A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 5, 2023 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
St Martin’s Day
Twelve years ago, the Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker published an ambitious book entitled The Better Angels of our Nature. In the book, Pinker documents and narrates how, over a 5000-year span, violence has gradually declined around the world. Violence can refer to taking pleasure in inflicting pain, to the urge for dominance, to the use of force to gain some ulterior goal, and to the belief that one will attain utopia by destroying perceived evil. He takes us through a series of historical epochs that have civilised human society, including the expansion of settlements, the centralisation of authority, and the growth of humanitarian awareness. The most recent one is a growing revulsion towards violence against women, children, minorities and animals. Most significantly, Pinker identifies four motives that shift people from violence to cooperation. These are empathy for others’ feelings, self-control in the face of the bad consequences of our actions, cultural norms and taboos that bypass decision-making and become second nature, and reason, which enables us to evaluate action dispassionately. Together, these four motives – empathy, self-control, taboos, and reason – constitute what Pinker calls, adapting a famous phrase of Abraham Lincoln, the ‘better angels of our nature.’
Ever since its publication, academics have quarrelled over whether Pinker’s data backs up his argument. But that seems to me to miss the point. The point is that if we want to live in a healthy society, we have to foster the habits, practices and institutions that inspire good attitudes and behaviours. I want you to think about the life of our beloved community of St Martin-in-the-Fields in terms not altogether dissimilar to Pinker’s way of talking about creating a world with much-reduced violence. I want to share with you a conversation I must have had a hundred times since I came to St Martin’s in 2012, in every case with a person who didn’t know our community.
They say, ‘How many staff do you have?’ I say, ‘About 250.’ They laugh, and say, ‘Don’t be silly.’ I say, ‘I’m not joking. There’s over a hundred in the company, just under a hundred in the homeless centre, around 30 in the Charity, and a combined 30 among the Trust and PCC teams.’ They laugh again, and say, ‘But which ones work for the church?’ I say, ‘They all do.’ They say, ‘I mean the real church.’ I say, ‘Yes, I mean a real church. A real church that believes in commerce, because commerce is the way to shop-window our convictions, and invest in people, and attract visitors to the site, and uphold the fabric, and generate income to run the community. A real church that believes in culture, because culture and arts make the heart sing and express our full creative nature and make us work together to produce beautiful things we couldn’t produce alone. A real church that believes in compassion, because it’s no use saying you love God if there’s no evidence you love your neighbour, and trusts that if you want to meet Jesus you need to hang around where the incarnate Jesus hung around, among those with their backs to the wall. A real church whose congregational life isn’t an escape from the realities and challenges of the world, but emerges out of exactly those realities and challenges. Maybe you’ve not encountered a real church before.’
If they haven’t wandered off in mind or body, they say, ‘But surely you’re not in charge of all those people?’ I say, ‘Of course not. I’m not as stupid as I look. I’m not really in charge of any of them. My job is to tell the story of the purpose and goal of this community back to itself and to the outside world so persuasively that people inside remember why they’re here and those outside want to get involved.’ At that stage things usually go in one of two directions. They either say, ‘That all sounds very busy and complicated,’ and laugh, and change the subject, or they say, ‘That sounds like the community I’ve spent all my life looking for; how can I get involved?’ If you’re listening to this sermon, you probably fall into the second group.
I want to explain how what we’re doing together at St Martin’s a is a bit like the process Steven Pinker describes in The Better Angels of our Nature. I wouldn’t say we’re focused specifically on reducing violence. Our goal is to overcome the great divide that was created during the Reformation. When Martin Luther insisted that what mattered was faith alone, he did a good thing, because countless people like him find it hard to break out of a cycle of guilt, fear, low self-esteem, self-hatred and misery. To say what matters is not what we think of ourselves, or what others think of us, but that God loves us unconditionally, is incredibly good news. But the Reformation left a damaging legacy. That legacy was that church became associated with a self-absorbed, other-worldly and judgemental emphasis on cultivating the worthiness of your own soul and became detached from a true engagement with ordinary life, a profound investment in creativity and culture, and, most troublingly, a genuine care and concern for those trodden down by the world’s cruelty and neglect.
What happened was we got on one side something called church, which sought to be holy, prayerful and faithful, but was widely regarded as self-serving, hypocritical and irrelevant, and on the other side something called God’s realm or kingdom, which was about life, kindness and joy, but tended to be discredited as worldly, unholy or ‘the gospel of good works.’ St Martin’s is about transcending that false and foolish divide. St Martin’s is about saying, ‘If you want to find God, exercise your creativity, spend time with those facing hardship, work as a team to make something worthwhile.’ But St Martin’s is at the same time about saying, ‘Fill your life with culture, compassion and commerce, but look through and beyond those things and ponder the questions of eternity, the purpose of the universe, and the love at the heart of it all.’
