The Letters of Saint Paul (3) Paul’s view of the Church Third of four sermons - Sunday 30th June 2013

Welcome back to the sermon series on the letters of St Paul and this third address on his view of the Church. The subject fits this feast day when we mark his death and the inspiration of his life and teaching.

As for me Paul writes in the epistle from 2 Timothy the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Would that we might say the same when we’ve finished our course!

This teaching series draws on the inspiration Paul has given through the ages to Bible readers and my hope is that what I share might encourage you to pick up your own Bible and draw anew on its inspired teaching.

We’re looking today at how Paul sees the Church.

Previously we’ve looked at what he’s got to say about human nature, the good and bad in us and how we get our nature to be in its right mind. We looked last time at how Paul sees God as love shown in Jesus’ death and poured into our hearts by his Spirit, God whose unity is shown in the fellowship of three persons, as in 2 Corinthians 13:13: the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

The Greek word translated there as fellowship is koinonia and that word gives us a vital clue to his understanding of the Church.

A family I know were on holiday on a Greek Island. They were having a meal in the local taverna when they were greeted by a friendly local. ‘Koinonia’ said the gentleman, waving his arms around the family circle to indicate their evident sense of belonging. That 2 Corinthians ending, with its reminder of Christian koinonia or communion in God, is mirrored at the start of 1 Corinthians, Chapter 1:9 where Paul speaks of how God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship literally koinonia of his son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

The first of Jesus followers to meet with him after his death and resurrection had a koinonia or fellowship with him that extended outwards to fellow believers. Their commitment was to a fellowship built on teaching, sacrament and prayer from which the Church developed as we know it built on the same essentials.

The writings of Paul and other New Testament authors speak of Christian believers’ koinonia with Christ and with one another. Paul especially emphasises how this union is effected through the sacraments. In the one Spirit he writes in 1 Corinthians 12:13 we were all baptised into one body. Earlier in Chapter 10:16-17 he writes The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

St Paul sees the Church as generated by both word and sacrament, a teaching picked up in Article 19 of the Church of England Thirty Nine Articles: ‘The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men [sic], in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance’.

To keep close to Jesus you need the Church, both its preaching and sacraments, which you can’t, as a rule, get at home!  

It’s Paul who teaches us most about the Church in the New Testament. His letters start as addressed to churches or to the Church of God in particular places – Thessalonica, Galatia, Corinth and so on. The apostle is first to use that Greek word ekklesia or assembly we translate as Church. It’s used in two senses, one of particular churches as in his opening greeting to the Churches of Galatia (Galatians1:2) but elsewhere as ‘the Church of God’, an institution over and beyond individual local Churches that’s actually expressed or brought into being in them. When he writes to the Galatians in Chapter 1:13 of persecuting the church of God he echoes his vision reported in Acts 9:5 where, questioning the Lord on Damascus road, he’s told I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. In hurting Christians Paul has hurt Christ!

This understanding of the mystical oneness of Christ and his Church comes across very plainly in Paul’s letters. It’s there especially in his teaching about the Church as the Body of Christ in Corinthians and in later letters like Ephesians and Colossians. We Christians are part of Christ’s life and work that fills all in all (Ephesians 1:23) and completes what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Colossians 1:24). Paul also speaks of the Church as the People of God, the Temple of the Spirit and the Bride of Christ though I’ve no time this morning to pursue those images.

As we think about what Paul has to say about the Church we can’t ignore the obvious point that his letters came about because of the love he had for the churches he founded. It’s his evident concern to keep them in the faith that flowed from Christ’s death and resurrection, safe from interest groups that threatened the apostolic faith. His so-called pastoral letters – 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus – show how that apostolic faith came to have guardians in the bishops that succeeded the apostles. By the end of the second century holy orders as we now know them had emerged – bishops, priests and deacons – as well as the assembly of New Testament documents we now know as the Canon of Scripture. Both Scripture and three fold order are with us still as double grounding in the risen Christ who is the church’s one foundation.

Today’s feast celebrates how both Peter and Paul anchor our bishops as successors of the apostles in their scriptural teaching. The strong tradition of their martyrdom in Rome gives the Diocese of Rome a special title – the apostolic see. The Anglican-Roman Catholic agreement honours that see or diocese and looks to a day when a reformed papacy will serve the unity of all Christians in the apostolic faith.

So what useful thoughts might we take away from this brief investigation of Paul’s view of the Church?

