A M D G
Sermon preached at St Laurence, Catford, 14.7.01
"Good God! That I should be reserved to these times to hear such things!" Not the exclamation of Charles, or some other one of the latest generation of over-sixties listening to the news, but a frequent exclamation of the elderly St Polycarp in the 2nd century AD. Perhaps, after all, if life is a drama, the script doesn't change much -- but there are just changes to the cast, and to their dramatic functions, from time to time. And it's a change of this kind that we are celebrating, and reflecting upon, tonight.
To look at it from another angle: when I was growing up in Australia, there was a custom that if you were going to travel abroad -- your family and friends all went down to the docks -- yes -- flying was desperately expensive in those days and few people did it-- to look over the ship and then watch her set sail. And when they said, "All visitors ashore!" the friends went down on to the quay and threw rolls of coloured paper streamers up to the traveller on the deck, holding on to one end -- and the traveller tried to pay out the streamer as the band started to play and the ship cast off. Of course however carefully you tried to pay them out the streamers didn't last long -- as the ship began to move and the wind began to catch them, they broke, one by one, and there you were -- travelling among people you didn't previously know, heading for somewhere new. Those scenes of my childhood mean that I picture every change in my own life as being accompanied by breaking streamers; and although I don't think Charles has ever had that exact experience, and I don't suppose anyone has it any more, it's that picture that I have in my mind tonight. Casting off from working life to retirement must inevitably involve breaking streamers. Of course you remain in touch with the people you have known and valued over your working years -- but no longer will you see them, and be seen by them, every day. And the new people you come to know will not know you in any professional capacity -- you will simply be half of that elderly couple down the road who talk as if they might have been teachers once. You no longer have that part of your identity that arises from what you do for a living -- and in our present long-hours culture, in which the "education for leisure" that people used to talk about when we were students seems a very bad joke indeed, the loss of that part of one's identity can come as a huge and not at all pleasant surprise. Ask any person who finds him or herself -- in the truly awful expression we now use -- MADE REDUNDANT. Redundant; surplus to requirements. A revealing expression because of course a worker's identity in terms of being a member of that organisation, a practitioner of that profession, is thus shown up for what it is -- a matter of being needed, or at least of being useful. Cease to be useful, and in a very real sense you cease to exist. Retire, and you are in effect redundant -- and in that sense useless and non-existent -- for good. And when, as a teacher, you have spent your every working day responding to demand after demand from people to whom you have to be useful -- pupils, colleagues, parents, governments, the head.... adjusting to a way of spending the day in which you may spend several hours without being particularly useful to anybody very much is a radical adjustment -- the streamers have broken, and where are you going? Indeed, who are you? It is probably highly significant that many teachers die not long after they retire -- at whatever age they do it. (Though Charles and I intend to buck the trend for a while if we can.)
Now it's easy to respond by pointing out, as we all can and must, that there are many people no longer economically active who are at least as useful as they have ever been in their working lives, and much busier. The people who organise fetes, run charities, man the Samaritans and the Citizens' Advice Bureau, invest time and energy in campaigning on local or indeed international issues -- very many of them are retired, and where would we be without them? But there is another response which also has to be made, particularly if one is a Christian. When, with that wisdom that we heard celebrated in our first reading, God brought the world into existence, He did not bring it into existence because he needed it or because it was useful to him. He brought it into existence -- and ourselves with it -- because He wanted to love it. Our primary identity has nothing at all to do with being needed or even with being useful, but only with being loved. And that, the writer of tonight's epistle implies, is why we must love one another -- because love is of God, and because He first loved us. We must love one another, not because we are useful to each other (though we may be given that further privilege from time to time) but because we are infinitely superfluous. And then our love will be like His, having nothing to do with need or with deserving, but a plain bounty. We are ALL ....redundant. The person who is no longer working is, or should be, a living sign of that fact, and whatever he or she does for the benefit of other redundant people is best done with that in mind.
Those who are no longer working can be a living sign, too, of another fact. Not only do we have to grow, as our lives go on, into a sense of God's creative love as independent of any notion of usefulness -- we discover that it is also, in a very real sense, independent of the idea of work. Now of course, as our Lord pointed out, "My father is still working, and I am working" -- he is continually active in sustaining and renewing his works, so much so that it rather looks as if we haven't got to the seventh day of the creation yet. But the creation story does nevertheless speak of a seventh day towards which the other six days are moving -- in which God...rests, stands back from it all, contemplates it with loving delight and sees that it is very good. That is not an anticlimax. Quite the reverse. In other words, work is secondary, leisure is primary. Work is temporal and temporary, leisure is eternal. It is God's purpose that we, whom he made in his likeness, should share with him in both.
Bound up with that purpose, and pointing towards it if we had eyes to see, are all the totally useless activities which, when you think about it, are among the distinguishing marks of the human species. Most of them are impossible to class as productive; if they are commercial, they are not primarily commercial. In our utilitarian moments, we think of them as a waste of time and money; sometimes we write to the papers to complain about it. . But In our more perceptive moments, we recognise them as fulfilling a different kind of need on our part; we see them as, in the fullest sense, re-creational . Some of them feel like work but minister to our leisure; some of them are rather in the nature of play. They range from the not particularly serious -- games like tiddlywinks -- to the very serious. Our creative and performing arts (thank you, choir) are one example. The way we create sacred buildings and sacred spaces, which are never in the ordinary sense useful, is another one. And so to the most serious : The greatest example of an activity which is essentially human while being, by our normal human criteria, totally useless is -- worship itself, and supremely that act of worship in which we are now taking part
So here we are. As we look back on work and forward on leisure, it is right to give Him thanks and praise -- of a kind that is personal but not just personal, and of a kind that needs not just our own words, and not just words. We need something we can do. And God, who has no need of anything that we do, has asked us to do this. Useless though we may be, we have been given something to do; and, like ourselves, its value and significance comes not from what we do, but from what He does . And so, like the millions of others who have done this same thing at countless significant moments in their lives, and joining our worship with theirs, we have come to DO THIS.
We take the work of human hands -- the bread and the wine -- we give thanks over them, we ask that the spirit of God will make them holy; we offer them to God in union with the self-offering of Christ on the Cross. They are given back to us as the body and blood of Christ -- so that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity. And what we see of Him and share with Him now is a foretaste, in this present time, of his final and eternal purpose for us. He accepts and transforms our work, not because of his need for it but because it is his gracious and mind-blowing pleasure to take our work into His work of creation and redemption. He made us, he redeemed us, he recreates us, not to be useful, but so that when that work is complete he can share himself with us for ever. Whatever happens to each of us in the years to come, and when time ceases to matter, leads to the fulfilment of that purpose. And that is the sense in which we know where we are going, and know the way -- and we know who we are -- because we know whose we are, and he is entirely faithful.
To return to St Polycarp, who was invited, in his old age, to escape martyrdom by disowning Christ:
"Eighty-six years have I served him and he has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my king and saviour?"
How indeed? Thanks be to God.
