RECEIVE THE WORD OF TRUTH

Sermon delivered on the 23rd Sunday after Trinity, the 30th October 2011 by Fr Nicholas JG Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban's Church of England, George Town, Cayman Islands.

Scriptures: Micah 3:5-12 1 Thessalonians 2: 9-13 S. Matthew 24: 1-14

1 Thess 2:13 St. Paul said, "We thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers."

Matt 24: 11 Jesus said, "Many false prophets will arise and lead many astray."

THE PLAIN WORD COMPLICATED BY CULTURE

I suppose the range of accents and perhaps dialects that people spoke with as they communicated the Gospel in the decades following Christ's Resurrection was as wide a range as English-speakers have today. Since New Testament Greek is what scholars call Koiné Greek (rather than classical Greek), that was evidently the predominant dialect of the language in use, but across the New Testament there is a range of styles, some closer to classical and relatively polished, and others perhaps approaching the equivalent of Liverpool scouse. St. Luke almost certainly wrote his own manuscripts, while St. Paul is thought usually if not always to have dictated to an amanuensis, who was free to contribute his own style of construction to the resulting epistle. St. Paul himself is known to have been a fluent speaker in either Hebrew or Aramaic as well as Greek. Undoubtedly when Paul and Silas first spoke the word of the Gospel to the residents of Thessalonica, the capital of Macedonia, part of modern Greece, they communicated it in the plainest Greek that they could, since one supposes that the Thessalonian accent and idioms would have differed quite a lot from Paul's native Greek coming from the north-eastern Mediterranean coast. The words of the early preachers were always wrapped up in something of a cultural package, as are the words of preachers to this day. Compare the style, for instance, of a Keswick preacher from the UK with a a U.S preacher such as Pat Buchanan or TD Jakes. But as the good news of Christ spread further and further westward, it had to enter a variety of cultural environments, and care would have been taken to communicate the word as plainly as possible. So St. Paul must indeed have been thankful, as he said in today's text, that the Thessalonians had received their words, the word of Paul and Silas, not as the word of men but as the word of God. The cultural package of their accents and expressions had not hindered the communication of the word of God. They had had only about three Sabbaths in the local synagogue of Thessalonica to communicate it, before they were forced to move on by their opposing Jewish compatriots who, because of jealousy and outrage over Paul’s success with their own high-ranking Gentile proselytes, accused him of sedition and caused an uproar in the city, an accusation that reminds us of the one made against the Lord Jesus Himself. And those of us who are aware of the details of some of the demotions of public sector employees in the United Kingdom going on as we speak, because they made their Christian social views known, have cause for concern that the history of forced repression is being repeated. Evidently after they departed from Thessalonica their opponents continued to accuse Paul and Silas of heresy, immorality, trickery and greed, but in his letter Paul reminds the Thessalonians of what his conduct among them really had been. The Thessalonian mission had met with considerable opposition, but by the grace of God because these new Christians were receptive to God's word, they had continued to survive as a church, against all odds.

THE CALL TO BE TRUE

The Scriptures today have to do with distinguishing the true from the false, where the things of God are concerned. Jesus said, "Take heed that no one leads you astray." It is as if the Lord was speaking of our own time. We are charged with a responsibility by God to receive the word that is truly God's word, and to preserve ourselves from being influenced by the word that may purport to be a word from God, but is in fact false. The New Testament and church history show us that this sorting out of what is true from what is false is done within the context of the church, and rarely or never by some individual who is quite divorced from the church's life. So we have to be man or woman enough to stick it out, to remain within the fellowship of the church, to keep receiving the true word of God, and to keep discerning and rejecting the words that are false, or the words that are not quite true, though they too may purport to be the word of God. This certainly has been one aspect of our particular calling as the Cayman Church over the last 28 years. How true have we remained to that calling?

THE WORD THROUGH PROPHETS AND TEACHERS TO THE PRESENT

In Thessalonica St. Paul had been accused of heresy and greed, and in the Old Testament lesson from Micah we are told of so-called prophets who really did lead people astray and proclaim "peace" only when those they preached to put food into their mouths. The prophet Micah warned that the result of all the corruption of justice, the legitimised murder, the bribing of priests and prophets and the hypocrisy of those who did these things and yet spoke the language of religion, would be disaster for the community. "Because of you" Micah declared, "Zion shall be ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins." Now as a matter of fact a century passed and these judgments had still not come upon Jerusalem. We read of this in a very interesting passage from Jeremiah. When the prophet Jeremiah was on trial because of prophesying against Jerusalem, Jeremiah told his accusers that if they amended their ways and obeyed God, the Lord would "repent of the evil" (as the Scriptural phrase goes) that He had pronounced. And then some of the elders of the land defended Jeremiah by the example a hundred years previously of our prophet Micah, who had proclaimed Jerusalem would become a heap of ruins, and yet it had not happened. They pointed out that the king of that time, Hezekiah, and his people had not put Micah to death, but on the contrary had feared the Lord and entreated the favour of the Lord, with the result that the Lord turned away from the disaster He had pronounced against them. The word of the Lord through a prophet, an apostle, or a preacher, even in the mouth of the Christ Himself, is not to be thought of as false if as a result of the warning and its being heeded, the original threat is either lifted or delayed. I do not doubt that the threat of Islamism to western nations in terms of a takeover and the imposition of sharia law is a real one, but through faithfulness to Christ and perhaps only through faithfulness to Christ, and not just by external measures, it may be averted. It would appear that we can interpret the apparent delay in our Lord's return, in comparison to the expectations of much of the New Testament, along similar lines. God is merciful, though His mercy must not be taken for granted especially in times of hard-heartedness and disobedience. We have to determine in our own hearts in this complicated age in which we live, whether to heed the word that God has constantly been feeding us with in the company of the faithful who are true to the apostles, or whether to reject it and accuse the authentic messengers of leading the people astray. God is merciful, but Jesus has declared, as in today's Gospel, that one day the end will come. And if we, the Church fail to heed God's word, but rather set out to judge that word and belittle it as if we were not members of Christ's Body, and follow the world's fashions of disbelief, atheistic humanism, legitimising unethical practices such as experimenting with human-animal hybrids, sexual immorality and the wanton murder of the unborn and the elimination of the weak: if we partake in and condone all the public misbehaviour and monstrous blasphemy that often characterises public life through the media and elsewhere: and if we put ourselves under the sway of the false prophets of our own day who distort the truth out of motives of gross self-interest, then we too will place ourselves as well under those judgments that have been declared, and will deny to ourselves and to others the way of grace which through the Lord Jesus Christ has been so kindly and patiently offered, and proclaimed by word after word, in century after century, to this present day. May we, then, aspire to be faithful to the true word, that is the Lord's, and avoid the sway of what has been corrupted by falsehood and self-interest. If we do so we may perhaps yet again, by the mercy of God, avert for a further time the judgments that so patently are hanging over our age.