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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral by Canon Edward Probert, Chancellor on Sunday 3 August 2009
"SUNDAY 3 AUGUST 2009"
In the next few weeks the results of various public exams will be published, and numerous young people around the country will learn how they’ve done in their A, AS, and GCSEs. I confidently predict that this will be accompanied by a controversy in the media about grade inflation; some will argue that, because the average of grades has become progressively higher over recent decades, this demonstrates not so much either the success of the system or of those who took the exams, but that it’s easier to get high results now than in the past. This is a tiresome and ultimately rather futile debate, one of those in which it’s possible to provide evidence to support both sides, and which we know is not going to be resolved.
One reason it won’t be resolved is that direct comparison of subjectively measurable achievements at different periods is a trickier and subtler task than the media can be bothered to engage in. But there’s an interesting analogy to be taken from human achievements which are measurable in absolute terms: sporting ones such as times of races, distances covered, weights lifted, and so on. And in almost all sporting fields the average achievement is better than it used to be.
We can all have our theories about why these things are so. Mine is simply that modern sport is highly professional and very dedicated, and modern pupils are given a much more direct focus on the results they are working towards than were their predecessors like me. It’s therefore rather unjust to complain if the measurable results are better. They probably are.
But there are losses as well as gains in single-minded focus. It is hard to be a rounded human being if, for instance, from the age of 3 all you have done is play tennis. All that grunting at Wimbledon about which many complain is no doubt a spin-off from each competitor doing what they think they need to do to perform at their best, and not caring whether others like it. Singles tennis is not a team game, and players’ attention is only on what makes them individually successful.
Better at sport, no doubt; but not necessarily better at life, and professional sport, like full-time education, is a phase in life and not life itself. Willy-nilly life involves engagement with other people, being affected by them and affecting them by what we do.
You could argue that Church life shows results of this tendency towards a narrower focus. The strongest growth areas – we are of course talking here about things which can be measured, such as numbers – have been those like evangelicalism and Pentecostalism which focus on individual salvation and personal experience. And it has become more normal, including within the Church, to regard it as a distinct society and not as an integrated part of wider society. So for example having bishops in the House of Lords or local clergy as mayors’ chaplains seem increasingly anomalous, because the assumption is that they only speak for, and address, their own constituency, which is the Church.
I’m not going to embark now on a consideration of the Establishment of the Church. But I want to register a couple of concerns I have with narrowness of vision in the Church.
First, being a Christian is not a private affair. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, from which we continue to hear at this service, contains a powerful sense of the cosmic existence of Christ, and of the Christian, including his readers, as part of it. No notion here of the life of faith being a boxed-up section which affects the Christian or the Church, but has minimal engagement with the rest of life and society. In fact to be a Christian is to accept living really corporately: accepting that we depend on the different skills and achievements of others, that we may, in Paul’s phrase, ‘grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.’ So Christians have to take each other seriously, and we have to take the whole of God’s creation seriously, and not be seduced by a narrow conception of the purposes of God.
In that common life of which Paul writes we are therefore engaged in something much bigger than its internal dynamics: we Christians are actually embodying the life of God. Except that all too often we are not: we, like our Corinthian and Ephesian predecessors, sometimes also disembody Christ by the quality of our life.
Which brings me to my second point: that too narrow a focus on aspects of what it means to be Christian – for example, on doctrinal purity, or on one’s own special calling (as an apostle or prophet or whatever) – can lose sight of what is ultimately important. What is ultimately important isn’t us or what we do, but God; and God is life and love. It’s not our achievements or our purity which will last, but life and love. So our real focus as Christians is at once in the banal and exalted: to (again I quote Paul) ‘bear with one another in love’. All those frustrating and irritating engagements with other people which make up daily life, those are the things which really matter. Jesus’ second commandment was that we love the people next to us.
We are not called to be the religious equivalent of the highly professional tennis prodigy, emerging from our churches wondering how to live. We are asked simply to live well, and to do so by practising love.
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One reason it won’t be resolved is that direct comparison of subjectively measurable achievements at different periods is a trickier and subtler task than the media can be bothered to engage in. But there’s an interesting analogy to be taken from human achievements which are measurable in absolute terms: sporting ones such as times of races, distances covered, weights lifted, and so on. And in almost all sporting fields the average achievement is better than it used to be.
We can all have our theories about why these things are so. Mine is simply that modern sport is highly professional and very dedicated, and modern pupils are given a much more direct focus on the results they are working towards than were their predecessors like me. It’s therefore rather unjust to complain if the measurable results are better. They probably are.
But there are losses as well as gains in single-minded focus. It is hard to be a rounded human being if, for instance, from the age of 3 all you have done is play tennis. All that grunting at Wimbledon about which many complain is no doubt a spin-off from each competitor doing what they think they need to do to perform at their best, and not caring whether others like it. Singles tennis is not a team game, and players’ attention is only on what makes them individually successful.
Better at sport, no doubt; but not necessarily better at life, and professional sport, like full-time education, is a phase in life and not life itself. Willy-nilly life involves engagement with other people, being affected by them and affecting them by what we do.
You could argue that Church life shows results of this tendency towards a narrower focus. The strongest growth areas – we are of course talking here about things which can be measured, such as numbers – have been those like evangelicalism and Pentecostalism which focus on individual salvation and personal experience. And it has become more normal, including within the Church, to regard it as a distinct society and not as an integrated part of wider society. So for example having bishops in the House of Lords or local clergy as mayors’ chaplains seem increasingly anomalous, because the assumption is that they only speak for, and address, their own constituency, which is the Church.
I’m not going to embark now on a consideration of the Establishment of the Church. But I want to register a couple of concerns I have with narrowness of vision in the Church.
First, being a Christian is not a private affair. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, from which we continue to hear at this service, contains a powerful sense of the cosmic existence of Christ, and of the Christian, including his readers, as part of it. No notion here of the life of faith being a boxed-up section which affects the Christian or the Church, but has minimal engagement with the rest of life and society. In fact to be a Christian is to accept living really corporately: accepting that we depend on the different skills and achievements of others, that we may, in Paul’s phrase, ‘grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.’ So Christians have to take each other seriously, and we have to take the whole of God’s creation seriously, and not be seduced by a narrow conception of the purposes of God.
In that common life of which Paul writes we are therefore engaged in something much bigger than its internal dynamics: we Christians are actually embodying the life of God. Except that all too often we are not: we, like our Corinthian and Ephesian predecessors, sometimes also disembody Christ by the quality of our life.
Which brings me to my second point: that too narrow a focus on aspects of what it means to be Christian – for example, on doctrinal purity, or on one’s own special calling (as an apostle or prophet or whatever) – can lose sight of what is ultimately important. What is ultimately important isn’t us or what we do, but God; and God is life and love. It’s not our achievements or our purity which will last, but life and love. So our real focus as Christians is at once in the banal and exalted: to (again I quote Paul) ‘bear with one another in love’. All those frustrating and irritating engagements with other people which make up daily life, those are the things which really matter. Jesus’ second commandment was that we love the people next to us.
We are not called to be the religious equivalent of the highly professional tennis prodigy, emerging from our churches wondering how to live. We are asked simply to live well, and to do so by practising love.