Barnes in Common

the magazine of Churches Together in Barnes
January/February 2009

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‘To have done the best things in the worst times’

On Remembrance Sunday, Bishop Richard Harries’ sermon gave us a most welcome feeling of hope, which we would like to carry forward into 2009. It was very moving before the service with quite a big crowd standing outside by the war memorial at St Mary’s, with our French friends from LePecq, all the scouts with their flags, and kind weather too.

We are here first, of course, to remember those who were killed in the two great wars of the 20th century. We remember especially here this morning the men and women of France and Britain, who stood side by side in the terrible struggles against tyranny, and in particular those who were of this parish and those of Le Pecq. ‘We will remember them’, we said at the memorial outside, as we stood in silence. We remember those long lists of names on war memorials in villages and towns throughout Europe; we remember too those in recent years killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; lives cut short, lives maimed and blighted. So it is a properly sombre occasion.

But those were people who, no doubt, for the usual mixture of human reasons, nevertheless put their lives at risk; people who often showed extraordinary courage and heroism, people who endured years of hardship and separation from what they most valued in the course of what they took to be their simple, overriding duty. They witnessed to the fact, sharply outlined against the background of an age like our own, that life is more than a fine calculus of pain and pleasure; that something greater is at stake; that there is in our very fact of our being human, the capacity for nobility of spirit. So we not only remember them, we salute them. There is a real, and not just a romantic sense, in which their lives, and deaths, nourished the soil of a new, better Europe.

In recent days the world has recovered a sense of hope that it has not had for years. Barrack Obama’s second book was called The Audacity of Hope, and he has built his life and career on that quality. Now he has passed something of that hope onto the rest of us. Not just America, but every human being today stands a bit taller, and looks at the future with brighter eyes.

Christians, above all, should be people who have the audacity to hope, but let us be clear what this is and what it is not. It is not optimism, a belief that things will inevitably get better. Vaclav Havel put it well when he wrote:

‘Hope is not the expectation that things will turn out successfully but the conviction that something is worth working for, however it turns out’

The world today is faced by exactly the same apparently intractable problems as it was a week ago, very severe problems. There is no guarantee that things will get better: they could get worse. Albert Camus once said, ‘Let us think clearly and not hope any more’. Certainly, we can and must think clearly, but hope is fundamental, provided we understand what it is. Three texts in the New Testament give us clear guidance. St Paul said, ‘Hope is no fantasy; through the Holy Spirit he has given us, God’s love has flooded our hearts.’ Romans 5:5.

Within each one of us there is an ember, the ember of our human spirit, the ember of that human spirit blown into flame by the presence within us of God’s Holy Spirit, and that is a Spirit which leads us to focus on God and other people. Already, now, day by day, we have that capacity and that presence of God with us and within us, to live for the well-being of others. Hope is not a mockery, because it is anchored in that reality. ‘Kindle a flame of sacred love on the mean altar of my heart’ goes a line of the English hymn writer, Charles Wesley. ‘Still stir up thy gift in me’. That gift of love, that flame, is a sign of the reality of our hope: the hope that in the end God’s loving purpose will prevail.

Secondly as Paul put it, ‘In everything God co-operates for good with those who love him and are called according to his purpose.’ Romans 8:28. This does not say that everything happens for the best. It clearly doesn’t. Some things happen for the worst. But it does say that in every situation, however apparently hopeless and intractable, God is at work co-operating with those who love him to bring out some unique good. We cannot always stop terrible things happening. But even at such times God is with us, and we can open ourselves to allow him to work in and through us. In the 17th century England was split apart by a civil war. Over the door of one church at that time is the following inscription:

In the year 1653
When all things sacred were throughout ye nation
Either demolished or profaned
Sir Robert Shirley, Baronet,
Founded this church;
Whose singular praise it is,
To have done the best things in ye worst times,
And hoped them in the most calamitous.

That is Christian hope – to have done the best things in the worst times.
Thirdly, again as Paul put it, ‘Therefore, my dear friends, stand firm and immovable, and work for the Lord always, work without limit, since you know that in the Lord your labour cannot be lost.’ I Corinthians 15:58 – or as the older translation puts it, ‘is not in vain’. When we allow God to co-operate with us in working for justice where there is no justice, for peace where there is conflict, for honesty where there is corruption, for health where there is disease, for understanding where there is antagonism, what we do, however tiny it might seem, is not in vain, cannot be lost. In some way, impossible to imagine, it is taken up into God’s wider purpose of a new heaven and a new earth; one that has to be built up on this earth but which in the end transcends the limits of time and space. So it is that we trust that all that was of God in those we remember today is not lost; that what we do in the future to make God’s purpose on earth a reality, is not in vain.

So finally, the Gospel today urges us to stay awake – one of the key words in the New Testament – to live fully aware of the world in which we live, fully aware of the presence of God in and through all things, awake to his purpose for us. As the Chief Rabbi has put it:

“Hope – not optimism – is what empowers us to take risks, to offer commitment, to give love, to begin great undertakings, to live by our ideals.”

Amongst other problems the world is now beset with a very serious economic crisis. But a crisis is also a time of opportunity, a time for change. Recent decades in the West have been characterized by shallowness, greed, vulgarity and pleasure at all costs. Perhaps this crisis will bring about what I would call an era of new seriousness – not ponderousness – for true seriousness goes with a great deal of humour, as those is the armed forces know – but an ultimate seriousness – the kind that those we remember today showed when faced by the great challenge of their time. Our challenges are different but they need to be met with the same resolution and grounded in that hope which the Christian faith offers us. So –

May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing, that we may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13)