Sermon preached by Mark Wakefield on March 9th 2008
Ezekiel 37:1-14/Romans 8:6-11/John 11:1-45

Early on in my broadcasting career I landed a job as a Researcher on the Current Affairs programme Panorama. To this day it remains one of the best jobs I have ever done.

What made it so was the kind of access to people's lives that working on such a well known and respected programme made possible. As a Researcher I could find myself in the homes of miners fighting pit closures and unemployment one week and sipping a gin and tonic mixed by none other than the legendary Denis Thatcher in the Prime Minister's study at Number 10 the next week. It really was the most wonderful privilege.

Soon after getting the job I was despatched to Liverpool. Those of you old enough to remember will recall that there was an outbreak of terrible inner-city rioting in the early 80s which began in Brixton and then spread to the Toxteth district of Liverpool. My job was to find out whether, five years later, attempts to address the poor police-community relations, unemployment and racism that were seen as underlying causes of the troubles had made any difference.

It only took a day or two of walking the streets talking to all manner of people to realise that little had changed. Just how true this was I was to learn late one evening when the phone rang in my hotel room and one of the community leaders told me to get myself down to Toxteth quickly as something was happening. Being young and – I thought – fearless I set off to see what was going on.

When I got there the atmosphere was thick with fear and apprehension. There had been some incident involving local youth and the police earlier in the evening, so I found groups of policemen on street corners wearing helmets with riot shields and batons at the ready.

For their part, local residents stood huddled in door ways, the young men in particular chattering excitedly as if relishing the fight to come.

Never having encountered anything like this before I was pretty frightened and my worst fears seemed about to be realised when, suddenly, the doors of a police van opened and two officers jumped out, grabbed one of the local youths and hauled him into the back of the van. When people began to shout I decided to make myself scarce and I turned on my heel only to walk – or was it run? - into the path of Fr Peter, the Roman Catholic priest I had met and interviewed only the day before.

Clearly sensing my fear he stood quite still and gently took my hand in his. I can't quite remember what he said – I think it may have been something as simple as “God bless you.” But it wasn't what he said that struck me. Rather, it was something about the way he was. He held my hand with remarkable firmness, yet warmth and looked at me with an intent, steady gaze that spoke to me powerfully of peace, of stillness, of confidence, even in that tense and frightening situation.

Fortunately, a full scale riot did not break out that night or any other night but I have never forgotten Fr Peter who became the fulfilment for me of that promise in the first letter to John that “perfect love casts out fear”.

Ever since then, as I've struggled with my faith, I have found myself asking: what was Fr. Peter's secret? Today's reading from Romans gives something of an answer, I think. Those whose mind is set on things of the flesh, says St. Paul, are hostile to God and his law, while those who set their minds on things of the spirit live freely and find life and peace, those very qualities I noticed in such abundance in Fr. Peter.

The trouble is that put like this, Paul's agenda for the faithful sounds like a charter for puritans and killjoys. Abstain from the pleasures of the flesh, this passage seems to say, and you'll be OK. But to read it like this is to fundamentally misunderstand what Paul is saying.

When Paul uses the Greek word “sarx”, which literally means “flesh”, he is not saying there is anything wrong with our bodies or any aspect of the physical world. Rather, he's pointing to our human frailty, to our all too obvious tendency to make wrong choices and to live our lives in ways that can harm both ourselves and others. That's why other bible translations translate “sarx” less literally but more accurately as “our sinful nature.”

And of course, all this makes perfect sense when we remember that Paul was – like the other first Christians, not to mention Jesus himself – a Jew, for there is no more earthy or life-affirming religion than Judaism. Just think of the book of Genesis where having created the world God looks on it with pleasure and sees that it's not just good but very good. And do we not, as Christians, worship a God who positively chose to become flesh?

The problems we Christians so often have with things of the flesh all hail from Greek philosophy in general and Plato in particular who disdained our earthly existence as but a pale and poor shadow of the world of pure spirit. That's why, to this day, we refer to a close relationship which doesn't involve sex as a “Platonic” one.

And of course, the world in which the early church struggled to stay alive and then grow was one dominated by Greek thought and culture and it's for this reason that the early Christians increasingly came to express their belief in terms that made sense to that culture, even though this has so often led us to a sad denial of the goodness of creation.

Encouraging as it may be to know that there's absolutely nothing wrong in our enjoyment of this world, we are still left with the problem of our sinful nature. So how do we escape to the life of freedom in the spirit of which Paul speaks? This is where we come to one of the great mysteries and apparent contradictions of the spiritual life: that the search for the authentic spirit of God within us is also the search for our true selves.

Anthony Bloom, who some of the older members of the congregation may remember from the 60s and 70s when he was the Archbishop of the Orthodox Church here in Britain, wrote about this in a little book called “Living Prayer”. In it he says that the basic condition for any real encounter with God is that we should present ourselves to him as we really are.

But the problem is that we so often aren't sure who that person is. Think about it. We each of us play a variety of different roles in life – father, mother, son, daughter, workmate, boss, servant, friend. In each of these roles there's likely to be a mixture of the true and the false. But which is the real you and the real me?

Bloom goes on to say that it's our vanity that so often stands in the way of answering this question. And by vanity he means glorying in things that are devoid of value and of depending for our judgement about ourselves on the opinion of other people.

And this is where we begin to see the truth of what Paul is getting at in today's passage from Romans. For we are all of us weighed down and enslaved by the false values of this world – position, possessions, success, wealth, power – values that we may make a fine show of disavowing but by which we so often end up judging both ourselves and other people.

In contrast, real wisdom comes not from without but within, from an inward journey to find what we truly value and in so doing to discover that Spirit that animates us and breathes life into us as the unique individuals that God has made us. And when – at last - we reach this centre of our being we will know ourselves at peace - loved, forgiven and free.

This spiritual journey is, I fear, a long and hard one. It requires above all, a prayerful attitude to life by which I don't mean just saying prayers, although that's part of it, but listening and being open to God in regular times of quiet, maybe just being still for a few minutes and emptying our minds, maybe reading a passage of scripture and mulling what it's saying to us.

But let's be clear: this journey is one for all of us and not just those we believe to be saints or those of us who wear dog collars. Because the goal of all this is to live this life of ours as abundantly as we possibly can. And to those who say – as I often find myself saying – “but I'm too busy!” let me leave you with the words of the 4th Century Archbishop of Constantinople St. John Chrysostom, who addressed himself to the concerns of busy people like this:

“'I am not” you will say, 'one of the monks but I have both a wife and children and the care of a household.' This is what has ruined everything, your thinking that the reading of scripture is for monks only when you need it more than they do. Those who are placed in the world, and who receive wounds every day, have the most need of medicine.'

Amen