Sermons
4th March 2007 - Lent 2
Our collect today asks God to grant to those who are called into the fellowship of Christ’s religion the grace to reject everything contrary to their calling and to follow all that is in accord, or agreeable, with their religion. We may well ask, how are we to know? How should we discern what is contrary and what is agreeable. This is an acute question for the Anglican church as it plays out in public an unedifying series of disputes between parties within the church which seem to have widely different views on what might be agreeable and what might be contrary. But are the questions disputed between different shades of Anglicans the sort that the collect is talking about? Does it really all hang on whether women can be bishops and whether gay people can be treated with the dignity and respect that all deserve equally? The collect I think is prayed at a much deeper level of contrariness and agreeability, it is prayed at the level of faith. And our readings can shed some light on how to understand this prayer and I guiding us towards the three chief actions and attributes that are agreeable with the Christian profession.
First, a Christian is called to believe. Not, that is, to a fully formed understanding of the doctrines of the church or a capability to understand the Bible through the necessary lenses of modern scholarship, nor to have in place a clean moral slate. Belief is offered as a gift from God and is rarely received simply through study of the Bible, or study of the Church, or through living a life of moral probity. Trust in God can very often begin as a tentative inclination felt within, a very precious and easily damaged notion that there may be an underlying principle and order that unites the creation in which we find ourselves, almost it seems, finds ourselves by chance. And this feeling that it may be possible to trust in something far surpassing our own understanding, but characterised by something we recognise as love, grows stronger over time - much as the use of muscles develops them over time. The instinct to trust in God is nurtured by repeated efforts to let go of self and be gently invaded by the divine. Consider Abram in the Old Testament reading today, failing to trust God, failing to let go of self, worrying about his legacy to the people of God. God takes Abram outside and shows him the stars, the stars which were flung out into sky by his own hands at the moment of creation, and he says your legacy will be the people of God, more numerous than you can possibly imagine, more than you can count. And Abram is brought to his senses, ‘Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness’. We haven’t got here a story about a man being convinced about the reasonableness of the idea of faith, he is not instructed in the logic and philosophy of theology, but is shown a vision which reminds him to believe God, to trust him. So as Christians we are called first to belief, to trust in God.
Secondly we are called to hope. That is, not to a rationalised working out of our chances of salvation because like faith, hope is a gift from God. In our second reading St Paul writes to the Christians in Phillippi reminding them that their citizenship in is heaven not on earth. He writes to remind them that their only security is to be found in the patterns of hope we celebrate here in every eucharist, the patterns of hope that we hear through the news of Christ’s death and his resurrection. Through this news, through this death, we are assured that our frail bodies can be transformed to the body of the glory of Christ, and like those first stirrings of faith, the first thoughts of hope beyond what we can see and hear are delicate, easily bruised by the society in which we find ourselves, where we find ourselves almost, it seems, by chance. In a society utterly focussed on the self and its morbidity those first shoots of hope in the eternal nature of God’s call can be all too easily trodden down. You can’t believe that can you? Our society says, you can’t really believe in something greater than yourself can you. Our society says, you are all there is, make the most of yourself, make the most of now. As Christians then we are called to faith, and hope.
Thirdly, we are called to love. We are called to mirror the love that God shows he has for us in the actions of his son who says to Jerusalem, the city that will reject him and thrust him onto to the cross, ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often have I desired to gather you as children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing’. We are called to love by mirroring the actions of a God who again and again seeks to draws us under his wings, a God who desires to shadow us and protect us with a motherly love, a love that is inclusive and embracing, and how often we are not willing!
A small incident recently reminded me of this image. I had gone into a barber shop on North End Road and an old gentleman had just finished his time in the chair. He was standing by the door re-arranging his clothes. But he stayed longer than seemed necessary, and then it became clear that he was methodically searching his pockets, one by one, going through again and again, looking. After about ten minutes he turned back towards the three barbers, big burly men, brisk with their customers but friendly, and when the old man turned around his face was full of tears, he was crying inconsolably and began to try to say that he had left his money at home…but before the words were out each of the three barbers had rushed over to him and put their arms around him and said ‘don’t pay, no need to pay, don’t worry about that’. He was gathered under the wings of the men, they treated him with motherly love.
We are called as Christians to faith, to hope, and to love. And none of these is learnt other than by practice. The constant exercise of faith of hope and of love, are the only ways in which we will become practitioners of Christ’s religion. These are the qualities and characteristics that are agreeable to our Christian profession, they are what make us Christians. In another of St Paul’s letters, the first to the Corinthians he says ‘and now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love’.