Preached at Holy Cross, Seend
Hebrews 11.29-12.2; Luke 12. 49-56
“Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division.”
Does anyone remember the 1960, black-and-white, British science fiction film called Village of the Damned, set in Midwich, a place that could be a fictional version of Seend? The first sign the twelve mysterious children with eerie golden eyes are sinister aliens out to dominate Earth is the way they seem to think and act as one.
Jeepers Creepers, where’d ya get those peepers?
More than half a century later, in another British sci-fi classic, The World’s End, a group middle-aged men back in their Home Counties hometown for a nostalgic pub crawl, slowly work out that the bland sameness of the pubs and the creepy cooperativeness of their customers is because the humans have been replaced by robots from an interstellar bureaucracy that wants to ‘civilise’ the primitive human race.
And, of course, any Star Trek fans among you will know all about The Borg!
The point of the digression into science fiction is this – all these films use the idea of a group of people agreeing too much with one another as a sign that an alien intelligence is at work. It’s not in the nature of humans to agree too much, too often.
There is no human organisation more intimate and where people have so much in common than families, yet at their worst families can be defined by conflict. And actually, a reasonable degree of conflict in a family is a healthy thing. A family where everyone always agrees is one where someone is dominating everyone else behind the scenes.
Similarly, a country where everyone agrees can only be a totalitarian state; and if we encounter a Church where everyone agrees, we know that we’re actually dealing with a cult. So, while too much conflict is obviously destructive, any healthy group of people needs a certain amount. Without division, we would just be robots.
Jesus says “Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division!” In this morning’s Gospel Christ says His mission was not to bring peace on Earth but to set things ablaze. This part of Luke’s Gospel is set on Christ’s final journey to Jerusalem, yet even this late He is expressing frustration that the fire has not yet been kindled, and that He will feel compressed and shut in, until the baptism He is to be baptised with has been accomplished—in other words, until He goes to die on the Cross. It is there things will finally catch light.
What a strange thing to long for, unless we look at it through the lens of faith. For while the terrible end of Christ’s earthy life seemed to be His defeat, it was through this that He the sealed the new covenant between God and humanity.
Our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews sheds light on this new covenant. It was written to a group of Jewish Christians, probably about thirty or forty years after Christ’s death, although precisely dating this letter is difficult. This was a time when the Church was becoming more mixed, with a growing number of Christians from pagan backgrounds joining the Jews who had been the first to follow Jesus. Of course, there was a certain amount of conflict between them.
This part of the letter lists many of the heroes and saints of the Jewish people, celebrating their courage, their devotion, and above all their faith in God. Their faith, the author says, was commendable, yet they didn’t receive the final fulfilment of God’s promise to humanity, for that was found only in Jesus, “the author and finisher of our faith; who … endured the cross”.
One of the central arguments of the Letter to the Hebrews is that there is now something much better than the old Jewish system of animal sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem. Instead of sacrificing animals to atone for one’s own sin, Jesus’ sacrifice of Himself on the Cross has atoned for the sins of the whole world.
So, in a few minutes, when I recite the Eucharistic Prayer, the one centred on the words Jesus spoke to his disciples on the night before He died, I will proclaim this—that the Father gave His son, Jesus Christ, to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption; and that on that Cross, He made full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world. Oblation isn’t a familiar word, but it just means something offered to God. In offering His life, Jesus paid the price for the sins of the whole world.
And Christ didn’t just give Himself up to death as an offering for our sins, but He told His closest followers to keep re-creating the last meal He had on Earth and told them that in doing so He would feed them with His actual body and blood, in the form of the bread and wine they shared.
This is really, really, strange stuff. We shouldn’t be afraid of that. In the Gospel reading Jesus told the people of First Century Palestine off for being obsessed with the weather but completely incapable of interpreting the really important signs of the times. We too must be careful to correctly discern the signs of our times.
And what are they? Well, in The Times yesterday, the journalist James Marriott wrote an article about whether or not there was a revival of Christianity among young people. Marriott who is in his early thirties and not, as far as I know, a Christian or a believer at all, wrote:
It was widely held that the world was soaring ineluctably along an arc of enlightened progress. We were all destined to become richer, more democratic, more just, more rational and more secular. But those optimistic beliefs have been sorely tested in difficult recent years. Anyone tempted to simply dismiss the idea that religion could ever revive may not grasp how dramatically the cultural and economic landscape inhabited by young people has changed.
In the days when we believed that the world was soaring ineluctably along an arc of enlightened progress, perhaps it made sense to talk about how Christ’s teachings might help humanity soar even higher. But we now live in strange times, and the strangeness of our faith might help make more sense of our times than the crumbling, over-optimistic, over-rational, certainties an era that very recently seemed to represent the future but is now crumbling quickly.
We fear that these changing times might bring conflict, and not healthy conflict, but a time of disintegration in our national life or perhaps even terrifying international war. While conflict at every level seems to be inevitable, we long for something else—not for us all to sound one note, but instead the sort of true harmony that seems to elude us here on Earth. This is a sign that we are made for more than our lives here—for a different state of being. It is this true state of our being that we will, through the Father’s Grace and Christ’s sacrifice, experience in Heaven, for Christ indeed did not come to establish peace on Earth but to lead us to peace in Heaven.
So let us, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes, run with perseverance the race that is set before us, remembering that we are not called to be perfect but to be human, with human flaws, just like Jesus’ closest friends, and like them looking to Him who made the full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of this world so He can lead us to our true and eternal home in the world to come.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
