New occasions teach new duties

New Occasions Teach New Duties - a service for a time of uncertainty and turmoil

Call to worship: (Psalm 96)

O sing to the Lord a new song: sing to the Lord all the Earth

Sing to the Lord and bless His holy name: proclaim the good news of his salvation from day to day.

Hymn O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness (Singing the faith 34)

Prayers of adoration and confession + Lord’s prayer

Address

As we enter a period of great uncertainty, as we embark on a voyage into the unknown, in which the only thing that everyone seems to be agreed upon is that there are choppy waters ahead and that landfall may be a very long way off, I’d like you to cast your minds back to another group of people who set off on a voyage, looking for a new world – a world in which they believed that they would have control – control over their lives, and more particularly over the way they worshipped God.

I’m talking of the Pilgrim Fathers, who set of from Plymouth nearly 400 years ago. They wanted to leave Europe, to find a place where they could decide for themselves how they lived and how they worshipped. And as they gathered on the quayside ready to board the Mayflower to depart forever from their native land, their pastor came to bid them farewell, and he preached a sermon to them. Some of his words have been incorporated into a hymn, which we are going to sing shortly: The Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his word.

They knew that they were going to have to change to meet the new challenges of their new life. He was reminding them that they would still take with them the Bible – God’s word to them – and that God would be with them wherever they went. But he was also reminding them that they must be ready to learn new things – that they did not know it all – there was more, and better, still to come!

Hymn We limit not the truth of God (suggested tune: Ellacombe StF 311)

Reading – Isaiah 43 vv. 16 - 21

Reading – Ezekiel 18 vv. 25 - 32

Hymn Once to every man and nation (Tune Ebenezer, StF 237)

Reading – Matthew 5 vv. 21 - 48

SERMON

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.

By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,

Toiling up new Calv’ries ever with the cross that turns not back;

New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,

They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

This hymn was one of the ones that we used to sing regularly in assembly at my secondary school – and I heartily disliked it! I didn’t like the tune, but more than that I disagreed with the sentiment expressed in the words, “time makes ancient good uncouth”. For a start “uncouth” seems such a silly word – I’m sure that us lads from the slums of Newcastle were uncouth more often than not. And we were proud of it, rather than ashamed!

But more than that – I disagreed with the idea that Truth could change over time, and in particular that there could be an upward progression with every age morally better than the last. Surely, I argued, Truth is universal and for All Time? I was considerably influenced by the writings of C.S. Lewis – whose books on Christian apologetics were new and fresh at the time. He was violently opposed what he called “chronological snobbery” – the notion that the accepted intellectual position of today is superior to those of previous eras. We don’t keep progressing – sometimes we go forward towards the universal truth (for example with the abolition of slavery), sometimes we regress back away from it (as in the rise of Nazi-ism in Germany); but the Truth itself never changes – or does it?

James Lowell, the author of this hymn, grew up in America before the civil war. He saw the evils of slavery, but he must also have seen that those who supported slavery and owned slaves were not all wicked people. Perhaps we need to remember today that those who have different views from our own – sometimes views that we consider to be unwholesome or downright wrong – are not contemptible or depraved. Even if we find it hard to understand how those who voted on the opposite side from us in the EU referendum can square their decision with their conscience, we have to force ourselves to assume that they were not acting out of self-interest or hatred, but genuinely saw the world differently from us and so had a different vision for the future.

As I say, Lowell must have been aware that, while slavery was a dreadful evil and a matter of shame for his country, there were slave owners who had genuine concern for their slaves and believed that the system was capable of being fair and just to both slave and owner. Of course, we disagree – but this is from a viewpoint that places personal freedom above almost any other criterion in assessing quality of life. The abolition of slavery was an example of a nation toiling to keep abreast of a truth that, in appearance at least, was changing.

However, it was not slavery that inspired the hymn: it is part of a longer poem written as a protest against the war that the United States was waging with Mexico. James Lowell pleaded with his nation to reject the call for what most people saw as a just war, and to find a new and better way of settling international disputes. Perhaps this is a call that we would like to see heeded today!

Whatever our opinion about the existence of a Universal Truth, it is undeniable that for each of us individually and for our society as a whole, truth does change over time. We may explain this in terms of getting closer (or further away) from the Absolute Truth, or in terms of a change in what truth is – for us; but these two concepts are not really so very far from one another.

Back in October 2005, Songs of Praise had an edition where contemporary hymn writers discussed the twenty favourite hymns nominated by viewers of the programme. One of these was John Bell, a member of the Iona Community. He took issue with the line in that well-loved hymn, Great is Thy Faithfulness, which states, “Thou changest not”. It’s not true, he argues: Our God is a dynamic God; Moses, Jonah and others in the Bible experienced God changing his mind. In the New Testament there is an example of Jesus altering his decision in response to argument:

Matthew 15:21-28

Here Jesus appears to have believed that his mission was only to the Jews – a new truth dawns on him when he sees the faith of the Canaanite woman. It seems that Jesus has been influenced by his Jewish upbringing into accepting that God has sent him only to the Jews. Even he needs to re-think in order to accept the universality of God’s love.

