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Sermon: The Second Sunday in Lent (A) - 20th March 2011
St Aidan's Anglican Church West Epping 8:30 am
Readings: Genesis 12:1-4a Psalm 121 Romans 4:1-5, 13-17 John 3:1-17
It was a Sunday morning in South America, in a little chapel on the border of Venezuela and Colombia. As Mass was beginning, a not uncommon occurrence took place: a band of guerrillas armed with machine guns came out of the jungle and crashed and banged their way into the chapel. The priest and the congregation were totally horrified and afraid. The men dragged the priest outside to be executed. Then the leader of the guerrillas came back into the chapel and demanded, "Anyone else who believes in this God stuff, come forward!" Everyone was petrified. They stood frozen. There was a long silence.
Finally, one man came forward, stood in front of the guerrilla chief and said simply, "I love Jesus”. And he was roughly tossed to the soldiers and also taken out to be executed. And several other Christians came forward saying the same thing; they, too, were driven outside. Then came the sound of machine gun fire. When there was no more people left willing to identify themselves as Christians, the guerrilla chief returned inside and told the remaining congregation to get out. "You have no right to be here!” Moreover, with that he herded them out of the chapel, where they were astonished to see their pastor and the others standing there.
The priest and those people were ordered to go back into the chapel to continue the service while the others were angrily warned to stay out "Until," said the guerrilla chief, "you have the courage to stand up for your beliefs!" And, with that the guerrillas disappeared into the jungle.
Whether this story actually took place or not, I do not know. However, it is a story of the cost of faith, and one that is important for us today as we have the Church AGM and we examine what it means to be the community of Saint Aidan’s and how we are to move forward into the future. Each of the readings is very helpful concerning these matters.
It is only by the power of God that we may move into the future positively, knowing that God goes with us. Everyone knows about becoming stuck, fatigued, discouraged or even immobilized. Everyone in such a state knows that we cannot be a self-starter and lift one by one’s own effort. We are not and cannot be that self-sufficient! The readings are examples of the lives of people of faith who have begun again by the power of God.
Abraham is in a state of hopelessness, because he and his wife Sarah are barren and have no heir, and then God intervenes and addresses Abraham and Sarah. God tells them to go in obedience, and promises them a radical, durable newness if they go. They accept God’s direction and leave all that is familiar, including their family. They receive a new land and eventually they receive a son who will be their heir. They had a future opened for them, that was totally unexpected which turned out to be very rewarding. Their story is all about the power of God’s promise. Paul’s teaching in Romans 4 takes Abraham as a carrier of the newness that is to be produced again by God’s grace so that all can begin again, not by merit or worth, but by God’s ready power.
John’s gospel concerns Nicodemus, the Jewish teacher. He is invited by Jesus to begin again, to be born “from above”. He does not quite get it, but the point is clear enough. The God who loves the world is the God who gives new life to those in it, because God’s spirit-wind blows freely where it will. It is the wind of love, the offer of new life that is inexplicable and quite beyond our control.
The stories of both the Abraham and Nicodemus entail the action of going where we have not yet been ... into God’s new life. For that reason Psalm 121 is a fitting companion psalm. It is about a journey, being safe on the way even if the route is dangerous. Thus we can imagine Abraham being one for whom God will “neither slumber nor sleep”, and Nicodemus being invited to be kept by God in his “going out and (his) coming in”. The journey is to God’s newness again; we may be safe in God’s care as we travel.
By calling Abram, God brings Abram into the new day provided by promise. God's new commitment to the relationship with Abram makes for a new identity for the one who now responds in trust and obedience. Abram now takes into his life the character of the promises made. The future is not yet, but because God has been faithful to earlier promises Abram's very being takes on the character of that future, though not apart from his own faithful response to the word of God, which created his faith in the first place. More generally, the promise stands at the beginning of Israel's ancestral story. We may understand not only the stories that follow, but also the entire history of Israel, as constituted and shaped by God's promises. We stand in that ancestral story.
Even more, promise as promise serves as a key here. What counts about God's promises finally is their continuing status as promise, which can then be taken up by us the community of faith, as still applicable to our future and us.
Abram's trust in the promise and his move from Haran to Canaan will certainly mean a new level of meaning and life for him. However, the God who commands and promises will also change forever as well. Having made promises, and being faithful to those promises, means that God is now committed to a future with the one who has faithfully responded. The reading describes not only human faithfulness, but also divine faithfulness to promises made to a specific family. God will never be the same again. By his word, God has created a new family, indeed a new world for both Abraham and God, which gives us a future, in which wherever we are God is there.
We live in a time of great technological changes, generational dynamics, environmental instabilities, and philosophical understandings pulsate, making discerning where to direct our energies is difficult. And yet, in this exciting and hope-filled time, we cannot resist trying to capture the movement.
During the last few decades, we’ve watched the attendance wane in many congregations as demographics and interests shifted. We all know it is particularly true of this community. People have moved out into retirement villages, or moved because of the M2, leaving us behind not knowing how to reach out to their new neighbours, especially people of different ethnicity. Evangelical mega-churches, such as Saint Paul’s Carlingford, or Hillsong, have sprang up, swallowing many of the more traditional churches. With bare exteriors and pleasant interiors reminiscent of shopping malls, these large churches filled with people attracted to charismatic pastors and catchy praise songs. For the last twenty years, eager leaders in mainline denominations have been looking to the robust mega-church movement to teach us how to reach out to our culture in a relevant way.
However, the mega-church model that doesn’t seem to be working as successfully as previously, as mega-church members age, worship as entertainment seems to be losing its lustre and many pastors have become exhausted by trying to grow a church on steroids. The children who were raised in mega-churches are becoming irritated with the bigger-is-always-better attitude, and attitudes toward that style of evangelicalism in general are becoming less enthusiastic.
How can we, the church in this place, adapt to enable us to flourish in this changing context? What vital possibilities are arising in this exciting, surging time? How can we reframe our faith, our hope and our love, in the midst of these currents? I believe that people are drawn by a deep sense of community and search for God. We can offer that if we free ourselves to be moved by God’s Spirit.
There is a deep spiritual yearning pervasive across generations, yet we know people will no longer settle for one-way preaching and entertaining services. They want meaningful worship, an empowered lay leadership and a spirituality that leads to action. Again, people are longing for the very things that many denominational churches have been cultivating for decades.
If we begin to reframe the important work of our church community, taking care to understand the shifts occurring in our culture and to respond to them faithfully, then the years ahead can be extremely fruitful for us. If we realize and welcome the changes that will come, if we can be open to what new adaptations will bring to us, if we can begin to sense the Holy Spirit moving, then we will be able to sense a new vitality in this church.
The Guerilla, A World of Stories for Preachers and Teachers, W J Bausch, Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic, 1999.
W Brueggemann, http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=resources.sermon_prep&item=LTW_110349_ALent2&week=A_Lent_2and The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol I, Abingdon, Nashville, 1994
www.alban.org/conversation.aspx?id=9436, Carol Howard Merritt.