Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 2 2021
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.
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