RCL Advent 3B
17 December 2023
Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral
New Westminster BC
More than forty years ago I accompanied a group of students from Regis High School, the Jesuit boys’ school where I taught for a year before going to seminary, on a white-water rafting trip down the Yampa and Green Rivers from northwestern Colorado into northeastern Utah. Although I had turned in my resignation, my contract was still in effect, so the Principal invoked the contract for two reasons: he needed another ‘responsible adult’ and I had made the trip some years earlier as an Explorer Scout.
Our trip was made under the auspices of Outward Bound, an American non-profit committed to helping young people learn about and appreciate the outdoors. Our three guides were quite different people. One guide and I realized that we had might eight years prior as participants in a state leadership program for high school students. Another guide rarely spoke but was a master chef, so his cooking endeared him to the boys. The third guide made it known on the first night of our trip, before we had even started down the river, that he was a firm atheist and that he wanted no religious stuff from our group, especially from the three adults, two of whom were Jesuits and one an Anglican on his way to seminary. At one point during the trip, probably when one or other of the boys was complaining about something, he memorably said, ‘No one likes martyrs but hungry lions.’
Over these years I have had many an occasion when his words have come back to me. I know that I’ve used with my children at various points during their lives. There have more than one committee meeting, whether at VST or the Diocese or the national church, when I’ve quoted him. It usually has the desired effect of causing some welcome laughter and lightness or the recipient slipping into silence while muttering one or two choice words under their breath.
But the irony is this: All of us who are here today are martyrs. And, as martyrs, we live in a world filled with hungry lions.
After all, the word ‘martyr’ is the Greek word for ‘witness’. No more and no less. Over the centuries it has come to mean someone who has sacrificed their lives or their livelihoods or both for a cause or a belief. This evolving change in meaning has led many of us to step back from the word and what it has come to mean, but it is precisely the word that we should embrace as a description of a key dimension of what it means to live as a disciple of Jesus. We are martyrs for Jesus; we are baptized to bear witness ‘by word and example (to) the good news of God in Jesus’.
We are martyrs for Jesus when we dare to share our faith with those whose faith is waning or with those whose faith is in values that do not ‘respect the dignity of every human being’ or with those who have no faith at all and are wandering in a wilderness of one sort or another. I think that it is true to say that Anglicans are often reticent to talk about our faith and how it sustains us in our daily lives and work. I know that I have had clever things to say about Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons or street evangelists, but I must admit to a certain ‘holy envy’ in their willingness to bear witness and to face the teeth of the hungry lions of public scorn or indifference. At least, I say to myself, they are willing to take the risk.
We are martyrs for Jesus when we dare to share our faith by choosing to live and work in ways that others find curious or inconvenient. I am certain that there are some in our neighbourhood who wish we did not welcome the homeless and the marginally housed here at the Cathedral. There are times that I hope not to find someone camping in front of the doors to the Cathedral or to the Hall. But they are here, and we bear witness by our actions that they are surely God’s beloved. We are now and will continue to be a place where refugee and immigrant women and their children come to learn how to be full participants in Canadian society. We are now and will continue to be a place where people seeking freedom from addictions of one sort or another gather for support and wisdom. And the hungry lions of electrical bills, gas bills and building maintenance will keep nipping at us saying, ‘Don’t be so generous!’, while our better angels will say, ‘How can we make room for our neighbours?’
Today Ella will commit herself to being a martyr for Jesus. She does so as someone who is old enough to know that being a Christian is somewhat counter-cultural, especially being a Christian following the Anglican way of Christian discipleship. She will face many hungry lions in the days ahead. But she will not face them alone nor will she face them unprepared and unarmed. No disciple of Jesus is alone; we stand with one another, and we are upheld by the Holy Spirit who guides our words and actions. No disciple of Jesus goes forth unprepared and unarmed; we carry the memories of generations who have served and whose examples show us how to act in our own times and places.
It’s true that no one likes martyrs but hungry lions. Yet it must be said that not all the hungry lions are trying to silence us. Some of those hungry lions are people who are desperate to find something worth believing in, something worth working towards, something worth giving one’s heart, mind, soul and strength to.
Friends, the spirit of the Lord is upon us and has anointed us to bear witness, to be martyrs, who bring good news to the oppressed, who bind up the broken-hearted, who comfort all who mourn and who proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. We may well be gnawed by hungry lions, but we shall surely be welcomed by others who seek the banquet we are called to share.
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