Sermon for St George

What happened to George after he killed the dragon?

 

Myths are a powerful thing. Myths can be a way of explaining – a way of seeking a past that explains the present. Yet myths can be something that – in their explaining – define us, too. Myths may build backwards – seeking to bring into being a history, a tradition, a past that can help justify – defend, rationalise, even – where we are today, but this link is not merely one-directional. In their description of the ‘then’, they impact directly on the ‘now’. They form part of our identity building, developing something of the ‘who-ness’ of who we are. They have authority, and influence – they have a hold over us in a way that we don’t always recognise. At their best, they give us a sense of purpose, a sense of group identity that is both cohesive and inspirational.

 

Yet this group identity can go awry – can push us towards a sense of demeaning superiority, lead us to scapegoat others, drive us to do things as a crowd that we as individuals would never countenance. In times of scarcity – whether real or perceived – they can form part of the heady mix that drive us towards violence, where competition bleeds into hatred, intimidation, violence – where fear and anxiety about who we are brings out not our best natures but our worst. Our myths can become so fiercely defended that they begin to control us – where we buy into our own narratives about ourselves to such an extent that we lose touch with reality, with the complex and complicated threads of self that create our identity as individuals and as communities.

 

We can end up worshipping our myths, turning inwards and losing touch with the world that the myth was created to help us understand and engage with. We can, in other words, allow our identity to become static and cemented, and lose its conversational nature. Who we are can become stilted, and pallid, and anaemic – and in doing so, it can lower our sights, dampening our ability to view the horizon of what we can become. A staid and stolid tradition may feel comforting, but, like anything that loses the ability to breathe, to move, to develop, it will ultimately atrophy and lose its vitality. Dead tradition is a pale imitation of the real thing, however strongly we might defend it.

 

Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.

 

Dead wood does not bear fruit. Dead tradition does not yield a healthy future. For tradition to survive, for fruit to be yielded, it requires pruning rather than nostalgic preservation.

 

St George is the source of at least one of our national myths – a saint, and a myth, that has been both much maligned and much abused in recent years. The flag of St George – that flies above our church buildings – has become something of a pariah in the panoply of national flags, something either fiercely defended in the name of some vague notion of nationalism, or bitterly rejected by those who fear the impact of nationalistic fervour tipping into racism and violence, something that, we must admit, is anything but an abstract concern. The flag – and by implication, the saint – have become, at least in much of the public imagination, a problem – symbolic, perhaps, of the deeper malaise that infects our politics, in the widest sense. The ‘who we are’ of Englishness in public debate seems to have swung wildly between rather unattractive notions of racial superiority, and similarly unattractive nuance-free debasement of the national story and vague self-loathing.

 

Occasionally rather sad notions of ‘healthy’ English identity raise their heads, but these often veer into somewhat bizarre flag patriotism in the style of the United States or are otherwise such a formless vapid void as to be meaningless. We have, it seems, forgotten who we are – and in the ensuing fear and anxiety about this very fact, we veer between the preposterous, the dangerous, the dull, and the non-existent. And so our sense of who we are becomes unstable — pulled, at times, towards fear and exclusion, and at others towards a kind of embarrassed silence, as though we no longer quite know how to speak about ourselves at all.

 

So what is the church to do? What can the church – particularly an established church like our own, that plays a particular part, however diminishing, in our public life – say into this space? For it is true that we have not helped – we have colluded, we have sometimes retreated – and all too often we have had nothing to say at all.

 

I think the first place we might turn is to the myth of St George himself. For whilst he is well known for killing a dragon – the credibility of which I will leave to you to mull over in your own time – this is not the key part of his story. Instead, what really matters is what happened after he killed the dragon, which is that he refused to worship one – a metaphorical dragon in the form of the Roman state. George’s valour and courage might indeed be the thing that he ought to be remembered for, but primarily this is his courage – and his commitment – in the face of brutal persecution by a state that wanted him to give it total allegiance. In the face of the Roman emperor Diocletian’s determination to wipe out any loyalties beyond those to himself, the embodiment of the Roman state, George stood firm. We know little more than that – yet, in the Christian tradition, that is enough.

