Evensong, 27^th August 2006
Joshua 24.1-2a, 14-18.  Ephesians 6. 10-20.  John 6. 56-69

The 27^th of August is the feast St Monica (AD 332-387) the mother of St Augustine of Hippo.

Monica was a devout Christian who watched, with anguish, her brilliant son lead a pretty dissolute life.  She never ceased to pray for him and try to persuade him to change his ways and accept the Christian faith.  When he took a teaching post in Italy she trailed there after him, still hot on the cause of conversion.  Once there she took him to meet Ambrose … and the rest, as they say, is history.

Once Augustine had accepted Christianity Monica sent packing his long time and much loved mistress, and their little son (pretty mean really); and still in ‘control freak mode’ tried to arrange an advantageous marriage for him.

I have to sympathize with Monica because I too know without doubt, what is best for my sons, and believe I know exactly whom they should marry.   But then I’m not expecting anyone to make me into a saint!

So that nicely dispenses with Monica: what of her son, whose feast day is tomorrow?  Very soon after his conversion in Italy (never was promotion so swift) he was made Bishop of Hippo in Africa.

He was undoubtedly a devout man (in the end!): and wrote prodigiously, including his still much revered book of Confessions.   Most people recognize one of his most famous quotes ‘we are made for thee, O Lord, and our hearts are restless ’til they find their rest in thee.’   Equally popular is ‘Lord give me chastity: but not yet!’

He was a prestigious thinker and writer, and the influence he had on Christian doctrine is still with us.  But I would be cautious in claiming it was all helpful or even desirable.  It was Augustine who promoted (to my mind) the terrible doctrine of Penal Substitution, which claims God to be incapable of forgiving our sins without demanding the death of his own Son.

So I have neatly dispensed with Augustine too: let’s turn to the lectionary readings appointed for today.

I don’t know about you, but I used to love to sing the wonderfully martial hymn Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war ... but it is out of favour these days.   Muscular Christianity and the Church Militant, are no longer popular themes.  And thank goodness for that.  So how do we cope with the military language of the Epistle we heard read this morning?

I can never hear that passage without remembering a phone call I had, many years ago now, from a Church Youth Group Leader who had been given my husband’s name as the chairman of the Leatherhead Fencing Club.  He wanted someone who could demonstrate fencing to the local kids, relating it to ‘putting on the whole armour of Christ’.  I volunteered my youngest son, Fergus (I said I was bossy).  I gave Fergus a lift to Chessington with a car load of fencing equipment that he had borrowed from the club.  He demonstrated what to do, and then let the kids loose with masks, jackets and epées.   He had his work cut out making sure they didn’t seriously injure one another, nor, which I think he was more concerned about, damage the club’s equipment!   I doubt much theology was taught; but they were an aggressive bunch so it was highly popular and he was invited back several times to repeat the experience

When we are considering that passage, we need, of course, to remember the conditions of the time.  Christianity was persecuted by the Romans.  People were being thrown to the lions, for heaven’s sake!  Paul (if it was Paul – there is considerable doubt over the authorship of this epistle) wrote many of his letters from prison!

When people feel under threat, and especially when they feel persecuted, they often resort to defiant language and even action.  Isn’t this what we are seeing among the Muslim population of Britain today?  When innocent people are expelled from an aircraft because other passengers don’t like the way they are dressed, and selective searches are being introduced to give police powers to harass anyone who looks vaguely Middle Eastern.  When Israel ignored the UN Cease Fire and continued to launch missiles and cluster bombs into Lebanon; is it any wonder that Muslim people, of all nations, feel under threat?  They are not being supplied by a huge arsenal from America via Scotland; their only weapon of retaliation would seem to be what some see as terrorism; others as freedom fighters.

And no doubt they can find passages in the Qu’ran to support such action.  Just as, in the past, Christianity could quote passages to support the Crusades, slavery, witch hunts, the persecution of the Jews, burnings at the stake, homophobia, the invasion of Iraq! and even (in a Chessington Youth Group) the noble sport of fencing!

All religions can find passages to support the most horrendous deeds.  One of them is staring us in the face in our Old Testament reading this morning.

‘The Lord brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt he protected us along the way … and the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land.’  A fearful claim to land which some Zionists still hold today.  God help all who live in Palestine!

So we turn to the gospel.  Well, is it really helpful talk about eating human flesh and drinking blood: a practice which is abhorrent to the Jews?   We know St John meant the taking of Jesus into our lives ‘spiritually’, but I should say it isn’t very obvious in the first reading of this passage; and anyway, what about the doctrine of transubstantiation?  Again we should reflect on the influences around the writer of the gospel at the time.   These were Hellenistic – just read some of the Greek and Roman myths and tragedies – eating people was something the gods just did!   And the fourth gospel is often seen above all, as a Greek text.

This isn’t meant to be an orgy of deconstruction.  It is my personal way of giving thanks that we are invited to have a reasoned and reasonable faith.   We will not be struck down if we critically discuss passages in the scriptures, or question Church Doctrine.  We don’t have to believe six impossible things before breakfast in order to be ‘saved.’  We no longer have the equivalent of the Inquisition or Mullahs or religious police lurking ready to clap the disobedient into irons or even torture them.

There are, of course, plenty of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures which remind the Jews that they need to live in peace alongside the people already living in Canaan.   Jesus preaches love and peace and turning the other cheek, not revenge and war.  Mohammed told his followers that God’s revelation had come late to the Arab world and that they must always respect older revelations in the Jewish Torah and Jesus of Christianity.

Augustine undoubtedly gave us a deeply spiritual Christianity, encouraging us to look beyond rigid creeds and dogma to find a faith which speaks directly to the heart of each one of us.  And for Augustine’s legacy we must thank St Monica for never giving up on her mission to convert him.

The bible charts the history of how people down the ages have come to understand their relationship with God.  That story continues.   I was in discussion some months ago with some young Muslim women in the mosque in St John’s Wood; they kept trying to tell me what it was that I believed, and quoted at me from the bible.  I told them that that was not what I believed and that Christianity was an evolving faith.  This was a new concept to them.   One of them insisted on following me out after the discussion and buying me a cup of tea and a sandwich.  She was fascinated that I didn’t see revelation as fixed or finished, but rejoiced in a living faith in a living and personal God.

Fundamentalism does no service to Judaism, Christianity or Islam.  It is inhibiting, ungenerous, dangerous; those who quote passages from the bible or the Qur’an to support a course of action of their own choosing are turning these holy books into a missile or a monster.  We need to let them speak to us on a quite different level; not divorcing them from critical appraisal and certainly not accepting them uncensored.

I value the bible far too much to treat it as a means of justifying our own actions or securing us in simplistic beliefs.  It is an inexhaustible resource; it can indeed confirm us in our faith, but it can also challenge us, it can make us angry, uncertain, depressed, exhilarated, it is the source of hope, and in it we find our own suffering echoed, met and healed.  It is the stuff of life itself.  God is revealed in its pages, but mostly as mystery.   It is a puzzle to be unraveled, a journey to be pursued.  It is too valuable a resource to be confined to simplistic interpretation or easy cliché.

So let us like Simon Peter, speak directly to the Christ within the mystery, saying ‘Lord, to whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.   We have come to believe and knew that you are the Holy One of God.’

Amen.