[This sermon was preached on Sunday, the 27th of July 2008, at St Andrew's Anglican Church in Langley, BC.]
Propers: Genesis 29.15-28; Psalm 105.1-11, 45c (BAS); Romans 8.26-39; Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52
O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy, increase and multiply upon us your mercy, that with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (BAS)
+ Lord, we come to you for you have the words of eternal life. Amen.
Almost two thousand years ago during the reign of the emperor Nero, a Jewish follower of Jesus of Nazareth put pen to paper and wrote a formal letter to the Christian community in Rome. Such formal letters were often understood to be theological statements that represented the views of the writer and were meant to convince the reader of a particular point of view. The occasion for this letter, written by Paul to a community of Christians whom he had never met, was a controversy caused primarily by a long-standing question: What was the relationship between Judaism and the emerging Christian movement?
As was the case for almost all of the first Christian communities, the Roman community had found its roots among Jews living in the city who had responded to the message that Jesus had been raised from the dead and was, in fact, the long-promised Messiah. However, during the reign of the emperor Claudius, Nero’s predecessor, many Jews had been expelled from the city as a punishment for a series of riots in which Jews had been implicated. Under Nero, the enforcement of this edict of expulsion had relaxed and many Jews began to return to the empire’s capital city.
During the absence of its Jewish members, the church in Rome had been led by its non-Jewish members, a group known by the collective term ‘Gentiles’. They did not follow Jewish traditions and it seems that there was some friction as the Jewish members of the church returned, perhaps to re-impose some Jewish practices or perhaps simply trying to re-establish themselves as leaders of the community. Whatever the details of the conflict were, what we do know is that Paul undertakes to calm a storm brewing in what could be one of the most important and influential communities in the new Christian movement.
Paul’s letter to the Romans is a complex and multi-dimensional document, perhaps the most ‘systematic’ of all his writings that have survived. Throughout the centuries it has served as the basis for the theological insights of many theologians as well as the source of heated debate as Christians have tried to understand some of the letter’s more difficult passages.
Today’s reading, Romans 8.26-39, comes as the conclusion to that part of the Letter to the Romans where Paul attempts to address the Jewish-Gentile conflict in Rome. Leading up to today’s reading Paul makes three fundamental points.
- No single group in the history of the world, whether Jew or Gentile, has lived up to God’s expectations.
- The one saving act in the entire history of the world has been the faithfulness of Jesus of Nazareth to the God of Israel, whom Jesus called ‘Abba’ and who raised Jesus from the dead.
- Any one who trusts in the faithfulness of Jesus to God’s will and who is baptized into that trust has been made one with Jesus through the power of the Spirit and shares in this present time, not only in some distant future, in the life that Jesus shares with his ‘Abba’.
For Paul arguments about who is in and who is out of the community of faith are irrelevant. Arguments about whether one should keep Jewish customs or Gentile customs are secondary at best and even then not crucial to the Christian message. We are reconciled to God not through our outward obedience to any particular code of behaviour nor by the intensity of our faith in Jesus. It is Jesus’ faithfulness to God that reconciles us to God and it is the Spirit working within us who will enable to grow into the likeness and image of God made known to us in Jesus of Nazareth, if we will seek to conform our wills to the Spirit’s guidance.
Paul summarizes this fundamental understanding of the Christian faith in a series of resounding rhetorical questions, a series of questions that are often read at funerals as a testimony to God’s love for us through the faithfulness of Jesus. Bishop Tom Wright of Durham summarizes this passage in this way:
- Who can be against us? No one; God, after all, did not spare the Son.
- Who will bring a charge against us? No one; God, after all, is the one who judges.
- Who will condemn us? No one; Christ Jesus, after all, who died and was raised, intercedes for us.
- Who will separate us from Christ’s love? No one; the Spirit, after all, has poured out the love of God into our hearts.
We are Christ’s and Christ’s we shall remain.
Let us move fast forward to a time just more than one hundred and fifty years ago. An English theologian published a volume of essays addressing the state of the Christian community in the Great Britain of his time. Frederick Denison Maurice was a convert to the Church of England from the Unitarianism of his childhood and young adulthood. His essays were addressed to contemporary Unitarians, but he was, in truth, addressing them to contemporary Anglicans.
