Hollowell & Guilsborough : Matins and Evensong. 3[rd] Sunday after Trinity 16 June 2013-06-14

Unsure what to talk about : OT,  NT or Father's Day. 
Peter Hitchens on A C Grayling's Book The God Argument: the Case Against Religion and for Humanism.   Ending in this way: 
<  It is my suspicion that Christians and atheists share one very strong emption  -  the fear that God exists.  The difference is that Christians wants Him to exist.  The truly interesting question is why each side wants what it wants > 
.  Of course the real purpose of our Service today  is to worship God,  to underpin our faith  and think about some of the fundamentals of our Christianity.   Rather than talking about Abram & Lot or about the parables of Jesus or fatherhood,  I thought I'd talk  about the state we are in and where Christians fit in. .
I've been encouraged to do that by some of the reading that I have been doing recently specially an essay by the Chief Rabbi,  Jonathan Sacks.  
But in attempting this I hope you will not think of me as an Oxford Don did about one of his colleagues :  " On the surface he is profound; but deep down he's superficial". 
So what are we all doing in this church today ?  I submit that one of the main reasons is to think about the place of God in our lives, where our lives, and those of our countrymen and women are going in this country.  
In a nutshell We need faith for the healthy survival of our society is my contention.  We also need social cohesion  And both are lacking at present. 
 I think that future historians will look back in wonder at the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent people, with a secular outlook on life in this 21[st] century,  believing that if they could show that the first chapters of Genesis were not literally true, that the Universe is indeed more than 6000 years old ( so Bishop Usher was wrong) and that there might be another explanation for rainbows other than as a sign of God's covenant after the Flood,  If they can show that ( not too difficult) then the whole edifice of religious belief would come tumbling down.  And once it did come down then we would be left in a happy world of non-believers getting on well with one another. 
One hears people say quite frequently on the radio or TV or in casual conversation " I'm not religious"  or  " I'm an atheist."    But does  "atheism"  have any real intellectual depth these days, compared with 150  -  200 years ago when Voltaire, Spinoza and Nietzsche were around ?   
Where is there the remotest sense that we are today grappling with the real issues which have nothing to do with science or with the literal meaning of scripture and I submit, everything to do with the meaningfulness or otherwise of human life.; the truth or falsity of the idea of human freedom; the ability or not of society to survive without rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and maintain a social bond. ?  
The debate has been dumbed down between believer and non believers.  to slogans on double  decker buses or puerile sloganising.   Does it matter?    Perhaps we should accept that just as there are people who claim to be tone deaf,  so there are  others who have no sense of humour or do not understand what is going on in the Book of Psalms, for example; people who lack a sense of the miracle of being  here  -  a collection of water and atoms on a planet that is one  -  it seems- of thousands in the ever expanding universe.   People who do not accept that the   " Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and all that dwell therein " 
People  who fail to understand what it might be to see human life as a drama of forgiveness or be moved to say prayers.  In short: some people get religion:  others do not.  That's it
Or is it?  
Religion has clear social, cultural and political consequences  and you cannot expect the religious foundations of our western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact.
Even the German philosopher   < God is dead > Nietzsche realised that losing Christian faith would mean abandoning Christian morality  No more  " love your neighbour as yourself " .  Instead the Will to Power.  No more " Thou shalt not " : instead people would live by the law of nature, with the strong dominating or eliminating the weak.    "An act of injury, violence, exploitation or destruction cannot be "unjust" as such, because life functions essentially in an injurious, exploitative and injurious manner"  - was Nietzsche's message. 
He was living in an age when Europe began to lose its Christian ethic.   One of his contemporaries wrote  prophetically :   " A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll.  Christianity restrained the martial ardour of the Germans,  but it did not destroy it and once the restraint is broken the savagery will rise again....the mad fury of the berserk of which Nordic poets sing and speak" 
We all know how true that turned out to be a hundred years later. 
The atheists these days do not seem to have an answer to the question of where we get our morality from, if not from science or religion. 
Let's face it.  People have been trying in Europe for 200 years to find alternatives to God. as an object of worship. : the nation state,  race,  the Communist Manifesto.  The cost has been enormous in terms of human lives. 
 Now we have turned to more peaceful forms of idolatry  - the free market, the Consumer Society, Democracy.  And what do those amount to?  An admission that there is no morality beyond personal choice,  so long that is as I do no harm to others.  
The costs of this attitude in society are growing.  Personal trust has all but disappeared in this and other Western countries:  bankers, C EO, police,  politicians, the press all hit by scandal.
Marriage has all but collapsed.  I read the other day that in parts of my home town Liverpool, 80% of children have no father. In England 50% of marriages end in divorce apparently. . Depressive and stress related illness is rampant.   
But NB The Queen's popularity  -  she  as a symbol of stability 
Whom do we trust ?  A recent survey, I have read, showed that the average 18-35 year old has 237 Facebook Friends.  When asked how many they could rely on in a crisis, the average answer was two.  A quarter said one. 
History shows that societies decline after they lose their faith:  Greece in the third century BC and Rome in the 2nd century.AD. Those societies were on the verge of decline   Destroyed eventually by Barbarians who,  though less civilised , were not so destitute of social cohesion. 
The threat is not now from Fascists or Communists but from  the New Barbarians,  fundamentalists who want to impose a single truth on a plural world.   They claim to be religious but are actually  devotees of the Will to Power.    As one historian put it " There is no significant example in history , before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.  Once a society loses its soul it loses its freedom. " 
Here's how someone else put in    " Freedom,  energising and exciting as it is , is also profoundly disintegrative, making it very difficult for individuals to find stable community support, very difficult for any community to count on the responsible participation of individual members.   It opens solitary men and women to the impact of the lowest common denominator  -  commercial culture. " 
That is why our Church and faith matters so much. 
An American writer on philosophy, Will Durant, put it this way    " There is no significant example in history before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion. "   It's a telling point it seems to me because in our time we have not found a secular ethic  capable of sustaining in the long run a society of strong communities and families  on the one hand,  with altruism, virtue, self-restrain, honour, obligation and trust on the other. 
 Here  in the Uplands Benefice through our Young People's Programme, through what we do in our churches, through our outreach to everyone,  through how we help our elderly and infirm, our unemployed.  We here have the opportunity to make a difference.  There are stirrings in the wider undergrowth.  Faith schools are prospering and that seems to be because parents want their children to be exposed to an ethic of responsibility and  -  dare I say it  -  restraint.  Second, we are fearful of the future as our culture becomes more polarised, less tolerant than in the days of the old, bumbling, Christian Britain. 
You don't have to be religious to be moral.   But a century after civilisation loses its soul it loses its freedom also.  That is he challenge that we as Christianians  in this our own little community face, and the message we have to get across. 
