Never heard a sermon like that at a wedding

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Yesterday a terminally ill man took me aside after a church service and said to me, "You preached at my son's wedding and I've never expected a sermon like that. You created a bridge between science and religion.  Being a man who has struggled with this issue I wanted to walk across that very bridge." 

Now, I know that some of you will say that preaching like this is opportunism. I recall as a teenager a visiting preacher who came to our church at Midnight and did a thumping homily on Jesus saves.  It came over as if he was 'pushing' Jesus like a manic salesman. Not very Anglican! This was not what I did. What I did was not dissimilar to the talk that Dr. Michael Lloyd, the Principal of Wycliffe Hall gave to us at the Diocesan Clergy Conference back in September. He urged us as preachers and teachers to firmly park our cars on the war of ideas that involves the culture and the Gospel. Fundamental to this was the concept of love.

Perhaps, this now becomes clearer.  For love is either a human invention or it is of God.  If it is a human invention, a hormone then it is nothing more a project onto the cold vacuum of a meaningless universe that one day will disintegrate with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Love, justice, peace, justice, beauty, art, harmony, etc. are all then synthetic.  The reality of existence is that cruelty is no more morally different from kindness because there is no morality. Morality itself is a construct. But, if love is of Divine origin then it is the key to the universe. It is the scent of God. Everything has a purpose and can move towards that goal of fulfillment in God. This is what the philosopher-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the 'Omega point'. What I believe we cannot allow for is a benign vision of reality from an atheistic worldview.  Nietzsche claimed that his fellow rationalists were too soft? The universe is either full of meaning (love) or it is meaningless.

One of the old words for a priest was a pontiff, a mobile bridge, like a pontoon. I like to imagine that ministry at its best includes creating these pontoons between the culture and the Gospel. If we do not, then we will increasingly find that we are peoples living into two different worlds.







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