Preached at Christ Church, Worton and St Mary’s, Potterne
Galatians 6. 7-16; Luke 10. 1-11, 16-20
“…do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven”
We’re all shaped forever by the world of our young adulthood. Some eras leave a particularly profound mark. Those who were young adults during the Second World War were defined by the words “Never Again”. They were the generation who built international institutions to try to build peace between nations, and social safety nets within them to try to prevent the sort of embittering poverty that did so much to pave the road to war in the 1930s.
The years when things could only get better? Clinton and Blair in Belfast, 1998.
That generation has mostly passed to its reward. Many of you here, however, were formed by the Swinging Sixties, when the world changed dramatically in just a few years, with a huge expansion of individual freedom and self-expression, and huge changes in the status of women.
Both of these were times when the Church urgently engaged with the task of making the world a better place. After the war it sought, in the name of the Prince of Peace, to help create the means for a permanently peaceful world. In the Sixties, the Church set itself the mission of updating itself, fearing the rapidly changing world might leave it obsolete.
The era that formed me was the 1990s Golden Age that followed the end of the Cold War. It was encapsulated in the title of the song that accompanied Tony Blair’s triumphal march into Downing Street twenty-eight years ago – D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better. By this time, the Church had become very much weaker. Although the Church itself still expected to play a part in helping things get better, few others expected it to. Mine was the generation that devoured the works of the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, especially after our youthful Golden Age was brought to an end when two aeroplanes shattered a bright September morning in New York
The optimistic world of my youth is now a long time ago—the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of President Mandela; the Play Station and the arrival of the Internet. For those of you who are young adults today, the world that shaped my outlook is something you read about in history books.
Your lives have instead been formed by a lengthy economic and cultural stagnation, by plague, and by failing institutions. Nobody believes anymore that things can only get better. The Church invested so much into trying to make the world a better place, but it may be getting worse anyway and, if it is, there’s probably little we can do about it. Like every generation before us, we are carried on great historical trends that are beyond the human capacity to identify fully, let alone control. It was always a bit naïve to think that these cycles of history would cease. Empires always rise and fall. Golden ages always turn to decadence. After any period of unity comes division. Thus it has ever been.
Because we sense we probably live at the end of an era, we look at the world and worry. We worry when we look at Ukraine, where the speed of technological development has been so rapid that the war being fought this summer bears only a passing resemblance that of the war’s first summer, just three years ago. We look with worry at the Middle East, where embittered nationalism, religious fanaticism, and the egos of powerful men remain as deadly as they ever have been, but the weapons have become so much more potentially catastrophic.
The good that the Church has sought to do seems so weak in the face of how the world is changing. Its good works and ours are important in their own terms but none of them have fixed the essential brokenness of the human condition.
This could all be a bit grim; except for this—we are lucky that our faith is not for this life only.
* * * * *
The sending of the Seventy is a milestone. Until this point, Jesus’ followers seem to have been spectators as he has taught and healed. Now Christ sends them out to work, independently in pairs, in all sorts of different directions, to preach and heal and work miracles in His name. Note that Christ doesn’t tell the Seventy to make the world a better place – He doesn’t tell them to organise a non-violent resistance movement against Roman occupation, or to petition the Emperor for human rights. He asks them to preach to those who will listen and heal those who are in front of them. They are told to do good in the immediate moment, in the places where they are.
When they come back, they’re elated by the powerful works they have been able to do in Christ’s name and, for a moment, Jesus celebrates with them. But then He says something strange – He tells them not to rejoice in this. Instead, they should rejoice that their names are written in heaven.
The good that the Seventy have done in the towns and villages of Palestine are reflections of, and pointers to, the much greater glory that awaits in Heaven. This passage is saying that what is ultimately real takes place in Heaven; when we live in heavenly ways on Earth, then we bring the Kingdom of God nearer, but we will only fully participate in it in Heaven. Sometimes in this life we sense a peace that is transcendent, often when we know we have been a channel of God’s great goodness to and love for others. These are the moments when we briefly perceive what Heaven is like, little flashes of the glory that awaits us, immeasurably greater than anything this world can offer.
And how do we get to Heaven? Our first reading comes from Galatians, Paul’s most direct, and sometimes angriest, argument that we can’t win heaven by what we do. God has already given us Heaven through Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross – we just need to have faith in that.
When you do good in Christ’s name, don’t do it to try to win God’s love. You don’t need to win God’s love. God already loves you. God already loves people who are much harder to love than you are. Do good instead because you are already loved by God; share that love. The Holy Spirit, who is God’s love, flows through you, and when you pass that love on, especially to the lowest and least, then you participate in the ever flowing love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the ever flowing love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that will be like the air we breathe when we get to Heaven.
It is in Heaven where we will, by God’s Grace, finally break free from the cycles of this reality, where our greatest hopes can never quite escape the limits our greatest weaknesses put on them.
* * * * *
Towards the end of the last Century, the Church stopped pointing the way to Heaven, desperate to be relevant, desperate to build a better world and fearing World War Three if it failed to do so.
But now we live at a time when people don’t believe that things can necessarily get better. As human institutions fail and times darken, there is a hunger for a faith more hopeful than what materialist science claims; for something more hopeful than humans being just random products of evolution, whose lives have no meaning and even whose sense of free will is an illusion. Instead of that, to be told that we are made by God for beauty, truth, goodness, and love – that we are made by God for heaven – is a liberation.
Yet although the harvest is ripe, -the labourers are few. So we few who labour must not weary at sharing the good news and doing the good deeds of Christ in this latter day. And when we do so, as we heard from St Paul this morning, we sow seeds of love and goodness that we will harvest when they fully ripen in the world to come.
Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.
