Sometimes I think there is just too much to take in ? too many issues to think about. So this week clamouring for our attention we have seen:
– The children of Africa crowding round to see a chancellor of the exchequer – descending from his helicopter to learn about their plight ? children?s faces, inquisitive, impudent, expectant giving no sign of the hopelessness, the disease, and hunger and conflict which is likely to be all that their future contains;
– The scientists in Darmstadt crowding round their monitors to see the fruits of 20 years labour and seven years of waiting for these images from Titan;
– A privileged young man from a tragic family background at a fancy dress party with a swastika on his arm;
– Angry faces outside the BBC television centre waving banners proclaiming ?Christians against blasphemy? and burning their TV licenses;
– A scientist on a beach predicting major climate changes which will dry up our green and pleasant land and regularly inundate our major cities with flood water;
– A woman separated from her husband on a beach in Sri Lanka who has to wait seven years before English law will official declare him to be dead.
So many images, so many issues ? all clamouring to be related to God. And just as walking through the streets of central London I have to put on metaphorical blinkers to save myself from the exhausting bombardment of visual impressions, so religiously it is tempting to put on blinkers. Stick with the familiar ideas and prayers, the daily local routines, and the people you know ? that is more than enough to be going on with.
And there is a tradition in Scripture and the church that supports such a view. Ancient Israel saw itself as a holy land and a holy people, with a unique relationship with the God of the whole earth. But the rest of the inhabitants of the earth were to be excluded from that relationship because they were idolatrous and sinful. Israel had of course to concern itself with other nations because they could endanger the sanctity and safety of the holy land but Israel wanted nothing more to be left in peace inside its boundaries. Israel began by wanting to keep others out. In the course of time and after centuries of dispersion what had begun as exclusivity almost came to an end in the ghetto and the concentration camp, where the Jew was kept in and finally excluded.
In the past the church – the so-called ark of salvation – has to some extent viewed itself in a similarly exclusive way. But the danger for us nowadays is perhaps the equivalent of the ghetto. In a liberal, secular, post-modern society faith becomes a private option, like sex, acceptable if kept discretely personal and not causing any harm to others. And the temptation within the faith to collude with such a view is very strong. It would be so much easier and simpler if faith could be a consoling story I tell myself. Something I don?t talk about so I don?t have to face up to questions I can?t answer. Something which affects only my private thoughts not my public persona, so that I can pass comfortably between church and home or office or theatre or shopping mall.
When God addresses his servant through the words of the prophet Isaiah he tells him that it is too light a task for him simply to restore Israel. ?I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.? Isaiah?s vision is universal rather than particular. If God has a special relationship with Israel that relationship is somehow in the end for the whole world. Introvert religion is too easy. We may start at home in the tribe or nation or local church, but we have to learn to grow. There is one God and he is the world?s creator. We may be used to making that claim but if we take it seriously it reveals either awesome conviction or supreme arrogance. For if God is universal then in all our differences, we are all to be part of the one faith to include all humankind. How that will work out we cannot possibly foresee but it doesn?t necessarily mean by conversion. As God says to Abraham, ?By you shall all the families of the earth bless themselves or be blessed.? Faith may work by association, by common action, by mutual blessing. But that association of faith will not be private or optional. As God says through the prophet, ?Pay attention, you peoples from far away.?
So we are called to be universalists in the sense that we must believe that God claims everyone?s attention, and that like it or not we have a part to play in that process. We have to find our own way of saying, with John the Baptist, ?Behold.? What John?s companions were to behold was Jesus. They follow Jesus and then in one of the strangest little conversations in the gospel he says to them, ?What are you looking for?? They reply with another question, ?Teacher, where are you staying?? Jesus replies, ?Come and see.? And if their culture had been an English one, the disciples would have gone home with Jesus to have tea ? for it was four o?clock in the afternoon. But first Andrew finds Simon to tell him that they have found the Messiah. This seemingly inconsequential dialogue about searching and staying and coming to see has been a conversation with the Messiah, the Saviour of the world, the Son of God. It is a mundane conversation with a universal resonance. And it is the model of the church?s mission.
What are people looking for? What unfulfilled, half understood need are we seeking to fulfil? And the only way to find out is to be made to feel at home and to talk ? to talk about any and everything ? mountains of talk that embraces far off planets and tsunami and what is or isn?t blasphemous, and how we can use less fossil fuels and feed the hungry and find our own calling to serve God and share God in our everyday lives.
If in a few weeks time you are thinking about what to do for Lent, we have the answer. We shall take up talking about God in one another?s homes in order to live God for our world.
Stephen Tucker