Now I want to explain how what we do at St Martin’s advances the better angels of our society and how this models God’s realm. I’m going to start with our commercial life. The late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says this. ‘We’re all different, and each of us has certain skills and lacks others. What I lack, you have, and what you lack, I have. Because we’re all different, we specialise, we trade, and we all gain. The economist David Ricardo put forward a fascinating proposition, the Law of Comparative Advantage, in the early 19th century. This says that if you’re better at making axe heads than fishing, and I’m better at fishing than making axe heads, we gain by trade … The law of comparative advantage tells us that every one of us has something unique to contribute, and by contributing we benefit not only ourselves but other people as well. … When different nations meet, they either make war or they trade. The difference is that from war at the very least one side loses, and in the long run, both sides lose. From trade, both sides gain. When we value difference … we turn the narrative of tragedy, of war, into a script of hope.’1 That’s what commerce is all about. That’s why we’re involved in it.
Now let’s turn to culture. Many people quote the line, ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my pistol,’ and often wrongly attribute it to Goebbels or Himmler. But one wisecracker replied, ‘When I hear the word pistol, I reach for my culture.’ Yet that second line exactly captures what culture means here, as St Martin’s appeals to the better angels of our society’s nature. Now don’t get me wrong. There can’t be many choirs, besides our own, where there isn’t a fight over who gets the soprano solo, or many theatre ensembles where everyone’s happy for someone else to play the lead, or art exhibitions where none of the painters want their work to have prime position. But for all the individuality of competition, culture is fundamentally about turning what could be destructive capabilities into creative ones, transforming dexterity that could have been used for fingering locks into the ability to pluck violin strings, harnessing collective spirit that could have proved destructive in a drug gang into one that makes glory in a jazz trio. Meanwhile an inspiring lecture or moving concert ennobles the whole community and raises the level of what we’re trying to be together. That’s what culture means here.
And perhaps most obviously compassion. The word compassion means to suffer with. It doesn’t mean to suffer instead of, to make the story all about oneself and place oneself at the centre of events. It doesn’t mean to fix, to see another’s plight as simply a problem to be solved. It means to be so present, attentive and attuned to the other person that you allow their plight and predicament to matter to you, to become part of your reality, and thus enable them to feel less isolated, no longer alone. What the Gaza-Israel war has shown us in vivid technicolour is how almost impossible it can be for the person experiencing profound suffering to understand the suffering of another, or to comprehend how much suffering they are inflicting on another. Compassion is our response to the tragedy of the world – not because it takes suffering away, but because it overcomes the isolation of suffering that leads to despair, and too often results in the person harmed visiting further harm on others.
And then finally congregation. Now the painful history of Christianity is that a faith that began in humble devotion, profound transformation, and selfless mercy has so often in myriad ways morphed into a system of judgement, exclusion and cruelty, and consequently not a balm in conflict but a pretext for division. Which is how we discern the calling of St Martin’s – to be a congregation that doesn’t exclude, even to the point of finding ways to embrace even those whose views feel exclusionary; a people that doesn’t judge, even those who seem themselves to be judgemental; a community that is so astonished that God has room for us that the least we can do in gratitude is to find room for others, even those it’s sometimes hard to sit beside. Thus, and perhaps only thus, do we find ourselves sitting next to the incarnate Jesus.
These are the 4Cs – commerce, culture, compassion and congregational life. This is the shape of St Martin’s, as it seeks to be not a church of the past, but a church of the present and the future, a community that doesn’t choose between church and kingdom, faith in God and outworkings in life, the word of truth and the spirit of eternity. These are the ways this community seeks to transform society by drawing out the better angels of its nature.
And in all things we’re inspired by our patron. For when St Martin met a beggar at the gates of Amiens, he was wearing a cloak that commerce had made and sold to him. He was dressed with style and panache, as culture dictated to him. He was moved by compassion, as he divided his cloak in half, not sacrificing for the man’s well-being but sharing with the man, making him his equal and regarding him with dignity. And in his dream that night he was transformed by the vision that that beggar was Christ, and thus began his congregational life that led to him becoming a monk and a bishop. That moment drew out the better angels of his nature, and portrayed for us the ways we hope today to draw out the better angels of our society’s nature, and discover the better angels of our own. It is such moments that the whole breadth of our life and work and love in this beloved community seeks to imitate and replicate, today and every day.
1 https://www.fpri.org/article/2013/06/the-dignity-of-difference-avoiding-the-clash-of-civilizations
