Sixth Sunday of Easter 2008

‘Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog-lovers and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’.

Fifteen years on from then, John Major’s words to his party’s Group for Europe are still remembered. What they are remembered for is not the nobility of their vision but rather their mawkishness of their sentiments. They remain the quintessential politician’s attempt at sepia-tinted nostalgia, aimed directly at their hearers’ heart-strings, and weighted for maximum emotional impact.

Yet it’s Major’s voice I hear when I read the prophet Zechariah. He foretells not pints supped on the square-leg boundary in the shadow of the village steeple, but old men and old women sitting once more in the streets of Jerusalem, their staves in their hands because of their great age. He foretells the city’s streets filled once more with boys and girls playing. And his words might easily have come from that infamous speech, or from some strategy document on inclusiveness and national cohesion.

This alarming closeness between the vision of a saintly prophet and the vision of a struggling Prime Minister has been much in my mind this week, when my diary has been dominated by two events. The first was the Annual Parochial Church Meeting, an institution that only the Church of England could have devised, an institution that is sadly beloved of far too many of its worshippers. The second was the licensing of a new priest colleague. I wield no political power and I claim no prophetic status, yet at both of these occasions I was expected to articulate a vision for the ecclesial community that is my responsibility.

I found this easy. Reading Zechariah and remembering Major, I think I found it too easy. The so-called dark arts of spin have embedded themselves very deeply in our culture. Assembling sound-bites, dressing them up in management-speak, and lacing them with suitably bathetic appeals to Gospel truth is simple, and superficially both very attractive and very effective. But it is plainly dishonest, and equally plainly perilous. There is surely an alternative. How can the Church be authentically prophetic?

That it must be is not a question for anyone who believes that Christian faith is intended to have an impact on the public sphere. It is not a question for anyone who believes that Christian faith is not intended to be a purely internal, purely private matter. John’s apocalyptic vision is of God at the heart of the city, of God as the light of the city. It is not of God at the city’s margins, or of God locked away in a sacred building. It is God at the heart of things that the Church is called to proclaim and that God’s prophets are called to name.

So the prophet first shuns popularity. His vocation, or hers, is not to be loved by the audience. It is not to reassure them or make them feel better. It is not to collude with the assumptions of the age, whether these are assumptions about the necessity of material accumulation or assumptions about the inevitability of energy consumption. John, of course, writes from exile on Patmos, there sharing the fate of many of his Hebrew forebears. The prophet must expect to be misunderstood, must expect to be misrepresented and must expect, quite possibly, to be mistreated.

Second, the prophet recalls always that through the middle of the heavenly city flows the river of life, and that it flows with water as bright as crystal. So he or she takes responsibility for those whose water is brackish and brown, for those who cannot reach down into the river to drink of its cooling flood or bathe their faces in its cleansing stream, and for those for whom the river has dried up and who are confronted with only the barren dryness of the riverbed. The prophet is alert to those who seek to dam the river and create their own reservoirs, for those who divert its course away from the city’s centre, and for those who are careless of its purity and cleanliness. The prophet must always speak for the poor.

And lastly the prophet will remember what it is that the tree of life puts forth: leaves, leaves for the healing of the nations. The prophet recalls God’s ultimate saving purpose, which is the unity of all created things. The prophet proclaims the end of strife and division, and the reconciliation of all humankind. The prophet, herself forgiven, represents God’s forgiveness to a world plagued by poverty and war. In the prophet’s faithfulness to God’s cause he offers an icon of human life, of human life as it might be lived. The prophet must preach unity amidst the world’s diversity.

I am fond of warm beer and of cricket; I grew up in a green suburb; and although I own a bicycle I walk regularly to Holy Communion. God’s vision and the vision of God’s prophets must surely be wider; it must surely be deeper. Amen.

Evensong at Magdalene College, Cambridge,
Sunday 27 April 2008