God and the common people

I once more had an opportunity to give an address at the unitarian church recently. Here's what I said:

I'd like to try something slightly odd this morning - though in many ways it will feel quite familiar. I'd like us to play a kind of game. It's a new game, but one you will be able to pick up very quickly. What we're going to do is pretend that I've heard a message straight from God, and that you're here to hear that message. I know, it's a crazy idea that God would speak to someone like me. You can fill in the details how you like: maybe I had a vision of an angel, or meditated in some arcane way, or the apostle Paul appeared in my cornflakes: whatever. Mad, I know, but please go along with it. Here we go...

One of the most explosive claims we can make about God is that he became one of us - a mixed up, flawed, stressed human being who had to muddle through like the rest of us. As John's Gospel puts it, the Word became meat. One of the common people.

To help us see just how incredible that is, let's look at the song of that name: `Common people', by Pulp. I guess a few of you will remember it. It starts by recounting how the singer (Jarvis Cocker) was in a bar and getting to know a young lady from a wealthy background. She explained that she hoped to experience a more `common' life, saying (I won't sing it, you'll be glad to hear) I want to live like common people. I want to do whatever common people do. I want to sleep with common people (well, it is a pop song). I want to sleep with common people like you.

The singer goes along with this a bit, taking her to a supermarket and asking her to pretend she has no money. However, it soon becomes clear that she'll never really be able to live like common people: But still you'll never get it right, `cos when you're laid in bed at night, watching roaches climb the wall, if you call your Dad he could stop it all. Her background gives her a security net which keeps her from facing the despair of the poor.

But doesn't the same apply to Jesus? After all, on the standard reading, if he called his Dad he could stop it all. Well, if we are to take the claim that he was one of us with full seriousness then that can't be right. If God was one of us in Jesus, he couldn't rely on the supernatural action of another part of himself any more than we can. The discomforts of life as a peasant in an occupied country (most of which we should be grateful we'll never even be able to imagine) were not relieved for Jesus or his peers by the possibility of escape.

Jesus himself, for most of his life, would have disagreed with what I just said. He thought that he had a heavenly Father who would, ultimately, look after him. The fact that he found himself utterly forsaken at his death is all the more tragic because it shattered that previous mistaken belief. As a human, Jesus shared the common human failing of being wrong about the answers to questions of ultimate importance.

It's a good job I have the authority of God behind me at this point, because what I've just said flies in the face of the core beliefs of a lot of people. But let's think about what it implies. God's presence in Jesus didn't entail that Jesus would be right in what he claimed about God (quite the opposite, in fact). Similarly, the presence of God in ourselves or in others isn't based on any such standard of correctness.

That brings me to the next point I wanted to address, which is a little more positive than the rather bleak picture I've painted so far. God didn't die out with the death of Jesus, since God wasn't just present in Jesus. Jesus didn't just talk about himself as the Son of God - he talked about all of us as sons or daughters of God. That has some serious implications for how we live, as Jesus made clear in the sermon on the mount: `But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.'

That can seem like a huge responsibility. Most days, when someone is rude to us or just plain annoying we don't feel like showing them love. Even if we can see ways we could love them - even just a smile or a kind word - we don't do it because we don't think that that's who we are. We don't see it as possible for us, for the identities we see ourselves as already hardened into. But if God can be in us then that isn't the only identity available. We can see ourselves as children of God, who can love our enemies, can turn the other cheek, and can go the extra mile. This, I think, is the sort of thing John was getting at when he said No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. [This quote was from the reading, 1 John 3:1-10]

This other identity doesn't trap us or harden around us, because it isn't strictly ours - it is hid with Christ in God. It is empowered by a power from beyond ourselves - God's Holy Spirit. Paul put it this way, in Romans 8:

Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.

For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

It's not just that God's Spirit can animate us individually in this way, but even more that we can be animated as a community. As a community, we can see that we are the family of God, the Kingdom of God. We needn't be trapped by the ways we have been in the past, and remembering the presence of God amongst us can help us avoid being blinkered to the good we can do just because we haven't done it before. The story today was a really simplified example of that - the people didn't realise that they could be a group who shared all their food freely so that all were satisfied until they found that that was what they were doing. [The story was Tolstoy's version of the story of the feeding of the five thousand, as found in chapter 5 of the Gospel in Brief.]

All this doesn't mean that we can look down on other folk, though - on those we see as outside our communities. We can't exclude them from the family of God, and in fact they too have available an identity as children of God. Sometimes we accidentally suppose that we can ignore some people, that their problems don't have the urgency of God's call, because of their squalour. As if God had never come to the squalid, been squalid Himself. It is because in the Christmas story we see God in a squalling baby that we are confident that whatever we do for the least of His children we do for Him.

It is so easy to think we can classify and dismiss a person on the basis of one thing they've done. Anyone who has committed a serious crime is liable to ever after be seen by others not just as a person but as a `person-who-commits-such-crimes': as a swindler, a thief, a murderer. For us the nearest case to hand is the rioters who caused so much havoc in our major cities a few weeks ago. It's easy to take that as their full identity: they are `rioters'. But we need to remember that they each have a fuller identity as people like us with complex and diverse motivations, loves and resentments. Nor should we content ourselves with politely analysing what may have led them to act as they did. We need to remember their hidden identity as children of God, and accord them the dignity that goes with it. If they should be punished - and I'm certain that they should - then it is because of that dignity, not simply as a whipping to keep the rabble in line.

We can't hem God's Spirit in to our own community, then, or to those like it. We have to treat other communities with the reverence appropriate to those in whom God is acting. This is true of all kinds of communities, though the only ones that themselves explicitly make this sort of claim on us, in these sorts of terms, are religious communities.

Unfortunately, it is with just those religious communities that a major stumbling block arises, something which often distracts us from God in them. It is that they get so much wrong about God. They say that He hates gay sex, or that He's put Himself in such a bind that He'll be forced to torture people in Hell, or whatever your pet peeve is. They say it so confidently. And they claim to be saying it all in the name of God. Just like I am doing now.

This is why it is so important that we look with clear eyes at the person who we see as the paradigm of God in the common people: at Jesus. We need to see that he wasn't a post-passionate liberal like us but another human being making all kinds of crazy claims about God, in the name of God. And so what? That doesn't stop us seeing God in him, and it shouldn't stop us recognising God in other religious communities either.

The same applies to us. We don't need to be sure that we're saying all the right things about God (or at least avoiding saying any wrong things) before we turn to the task of living Him out in the world. Just as God's Spirit can animate other communities whatever their nutty dogmas, we don't have to step aside to de-nuttify all our dogmas before being swept up by God's Spirit ourselves.

Okay, that's the end of the game. I guess you'll have managed to pick it up as you went along, though maybe, like me when I found out about golf, you're wondering what the point was.

Well, I wanted to talk about the availability of an identity directed to good in God for us and for others, individually and collectively, and I wanted to do that without positing a mysterious powerful mechanism which makes everything turn out well for us. The only way I can talk about that at the moment is by talking about God. Maybe some of you would want to say other more wonderful things by saying something very different about God, and that certainly doesn't interfere with what I was trying to do. As I said, we don't have to get all our words straight before we start showing God's love.

God is in us. Live Him.