Grown Up Faith in a World Come of Age

This new year marks the golden jubilee of my coming of age. How so, you ask? I was one of a batch of baby-boomers who at the stroke of midnight on 1 January 1970 became legal adults. I was nineteen and three quarters. For this was the date when the age of legal majority was lowered from twenty one to eighteen. We saved the partying till I reached twenty one. But this fiftieth anniversary gives me pause for thought. Becoming a legal adult is one thing. Growing into moral and spiritual adulthood is quite another. It's a life task, I believe, always a work in progress. I doubt if any of us can say of ourselves that in every possible respect, we have altogether grown up however old we may be biologically.

I shall reach seventy in April. It feels like another coming-of-age threshold, this arrival of the decade in which I shall have to learn to grow old - gracefully, I'd like to think - and face the indisputable fact of my mortality. Quite possibly it will be my last full decade of human life (if I'm spared that long). Yes, I know that Thomas Ken and Jeremy Taylor tell us always to live each day as if it were our last. But somehow it's feeling all the more real as I approach the biblical three score years and ten.

The same month will also mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer's execution by the Nazis on 9 April. It was just a month before the end of the war in Europe. Bonhoeffer doesn't need any introduction from me. He was - is - one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. His return home in 1939 from the safety of the USA to face the dangers of life under the Third Reich was a decision to live in solidarity with his church in its protest against tyranny. The question with which he wrestles in those extraordinary letters from Tegel Prison, "Who is Jesus Christ for us today?" represents a theology that was finely wrought in the place where all the best thinking is done, at the edge of human experience. It was to be an unfinished symphony. But how rich are the movements he bequeathed us!

One of Bonhoeffer's most fertile ideas was that of "a world come of age". It was a phrase much bandied about in the 1960s along with "religionless Christianity" and "the Man for others". I remember as a chorister half-listening (on good days) to sermons about Honest to God and hearing the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer linked to John Robinson, Paul Tillich and what was coming to be called "secular theology". Looking back, I can't help admiring the heroism of that project, its intellectual and spiritual courage in questioning inherited language and ideas. What Bonhoeffer himself would have made of it is an intriguing question.

What is coming of age? Entering my majority 50 years ago wasn't the same as acquiring particular rights closed to me earlier in life such as voting, driving a car, drinking alcohol and so on. Some of these coincided with attaining adulthood but many didn't. What it meant was that my parents no longer held legal responsibility for me. I was now responsible for myself. Which in a moral and spiritual sense means becoming aware of who and what I am, recognising the truth about myself, taking responsibility for what I think and say and do. And if my adulthood reflects attaining any kind of personal maturity, it means grasping how responsibility is never self-serving, but is part of a collaborative, communitarian project that extends to all others in the world where I learn that human existence means "life together".

I think this is what Bonhoeffer is getting at when he links humanity's "coming of age" with shedding infantile notions of dependency. Like St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, becoming an adult means "putting an end to childish ways" in which others hold responsibility for us. So faith that has come of age honours the proper autonomy and self-determination that belongs to adulthood. Bonhoeffer said that this means living etsi deus non daretur, no longer resorting to the divine as the answer to every unsolved problem or dilemma. This is much more than merely invoking a "god of the gaps" to explain what we don't yet know intellectually. It means learning what's altogether more exacting spiritually, that in the modern world God is no longer a presumption, a given part of our daily experience of cause and effect. In such a world, I have to learn to think for myself, take responsibility for my values, decisions and behaviours, and make the most intelligent response I can to the challenges of living authentically as an adult of my own century.

There is a paradox here that Bonhoeffer loved to point out. It's the answer to those who were tempted to see him as a liberal protestant with a strongly agnostic, not to say humanistic, streak. He said that it was precisely as humanity learned to live in this way that startling insights about God began to be revealed. "Before God and with God we live without God." It’s an arresting rhetorical saying that it’s tempting to regard as metaphorical. But I think Bonhoeffer was putting words to a genuine spiritual experience of simultaneous absence and presence. The naked exposure that feels like abandonment means not the renunciation of faith but entering into its most profound meaning at the very place where the truth about God and humanity is finally disclosed: at Golgotha, where God is crucified in the Jesus who cries out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” In another memorable saying, Bonhoeffer suggests that "God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross".

