This month I’ve been preaching around the diocesan vision in the run up to our Looking forwards day on Sunday week 5th July.
In
As I reflected on the scriptures set for this second Sunday after Trinity the thing that struck me first was about the importance of vision itself when setting eyes upon our Job passage.
If ever there was a passage in scripture that sets forth a splendid vision of God it's this. Were you there God says to us through Job when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding…Or shut the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?
God is God and it is the role of scripture to open up a fuller vision of him through the things God has said of himself. Our passage rings true especially for us country folk who marvel day by day at the splendour of creation. When you follow through those last chapters of Job, and I do commend that as a spiritual exercise that builds on the love of nature, you see something quite awesome. The book concludes with a jolt as Job, awed by a fuller vision of the Lord, repents in dust and ashes. All his sufferings melt away as he sees the Lord in his fullness.
It’s the vision of God that’s to be our be all and end all. Without it we’re in no position to commend God’s love for the world.
Moving on to our second reading from 2 Corinthians listen again to what Paul endured: afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labours, sleepless nights, hunger. Would he, or would you and I, endure those things without a cause? The passage starts with mention of the grace of God. For Paul, as he says earlier in 2 Corinthians, it is the love of Christ that impels him. This is why the great evangelist can say at the end of today’s passage Corinthians our heart is wide open to you.
You can’t commend God’s love to the world without an open heart. I might almost add a broken heart. Some of the most powerful Christians I have encountered have been people who’s credibility in my own eyes was established by the way I saw them suffer. The best priests have a limp someone said of the priesthood. You’re more effective at commending God’s love if it has carried you through the dark places all of us have to enter at times on our life’s pilgrimage.
I’ve been picking up on some of this in getting to know you all as Anne and I have visited you. Many of you have told me how God came close to you as you put faith in him through some sort of trial, humiliation, sickness or bereavement. That would be true of Anne or I. Do read Chichester Magazine this month for Anne’s testimony.
This brings me to today’s gospel where the disciples fail to put faith in God in the storm at sea. Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing they cry. After calming the storm Jesus rebukes them for their lack of faith. Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?
Christian tradition has always used the image of the boat as a metaphor for the Church herself. When we are within the boat, we are safe, even though beset by waves. The sides of the boat are the disciplines of church life, the disciples represent all Christians, and the stormy sea is our life.
There is truth here still. With Jesus in the boat you can smile at the storm the children sing.
Yet there is no storm free faith! Commending God’s love comes most powerfully from those who have braved great storms through an active faith in Jesus alongside them.
My own love for Jesus in the Holy Eucharist was inspired by reading this book He Leadeth Me, which tells of how Fr. Walter Ciszek survived 23 years in a Soviet labour camp. The book tells how the priest was stripped of all life and spiritual comforts to be left with Jesus alone and a sense of God’s providence. Some of the most moving passages are about the surreptitious celebration of the Eucharist using a fragment of bread and wine procured by Christian prisoners working in the camp clinic, the distribution of Holy Communion under cove of the general commotion and moving about that followed the rising signal each morning. Some of the prisoners made great sacrifices for the consolation of attending the Eucharist or receiving Communion. That priest’s heroism and his reliance on the Jesus who comes in bread and wine infected others. It infected me.
There is no storm free faith! Commending God’s love comes most powerfully from those who have braved great storms through an active faith in Jesus alongside them. It’s action that commends God’s love, action as well as words.
The pamphlet we’ve produced for our Looking forward day on Sunday week catalogues some of the things we do to commend God’s love as a church. It’s an impressive list. The lift scheme, Traidcraft, Faith in Action, Family Support Group, the CB Radio caring network, use of the Martindale Centre by young and old and the local outreach work of the fund raising working group.
We note though in the pamphlet that evangelism, giving a verbal statement of our faith would rank lower as a current priority. So would apologetics, which means giving an apologia or reasoned defence of Christianity when we’re challenged about it. We need as a church to debunk the rather weak and accommodating arguments against faith sharing and the reasoned defence of Christianity. They’re like water getting into boat of the church to try and sink us.
The church is to rise and not sink! It can’t though unless its members rise above their fears. Someone wrote perhaps unfairly that when it comes to evangelism “Anglicans are like Canadian rivers” – like what? Yes, we get frozen across the mouth when it comes to God talk! Understandable, given the crass God talk around, but we should be able as thoughtful Christians – Anglicans are prized for thoughtfulness – to talk intelligently about our faith.
This is also a matter of obedience, as the diocesan ABC vision reminds us.
Firstly Our Lord clearly commands his disciples to tell others about him. He says there other sheep not of the fold he wants brought in to his church.
Secondly if you and I don’t share appropriately with others about Jesus they’re unlikely to hear about him from anywhere else.
The Christian community in Horsted Keynes will sink if it swallows the arguments against commending God’s love when appropriate in words as well in deeds.
Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing? They said. And we say, Lord, do you not care for St. Giles, after 800 years, as we weather the storms of financial astringency and the challenge of reaching the next generation for you?
Peace, be still the Lord says again to his disciples. Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?
Hear the word of Jesus deep down in your heart this morning. Fear, anxiety, pessimism are counter to faith. Your calling is not to look down but up, up where our spire points to him, to the risen Lord Jesus, present with us anew this morning in the boat of holy Church, in his word and in the Blessed Sacrament of the altar.
Filled with great awe we should say to one another who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?
No comments:
Post a Comment