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St Mary's Church Hitchin |
Contact us:
Church House, Churchyard, Hitchin Hertfordshire SG5 1HP
Tel: 01462 452758 Email: stmaryhitchin@yahoo.co.uk |
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ADVENT SUNDAY 3rd December 2006 On Advent Sunday we are at the beginning of a new year in the life of the church. It is a moment when we light a candle and look around us. We think about two things, the life we lead and then about the life God calls us to lead. We think about the distance between the two points. Our society is immensely successful. We have the 5th largest economy in the world and when the wind is in the right direction you can almost hear the money sloshing out of the City of London. As the money spills out of London, so Hitchin fills up with building sites. But there is something lacking in our society. Something that is harder to quantify. There is an underlying sense of disturbance and anxiety in almost every news report, on almost any matter. To put it simply, we could say that, our country, in common with many in Western Europe, is suffering from an identity crisis. What are we about as a society? Where are we going? What is all this wealth for? Some extreme voices want to tell us that the crisis is one of many identities in one place, but this is nothing new. This has been so since the beginning of time. God made all of us in our huge variety. Our own Nativity painting points to a stable crowded with people from east and west, from far and near. In Christianity we learn early on that, however different, we are all God’s family. The crisis is, I believe, a crisis of purpose. We have tried to fill this void with things, with consumption, but this consumption is overwhelming us. It seems that everything is getting cheaper. As you go around town the money or debit card gets handed over, the goods come in, but then the puzzle, where do I put all this stuff? Life is physically more comfortable, but there is a neurosis to comfort. What if this comfort were to end? When I was a child in the 1960’s, materialism was very exciting. The house always had a piano, but now the department store delivered with much ceremony, a television, a fridge, a top loading washing machine and a thing which I was told firmly to keep my sticky paws off- a stereogram. It was you see Hi-fi and we very lo-fi children were allowed to look whilst Daddy operated it. If, by accident, you knocked the hi-fi you feared being sent to borstal. Somewhere in the middle of this, instead of our two coal fires and paraffin heaters, Mr Lewis came round and put in some dodgy central heating system. Since the Second World War, the drive to rebuild for prosperity has motivated us. But now we are beginning to suffer from what an American TV show has dubbed ‘Affluenza’. Af-flu-en-za has three meanings n. 1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses. 2. An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of a consumer dream. 3. An unsustainable addiction to economic growth. The market economy has begun to worry us. It can distort ordinary life. Take the Comet headline this week that Hitchin Town hall is in jeopardy. It raises a question. Do we want a civic and social society, or a market driven society? Our parents would laugh at us, at a generation on the one hand so individually wealthy, on the other, so socially out of touch that we feel we cannot afford the Town Hall. I think that this individualised lifestyle is beginning to end and that the church needs to be ready for a new hunger for something else, for an identity which comes from within not without, an identity which we share with one another, a profound identity that comes from something that we call holiness. What is the evidence for this? The other day we had a candlelit supper in the church to raise money for the appeal 200 people came, the majority were not church goers. At the end of the evening the profit, the clear profit for the appeal was £32,100. As a result our church appeal is almost done. Now why did they do this? One or two, shocked at this generosity, have rushed to cynical explanations of this. They have missed the number one point that people care about this place and furthermore, thought they do not fully subscribe to our practice, they are prepared to identify enough to subscribe generously to what we stand for. Services that reinforce a sense of identity are increasingly popular. Remembrance services round the country have reported far higher attendances and our own statistics of people attending Christmas services have leapt from 1300 to 2000 in the last five years. Whilst the shops are dripping with kitsch at this time of year, we have become bored with what we might call the shock of the shallow. Our society is in deep trouble. We have stumbled blindly into two wars which we do not appear to be winning either physically or morally As we watch the pictures of Iraq on the news, we realize we have all had to grow up Kitsch does not work in the face of this reality, indeed it looks sinister. We need to learn how to care for each other again. For this we need a new culture of compassion. I believe it is time take much of our present Brit Art and shove it in the archives. It more kitsch than an inflatable Santa .Damien Hirst’s pickled cow – what has that got to say to us? Tracy Emin’s unmade bed now looks like an adolescent protest. One day we may get it out again to remind us of the time when we were really out of touch with ourselves. We have slipped from suspicion of others into full scale conflict by being morally only half awake. We have broadcast the ‘fundamentalists’ and been sickened by religion, but have forgotten that what is really fundamental to all religions is quest to enlarge human compassion. If art refuses to lead us out of our mess, then religion, once again, starts to be the only show in town, and holiness and compassion the only direction worth heading in. On Advent Sunday we are at the beginning of a new year in the life of the church. It is a moment when we light a candle and look around us. We think about two things, the life we lead and then about the life God calls us to lead. We think about the distance between the two points.
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