Easter 6 A

I wrote my sermon this week (http://www.cityurc.org.uk/sermons.htm) before getting around to this blog, so I am left in a curious position. Do I fake an exploration of the text as if I hadn't yet drafted the sermon itself? No. What I think I will do is collect a few scraps I had in my portfolio that wouldn't fit into the sermon.

There is an implied contrast between the Christian vision and the classics that has run throughout western history. My favourite story is the story of St Jerome's struggle. He loved the classical literature of Greece and Rome, and felt annoyed every time he turned to read the gospels at the rudeness of their style. But as one who would one day be canonised as a saint, he felt guilty about this. He vowed to lead an ascetic life, but did not want to give up his rich library. So he settled on a routine of fasting alternating with reading Cicero. One day, the story goes, he fell ill and in his delirium he had a dream that he was on trial. He protested that he was a Christian. But the judge said, No, you are a Ciceronian. Realising he was a man of divided loyalties, when he recovered Jerome abandoned the classics and devoted himself to demonstrating the integrity and sophistication of biblical literature in his own right.

I like this story, but I am quoting it from memory so it may not be all that accurate. Another thing I like about Jerome is his confession to wasting so much time daydreaming, wishing things weren't as they were. But that has nothing to do with Acts 17, which I am preaching on. The gospel lesson, continuing from last Sunday's reading in John 14, has that core proclamation in John that God abides in us as we in our discipleship abide in him. In the sermon I pick this up in connection with Paul saying, in Acts 17, that in God we live and move and have our being.

The Areopagus, where the street preacher Paul is taken to speak more formally, by the way, was the criminal court north west of the city centre. The story here doesn;t make much of this, but I find it interesting.

Underneath this story I find a fundamental tension between classical culture and the emerging Christian culture. The popular religion of multiple gods was a religion of anxiety in which people saw themselves pulled by irrational forces in all sorts of directions. Religious practice was a means of propitiating the gods so that their influence would be benign rather than distructive. The centre of personality was exterior to the individual in this sense. (Bruno Snell tells this story in The Discovery of the Mind). Another story in this direction is the one about Augustine coming across Ambrose reading silently. The custom was always to read out loud, but Ambrose confessed that he always read silently. Augustine was amazed, as if to discover that the world of ideas was not just something that happened outside the person (out loud), but inside.

In a sense both the Stoics and the Epicurians represented efforts to overcome the way the gods pull us in so many directions by resisting extremes of passion all together, with the Epicurians resisting the popular fear of the gods and fear of retribution in life after death by embracing simple this-world pleasures (not hedonism), and the Stoics cultivated a dispassionate life that formed the philosophical background to British stiff-upper-lip-ism. Both schools therefore represent a flight from the wholeness of experience. Luke's Paul introduces a way of life that is wholly integrated in what is, using the Greek philosophical language of that in which we live and move and have our being as the ground of consciousness of an individual capable of both self-consciousness and a capacity to transform life into relationship with what is fundamental to a creation of which we are a part, and not separated from, a relationship that is manifested in action--acts of healing and compassion. This is self-consciousness that is also conscious of life with God that looks to me like a pretty good cure for anxiety.