Given at Christ Church, Bulkington
Romans 8. 31-39
A mosaic of Christ victorious, holding a book that says “I am the way, the truth, and the life” in Latin. From the Archbishops’ Chapel in Ravenna. Date, c. 425.
More than conquerors? What does it mean to win at life? Surrounded as we are by advertising, we are constantly bombarded with images and words aimed at convincing us that we can be winners if only we have a new kitchen, a new phone, or a successful fifty quid flutter on the Grand National. This taps into an instinct that most of us seem to have that success comes from imitating the things we associate with people who are obviously more ‘successful’ than us.
Sky – the Sky of the TV channels and the broadband – spends about a quarter of a billion pounds every year on advertising in the UK. They would not do so if it were not effective. Yet, we and they know that faster broadband is nice but hardly ‘winning at life’. True victory must lie somewhere else.
Two English authors, born two generations apart, contrasted their own lives, ones of literary and financial success with those of student friends at Oxford who had gone on to be ordained.
In his autobiographical prose poem, ‘Summoned by Bells’, Sir John Betjeman, wrote of fellow students who worshipped at Pusey House, who, he felt who had truly lived out the faith they shared:
Friends of those days, now patient parish priests,
By worldly standards you have not ‘got on’
Who knelt with me as Oxford sunlight streamed
On some colonial bishop’s broidery cope.
Writing in the early years of this century, the author A N Wilson, who attended the same theological college as I, but did not go on to be ordained, wrote of meeting one of his colleagues many years later at a book reading in a Northern town. By then, Wilson was a prosperous and prominent figure, while his former colleague, who had been a handsome, rather camp, young man rejoicing in the nickname ‘Plum Tart’ had given decades of unselfish service in working-class parishes for a modest financial reward.
Then in the throes of an atheism which would be followed by a more recent return to the Church, Wilson wrote:
“When…I had parted from Plum Tart, I went out, and like Peter in the Gospels, I wept bitterly.
“My life had been supposedly a success. I had written books, and newspaper articles. I had made, by the standards of an Anglican clergyman, lots of money. … I wept after meeting Plum Tart, because I thought, and think, that his life has been so much more useful, so much better in every way than my own.”
In my experience, those who have succeeded in material terms are sometimes happy, and sometimes not. They can avoid, of course, many of the problems that make poorer people unhappy, but they can’t really influence the world much more than the rest of us, and at best all their wealth might add a year or two to their lives.
For us as Christians to win is to pattern our lives on Christ’s, as best we can given our temperaments and limitations, something that we know will not be a matter of single moment of conversion, but a lifetime’s journey of ups and downs, some dramatic moves forward but also backward steps.
Jesus didn’t promise to make us good, but to forgive us our sins. Nor did He promise that we would always be successful or comfortable, but to be with us in our darkest moments—which He knows all about, not least from the Cross.
From tomorrow, the intensity of Holy Week picks up a little. May you be able to journey with Christ to the Cross, and then through it to the Resurrection that through the Cross, he opened up to you and to all humanity. The Resurrection is the true victory, for us here and for everyone alive. Amen.
