St Bartholomew, Brighton Trinity 12 (23rd of Year) 4th September 2022

Who’d be a preacher?

We have to set forth God’s truth without making it an obstacle to good living and call for love of the truth that’s wholly practical.

Christianity’s a matter of principle – we need these principles stating and restating - but it’s tailored to people, and people fall short in their allegiance to principle.

Those verses in the Gospel shook me up. 

If anyone comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life too, he cannot be my disciple. 

Following God means surrendering your whole life to him.

We’re here this morning to give an hour of our life, Jesus’ hour, for him to impact and take hold of us afresh in word and sacrament and Christian fellowship. We can’t underestimate the value of Sunday obligation. For many of you, all of you hopefully, this morning’s attendance has been a victory, a going out of your way to synchronise a variety of commitments to honour God as the Lord of your life by coming to Church this morning.

You’re here to be one with the Lord’s people, on the Lord’s day, in the Lord’s house and round the Lord’s table. Alleluia!

You’ll leave hopefully with more of a taste for Jesus Christ, more set to face the cost of being his disciple and more attentive to what he has for you in the coming week. 

Following God means surrendering your whole life to him.

Saying our prayers, coming to Church, reading our Bibles, serving our neighbour and reflecting upon our need for God are expressions of that commitment. Our stewardship campaign is a reminder of the financial contribution we make to pay for our priests.

Melvyn Bragg once asked Rowan Williams what God meant to him. Here’s the answer he gave: God is first and foremost that depth around all things and beyond all things into which, when I pray, I try to sink. But God is also the activity that comes to me out of that depth, tells me I’m loved, that opens up a future for me, that offers transformation I can’t imagine. Very much a mystery but also very much a presence. Very much a person.

To commit to God as a Christian is to commit trustfully to the eternal God as the depth beyond all things, to see the world as no longer a flat surface but to descend to the heart of things and be impacted. To be caught up into something utterly mysterious and countercultural. 

The second reading touches on this, where Paul commends the runaway slave Onesimus he’d helped to faith back to his master Philemon. Onesimus had found these depths, that transcend the way the world is, in the person of Jesus. Now, as Paul insists, his being a slave or a slave owner is a lesser point, but not so much less that Onesimus shouldn’t return to Philemon, the master he ran away from. Paul’s letter survives, shortest in the Bible, to affirm among other things how in the depth of things there’s no hierarchy of power. 

Following God means surrendering your whole life to him.

Once we’re surrendered we are, in baptism, made equal to one another in a new way of living that’s no longer two dimensional and superficial but one that’s surrendered to God as ground of our being. The eternal God is your refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms we read in Deuteronomy 33:27.

Christian belief isn’t something cerebral, contrary to those thinking you build belief or disbelief by argument. It’s whole life surrender. It’s not a matter of thinking your way into a new way of living but living your way into a new way of thinking. 

Faith’s the act of the whole of our being. Doubt by contrast is a partial business employing that part of the mind that questions what we’re about and what it's right to think. This questioning is set for Christians within the wholehearted surrender of faith. We believe in the resurrection not with our minds but as we live out the death of the old self so the Holy Spirit can bring us new life through the agency of faith. We believe in the Cross as we make sense of suffering with the assurance that not all that happens is determined by God's plan but that all that happens is encompassed by his love. 

We are loved by almighty love and we are loved for ever, that is the reality Christian faith sees for sure. Paul knew Philemon knew this when he wrote in the verse before today’s passage I have indeed received much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, my brother. 

Could that be said of me, of you? Would it were so!

In his book God is no thing Rupert Short, religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement, reflects upon how many believing artists and writers in the UK are advised to conceal their faith if they want a following. Such is our local scenario in which secular humanism predominates the world of ideas with pretended neutrality. Meanwhile secularism is losing ground worldwide with three quarters of humanity professing a religious faith, said to be heading for 80% by 2050. The world over people evidently see in Christianity a vitality and coherence that is being lost or obscured in our own culture. Reading Shortt was a real tonic. Here is his summary of how he sees what we’re about: Christianity - at its centre, the story of love’s mending of wounded hearts - forms a potent resource for making sense of our existence. It provides the strongest available underpinning for values including the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, and human responsibility for the environment.

