Hollowell  1 December 2002-11-30
Happy New Year everyone!  The long march through the 24 Sundays after Trinity is over and we are to-day, on Advent Sunday, back at the start of the Church Year.  The saviour is coming: it’s a time for renewal. 
When I was a boy we used to start the new school year with assembly, prayers and that reading from Ecclesiasticus which begins  “Let us now praise famous men…melln renowned for their power giving counsel by their understanding..”   As a young lad brought up on  books like “Our Empire Story”,  famous men to me were, almost by definition, the heroes of that Empire:  Henry Hudson,  Captain Cook, Francis Drake  and Clive of India and David Livingstone.  My heroes did not include Mr. Churchill, great war leader that he was, newly defeated in the election of 1945. Because heroes were usually dead. 
Then someone gave me a book called  One Hundred Great Lives. I poured over it and discovered that famous men were not necessarily Englishmen. I learned about Alexander the Great, Socrates,  Genghiz Khan, and Omar Khyam,  Columbus and Vasco da Gama and Descartes.  So now, as T S Eliot put it :  “I shall not want honour in heaven/ For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney/And have a talk with Coriolanus/ And other heroes of that kidney.”
But we need to be careful.  Hero worship is catching. For what we have been seeing on our televisions and in the newspapers in the last few days has made me think in a rather different way about  praising famous men.   
Thanks to the Apocrypha, praising famous men has, then, a pretty good pedigree.  And to-day more than ever so called cult of celebrity is now an integral part of our national psyche.  Programmes like “Celebrity Big Brother”,  “Get Me Out of Here I’m a Celebrity” have attracted huge television audiences.  
Did you vote in the great popularity poll? - I mean the BBC’s  competition to find the so called  “Greatest Briton” of the last 1000 years. I confess that I was at first rather snooty about the idea, regarding it as a pretty fatuous exercise.  But then I heard Germaine Greer denounce it.  I never agree with her and changed my mind.  So, sneakily and on the Internet, I did vote - for Shakespeare  : so at least my man was in the Top Ten.  
Knowing that a fair proportion of the British public equates Joan of Arc with Noah’s wife, I was pretty cynical about the BBC’s quest for the Celebrity of the Millennium.  But my own ignorance is also pretty startling  – I’d never heard of the celebrity who turned on the Christmas lights last week in Burton Latimer.  I must look at more soap operas. 
The final result of the BBC poll was, I suppose fairly predictable. Except perhaps for Brunel who got the votes from his university students, those among the Top Ten had all had some considerable exposure to that great maker and breaker of celebrities – television.  True it got a bit muddled at times – some viewers mixed up Thomas and Oliver Cromwell, blaming the latter for the sins of the former.   But I didn’t take it too seriously when  David Bowie, Eric Morcambe and David Beckham were placed higher Francis Drake, Thomas More, William Blake and John Wesley etc. etc. 
In that context one has to ask what on earth does greatness mean? I was at school with radio personality John Peel  (then called Simon Ravenscroft) who came 43rd, a place ahead of the inventor of Television himself, John Logie Baird. 
So whilst having some fun with a television poll, I have to ask as Christian whether Greatness or celebrity - what ever it may mean – really matters.?  I don’t think so.   History shows that these are brittle and ephemeral attributes! As we know from the fate of some so called celebrities in recent weeks, set up and then destroyed by the media.  Fame is ephemeral.
I met traveller from an antique land
Who said two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. 
“My name is Ozymandias King of Kings
Look on my works ye mighty and despair! 
On Palm Sunday Jesus was a celebrity as he entered Jerusalem. A week later they were reviling him and calling for his death.  Yet he was the greatest human being who ever lived, the Son of Man who changed the world. 
Yet it is a comfort to know that many of the men and women in the Top 100 Greatest Britons,  who played their part in changing the history of these islands, themselves found inspiration for their lives from their Christian faith.  Their greatness – however you define it – came from a God who  has a plan for all our lives and sent his son to take on human flesh and dwell  among us.  
As Queen Elizabeth I put it: 
‘Twas God the word that spake it
He took the bread and brake it
And what the word did make it
That I believe, and take it.
During Advent at the start of this new year in our Prayer Books, we begin of course to think about commemorating the birth of our Saviour, and the message that he brought to the world.  But that was not a message aimed at celebrities, the rulers of his day, though Jesus acknowledged the need to give Caesar his due.  I take comfort from the fact that it’s a message aimed at obscurities, unknowns like me - those who can expect to become forgotten sooner or later and, in the words of Ecclesiasticus  “to have no memorial who are  perished as though they had never been.”  He gave us – what thepoliticians airily call ordinary people - a very straightforward message spelled out in the Epistle to the Romans that we have set for to-day
“ Owe no man  any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law….and if there be any other commandment it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely that thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself….”  
Let us therefore bend our minds and our activities, at the start of this new Church Year, to trying to carry out that simple, unique message.  We are the people who matter, not the celebrities, when Christian values are under fire as they are to-day here on our door step in Northamptonshire.  Homelessness,  drugs and alcohol, unwanted children, record levels of HIV – above all a lack of love - turning on the radio these days brings a catalogue of woes to our ears.  
It’s easy to be Victor Meldrew.  But if each of us resolves to play our part as Jesus taught us, the world will be a better place.  After all, Winston Churchill could not have led us to victory without the support of Mr and Mrs Everyman. Shakespeare would have faded into obscurity had not some of his friends after his death put together his works in the First Folio. Nelson could not have set sail without Jack Tar.  John Lennon - who once claimed the Beatles were better known than Jesus and regretted it for the rest of his days – would have remained a Quarryman, playing the seedy night clubs, if the fans had not bought the records.   
“Though God has raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves.”  Queen Elizabeth, number 7 in the BBC poll, knew where she stood. 
We are the people: we can be the movers and shakers. And who cares about celerity?
I’m quite happy to be among those  “who have no memorial, who are perished as though they had never been. But these were merciful men , whose righteous hath not been forgotten. Our unknown ancestors created this village and built this church to the glory of God; they tilled the fields and went to war to defend them.  Their bodies are buried in peace, but their name liveth for evermore.  They had the advent message, too.  The people, says Ecclesiasticus, wil tell of their wisdom and the congregation will shew forth their praise.  
Let’s hope they can say that about us. 
 
  
