14th February 2010 - "Become children of light"

Stephen Fielding - St Mary's, St Peter's, Tewin and Ayot St Peter
John 12:36

Last Thursday, I watched the play Enron, the drama about one of the most serious company failings in the whole of American corporate history. You will know the basic outline. A company moves beyond its ordinary business of energy. Using very creative accountancy it boosts its profits to the point where they bear absolutely no relation to reality whatsoever. So profits were really losses, and the task for the chief financial officer was how to conceal these while keeping investor and employee perceptions unsuspecting and in fact buoyant. And what the play brings out is the deep unpleasantness of the way the company did things, the way employees were treated, how they were expected to be really very sycophantic sucking up to the bosses, nearly everyone caught up in a sense of greed, with employees encouraged to take their pay in stock or shares on the basis that the stock price kept on rising and so surely they were really well off. And in the background there was the political corruption in the state of Texas.  By the end, the company was worthless and 29,000 employees were without jobs and without pensions, given a small sum by way of pay off. What the company had done was to take the proper freedom of the markets and pervert it into a cruel and grotesque parody. The play was brilliantly and convincingly done, but it was very interesting that at the end the applause was rather subdued, as if we could see in that drama a bit of ourselves too.

We live in an age of very considerable pressure. Some of it is due to the speed of modern communication, which produces a culture of immediacy. The Blackberry that I own is tremendously useful, but there's no doubt that it also produces huge pressure to respond without delay. It means you're on the go all the time. There is the pressure for greater efficiency, cutting out waste, and duplication and bureaucracy. There is the pressure of economic stringency, leading to loss of work and work pressures and on into domestic pressures. I know from my own experience that I need to relate to different organisations and institutions within different timescales all of which can displace the sense of the natural rhythms of life. Of all the pressures that we face, and of all the pressures that there were at work in Enron, the pressure to conform is perhaps the strongest. The pressure on you as a member of the group, or the pressure imposed by the leader of the group. Leadership which operates by applying pressure or coercion defies what we know about the best form of leadership, and it fails to exhibit one of the two qualities which one of the best surveys of leadership in the last 20 years has identified, namely the quality of humility.

Moses hid his face because he was afraid of God; he stood in awe of this God who spoke to him from the burning bush. He stood in awe of the God of utter freedom, the God of love, the God of an unchanging character - the God who says, ‘I am who I am’, ‘I will be who I will be’ - the God of freedom and the God of unchanging character. The God ‘who loves in freedom’ (Barth). Moses was a true leader because he had humility. Does he not say –‘But who am I that I should approach Pharaoh and that I should bring the Israelites out Egypt?’ He is the leader who exhibits the vital quality of humility. Faced with this God, Moses has humility, and it is the humility of the best kind of leader, the humility that does not cringe but has authority, that is, it is deeply concerned with the welfare of the other, it has the other's good in view and at heart.

The God who loves in freedom desires that we love in freedom too. He desires that we set our moral compass by reference to his unchanging faithfulness. He doesn't want us to be hemmed in or coerced; nor does he want us to hem in or coerce others. In other words freedom and restraint and respect for others are the hallmarks of the good Christian life. And we must find time and room for God. The most fatal objection to all the pressures that we face is that they may make us displace God, may make us push God to the margin. How vital it remains to retrieve the wisdom of the Sabbath, alas so carelessly thrown away when Sunday was no longer regarded as a day of rest. There should be something very different about Sunday, which interrupts the pressures on us, which enables us to do things together, when we do stuff in the interests of God and of ourselves with celebration and thankfulness. At best it can ensure a change in our perspective on what has gone before and what the week ahead is likely to bring.

But most important of all, perhaps, we need to pray. Just look at the life of Jesus and see how in addition to the basic pattern of synagogue and temple worship he spent hours in a relationship of prayer with his Father. His secret life with God was shaped and nourished by this regular pattern. The prayer alone in the wilderness, nights spent in prayer, the prayer on the amount of transfiguration, the prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. The lesson seems to be that if we want to cope and flourish we had better pray, and it will be well for us to develop good habits of prayer that we repeat day after day, week after week. This is the formation of our life and of our life with God. It is the gradual shaping of our subconscious mind, the shaping of the layers of our self that we can nourish and sustain.  It enables us to trust to the light so that we may become children of light.

How vital it remains then to find some time every day when we can be alone with God, to place our lives into the hands of the living God.

AMEN