Sermon by Fr James Heard, Sunday 4th September 2016, Trinity 15, United Benefice of Holland Park
Sermon by Fr James Heard, Sunday 4th September 2016, Trinity 15, United Benefice of Holland Park
The holidays for many of us are now over, and we’re at
the beginning of a new academic year, children starting school for the first
term, others moving to a new year or a new school, back to church after a
summer break, so it’s worth asking the question: What happens when we come to
church? Why we do attend church? I regularly reflect on this question. I also
ask myself the question: If I wasn’t a signed up priest, would I bother turning
up! It’s an important question to ask.
There are many people in the Church of England who are
desperately worried about church decline, and perhaps also about the church’s
loss of significance at a national level. What are we to do about this? Is it
up to the vicar to work harder and ever longer hours? That’s one option,
although judging by the significant level of clergy burn out, perhaps not a
long term solution. There are those who have studied church growth who suggest
that the answer is to be ‘relevant’ to the needs, concerns and culture of our
modern world. Enter trendy vicars and a soft rock music style with a rock
concert format. The rationale here is that young people don’t go around
listening to organ music in their cars, therefore the church should adapt, to
be relevant, to become more contemporary.
Other churches have attempted to include novelty into
their worshipping life – with churches built like a theatre with comfy chairs,
and that include seeker services (ie church for those who don’t normally come
to church). Others have tried café style church, where you munch on coffee and
croissant during the service. It’s easy to sneer at such attempts to engage
with non-churchgoers. But I sincerely hope that some of these approaches bring
in those who don’t normally attend church.
As a church here in the United Benefice of Holland Park
we haven’t gone down this ‘relevance’ or novelty route. We sing hymns, hear
from the Bible, we grapple with how to make sense of Jesus’ hard sayings like
in today’s Gospel – to hate your mother, brother, sister… and so on – what
might Jesus mean?
Is Jesus using hyperbole to express a literal
truth — perhaps he means that authentic discipleship demands radical
renunciation. Even good things can distract us. On Sundays we grapple
with the Bible. And then we hold the needs of our broken world in prayer, we
receive simple gifts of bread and wine, and we are sent out to share God’s
peace, compassion and love. Of course, there is a yearly rhythm that
encompasses all of the emotions and experiences of life. But our weekly service
is very similar and it’s only fair to ask, does this hour that we spend in
church really do anything? Does it change us?
I’d like to suggest that it does, and profoundly so,
although the change is slow, its gradual, and it’s almost imperceptible. Part
of the change that happens involves simply being part of a community. Hearing
about the kingdom of God, the bigger narrative of which we are a tiny part,
de-centers our ego. Coming to church slowly changes us into people capable of
forgetting our own needs for a moment in order to find a spark of generosity
for those in need.
We were once deeply communitarian people, and it's only
recently that people have been able to become invisible to their neighbors and
have lives that are detached from any local community. We need to rediscover
why we need to belong. And the church community is one way of doing so.
The cricketer turned sport psychologist, Steven
Sylvester, has written a book called Detox Your Ego. He argues that
inflated egos are getting in the way of our objectives. People who compete to
bolster their sense of self-worth, who narrowly focus on their own interests,
experience more stress, failure and frustration. However, he suggests that
stress can be reduced, and our talents liberated, if we work towards bigger
ideals such as family, country or moral purpose. Sylvester says this: “When we
think about ‘me, me, me’ we tend to get nervous and to worry about what could go
wrong… But when we play for others, when the focus is outwards rather than
inwards, we become more creative and ultimately more effective. We have to get
our egos out of the way.”
Sylvester writes from personal experience as a county
cricketer in the 1990s. His form was never consistent. He struggled with
nerves. He belatedly realised that he was putting too much pressure on himself
because he wanted to be the main man. Only when he learnt to turn his focus
away from his ego did he discover a deeper joy in the game. Researches that
backs this up.
William Muir, a biologist at Purdue University in
Indiana, wanted to increase the productivity of chickens, as measured by eggs
laid. He took a group of ordinary chickens and left them alone for six
generations. When he came back, he found that they were fully feathered,
behaving normally and producing lots of eggs.
Then he took a group of the most productive chickens and
put them together and in each generation allowed only the most productive to
breed. This was a group of what might be called “super chickens”. After six
generations of selective breeding, however, things had gone terribly wrong. All
but three were dead. The rest had been pecked to smithereens.
Muir concludes that the problem was the chicken’s
equivalent of ego. The super chickens want to rise above the rest. They want to
be the star performers. They are driven by their aims and interests. But that
is why they’re not able to collaborate, to share, to coexist.
The interesting thing about this experiment is that it
attacks the basic model that most of us operate with. Most of us crave
additional self-worth, we desperately desire to be recognised. Yet the problem
with building bigger egos is not just that it can have bad effects on those
around you, it can also undermine your own objectives. According to this
vision, it’s only by connecting with others that we can achieve our goals.
Sport has long grappled with the issue of ego.
The debate last year over the cricketer Kevin Pietersen
was effectively about whether a “super chicken” could be accommodated within
the England team. Management apparently felt that his narcissistic attitude was
corroding the team ethic. Pietersen’s admirers argued that a decent coach
should have been able to harness his ego in the service of the team’s
objectives.
I personally feel resonance with the focus on team rather
than the big ‘super-chicken’ individual. The Team GB women’s hockey team worked
together in winning the Gold at the Rio Olympics. I read a comment from one of
the ladies: ‘we weren’t the best players in the world out there… but we’re the
best team.’
Returning to where we started: What happens when we come
to church? Firstly, we hear that we are loved more deeply and fully than we can
ever imagine. We discover that the secret of our identity is hidden in the love
and mercy of God. What happens when we come to church is that we detox our ego,
we hear about other needs, not just ours. We hear of the bigger narrative of
the kingdom of God, God’s way of doing things, and we are invited to share in a
small way in that vision. In a fragmented, individualistic world, we are to
model a different path. We are to be a place of community, of belonging and
healing. And we may radiate the burning fire of God’s love.
Reference:
Matthew
Syed, ‘The Times’, January 7 2016