Christ Church

“Master we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing”

Nada, nothing, nihil, ouden. Simon Peter’s word captures the empty nothingness of our culture and our church. Nihilism is the default position of both. We have toiled or worked, everyone thinks and says. But to what end? Nothing. What does that mean? It means the discovery that our labours, our work, if measured in worldly, practical and economic terms, and in social and political terms, have really all come to nothing. There is only disappointment and uncertainty, fear and anxiety and a whole lot of anger and despair. Just consider the remarkable state of affairs politically, socially, and, economically, in England and the United States. Ask yourself what that is all about. Recognize that while there are many, many factors, much of the phenomenon in England about the European Union and in America about the presidential election is the profound disconnect between a great number of people and their ruling elites. I think that is a fairly obvious and rather banal observation, hardly controversial.

Take it one step further and ask why. The answer, equally obvious, is that there is an obscene concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few and no hope whatsoever especially for a younger generation or for anyone else for that matter. And no, they are not simply spoiled millennials. The folly of the entitlement culture is deeply entrenched and runs across generational lines whether it is about education or health care, to name but two concerns. The problem is a world caught between the largely unregulated market economy of neoliberal capitalism, on the one hand, and the leviathan of the modern market state, on the other hand. Either in collusion or in competition, they contribute to a world of vast inequalities of wealth and a denigration of human labour; in short, to a profound unease. We have begun, it seems, the summer of our discontent.

We face a world where humans increasingly do not matter and the more that people invest themselves in technology as the solution the more alienated and empty and inhuman our world becomes. There is literally nothing to live for in the dystopia that we have created and in which we are all implicated.

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“What went ye out for to see?”

He catches our attention. We are even drawn to him, attracted by something strange and yet compelling. “What went ye out for to see?” Jesus asks, highlighting the strange and yet compelling character of John the Baptist whose nativity we celebrate in the week of the summer solstice, the week of the longest day of nature’s year. His feast prepares us for our being with the one who comes to be with us everlastingly.

The figure of John the Baptist frames our summer sojourning; his nativity marks the beginning of summer, and his death, “The Beheading of John the Baptist”, coming at the end of August, marks the end of summer, at least in Maritime terms!

Birth and death. Summer and winter. This summer’s birth points us to the winter’s birth of Christ, whose greater nativity signals all the summer of our lives in the grace of God towards us. That is the point of John the Baptist. He points not to himself but to Christ. The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ.

But beyond the reminder of God’s coming to us, there is the purpose of his coming in us – the motions of his grace taking shape in our lives. From that standpoint, the strange and compelling message of John the Baptist is constant and necessary; he points us to Christ, yes, but as well to Christ in us.

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“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”

It is a powerful and a familiar image, I think, that speaks rather profoundly to our current distresses within and without the institutional church, distresses which are really about our collective blindness about what it means to be the church as much as anything else.

The confessing church is, I think, what we are called to be regardless of the circumstances of each and every age and culture. What undermines our confidence in the Faith, however, is the overwhelming desire to accommodate the faith and the church to the prevailing winds of the contemporary culture. This means to forget that we have a teaching and a way of thinking and being that can speak to our world and day but not if we are taken captive to the underlying assumptions belonging to its agendas. It is after all a post-Christian and post-secular age. The institutional church is, I fear, completely compromised. For Anglicans in Canada, it seems, going along with majority opinion in the secular culture on the questions of the day appears to be the main concern and probably so for most of you.

I am not much interested in mere morality. That can only lead to the kind of dogmatic judgmentalism and hypocrisy so clearly indicated in today’s Gospel. On all of the moral questions of our day, the greater question is about the doctrine of God as grounded in the doctrine of revelation. This is always the question to some extent. But the church is in ruins because the scriptures have been reduced to a heap of broken images. It is an image from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land.

The first section of his poem is entitled, The Burial of the Dead, which intentionally recalls the Order for the Burial of the Dead in the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer. So, too, today’s epistle reading is familiar as being one of the traditional readings in the Burial Office.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

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