The End of the World

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Exodus 2.1-10, Psalm 127:1-4, 2 Corinthians 1.3-7, John 19.25-27

Last Sunday felt positively triumphant. It was almost a Palm Sunday before Holy Week. At the 8 o’clock, we were above average, 11 people, mostly at risk, but with that indomitable British resilience. And at the 10 it was a good turn-out, and the old sea dogs and warhorses were out there braving the inclement times.

The pace of events this week has been brutal and now we are on a very different footing. I suppose calamities that hit a generation are usually like this. It is upon you before the reality has set in.

The song that has been in my head all week is Skeeter Davis’ 1962 hit ‘The End of the World’. It sounds melodramatic, but it’s this beautiful, simple song, and the conceit is the dissonance she feels between a world carrying on as normal and the devastation of heartbreak she is feeling. Perhaps it’s just having spent a week indoors but everything outside looks very much as it did. Only I know of the measures coming in; the disruption of ordinary life; many friends losing their jobs, their businesses; the great uncertainty about, well, everything; the interconnectedness of the world which has caused this rapid spread of contagion; is also causing the whole way of life that we know to shudder convulsively.

This is without mentioning the reports from Italy and around the world.

‘I wake up in the morning and I wonder – 
Why everything's the same as it was.
I can't understand, no, I can't understand,
How life goes on the way it does.’

What it most reminds me of is the morning I learned of the death of a close friend. At times like this we can feel such a fracture between our interior life and the world as it presents, that everything feels like a dream; Reality needs a pinch.

This is a very human problem. We so quickly adapt to ‘how things are’ and are somehow built to believe they will never change. It takes a supreme act of imagination to break out of it. To imagine the world differently. We are suddenly in a world where the old certainties are gone. The confidence is broken. But because of that we are now in a world of faith.

The church of England has always been very good at background music. Saying grace before meals, a bit player in the coronation; sneaking in to people’s baptisms, weddings and funerals. Not the centre of attention, but a steady role; the straight man to the comedy of life; or the light touch of humour within the heavy drama.

But every life has existential moments, which is why we are there at birth, love and death. Faith’s real place is less dressing on the side, but the elemental truths. I blame Jane Austen and Trollope, for whom the clergy always seem slightly ridiculous, leading to that beloved abomination the vicar of Dibley; but despite the niceness of it all, faith is about times of trial. It can be seen in the approach of death. In grief, In the joy of children; In the magic of love; these are all life changing moments. They are scenes of transformation.

 Socially, we keep them hidden.Baptisms have a different vibe to childbirth; sex is cloaked in wedding feasts; the elderly usually fade and slip from society before death. So society hides its elemental, its existential threats.

But now this danger to society, the elemental forces, are present. Our security, our lives, are threatened. The safety net that covers so many of us is wavering.

This matters for two reasons. Firstly, we are given to understand something of the daily plight of many who have never known that safety net. Following the crushing grief of the First World War, there was great reform – they built our Dover House Estate out of a new solidarity. Even more so after World War 2, the shared struggle birthed the Welfare State.  If we are woken to the horror of insecurity; the hopelessness of debt and powerlessness; the vulnerability of lack of access to health and education; then we may see and understand that it existed before COVID-19 and not just in far flung parts of the world. We can find inspiration here to make a better society.

But also we might come to understand the fundamental human vulnerability. That our time is fleeting; as the funeral service puts it: ‘we are but dust. Our days are like the grass: we flourish like a flower of the field; when the wind goes over it, it is gone and its place will know it no more.’ And in coming to terms with the hidden existential questions; with the elemental truths of life, of living and dying; we might find a more honest, less superficial set of values and way of living.

Theologically, we are lucky this has happened in Lent; traditionally an austere season to reflect on mortality. Easter is coming, but Easter always has one foot in the grave.

Today’s Gospel is the crucifixion. Superficially we have all those Maries, and most particularly Jesus’ mother here adopted by the beloved disciple.  More poignantly we have the most unimaginable grief of motherhood. Not the twee – ‘that’s why Mum’s gone to Iceland,’ but the reminder that motherhood is a vocation of hard loving, and perpetual anxiety over the frailty of created life. Flesh of my flesh.

Our little piglet with his temperature has quarantined us this week but he is improving. 

But more theologically the crucifixion is a birth. It could be seen as the answer to those smart-alecs who remark that if it really was a virgin birth, then why wasn’t Jesus born female? Jesus is the mother of the church. When the soldier pierces Jesus’ side, the church comes forth in blood and water, signs of the sacraments of baptism and eucharist. From this moment of agony and death, the church is born in the hope of the resurrection. This might sound academic, or symbolic, but what I’m saying is that the Christian faith is born in godlessness, primal fear, elemental forces and existential angst. It is born here in the faith, hope and love of Jesus. It is the light shining in the darkest of places.  And it waits, it hopes for the resurrection morning. 

So the question we’re asked today, at this dark time, is a question asked of most generations. What is the capacity of our faith? Do we have the strength of character to maintain hope in difficulty? To love whatever the cost? The challenge before us, I believe, is bigger than this virus. This virus may even shed light on areas we have been unwilling to look. But in the short term, how we look after one another in the coming weeks and months and how we begin to rebuild will be defining for our generation. 

It is not the end of the world. But there will be grief and loss. And we have the faith to be an encouragement to one another and in all the uncertainty and fear, to demonstrate the reality of that faith in the strength of our hope and the service of our love.  Amen.