Village Shepherd

Our diocese recently had a three-day residential clergy conference. It was an interesting experience to spend three days in the company of no-one but clergy. By the end of the three days I was very glad to get home and back to some normal conversation.

There can be something very stifling about spending time exclusively with Christians. Christians are often so concerned to do the right thing and to act in the right way that they don't always come across as being quite real. This may be true of devotees of other religions as well, but it seems to be less true of those who have no religious affiliation. The company of those who have no spiritual pretensions whatsoever can therefore be very refreshing and I find myself looking forward to the robust wit and humour of non-Christians.

We Christians have something of a problem. On the one hand, Jesus tells us to be real and deplores those whom he considers to be hypocrites, on the other hand Saint Paul spends a lot of time telling us how we ought to behave. The instructions given in today's reading from the letter to the Ephesians make quite depressing reading and sound like the sort of instructions the Victorians were fond of issuing.

Today's verses have a very negative sound and they seem devoid of fun. We're told to be careful how we live. We must be wise and make the most of our time. We're warned against alcohol and told instead to be filled with the spirit, singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. And we're told to spend the whole of our time giving thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of the our Lord Jesus Christ.

For me, this passage reinforces those Victorian and childhood images of life after death spent sitting on a cloud and twanging a harp. The thought of spending eternity singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs appalls me.

But there is an awful lot of evil in the world and I certainly wouldn't want to promote that evil. A well-known brand of ice cream has hit upon the brilliant idea of marketing their products under the name of the seven deadly sins. And so we're encouraged to indulge in jealousy and envy and so on. Just a bit of good humoured fun to sell a product, but it's constantly reinforcing the message that sin is just a bit of fun to be enjoyed.

How do Christians strike the balance between being kill-joys, and indulging in the horrible sins which militate against God and against spirituality? And how can Christians promote Christianity without being entirely negative and turning people against God by their obvious disapproval of what other people regard as enjoyment?

I'm sure that Jesus had the right answer when he encouraged his followers not to put on airs and graces or to wear a Christian façade, but to constantly work at being themselves. Those of us who are grown up have spent so long trying to conform to what other people require of us, that many of us no longer really know quite what we're like deep inside. Sometimes our inner self bursts out and startles us and we find ourselves doing something really unexpected. Sometimes we can frighten ourselves by the intensity of our reaction. When this happens we tend to say things like, "I don't know what got into me." Or we might describe someone else who has acted apparently out of character as being "beside himself" with rage.

Actually we're all acting in character, but it's a part of our character which hasn't been very deeply probed. We only reach those hidden depths when we lose control and the experience is often so terrifying that we do all we can never to lose control. But this means that those hidden depths are pushed further and further away from consciousness until we soon deny that they exist at all. When that happens our façade becomes thicker and thicker, and we move further and further away from reality whilst kidding ourselves that we know all there is to know about our own inner depths.

And for Christians all of this is compounded, because we know it exactly how we ought to behave but we are afraid that if we let go and allow our behaviour to be uncontrolled, we will let down both God and Christianity.

But this is one of the risks of Christianity. We need to trust Jesus when he says that he loves us exactly as we are. We need to face the humiliation and the shame that the worst of our behaviour can produce in us. We need to know that even though we might feel humiliated and ashamed, Jesus never feels like that about us. And we need to forgive ourselves for our faults, just as Jesus forgives us.

Once we're able to face all that about ourselves, then we cease to worry about what other people think about us and begin to become who we really are. And then amazingly, we'll discover that the awfulness that we thought was inside us isn't nearly so awful after all. And with that incredible discovery comes a real freedom, a freedom to behave as we like, to have fun and to enjoy life.

The strait-laced disapproval disappears. The kill-joy disappears. Christian joy and happiness engulfs our being without us having to do anything about it. Like Jesus, we'll find ourselves overflowing with Christian love.

We'll be free to drink but we won't fall into drunkenness or debauchery, we'll be filled with the spirit. We'll sing and make a melody to the Lord in our hearts, and we won't be able to stop giving thanks to God for everything, through Jesus Christ.

And suddenly we'll find that we've cracked it. Suddenly we'll discover that through Jesus, we're living not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of our time, just as St Paul said we should.