First thought - our communion with God as Christians is inseparable from our communion with one another and there’s a challenge because in choosing God we probably didn’t choose one another! Our evangelism depends not just on your faith and my faith but on generating an intriguing Christ-centred community.

Second thought - Christian faith grows by the Church’s gift as ‘the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance’. In more common parlance Paul strongly urges what we call Sunday obligation - gathering as the Lord’s people on the Lord’s day around the Lord’s table – and not neglecting Christian fellowship.

Third thought - the Church is both human and divine. With all its failings it’s Christ’s body and woe betide us if we make it our own. A 20^th century prophet heard God say: ‘I want my Church back’. Letting God have his church back in Horsted Keynes is our joyful task as we seek to put mission before maintenance and money.

‘St Giles Church seeks to grow in faith, love and numbers.’ May Paul’s teaching and prayers further our progress towards that end as we read his letters here and at home and as we partake of the one bread for we are Christ’s body, given once again Christ’s body, to become more fully that body which is the Church.

Dedication Festival 23rd June 2013 8am

As parish priest I get holes in my pocket from these (show)

I carry a lot of keys.

The two porch door keys are biggest, then the sacristy and then the safe.

What a privilege, though, pocket holes apart, for there are no more precious keys in the village than those that open Saint Giles Church.

It is our Feast of Dedication. We recall the day 900 years ago when our current building was set apart, after its construction, for the worship of God.

Church keys take us into church buildings - but what you do there is the real thing.

We worship. We lift heart and mind to God standing on the shoulders of thousands who’ve been here before us in this holy place seeking God’s face.

There was worship in heaven before Saint Giles was built and there will be worship in heaven after this building lies in the dust.

The question is will you and I in a century’s time be part of that worship?

We will need a key to do so.

That will be our faith in Jesus who opens wide the gate of heaven to those below.

By faith, the conviction of things unseen, we unlock possibilities for this world and the next.

The gift of faith gives you access to a sense of belonging, purpose and empowerment that makes life really worth living.

On this Feast of Dedication we have a challenge to deepen our spiritual life.

Take our prayer, yours and mine.

When the church becomes a house of prayer the people will come running. wrote Brother Roger of Taizé

The church’s mission is weak because her prayer is weak.

Refreshing our prayer has enormous implications if we really set our hearts to it – and the Feast of Dedication is good pretext if we will make it so.

Prayer is the key of faith. By it we unlock the eternity we were made for and the eternal love that welcomes open hearts to make them one with the just made perfect .

Prayer is the key that unlocks the way into what God has in store for each one of us.

Through the exercise of faith that is prayer we are able to make better life choices from the countless possibilities that lie before us all.

When I was 21 I remember getting cards with keys upon them. ‘Key of the door – 21’. Life has moved on so that the things I gained access to at 21, to vote, to open a bank account and so on, come earlier than they did years ago.

My church keys open up access to a building where through preaching and sacrament we encounter one whose oversight extends across this world and the next.

Your faith and mine, the Christian faith, owns that oversight and welcomes through it a purpose for living and a reason for dying.  

This is what lies behind what we’re about this morning on our Feast of Dedication: a call to our faith’s exercising itself more in prayer so that we may see even more of God’s possibilities coming about in our lives.

The Letters of Saint Paul (2) Paul’s view of God Second of four sermons – Sunday 9th June 2013

To encourage us to pick up our Bibles more and follow up on what we have read to us on a Sunday I’m inviting you to look with me this summer at the letters of St Paul and what he teaches there about man, God, the Church and the future.

Last week, after some background on Paul himself, we looked at what he has to say about human nature, the good and bad in us and how we get our nature to be in its right mind. In Paul’s understanding we’ve got God’s likeness so God is within us - yet so is sin and the wonder of Christianity is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ accepting us as we are, overcoming our deficiencies and making us more fully what we were born to be.

I said last week that Paul’s one of the most accessible of all biblical figures since we’ve got more biography and autobiography for him than we have even for Jesus himself. Today’s second reading is a brilliant example. 

The letter to the Galatians shows Paul’s irritated humanity but it also evidences how God took him, with all his imperfections, and made him his chosen instrument. I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.  I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.   But… God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.

That passage stands alongside two accounts in the book of Acts of Paul’s conversion and it underlines to us the significance of the man and his writings for our Christian faith.

