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What should I say?
Sermon for Street Parish Church 27 Feb 2006
The readings were:
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2 Corinthians 4:3-6:
If there is anything hidden about our message, it is hidden only to someone who is lost. The
god who rules this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers. They
cannot see the light, which is the good news about our glorious
Christ, who shows what God is like. We are not preaching about
ourselves. Our message is that Jesus Christ is Lord. He also sent us
to be your servants. The Scriptures say, "God commanded light
to shine in the dark." Now God is shining in our hearts to let
you know that his glory is seen in Jesus Christ. -
Six days later Jesus
took Peter, James, and John with him. They went up on a high
mountain, where they could be alone. There in front of the disciples,
Jesus was completely changed. And his clothes became much whiter
than any bleach on earth could make them. Then Moses and Elijah were
there talking with Jesus. Peter said to Jesus,
"Teacher, it is good for us to be here! Let us make three
shelters, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." But
Peter and the others were terribly frightened, and he did not know
what he was talking about. The shadow of a cloud
passed over and covered them. From the cloud a voice said, "This
is my Son, and I love him. Listen to what he says!" At once the
disciples looked around, but they saw only Jesus. As
Jesus and his disciples were coming down the mountain, he told them
not to say a word about what they had seen, until the Son of Man had
been raised from death.
So what should I have
said – or thought, anyhow – when Jean said to me a few
months ago:
I think I should make my
position clear. I couldn't say the creed. I think that Jesus was a
very great teacher, but I couldn't say that he was the Son of God. I
think that his moral teaching probably has never been surpassed or
even equalled; but that's as far as it goes.
I may tell you that Jean
is a highly intelligent retired teacher, a delightful, cultured
person in her 80s. She thinks about things. She comes to events in
church. But she couldn't say the creed.
And what should I have
said to Stan, who is in his 90s and lives in Warminster, an amateur
artist, a former accountant, who has acted as church treasurer for
several churches? He said almost exactly the same as Jean did. And he
added that as far as he had observed, Christians were better and
nicer people than others; and he thinks the Church has an important
role in keeping community going – but he still couldn't accept
the Christian faith.
These two delightful
people are no spring chickens. They aren't part of the generation
that grew up with hardly any contact with Christian teaching, the
generation now in their 40s and 50s. They certainly aren't part of
the younger generation to whom the Christian Church is even more
foreign than the mosque, who take it for granted that religion, if
people take it seriously, is a force for evil in the world.
They are people who grew
up in a world, or at any rate in a country, where Christianity was
the accepted world view; and they have come to the position that they
told me about, and I've told you.
Right. While I'm
confronting difficulties and worries, what about this? People are
leaving the mainstream churches; but before they leave, they are
losing their faith. It isn't, according to a survey last year, that
they lose their faith and stop going to church all at one moment.
They stop believing, but they go on attending church; until perhaps a
lot later they drop away.
So, unless this is a
completely untypical church, there are people here who still come to
church, but who don't believe any longer.
Why? Perhaps it's the
shrinking world that brings different religions to our screens and to
our doorstep, and makes us see that there is good in many faiths –
as well as evil. If Buddhists, for example, can be such good people,
then what right have Christians to claim that their Jesus is the Son
of God, more than the Buddha, the one way to God?
Or perhaps it's a matter
of our faith not growing up with the rest of us. Many Christians stay
with the understanding of the faith that they gained as children, or
teenagers at best. How can a child-sized faith fit an adult? I knew a
lovely Christian woman back in the 1960s who eagerly read magazines
about her beloved gardening, but when I told her (I was lodging with
her as a young curate) that I planned to run a bookstall in the
church, she said:
Do you think we
are ignorant, then?”
She couldn't see that
there was learning to be done in faith as well as in gardening! I
won't embarrass you by asking whether you take a Christian magazine
regularly (apart from the parish magazine, of course), or what the
last Christian book that you read was. But the question might remind
some that there is growing and learning still to be done.
Stemming from this
failure to grow up in faith come a third possible reason for losing
faith. It's tragedy striking. It might be illness. Why should this
happen to me? Or why should it happen to her? It might be
bereavement. I can't believe in a God who would allow him to be
killed that way. With our minds we know that if we follow a good man
who was crucified we can't expect good people to escape suffering.
But maybe our hearts haven't caught up with our minds, and tragedy
knocks our faith sideways.
But I've allowed myself
to stray from my theme. I began by asking what to say to someone who
accepts the teaching of Jesus but rejects his divinity. He gave us a
marvellous way of living, but he wasn't God. Just an inspired
teacher.
Let's think about the
people who first followed Jesus. What did they think they were doing?
It seems clear from the Gospels that they were following a teacher.
Someone who could heal, as well – but there were many
exceptional healers around, then and now, and thank God for them. No,
I believe they were chiefly following a teacher. He had something
about him, a charisma, that made it seem natural to follow him and
call him Master. But he was a teacher.
Then came a
turning-point. We don't know whether it was a few months after Jesus
called them to follow, or a couple of years. They had been together
for some time, anyway. The men and women who followed Jesus had had
the chance to see him in every kind of company, under all sorts of
pressure. They say that no man is a hero to his valet. The person
closest to him sees his weaknesses clearly. But the men and women who
got to know Jesus as closely as a valet knows his master found no
weaknesses. I don't suppose they stopped to think what this meant. I
expect they were bowled over by his attractive personality when they
first followed him, and when nothing happened to knock him from the
pedestal they had put him on, they just took that for granted. Until
that day.