I like that phrase love’s mending of wounded hearts as a description of the dynamic of faith. It’s a long way from that over hasty perception of religion as a bully. Shortt sees the problem for religion and secularism as the tendency to bully rather than reason with one another. 

Following God means surrendering your whole life to him.

I can’t escape as preacher underlining that Christian basic this morning, praying it will touch our hearts and enlist them in mending the wounded hearts in our own circle. The eternal God is your refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms…. God is also the activity that comes to me out of [the] depth, tells me I’m loved, that opens up a future for me, that offers transformation I can’t imagine. 

That transformation isn’t just for you but, like Philemon, for all in your orbit. May this Mass fill you with the joy and encouragement that filled him to overflow, so that you can more fully love God and make him loved in the networks you’re part of!

 

Baptism of the Lord 12th January 2013

I’ve got my passport out - here it is - and we're getting the children to look at where I’ve been: Guyana, Lebanon, Brasil, Barbados, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and so on and what an awful picture!

Did you know the earliest reference to a passport is in the Bible? It’s in the book of Nehemiah Chapter 2 and is from around about 450 B.C. Nehemiah, an official serving King Artaxerxes of ancient Persia, asked permission to travel to Judah. The King agreed and gave Nehemiah a letter "to the governors of the province beyond the river" requesting safe passage for him as he travelled through their lands.

Today's passports still carry such a letter of request. Inside the front cover is a letter issued in the name of Her Majesty the Queen. Like Nehemiah's letter, it also asks for safe passage and protection for the holder of the passport.

In the Middle Ages passports were letters saying which cities and city gates a person might travel through, pass porte is a French term which means, pass through the gate.

So what’s all this to do with the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord?

When God’s people passed from one country to another they went through the river. 

They passed through a river into the Promised Land, where they could start a new life as God s people. 

When John the Baptist came to tell people that Jesus was coming he took them to the river as well.  He baptised them because they were saying that they wanted to start again with God, and live his new life. 

Jesus came to give us new life.  If we have been baptised it is as if we have been given a passport, which allows us to pass from living for ourselves to living for God.

At his baptism Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit as Christ so that we might share in his anointing and be given a passport to abundant living!

We live as Christians with dual citizenship. We’re citizens of this world (UK passport) with all its privileges and we’re citizens of God’s kingdom through baptism with additional privileges, what I’ve just called ‘abundant living’.

I  asked folk last week to think about sharing this morning something of what they see as the privileges of living in God’s kingdom, the benefits of church membership, of being a Christian, of abundant life as I’ve called it. One of our members sent me this e mail in consequence:

I had simply never thought about it, so it’s been intriguing me! She says, then lists four items:

To receive Communion, which reminds me that I am loved by God.

To learn from other individual Christians, who give me a good example to follow.

To be part of a fellowship which has nothing necessarily to do with my social life, or my family, or my work, which connects me to the family of God and encourages me.

To know that we are stronger together than when we try to work alone.

Maybe that’s got you thinking yourself of the blessings that are yours!

A Christian is one very aware of their privileges in sharing the anointing of the Anointed One.  We can only live to the full if we welcome and own that anointing in the Holy Spirit which is our own through baptism.

Maybe the church in this land has not failed so much as shrunk back from its task and that we need to get back to basics. That is why we need what Jesus received and offered at his baptism – we need the Holy Spirit to come in power upon us.

Almost his last words to his first disciples at the hour of his ascension were a promise that takes up these first words about him at the start of his ministry: You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses he said, as recorded in Acts 1.8

We hear regularly on the news of people from abroad seeking passports or the equivalent to Britain so they can live with greater abundance materially. That should make us proud to have British passports!

How proud are we of the spiritual abundance that is ours through our Christian faith and the passport of baptism?

How’s your enthusiasm for your Christianity and for sharing it? As one who shares in the Spirit’s anointing could today’s eucharist be for you a rekindling of passion through a fresh anointing in that Spirit on the Feast of Jesus’ own anointing?

So be it! God grant us a right pride in both our nationality and our Christianity!