Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 2 2021

 

Genesis 17.1-7,15-16

Romans 4.13-25

Mark 8.31-38

What does faith mean to us? It’s said that a schoolchild once defined faith as “believing something that we know isn’t true”. We who have faith might smile at that misunderstanding but we read today in our lessons about Abraham and Sarah in the Old Testament, and Peter in the Gospel, people who are held up to us as examples of faith, and yet their journey of faith involved discovering that, yes indeed, they believed in something that was true, but that turned out to be true in quite a different way from what they were expecting. Their journey of faith involved struggle, getting things wrong, and learning to let go and trust God.

God made a promise to Abraham that he would be the ancestor of many nations. And he believed, in spite of the fact that he and Sarah had no children and were very old.

But Abraham and Sarah didn’t know how God was going to fulfil this promise of children. And the awkward bit that our readings leave out today is that they set about doing things their own way. They hit upon the idea that Abraham would have a child with Sarah’s slave Hagar, who would give birth on Sarah’s lap, so the child would count as her own.

Leaving aside the bizarre things that were considered acceptable in some Biblical marriages, this wasn’t what God had in mind. God came to Abraham again and said, yes, I know you’ve had this child, and I’ll bless him for your sake, but that wasn’t what I meant. And then Sarah herself conceived. Isaac was born, the child of God’s promise, the father of Israel.

Abraham and Sarah believed God, but acted on their own mistaken ideas of how God’s purposes would come about. Nevertheless, God kept his word and did things the way he intended, anyway. Faith is a journey. We can make false starts and take wrong turnings, but that’s ok, because faith is not about making ourselves strong for God, it’s about owning our weakness and littleness for God to use.

It was like that for Peter, too, in today’s gospel reading. Just before today’s extract Peter has made the great confession of faith to Jesus, “you are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God”.

Now the Messiah is the person who will save God’s people. But Peter, in common with many faithful Jewish people of the time, had his own idea of how God’s purposes would be fulfilled. They thought the Messiah would be a military leader who would drive the occupying Romans out of their land, a political liberator. The Messiah was certainly not someone who could be defeated and killed.

And yet, Jesus says to Peter, this is how it has to be. “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed.”

To Peter this seems like madness. Perhaps he thought it was a test. So Peter said to Jesus, no, don’t worry, we won’t let that happen to you. Which earns for him that really harsh rebuke, “get behind me, Satan!”. And yet Peter needed to hear that. Peter had to learn that the way of violent opposition, the way of his own strength, that he thinks is God’s way, is actually the way of Satan. If you oppose the Romans with their own methods, you will just end up perpetuating their oppressive world system.

Peter has real faith, but he wants to organise God’s programme for him. He wants to be strong for God. But his ideas are not God’s ideas.

So, Peter, who wants to take up his sword against Rome, has to learn instead to take up his cross, the Roman instrument of oppression and death. He has to learn to lose his life for the sake of Jesus and the Gospel.

Part of the journey of faith, for Peter, Abraham and Sarah, for us, is about discovering that God is in charge and we are not. That God’s promises will indeed come true, but in God’s way, not necessarily ours. It is about trusting God, not from our own strength, but from our weakness.

For Peter the way of the cross was no metaphor. According to the early tradition he was crucified upside down in Rome, the hunted leader of a small group of Christians. And yet his witness and death, in weakness and apparent failure, laid the foundations for the Roman church of centuries to come.

Five centuries after Peter that same Roman church, which was now interested in evangelising all the known world, sent a small group of reluctant monks to evangelise a distant, cold, wet and unpleasant country they had vaguely heard of, called Britain. Their mission, it has to be said, wasn’t terribly effective in their own day. One of them, Mellitus, became the first bishop of a Saxon fishing port called London. His cathedral was probably no more than a wooden hut. He wasn’t there long, as the pagan sons of the local king drove him into exile.

Yet, on the site of Mellitus’ wooden hut, today there stands Saint Paul’s Cathedral. And we are here, part of the Church in London, in a parish that began as a mission district dedicated to Saint Mellitus, here because of his response in faith all those years ago. Our side chapel, dedicated to Our Lady and Saint Mellitus, with his icon and reliquary, reminds us of our origins and our communion with him and all the saints.

Today, the Saxon fishing port of London has grown to a great global city. But it is a city of many faiths and worldviews. This can make us anxious about our future. As a minority faith community, we can feel weak and insignificant. We might want to make ourselves strong for God. We might want to determine how God is going to keep his promises. We might perhaps want to go back to the days when the Christian church had a position of privilege and power in society. But then we need to remember that the task of faith is to bear witness to the One who raises the dead, which means we must allow God to work through our weakness and littleness. As did Abraham and Sarah, and Peter, and Mellitus.

At Deanery Synod last week we reflected on the new Diocesan vision for our collective task through to the year 2030. The main themes are Confident Disciples, Compassionate Communities and Creative Growth. The materials on the Diocesan web page are well worth reading. It is a vision we can embrace, because we are here with a mission, with a purpose. But amid its positivity and encouragement, I hope we will not lose sight of how God acts in the scriptures and through history, which is not necessarily how his people expect.

Faith does not mean making ourselves strong for God, as if God needed our strength. Faith means opening our weakness and littleness to God, for God to work through us, to show, as St Paul says, that the transforming power comes from God and not from us. Faith invites us on a journey which does not involve achieving God’s purposes through our own strength or ideas, but, rather, trusting in the One who raises the dead. Which is the meaning of Lent, and of all the journey of our lives of faith.

The Greatest Story Ever Told 

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 1 2021

The Threefold Temptation of Christ at the St. Wolfgang Altarpiece of the Catholic parish- and pilgrimage church St. Wolfgang im Salzkammergut, Upper Austria. Michael Pacher, 1471–79. (Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day, 21/2/21)

 

Genesis 9:8-17

1 Peter 3:18-22

Mark 1:9-15

Here are a couple of possibly familiar stories, reimagined.