It was in a place way to
the north of their usual haunts, a place called Caesarea Philippi.
And Jesus wanted to know what people made of him. Who did they think
he was? Elijah, some said. A prophet, said others. And then Jesus
wanted to know something that was even more important to him. Who did
they, his close friends, think he was? Silence. You can just imagine
Levi and James thinking, “What sort of a question is that? He's
Jesus. He's the Jesus we know so well. We know his family, his mother
and his brothers and sisters. He's just ... Jesus.”
But in the mind of one of
them the penny dropped. Two and two were coming together. The truth
dawns. We've always known he's completely authentic. We've never
known him put a foot wrong, say a spiteful word, do an unkind action.
Add to that the mind-blowing teaching, the skill in dealing with
questions, the love that broke through conventions and included the
people everyone else rejected. And the teaching isn't mere morality.
It's focussed on himself – and yet he's utterly humble. It's
foretelling a crisis to come, and getting people ready. I know the
title for this person. Messiah. Christ. So Peter boldly said the
word. 'You are the Christ.'
Could this suggest the
answer to my question? Could the way the first disciples of Jesus
came to faith, be the best way for people of the 21st
century to come to faith?
50 years ago people were
still willing to accept what they were told by authority figures.
Billy Graham just had to say “The Bible says ...” and we
responded. Came the sixties, and the trend away from that began. By
the nineties, when I came to teach a few periods of history to 13
year olds, the immediate response to any original source, parrotted
by pupils trained by today's history teachers, was: “This
source is biased.” We may welcome the fashion to question
everything, to the point of downright cynicism, or we may deplore it;
but it's there. That's what we have to live with. That's how people
now think. And my friends Jean and Stan have lived through the
revolution in thinking, from authority and acceptance, to questioning
and experience. They decided that what they had been told as children
was a fairy-tale. So did millions more. From across the Atlantic,
what happened looks like this:
Europe lost
its soul after WWII and the Holocaust. In the decades since the War,
Western Europe became increasingly secular and anti-Christian. Other
than catering to their people’s hedonistic pleasures, the
Europeans stood for nothing.
(last Wednesday's New Media Journal)
But that's not how it would seem to
Jean and Stan. They would say, I'm sure, that they were just being
honest, just refusing to be seduced by baseless stories. What I am
suggesting is that for them, as for us, the answer is to experience
Jesus first, whether we think of him as teacher, or healer, or
something else, until we come to see who he really is.
Last week our first reading told us
the conclusion that St Paul reached after he had met the risen Christ
and lived as his servant in many lands and for many years:
Christ
is exactly like God, who cannot be
seen. He is the first-born Son, superior to all creation. Everything
was created by him, everything in heaven and on earth, everything
seen and unseen, including all forces and powers, and all rulers and
authorities.
Today's
generation may have to go through many of St Paul's experiences
before they can come to accept his glowing, glorious conclusion. If
we tell them the conclusion first, they may reject it as idle tales.
This week's Gospel reading tells us
how Peter, with James and John, were rewarded for Peter's gradually
gained understanding and faith. Remember that these three, and the
others, both men and women, had known Jesus as a man and a friend and
inspiring leader. With this in mind, listen again:
They went up on a high
mountain, where they could be alone. There in front of the disciples,
Jesus was completely changed. And his clothes became much whiter than
any bleach on earth could make them. ... The shadow of a cloud
passed over and covered them. From the cloud a voice said, "This
is my Son, and I love him. Listen to what he says!" At once the
disciples looked around, but they saw only Jesus.
It was a vision that came and went
all too soon. It came as the crowning moment at the end of a long
process. They were ready for it. It was what these three needed to
make them quite sure that their experience of Jesus had led them to
the right conclusion.
So how are we, how are Jean and Stan,
and our other friends, going to have such an experience of Jesus, one
that will bring them to see him as Christ, as Son of God, as Way,
Truth and Life? St Paul tells the Corinthians, as we heard a few
minutes ago:
Now
God is shining in our hearts to let you know that his glory is seen
in Jesus Christ.
People
need us. They need to see something shining in us, God shining in our
hearts. Stan saw that Christians were better, nicer people than
others. That's good. But Christians aren't just there to keep their
noses clean, to be respectable. We're there to shine with God-light.
It's got to be real. People today, like my history class, are on the
lookout for anything false, anything put on. They want the real
thing. There is no guarantee that even when they see God-light
shining in us they will come to believe in Jesus. After all large
numbers of people saw and heard Jesus himself in the Galilee region
and didn't believe in him. But it seems to give them the best chance.
Let
me give you a real-life example of a person who brought the God-light
with her. It's from a book written by Robin Reid, a patient helped by
my daughter Barbara to speak again after having had his voice-box
removed. This particular incident was while he was in hospital
waiting for surgery:
I
happened to look towards the ward entrance... Dressed in dark
clothing and walking with the aid of sticks, I noticed the small
figure of Janet. Her whole demeanour displayed all the merriment and
joie de vivre that were her hallmarks. (She was in fact dying of MS),
with no outwards signs of the frustration that her wasting muscles
and declining physical abilities must have wrought in her. I brought
her up to date with my health issues. She kindly administered an
appropriate blessing and anointed me with special oil. She prayed
with me before leaving. Through her praying she shared with me her
relationship with God and gave me to know that I was a full party to
it. I had a very real sense of the Lord's presence with me, as I so
often had when I was in Janet's company. Long after she had left, the
inner calm it had brought to me lingered.
Will
you, will I, be a Janet for someone this week?
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Thursday 28th of August 2008
