‘Forsaking what lies behind and reaching out to that which is before’

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Genesis 32:22-31, 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5, Luke 18:1-8

‘forsaking what lies behind and reaching out to that which is before’

The Collect, I’m aware, is often a time when people switch off: that moment between the confession and the readings. And to be fair they often have more clauses than seems plausible for the English language:
a mere ten in today’s; you wouldn’t find them in an advertising campaign. Being mostly written originally by Cramner they often have a beauty which can be overlooked; they’re sort of like little faith-poems, and quite often they have phrases that are worth dwelling on, today’s stealing from the letter to the Philippians: ‘forsaking what lies behind and reaching out to that which is before’.

It reminds me of a cold December day two years ago when as a pre-Christmas treat my commanding officer told the whole battalion we were going to do a fifty mile march across Kent with full kit, but without rifles. He didn’t want to scare the locals and to be fair 500 men marching through your village at night is probably enough even without weapons.

It was broken down into 10 mile blocks, with twenty minute breaks between. As exercise it was a strange experience. Even carrying 35lbs you were never out of breath, never heart pounding, or muscles burning; it was just a long boring trudge, mostly through darkness. The CO was ex-special forces and had a reputation. His surname was Mann, and he was known respectfully if not affectionately as the Man-grenade. On our first exercise on the Scottish border I was told to expect 10% losses – which meant around 40 men going down with injuries. I spent more time doing hospital visits in those two weeks than in all my previous ministry. 

But it was the last ten miles that caught people out on the 50-miler. Just the weariness of it, some little rub at 2 miles which had become intolerable at 30.  (You should never go anywhere in the army without tape and Vaseline.) But it’s the psychology of it that matters – knowing you’ve gone 40 miles, feeling your almost there – but 10 miles is a very long way to hang in there for.

‘forsaking what lies behind and reaching out to that which is before’. You had to just forget the 40 miles done and focus on the task in hand – each one of those last ten miles. It’s the virtue of perseverance, which in so many things is easy for the first eighty percent, testing for the next ten, and the making and breaking of you for the last ten. That’s where you find out who you are. And it’s usually a surprise just how far you can push yourself.

England will doubtless find this as they prepare themselves for the All-blacks in the semi-final only, for the big challenge of Wales in the final. 

Perseverance is the undoubted theme for our readings today. In Genesis we heard of Jacob persisting in wrestling with the angel until he’d won the blessing.St Paul asks us to ‘continue in what you have learned and firmly believed’; to ‘be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable’ to have ‘the utmost patience’. And finally in the Gospel there is the parable of the unjust judge who gives into the widow simply for her bruising persistence, told to the disciples to encourage them ‘to pray always and not to lose heart’.

Jo de Wardener, who has truly persisted in teaching in our Sunday School now from generation to generation, came to me in the week, claiming extraordinarily that she’d never had this Gospel before, alarmed I think, that the passage seemed to encourage children to nag their parents until they got what they wanted. We’ll see when the children come back in whether they’ve been encouraged in this.

But I think perhaps we all need a little encouragement in perseverance.  For while faith can be easy – and barely acknowledged for years of our life sometimes – there will also be those moments when the testing is severe. 

But even here we can jump to conclusions as to what we will find difficult. I was struck in researching the Great War some years ago that for all the mythology of the Siegfried Sassoon’s, Robert Graves and Wilfrid Owens, that most horrific war returned a more religious, more Christian nation. While the popular assumption is that the War was the beginning of the secular turn, the grim reality of the trenches overturning the Victorian certainties of Empire and Faith, church attendance rose during the decade following the War. Statistically, it’s decades of decadence and individualism that most hurt religion – the 60s being a great turning point in the life of the Church. War and disease, it would seem, are the friends of faith; its enemies are the bicycle, the television and the discotheque.

But what I think most accounts for our difficulty with perseverance is contained in that line from the collect: ‘forsaking what lies behind and reaching out to that which is before’. For faith to be real, and not just the comfortable nostalgia of years gone by, we must forsake what lies behind.

Church should not be a return to a world of the past, the familiar thump of Victorian hymns and dreams of running round the old oak tree; the glory days of St Margaret’s, before this dreadful new vicar, a time with less problems and less burdens. And we should not be afraid of the future, of a building without scaffolding, a transformed garden, with new people coming in and having a go, using new energy and skills to do things differently; that is not a dishonouring of the past but its recreation. T.S. Eliot said:

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without; 
For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while there is time of prosperity 
The people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity they will decry it. 

Last weekend, I was in the eternal city, witnessing with a few other vicars the canonisation of John Henry Newman, who wrote today’s final hymn. It was an interesting situation to be in as Newman was a Church of England priest for most of his life before he converted to Roman Catholicism. He had preached and written of the Pope as the anti-Christ which must be fairly unique on the CV of Roman Catholic saints. They were very hospitable to us, in any case, and we were seated just yards from the Pope while a crowd of more than a hundred thousand thronged St Peter’s square. It is encouraging to be reminded just occasionally that Christians number in the billions and are counted in every country on earth.

But Newman who spread a revolution in the Church of his day and then scandalised the nation by absconding to Rome, is famed for saying: ‘To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’ It’s a rather extraordinary thing to say, especially for a conservative cleric: ‘To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’ But behind it is the understanding that the nature of reality is change and if we are not changing then we are decaying. That is if you like the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

On the Berlin Wall someone had scrawled in graffiti the words of a German poet: ‘whoever wishes that the world remain as it is, does not wish that it remains’ Which is a warning to Conservatives everywhere.

For Jacob, persevering in faith meant crossing the Jabok and putting out his hip in his struggle with God; Jesus himself commends us to pester God like a dog with a bone, as though we were battling against an unjust judge. A True faith is something that is battled over, worn smooth with years of ease, years of angst, hard fought nights of wrestling; the slow trudge and the irritant that is not eased by tape and Vaseline. We may look back at times and see the story of faith unfold; but we should be wary when that story is too easy; too comfortable; when St Margaret’s has become the comfortable slipper, unaffected by the river of mud flowing down Putney Park Lane.

Let us ‘forsake what lies behind and reach out to that which is before’. Let us discern what is needed for the kingdom of God now. Let us persevere in the faith; let us be perfect and embrace change. To quote the BT advert currently stealing from Dickens: ‘We have everything before us, we have nothing before us.’  Amen.

And now appropriately we have a baptism. Nothing brings home the perfection of embracing change like the first years of a baby and nothing forsakes what lies behind and reaches to that which is before like a child. So we ask Isobel to bring her family out to gather at the font, as we make the promises that begin another journey of faith,praying for her perseverance through the best of times and the worst of times.