Sermon for the 3rd Sunday before Advent

Sunday 7th November 2004

Preached by Rev Paul Hewitt

I must admit I’m getting a bit worried these days!

Since George W Bush was elected President of the USA for his second term, you get even more a sense that the world is moving a certain way. More people in the US voted for George Bush than any other President ever. I’m not making any political comment; I understand that to change your Commander in Chief in the middle of a war would not send a good message to the soldiers on the ground. There are people here today who would understand that better than most. Many saw his election as a victory for the moral, religious right, where Christian beliefs, often fundamentalist beliefs, have been upheld. The white evangelical vote remained loyal to George Bush. More than ever, perhaps, there is the great divide in our world between a clear rise in more fundamentalist beliefs and the more liberal thinking.

I say that it is becoming a world phenomenon because we are experiencing it in our own Anglican Communion. As it was said on the radio on that fateful day when the Windsor Report was released, that we have in the Anglican Church people more Protestant than Ian Paisley and people more Catholic than the Pope! The whole issue behind The Anglican Commission on Communion is trying to address that fact; how to hold together in communion churches which think radically differently on a number of issues. The worry is the kind of polarisation, which seems to be affecting all of our lives; our politics, our Diocese, even our individual churches.

And then I open the Faith Page in yesterday’s Times and see the article by Stephen Plant entitled ‘Too often we see the world in black and white’. It was just as I had been thinking. Worried, concerned? It’s almost scary! Would that life were black and white, perhaps then that would be OK, but would it, and is it?

I think we do God a huge disservice when we try to limit him to one particular way of thinking. By making ourselves believe that he is, and can only be ‘on our side’, we make him into a very small God indeed!

I know I’ve told to you before the findings of a famous sociologist called Emile Durkheim. He had noticed among the American Indians how in each tribe they came up with particular traits that characterised that particular tribe. So much so, that they created totems. That’s what a totem is, it is an animal, plant or object symbolising certain characteristics of a clan or family or tribe. ‘They are e.g. as sly as a fox’, so a fox became a totem, representation of their tribe and so on. These totems began to have ritual associations as tribal symbols. The totem poles themselves became objects of veneration. But Emile Durkheim then asked the question, who are they actually worshipping when they venerate these Totem Poles?

Durkheim went on to say that all varying and different ‘groups’ of people develop their own culture, their own particular traits and values, and part of that culture is developing their sense of God, of who they worship. He went on to conclude that what each culture or society had done was to create a God which simply reflects the traits and values of their own culture. Durkheim asks: if people end up worshipping a god which is nothing more than a symbolic representation of the traits and values of their own group, what are they actually worshipping? … They are worshipping themselves.

The wonderful George Bernard Shaw said, “God created man in his image, and man decided to return the compliment”. We know all about this, don’t we? “In God we trust” is the American motto, “For God and Ulster”, “God and my right”. Of course God is on our side, we created him, didn’t we?

We have always tried to make God in our image, and in so doing we miss his glorious majesty, because we make him too small.

The readings this morning are just the readings for this particular Sunday, the Third before Advent.
In Luke’s Gospel, the Sadducees, the elite, aristocratic Jewish grouping which only held to the Mosaic law, didn’t believe in the resurrection, and that’s why they were sad, you see … But they kept questioning Jesus all the time because they wanted to trap him and put him in a box. And Jesus was having none of it. What did Jesus do? He used their very own language and logic to turn the argument around in his favour! For if Moses himself claims that the Lord is the ‘God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’ then they must be alive. ‘He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive’! By using the very language and logic of the Sadducee, Jesus was able to turn the argument around and make them see what they were really saying.

In a very small way, maybe that is what I am trying to do this morning. In a language and logic that we are all familiar with, perhaps we can see what we are really saying. Have we really created a God in our own image? Have we made him into an Anglican? (Or even worse a Presbyterian!). Is he really a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant? A WASP? If that is the case then we really have created an ‘us and them’. You see, in the words of Stephen Plant, who wrote that article in the Times, “the crucial difference is not between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but between ‘us’ and ‘Him’.

We are always too ready to create an ‘us and them’

We are always so ready to compare ourselves with everyone else, when all the time, all we need to do is compare ourselves to His glorious majesty. When that truly happens, then we will truly know where we stand in His eyes! For the glory of it is overwhelming.