‍This sermon by GlynnCardy 31/8/25 draws extensively on Sam Wells thinking

 A brief comment on the Gospel for the day.

Luke frequently depicts Jesus at dinner being with a variety of hosts and fellow-guests. And he is criticised for this, especially for dining with ‘sinners.’ In our day it would be better to substitute the word ‘sinners’ with ‘failures’. Who you dined with was a way of defining you. It still is.

In this episode Jesus offers two pieces of advice. Firstly, in a pragmatic way, he advises taking a lower place at the hierarchically set table. This is not so much a call to deep humility as a warning about how the thoughtless pursuit of self-glory will backfire. It is a situational version of the maxim that “pride cometh before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18).

Secondly, he comments on the guest-list. Culturally when you receive an invitation to dine, it implies in time you will reciprocate. Acts of mutual and reciprocal invitation are the glue in communities, expressing and creating a sense of belonging and responsibility. So to welcome another to table, or to accept their invitation, means obligation.

But what about people who can’t reciprocate? Who due to poverty, disadvantage, or circumstance don’t have the resources to reciprocate?

Jesus says such people are the most desirable guests. With such guests there is no return, no gain for the host. To invite them is to be freed from treating hospitality or anything else as a “deal” that gets us something in return. There is no quid pro quo. Life is not a “deal”.

And we must be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that there will be heavenly rewards, or divine praise for our actions. God and religion is not a “deal” either.

For the truth is that being together, being with one another, without obligation, without rewards, without the demarcations of privilege or poverty, is an end in itself. This is what the kin-dom of God, being in/with God/each other/relationship, looks like.

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The novel & film The English Patient is set in Egypt during the WWII. I would invite you to consider it as a parable.

A married Englishwoman, Katherine, finds herself often alone in Cairo as her husband pursues a cartographical expedition. She falls in love with an impossibly exotic Hungarian nobleman, Laszlo, who is also a cartographer. Katherine’s husband, sensing the affair, plans a murderous revenge. He puts Katherine in the back seat of his biplane and flies toward Count Laszlo’s camp in the desert. As the plane draws near to the camp and Laszlo comes out to the landing strip to meet it, it becomes clear Katherine’s husband is intent on landing the plane right on Laszlo himself. But the bloodthirsty plan catastrophically backfires. It turns out it’s Katherine’s husband himself who dies in the crash. Laszlo sustains only minor injuries; but Katherine, the woman at the centre of two men’s passionate rivalry, is badly hurt. He carries Katherine slowly and tenderly to a cave.

Now Laszlo and Katherine face a terrible predicament. Katherine’s injuries are, without question, life-threatening. If Katherine’s going to live, Laszlo’s is going to need to travel to find medical help. But finding medical help means going to Cairo – and Cairo is three days’ walk away. It’s a dangerous journey. Even if Laszlo gets there unscathed, there may be no one he can persuade to bring help. And even if he is successful, there is only a small chance Katherine will still be alive when Laszlo gets back. What are they to do?

The theologian Sam Wells names this as the defining question of contemporary Western life. Because the great tide of assumptions in Western culture orients people towards solutions, towards answers, towards ways to fix things: whether those things are the human body, the human mind, the world’s economy, Ukraine, Gaza, the climate emergency. Are we ready for a problem that doesn’t have a solution?

Let’s start with a more conventional candidate for a defining question. What’s the essential problem of human existence? Wells posits that it is mortality. From the moment we come into the world, our fundamental crisis is that we’re going to die. And a lot of religion has that focus.

But the issue isn’t simply that life is limited in terms of duration. Human flourishing is circumscribed by a host of other limitations. Like disability, chronic ill health, poverty, hardship, adverse weather, famine, limited natural resources, and on and on. We’re hemmed in on all sides not just by death but by a host of other constraints.

What’s changed in perhaps the last 70 years is that, at least in the West, humanity no longer feels such limitations are integral to its existence. There was a time when life was a largely matter of learning to live within the boundaries of limited human potential. Death took place in the home, most illnesses had little or no chance of a cure, and it was best to prepare oneself for a fragile existence. The world’s resources of course held enormous potential; but the technology and techniques for tapping that potential were still in their infancy.

But those days have gone. A cascade of technological advance, in fields such as medicine, transport, and information transfer, has made constraints seem absurd, rather than necessary. The human project is no longer about coming toterms with limitations and flourishing within them. It’s now, almost without question, about overcoming and transcending limitations. Human contingency is to be swept aside like racist legislation during the civil rights movement. It’s not something one learns to live with: it’s something one expects to conquer. Doing so is part of human self-assertion, human full expression – the spreading of humanity’s wings. It seems all are agreed that the key project of our species is the alleviation, overcoming, and transcendence of mortality. We achieve this by inventing medicines, discovering new dimensions of experience, reducing or reversing limitations such as blindness, breaking athletic records, and circumventing such tragedies as famine or muscular dystrophy. That’s what we strive for. That’s what gains outstanding individuals rewards and acclaim. That’s what our culture prizes most highly.

