A
sermon first preached at St Gabriel’s Church, Bishopwearmouth.
Acts 17:15-34 and John 6:56-69
Last
week a small article caught my eye in the Church
Times. It read:
Pagans demand restitution
A group of
pagans have written to the Archbishops and several bishops asking for a public
apology for what they claim is “centuries of persecution”, and that two Church
of England churches be given to them to turn back into temples. The Odinist
Fellowship, a charity that promotes English paganism, has accused the C of E of
attempting a “spiritual genocide” during the conversion of England in the
seventh century, and of turning pagan temples into today’s parish churches.
“The Church has never come to terms with its past crimes,” the Fellowship’s
director, Ralph Harrison, said.
Church Times 18 August 2017
Now,
that might sound bizarre or even quite funny, and—at least, as
reported—somewhat confused about history, but, given our reading from Acts this evening, I took a closer look
at the Odinist Fellowship.
They are registered as a charity and as an official
religion in England and Wales, with the legal protection from discrimination
that being an officially-recognised religion provides.
They worship the
northern European gods we might recognise as belonging to Norse mythology, gods
and goddesses such as Tyr, Odin, Thor, and Frigg, after whom we name days of
the week. These they consider to be our indigenous deities, brought by the
Anglo-Saxons, and as opposed to Christianity and Islam, which they see as
hostile immigrant religions.
They believe these gods and goddesses to be “true
gods, divine, living, spiritual entities, endowed with power and intelligence,
able and willing to intervene in the course of Nature and of human lives” [see
odinistfellowship.co.uk] and in the mythologies not as literal figures and
events but as human attempts to understand and speak of the real gods that
stand behind the stories.
They hold to Nine Noble Virtues of courage, truth,
honour, fidelity, discipline, hospitality, industriousness, self-reliance and
perseverance.
They practice sacrifice, of food and drink, understood not as
physically feeding spiritual beings but as a sacrament: “that is to say, it is a
symbol which effects what it symbolises, and symbolises what it effects. The
sacrifice plays an important role in the cosmic conflict between the forces of
order and chaos, because the symbolism of ritually offering … life-giving
sustenance to the gods actually brings what is symbolically portrayed into
effect on the spiritual plane,
thereby strengthening the gods’ hand in their eternal struggle against the
powers of chaos.” [see odinistfellowship.co.uk].
We might contrast this with
the sacrament we will take part in this evening, which we understand to bring
into effect in the physical plane what is already determined in the spiritual
plane in and through Christ Jesus.
What
is at first glance faintly ridiculous is, at second glance, a true and living
relationship with the local pantheon of gods. Which is, in and of itself, very
interesting, in our post-Christian but also post-secular society.
But
at a third glance, we may see something very ugly: the way in which this
Teutonic religion sets itself against Christianity as a weak and despised
Semitic religion that has failed Britain and left us exposed to the rise of
Islam. They repeatedly affirm Odinism as being life-affirming, spiritual,
nature-loving, cosmic, ethical, as
opposed to Christianity which they present as being none of these things,
but, rather, of stealing many of their stories, rites and festivals and
debasing them. In Odinism, instead, they proclaim, is the indigenous and true answer
to disaffected young people’s spiritual longing.
These
are the gods that stand behind the rise of northern European and English
nationalism, the resurgence of White Supremacy and its attendant blame-shifting.
To be clear, I am not saying that all
adherents of Odinism are neo-Nazis; but there is a very strong overlap with far-right
fascism, as well as clear parallels with the ‘folk and hearth’ mythos that underpinned
the rise of the Nazi movement.
But,
you might say to me, these are not gods at all. They are nothing but stories.
Not so.
The Bible does not paint for us what might be called philosophical monotheism—the belief that
there is only one god; with the correlation that all other gods are either
figments of the imagination or alternative approximations of the one god.
Rather, the Bible paints a picture of what we might term creational monotheism—that there is one eternal and creator God,
whose creation includes many spiritual beings, or lower-case-g gods, endowed
with power, intelligence, and free-will. Some of these choose to love and serve
the creator God—Yahweh—while others are in rebellion against him.
