Sermon by John Morris

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: Sermon 21 May 2006

Corpus Chapel

Before I turn to today’s gospel and link it with Ascension Day on Thursday, may I add this preface? When I was ordained at the age of 58, as a non-stipendiary clergyman, the Bishop wrote in my Bible the words of St Paul, “We do not preach ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord”, 2 Corinthians 4:5. I have tried to follow that advice in my 6 years in 3 rural parishes and as a school chaplain. So when I mention my own little book, called Contemporary Creed, I hope you will not take it as self-advertisement or book promotion but as evidence of my desire to see Jesus promoted as Lord, and reverse the Dover Beach tide of receding Christianity. I have been teaching and lecturing all my life since we were married in this chapel in 1960. More recently I have entered the business of Christian education, building a contemporary creed website, and marrying modern science and faith in a book that tries to help Christians become more theologically literate, and unbelievers to find Christian beliefs plausible. I said business – in fact my royalties go to charity so I shall not earn a penny from the sales of my cheap book in Heffers!

In our gospel reading tonight Jesus told his disciples at the Last Supper, that “the greatest among you must bear himself like the youngest, the one who rules like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who sits at table or the servant who waits on him? Surely the one who sits at table. Yet I am among you like a servant”, Luke 22: 26,27.

Elsewhere Jesus said he is showing us the Father – “To see me is to see him who sent me” John 12:45 - so we can infer that God who rules, condescends to behave like the one who serves, that God is among us like a servant. And in St John’s version of the supper before the Passover, Jesus takes up a towel, bends his knees, and washes his disciples’ feet. Not surprisingly, that menial servant’s job drew protests from Peter, who was accustomed to Jesus being the ruler, not the server.

Peter speaks for many of us. We want a Jesus who rules, and an Almighty God in charge. But what sort of God is available?

The long history of religion could be simplified into a choice of three sorts of God: one who is either widespread, distant, or personal. First, the widespread God, as in the many gods of polytheism, or in pantheism where everything is God (pan = everything), or its variant panentheism where everthing is in God. If all is God and God is all, everything is sacred, rivers, trees, insects, bacteria and – if one is logical - even evil, for all is God’s self-expression. But to include the evils of contemporary Iraq and Palestine as expressions of God’s nature gives me problems with this widespread God and makes me search for another sort.

A second God is the distant God of deism, the original “source of all”, its first cause, the Unmoved Mover. He is the absent landlord, who has since played no part, so is completely separate, leaving us alone in the universe. So heaven and earth never meet and it is goodbye to Christianity.

A third, personal God, is the one we find in the Bible. This personal God includes something of the first widespread God but more of the second distant God. So the deist source of the universe is also its present upholder. “In him we live and move, and have our being”, as Paul says. By the way, I follow the convention of calling God “him”, but I do not mean the male gender, I mean God is personal - so we can relate to him - but he is not a person. Jesus sees God as his Father but feminine imagery enriches ideas about God in the Old Testament e.g. Isaiah 49:15. And here we have a paradox where this God is both distant and close – He is beyond us, external, in heaven above we say, (transcendent), yet near us (immanent). We have a sense of colliding worlds, heaven meeting Earth.

To the atheist, this is pure fantasy, God’s “reality” is just a man-made idea, a wild-goose chase, subjective. Yet I argue that God’s existence is objective. I cannot prove that, but I believe one can show that the existence of a personal God is at least a reasonable hypothesis.

But what do we mean by a personal God? All I can do tonight is to suggest three things, that this personal God is a servant God with three qualities. First, he is a systematic servant. That idea I placed at the start of my contemporary creed, which I condensed, foolishly, into merely 100 words, and made into a bookmark for my school leavers, so they would be able to remember something from their years in school.

Here are the first 32 words of my 100 word creed that developed over six years into the spine of my whole book:

“I believe in God, the Father of all,
Who began and upholds a universe
That makes itself through evolving processes.
God is Love, granting to creation a freedom
That restricts his power.”

