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Listening to the Voices of Today
Sermon on Ash Wednesday in Shapwick
by Revd David Parsons
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This is my first visit to Shapwick Church. Thank you for letting me come and share this Ash Wednesday service here.
I have spent more than half my working life as a teacher of the Classics – the Romans and the Greeks and their languages. So as I prepared to come to Shapwick I was glad to find out that there are several Roman sites here, and that many interesting artefacts have been discovered from Roman times.
But I thought I should get more up to date, so I got out a more modern guide book. It's called Domesday Book, and in it I find that Shapwick is a bigger and richer place than my village of Street. Where Street has land for 10 ploughs, Shapwick has land for 40. Street is worth £10, whereas Shapwick is worth £12 to the abbot, £19 to Roger, and £7 to Alvred, making £38, again nearly four times the worth of Street. So I feel that when I come from my little village to Shapwick, I'm really the country cousin visiting the big city.
And I'm looking forward to a good time. Though my guide book doesn't say so, being dated 1086, I believe that before 250 years had passed you had 17 ale-sellers (and that's just the illegal ones) and four years later you had 21.
But enough of the past. We are here in 2006, and Shapwick, and Street, and our LMG and country are a different world.
In Roman times we should have gone in awe of our local leaders who aped the occupying power by dressing in the toga, taking baths, making a meal of their supper. To become a Roman would be self-evidently our goal in life. We would worship their glamorous gods as well as our own local ones.
At the time of Domesday Book we would be subservient to the great Normans, taking care not to be noticed, giving so many days' work every year to the abbot, or to Roger, or to Alvred, hoping that the local lord would not notice our pretty daughters. Church teaching, in a rudimentary form, would be generally accepted. The church building would be the grandest place we ever entered.
And so through the centuries, what was accepted, what we were told, would change, and change again. Apart from big crises like the Reformation, and later the Civil War, we wouldn't notice the changes. We would take in what was in the atmosphere around us at that period, and assume that it had always been so and that it always would. We would have been like the child whose viewpoint Thomas Traherne expressed like this:
The Corn was Orient and Immortal Wheat which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from Everlasting to Everlasting.
Today it's different. We are so much more sophisticated. We can see through advertising. We are cynical about politicians. We don't believe what we read in the papers.
Or is it so different? Can we really stand outside our own world of 2006 and discern what is good about it, what is bad?
We follow a man who could stand outside the assumptions of his world, and see very clearly the admirable and the underhand. Do you remember the day that he stood and watched people putting money into the church collection? It must have been a plate and not a collection bag, because he could see exactly what each of them put it. A big gift from that landowner. An even bigger one from that merchant banker. And exactly a quarter of one penny from a woman in black.
And the man watching said to his friends:
That woman has put in the most. She put in all she had.
That's just one small, obvious example of how Jesus stood apart from what everyone assumed. We notice it in many other ways, too. 'You have heard that it was said ... but I tell you.'
How does it affect us, now? Do we say: 'We have the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels. We have the answers. We don't need to worry about what the world assumes. We're all right.'
Well, in theory, yes. In practice it isn't so simple. Most of us spend a good nine tenths of our waking life exposed to the opinions and tastes and prejudices of the world around, and possibly one tenth, if we are lucky, reading the Bible and Christian books, meeting other Christians, praying. The non-Christian world has a lot more time to shape our thinking than God has.
Some Christians, knowing that this is so, take drastic measures. A family I lodged with as a student did not possess a radio, let alone a TV, and didn't read newspapers, for fear of being contaminated by the world. Some men and women enter monasteries.
Don't dismiss these Christians as deluded. We are just starting the 40 days when we think how our Master went into the wilderness for 40 days to get away from all distractions and to wrestle with the temptations to get his priorities wrong. Even if we don't become nuns or monks we can go to Christian centres for a holiday or a retreat, and surround ourselves with what is good and right and lovely, and so be realigned and refreshed for day to day living.
But what are we to do the rest of the year? Our Lent course is designed to help us be aware of the messages the world is throwing at us, and to help us receive these messages as people of Jesus. Just as schoolchildren are taught to look closely at advertising, and see how the advertisers are trying to manipulate us, so we as Christians can teach ourselves,and help each other, to discern how the arts and the media are trying to shape us. And so we can choose whether to allow ourselves to be shaped by them or not.
St Paul's instructions to Christians in Rome (Romans 12) are these:
Don't be like the people of this world, but let God change the way you think.
The Message interprets it this way:
Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
Yesterday morning news came that the murderer of a policeman has finally, after 12 years, been sentenced to life imprisonment. Radio 5 interviewed the two brothers of the murdered policeman. One maintained solidly that he is comfortable living with his hatred of the murderer. The other expressed most wonderfully his willingness to forgive him, and the reasons – that he himself has received forgiveness and full life through the love and the death of Jesus. It was, for me, a spine-tingling few minutes. There on the BBC, on the secular radio, someone was not only explaining but also living out his Christian faith.
That interview brought home to me, by its very unusualness, how unchristian we expect our broadcasting to be. Unchristian is normal. Christian is unusual.
If, during this Lent, we become more sensitive to what Jesus is saying to us, and more aware and critical of what the world is saying, then our Lent will have achieved something. The Wednesday evenings are one part of the exercise. Our own times of prayer, times with the Bible, times with Christian friends, are the other, even more important part.
What shall we give up for Lent? I suggest we try to give up drifting along with the current, lapping up the world's values. I suggest we deliberately align ourselves with the man who went our into the wilderness for 40 days, who there rejected the world's ways of winning friends and influencing people, who went on to teach revolutionary ideas, who walked the lonely path to the cross.
One way is broad and popular, and we know where Jesus said it leads. The other way leads to life.
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Thursday 20th of November 2008
