A Faith for this World?: Sermon Preached on 16th February 2025 (Third Sunday before Lent)

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – 1 Corinthians 15. 12-20; Luke 6. 17-26

“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Is your hope only for this world rather than what might be in the life to come? Is your faith in vain?

I always feel a little uncomfortable as an inclusive, liberal-minded, sort of priest in putting Paul’s case as bluntly as that. I realise many people do support the Church for what it does in this world, and many folk are loyal churchpeople and seek to be faithful to Christ as He taught us to live in this world, while not really believing in “the magic bits”. The Beatitudes, which are today’s Gospel reading, are often presented as a manifesto of hope for the future of humanity—if we could only fully embrace them and the rest of Christ’s teachings, really fully embrace them, we could create heaven on earth. Or so some say.

All of you welcome here, just as you are. That’s an important principle for a parish church that seeks to be a centre of faith and hope for the whole community; also I’ve had enough people tell me over the years I’m not a real Christian for me to tell anybody else the same thing. For what it’s worth I think that, on balance, over time, Christianity is good for earthly societies and Jesus Christ’s teachings, on those occasions when we really do live them out fully, do create little pockets of heaven here on Earth.

But I’m going to tell you why I believe in “the magic bits” and why I agree with Paul that if our faith is only for this world then we are to be pitied.

Firstly, all human endeavours, no matter how noble, crumble in the end. We live at a time of immense and rapid political and cultural change, which frightens many of us, perhaps rightly. The dream that inspired many of us over three or four generations since the end of the Second World War seems to be dying. Like all dreams it was never a set of bullet point proposals, but could be summed up like this: that with the right spirit of co-operation and mutual respect between nations and people, with the right knowledge and learning, we could ensure the horrors of the past were permanently laid to rest and build a global community of prosperity and security. While this vision was often in practice honoured mainly in the breach, all of a sudden those emerging are actively repudiating it and glorifying in belligerent speech and actions.

Perhaps, however, we’re just discovering that this dream, noble as it was, could only ever have been a fantasy. Just as all physical buildings are subject to decay, and our physical bodies cannot last forever, so our political structures and even the great ideas we hold dear can’t last forever. All things in this universe are subject to the iron law of entropy; even the particles that make up all matter will decay and die, admittedly on a timescale that is mind-boggling. Tower and temple will always fall to dust. The laws of physics tell us that as much as the precepts of religion.

The second problem with a purely worldly faith is that we do indeed have a soul, as most of us know instinctively. We are creatures of spirit, as well as body and mind. The great dream which seems now to be dying never addressed our spiritual side. It also never addressed one of the fundamental paradoxesof human nature: that while conflict can destroy us, without conflict we become stale and stagnant, decadent and corrupt. It never addressed that the great wars we fight are often within ourselves. At a time of tension between Islam and the West, it might be worth bearing in mind that the finest Muslim scholars have always understood true jihad as something waged within the self against ego, selfishness, and greed, to fit oneself to meet one’s maker at life’s end. This instinct that we have a spirit that endures beyond our physical lives is universal; it’s not one that Christians invented as some sort of means of social control. In fact, it is the dream of earthly heaven, along with the technology that dulls our five senses, that has obscured this truth in our culture and time.

The third point I’d make against a purely worldly faith is that, as I said, while on balance, over time, Christianity is good for earthly societies it isn’t a magic bullet. All Christians do bad things some of the time and some Christians seem to do bad things most of the time. The Beatitudes have inspired the most wonderful acts of selfless good, but at the same time millions of people have heard them, and claimed to be followers of the Christ who spoke then, and still gone on to do wicked things. No secular ideology is going to do any better; human nature is for us to fail to live up to our highest ideas.

And this is where we come to the core of the Christian Faith. Christ didn’t come to make us good; He came to fix the consequences of the reality that all of us are at least a little bit bad sometimes. Accepting this frees us in a number of ways; it frees us to accept salvation and eternal life as a gift from God, one we could never earn on our own terms; it frees us to love God for what God is rather than what we think we can get out of Him; perhaps of most current relevance, it frees us from the delusions of the secular world that we can ever make things perfect, and so to embrace the joys of being imperfect in an imperfect world. All that imperfection means that we can never fully embrace the Beatitudes, but of course, things are so much better when we try, and then after we fail try again.

On top of all that, the Beatitudes are very clear themselves in pointing to a heavenly reward, not a future earthly paradise.

Now, did you notice these Beatitudes are a little different from the version you’re most familiar with? Instead of coming from the famous ‘Sermon on the Mount’ in Matthew’s Gospel, these come from the so-called ‘Sermon on the Plain’ which occupies roughly the same spot in Luke’s Gospel. If you know a little bit about the Bible, you’ll have picked up that Luke is the socially concerned Gospel with a particular interest in the marginalised and the outsider. Matthew is said to be a rather harsher affair, full of divisions between sheep and goats, and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

That’s the stereotype, anyway. But here we see something different. Matthew is content to tell us the blessings that await those who suffer or are faithful. Luke adds to these by pronouncing woe on three groups of people. Perhaps the rich and satisfied of an unjust world deserve some woe, but surely those who laugh don’t deserve to be made to mourn and weep? I’m not going to pretend I like this one; I struggle with it. I don’t like religion that frowns. Perhaps it’s a warning not to place our faith in the passing joys of this world.

Finally, remember that the worst of our thoughts and actions could deservedly condemn any of us. But, as St Paul reminds us, if Christ is risen then we are no longer in our sins—for Christ paid the price for them on the Cross and then rose from the dead to open the way to eternal life for us. Don’t trust in your goodness but instead in God’s mercy, the God who will fill the hungry, grant kingdoms to the poor, and even make the miserable laugh; the God who will fill you with all that you have lacked in this world when you enter heaven and finally become what you were made to be.

And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.