Both
Old and New Testaments assume a world populated by gods. Many are named, such
as Tiamat and Rahab and Chemosh and Baal and the Princes of Persia and Greece;
along with others who serve Yahweh, such as Michael, for whom the Minster where
I am based is named, or Gabriel, after whom this place is named (we tend to
call these gods ‘angels’ but that term comes with a great deal of unhelpful
cultural baggage).
Other descriptions of gods include the Angel of the Lord,
the Angel of Death, the Council of Heaven, the Sons of God, the satan (which
might be a role, rather than an individual), the powers and principalities of
the heavenly realms, and the unclean spirits Jesus drives out before him again
and again.
In the plagues of Egypt, Yahweh takes on and overthrows one member
of the Egyptian pantheon after another, culminating with Ra the sun god and the
divine image-bearers Pharaoh and his first-born son.
The
Ten Commandments assume the existence of many gods. The first is an injunction
to have no gods besides Yahweh—and the sin of Israel is always to turn to other
gods along with Yahweh, never instead of Yahweh. The second prohibits
idols, images behind which gods stand.
Again and again, the Psalms refer to
Yahweh judging the gods for the injustice with which they hold humanity in
slavery. The gods are real. Many do not hold us in goodwill: we are to avoid
them, as a matter of priority. Others, loyal to Yahweh, support us: but we are
not to consider them his equal, for they are created beings like ourselves.
When
Paul sees that Athens was full of idols, he was deeply distressed: not because
they were wasting their time on things that were not real, but because they
were exposing themselves to gods that were very real—albeit, as the Odinists
understand, bearing no actual correlation to the idols they stand behind—and
those spiritual beings were holding them captive.
Indeed, Paul was so
distressed that he abandoned his usual practice of going to the local Jewish
community before going to the Gentiles, choosing instead to go to both
communities from the start.
His
message was that there is one creator God, above all the created gods; a God
who does not need us to empower him, but who longs for us to know him as our
parent. This God stepped decisively into the world he had created, in the
person of Jesus, to set us free and call us into relationship with him.
This
Jesus has broken the power of the rebellious gods: they exerted their influence
over people to crucify him, but God vindicated this Jesus by raising him from
the dead; and in so doing has given assurance that there will be a day when
this Jesus judges the world in righteousness, dealing once-and-for-all with the
injustice of humans and of the gods.
It
is a powerful message; and one that is rather strange. Indeed, on hearing about
Jesus and the resurrection—in Greek, anastasis—for
the first time, Paul’s audience think he is talking of two new deities, Jesus
and his goddess-consort Anastasis. As Paul explains his hope to them, some
reject his message, others ask to hear more, and still others became believers.
Regardless
of how many Odinists there may be in the UK, we live in a society not
dissimilar to that of the Athens Paul visited. The good news of Jesus Christ,
widely misunderstood and rejected, is no longer familiar to many. Yet there is
an impulse to worship, an awareness of—and engagement with—the predominantly
unseen spiritual aspect of creation. There is an interest in magic, in healing
powers, in divination, in seeing the future or in contacting the dead.
This
is not good news. Promising benevolence, the gods provoke people against
people, with the goal of devouring one another. By this, I am not diminishing
human free-will and responsibility—Jesus will judge humanity—but I am saying
that there is more at work than meets the eye—he will judge the powers and
principalities too.
The
good news is that God—the one eternal creator God—has not left us alone, but
comes to seek and to save: to save us from ourselves, and from the gods.
In
a world where we see so much going on that we, so shaped by a secular
worldview, find hard to make any sense of;
in a world where many, having been
persuaded to disbelieve in the gods, are left blaming the one eternal creator
God for so much suffering;
this
is a hope that, yes, still divides opinion, but one that sets the captives
free. As Simon Peter recognised, in Jesus is eternal life—life in its fullness—for
he is the believable, knowable, Holy One of God. In Jesus, the one eternal
creator God is made known—relationally known—to us. This is not “spiritual
genocide” but spiritual liberation.
The
population of Sunderland needs to hear this good news. Are we deeply distressed
enough by what we see around us to proclaim it?
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