Preached at Christ Church, Worton
Colossians 3. 1-11; Luke 12. 13-21
“…seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.”
A couple of weeks ago, our former MP, Danny Kruger, who now has a different constituency due to boundary changes, gave a speech to a nearly empty House of Commons that got bits of the Internet cheering, got a well-considered but critical response in the Church Times from Lord Harries, the retired Bishop of Oxford, but raised as little interest in the mainstream press as it did with his colleagues in parliament.
I don’t always agree with Danny, and I disagreed with quite a bit of what he said in this speech. Just for starters, he takes a much rosier view than I do of the religious history of these islands – and the contribution of the Church of England to it. But his central point was very well made: that all of the blessings of democracy, tolerance, and freedom of thought and expression that we too often take for granted were built, painstakingly over many generations, on the foundations of Christianity. Those blessings were won in a society where Christianity was taken for granted as the shared moral and philosophical framework of almost everyone, even if they would never used fancy words like ‘philosophical’. Christianity was a shared way of looking at the world.
We moved away from that over the last two generations. We thought we could create a new shared way of looking at the world, one that was entirely neutral between faiths and was based only on rational principles and values that people of good will of all faiths and none could share. We hoped that as well as better fitting an increasingly post-Christian and religiously diverse country, it might also give us a means to manage a shrinking world of global problems across boundaries of culture, faith, and political system. The mainstream Churches mostly embraced this new idea of a religionless value system enthusiastically, and Lord Harries’ article in the Church Times was essentially about defending it.
But every society has a religion. Many of those religions have faith in God, but others are entirely materialistic. Our new value system is such a godless religion. Likewise, the Soviets with their godless religion of Communism also though they were creating a society based only on rational principles and values that all people of good will found could share. They thought that once they got superstitions like Christianity out of the way, along with getting rid of an economy based on the profit motive, people would improve morally. That was, of course, a matter of faith, faith in the teachings of Marx and Lenin. We can forget how for a time it seemed to be successful. In the long run, however, getting rid of God drove some people in the Soviet world to strange superstitions about everything from UFOs to forest spirits, and others to a bleak and cynical materialism. When the great storm came for the Communist economic system at the end of the 1980s, it turned out that their societies had been built on foundations of sand.