St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of All Saints, 30 May 2010
Lo, we have left everything and followed you. (Matthew 19.27)
What could be more ‘normal’ than a box of Cracker Jacks? Do you know what Cracker Jacks are? A small box of stale popcorn and peanuts, all covered in a coat of caramel that tasted like sugary glue. Inside was the ‘prize’, a cheap toy made of plastic or metal, that used to break your teeth if you bit into it. The toy was so cheap that it gave rise to a new idiom: ‘Did you get that out of a box of Cracker Jacks?’ Meaning, ‘that’s about as worthless as it gets’. But popcorn and peanuts – what could be more normal? For example, suppose you are engaged. Why spend money on a fancy ring when you could give your fiancée a nice shiny plastic ring from a box of Cracker Jacks? A normal part of everyday life. (Somehow, I doubt that your fiancée would dance for joy). To buy her a ring that is worth more than cheap plastic requires effort. You sweat and strain and save your last penny; you spend nights, worrying about how to pay the rent. Maybe, go without meals – just to buy one gold ring. A ring worth more, for someone worth more, than the meals that you go without. A plastic ring is normal, O so normal. A ring of gold is rare, unusual, yes, abnormal: out of the range of everyday life. It does not come easily; but the more you sacrifice for it, the more valuable it will be. Who would give someone he loved a ring from a box of Cracker Jacks, instead of a ring of gold?
In an age of stale popcorn and plastic rings, is there anything that we have not placed in a box of Cracker Jacks? Anything that easy to get, is easy to throw away. In the age of disposable nappies, why not a ‘disposable God’? Do you know the term ‘cheap grace’? At the depth of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York, talked of cheap grace. The grace of God, parcelled out in free, bite-size chunks. Cheap grace means forgiveness without repentance. Baptism, or should I say, ‘christening’, without life in Christ. Communion, without confession. Christ, without the Cross. Christianity without Christ: that is precisely what one young German scholar called cheap grace, when he heard the term in a Baptist church in the centre of Harlem. Cheap grace is Christianity gone middle class. The reverend canon So-and-So, preaching on climate change and gay unions, for fear of offending Parliament. Or Little Montague’s christening, hidden away on a discreet Saturday afternoon, so Aunt Mildred can make it from her villa in Tunbridge Wells. A private wedding, with organ tunes piped in between the Orthodox chants, to make the in-laws feel at home. Cheap grace: syrupy hymns and saccharine sermons, trimmed down for that ‘feel-good’ factor. In 1937, when the Third Reich was preparing to launch its ultimate secular war, that German scholar in the Resistance warned what happens if you trim Christianity down to size: ‘the collapse of the organized church’, he wrote, ‘is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all – at too low a cost.’ Easy Gospel, empty pews. What could be more ‘normal’ than that? Christ, the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks.
A ring from the box of Cracker Jacks is ordinary. Normal. Easy to understand, within the reach of any normal person. A person who gets married, gets a normal job, and raises a few ‘normal’ children in a ‘normal’ house, so they can attend a ‘normal’ school. If all it took to be a Christian was being normal, we would all wear Cracker Jack rings.
Christ does not ask us to be normal, but abnormal. Not ordinary, but extraordinary. He does not offer cheap grace, but grace that costs. Grace that costs everything.
In a Middle East that still values a man by his tribe, his family, to this day, Christ says: ‘If you belong to your tribe, you do not belong to me’. In an Orient that places family loyalty above all, Christ warns: ‘Anyone who loves father, mother, son, or daughter more than me is not worthy of me’. In a politically correct, middle-class culture that tells us to cover up our religious views, Christ declares: ‘Whoever denies me, I will deny before God the Father in heaven’. This is not cheap grace. It is costly grace. It costs you your life. A gift of God that can only fill you if you empty yourself. Dare to be abnormal – to take up your Cross, and follow a Crucified God.
What do all glorified saints have in common, if not this abnormal life? A life that inverts the normal values. Wealthy saints, like Basil the Great; and poor, like Anthony of Egypt. Urban, like John the Golden-mouthed; or rural, like Sabbas the Sanctified. Saints that wielded weapons, like George the Victory-clad; or wielded only a pen, like Maximus the Confessor. Saints who gave the last drop of blood, like Stephen the Proto-Martyr, or Alban the First Martyr of Britain, or the millions of butchered, buried names in the bloody twentieth century that made the Orthodox Church once more, the church of the martyrs. Or unknown saints, lost in the lonely corners of life: a doctor, Panteleimon, who charged no fees; a monk, Erkenwald, and his sister, the nun Ethelburga – among those millions of monks and nuns who forego a ‘normal’ life for a life that encircles us all in prayer. The saints who are kind, like John the Merciful, or harsh and outspoken, like Athanasius the Great; or both at once, like Nicholas the Wonderworker. Saints can be male or female, kings or paupers, monks clothed in light, or soldiers covered in blood. Everything under the sun – except normal. No saint that ever lived was as ‘normal’ as a ring from a box of Cracker Jacks.
But who would give his beloved a ring that cost him nothing – instead of a ring that cost him everything? A ring of plastic, instead of a ring of gold?
Beloved in Christ: Simon Peter, the ordinary, normal fisherman, is astonished when his Master says: ‘Unless you give up your “normal” life, you cannot follow me’. But, you see, Peter is no more ‘normal’ than the rest. To walk away from your fishing trade and follow a homeless healer who happens to be God: that is not normal. ‘What have we not given up, Lord, to follow you?’ Then Christ replies as abnormally as always: ‘When the Son of Man is enthroned in glory, everything that you gave up for my sake – house, land, family and your own life – will be yours a hundred times over. You shall see it for what it is: the path to me. From a world that is already dead, you pass into the never-ending daylight of the Kingdom’. But, to do so, you must be rare, unusual, out of the ordinary – in short, abnormal. A saint is not a ‘good’ person, a ‘nice’, ‘sensible’ person who gets on well in the world. That is a Sunday School teacher, not a saint. No saint was ever that ‘normal’. On this Sunday of All Saints, let every normal person give his sweetheart a ring out of a box of Cracker Jacks.
A saint gives God the one gold ring that costs him nothing less than his whole life.