The Church of England had emerged from the difficult times of the eighteenth century bitterly divided. On the one hand, Evangelical Anglicans had responded to the emergence of modern biblical criticism by emphasizing the truth and sufficiency of the Bible in answering all theological and social questions. On the other hand, Catholic Anglicans had responded to the co-opting of the Church of England by the state by emphasizing the continuity of the Church of England to the early and medieval church, claiming that the tradition, especially as it was then witnessed to by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions, was the way to respond to changing cultural and social contexts. On the ‘third’ hand, so-called ‘Liberals’ questioned whether the church was relevant for anything more than establishing social and moral norms for public behaviour.
Maurice weighed into the fray by asserting that there was yet a ‘fourth’ way of responding to his contemporary situation. His ‘fourth’ way was to proclaim the message that Christ was in every human being and that God wished to be the life of every human being. The deepest truth, Maurice claimed, was not that we are divided but that we are united, united to God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. God’s kingdom, Maurice wrote, is not just our future hope, but it is also a present reality.
He attacked those who proclaimed a message of ‘ever-lasting punishment’ as a threat, as a means of coercing people to conduct themselves in a particular fashion. We all know the message: Behave yourselves in such and such a manner or you’ll go to hell. Maurice re-claimed the message of Paul and of the Gospel of John by saying to his contemporaries, “The message of the gospel is not about fear but about hope. The attitude of God towards humanity is not condemnation but love. The promise of God is not a future reward for the good and punishment for the evil but eternal life now, the fullness of life in the present.”
In his final essay on ‘Eternal Life and Eternal Death’, Maurice wrote these words.
I ask no one to pronounce . . . what are the possibilities of resistance in a human will to the loving will of God. There are times when they seem to me . . . almost infinite. But I know that there is something which must be infinite. I am obliged to believe in an abyss of love which is deeper than the abyss of death: I dare not lose faith in that love. I sink into death, eternal death, if I do. I must feel that this love is compassing the universe. More about it I cannot know. But God knows. I leave myself and all to Him.
Maurice’s essays caused a turmoil in the Church of England. Shortly after they were published, Maurice was dismissed from his post at King’s College, London.
Today in the Anglican Communion there are voices raised that would separate us from the love of God made known to us in Jesus of Nazareth. Just as the church in Rome was convulsed by conflict over the relationship between Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus, so too our Communion is convulsed by conflict over questions of gender, sexuality and authority. Just as the Church of England in the time of Maurice was convulsed by conflict over Scripture and tradition, so too our communion is convulsed by conflict over how the Scriptures are to be interpreted and by whom as well as how the good news of God in Jesus of Nazareth is to be translated into the many national, social, cultural and ethnic ‘languages’ spoken in our world. This is not a new conflict nor is it likely to disappear in the near future. Every generation of Christians has faced this challenge.
What I do know is this. Any one who uses fear cannot be speaking by the Spirit of God. Any one who says to a brother or sister who has been clothed by Christ in baptism that he or she can be separated from God cannot be speaking by the Spirit of God. Any one who claims or implies that the love of God is limited to only one group or only one party with the church or only one expression of the Christian message cannot be speaking by the Spirit of God. Any one who attempts to exclude another brother or sister in Christ because he or she does not follow the same code as another cannot be speaking by the Spirit of God.
All of us, gay or straight, male or female, European or African, so-called ‘conservative’ or so-called ‘progressive’, all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. But the good news is that Christ has not. By his faithfulness to his ‘Abba’, Christ accomplished what we could not --- despite all the codes and strategies we have adopted or imagined. In our baptism we participate in Christ’s faithfulness
- so that we can become mustard seeds that give rise to bushes which shelter those who are vulnerable;
- so that we can become leaven that gives rise to bread to feed those who are hungry in body, soul and spirit;
- so that we can become the treasure that gives value to what may seem to be a fallow field;
- so that we can become the pearl that reveals the beauty of God’s creating, redeeming and life-giving love.
In baptism we are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own for ever --- for ever.
No one, whether archbishop or bishop, whether conservative or liberal, whether professor or church bureaucrat, can take from us our basic identity, our true selves. That identity, that selfhood, has been given us by our Lover, God. Through Jesus, God’s Beloved, and in the power of the Spirit, the Love that unites them, God calls us to be agents of love not fear, voices of hope not accusation, hands that embrace rather than strike out.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment