The Gray Monk

Trinity 5, 15th July 2001

Tewkesbury Abbey

Evensong

+In the name of God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Amen.

Jesus said, “What comes out of a man makes him unclean”.

In many respects that would seem to be true of society as a whole as well.

In recent weeks there has been much in the press and elsewhere about morals in society, ethics in public life, and the responsibility of governments to provide guidance or to bring criminal proceedings against this national leader or another. We here at the Abbey have also been privileged to hear a number of preachers touching upon the dilemma of Christians when confronted by crime, bigotry, and other related issues. Reading the papers, listening to the radio, or watching television you could be forgiven for wondering what was going on in the world when we have racist riots in some of our Northern cities and horrific crimes against humanity in the Congo, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Montenegro, and other parts of the globe. In recent weeks there has been public outcry over the pending release of two boys who murdered a toddler and it sometimes seems there is scarcely a day goes by when there is not another youth murdered by his peers.

In tonight’s reading from Mark’s gospel we find Christ telling his audience that it is not what you eat or touch which makes the spirit unclean but rather the darkness and uncleanness which lurks within us all which does the damage. Perhaps this tells us something of what is wrong in our society, our world, when we stop and look hard at it all.

Christians are charged with two great commandments, we must love the Lord our God with all our hearts, all our minds, and all our souls, and the second is to love our neighbour as ourselves. It matters not who that neighbour is, we are required to love them. This opens for us all a huge dichotomy. How can we love someone who has committed, is committing, and may well continue to commit some terrible crime?
Some years ago when I served on the Bishop’s committee for justice and reconciliation, it often seemed that for most of the members of that committee justice meant revenge and reconciliation meant reversing the hurt they were suffering and inflicting it on the members of society they saw as responsible. And this was a Christian Committee, its membership drawn supposedly from congregations in the Diocese! It often struck me that, while this response may well have been justified, it was hardly a Christian one, yet to say so was to invite vilification.

As many of you will know, I have spent most of my working life in the fire service. This has given me the opportunity to see humanity at both its best and at its worst, and not unnaturally some of it has left me with huge questions to deal with as a Christian. How do you deal with a man who is prepared to burn, kill, and maim his fellow humans in order to achieve a political objective? What do you say to the 80 year old pensioner whose one room hovel and all his worldly possessions have been destroyed by a gang because he dared to remonstrate with them for destroying his garden? What do you say to the man who tries to kill or maim you with an acid bomb flung at you from the shadows? In the course of 30 years in the fire service I have had all these and a few more to deal with, and I still do not have answers.

For all of us there is a larger problem to confront; we live in a society which measures success or failure, poverty or wealth by purely material yardsticks. In the midst of plenty we are in the depths of poverty - not material poverty, but a more devastating form of poverty which cannot be fixed by the Chancellor throwing more money at it. Our society, or our world, has become so spiritually deprived that its very fabric is in danger. In a society where almost anything goes, anything of a spiritual nature is belittled, believers denigrated, and churches treated as irrelevant to the modern world. Our wealth masks our true poverty. In the society in which Jesus lived, the slavish adherence to rules without actually understanding their purpose debased these to meaningless showmanship which hid the fact that the society was far from the haven of God's chosen. Similarly, in all the hype and glitz of the society in which we must operate I would suggest to you that there is very little substance underpinning much of it. And here lies the problem for the Christian. At almost every turn we are faced with ethical questions which must be resolved before we can do what is right as a Christian, and sometimes that may require not doing what Society sees as right.

Recently we heard Fr Simon preach on the dilemma of the Death Penalty for murderers. I will admit that I disagree with him on some points he raised with this, but it made me think hard about a range of these issues and what they mean for me a struggling Christian. I concluded after reading several different authors' thoughts on this topic that there is no easy answer. Firstly because it dissolves into several subsidiary questions which need answers, and secondly, because there is never only one answer to any of them.

The first question I think arises in this is the question of forgiveness. Can I forgive the criminal who rapes and perhaps kills another family’s daughter? I think not. In the first place the crime was not against me or any member of my family, it cannot therefore be right for me to act on their behalf. This was brought home to me again recently when the Rev Saward, whose wife was killed and his daughter raped in the Ealing Vicarage, wrote a letter to the paper on the subject of the Bulger case. Forgiveness here must come from the victim or the victim’s family; it cannot come from me. Yet in the last few years we have seen the growth of the belief that society can and must act to “forgive” the criminal once they have been caught and sentenced, the inference being that they are also the victims of some nebulous wrong committed by our society. In my view this is a monstrous perversion of the whole ethos of forgiveness.

