The nation will be restored. The land will be renewed. The sick will be healed. And a resurrection community will be born.

So what’s that got to do with the question posed by my artist, Robert Lenkiewicz? 'What on earth are you doing that for?'

Certainly, just repeating a kind of Christian triumphalism that all will be well, sounds hollow. We have to recognise the realities facing the Christian community both here and through much of western Europe.

But a different picture emerged at a conference I attended this week in Cambridge, the result of four years of government-funded research across seventy-six projects. Itself something of a miracle: all on the theme – ‘New Forms of Public Religion’, some of which has been showcased in the recent Westminster Faith Debates.

Drawing on the work of academics from across the world, we heard of:

The rise of politically powerful Pentecostalism in south America, the persistence of Orthodoxy in post-Communist Romania, the clustering of multi-faith buildings in Vancouver’s Highway to Heaven, the myriad expression of religious rituals surrounding life events.

What emerged was not the picture of doom and gloom which Lenkiewicz foretold. Nor indeed a resurgent Christian hegemony which perhaps my twenty-two-year-old self had believed in! But something more subtle.

A world where religious faith continues across many cultural boundaries to exert powerful influence both in public and private life, indeed where those boundaries seem less important. Certainly one where the decline of religious influence in Western Europe looks at odd with the global picture – what’s sometimes called ‘European exceptionalism’. More varied, more organic, where the individual’s relationship to authority is something to be negotiated and adopted rather than assumed or required. Above all, faith which connects with the reality of our human experience: where

The nation will be redeemed, the earth will be restored, the whole person is healed, and a new community born.