 

George bore witness to Christ – was willing to name Christ as being the truest thing there is, not as in competition with the Roman empire but instead deserving of a much greater loyalty. For abiding in Christ, George paid the highest price – yet bore much fruit, too, glorifying God and drawing others to abide in the true vine. George, venerated through so much of the world, through his death brought in, and continues to bring in, those from the south, the north, from far, from the ends of the earth, even from this island, everyone who is called by God name, created for God’s glory, formed and made by God – precious in God’s sight, called by name – ‘thou art mine’. George may have killed a dragon, but it was his witness in death that really counts. It was his refusal to worship the savage beast that made him a saint.

 

So what might the story of St George have to say to us today, to a church and to a country struggling to work out its identity?

 

St George surely reminds us that our first loyalty is to the thing to which we truly – whoever we are, whatever our national identity – belong, Jesus Christ. He is the vine, we are the branches. People were drawn to Christianity not because of what St George said, not even because of his courage against a dragon, but because of what he did – his witnessing to the truth that nothing, and nobody, can have claim over our lives more than the God of the universe that we worship. Our being God’s demands in us a response – demands us to live lives that are worthy of that calling, and which place God at the centre of everything. No call to national identity can be allowed to get in the way of that call to be who – and whose – we truly are. The very being of this God is to build up, and not to tear down – to love, to require of us mercy and compassion, not vainglory and self-aggrandisement. The demands of this God are real and all consuming.

 

His eyes consider the poor ◆

and his eye-lids try the children of men.

For the righteous Lord loveth righteousness ◆

his countenance will behold the thing that is just.

 

To live like this is to undergo – to be open to undergoing – a transformation in our hearts and in our civil engagement. In a pluralistic society, it is not enough to parade around with crosses and to claim the term Christian – this will not do. Our calling, instead, is to live the life that God has called us to live – one that is borne out of an identity that is given and not constructed defensively, anxiously, fearfully – a life that calls us to resist the modern dragons of state, tribe, ideology, and fear, and instead to commit ourselves to the costly, life-giving, enduring hope that finds its fulfilment in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is less to ask how our identity might be found in our national pride, and more to ask how our Christian faith might shape the nation in which we are called to live.

 

For Christians are not called to be of this world, not called imagine our citizenship as being of this world alone, yet nor are we called to ignore it, to somehow separate ourselves from it. When Christians hear the call to be salt and light, it is not because we are somehow holier or better than anyone else, but because we are called – however imperfectly – to make something of Christ known amid the world he loved enough to die for. To be countercultural is not to be reactionary – it is to exercise discernment in public life and to live into our calling as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven.

 

At such a time as this, the Church of England is not called to be a club for the sinless, and nor is it called to retreat from public life. It is called to throw itself fully into the world, proclaiming, pointing towards, and even living something of the beauty of the life of the Kingdom of God which surpasses all kingdoms of this world. Its vocation, surely, is to call us out of narrowminded, self-referential, petty-minded ideas of national identity, out of a national identity that is borne out of fear and anxious self-seeking, towards a sense of nationhood that truly knows its own provisionality yet rejoices in the grounded beauty of community, and which points towards the hope, the joy, the ‘more’ of the Kingdom of Heaven. To call us towards what might be, towards mercy, towards compassion, towards generosity, towards God. To dare to imagine we might go some way to building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

 

What might it look like to recommit to building Jerusalem here – right here, right now – in this nation, where neighbourliness, where deep love of the land and its people that compels us to love outwards rather than retreat inwards becomes the focus of our national story? What might it look like to let go of fear? What might it look like to allow ourselves, and our myths, to be pruned, to allow fruit to flourish? To reckon with our history to plough the furrows of the future? To name and acknowledge painful realities, not for self-loathing but to recommit ourselves to the Gospel? To orient ourselves towards the joy in our communities? To follow George’s example, and truly witness, in this land, to the superabundant God that we worship?

 

Fear not, O land, be glad and rejoice,

for the Lord will do great things.

 

Amen.