One of the implications of this way of reading the cross is that at Golgotha, religion itself is put to death, for it belongs to the old self that needs to die if the new self is to be born. Bonhoeffer’s "religionless Christianity" doesn't mean in any way denying faith, but letting go of the childish dependency that flees to the bolt-hole of religious practice as an escape from living in the real world. Only this can put true faith back in the centre where it belongs. For "religion-as-refuge" can never do the work that only an adult response to God can do. What this entails can only be learned by taking in all that the cross symbolises: how God reaches out to embrace and love humanity unconditionally, how he invites us into a relationship of gratitude and trust and mutual self-giving. We could call this "faith seeking understanding" in Anselm's great phrase.

I want to learn late in life what grown-up faith means. I won't deny that it's tough to figure it out in an environment where I try in vain, or so it seems, to trace shapes and patterns amid the baffling complexity of events, whether it's the twists and turns of history or the ever shifting light-and-shadow of my own path through life.

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Which brings me back to the times we find ourselves living in as 2020 dawns. The year has not begun well. On this feast of the Epiphany we celebrate the light that radiates from the Holy Infant whom the magi travelled from distant lands to worship.  But while Christmas songs of peace and good will were still echoing in our ears, the US President ordered the assassination of an Iranian general who was visiting Iraq. And at once we are plunged into uncertainty, worry and fear on account of consequences we cannot even guess at. We are destined to watch a relentless game of tit-for-tat being played out by powerfully armed nations with the suffering of innocent people almost inevitable. Far from having come of age with the emotional intelligence that goes with it, humanity is regressing into infantile patterns of behaviour that pose frightening possibilities for destructiveness. If there are world leaders with influence who are capable of behaving as adults, now is the time we need them.

How do we have faith, how do we say our prayers in such grave times? Bonhoeffer, prisoner of the Nazis, who lived through even darker events than we do, knew there was no point in praying to some deus ex machina that would intervene and rescue him. He knew that the only meaning to be found in his own suffering and death, one more victim out of so many, would have to come from within. It would flow out of what he had learned by contemplating the crucified Jesus and seeing in the cross the universal victim of man's inhumanity to man. At Golgotha we know that there is a solidarity in prayer shaped by the cross as a sign not only of victimhood but supremely, of love. And this solidarity brings the strength to go on loving in the midst of suffering and to bear witness to its transforming power. The capacity to love in every circumstance, to love my neighbour and love my enemy, to love as an act of the will because it is required of me as a matter of Christian obedience, this is the ultimate test of how far I have come of age.

In this year that we celebrate the seventy fifth anniversary of VE Day, we should remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyr of the twentieth century. Martyria means "witness". We need to do what he did, discover how best to live today as adult Christian citizens not only of our own country but of the world. And to embrace our vocation to be citizens not of past ages, however nostalgically we are tempted to feel about them, but of our own century with all its contradictions, possibilities and pain. And how to bear witness in our time to the grace and truth we have seen in the glory of God's incarnate Word this Christmas.

All Those Sermons! On Preaching at Easter

This is a guest blog I wrote for Sacristy Press for Easter. It was published on their website yesterday. Friends and followers of the Northern Woolgatherer may be interested. It is reproduced here as published. 

I’ve always loved preaching. I’ve found it among the most rewarding aspects of public ministry. I don’t simply mean delivering a sermon to a (usually) appreciative audience in a church or cathedral. There’s the satisfaction of preparing it, immersing myself in the biblical texts set for the day, reflecting on my own experience of faith and human life, drawing on poetry or music, film, literature or art to stimulate the imagination.

So I was delighted that some of my sermons from my time at Durham Cathedral were published by Sacristy Press when I retired in 2015. And I’m pleased that four years later, as I write, Christ in a Choppie Box is being featured as Sacristy Press’s Book of the Month. (If you find the title baffling and wonder what it means, read the preface!) Being asked to write this month’s blog gave me the chance to pull the book off the shelf and glance through it once more.

