Leaving the village

We all live in vanishingly small worlds. By saying that, I don’t mean that with the onward march of technology we can watch the rantings of an orange madman on the other side of the Atlantic as they happen while sat on our sofa. Nor do I mean we can pick an argument on social media with someone we’ll never meet in Australia. I’m not even alluding to the fact that thanks to aviation technology we can meet someone from six thousand miles away, marry them and then have their family come to visit. Every year. For months on end. But that’s my problem, not yours. Though I’m happy to share.

It’s not the silicon chip technology that makes our worlds small, it’s more the kit that’s installed by default each time a new life is squeezed out the human sausage machine. It’s small world tech.

It’s true that most of us no longer live all our lives in the same village where we were born and our parents and their parents before them; marrying the girl or boy next door, not knowing what lies down the road and beyond the next hill,  finally being laid to rest in the burial plot of the parish church we have attended every Sunday of our lives (those were the days). We move around much more now, but every time we move, we take the village with us. We are born in one place, spend some time there; move on to the next village and stay there for a while; totter down the road and settle there for a while and so on and so on until we reach the end of our road and stop moving completely. It’s a sort of geographical serial monogamy, village-citizens of one small world after another

This is only ever the way it’s going to be. Not many of us really thrive living out of a suitcase. Even our brain architecture imposes a physical limit to the number of people who we can have even slightly meaningful relationships with- about 150 maximum; though apparently we can only ever  remember the names of about twenty. On a good day. WIth reminders.

Village mentality is pretty much baked in to the human experience. And lest you’re thinking that this is all becoming a bit suffocatingly Thomas Hardy English pastoral morris dancing lark ascending spinsters cycling to evensong; worry not. It’s just about to escalate.

While we’re almost hardwired with the village mentality, the limits of its advantages are soon reached and the problems begin— and that can be more worrying  than going silent when a stranger enters the pub or cracking out the pitchforks and flaming torches when someone’s dough fails to rise. Here’s an example close to home (after all, that’s the way you like it); a bit too close for comfort for some of us.

The Church of England is just about to finish a  nine yearlong process called Living in Love and Faith. After spending more than a million pounds and taking up countless hours of countless people’s time the church by law established finds itself still unable, after seventy years of handwringing and talking about rather than with the people concerned, still the C of E finds itself unable officially to treat LBGT people with even basic decency, and all because a powerful and well-financed conservative evangelical minority refuses to believe that there is a world outside their village.  

This is not the ‘not-like-us’ mentality of village stranger-phobia; instead it’s the small world mentality applied to Christianity. Sometimes, it seems, there is no smaller world that that we inhabit with our faith.

We all do it, of course, all religions, all faiths; we treat God as though he is finite, that we can know all there is to know about Him, or at least all we need to know; that the content of our faith is a rock of ages; a granite God standing unmoved, unchanged and unchangeable through the ages; the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow. This is indeed how Jesus is described in the letter to the Hebrews: 

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

In Revelation Jesus is described as

‘[he] who is and who was and who is to come’

Some  take this to mean Jesus was and he is what he was and will be what he was. But there is a distinction to be made between our faith and its object, between Jesus and what we believe about him. 

If Jesus is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, the Way of Christ, the faith in thought and word and deed of those who follow him, is not: the Way has a past, a present and a future: and they are not the same.

Faith is not there as a lump to be consumed. It’s not like War and Peace: if you don’t know what happens in the story when you start at page one you do if you finish it and it’s the same book when you start on page one as it is 1200 pages later. You don’t know it all when you’re at the beginning but you do by the last page, though you probably wouldn’t have read the boring bit at the end had you known. That’s War and Peace. Faith is not like that. The book of faith changes as you read it– new pages are being written as you read, not just at the end, but at all points of the story. If you’re one of those people who just has to know it’s going to be a happy ending and you’ve checked the last page when you started, read a bit, check it again and it’s changed. As has the bit you’ve just read. Not because God has changed, but because, what you started with, wasn’t all of it. How could it be?

It is a nonsense to think that all there could be to know about faith was there from the beginning, whether that is locked in the Bible or in the traditions of the church or even to be read from the book of nature. It was several centuries before Christians got the Creeds; more than a millennia till the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine articles of religion, and though the conceit of conservatives everywhere is that the truths of our faith have always been there, it is ultimately a conceit.

Some things you get before you start: it says something on the tin and that’s what you’ll find inside it. Others you cannot know till you enter in and start looking around. And yet other things you can only know the part you are in right now.   Revelation, what we know about God,  is not a one off, it is an unfolding disclosure. We are in the midst of salvation history and being in the thick of something your perspective is limited; you cannot see the whole picture; you cannot see outside the box; you can know something of the past, less of the present, and nothing for sure of the future.

And what Jesus is, what following Jesus means is so much more than we can hope to know at any one point of the pilgrimage of the people of God. If it was all there right in front of us from the beginning, we’d be no better off because we wouldn’t have a clue what we were being shown. We are creatures limited in time and space and understanding.

The Gospel we have just heard illustrates this neatly. Up the mountain the disciples suddenly had in front of them so much more than they had previously seen and way, way more than they could understand. Peter’s bumbling Laurel and Hardy turn is not even the start of their incomprehension. What that vision on the mountain top showed them was just how parochial their understanding was, just how small their world was, just how little they actually knew, and how much more, infinitely more, there was to— and  of —Jesus.

In a very literal way, Peter, James and John would all leave their villages: Peter ended his days in Rome, John at the other side of Asia Minor in Ephesus, James in the capital city of Jerusalem. The point, though, is not that they travelled geographically, but that they moved spiritually. The point they left their small worlds of belief was on the mount of Transfiguration

The Christian faith is not a small world; it has no boundaries, no borders, no limits. There is never a point following Jesus that we can say  ‘that’s it, we know it all now, so let’s stop looking; we’ve arrived, we can stop travelling; these are the boundaries of our faith and there’s nothing outside this village.’  All religious people end up believing that, of course; how could we not and who can blame us, poor limited creatures that we are? It’s pitifully wrong, but we still end up there, despite the warnings.

Such as this one, pretty close to the beginning of Christianity, from St Paul:

we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;  but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

This side of the Kingdom, we will only ever know in part.

So, when it comes to our faith, it’s not, as the Disney song has it, a small world after all.  Despite our tendency to tribalism and insularity, stasis and reaction, bickering and blinkers: there’s a whole world of infinite space out there, we just have to get out of the village.

For a Christian, it’s not a small world at all.

That I think, is about one of the best things you’re ever going to hear, yesterday, today or tomorrow. 

God never changes: we do. Alleluia.