When we advertise our organisations today, we seldom still say, ‘Making lead pencils the same way for 150 years.’ Instead we say, ‘Testing and stretching the boundaries of knowledge: making the impossible, possible.’

The single notion that sums up this sense of throwing off limitations is freedom, and the term we employ to commodify freedom and give it retail value is choice. So the basic line in promoting what we do is to say our product or service overcomes one or more of the real or perceived constraints of our daily or lifelong existence and thus gives us more choice.

But what if it turned out that the fundamental human problem wasn’t limitation after all? What if it turned out that all along the fundamental human problem was isolation? What if the answer, for Laszlo, doesn’t lie in walking to Cairo?

What do I mean by this? If the fundamental human problem is isolation, then the solutions we are looking for don’t lie in the laboratory or the hospital or the frontiers of human knowledge or experience. Instead the solutions lie in things we already have – most of all, in one another. There’s no value in existence unless it’s existence in relationship. And church and religion, at their best, are all about relationship, being with one another, with creation, communing. Indeed I would say, God is relationship.

It’s not difficult to see how a philosophy based on overcoming mortality and a philosophy based on overcoming isolation can come into tension with one another. As humanity’s quest to overcome mortality has gathered pace, the degree of human isolation has increased with it. For sure, enhanced transportation, telecommunications, and information technology have made it possible to communicate in ever more extensive and complex ways. But they’ve also, to quote Sam Wells, facilitated lifestyles where people are in touch with conversation partners on the other side of the planet, but not with next-door neighbours; where insurance lies in investments and pensions, rather than in friendships and extended families; and where face-to-face human interaction is ceasing to become the encounter of choice for a generation who are used to having plentiful alternative ways to make themselves known to one another. The flipside of making ourselves more independent and self-sufficient is that we are simultaneously becoming more isolated and more alone.  

And this brings me to the crucial point of purpose or mission. If you see the central quest of life as being to overcome isolation, rather than to overcome limitations, your notion of purpose or mission will change. Mission that seeks to overcome isolation doesn’t look to technology to solve problems, but becomes recognising those from whom one is alienated and seeking and finding ways to be present with them. Mission doesn’t assume that the solution is to make other people more like us by ensuring that they have what we have and live as we live. It is simply being with, listening with, dining with one another. Being with is both the goal and the means

Let’s return to the parable of The English Patient. Think again about Laszlo’s choice of whether to stay beside Katherine and be her companion in her last hours, or walk to Cairo in search of assistance. In the story, Laszlo scarcely thinks twice before he sets off on his three-day journey to find help. He has all sorts of adventures before he finally makes it back to the encampment. And when he does, Katherine is very, very dead. Laszlo is so committed to believing that there’s a solution to Katherine’s agonising plight, and that he has the solution, that he overlooks the one thing needed. And that is, being with Katherine. He’s so concerned to solve the problem that he leaves her alone in her hour of greatest need.  

Could it possibly be that the real reason Laszlo went to Cairo was because he couldn’t bear to watch Katherine die? Is not Western late modernity a culture in which we fill our lives with activity and creativity and productivity because we fear if we sat still we’d go to pieces? It never occurs to any of us to think this frenzy of programming and experiencing and sampling is madness. On the contrary, it’s those that lag behind or stand outside our frenetic world that we regard as mad or failures (‘sinners’). Maybe, like Jesus, it’s those who we need to dine with, listen to, and be with.

What’s at the bottom of all this fixation on activity? We are trying to make a world that can withstand the fragility of relationships. If you’ve got a problem, here’s a host of solutions. How much of this is like Laszlo walking to Cairo? What Katherine needed was the man she loved to be with her as she faced the near-certainty of her own impending death. But Laszlo didn’t, or maybe couldn’t, give her what she needed. We’re turning our world into a Laszlo society, full of products, full of gadgets, full of devices, full of techniques, full of energy, all of which make the world go round very effectively. The result is that we’ve all become Laszlo. Yet the irony of the film is that when Laszlo, returning to Cairo with Katherine’s body, crashes another plane, and is himself horribly injured, he’s found in the desert, and carefully extracted from the wreckage, and tenderly accompanied by strangers –who then care for him until the point of his death. He receives from stranger sat the end of his life the patient love he wasn’t able to give to Katherine at the end of hers.  

Can we, in the face of every pressure of our culture and our day, learn from his parable, and come to be wiser than him?

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