Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Tenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

There is a book, on the shelves in my study, Heresies and How to Avoid Them.  I have reached for it this week, because this has been a good week for heresy.  So, this morning, let me introduce you to a heresy and explain how you might avoid it.  You should.  You really should.

After the horrific knife attack in Southport, on Monday, the mosque was attacked and, during a riot in Hartlepool, Police advised the local mosque there to shut its gates.  In Manchester and Aldershot, there have been targeted protests outside accommodation provided for asylum seekers.  On Wednesday, demonstrators claiming that ‘Enough is enough’ gathered just up the road, near the gates of Downing Street.  On Friday it was Sunderland, yesterday it was Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Belfast and more These protests are complex things, but they contain a common thread of hatred.  It is hatred directed at the other, the one who is ‘’not one of us’  In London on Wednesday they shouted ‘give us our country back’.  Their point being that it is ours, not yours.  Social media has been busy with claims about the risk that all those ‘others’ pose, to ‘us’.  At the beginning of the week someone posted on X that the Southport suspect ‘was alleged to be a Muslim immigrant’.  That is not true, but the post has been viewed nearly 7 million times.  By mid-week there were 27 million impressions of posts claiming that the Southport attacker was Muslim, a migrant, a refugee, or a foreigner.  Social media loves heresy, it fans it into flame.

Christians believe that God created all that is.  It is what we read in the beginning of John’s gospel.  In the beginning the Word was with God and

All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. John 1:3  

John goes on, ‘in him was life and the life was the light of all people’.  God creates all things, everything that is.  Creation is us, all of us.  There is no ‘them’, no ‘others’.  It is a deeply challenging truth.  If you are a supporter of English cricket you have to accept that God also loved the Australian cricket team into being.  God creates everything, even celery and spiders.  All of it hangs together.

God’s creation was full of difference, he separated light from darkness and the land from the waters.   Creation is a both / and  gift to us, this and that.  It is the big idea that Gerard Manley Hopkins got hold of

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

‘Look at this, look at that’ he insists,  Hopkins delights in a creation full of different things all being gloriously themselves

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came

He sees difference, the other, and it is OK, it’s alright.  There is a much more modern poem, by Kathleen Jamie, that celebrates the same idea

Pass the tambourine, let me bash out praises
To the Lord God of movement…
Of chicken tandoori and reggae, loud, from tenements

God’s creation is full of difference.  And, pretty well from the beginning, what God created as a whole is something that we have been trying to pull apart.   In one of the very early heresies of the church a man called Marcion, wrote a book called Contradictions which sets the alarm bells ringing straightaway.  He looked at the this and that of things and could not accept that they could ever belong together.  He thought that there was one God in the Old Testament, and quite another in the New Testament.  One faith was judgmental, terrifyingly holy and insisted on righteousness and the other spoke of love and forgiveness.  You cannot live with contradictions said Marcion and quickly produced his own bible taking out all the bits he did not like.  Just eleven books these and never those.

He also did something that heresy has kept doing ever since.  Marcion suggested that the true God did not make all that is.  The true God, he said, inhabits a realm of beauty and truth.  It is a false God that then makes the messed-up world of things cabbages, Carshalton, and camels - and creates all sorts of things – like celery - that just do not measure up.

So much, this morning, for Theology 101.  The Honorary Stewards will pass around exam papers later and of course you must answer every question., because we believe that all things come from God.  I am telling you all this partially because it is in the news and it is disturbing.  I am also telling you this because we heard read the Epistle to the Ephesians./  Do you remember?

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling,  one Lord, one faith, one baptism,  one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. 

Ephesians is a really interesting letter.  It makes some very big assumptions.  It assumes that there is a reason and purpose beyond and beneath the mess and muddle of history.  It believes there is a story about God’s purposes in creation, about salvation and redemption.  And, of course, it is just one story and it sweeps up everything.  On story, one God, one faith - above all and through all and in all.  Ephesians argues that most of this story is already told, that salvation has been secured, that a new kind of living is already possible.  Ephesians tells us that we see the story in Christ who gathers all things up, reconciles, and hold together all that is - so that he might fill all things.

Ephesians goes on to say that the Christ who holds all things together bestows gifts on us and, of course, the gifts are different - that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers.  So, not only is the world full of difference, but the church should be various too.  Finally, our reading, celebrating the glory of things being various, ended with a warning.  Ephesians is worried about doctrine, worried indeed about heresy.

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming

There is a storm out there, the letter suggests and it will capsize and drown us.  We must not think that we are dealing with mere words that can never hurt us.  Heresy is dangerous, it is cruel.

What we have seen on the streets of our cities this week is violence and hatred.  Those are things that we fear, and rightly so.  The danger in the heresy we are talking about goes deeper though and its cruelty is worse.  Ephesians want us to live in this world, in all its complexity and its variety with confidence and with hope.  The heretics say something else.  They say that this world is no place for us.  This life is not real.  True living, true hope, is only for the few, the few who know, the few who can call themselves ‘us’ and know that the rest of us are ‘them’.   That is the true danger here, not violence and hatred, but the idea that this world is not what it seems, not safe, not good.  The idea that this world is not for us and this life we lead is not life at all.  The idea that none of us belong.

Ephesians longs to build us up in love, longs for the life and world we can share, the one that is God’s gift to us all.  Let’s finish with the joyful Kathleen Jamie who sees life ands hope in the midst of our mess and muddle, just where God put it.

Pass the tambourine, let me bash out praises
to the Lord God of movement, to Absolute
non-friction, flight, and the scarey side:

… Of endless gloaming in the North, of Asiatic swelter,
to launderettes, anecdotes, passions and exhaustion…
… To misery and elation; mixed,
the sod and caprice of landlords.
To the way it fits, the way it is, the way it seems
to be: let me bash out praises - pass the tambourine.

Together, not apart, this and that, no us and them.  Pass the tambourine for life in its diversity under God who is above all and through all and in all.