When God became one of us in Jesus it took the choice of another man to set forth the significance of that revelation.That man was Paul of Tarsus who lived from around 10AD to 64AD when he was most likely martyred in the Rome of Emperor Nero.

How then did Paul see God?

He saw, in Michael Ramsey’s analogy with a phrase in the Psalms, that ‘God is Christlike and in him in no unChristlikeness at all’. Because of the coming, death and resurrection of Jesus God is to be seen in a new and extraordinary fashion. He saw to quote Ephesians 2:4-6 that   God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved -and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

In witnessing to God’s love shown in Jesus’ death and poured into our hearts by his Spirit Paul announces a God whose unity is shown in the fellowship of three persons, as in 2 Corinthians 13:13: the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

To believe this is to believe God isn’t One but One God in three persons. Paul can write with particular authority because as he says in today’s reading I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. He received how God had sent his Son in our likeness to be our Saviour, something no one could have ever worked out for themselves but something God himself had demonstrated in human history – that God is a triune God.

As we might have read from Paul in two weeks time in Galatians Chapter 2, save the readings are changed for dedication feast, I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:19b-20

For Paul God is Christlike and would have us be the same. As Christ was crucified the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me so Paul speaks for himself of the life I now live being life with faith in the Son of God who now lives in him. As we heard last week human beings have sin within them that can be countered by inviting God’s loving presence to dwell within them on account of Jesus.

Christians are ‘J shaped’. The letter ‘J’ is like an ‘I’ pressed down that’ll spring up again. All through his letters, like in the Ephesians passage I just quoted, believers are said to die, get buried, rise and ascend just like Jesus. God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

What is true of God who in love came, died and rose is to be true of us Paul writes. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

The sacrament of baptism contains all of this potential shaping of our lives to be like God as Paul taught in his letter to Rome. I strongly commend reading Romans for more meat of the kind I am sharing. It is probably the most significant Christian writing and it’s shaped the Christian vision of God as much as words can ever shape that vision.  Do you not know Paul writes in Romans 6:3-4 that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

Paul’s view of God is inseparable from Jesus Christ with whom he has a mystical union. He looks at the Cross and sees our  cleansing from sin into holiness. He walks with the risen Lord Jesus who gives us newness of life. He witnesses in his writings how the Holy Spirit pours the love of Jesus into our hearts.

If you’ve no time to read much of Paul this week, at least try reading Romans Chapter 8. It’s one of my own purple passages that speaks of life and love in Jesus Christ. In verse 11 it speaks of God who gives life to (our) mortal bodies…through his Spirit that dwells in (us). It goes on in v28 of Romans 8 to say words of supreme encouragement: all things work together for good for those who love God. The last verse of Chapter 8 in the Message translation reads: Absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.

The letter to the Romans and Paul’s other twelve letters are a tonic to anyone’s Christian faith. Last week I mentioned how the four shortest letters could be remembered using the vowel alphabet – a, e, i, o – Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians. We’re reading Galatians on Sundays. Why not read Ephesians, full of God’s truth and readable in 20 minutes, or Philippians, just as short and full of joy or Colossians, again just 4 Chapters.  

My purpose this month and next is to give you a taster of Paul’s letters. You need more than a ten minute sermon to get into Paul’s wisdom on God and once again times up – though I’d again encourage you to put in extra time at home, pick up your bible and let Paul speak to you himself – and God through him.

The Letters of Saint Paul (1) Paul’s view of human nature First of four sermons – Sunday 2nd June 2013

When did you last pick up your Bible?

I don’t know if you have purple passages you go back to again and again. Mine are very often to be found in the New Testament within the letters of St Paul.

To encourage us to pick up our Bibles more, I thought I’d invite you to look with me this summer at the letters of St Paul and what he teaches there about man, God, the Church and the future.

Here goes then, we start a four part series that’ll run on until the end of next month as we have to work round all age Sundays.

What does Paul have to say about human nature? About the good and bad in us? About how we get our nature into its right mind?

One of the great advantages in reading Paul is there’s enough of him – 13 letters – to make his character evident. Because his style is partly autobiographical we know more about him than we know about Our Lord.  We see his humanity full square!

Take this week’s passage from the start of Galatians. Look at all that emotion: I am astonished…there are some who want to pervert the gospel…let (them) be accursed. All pretty engaging stuff! Paul’s upset and rushes to the point in anguish and anger. He’s heard how Asian churches he’s planted in Galatia, modern day Turkey, are losing the plot with Jewish Christians forcing non-Jewish converts to be circumcised, a development that’s totally against the good news of a love that embraces without condition.