"With a last glance back at his comfortable home, Frodo shouldered his pack and set his foot resolutely to the road. He knew what he had to do. He had to go down to the shops and buy some buns for his tea. The end."

"Luke Skywalker had long been troubled by rumours of his unknown ancestry. At last, after years of his quest through ancient scrolls in distant lands, he had the answer. His great-grandfather had indeed been a piano tuner in Shoreditch. The end."

Somehow, I don’t think the stories of Frodo Baggins or Luke Skywalker would have taken off if they had been so lacking in high purpose and noble deeds, adventure and peril. The stories that stick in our minds are those where we can feel the excitement, share in the suspense, the thrills, the fear, where we can rejoice at the hero winning through in the end against all odds.

Five hundred years ago, this year, a knight called Iñigo had his leg shattered by a cannonball whilst defending the citadel of Pamplona, in Spain. Now Iñigo was addicted to romantic novels, I don’t mean Mills and Boon, but stories of high adventure, knights in shining armour performing heroic feats on quests against impossible odds. But he was taken to recuperate at a castle whose only reading matter was rather pious lives of Christ and the saints.

So, he read those. But he read them in the same way as he did his favourite novels, as adventure stories full of high hopes and daring deeds. This sparked his imagination, and he began to see the Christian life in the same way. He envisaged Christians as knights risking all in the service of a great King, whose purpose was nothing less than to save the world.

Iñigo became known to history as Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and a spiritual guide whose new imagination of Christian life transformed spirituality in the West. If we read the scriptures, not as dry academic texts, but as stories into which we can imagine ourselves, stories of excitement and high adventure, then we read them with fresh eyes and receive new insights.

One of Ignatius’ great insights was about how God calls people in the scriptures. Very often God’s call to someone begins with great affirmation and assurance that they are indeed beloved children of God, called by God for some special purpose, that nothing and nobody can take that identity away. Ignatius called this “consolation”.

But then, afterwards, there comes a time of testing, of darkness and doubt and wrestling with fears and foes, when those called by God have to hold firm to their original purpose, and persevere in their struggle. This can lead to a state of getting caught up in ourselves and losing sight of our purpose, a state that Ignatius called “desolation”.

Perseverance, however, brings a person through desolation to a reaffirmation of their vocation, or even its discovery for the first time. Ignatius wrote his classic work, the Spiritual Exercises, around these principles, the movement of the soul to find its true vocation. Discover who you truly are, and what you are truly meant to do, in a time of consolation, then hold firm to your purpose through times of desolation.

It is the pattern, too, for heroes in the great stories, people like Frodo and Luke Skywalker. And it is a similar pattern that we see in today’s Gospel reading, in the greatest vocation of all, that of Jesus.

At his baptism Jesus’s identity is revealed: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”. Here is the Messiah, the one who will save the world, the fulfilment of the hopes and prophecies of old. Consolation. But immediately the Spirit drives him into the wilderness to be tested, to fast and pray and do battle with the power of the devil, who wants to draw him into desolation. Both are parts of the same movement of the Spirit. That’s very clear in Mark, the Spirit comes down at his baptism, the Spirit drives him into the wilderness, it’s the same movement. And, then, his purpose reaffirmed, as he comes to Galilee and proclaims the good news of God, calling on people to repent and believe.

Read as a story, Mark’s Gospel is dynamic and compelling. It is a story into which we can imagine ourselves. Indeed, when Jesus is baptised we are baptised in him. What he is revealed to be by nature, we become by grace, through the sacrament of baptism. Adopted in him, our identity becomes that of God’s beloved Son, with whom he is well pleased.

His story becomes our story. We can read it as an adventure, with high purpose and daring deeds. Jesus’s vocation becomes our vocation. We are knights enlisted in the army of a great King, whose purpose is to save the world. We are the people who know and keep alive the secret of the Kingdom of God – a secret which is not indeed hidden, except to the power structures of this world that cannot see any point in a Kingdom of justice, mercy and peace. We are those granted the help of power from on high at the times of our greatest need, through the Holy Spirit, given to us.

In our own story there will be, as with Jesus, times when we rest secure, resting in our Father’s love and his irrevocable call to us as his children. And there will be times of testing, of darkness and struggle and spiritual dryness, when we are called to persevere, to keep on going, remembering our fundamental identity as Children of God.

That might seem nearer to us at the moment. As a church and as individuals we have been through a time of desolation in this past year. As Father Simon said last week, we almost don’t need the symbolic forty days of Lent this year, as we have been through a real wilderness of testing and endurance.

But this too is part of our story. And the Gospel reminds us that it is not the whole story. All the great stories have times of struggle, dark moments when the heroes are tempted to give up, when they have to hold on and endure. But they are framed by the stories of consolation and vocation, the call of the hero to persevere and win through to the end.

This Lent, we can return again to the scriptures, and see in them our story, a story we can imagine ourselves into, for they describe the call and movement of the Spirit that is ours too. In Bible Book Club in this parish we will be reading Mark’s Gospel like that, as a story, an exercise of imagination. A story in which we discover once again that even our times of desolation, of trial and endurance, those too are part of the story, but not the whole story, part of the way in which good will triumph over evil in the end.

You might not be able to join in the online sessions of Bible Book Club, but even if you can’t I do recommend doing the reading. Reading Mark, or other books of the Bible, as books, not as dry academic texts, but as stories of high purpose and daring deeds that we can imagine ourselves into. For in them we can recover a fresh vision of our identity and our calling. Of the part that we have to play in the greatest story ever told.