How can I forgive the vicious gangs which roamed the streets of South Africa’s black townships, killing and murdering their fellow blacks purely because they refused to support “the cause” or had perhaps managed in that benighted society to make their homes look a little nicer or perhaps a little more comfortable than their neighbours. How can I forgive the murderous mobs that used the inhuman “necklace” treatment on those they had decided must be police informers? How can I forgive the Martin MacGuiness’ of this world who bomb and maim their way to power? How can I call myself a Christian when in my heart I want to see these madmen removed from society forever? Placed where they can do no more harm to anyone. Many of my colleagues find themselves driven to renouncing God altogether in such circumstances.

In the society in which we live today it often seems that the good are no longer regarded with anything but contempt. The more vicious the crime, the more depraved the act, the more likely to be rewarded. How can the Christian reconcile the teaching of scripture with the evidence of a society which sees rewarding truancy with CD’s and designer clothes as a way of preventing re-offending, and the act of defending oneself from a burglar as a crime?

The truth is, of course, that nothing is ever clear-cut or as black and white as we would like to think. We live apparently in a society in which moral responsibility is not a person issue but a state-controlled one. There is no crime these days that cannot be excused by shifting the blame to someone else. Poverty is blamed for crime; upbringing blamed for loutish behaviour, and “society” is blamed for creating a world of haves and have-nots. Our duty to care for one another is now taken over by the armies of civil servants and social workers and paid for in our taxes. Personal responsibility? Not me, guv!

Yet that is the very core of Christian teaching. Each of us is and must be responsible for our own innermost thoughts and our public actions. Just as Christ told his audience that the observance of the strict codes of ritual cleansing and the observance of the strict dietary laws did not make a man Godly, so with us. The outside may appear shiny, upright, and righteous, but the inside is an appalling mass of corruption where there is only hatred, anger, or deceit. I am very much afraid that all to much of our society today is just that, good to look at, but corrupt and utterly devoid of God at its heart. You have only to look at the product of our society with its rising crime, predilection for violence in “entertainment” and the desperate searching for some substitute for the gospels, so expertly undermined by the propagandists of the anti-church factions.

So how do I, as a would-be Christian, reconcile the commandment to love my neighbour as myself, to forgive until seventy times seven the wrongdoing of that neighbour, and the pain and hurt at the damage that those wrongdoings cause. I am not sure there is an answer to this question. I do know that I wrestle with it daily as I try to apply the commandment to give love to the unlovable, to forgive the unforgivable, and attempt to live in a society that has turned its back on God. Nor can I be entirely satisfied that I am as clean on the inside as the image I try to project on the outside. Sometimes my anger, and perhaps my self-righteous arrogance, shuts out God entirely and I find myself sinking into the same Godless state that Christ’s questioners are accused of.

It seems to me that I, too, need to wrestle with God, just as Jacob did to find the new man, the man who can worship not just the God of the gospel and the Church, but God, Lord of all creation and of my soul. In our society it is all too easy to be distracted from the things of the spirit, to become so wrapped up in the minutiae of the world that we lose sight of the help God can and does give in all these things.

“What comes out of a man makes him unclean”.

We, as Christians, need to be aware of this and strive to ensure that what we show to the world is what is within us. That what comes from our deepest and most hidden recesses of the soul are the things that come of God and not the things that make us “unclean”. At the same time, we must also remember that we are also human. God knows this and just as he knows our inmost thoughts, from him, too, comes the strength to at least strive for that goal.

So, can I forgive the murderer and the evildoer? I do not know. Forgiving must come from the victim and I am merely the witness. And I remember, all too clearly perhaps, the pain, the anguish, and senselessness and waste. I remember the disgust and the sickness I felt at the sheer evil I have witnessed, and I pray that God can give me grace to find a way to at least continue to alleviate such suffering where I can. In the meantime I will continue to strive to keep Christ as my King and as my Governor and pray that all who have heard his name may do so with me.

If it is what comes out of us which makes us unclean, then we must needs examine ourselves, and our inmost thoughts, our anger, our hurts, and perhaps our responses to the world around us to see how and where we can drink from the cleansing power of Christ to ensure we are truly clean. Only then can we begin to be truly Christian.

Amen