Sermons

Third Sunday before Lent
Sunday 12th February at 6.30pm

Simon Cowling
Readings: Numbers 20. 2-13; Philippians 3. 7-end

My address this evening is partly a reflection on personhood. Who am I? How do I describe myself to others? Events of the past ten days or so have put some of these questions into sharp focus. Cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed published in Denmark lead to a burnt-out embassy in Beiruit, to troops being deployed in a hurry to prevent rioting in Afghanistan, to a competition being launched in Teheran for the best cartoon about the Holocaust and to agonised editorials in liberal newspapers calling on the media to balance the right of freedom of expression with the need to protect the religious sensibilities of Muslims.

My reactions to these events are not straightforward. As a fully paid-up member of a liberal western democratic society I am in favour of freedom of expression - but I am also in favour of protecting the position of minorities, in this case the position of my Muslim neighbours; as a Christian who has grown up immersed in the western European tradition of representational art, I find I can easily separate the Christian iconography in stained glass windows or other religious art from the prohibition on idolatry that we find in the second commandment - but I am also aware that at various periods in our history, not least at the Reformation, Christians have been quite content to use violence in pursuit of a complete ban on religious art. As a non-Muslim, I cannot fully understand, far less enter into the fury that the Danish cartoons evoked in the Muslim community - but the fury I have witnessed has encouraged me to reflect on what, in my own faith tradition, I hold most dear.

Reading tonight's passage from Philippians has helped me in this reflection. In this last part of chapter 3 I am struck by the passionate language that Paul uses; he is willing to throw away everything he might have considered as profit for the sake of knowing Jesus Christ, to consider it as rubbish in order, as he puts it, to 'gain Christ and be completely united with him.' He goes on to say that all he wants 'is to know Christ and to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings and become like him in his death, in the hope that I myself will be raised from death to life.' Then at the end of the chapter the Apostle writes of Christ changing 'our weak mortal bodies' and making them 'like his own glorious body'.

This passionate language speaks of life lived in union with Christ, of life that is worth nothing without Christ, of a life that draws its very identity from the suffering, the death and the resurrection of Christ. This passionate language, then, speaks of how the personhood of a Christian, my personhood, is inseparable from Jesus Christ and the life lived in union with him of which Paul writes. It follows that all I say or do should be rooted in that life lived in union with Christ. Here is true freedom to be found. Freedom that allows me to assert as a Christian that all actions - the original publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed, the burning of embassies, promiscuous exercise of the right to freedom of expression - whether it's mocking the Holocaust in Teheran or re-publishing the Danish cartoons in Paris - all actions must be judged by their conformity with what Paul describes earlier in Philippians as 'the mind of Christ'. Having that mind frees us from being fearful and brings us to full and mature personhood. Amen.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay