St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A Sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in St George's Cathedral, Cape Town at Evensong on 9 November 2008, the Thirty-Second Sunday of the Year.

We live in perplexing times. The world grows smaller and smaller and smaller. First radio, then television and now the worldwide web have made Moscow and Beijing and London and New York familiar to us, and now they – and the remotest regions of our world - have become everyday, features of our experience. Our world grows smaller and almost in inverse proportion to that shrinking, our sense of ourselves in our world, with our rights and prerogatives over it, grows to enormous proportions.

There is a frightening tension - here between our shrinking world and our overweening sense of self in it. As our world has shrunk so our sense of self-importance, entitlement and prerogative has burgeoned. It is our shrinking world that has brought our northern neighbours into our cities and onto our streets. It is our escalating self-importance and the greed that goes with it, that has made us resentful of them. Their presence among us threatens our comfortable avarice. Our fellow-feeling and generosity is immediately stunted, and we are reduced to rabid racists, jingoistic and full of the xenophobia that despises and discriminates, attacks and murders. We live in perplexing times.

Christina Baldwin, contemporary writer on spiritual matters, has said that we, as 'creatures of a very particular making, need to know the cultural blinders that narrow our world view as well as the psychological blinders that narrow our view of our personal experience.' She suggests that there are two dynamics that shape our understanding of life – our personal experience and our world view. More compellingly, she proposes that we are prey to psychological blinders that press in upon our personal experience and cultural blinders that constrict and constrain our world view.

We are not in control of what life offers us of pain and joy, opportunity or limitation. We are in control of who we are in response to what life holds before us. We can choose to be curious or threatened, modest or presumptuous, acquisitive or generous, apathetic or engaged. Our psychology shapes our view of what life offers us and what we do in response to it. Beyond the intimate world of our personal experience lie the wide horizons of the whole of life and its many mysteries. Here the assumptions and predispositions of our culture will shape our view of the world and how things hold together: how we deal with the unfamiliar and exotic, how we place ourselves in relation to what is different and unusual, how we accept varying interpretations of the same reality and diverse definitions of the same truth. Prejudice or acceptance, a conservative as opposed to a liberal view of events, whether people take precedence over principles, vengeance over forgiveness, accountability over reconciliation, these cultural assumptions shape our world views.

The religious spirit is fundamentally a response to the call to holiness. It is that religious spirit that draws us into God's presence by our daily prayers. It is that religious spirit that brings us to this holy place Sunday by Sunday. We are here, in search of holiness. In that pilgrimage in search of sanctity we are always and ever confronted by two questions: What is my relationship with God? and What is my relationship with the world?

Tonight the lessons provide some important clues to answering those two crucial questions. The prophets Ezra and Nehemiah are concerned with the re-establishment of the people in the land after the return from exile in Babylon. Notions of holiness and ethnic purity are confused in this rebuilding of the nation. Purity is understood to be the way to God's heart and it a carefully protected purity will guarantee God's promises. Purity is the practical prerequisite ancillary to holiness. Purity is understood as distancing oneself from all that is unclean and which will besmirch body, soul and spirit, both of individuals and of the nation as a whole. It is ironic that in this search for ethnic purity the greatest prejudice, with a whole arsenal of taboos, is directed against the Samaritans who share the same Semitic genealogy and venerate the same Hebrew Scriptures.

Questions of purity and holiness are often confused – nor is that confusion restricted to Biblical times. The Church's struggle with human sexuality in our time is testimony to this confusion. Culturally defined notions of purity and the psychology of our personal sexual experiences continue to make it horrendously difficult for the Church unreservedly to include women in its sacred life and to recognise homosexuality as part of the natural order of creation. While one can be unambiguous about what constitutes holiness – being completely and utterly turned towards God and at God's disposal - it is not quite so easy to be unambiguous about what constitutes purity. One person's swine is another person's glazed gammon, for instance.

Meister Eckhart, the 13th century German theologian and spiritual teacher offers this sage advice to those in search of holiness: 'People should not worry so much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us, but we who sanctify our works.'

So much for the first question raised by the pilgrimage to sanctity: What is my relationship with God? The Scriptures appointed for this evening now turn us to those works we which we are called to sanctify. With this turn we engage the second of the two questions which confront the pilgrim in search of holiness: What is my relationship with the world? The parable Jesus tells is a challenging one. A landowner hires a whole platoon of labourers, some early in the morning, some more at nine o'clock, others at noon, and some more at three o'clock. At five o'clock, just before closing time, he hires some more. At the end of the day he pays them all the same wage, and those who started first grumble at the injustice. The parable Jesus tells turns all our cultural assumptions about employment, labour and remuneration upside down. It wreaks havoc with the economy of supply and demand, undermines the rights of workers and erodes the prerogatives of employers.

This parable occurs only in Matthew's Gospel and thus appears to belong to the traditions of Jewish Christians. From this perspective the parable is about who is in and who is out, who has been in longest and what privileges should accrue with length of tenure. So it might be in the cultures of this world, Jesus is saying, but this is not the case in the kingdom of God. In the economy of God's reign, whatever the hour or situation, all are admitted on an equal footing, there are no favourites and no late comers. Every one has a place, all are included and no one is left behind.

To stand in holiness before God and in the world is not an easy task. It is made difficult by the challenges of our personal psychological make-up and muddled by the cultural assumptions and prejudices that unconsciously shape us. Because our moment in time is but one small instant in its infinite unfolding, it is foolish for us be smugly dogmatic about what we know and understand. It is not certainty that is required of us, but faith. Because each of us has only one life to live, limited to this place and this time, it is impossible for us to be all that we need to be and do all that needs to be done. It is not achievement that is required of us, but hope. Because we come into the world alone and alone we pass through the gates of death, it is impossible to reach as far as reaching must touch, it is impossible to embrace as widely as an embrace must be. It is not self-sufficiency that is required of us, but mutually supportive relationships.

Reinhold Niebuhr, the 20th century Protestant theologian, put it this way: Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. Between the two of them they got it right, St Paul two thousand years ago and Niebuhr in the last century. Holiness, which is our vocation and our destiny, is not merely a project we undertake, a discipline to be mastered or a code of behaviour to be honoured and obeyed. God saves us for it. God picks us up out of the dust and dirt of our lives and makes us holy. That is why faith, hope and love abide. Faith saves us from the arrogance of our own opinions. Hope saves us from egotism that we must do it all, and we must do at all now. Love saves us from the lonely burden of a world gone tragically wrong. Faith, hope and love remain. And the greatest of these is love.

On our pilgrimage to holiness, let faith be our guide, hope be our compass and love the measure of our pilgrim steps.

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