We read in Jeremiah 20:9, If I say, “I will not mention Him, or speak any more in His name, “there is in my heart as it were a burning fire ... “ - a part of what is described by scholars as Jesremiah’s Fifth Personal Lament. That prophet seems to be the first to have described his innermost feelings, and here they reveal his anguish. The prophet of God is compelled to speak in God’s Name. It is a very simple and direct point of view. Moses is said not to have reached the Promised Land because after he was directed to obtain water from the rock in the desert he did not take care to acknowledge the authority of God before the people in what he was doing. Perhaps some of the company of Israelites got the idea that Moses himself had divine powers. So it was and is a serious matter, this matter of acknowledging the divine presence and activity.

When Western countries were coming to the rescue of the small Muslim country Kuwait from the large Muslim state of Iraq during the first Gulf War, the Western armies in Saudi Arabia were not allowed to hold Christian services or even to display personal pendants like small crosses. Since those days we have seen British Airways eventually give in to an air hostess wearing such a pendant. As a Daily Telegraph writer wrote some time ago there are elements of the developed world of the West and especially young people that are tiring of the fashion of leaving God out of public life. The outlook of atheism seems to be getting more muscular and assertive in recent times, but still perhaps underneath it a sea-change is on the way, and forms of political and scientific philosophy based on the adequacy of secular humanism may come to be seen as tired, worn-out and out-dated. It is possible to find in up-to-date literature some very good counter-arguments.

From the point of view as those who see the Christian truths as life-giving and deriving from the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, these expectations should be seen as more prophetic than surprising, indeed as the things we should be watching for as the “watchman looks for the dawn”. But meanwhile the religion of humanism is strong in the media and in public life. Courageous and good acts are spoken of as a victory for the values of decency and human rights, but seldom as an exercise of Christian compassion. The Church especially needs to remember the adage, that a Church that is married to the spirit of the current age will become a widow in the next.

The character of the Church is essentially a prophetic, proclaiming character. When the Scriptures are read in public, the reader should not merely be informing, he should be proclaiming. Similarly, sermons should not merely stay at the level of personal opinion or good advice. Sermons must proclaim, whether the proclamation be comfortable or uncomfortable. Even the church building needs not only to be a structure for convenient assemblage. We consider that the very stones must cry out to the community. Its very presence and shape must speak of the Triune God. If the fellowship of the Church does not proclaim God or speak any more in Christ’s name, there is in her heart as it were a “burning fire shut up in her bones”, to paraphrase Jeremiah’s words. We must proclaim to the community and to the media those life-giving truths of our faith that are attached to the Resurrection of Christ. Not to do so is to succumb to what appears to be life, but is death, and in our own time it is to succumb to the deadness of the religion of secularist humanism that so many think is the way of life. But as St. Paul teaches in our second Lesson today, “All of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death. We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

Let us not forget that taking history as a whole, the West and its institutions, including our own Islands and their institutions, have been baptised in the name of Christ. Now we are being tempted to walk away from that baptism, but when we do, we have also to walk away from the crucifixion which alone destroys the body of sin, as St. Paul evocatively puts it in Romans 6: 6. If we have been united with Christ in a death like his, we shall certainly be united in a resurrection like his, as St. Paul says. When the West walks away from its baptism, it walks away from all that, and all that has yielded it its life. It is for this basic reason why the present social order is a collapsing one, but we are the ones that hold the seeds that can regenerate it. Legalities and conventions, however well-meaning they may be, can never regenerate it. Let not the Church be so adjusted and accommodated to the thought and language of political and media correctness that it loses its distinctiveness, its teaching from that which went before, and its hope in that which is to come.

For commentary, information and devotional material see www.churchofenglandcayman.com and www.anglicansatprayer.org