Texts: 1 Thessalonians 7:11-12; Luke 21:8-9
Whatever Jesus Himself taught about the end of the world (and there’s a lot of debate about this), there’s no doubt that many early Christians believed it was just around the corner and that very shortly God was going to wrap the whole thing up.

But that raised the question, what were Christians to do in the meantime? Give up the day job, leave the family and spend all the time evangelising and thus save as many souls as possible from being on the wrong side at the looming Day of Judgement? And then, when the Second Coming didn’t arrive as many expected, another question took centre stage: how are Christians to relate to this present world, this present Age – which looked like continuing for a while? What about the various institutions of society?

We can see the shift in focus occurring within the pages of the New Testament, both in the letters of Paul (which were all written before the Gospels) and in the Gospels themselves. There’s a progression from Mark through Matthew and then Luke and ending with John. In John’s Gospel, the emphasis on the Second Coming has diminished drastically, and the emphasis is on living in the dimension of the eternal now, where we encounter resurrection and judgement and Christ’s presence breaking in into this continuing life. (Though it’s important to remember that John does also keep hold of the hope of future resurrection and the final judgement.)

This morning’s readings are from early Paul and from Luke, a later Gospel. The interesting thing is that both are dealing with what to do in the time before the End. And the practical advice of Paul and the Lucan Jesus is similar, namely: whether the End comes tomorrow or a long way into the future, simply carry on with ordinary life and with its responsibilities, and keep your eyes on God.

Paul: ‘…we hear that some of your number are idling their time away, minding everybody’s business but their own. To all such we give these orders, and we appeal to them in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to work quietly for their living’. (2 Thessalonians 3:11-12)    (Which is not a charter for ‘work-for-the-dole’ policies, though right-wing politicians have sometimes tried to make use of this passage.)

Jesus: ‘…Take care that you are not misled. For many will come claiming my name and saying, “I am he”, and, “The Day is upon us”. Do not follow them. And when you hear of wars and insurrections, do not fall into a panic. These things are bound to happen first; but the end does not follow immediately.’ (Luke 21:8-9)

The questions did not and do not go away. How do we Christians relate to this present age? And as the centuries pass, one question becomes acute: how does the Church remain authentic as she journeys through history? How do we retain our freshness, our integrity, our distinct identity, and not get swallowed up by the world, betrayed by our own weak and sinful natures? How does the salt retain its savour?

For the first 250 years the Church was kept authentic by its periodic persecution at the hands of the Roman State. There were few advantages in this world to being a Christian then. If you belonged to the Church, your faith cost you and was likely to be genuine. But after the Roman Empire became officially Christian, many people flooded into the Church who were not genuine converts. The spiritual temperature of the Church declined. And the long struggle to maintain the spiritual integrity of the Church and of individual Christians began in earnest, in the face of compromise and of weakness and of complex social reality.

Now there are several basic strategies Christians have adopted in this struggle, not all of them mutually exclusive.
o One is to strive to transform this world – to engage in holistic mission. To be leaven, salt, light in the world, in the totality of human life. To deal with the tension between the Church and the world by mission.
o A second is to go into the desert, into the wilderness, either as individuals or as communities, and live lives of prayer in silence and solitude. This was the response of many in the 4th Century Church to the flood of pseudo-converts into the Church. The Desert Fathers gave birth to what came to be called ‘monasticism’.
o A third is to separate off as a faith community geographically – to take your families away from the corrupting culture around you and go to another part of the world which seems to be empty, and start again. For example, a lot of European Christians went to North America with this in mind. But this strategy works only temporarily, and often not at all.
o A fourth is to stay where you are but retreat inwardly as individuals – to privatise and interiorise your life of faith, leaving the world to its own devices, but nevertheless obeying its laws and participating in to a greater or lesser extent in its commercial life and its social life. The difficulty with this last strategy is that the unbelieving world keeps changing the boundaries, and its values and world-view or views keep invading the Church. In the long run it’s impossible to keep our life of faith in a water-tight compartment. As the German Church found under Hitler.

Of course no strategy can bear fruit unless it’s blessed by the Holy Spirit, the giver of life. And the Spirit has sent waves of renewal and revival through the Church from time to time – unpredictably, so this can’t be a strategy. That said, the most effective long-term strategy seems to be a combination of the first two I’ve mentioned. It seems that the Holy Spirit blesses the Church when she has an uncompromising sense of her mission to the totality of human life, coupled with a vibrant monasticism. This corresponds to what faithful individual Christians discover in their individual lives: the importance of the outward journey in costly mission engagement with the world, and the importance of the inward journey of prayer and inward engagement with self and God.

If it’s all action and no prayer, we either burn out or we get diverted from what it’s all about, that is, about God and the Kingdom of God. And if it’s all prayer and no action, we stand aside from God’s purpose from the world, we cease to be His leaven, salt, light in the world which is ultimately His.

I want now to look at monasticism and monastics within this perspective. (By the way, we find monasticism across most of the Christian Church, in Roman Catholicism, in Eastern Orthodoxy, in Anglicanism, and in some forms of Protestantism.) At the heart of classic monasticism are these elements:
o continual worship and prayer, witnessing to the goal of all human life, which is communion with God, in this life and the next;
o a community life of love and mutual service;
o vows of commitment to that community (‘stability’), continued conversion of life within that community, and obedience;
o celibacy and renunciation of personal possessions;
o a continuing engagement with Holy Scripture;
o hospitality to the stranger, the visitor, who is to be treated as Christ.

