Love and Do what you like.

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 55.1-5, Psalm 145.8-9,15-22, Romans 9.1-5, Matthew 14.13-21

Ending relationships is not easy to do well. I’m not totally sure though whether it’s better to be the breaker of hearts or the broken.

Being conflict-averse, I once (in my callow youth) spent a long angst-and-tear-filled afternoon telling someone it wasn’t them, it was me. That evening I got a furious call around midnight from the same girl, who was at a party with a friend of mine who’d said to her how sorry he was to hear we’d broken up. Apparently, despite an exhausting four hours I’d somehow failed to convey the essential fact that it was over. Dreadful.

My most memorable experience of the other end was at university, when a girl decide the appropriate moment was on my birthday in MacDonald’s immediately before we went to see Titanic at the cinema.  We still saw the film. That was quite a traumatic experience (for a number of reasons). We got back together later but she went on to break up with me another 7 times over the next year, before I perceived she might have a problem with commitment. 

And I suspect that more than ever we live in a commitment-averse society. No longer do we expect people to remain in a single career their whole life; neither do we expect them to stay in one house, one city or even one country. Political allegiances have been changing overnight, and hopefully will soon in America.People choose the church that suits them at that moment – especially when church goes online – life is more prone to the swinging tides of fashion than the firmer ground of tradition. People marry later, and are more likely to dissolve their marriages. Even children now divorce their parents. I couldn’t tell you exactly what Oberon is thinking at 5:30pm when his pasta isn’t quite cooked and he’s been tap-dancing for a solid 3 hours but it certainly seems quite negative. Singers, of course, are notoriously flighty. But she hasn’t given up yet.

And all of this is a homage to the great virtue of contemporary Western society: freedom. Our culture loves more than anything the possibility of making free, independent decisions, of being able to walk away from anything, and being able to spontaneously act according to our desires. The perfect freedom of our society is the freedom of the happy child.

I know this because I see it in myself. Since I met my current wife, she’s insisted on collecting expensive things like furniture, and pianos, greyhounds, children and recently has demanded I chauffeur her round Sussex looking at flats. Having grown up in the 90s I’m reminded of the film Fight Club and the line: ‘the things you own end up owning you.’ We’ve cleared the crypt now but I don’t think we’re quite ready for bare-knuckle boxing. But as a society we venerate freedom, this happy-child freedom, and are warily suspicious of its opposite: the heavy yoke of commitment.

This Sunday’s Gospel relates the story of the feeding of the 5000, in which the followers of Jesus are fed with loaves and fishes. As Christians we cannot hear this story without thinking of the Eucharist. He blesses, breaks and distributes the bread prefiguring the later act at the Last Supper. All the readings this Sunday point to the food, spiritual and physical, of the people of God. Our psalm echoed the words most commonly used in graces: Oculi omnium in te sperant Domine: Tu das iis escam eorum in tempore opportuno: The eyes of all look to you, O Lord, and you give them their food in due season. Isaiah – Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labour for that which does not satisfy?  This bread of heaven is the Word that satisfies body and soul. And it’s there in abundance. When all have eaten their fill there’s still 12 baskets of bread left over.

For Scripture, the symbolism of bread goes further, though, as a primary symbol of liberation, of freedom. When the Israelites fled from pharaoh, they took with them unleavened bread, the IKEA of baked goods, to sustain them during their flight. In the wilderness they received the manna, bread from heaven, bread to go, sustaining them until they reached the Promised Land.  The place of bread in the liberation story is remembered in the Seder order, the Passover liturgy: the template for today’s Eucharistic liturgy, as we remember Jesus celebrating the Passover on the night of his arrest.

So when Jesus gives the people bread he’s deliberately using a symbol of his people’s liberation.  And as the “bread of life” he’s claiming that he is the means to finding freedom.

Now, as I said earlier, we tend to think of freedom as glorious, responsibility-free non-commitment. The life of a cat, lazily drifting through summer days. Whereas Christ’s claim is that commitment leads to freedom:  whoever comes to me, whoever believes in me will have life in abundance. How can we reconcile this?

Well, consider romantic comedies and all those clichés about perfect relationships. They’ve existed since Plato, who gives us the myth of soul mates as souls that are cut in two and spend their lives looking for their other half.  More prosaically we have lines like “you know me better than I know myself”, “you make me want to be a better person”, “you complete me”.  And this is because, when we’re committing to a relationship, we’re incorporating someone into our sense of self:  saying that we belong together. This sort of commitment isn’t about drawing boundaries and saying no but expanding our sense of self outwards so that our narrow self-interest incorporates another person. It is about stretching our sense of who we are to include others. And this is what we believe God in Christ demonstrates by extending his love to include all people. So Jesus who embodies the principal of loving others freely gives himself entirely for love of the world.

St Augustine famously declared “Love and do what you like”.  Not love God and do what you like, as he’s sometimes misquoted, but just love and do what you like.  And this is Christian freedom: That right living isn’t about rules and codes of protection for self and society, such as the Pharisees embody, but the simple principle of loving one another. And the first step in loving someone is saying, we belong together.

Even if the virus keeps us at a 2m distance – this is what we believe at St Margaret’s – that even though we’re different we belong together.  And that beginning with the people closest to us, with our families, with our friends, with our neighbours, with this little part of London, we will try and expand the borders of who we include, who we love, and with whom we say we belong.  And when we share this meal, this bread, that’s what we’re enacting – that we’re one body in Christ. But this is also about freedom – because the Eucharist remembers the Passover meal. And I suppose that’s what Christian freedom is really about – not the freedom to do anything we like at any moment, to satisfy each momentary whim; but the freedom to discover who we are as the people of God, which comes from belonging to a community. The Eucharist is a sign of our commitment in sharing a meal as we continue our journey together.

So perhaps we need to change the way we think about freedom: Not as a childish freedom of autonomy and fulfilling our own desires, to the freedom to be ourselves alongside the friends we’ve made here.

Most beauty we recognise is given shape by form: poetry in sonnets and villanelles, music in sonatas and symphonies, fine art in landscapes and portraits, movement in the steps of waltzes and tangos. In the same way freedom is given shape by commitment. Commitment without freedom would be tyranny, but freedom without commitment would be chaotic. Christian freedom is given shape by our sense of belonging, by our starting point in love. So Love and do what you like. Amen.