There are numerous examples from past history where “new occasions” have shaken firmly held beliefs. Perhaps the most obvious was the campaign by Wilberforce and others to abolish the slave trade. We now find it astonishing that practising Christians could have supported and defended (even from the pulpit) this terrible evil – but perhaps there are aspects of our own society that will appear equally repugnant to our great grandchildren’s generation!

We now accept democracy as the fairest (or even the only acceptable) method of governing society, but it is only a century since universal male suffrage was finally introduced in this country at the end of the First World War – and even less time since women were given the vote on the same terms as men.

The hymn “all things bright and beautiful” remains a favourite with many, but we have long since stopped including in our hymnbooks the verse: “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate; God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate.” We no longer accept the idea of a rigid class system where everyone ought to accept their station in life and be grateful for it. We believe that everyone should be allowed to aspire to greatness and equality of opportunity to pursue their aspirations.

In 1961, suicide ceased to be an offence, because we came to recognise that the person who commits suicide is not a feckless good-for-nothing seeking to escape their responsibilities to society, but a wretched, unhappy individual who deserves our sympathy, rather than our blame.

Today there are many examples of “New Occasions” that create new duties and demand that we seek out new truths.

There is an ongoing debate about euthanasia, as medical science makes advances in prolongation of life, but sometimes without preserving quality of life. Our hearts go out to those of whom we read in our newspapers or see on our television screens, who are facing a lengthy period of pain and incapacity and long to be allowed to choose to die if life becomes intolerable – and also to their families who are condemned to watch their loved-one suffer. But, if we once allow the principle of allowing someone to choose to die, how can we be sure that no-one will ever feel under an obligation to ask for their life to be ended? How will we be able to distinguish between the invalid for whom life has become intolerable and the person who believes that they have become an intolerable burden to those around them?

Perhaps we do not need to? Perhaps, someone should be allowed to take their own life in order to relieve the suffering of those who have to care for them. After all, “there is no love greater than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” But then again, things could go further than this: sons and daughters might start to put pressure on their parents to ask for euthanasia – because they cannot bear to watch their suffering, or because they cannot cope with the responsibility of caring for them, or because they don’t want all of their inheritance to be spent on nursing care! How do we decide what is right? Is there an absolute “sanctity of human life” that is true for all time? Or is it time for us to toil up a new Calvary to find a new truth?

We have recently become very conscious of the need to guard our national security against the threat of terrorism; but how do we get the right balance between security for the many and freedom and human rights for the few? Can we, for example, justify imprisoning a suspected terrorist without bringing them to trial? Who is to decide when someone becomes a “suspected terrorist”?

Within the Christian Church, there is disagreement about the correct attitude towards homosexuality. What was once seen as a sin is now recognised by many as being a genuine difference in personal makeup – whether of genetic or environmental origin. But how far should we go in accepting the validity of different sexual orientations? Christian responses currently range from the evangelical offer of help to repentance and cure, through the Anglican Church’s demand for celibacy for homosexual clergy, to the recognition of Gay marriage.

Conservation has become a popular cause both within and outside the church in recent years; but exactly what are we seeking to conserve? And for what purpose? It makes a substantial difference whether we are concerned to pass on to our grandchildren a world where they will be able to enjoy a good standard of living, or are seeking to look after the whole of God’s creation as His stewards.

And this brings us on to the vexed question of Animal Rights. Traditional Christianity did not recognise that animals had any rights – they were merely part of the creation that God had given to Adam to subdue. But we are now aware, not only that we are ourselves animals, but also that many of the so-called “higher” animals share many characteristics with us including a degree of reasoning power, the ability to show affection towards one another and the potential for fearing and anticipating, as well as feeling, pain. To what extent does out new knowledge about our non-human cousins require that we change our attitudes towards them? How far are we justified in exploiting them for our own benefit?

Those are just a few examples of how our modern world presents us with new questions regarding right and wrong. How do we go about deciding how we ought to behave in these new circumstances? Well, I’ll come on to that in a moment, but first I’d like to say something about being very careful about judging other people who seem to have different standards to our own – perhaps standards that we find totally alien and – well, let’s not beat about the bush, wrong. Jesus told us not to judge and one very good reason for that is that we can never get inside another person and see what is really making them think and speak and do the things that they do.

Let me give you a couple of examples to explain what I mean.

