Preached at Evensong in St Mary the Virgin, Bishop’s Cannings
Genesis 28.10-22; Philemon 1–16
“…this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house.”
Philemon is not a text that preachers tend to thank the lectionary for throwing their way. Nonetheless I think it has quite a bit of interest to say to us here this evening, especially when paired with our Old Testament reading from Genesis, one of the most famous passages from that book, Jacob’s Ladder. Evensong often gives us the chance to engage with parts of the Bible that are rarely read in the Sunday morning lectionary. Tonight it certainly has.
Chagall, Jacob’s Ladder (1973).
There is often debate in the Church about whether the Church’s primary job is to help the needy or to worship almighty God. We often hear a similar debate about evangelism, where some argue it should be de-prioritised or even avoided entirely for the sake of helping the poor. In his letter to Philemon, St Paul sees all these things as being intimately connected with one another and mutually reinforcing one another. He prays for Philemon that “the communication of thy faith may become effectual by the acknowledging of every good thing which is in you in Christ Jesus”. It is when we take time to recognise the good that Jesus Christ does in us and through us, and to thank Him for that in prayer, that we become effective in sharing our faith.
Philemon is a difficult document because in it Paul discusses Onesimus, a runaway slave, with Philemon, who is his owner. Any thought of doing anything other than condemning slavery makes us outraged, and rightly so. The sad reality, however, is nearly every human society, on every continent, began practising slavery as soon the development of agriculture made it practical. What more demonstration of the reality of original sin do we need?
Indeed, while our first instinct when reading this letter is to stand in pious judgement over St Paul and the Roman Imperial society that produced him, we might consider that for all their faults, the Romans never came close to threatening the planet’s capacity to support human life, something we’ve done remarkably quickly through nothing more sophisticated than burning a bit of coal and oil. We are very quick to judge those of the past perhaps precisely because we know that us people of the present are, for all our wealth and technological power, just as flawed as our ancestors.
So, I think part of what this difficult letter has to teach us that there is no perfect social or political order and that there never will be — we must live our lives as Christians and seek to do good and follow Christ in a world that will always have dark aspects. We can, of course, work to change the political system and the laws we live under. Christianity supplied most of those who led the worldwide abolition of slavery in the century before last and we thank God for them. But we won’t always succeed in our attempts to make the world a better place; in fact sometimes we won’t even be pushing for the right things. Attempts to create utopia, to actually build heaven on earth, have usually led to hellish outcomes; the first society to reintroduce forms of slavery after having previously abolished the practice was the Soviet Union, which claimed to be a staging-post towards the perfect system of governing the world.
So, how do we sustain our faith in a world where our efforts often fail, and where we sometimes have to acknowledge that we have spent much time and energy working for things we later realised were gravely wrong?
Let’s turn to our Old Testament reading for some inspiration. Jacob has a mystical dream during an exhausted sleep in the middle a long journey. In it, he sees heaven and earth connected by a ladder, with angels moving along it between the mundane and transcendent realms. In the dream, God promises he will never leave Jacob and that his descendants will be more numerous than the stars. Waking from his dream, Jacob realises that God was in this place all along and he hadn’t known it. So he establishes a place of worship, a house of God, on that very spot. Worship is what sustains us on our long and sometimes difficult journeys of life. The instinct to make houses of worship for God, special holy places to refresh ourselves in God’s presence, is natural and ancient.
We should resist the conventional viewpoint in our culture, held by the faithful and atheists alike, that faith is all about our individual interior world. In Christ, the divine Word became a flesh and blood human just like us. Christianity is a faith of the earthly as well as the heavenly; one that celebrates the goodness of the material world as well as pointing us towards the transcendent.
St Mary the Virgin is both the parish church of a small village and a mighty and ancient temple of God. Those who built it, and who have sustained it over the centuries, didn’t just seek to provide a venue for people to meet, but one that represented Jesus Christ, the living and eternal temple, in stone and wood. They sought to create a place that connected the villagers of Bishops Cannings with eternity. One of our principal jobs as Christians is to open up little portals to heaven, where people can see the angels ascending and descending, connecting heaven and earth. This is perhaps more important than ever in our own culture and time, which rejects the idea of a transcendent heavenly realm as primitive superstition, yet is at the same increasingly prone to conspiracy theories and wild metaphysical fancies.
Churches and worship within them should give people an alternative to the unrealistic materialism of our times by connect them to the God who, even if He has gone unrecognised, is already present in their lives, just as he was already when Jacob came to Bethel.
May it please God that we will keep praising him together in holy places for that is how we can help one another perceive all the good we do in Christ, and so share our faith.
