The most famous line in modern philosophy is spoken by the character of a madman in Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Joyous Wisdom: “God is dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?” And it’s always struck me as significant that the madman utters these words in the marketplace. At the dawn of the 20th century it was in the context of the growing dominance of the market that Nietzsche could proclaim “God is dead”.
So there were some curious resonances for me when I attended a meeting last week, primarily for business leaders at St Paul’s Cathedral, and the chief executive of an international management consultancy stood up and said “free-market capitalism is dead”.
Rather like the idea of God after Nietzsche, I suspect that the idea of the market will, in some form, remain alive and well. But what has been extraordinary about the last few weeks has been how dramatically the economic systems in which we had invested so much confidence and unquestioned allegiance have been shaken to the core. And that has provoked in many an almost existential anxiety and in some almost total hysteria.
In many ways we could not have picked a more disastrous month to promote stewardship and committed giving within our church. The analysis we’ve done indicates that a third of you, our congregation, have jobs connected with city finance. You will be worried about your jobs, the stability of your incomes, and your ability to meet your existing financial commitments without taking on greater pledge to the church. Another third of you are retired. You will be fearing a significant drop in the income that you had been anticipating from your pensions and investments. This may not feel like a good time for you to be increasing your pledges to the church. And for all of us, belts are tightening. We could feel well justified in letting stewardship month pass us by this year.
But if we take a step back, this is an interesting time for some rather “big picture” reflection: reflection on where our world is going and how it sets its priorities; and reflection on our own lives and how we order our priorities.
Over several centuries, the Church has become an increasingly peripheral institution in the structure of our society. As the concept of Christendom slowly declined, the nation state took over as the fundamental source of identity and stability in people’s lives. With it grew the predominance of market exchange as the primary mode of human interaction and betterment. “God is dead” proclaimed Nietzsche and in God’s place we put State and Market as our sources of certainty and security.
That wasn’t so bad and they served us very well. But we now live in much more uncertain times. We know that over the last few decades the nation state as an effective unit has been put under strain by strong globalising forces, both the movement of financial capital in a new global market and the movement of people responding to that global market. And now that market itself has revealed itself to be far less inherently geared towards human flourishing than the gurus of our time, even Alan Greenspan, and lead us to believe. We might say that our faith in the market has been betrayed as misplaced from the beginning. The archbishop wrote recently:
“[We] lost sight of the fact that [markets] are things that we make. They are sets of practices, habits and agreements which have arisen through a mixture of choice and chance. Once we get use to speaking about any of them as if they have a life independent of actual human practices and relations, we fall into any number of destructive errors. We expect an abstraction called ‘the market’ to produce the common good or to regulate its potential excesses like an organism, and ascribing independence to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry”.
That idea is what the mid 20th century artist David Jones was seeking to represent in the print has been rather poorly produced on the front of your new sheet. On the left worshippers bow down to Mammon, the idol of the market economy and on the right the faithful worshippers bow down to the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
So we live in difficult times. Our modern substitutes for God, both the nation state and the market are shown to be incapable of bringing about the common good. Collectively and personally there needs to be a lot of soul-searching to address the question of how human beings really might be able to flourish in the fullest sense as we move further into the 21st century. There’s quite a lot of consensus that the ethic expressed in our reading from Leviticus and in the words of Jesus that we should love our neighbour as ourselves is a sound one for the good society. We’re even hearing from some very unlikely quarters at the moment that our fixation with the market might in some way have eroded that ethic. But what many seem reluctant to consider is that the other side of the commandment, that we should love God, with all our heart, soul and mind, might be more than just a choice for the few, but in fact could be indispensable to making this ethic of love really work for the flourishing of society.
The French have an expression for putting things in their proper order, “Remettre l’église au milieu du village”, “Put the church back at the heart of the village”. Could it be time for us, collectively and individually, to put God back at the heart of our lives, our communities and our society? And could it be time for us, after centuries of its marginalisation, to once again take the Church more seriously, not just as a cultural centre, a preserve of heritage, or some kind of spiritual top-up centre, but as the primary driver of a really flourishing society because it stakes its certainties, its stability, its identity on nothing less dependable than the very God who has created redeem and sustains us?
It’s in the context of those questions, as well as our pressing financial concerns, that we need to ask how we’re going to respond to stewardship month this year. Because if we think about church in those terms, then our financial giving to the church won’t just be an optional extra when economic times are good, but something built into our core budgeting as a constant 5% of our disposable income whether that comes to one pound a month or one thousand pounds a month. That would take our giving to the church to a whole new level from mere charitable giving because that kind of commitment is nothing less than an expression of our love for God which we believe to be the driver of our loving our neighbour as ourselves.
We’ve been presented with the facts. This church has reserves of about £21,000 and we’re facing a deficit for this year of over £28,000. Were also facing some decisions about whether we don’t just “keep the show on the road” here but whether we want to develop our resources, particularly refurbishing our buildings for the use of our Sunday School and the community groups that meet in our Undercroft. That kind of projects is a test of what a church is really about and where it’s really going. As the vicar said to the PCC last year, “We cannot stand still. We either move forward or we move backwards.”
To put the church back at the heart of the village is to put things in proper order. It’s to get our priorities right because we have put things back in relationship with the God who longs for us to flourish, personally and collectively. From what I have learned of him, we could do far worse than to learn from the example of Sir Alan Goodison in getting things in the right order in that way. Here was a man deeply caught up in the affairs of the world, its conflicts and its compromises. But Alan knew that God – and God’s church – are at the heart of things: at the heart of his life of service, at the heart of the community in which he lived and at the heart of life itself. So that when the time comes to give that life back to God, as we have gone through again this week with Eric and Barney, we can do so with faith in God’s promises of eternal life and the peace of mind of knowing that we can be accountable to God for how we have ordered our priorities in life.
At the centre of Nietzsche’s town was a marketplace and it was from there that he proclaimed the death of God. But God is not just alive, God is life and love itself. So for our own sakes and for the sake of our society, let’s keep on building this church at the heart of our community. And from it, let’s proclaim to our confused and uncertain world, the life and love that we have found in Jesus Christ.
Amen.