Epiphany 2
Running in parallel
Quantum physics is, well, bonkers. I know people say that about religion as well, but us fakirs of faith have nothing on quantum physicists. That stuff is really, seriously, away with the fairies. Happily you don’t need to understand it to benefit from it’s application; handy too, because pretty much nobody actually understands quantum mechanics but it’s that rather than pixie dust that makes your toaster work and your smartphone and your satnav and your full fibre broadband and your lightbulbs and… well you get the picture. Bonkers, but useful. And entertaining. Thanks to quantum physics we have that staple of science fiction writing, the parallel universe, the great plot device that gives us a hypothetical universe that co-exists with this one but is different in some interesting way. The adventure starts when someone from this universe manages to slip into parallel one- or vice versa. Parallel universes are popular in sci-fi because you don’t have to reimagine a whole new world, just a slightly different one. And for TV and film a parallel reality has the great virtue of being relatively cheap- you keep your existing sets and just change them slightly, keep all the same cast, just give them slightly different roles and maybe haircuts. Whether or not parallel universes actually exist or are simply the result of imbibing too much theoretical physics nobody knows, and like all metaphysical propositions such as religion, the existence of other realities is pretty much unprovable. But still possible. And fun. And cheap.
You yourself can experience the feeling of having slipped through the wormhole into a parallel reality in the comfort of your own home- or indeed anywhere you can get internet access, on the bus or in the park or in the cafe at Dobbies garden centre, though that’s a hair’s breadth away from being another world as it is. Yes, you too can step into Narnia or trip through the looking glass simply by firing up your web browser and heading to the Church of England web site. How much religion you’ll find at that URL is debatable, but you will find yourself in an alternate reality simply by scrolling down the glossy front page and clicking on the link that says ‘Vision and Strategy’. No it’s not an advert for a hedge fund: this is the church by law established and despite giving every appearance of being a barrelful of headless chickens it apparently has something called ‘Vision and Strategy’. So, go on. Click the link. Dare you. One moment you’re sat in front of your computer: the next you’re in a corridor in Everything Everywhere All At Once waving a large pink… balloon which just happens to be the lead candidate to be the next ABC.
I won’t read out what you’ll find on the Vision and Strategy page, partly because I want us to stay firmly fixed in the here and now and mostly because I’ve not long recovered from norovirus and still have a slightly sensitive digestion. I could I suppose summarise what’s there in one word, but then I wouldn’t be able to put this sermon on our web site. However, for your benefit I did spend some of my Christmas break making a mini concordance of the words in my employer’s mission statement:- something like a word cloud if you like- it’s a quick if slightly underhand way of opening a window into the heart of any text.
So the Church of England Vision and Strategy features 30 occurrences of the word ‘Church’. Seems fair enough, that is, after all what we claim is in the tin. Strategy is next coming up ten times. Mission makes five appearances, we have four priorities and we are bold three times, which is also the number of times Jesus gets a look in, which is two more than God who makes a doctrinally apt if disappointing singular appearance. Young appears twice; there is however no room for the old, who don’t merit a mention. There are also one or more hubs, contextual expressions, strategic priorities, bold outcomes and things enriching and compelling. You will search high, low and fruitlessly on our Anglican Prospectus however for any mention of ‘sacrament’ or ‘baptism’ or indeed ‘eucharist’- we have vision it seems but no heartbeat. Most worrying? Shocking? Depressing? of all is the one word that screams its absence. You can probably guess it, but, keep listening I’ll tell you at the end.
Anyway, what we have reads like the prospectus for a business. A rather vague prospectus written by a contestant on the Apprentice for their first year MBA exams. Take out a word here or there and it could have been produced for a tech start up or a manufacturer of pyjamas. This is not something you could say about the Nicene Creed or the 39 Articles. The Vision and Strategy is not what you’d expect from a church. Not in this reality anyway.