I read recently that there used to be a tribe of South Sea islanders who routinely put to death their parents as soon as they began to exhibit any of the frailties of old age. But this was not a sign that they loved their parents less than we do, or that they did not believe that they had an obligation to treat them with kindness and respect. But they had a belief that the bodily state in which a person died would be the state in which they would live eternally in the afterlife. So, in their own eyes, they were actually saving their relatives from an eternity of disability.

In our own society, Jehovah’s witnesses may refuse to give consent for their children to receive a potentially life-saving blood transfusion. This is not because they value religious rules above the welfare of their children, but because they believe that the highest good of their children is served by refusing blood from another person. Death, in their view, is of lesser ultimate importance than disobedience to what they believe to be God’s will.

OK. Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s try to get down to something more practical. We must never judge other people, but we should be constantly questioning our own behaviour and trying to align it more with the will of God. Before we can start considering particular cases, we will need to get as clear as possible in our mind what basic rules of Right and Wrong underpin our decisions. As Christians, we will probably turn to the Bible as a source of guidance in this, but we will be sadly disappointed if we expect it to be easy to construct an ethical framework for the twenty-first century from books that were written more than two thousand years ago and in very different cultures. Most of the books of the Bible are long on examples and special cases, but rather short on broad general theories. We need to be constantly working from the particular to the general, and comparing and contrasting different approaches.

It is untenable to simply pick on a text and expect it to apply immediately and literally to our own situation. After all, few of us are likely to covet our neighbour’s ass or be tempted to cook a kid in its mother’s milk! We live in different times from those of the patriarchs, prophets or apostles and we have to work out our own duties for our new occasions. We need to remember the rousing words spoken to the Pilgrim Fathers as they set out for the New World: the Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his word.

But how do we help it to break forth?

The philosophers have three main views on the origin of ethical principles: teleological, deontological and consequential.

The teleological approach is named from the Greek word for “aim” or “purpose”; for example, the “telos” of a knife is to cut well. Thus the purpose of ethics is to bring about the fulfilment of each person given the potentialities of human nature. This view gave rise to the ideas of a “natural law” common to everyone and tends to imply that the best way to decide on what is right and wrong is to follow your conscience. It also implies that the effect of an action on the actor is of great importance; thus the telling of a lie not only has bad consequences for those who are misled by the falsehood, but may also have a detrimental effect on the liar by making them a more untruthful person.

The deontological approach sees ethics as being derived from an external demand. Its name is derived from the Greek word for “ought” or “duty” and assumes that there is some sort of standard, perhaps a God, outside of mankind which demands our obedience. Kant adopted this view and suggested that the way to decide whether a particular rule was right or wrong was to imagine the consequences of everyone following it. Thus, if everyone told lies, no-one would be able to believe one another and chaos would result, so telling lies is wrong.

Finally you can take the consequential view of ethics. Here the rightness of an action is determined by its total consequences, with the aim being for “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. No action is intrinsically right or wrong, it all depends on its consequences. Thus a lie would be justified if it produced greater happiness than telling the truth. The standard example of this, which I remember being debated when I was training as a local preacher, is the situation where you are faced with someone who has declared his intention of murdering another person. He asks you where his intended victim is. You know, but are unsure whether or not to tell him. Should you (a) tell the truth (b) refuse to answer or (c) tell a bold lie and send him off in the opposite direction?

Would you like to phone a friend?

Based entirely on the consequential approach, we would probably decide that the best course of action is to tell a bold, convincing lie and send the murderer off on a wild goose chase. But I expect that most of us would find this a difficult thing to do, because we have been brought to believe that there is a deontological imperative to tell the truth – “honesty is the best policy”, “the devil is the father of lies”. Then again, the teleological view would urge us to consider the effect of our action on our own character and on those of both the murderer and his victim. Or we might hope to get away with refusing to answer, but what if the murderer threatens our life too? Do we sacrifice our life, perhaps knowing that he will find his victim sooner or later without our help?

I think that, when it comes to making decisions about real-life ethical dilemmas, we need to adopt all three philosophical approaches. As Christians we believe that God makes demands upon us; we also believe that one function of life on earth is to prepare us for eternal life by building up our characters; and we also need to consider the global consequences of our actions. And this means that we can’t rely solely on the written word in the Bible, or on Church Tradition to give us the answers. We must be, in the words of Jesus, “like a householder who can produce from his store things new and old.” (Matthew 13:52)

Hymn Moses, I know you’re the man (Singing the Faith 237)

Prayers of intercession

Hymn Lord, thy church on earth is seeking (Singing the Faith 410)

Blessing: O Father, Son, and Spirit, send us increase from above;

enlarge, expand all Christian souls to comprehend thy love,

and make us to go on, to know with nobler powers conferred:

The Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his word.