Readings – Philippians 3:4b-14, Matthew 21:33-46
I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
It is a time of troubles. Plagues, accelerated by the rapid growth in intercontinental trade, spread across the world with dizzying speed. The economic gap between rich and poor is yawning, and many of the young have given up on the ability of the existing order to usher in a just society and are seeking a completely fresh start, consigning the old ways to the dustbin of history with as much aggression as needed. The West and the Islamic world are at loggerheads, with Western powers embroiled in multiple bloody conflicts in the Middle East, which started so long ago that nobody much remembers how or why they started. I am not, of course, talking about the present day but about the first years of the 13th Century, a time when the older townsfolk of Devizes will still have remembered the Church of St John the Baptist being built. There is truly nothing new under the Sun.
In that tumultuous time, a rich young party animal called Francis, whose feast we commemorate today, was having a life crisis. Set to inherit a family fortune, he had spent his youth hanging out with the troubadours, the wandering bands of minstrels who travelled around during the High Middle Ages making music, singing with them in his beautiful voice and partying with them. An attempt to settle down a little by turning his hand to soldiering had resulted in Francis spending a year as a prisoner of war. After that, his former life of drinking and dancing no longer had any appeal. He wandered the countryside of his native central Italy, half-starved and dressed in rags, begging God to show him a more meaningful way of life. One day, Francis stumbled across a church dedicated to Saint Damian, no older than the then relatively new St John’s, but already falling into disrepair. Amid the crumbling stones, he had a vision of an Icon of Christ Crucified that hung in the church speaking to him. “Rebuild my Church”, it said.
He took up the task with enthusiasm, starting with the physical rebuilding of that Church of St Damian, and going on to work for a spiritual renovation of the whole Christian world. Some of his schemes were perhaps a little overambitious: he once travelled to Cairo, reckoning that if he could only convert the Sultan to Christianity then he could end the wars connected to the Crusades. You will not be surprised to learn that he wasn’t successful.
But that isn’t the point – the point is that he gave things a go. Following Christ isn’t about following a series of step-by-step orders like the instructions for setting up a new mobile phone. As we know, that doesn’t guarantee success anyway. Richard Holloway once described the Christian journey as being less like marching to a heavenly military band and more like joining God in a jazz jam session, listening to the music God is playing and seeking to chime our own personal riffs with His. Christian obedience is about co-operating with God and recognising our own immense value to Him. God is not a cosmic sergeant-major waiting to scream at us angrily if we miss a beat. If God doesn’t pick up on the tune we’re playing, we can always get back into the beat in the next bar. New life can begin at any time. Following Christ is about trying to sense where the Holy Spirit is leading, trying different ideas, accepting that God will not pick up on some of them, because it’s only in a world of chance and risk and serendipity that other little tunes we toot can blossom into symphonies that are more magnificent than anything we could have imagined.
Last week I watched two films that depicted how people convinced they are fighting injustice can descend into barbarism precisely because of their moral certainty. Both looked back on events in the late 1960s and 1970s. The first was Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s insightful documentary on The Weather Underground, the second was Bernd Eichlinger’s emotionally overwhelming dramatization of the story of The Baader Meinhof Complex. On both sides of the Atlantic, young people outraged by the nightly television scenes from Vietnam, with America killing civilians in great numbers, themselves resorted to bombing and killing. None of this produced any of the justice and liberation they sought. In the end, both organisations found the world moved on rapidly and left those in them behind: on the run, or marooned on the edge of society, or imprisoned. The illusion that if only we ourselves ran the world, then everything would be wonderful, is a dangerous one.
