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St
Alban’s (Grand Cayman) & St Mary’s (Cayman Brac) |
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THE WAY OF FAITH
Sermon
delivered on the Second Sunday in Lent, the 8th March 2009 by Fr
Nicholas JG Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban’s Church of
England, George Town, Cayman Islands in the service of the Holy
Eucharist. Scriptures:
Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16
Romans 4: 13-25
Mark 8: 31-38 Romans
4:13 The
promise to Abraham and his descendants, that they should inherit the
world, did not come through the law but through the righteousness of
faith.
The
Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ makes the demand upon us that we
accept its privileges and take on its responsibilities by faith. One
of the wonderful things about that Good News through faith is that
it causes us to have a forward-looking outlook. Whatever
difficulties we may be in, the Good News through faith shows us that
there is a way through them and out of them, beyond the dictates of
current law and logic. That does not mean that law and logic can be
dismissed or broken or overturned. What it means is that life
possesses a dimension by means of which the law and the logic which
seem totally to govern a situation do not, in fact, have the last
word. To
this day Jews that retain their Judaistic heritage are people of
laws and books of commentary that flow out of their laws. It is
interesting too that in the secular world of the West, there is a
strong Jewish presence in our judiciary. But when you read the
Gospels and St. Paul's epistles, you see recorded there the extraordinary unfolding to us of a
sort of life that brings the whole bookish law-scheme under
judgment. There we find out that the way that is good is more and
other than the law-keeping way. Jesus and St. Paul, both notably of
the Jewish race and both notably transcending their Jewish heritage,
are united in saying that the ways of the scribes and the Pharisees
and the sanhedrin have diverged from the fulness of life to which
God invites us. I find that this New Testament scenario reflects
some of the particular challenges of our own time. In today's
world the march of laws and regulations and conventions and
standards and commissions, claiming authority over principles or
sovereignties we thought we had held secure on ethical or perhaps
theological grounds, seems unstoppable. From time immemorial the
Scripture has declared, “He has shown you, O man, what is good.”
But now in the world, we are to consult the books, employing an
ever-increasing army of scribes and legal libraries at an
ever-increasing expense to advise us, to find out the ways to walk
in, the ways to talk and even to think, ways that are written upon
the new tablets of stone. So increasingly, the only way to maintain
our own humanity is to hold intact an allegiance that, like that of
New Testament Christians in their day, transcends and challenges the
increasingly legalistic element in the ethics of our time. Our
Scriptures today show how our father in faith, the Biblical Abraham,
responds in faith to the good news that the Lord makes known to him,
that God will establish a covenant with Abraham and Abraham’s
descendants through Sarah his wife. But the dictates of natural law
and logic ruled that to be impossible. Even allowing for the
apparent discrepancy between the patriarchal reckoning of biological
ages and our own, it was still undoubtedly true that not only was
his wife past the age of child-bearing, but that they had for all
the years of their marriage been a childless couple. So
as might be expected, Abraham and his wife did not at first fully take
in every element of the good news. Even so, Abraham positively
responded to the Lord’s promise by doing what He was commanded at
that time. As the story of Abraham goes on we see how in the course of
time Abraham trusts in the word of the Lord with decreasing hesitation
and increasing simplicity. That trust in the word of God no matter
what, is what makes the New Testament writers regard him as the father
of all who have faith. The story of Abraham is a story of the breaking
in of God upon our human systems and disrupting them. There
is a light touch in the way this is done that perhaps we can easily
miss. It is as if God is establishing His way, not with heavy-handed
compulsion, but with laughter and gaiety. Not unreasonably, when
Abraham is told he will father a son at 99 years old and with a barren
and elderly wife, he laughs. Later, we learn that when Sarah is
herself within earshot of the promise, she laughs too. One of my
commentaries points out that by putting the sounds “ah” into both
their names, so that Abram was to be called Abraham, and Sarai
was to be called Sarah, seemingly without changing much the
substantive meaning of the original names, God can be said to have put
laughter into their names. Both saw that what God proposed was
laughable, and both indeed laughed when the proposal was made. As
always though, it was God that laughed last and best, and provided
that when the promised son was born to them, he should be called
“Isaac”, meaning, “He laughs”. Let us learn that the ways of
God are the ways of gaiety that laugh at the solemnities and obstacles
that they perennially challenge. In
the Gospel today we see Peter, like Abraham, at the stage of doing
what Jesus commands him to do, namely to follow him as a disciple, but
not yet fully able to take in every element of the good news, and in
particular, to accept Jesus’ teaching about His suffering and His
being raised from the dead. Again, that was against what all logic and
natural Messianic expectations permitted. It went counter to the whole
culture. In that context, as we saw two Sundays ago, the vision of the
Transfiguration of Christ and the voice from heaven were shared with
the vulnerable disciples. This was another instance, no doubt, of God's
persistent gaiety, that those disciples who had demonstrated a sort of
stubborn obduracy in the presence of the Son of God, God should freely
so astonish. Peter and the others were shown that the last word was
not that of the law and logic of their heritage, but the word of God
Himself about His Son. And our way of life as those baptised into
Christ, will, if we are true to Him, come to show forth, as Peter’s
life as well as Abraham’s came to do, that dimension that gives us
freedom - freedom from the imprisonment and frustration of every
system or culture or law of man's devising. And Christ shows us too
how high the stakes are. The way of faith calls us to go counter to
the very core of our expectations in life. We have no desire of our
own for a cross, any more than Peter had. Yet, “If any man would
come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow
Me.” By the laws of nature, self-preservation is written into the
fibres of our being. Yet, “Whoever would save his life will lose it;
and whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save
it.” We may appropriately consider in Lent, that it will take
courage of the highest gaiety for us to maintain that walk of faith
upon which we have set out, and not fall back for our Christian
identity upon the culture from which we came or the systems of this
world that urge us to their obedience. Relentlessly but mercifully,
Jesus drives us forward on faith's way by His pitchfork-like
utterance. “Whoever is ashamed of Me and of My words in this
adulterous and sinful generation will the Son of man also be ashamed,
when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”
Trusting gaily in His words, let us take up our cross for His sake, no
matter what the immediate consequences. | |
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