It’s possible to idealise monasticism. But it’s hard work, and like anything in the Church it can go wrong, and from time to time it has to be reformed. Yet again and again it has been the secret source of the spiritual integrity and renewal of the Church. And this is not surprising, as in many respects it’s a repeat of the life the disciples lived around Jesus. And it’s an uncompromising witness to the truth that we are meant for God, that God is our goal. It can perform something of the same spiritually bracing function as does expectation of the imminent end of the world, when God will be all in all. Which is what monasticism is all about also.

Monastic life is separate from the world, and isn’t possible without that separation. But that separation is not absolute. In the first place, many people keep seeking out monasteries, to share at least temporarily in a life totally integrated around Christ, to regain their own Christian vision of life, and to seek spiritual refreshment and guidance. I myself do. I’ve been regularly going to a Cistercian monastery in Hawkes Bay for forty years, and I always find it both challenging and revitalising.

In the second place, monastics (monks and nuns) do impact on the world directly and indirectly, by their writings and their dealings with individual people (and of course by their intercessory prayer). And a few are drawn back unwillingly into a ministry in the world. One such monk was the saint whose life we celebrate today, Saint Hugh of Lincoln. He was a Carthusian monk of the 12th Century, living in Le Grande Chartreuse in the Alps. (If any of you saw the beautiful film ‘Into Great Silence’ at a recent film festival, that’s his monastery, 900 years on.) He was persuaded by King Henry II of England to take charge of a Carthusian monastery in England founded by the king. There Hugh immediately found himself on the side of the peasants and the poor in various conflicts with the royal establishment. In spite of this, the king had him appointed Bishop of Lincoln. There he continued to stand up for the rights of the poor, and to minister to them. He built a hospital for lepers, and helped nurse them. He was committed to education, and to the ministry of preaching. He was disciplined, cheerful, humble, tactful, and much loved. He earned the respect of three English kings, and one of them was pall bearer at his funeral. On reflection, what strikes me about him is that it was the values he learned in his monastic formation which determined the integrity of his engagement with the world of his day.

When we go through church history, this story is repeated again and again. Monastics themselves, or people influenced by monastics, have been quietly at the heart of powerful movements of spiritual renewal and of social justice. For example, in the 20th Century, perhaps the greatest spiritual writer, someone whose many books spoke deeply to the spiritual condition of his contemporaries (and continue to speak), was Thomas Merton. The son of a New Zealand father and an American mother, Merton became a Cistercian monk in the United States, and amongst other roles he was one of the articulate consciences of the civil rights movement and the peace struggle at the time of the Vietnamese War and the nuclear arms race. One American church leader at the time dismissed him scornfully – ‘what can a monk living apart from society know of such things?’ Ten years later he apologised, and recognised that Merton’s very detachment from society gave him the perspective to speak prophetically. One of Merton’s books was entitled ‘Contemplation in a world of action’, a title which just about sums things up. Another book he wrote, ‘Elected Silence’, was a crucial part of my own faith journey as a young man.

There’s something very interesting going on in the Christian Church today. The ‘active’ religious orders, orders formed around a ministry in the world like nursing or education, in many places are in decline, sometimes rapid. However, the ‘contemplative’ orders (which exploded again after the Second World War), today are holding, or declining a little. And what has exploded in the last couple of decades is the number of those people associated formally with contemplative monasteries and convents. Christians who link themselves to a particular religious community and seek to live out its particular spirituality, its charism, in their daily lives.

The significance of this development is several-sided.
o It complements what the parishes can offer. No parish, however good, can meet the diverse spiritual needs of every one of its members. Inevitably there are trade-offs which leave some people out. One size does not fit all.
o It challenges what the parishes actually offer. In today’s world, many congregations have been evangelised by the unbelieving world, have compromised with the values and assumptions of the world, often without knowing it. Its culture has infiltrated them. Being associated with a monastic community can give a salutary perspective and corrective.
o It renews people’s energy and vision for holistic mission to the whole of human life. When you’ve experienced something of the totality of life lived in Christian community, you’re thrown back into the fullness of Christ’s transforming mission for the world. In a monastery there’s no distinction between Sunday and Monday.
o It may well be foreshadowing a change in the shape of the Church. The comprehensive geographical parish structures which served the Church in its Christendom centuries (when Church and society were coterminous), these structures are no longer sufficient for Christian life and mission in today’s pluralist world. New ways of ‘being Church’ are emerging. Watch this space.

Finally. The Church remains authentic to the extent that she opens herself in prayer to the Holy Spirit and to the Word who is Jesus, and obeys what she hears God saying when she prays. This is the meaning of the daily monastic service called Vigils –at about 2 a.m. - where monks pray in the night and wait for the coming of the dawn and the coming of Christ. So let me finish with two quotes of deceptively simple words from a 20th Century Benedictine monk:  ‘Pray as you can, and not as you can’t.’ And, ‘The only way to pray is to pray; and the way to pray well is to pray much. If one has no time for this, then one must at least pray regularly. But the less one prays the worse it goes.’  True words. Think about them. And wait in hope.

A sermon preached in St Alban’s Anglican Church on 18 November 2007 by the Revd Canon Peter Stuart.

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