Sermon for the First Sunday after the Epiphany
“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”
A scriptural text frequently used and emphasized by the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse, one of my teachers and the teacher of many clergy and many students spanning many generations and scattered over several continents, it speaks directly to the confusions of contemporary culture within and without the Christian Church, itself confused and uncertain about itself. It will not surprise you, I suspect, that my response to the disturbing events of terrorism in France, on the one hand, and the ethical debacle concerning the Dalhousie Dental School, on the other hand, is an echo of this text captured in one word, teaching.
Perhaps, repeatedly, as in teaching, teaching, teaching! But you will want to ask, teaching what? How can education make any real difference? You are right to ask. For if teaching is simply about getting ahead in the world, simply about success, simply about what serves consumer and economic culture, then it only contributes to the dis-ease that occasions all of the problems that we confront. Such teaching is little more than cultural conformity to the world; the very opposite of what Paul is talking about. “Be not conformed to the world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Not by blowing up people; not by misogynistic fantasies, but by teaching what belongs to the truth of Islam as opposed to the fanatics which defame and debase it and what belongs to the moral responsibilities of ethical communities. For that is what is at stake. It is not about particular groups or individuals who are offended but about offences against the ethical communities of our humanity itself.
This leads to a question too for the Christian Church. How to engage contemporary culture without simply accommodating its agendas? For that is where most Christian churches are, at least in the western democracies, and why they are dying if not dead. That is not to say that the business of the Church is simply to be oppositional and reactionary. No. At issue is how the Church engages the world in which it finds itself. That requires one simple yet difficult thing: knowing and caring about what the Christian Faith actually is and how it matters.