So. How did we get down this particular wormhole? I can but guess: I’m so far away from the corridors of power I’m on the far side of the car park in a different town. But I can guess. I might be wrong- I usually am, but I can guess.
Firstly though, I want to be clear that I think the Vision and Strategy was cooked up with the best of intentions- to grow the church and all the good things that means. And secondly I would struggle to come up with anything better. That said, here’s my guess as to what the thinking behind this is. Fewer and fewer people want what we have to offer. Therefore we need new things to attract people. It’s marketing 101: put ‘new’ on your packaging and everyone will try some then buy some.
I’m not sure this is even a sound business strategy: you’re either changing the packaging in the hope that people will think something new is in the shiny wrapper; or you’re expending energy dreaming up new varieties of something people no longer want.
If you see photos taken 100 years ago, everybody, but everybody is wearing a hat. Nowadays nobody wears a hat except for weddings and bad hair days. They’re not wearing our hats, that’s true; but they’re not wearing anyone else’s hats either. That’s not because hats are not as good as they used to be, or what millinery really needs is new ways of being hat. It’s because something bigger has changed: the zeitgeist no longer requires a head covering. So, as a business strategy ‘shiny new’ is unlikely to succeed.
But we’re not a business- that much is obvious- we’re a branch of Christianity- so where does shiny new fit? A Christian’s first port of call for pretty much everything is the Scriptures and I suspect a key passage for those promoting the shiny new agenda is this from Luke:
No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins.
That seems plain enough: to move forward you have to discard the old and be new: new wine must be poured into new wineskins. Out with the old, in with the new. As the world rises ever-new each day, so the church must slough off its old skin and put on the new.
Except… it’s not really like that is it?
There is a little coda to the wineskin saying that nobody seems to much notice, at least not in the networks that promote the new wine, or indeed, name themselves after it. Right after warning of bursting wineskins Jesus adds:
And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, ‘The old is good.’”
The old skins are not discarded. In fact, what’s in them is better than what is contained in the new. What Jesus, his coming, his teaching, his presence, his Spirit is doing is transforming not replacing.
“See,” Jesus says ‘ I make all things new.
What Jesus brings is not so much a replacing of the old things as a revealing of the truth about them we, up till now, had not seen. We had seen no further than the surface, now we see what has always been there, but we see it anew in 3D. And one of the most unlikely examples of this comes in today’s gospel reading, the Wedding at Cana.
Unless you have a very big family and a lot of friends, you probably don’t attend quite as many weddings as I do. But if you have ever been to celebrate someone’s nuptials you will recognise that weddings are one of the most traditional of rituals we humans engage in. They are dripping in patriarchy, packed full of social norms, stuffed with traditions. And here is Jesus at a wedding. So, he’s a traditional conservative guy right? He’s here at a wedding in Cana so he’s giving his stamp of approval to all that patriarchy; fixed gender roles; love, cherish and obey traditional stuff, right? That’s what the marriage service, squirming to find an exegesis for an awkward reading says Cana is about.
But, no. The point is not that marriage as displayed in this gospel passage is a norm for all times and places. The tale of the wedding at Cana is not about marriage at all. The point is that even the most fundamental, ancient, unchanging, conservative rituals of humanity can be part of Christ’s transformation of the world, and are transformed by Christ’s being in the world.
You don’t put new wine in old wine skins, but you can put it in old water jars. And look, those ancient stone jars are not smashed or broken but contain the new: indeed, they enhance it, for when the wine is drawn from those jars, it is the best, saved till last. And, it is the wine that matters, not whether the container is shiny and new.
So, I promised to tell you the missing word in the Church of England’s Vision and Strategy. It is the one word that defines our faith, the one word that is the greatest of Christian virtues, the one word, to rule them all. And yet, nowhere in Vision and Strategy will you find Love. That wineskin is empty.
Happily, love is to be found wherever God is, and where two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name, there he is. That, is all the vision we need.
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