Sermon for the 15th of September - Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity

At the start of the academic year, it’s worth asking ourselves this question: Why do we bother coming to church? Why aren’t you instead going for a walk or reading a Sunday paper, or shopping, or playing tennis or football?

Timothy Radcliffe asks exactly this question in his book, Why Go to Church?

He quotes a teenager: ‘Attending the Eucharist is like sitting through an endlessly repeated film, and you know exactly how it ends’. So why do we do it?  Does it make any difference? I wonder if you can admit that church can be a bit boring?

There are many important reasons to come to church: scientific research overwhelmingly affirms that doing so generates better mental health; it creates community in what can be a populous but lonely city; we encourage our family, friends and ourselves to discern what it means to live life in all its abundance.

There are two other reasons that are important: ritual and boredom. First ritual.

The late Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, suggests that ritual is transformative. People tend to think that what makes religious people different from those who have no religious faith is that they believe different things. But that’s less than half the story. People in most religions behave distinctively.

It’s not that Christians are necessarily more moral than non-religious people. Although I would hope that our faith transforms us, little by little.

The difference is that religious people engage in ritual. We do certain things like praying over and over again. Musicians and sportspeople do the same thing.

There’s the old joke about a tourist who stops a taxi driver and she asks: ‘How can I get to the Royal Albert Hall’. The taxi driver replies: ‘Practise, lady, practise’.

Ritual – what we are doing here today and week by week – is the religious equivalent of the ‘deep practice’ of athletes or musicians.

It makes certain forms of behaviour instinctive. Engraved into our instincts, we have a certain way of being and of living. For example, prayer engenders gratitude; regular charitable giving makes us generous; being kind helps us feel less anxious; the experience of abstinence in Lent teaches us self-control; chatting to others after the service takes us beyond our own world and needs.

Each week, we hear again and again – because we constantly need reminding – of the importance of love of God and love of neighbour. The transformation of our character, our lives, and our habits, quietly happen as we come to church week by week. Every week we hear Scripture read. Like Peter in today’s gospel, we are challenged by Jesus’ sayings, and like him our understanding needs to change. Our epistle reading reminds us how careful we need to be in what we say. Particularly important in a world where what we say can be read immediately by millions of people on social media.

And we are spiritual nourished by simple gifts of bread and wine, and we are reminded that we, here in Campden Hill, are the body of Christ. [Ritual, what we do Sunday by Sunday, is what Cardinal Newman described as ‘God’s noiseless work’.]  That’s the first point: ritual changes us. It slowly transforms us and our community.

What about church being boring? Yes, it can be boring. Let me tell you, though, that watching a football match…. quite a lot of the time, it can be really boring. [unless Brentford are playing, of course!] And I’d like to suggest that it’s okay to experience boredom. In fact, it’s more than okay. Today we are surrounded by constant activity, lots of stimulation. Rory Stewart puts it like this:

"Our brains have become like the phones in our pockets: flashing, titillating, obsequious, insinuating machines, allergic to depth and seriousness, that tempt us every moment of the day from duty, friends, family and sleep."

So, we shouldn’t be surprised when we’re faced with an hour in church without this stimulation, we naturally feel a twinge of boredom. And the reason is that we are being detoxed. It can be really uncomfortable.

I once decided to do a three day food detox. It wasn’t a happy experiment. I only ate fruit and vegetables for three days. No coffee, no alcohol, no salt or pepper or sugar, no butter with a baked potato, no salad dressing to make salad actually nice to eat. It was so difficult.

In fact, it was a disaster because by the end of it I was so sick of the diet that I went out and bought a MacDonalds… clearly undoing all that good eating!

The experience was deeply uncomfortable because of years of a particular diet isn’t easily shifted in three days.

During our weekly detox here in church, sometimes feeling a sense of boredom, unseen things happen. It interrupts our regular life pattern and encourages a state of deeper thoughtfulness and creativity. Many parents will tell you that children with ‘nothing to do’ will eventually invent some weird, fun game to play—with a cardboard box, or a dance routine.

The problem in today’s world is that we don’t wrestle with these slow moments. We try to eliminate moments of boredom with smart phones.

Winnie the Pooh has some wise words. He says to the overworked, stressed out, middle-aged Christopher Robin: “Doing nothing often leads to the very best kind of something.” In other words, right action emerges from long and slow deliberation.

So, what we are doing on Sundays (and daily if you can), instead of fleeing boredom, lean into it. What might we experience as we relax into the liturgy: space to think, to question, journey together and inhabit the tradition.

Timothy Radcliffe writes: ‘…the liturgy works in the depths of our minds and hearts a very gradual, barely perceptible transformation of who we are, so quietly that we might easily think that nothing is happening at all’.

But something is happening: we experience a very gradual barely perceptible transformation of who we are. Ritual, and the boredom we might feel in these moments, gathered around this altar, it changes the world by changing us.

References

Lord Sacks, http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical1785.aspx

Timothy Radcliffe, Why Go to Church?