We’ll be reading more of Galatians week by week this month but first a little background on Paul.

He was born in what is now south central Turkey, a Roman citizen of Tarsus and a devout Jew (Acts 22:3). His double names, Paul, a Roman name and Saul, his Jewish name, express this dual allegiance. Paul’s date of birth is around ten years later than that of Jesus Christ.

Besides his letters we get a really good picture of his life in the Acts of the Apostles where we learn he was a zealous student of the great rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). Zeal was Paul all over, as a member of the Jewish Pharisee party when he persecuted Christians, and then, after seeing a vision of Jesus on the Damascus road, changed zeal in his new passion to share Jesus.

Paul’s Christian mission began around 40AD when after his conversion and 3 years preaching he gets driven out of Damascus. Off he goes to Jerusalem to meet St Peter, then home to Tarsus, from there to Antioch in north Syria and then with St Barnabas he embarks on the first of three missionary journeys that take the good news of Jesus to Asia minor, Macedonia, Greece, Crete and Italy.

The Roman Empire’s his mission field and there’s no doubt God’s choice of a communicator like Paul of Roman citizenship was second to sending his Son to earth in strategic importance to get news of Jesus taken from Jerusalem to the ends of the world.

The 13 New Testament letters we’re thinking about over the next four weeks were written to a number of Christian communities about their joys, needs and concerns. They became part of the canon of holy scripture by the end of the second century. As such they are privileged writings the Holy Spirit opens up to people in every age.

My purpose this month and next is to give you a taster of them with the hope you might pick up your Bible and read them yourself.

They run as follows: After Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts we’ve got Paul’s letter to Rome, his greatest work on God. Then we have the first and second letters to Corinth where Paul founded a church situated on the very bridge between Asia and Europe. The next four I remember using the vowel alphabet – a, e, i, o – Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians. These are short and sweet compared to Romans and Corinthians, but Galatians is probably least sweet of them as we’ve already heard.

Two letters to Thessalonica in Greece follow, then two to Paul’s assistant Timothy, one to his assistant Titus and then a very short one to someone called Philemon about a runaway slave. The letter to the Hebrews was once thought to be from Paul but that is now disputed.

Thirteen letters then, and four subjects over four sermons: Paul on man, on God, on the Church and on the future.

In five minutes what does Paul have to say about human nature?

St. Paul strongly affirms in 1 Timothy 4:4 belief that everything created by God is good. At the same time, he insists elsewhere there’s a power of disobedience at work that makes for talk of creation as being fallen away from goodness. This disobedience is there in the devil, a fallen spirit, and in us as fallen human beings. In spite of the fact that all things created by God are good, the devil has temporarily become ‘god of this age’. Evil exists, at least temporarily, as a parasite inside what God created originally good. In his autobiographical details Paul speaks of the war between God’s dominion and the dominion of evil as a conflict that’s there in his own heart as in Romans 7:19-20: For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.  He goes on to ponder who’ll rescue him from this wretched condition and announces it is Jesus who has rescued, is rescuing and will finally rescue him as a believer.

Paul’s view of humanity is a ‘yes, but’ view – yes we’re made good but left to ourselves we’re without hope for no way can we save ourselves from the sin that’s within us. We need a Saviour and there’s no doubt Paul’s discovery of Jesus as the Saviour colours his whole view of human nature.

There’s humility in Paul, humble awareness that for God to touch his life in any way at all is an exceptional miracle. I received mercy he writes in 1 Timothy 1:16 so that in me, as the foremost Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience. He saw himself as the least of Christians because he’d been a leading persecutor of Christians. By the grace of God I am what I am he wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:10.

For Paul and for us our humanity is flawed. We have God’s likeness, God is within us - yet so is sin. The wonder of Christianity is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ accepting us as we are and making us more fully what we should be. All of us, he writes to Corinth seeing the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:19) It’s a matter of where we’re looking. Inasmuch as our gaze is fixed on Jesus we’re being transformed into right minded humanity. When our gaze slips, so do our thoughts, words and deeds. 

You need more than five minutes to get into Paul’s wisdom on humanity but times up – though I would encourage you to put in extra time at home when you hopefully pick up your bible and let Paul himself speak to you.