Ninth Sunday After Trinity 2011 : Hollowell / Guilsborough
 <  May God take our lips and speak through them, our hands and work through them. And may God take our hearts and set them on fire  >
It won't have escaped you that we are going through one of those periodic phases of handwringing and introspection.   All our leading politicians and commentators have had their say and are arguing about the causes and solutions.   For his part, the Archbishop of Canterbury says state schooling has focused too much on creating pupils who would grow up to be "consumers" and "cogs" in an economic wheel.  David Cameron  needs to show, Rowan Williams says,  what the Big Society would  "look like" by "rebuilding" the school system so that children learn to be responsible citizens.    
" Surely, he went on,  "high on our priorities as we respond to these circumstances must be the question of what we are to do in terms not only of rebuilding the skills of parenting in some of our communities, but in rebuilding education itself."    Well, that's a challenge. 
Dr David Starkey, an historian,  claims that white have become black, and that our society has been undermined by an imported black, gangster, culture.  For that he's called a racist by Ed Milliband.  Starkey right or wrong, what that row brought home to me was that there are certain subjects you cannot raise in public in this country.        
Throughout my career as a civil servant, I was trying to explain to foreigners what was going on in this country and put us in the best possible light.   Often it was not easy.  Bad labour relations, the 3 day week,  devaluation of the pound, loss of empire, loss of manufacturing base, plus economic woes : we seemed to be on the skids.   Then came the Thatcherite revolution, painful for some as it was,  and a new sense of national confidence  Britain was back on track or so some thought.    But that is now derided as having ushered in the Age of Greed and me, me, me.   What we need these days is create the white heat of the technological revolution  -  remember that in Harold Wilson's day ? - or in our own the Third Way of Tony Blair or David Cameron's  Big Society.   
And so we go on, clutching at concepts to cure our woes. 
There is nothing very new about this.  In every country over the centuries someone has probably claimed that the world was going to the dogs.   In 1757 an Anglican clergyman John Brown has huge success with his book  "An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of The Time" .  He argued that the real danger to this country lay not so much in the power of external enemies, principally France, but in internal divisions and moral corruption.   Britain, Brown claimed was vulnerable because it lacked adequate reserves of public spirit  "There is no cement or cohesion between parts."   
A few years later in 1783 after the loss of the American Colonies, there was an awful lot of breast beating and a feeling that the country, in that case because of sin ( and there was plenty of gin around according to Hogarth)  had lost its way.  Yet no one really foresaw that round the corner an industrial revolution was getting under way and the rest, as they say, is history. 
Encounter Magazine.  Well we didn't commit suicide. 
History apart, the Big Society or whatever we want to call it, where we all participate in making life better for everyone, is certainly a goal to aim at.   And the Church needs to play a big part in that.   Is the Church of England up to it, one has to ask?   
Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore opprest,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distrest,
Yet Saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, `How long?'
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song.
That was in 1866, a mid-Victorian year when people in the Church thought that everything was going wrong  -  yet again.  But as Tom Wright the former Bishop of Durham has recently pointed out, as the French say, the more things change the more they remain the same.   
And yet the Church of England  is right there, and always has been in the middle of our society.  When he was Bishop of Durham Tom Wright saw a local authority ask the church to take over a failing school; a new vicar at a city centre church, previously dead on its feet, apologises that a mid-week service is a little late in starting.  He had been helping a worried asylum seeker.  All around the Church of England was binding up wounds and taking initiatives.  
The Church, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury once said, is the only society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non members.  As members of that Church, you and I,  we are all in the Big Society.  It's never gone away.  
Think of volunteers, say, in prison, in a hospice, in charity shops.  Many of them are practising Christians in my experience.   This is the country that gave the world the YMCA, the Salvation Army, St. John Ambulance and Tubby Clayton's Toc-H.   
But people are not volunteering because the Government has told them that it can't afford to carry out certain services any longer.  Those who are practising Christians do it because of Jesus.  And many who are not, do it because they feel in their bones that they want to help  -  as you will have seen in the clean up operation after the riots in Tottenham  and elsewhere.   But the other source of that awareness of obligation to community is often a line that leads back to a parish church or some equivalent., to reading the Bible,  to Scripture lessons at school, to  prayers and Songs of Praise that say in our sceptical world that God is God and Jesus is Lord and the Holy Ghost is at work among us.
As Tom Wright puts it, the Church exists to be for the world what Jesus had been for his contemporaries, to bring healing and hope and to rescue people from their own follies and sin.    To help people discover what their place in the world is by looking beyond themselves to God, to the beauties of creation and to their neighbours in need. 
When God wants to change the world he does not send in tanks ( although many think he should) He sends in the meek and by the time the world realises what is going on the meek have set up schools and clinics, taught people to read and given them hope  -  and give their lives a meaning that secular modernism cannot do.  At its best that is what the C of E is all about.
Which brings me to the Gospel message from Romans that was read earlier.  It is that we are all members of one body, the Church and joined to Christ through that Church. So we are  to use our different gifts in accordance with the grace that God has given us, whether it be to serve, to teach or encourage others.  And at the end of our lives we will have, hopefully, a sense of some achievement. 
On the 29[th] of September we start a new era in our Benefice with Mark's licensing and I for one am greatly looking forward to it,  and the stimulus that it will bring to our Christian lives under his leadership.    I'm not a revivalist preacher,  but I can't help feeling, brothers and sisters, that we are on our way to pastures new and exciting in the history of this parish and in its Christian life.  Each of us and many who are not here now will play a part,  and in the words of that wonderful prayer the General Confession  show forth God's praise  "not only with our lips but in our lives ".   As I see it, that then is what the Church, our Church right here,  is all about. 
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[ And there is one other thought that I'd like to share with you before I end.  I don't often watch YouTube, that website showing all kinds of videos. Some pretty weird and wonderful.  But the other day I read an article in a magazine that recommended a YouTube video one about a funeral  of a man called Otto von Habsburg, the last Emperor of Austria who  died earlier this year.  He was deposed  at the age of 2 when Austria became a republic at the after the First World war.  He had an extraordinary life. Excluded from the country of his birth for many years, having his nationality revoked by Hitler, a keen European and member of the European Parliament etc.  Had he reigned he would have been emperor of Austria for a record 89 years. 
A coffin  covered in a flag is carried into a church, which turns out to be part of a Capuchin monastery.   As the procession moves into the church, the Austrian national anthem is playing, that lovely tune by Haydn that we use to sing the  hymn " Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken" . 
A man in a tailed coat walks in front of the coffin . He bangs on the door of the crypt where for hundreds of years the Habsburg emperors have been buried.   He calls out the numerous titles of the dead man:  Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia, even King of Jerusalem and ( interestingly Duke of Auschwitz is one). The list is long.  There is a pause when it ends. Then  From  the other side of the door  the monks say   "We do not know him".  
Only when the man in tails says  "  Here is Otto a mortal, sinful soul' do they open the door and admit the coffin.   It is a very moving moment.  
And as I watched I recalled John Newton's words in that hymn set to Haydn's tune  " Fading is the worlding's pleasure, all his boasted pomp and show/ solid joys and lasting treasure none but Zion's children know.  ]  Another thought to take with us on our way this evening. 



 




