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Giving Something Up to Receive Much More

18th Sunday : 4 August 2013  : Colossians 3: 1-5, 9-11

Augustine of Hippo became the most powerful formative theological influence that western Christianity experienced from the 5th century on. He was also a successful and pugnacious controversialist and debater on behalf of North African Catholic Christianity. Although only the Bishop of a back water Diocese, he spearheaded the overcoming of all the false faith options that were powerfully entrenched in the religious landscape of his day.

But before taking up high office in the Church he knew that he would have to take the measure of the personal costs involved in this choice. In particular he would have to do without intimate association with women, whose company he enjoyed in and out of bed. So in his Episcopal living arrangements he took two prudential steps. He surrounded himself with bright male friends, highly committed Christians, whose company and conversation would reward, stimulate and comfort him.

He also turned his Episcopal household into a semi monastic group of lay helpers whose corporate life was governed by sensible rules for group living. A glass or two of wine was allowed at dinner, but those who couldn’t stop at that would have their wine ration cut for a while. There were also tough prohibitions against bitchy gossip. A sign in the dining room read, "Whoever enjoys attacking the life of those who are absent/ by his scandal mongering/ let him know that his own life is not worthy of this table."

Giving up things we enjoy in order to get closer to God, and to become more effective Christians – this is not something we hear much about in contemporary Christianity. We are used to life affirming versions of the faith that let us enjoy to the full all the good things of our prosperous society. But sometimes it helps to say no to what we like in order to be able to say yes to what we want to become.

At an early stage of my ministry at St Peter’s, Willis St we set out on what was called a collective discernment process, a wide ranging consultation with our urban neighbours and our congregations to find out what we wanted to do and be in the years ahead. At the end of it our guidebook told us that the Vestry should fast for 24 hours up to and including the day we would spend together choosing our goals for the next few years of parish life.

How this strong request threw us into confusion! None of us had fasted before. Nor did any of our Christian neighbours have any experience of this helpful discipline from which to advise us – not even the Marist Fathers up the road at St Mary’s, Boulcott St. So reading off the instruction book we stopped eating meat the day before, and then went on to lots of non-caffeine liquids on the day of the fast.

What I remember about that fast day is the blanket feeling of grey, blandness that settled over me as all the emotional colouring that food and coffee normally supplied dropped out of the range of my senses. I became aware of how much I used food and drink as little treats and rewards to get me through the parts of the day I didn’t enjoy so much. Yet along with all this dullness came also a sharpened sense of judgement, an unblunted discernment of what we ought to be doing in the next little while in our life together.

This morning we heard some astringent advice to the Colossians on the subject of self-discipline, and about the giving up of certain pleasures in order to advance their spiritual growth. In that brief excerpt we missed out on the warning against false asceticism that is always a danger when spiritual elites become obsessed with complicated rules that are more a reflection of spiritual pride than a common sense avoiding of bad habits and beguiling temptations. We heard about a list of sins that relate to the body, though we missed out on a list that diagnosed all the destructive effects of wagging tongues. This is the saying no side of Christianity that its twentieth century critics seized on with such glee. In "Beyond the Fringe," Peter Cook and Dudley Moore caricatured the message of the Pauline epistles as, "Dear Corinthians, stop enjoying yourselves, don sack cloth and ashes, and start flagellating yourselves."

In fact the real message of Christianity is that sometimes we have to give something up in order to receive much more. We sacrifice something that matters to us not because we are life hating pleasure avoiders, but rather because we anticipate that it is the royal road to better things that God has in store for us.

That is where Augustine comes in again. As Henry Chadwick pointed out, "He first saw the paradox that love, which is the quest for personal happiness, necessarily implies some self-renunciation and the pain of being made what one is not." We have to grow in order to become more loving people and more faithful Christians, and sometimes that involves a bit of pruning and cutting. But always with the wisdom that Augustine showed in setting up his new life as a busy Bishop. In order to take something out of his life – in this case erotic pleasure – he put some new rewarding factors in – a supportive, healthy community, and stimulating companionship – to balance things out.

Christianity has this ascetic side to it – this saying no to some pleasures – because of two deep beliefs in its way of looking at the world. If we want to experience a real and lasting peace with God and with ourselves then we will need to neutralise the life of the passions – that driven, volcanic side of our affections and revulsions that can sweep aside the prudent, peaceable wisdom that Christ offers us. And Christianity believes in our total transformation, a transformation of the body through resurrection in which our old natures that got us into so much trouble will be put aside. That will involve a process of patient, determined learning of God’s new ways, supported and inspired by the power of Divine grace to change us.

Finally, let me make this clear – healthy Christian renunciation is as much an attitude to life as it is about a disciplined way of drawing near to God. Edith Wharton was an accomplished novelist and acute observer of New York society. Towards the end of her life she summed up her attitude to the more unyielding aspects of her life experience in this way, "At my age, and with a will to live (and to work) as strong as mine, one comes soon, I find, to accept sorrows and renunciations, and to build with them, instead of letting them tear one down."