Sermons
17th Feb 2008 - Second Sunday in Lent
(Week two of the Stewardship campaign: Priorities)
The Lord said to Abram go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you...and Abram went as the Lord had told him.
Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.
In both of these quotations from today’s readings Abraham is portrayed as the model of faith in God, the one who hears the voice of the Lord and responds eagerly, almost without question. There is no prevarication, no arguing, he believes, he goes. He is the model of faith and action, not the model of theological reason or doctrinal purity. St Paul says Abraham believed God, not that he believed certain things about God. Belief here really means utter trust and there is a sense in which beliefs about God become a second order issue, almost an irrelevance. This model of faith and action is so powerful because it occupies a space at the limits of our reasoning, or rather, at the interaction between our reasoning and our answering the call of God in our lives.
People don’t answer the call of God because it is reasonable, quite often it seems the reverse. Many people who end up answering a vocation to the ordained ministry begin by finding that call very unwelcome. As I have said here before, I ran away from God’s call for many years. I had plans, big ideas, and I certainly wasn’t going to entertain any calling that entailed working 17 hours a day for a pittance. Like many before, and no doubt many after, the idea of my becoming a priest was both ludicrous and unattractive. Yet I am happier and more fulfilled now than ever before in my life. I answer the call in a faltering clumsy way, but I do feel called to be a priest and indeed to be your parish priest.
And just as people don’t answer a call from God because it is reasonable neither I think do many become Christians through reason. After all if Christianity was utterly reasonable and attractive, if understanding the doctrines of the church were rather like understanding how to drive or how to speak a new language, people would be picking it up all the time. They would say, ‘yes I can drive, yes I can speak French, yes, I’ve understood Christianity and it seems reasonable therefore and I am a Christian.’
I am not suggesting that the doctrines of the church don’t make sense or that theology is not beautifully crafted to order our fumblings after some insight into the nature of God, but they alone will never explain why people become Christians and they will never alone account for the very odd business of people answering a call from God to go and do something new.
And vocation is something that is felt both individually and corporately. The church across time and place is called by God and sent by him to do his work. The church is apostolic; it is the sent church, the church that is often called by God to leave its comfort zones, to leave its own country and kindred as Abram did. And you can easily recognize when the church is trying to resist the call because it starts to put down deep roots, to say ‘we cannot move from this position’. The pattern of Abraham suggests the call of God, is often a call to go and do, the church on the move is the church answering her vocation.
The Lord The Lord said to Abram go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you...and Abram went as the Lord had told him
So what is God calling the church to here, what is God up to in St Andrew’s, Fulham Fields? Well, just as in any vocation, the best way to look forward is to try to work out how God has got you to where you are, what sorts of patterns can be discerned in what has already been God’s activity. So what has God been up to in this church recently?
Well it seems to me that over the last 18 months that this church has begun to answer a call from God to enrich and enliven its corporate life. This is a church all of a sudden full of people and full of ideas. Ideas like coffee mornings and art exhibitions. Ideas like a choral evensong with a choir expanded through Facebook, ideas like a soup kitchen for the homeless, a fruit and vegetable co-op, ideas like starting a community magazine from scratch and producing a book about Fulham Football Club, ideas like starting a children’s choir – I could go on. God has been very powerfully at work calling people in this community into his service, saying to them ‘go, do this, do that’. And he has been calling a huge range and diversity of people, so we can see vocations being answered by Peter, and by Trevor, by Cynthia, by Janet, by our children and by our welcomers and our choirs, by each one of us in our different ways. God has blessed us richly in this time and people have come to faith or have returned to a faith they had given up on, perhaps thinking they had been abandoned by God or by the church. We have new vision and we have new people but in the excitement and enthusiasm that is around, in the focus on all the ways God is blessing us, we have been in danger of missing out on some practicalities.
Our activities and numbers have increased dramatically but a similar growth in financial support for the church is lagging behind. Over these first four weeks of Lent I am encouraging everyone to think seriously about how we structure our finances here and last week I spoke about the sense of commitment which we should all share to this church - to the expanding and ever-changing set of ministries here at St Andrew’s.
If you look at the way things have developed under God’s guidance here over the last 18 months and if you try to pick out a pattern which might nudge us in the right direction for answering God’s call in the next 18 months I think we have to take seriously the possibility that we might only just have started. And with that possibility we have to take this moment in our life together and look sensibly at how we are to support all that stems from this answering of God’s call to go and do. If we want to be able to provide for the future, to enter into the development project on a firm financial standing, to pay the £21,000 each year to the diocese that at the moment is paid for us by other parishes, if we want to fund administrative staff and we want to fund pastoral staff and we want to be able to say to the next initiative that comes along ‘Yes, we will do that’. Then we need to take up our responsibility for financial provision and we need to do it rapidly. I think we probably need to double our regular giving over the next two years, and actually we would probably do that tomorrow were every person who belongs to this church somewhere near that sacrificial target we have set ourselves of 5% of take home pay. There is no shortage now of information about how and why we need to make significant progress on this at this time, and it feels to me as if this has had to be brought out into the open and examined before God.
One of the most moving developments that has occurred in our life recently has been the opening of the soup kitchen and the huge number of people who have stepped forward to help in various ways with that. We need the same sort of response to this Stewardship campaign, this is a moment in the life of the church where people need to step forward and take up the strain, to answer a perhaps unwelcome calling. Sustainable development is what we need in this church. We have had a massive amount of development, what we need now is a real injection of sustenance.