I turned to an Easter sermon that the editor chose to include (my friend Carol Harrison, once of Durham University, now the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford). It’s called ‘White Easter’ because that year it fell in March and it was proving to be a bruisingly cold spring with unseasonable frosts and snows lingering well after the equinox. I am surprised how keenly I felt the rigours of winter. I was clearly getting old.

In the sermon I link our yearning for warmth and light with our hunger for springtime and resurrection in life. “Easter answers our longings and desires,” I say. “It does this by both changing how things were, and transforming our view of them. We would not be here if we didn’t believe that something infinitely life-changing took place on Easter morning when the women went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away and the grave space empty… Here is where fantasy meets reality, where longing is transmuted into hope.”

Re-reading that sermon made me think about preaching at the great festivals. I’ve now been ordained 44 years. That must mean around forty Easter sermons—many more if you include those preached during the fifty-day Easter season. Not all of them have survived (mercifully), though the earliest sermon which I have a clear memory of preaching was, as it happens, an Easter one. That was when I’d been ordained just a few months. It was on the beautiful story of the Emmaus Road in St Luke’s Easter story (Luke 24: 13-35). The text is long lost, but not the memory of how, like the disciples, my heart seemed to burn as I tried to speak about the risen Christ. When that happens to the preacher, it’s an experience to cherish.

“Easter answers our longings and desires,” I say. “It does this by both changing how things were, and transforming our view of them. We would not be here if we didn’t believe that something infinitely life-changing took place on Easter morning when the women went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away and the grave space empty… Here is where fantasy meets reality, where longing is transmuted into hope.”

All those sermons! How does the preacher stay fresh over a lifetime of preaching? How do we not collapse into cliché time and again, or simply recycle old material from years ago? This year I’m preaching Holy Week and Easter at Southwark Cathedral. How do I say something new at first light on Easter Day? – for yes, on the south bank of the Thames, the guest preacher has to be up at the crack of dawn to preach at the Great Vigil and Liturgy of Easter.

I wish I knew the answer. Maybe it’s one of the miracles of ministry. I’m not in any way comparing myself to Johann Sebastian Bach, but when you think how as cantor of the two churches at Leipzig he had to write a new cantata every week, orchestrate it, copy out the parts and rehearse his musicians all in the space of a few days, you’re amazed that it could be done at all, let alone with such brilliance and consistency. (That was a normal workload for church musicians in those days from the greatest like Bach to the least. Meanwhile Lutheran pastors would be expected to deliver sermons lasting a full hour… you have to admire the stamina not only of preachers and musicians but also of church congregations!)

I guess there are many aspects to staying fresh as a preacher, or trying to. One is the conviction, as the Puritan Samuel Rutherford put it, that “there is always more light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word”. A lifetime of preaching is too short to fathom the mystery of God and his ways, let alone speak of it in the pulpit. But that calls for curiosity on my part as a preacher: about the text, about life, about human beings, about God. I need to continue to be animated by this lifelong journey of discovery as faith seeks understanding. “Old people should be explorers” said Haydn when he was composing his last great works. Even in retirement. (Especially in retirement?)

Michael’s sermons are both beautiful and inspiring. They draw the reader face to face with God in surprising ways, always feeding the spiritual appetite—yet leaving me thirsty for more of what we have just tasted. They are beautifully crafted, and admirably concise. The use of English is impeccable and the scholarship profound. The eclectic references to art and literature demonstrate an aesthetic talent and theological versatility that is exceptional.”
from the Foreword by Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

Liturgy, prayer and spirituality are of course the bedrock of authentic ministry. You can’t speak about what you haven’t at least begun to glimpse, or wanted to. To be inspired by the church’s liturgy and to feel its rhythms is, I think, vital for good liturgical preaching. But so is personal prayer, especially the capacity to be still and pay attention to (“notice”, my wife says) the ebbs and flows of life where so often God comes to us. You can call it being a reflective practitioner for it’s certainly true that “the unreflected life is not worth living”. Why else would people listen to sermons if not to glean wisdom and insight from the word of God as mediated through the preacher’s own lived experience?

The golden rule of every sermon is, before you ever get into the pulpit, first preach your sermon to yourself. The same is true of blogging. I’ll try to remember that when I get into the pulpit on Easter morning.

Happy Easter to you all!