MAKING
DISCIPLESHIP CONSISTENT
or "HALLOWED
BE THY NAME"
Sermon
delivered on the 5th Sunday after Trinity, the 22nd
June 2008 by Fr Nicholas JG Sykes at the Holy Eucharist in the
congregation of St. Alban's Church of England, Cayman Islands.
Scriptures:
Jeremiah 20: 7-13 Romans 6:
1b-11 S. Matthew 10:24-39
Jeremiah 20:9
If I say, "I will not mention Him, or speak any more in His name,
"there is in my heart as it were a burning fire ... "
THE PROPHETIC
CHARGE
The Lesson
from Jeremiah this morning is described as that prophet’s Fifth
Personal Lament. That prophet seems to be the first to have described
his innermost feelings, and here they reveal his anguish. The prophet
of God has to speak in God's Name. It is a very simple and direct
point of view. Moses is said not to have reached the Promised Land
because after he was directed to obtain water from the rock in the
desert he did not take care to acknowledge the authority of God before
the people in what he was doing. Perhaps some of the company of
Israelites got the idea that Moses himself had divine powers. So it
was and is a serious matter, this matter of acknowledging the divine
presence and activity.
SUPPRESSING
THE NAME
It always
sticks in the mind for me that when Billy Graham prayed publicly on
the occasion of President Clinton's inauguration as President, he did
not end his prayer "through Jesus Christ our Lord", or
mention Christ's Name at any time. I suppose it would have been
heavily criticised if he had. By the same token the Western armies in
Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War when Western countries were
coming to the rescue of the small Muslim country Kuwait from the large
Muslim state of Iraq, were not allowed to hold Christian services or
even to display personal pendants like small crosses. Since those days
we have seen British Airways eventually give in to an air hostess
wearing such a pendant. As a Daily Telegraph writer wrote some time
ago there are elements of the developed world of the West and
especially young people that are tiring of the fashion of leaving God
out of public life. The outlook of atheism seems to be getting more
muscular and assertive in recent times, but still perhaps underneath
it a sea-change is on the way, and forms of political and scientific
philosophy based on the adequacy of secular humanism may come to be
seen as tired, worn-out and out-dated. It is possible to find in
up-to-date literature some very good counter-arguments. From our point
of view as those who see the Christian truths as life-giving and
deriving from the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, these
expectations should be seen as more prophetic than surprising, indeed
as the things we should be watching for as the "watchman looks
for the dawn". But meanwhile the religion of humanism is strong
in the media and in public life. Courageous and good acts are spoken
of as a victory for the values of decency and human rights, but seldom
as an exercise of Christian compassion. The Church especially needs to
remember the adage, that a Church that is married to the spirit of the
current age will become a widow in the next.
THE CHURCH'S
ESSENTIAL CHARACTER
The character
of the Church is essentially a prophetic, proclaiming character. When
the Scriptures are read in public, the reader should not merely be
informing, he should be proclaiming. Similarly, sermons should not
merely stay at the level of personal opinion or good advice. Sermons
must proclaim, whether the proclamation be comfortable or
uncomfortable. Even the church building, that we are now beginning to
prepare to expand, needs not only to be a structure for convenient
assemblage. We consider that the very stones must cry out to the
community. Its very presence and shape must speak of the Triune God.
If the fellowship of the Church does not proclaim God
or speak any more in Christ's name, there is in her heart as it were a
"burning fire shut up in her bones", to paraphrase
Jeremiah's words of our text this morning. We must proclaim to the
community and to the media those life-giving truths of our faith that
are attached to the Resurrection of Christ. Not to do so is to succumb
to what appears to be life, but is death, and in our own time it is to
succumb to the deadness of the religion of secularist humanism that
our media think is the way of life. But as St. Paul teaches in our
second Lesson today, "All of us who have been baptised into
Christ Jesus were baptised into His death. We were buried therefore
with Him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the
dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of
life."
WE HOLD THE
SEEDS
Let us not
forget that taking history as a whole, the West and its institutions,
including our own little Islands and their quirky institutions, have
been baptised in the name of Christ. Now we are being tempted to walk
away from that baptism, but when we do, we have also to walk away from
the crucifixion which alone destroys the body of sin, as St. Paul
evocatively puts it in our New Testament lesson today. If we have been
united with Christ in a death like his, we shall certainly be united
in a resurrection like his, as St. Paul says. When the West walks away
from its baptism, it walks away from all that, and all that has
yielded it its life. It is for this basic reason why the present
social order is a collapsing one, but we are the ones that hold the
seeds that can regenerate it. Legalities and conventions, however
well-meaning they may be, can never regenerate it. So we hold the
seeds; we are, if you like, the children of Sarah and Isaac rather
than of Hagar and Ishmael, but we will need both the wisdom and the
gentleness that Jesus spoke of, and persistence and endurance too, if
we are to plant the seeds effectively.
JESUS CALLS
US TO NAME HIM
In the Gospel
today our Lord calls us to courageous proclamation. The Master of the
House, Jesus Himself, was called Beelzebul the Prince of Lies - then
we too must expect times of being maligned. Jesus calls us to endure
times of conflict even with those who are close to us. We don't court
conflict, but we are not to be afraid of it when it comes. We are not
even to fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, because
in Christ we have already died and been raised. They wouldn't be able
to touch the essential person whatever they did.
LOSING OUR
LIFE FOR HIS SAKE
But we are, I
believe, to fear and indeed shun that which can kill the soul of the
Church. Let not the Church be so adjusted and accommodated to the
thought and language of political and media correctness that it loses
its distinctiveness, its teaching from that which went before, and its
hope in that which is to come. Jesus said "He who finds his life
will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find
it."
