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.
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.