Here is the Creator God, a personal Father, but who rules like a systematic servant. The mystery that is God chose to begin a universe that makes itself through evolving processes, that gives the appearance that he is absent and unnecessary. God chose to submit himself like a servant to obey natural laws, to let earthquakes erupt, tectonic plates crash, and genes mutate, as part of the package. The old belief in an Almighty God in control, who intervenes every now and then to avert disasters, does not make contemporary sense. More credible is the God who does not intervene from the outside every now and then, unsystematically, but is in charge in the sense that all the time he is interacting with his universe, sustaining its natural processes, and constantly at work in the minds of his creatures. I am not ruling out the possibility of miraculous cures from terminal illnesses, but I suggest that as a general rule the servant God is not arbitrary but methodical, faithfully obeying his system. If natural laws were unreliable, how could science progress? Would man’s brain have developed if God did all the work of rescue?

But why did God choose to be his creation’s servant and take massive risks?

As my creed said, God is Love, granting to creation a freedom that restricts his power. That freedom is not merely in human choices for we have only recently arrived on the scene but in ancient matter itself, in the quantum world’s indeterminacy. In my 100 words I could only hint at freedom as an explanation of how one squares a God of Love with tsunamis, cancer, and my own profoundly handicapped grandson. These are the hard questions which I have faced head on, trying to match doctrine with my experience. So I wrote about 60 intellectual problems with traditional Christian beliefs, for readers like me, who do not find it easy to believe and whose faith is mixed with doubt. Like me, your beliefs will probably shift over the years, but I hope you will still be able to trust that it is truly Love that makes the world go round.

If the servant God is systematic, his second characteristic is that he is a suffering servant. The idea of the Suffering Servant comes of course from the Old Testament, “pierced for our transgressions…he bore the sin of many”, Isaiah 53:5,12. We cannot be certain, but it may be that Jesus had Isaiah in mind when at the Last Supper he took a cup and said “Drink…for this is my blood, the blood of the covenant, shed for many for the forgiveness of sins” Matthew 26:27,28.

Earlier Jesus had said “The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many”, Mark 10:45. Ransom, the price of liberation. But on television today, it does not look as though we have been liberated from sin, or saved from disaster. So my creed could not duck the question “In what sense is Jesus our contemporary Saviour?” Here are the next 32 words of my creed:

“Through his Son Jesus
This self-giving God rescued us and
Showed us what he is like:
Loving in life and death;
Sharing our pain;
Suffering the consequences of our sin;
Offering forgiveness.”

Time does not permit me to justify those four ways in which Jesus is our contemporary Saviour. But I have tried to make heavy theology into lighter reading without jargon, wrestling with the idea of incarnation and competing , bewildering theories of the atonement so that they make sense now. A distant God who has never known human pain lacks credibility. After the Holocaust, only a suffering God has street cred. He did not intervene to save Jesus from the cross. But on Calvary “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself”, 2 Corinthians 5: 19.

After Pentecost, Peter preached that “they put him to death…but God raised him to life on the third day and allowed him to be clearly seen”, Acts 10:39,40. Here my interactive God is interventionist, in the unique resurrection of Jesus, which brings me to my third and final quality of the servant God. A sympathetic servant. The writer to the Hebrews describes the risen and ascended Jesus as “our high priest before God…Because he himself has passed through the test of suffering, he is able to help those who are in the midst of their test”, Hebrews 2:17,18.

I suppose the word test makes you think of the exams you are sweating over at the moment! I mentioned exams in a section called “Mayday for a friend” who was dying of cancer. I was trying to answer the problem of what to pray in a crisis. I’m sorry that I cannot tell you that God is going to intervene in your exams to turn you from a third into a first! However I do think, as I wrote, that “God’s influence works on minds and hearts”.

Jesus demonstrated that idea. After saying to his disciples “I am among you like a servant”, he turns to Simon Peter to say “I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail”. So here is Jesus, the sympathetic servant, praying for the disciple who is about to deny him three times.

A sympathetic servant God, systematic, and suffering. This personal servant God humbly allows himself to be hired and fired, leaving the choice to us, to hold on to him or give him up. But as Ascension Day approaches, let us accept this invitation from Hebrews:

“Ours is not a high priest unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but one who has been tested in every way as we are, only without sinning. Let us therefore boldy approach the throne of grace, in order that we may receive mercy and find grace to give us timely help”, Hebrews 4:15,16.

Revd Dr John Morris

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