Sermon preached on Christmas Day, 2011 at the Grosvenor Chapel.

“How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news” Isaiah 52.7

Good news? What good news? Generally speaking we seem to have only bad news…economic instability; spring-times turning swiftly to arctic cold; elections mishandled, mismanaged or fraudulent, Leverson uncovering the cack handedness of the media; weaponry being debated to give police better riot control; tensions in Iran, the Koreas, Syria, the Congo, Somalia and Kenya; climate problems endlessly disputed; protestors still in the market place….it is all pretty discouraging.

Yet how beautiful are those feet which bring good news!

Maybe we just have lost the plot, and the news we think is good, doesn’t make much sense any more.

More that two hundred years ago a German theologian was writing about religion to those he called its ‘cultured despisers’ arguing that religion was to be found in a sense and taste of the infinite, a rather romantic notion, but one which influenced many. Maybe then that was good news. Yet other writers were seeing things differently, and a Russian journalist and editor was to present us with some of the great novels of the nineteenth century, recognising sin and corruption as realities which spoilt our lives:

Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, in which he incorporated the short story The Grand Inquisitor and its denunciation of the institutional church, all shed light on a pessimistic view of mankind and the need for the overwhelming grace of God, not earned in any way by man. So we have the tension between Schleiermacher and Dostoevsky.

Later in the 1920’s Karl Barth’s powerful study The Epistle to the Romans rehearsed so deeply this Augustinian view of the overwhelming power of God’s grace.

Was this then the good news?

These theological debates creep into our own time and I sense that there is a sort of neo-paganism which is discovered sometimes in naïve utterances of our politicians and economic theorists who seem a little too like the 19th century romantics. Pagan is not too strong a word. It meant in Roman times people who were rustics, simple people sometimes living with old tribal gods, not willing to accept the sophistication and smarts of the town-folk. I rather feel some sympathy for the pagans. Especially when religion gets to be very uppity with certainties and certitudes.

For, we still have too many of the old players still on the field, and they still sound the old trumpets and sing from the same hymn book, as if the weight of the critical and discomforting insights of the last centuries had never taken place. But surely it becomes clear that the time of religious dogma and certitude has been slipping away for many years. The good news may well be that we have to recognise that, and that the development of the skills of biblical research and biblical scrutiny of the recent decades means we still have exciting news, indeed good news, to share. But I fear there is also the Grand Inquisitor, and there is still a struggle to find how a critical, common-sense kind of religious insight can free us, indeed, be the open gate for that grace of God to swamp over us so that we do celebrate in our carols and Christmas greetings something of that freedom and audacity to think. That we can indeed continue to worship with joy and integrity, that indeed something has broken out among us, and it is good news.

Then, happily, we can say again “how beautiful are the feet which bring us good news.”

RD ©