Second Sunday of Epiphany, 14th January 2018
Queen Camel, West Camel, Weston Bampfylde
I woke up one day and saw the police officers of Windsor escorting homeless people off the streets into vans, and taxiing them to the very gates of the royal palace, to be ushered along a red carpet and take their seats as guests of honour at the prince and princess’s wedding feast. [1]
I woke up one day and saw delighted groups of young girls and young men, dancing arm in arm across the shiny floors of an out-of-town shopping centre, the doors of the shops closed, window displays telling their ex-customers, ‘You don’t need these products, to be accepted and loved - you are beautiful in yourselves, go free’.
I woke up one day and saw expert engineers in armament factories dismantling warheads and, using those same materials, turning their skilful hands to the manufacture of bespoke hospital equipment.
I woke up one day and saw postmen and postwomen in every street and village delivering letters from the banks to everyone in debt, telling them their balance had been fully cleared; I saw the hugs and the tears of joy in each household.
I woke up and saw the churches closing down their foodbanks, for the well-off people and the poorer ones were now in the habit of sharing food together in each other’s homes.
I woke up and realised that for all my life beforehand I had been living in a sombre dream, I’d been living in a world of meanness and unkindness, a world of exploitation and inequality, a world where selfishness and greed were elevated and where no-one, ever, felt good enough in the eyes of others.
I woke up to the real world - the world envisioned through the eyes of God. I realised that embracing the good news of Jesus Christ is the doorway to this reality, that those who pass through it put that bad dream behind them as they begin to learn to walk with God. Following Christ is an awakening.
How does one wake up? Sometimes we awaken because an alarm goes off, a sharp reminder that the time has come to get up, shape up, move on. Sometimes we wake up when a storm hits us, when we find our once stable selves blown and tossed around in the chaos, grasping after something solid to hold onto. Sometimes we awaken because someone gives us a prod: “It’s time,” they tell us, and reluctantly perhaps, or cautiously maybe, we give ourselves over to follow them into the new situation.
Evangelism is a word which describes how we help other people to wake up from the world’s bad dream into God’s glorious reality. We are all called to share the story and the message of Jesus, in our own way, in our own place, as well as we can. In that sense we’re all called to be evangelists.
Now we know that some Christians ‘do evangelism’ like shrill alarm bells ringing in the ears of the lost - and you know, in doing so they’re not unlike the first Christians, those who we find in the New Testament, who ‘were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent.’ [2] Like Jesus their leader they wasted no time alerting ‘the lost’ to how they could be found, there was an urgency and intensity about their evangelical task.
We generally more reticent Anglicans tend to do evangelism quietly, we tend to prefer to show our love for God through acts of kindness or charity towards others, we like that saying attributed to St Francis which goes like this: ‘Preach the gospel. Use words if necessary.’ [3] Which is probably why our Deanery Mission Plan says that ‘we will seek every opportunity to live and tell the story of Jesus.’ In our living it out, we hope that the story comes across. [4]
And we Anglicans tend to understand and express our faith primarily through our worship, and through the church buildings we worship in, which are a witness to God’s presence in our communities through the ages. So it’s no surprise that the Deanery Mission Plan addresses evangelism in terms of ‘Reaching out to young families through services, events and Messy Church’ and ‘Using our buildings as a resource to illuminate our faith’.
We’re also committed as a Deanery to ‘Being welcoming to all’ as part of the evangelical task. Now this is an interesting intention. I think it’s true to say that ‘all churches think that they are welcoming and friendly’. [5] But sadly that’s not always the experience of people who come through the doors on a Sunday and maybe find it all a little bit clubbish and exclusive; or who try to come with a pushchair or in a wheelchair and find they can’t even access the building or communion rail; or who come with eye problems and find it impossible to follow a service based entirely on a written document; or who come with debt problems and shrink inside when the offertory plate is held in front of them; or who come with marital problems and feel condemned by the idea that Christian relationships should be perfect … and so on. When people’s experience of church feels to them like bad news, then our evangelism - our sharing the good news - is compromised.
Addressing this, in our Lent Meetings this year we’ll be looking at how we can be an ‘Inclusive Church’, that is a ‘church which does not discriminate, on any level, on grounds of economic power, gender, mental health, physical ability, race or sexuality.’ We will be asking how we can show that we are ‘a Church which welcomes and serves all people in the name of Jesus Christ; which …, in the power of the Holy Spirit, allows all people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus Christ.’ [6]
We are inviting speakers to come and share their stories of living with Disability, or Mental Health problems, or Poverty, of living with challenging circumstances around their Gender or Sexuality or Ethnicity - and we will be putting their stories into the mix with some passages of scripture to help us consider together what the good news of Jesus Christ is for people in these situations, and how we can express it. The idea behind this is that good evangelism must begin with good listening - that if we are to meaningfully share the gospel with others we must have listened to them first: not so as to be ready with a certain answer, but listened to them so as to understand.
And having listened well, and understood where people are coming from outside the church, outside the faith, what questions they have, what motivates them, what alarms them maybe, what storms of life are tossing them around; having done all that, our Deanery Mission Plan is rightly asking us to consider how we may find ‘new ways to share our faith’ - ways which can connect with people just where they are, just as they are.
This is especially important with children. Studies show that over the past decade church attendance by children fell by 22 per cent, and in the smallest 25 per cent of churches the average weekly attendance by children was zero. But other studies reinforced what most people already understand: ‘that foundations for faith are laid in early childhood, and the part played by, and the responsibility of the family is central to the transmission of faith.’ So ‘when young people were asked who or what influenced the way that they thought about faith and religion, 73 per cent who believed in God said their family.’ [7] So maybe finding ‘new ways to share our faith’ means simply finding ways to pass on the story of Jesus Christ to the young ones in our family homes, and to help the other members of our families do the same.
I suspect that children, even more than adults, are open to awakening to the good news which Jesus brings - able to locate themselves belonging in a world inspired by the life and teachings of Christ, a world where the homeless are the top guests at the royal feast, where people put down their swords and turn them into ploughshares, where people are set free from all that oppresses them, where people share their good things with each other; a world where, more than anything else, they are valued and loved just for who they are.
It has been suggested that we may be living through a ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer moment’. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young pastor and theologian in Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler, helped to lead what became known as the Confessing Church, which objected to Nazism on theological and political grounds. Bonhoeffer's fundamental question was always, “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” [8]
It is a question always worth asking. Who is Jesus Christ for me, today? Is he the one who awakens me from the world’s bad dream into the possibilities, each day, of living in God’s glorious reality? Are his story and his message things I long to share? Who is Jesus Christ for me, today?
Evangelism is as natural as chatting to our children, reading our grandchildren the stories we ourselves love. You needn’t fear telling Jesus’ story, for that story is so much part of your own. You needn’t be reluctant sharing Jesus’ message, for that same message nourishes you; and I suspect that many more people than you and I imagine, are longing to hear our good news….
Notes
[1] The opening section of this sermon is a very loose revision of the beatitudes - the first paragraph (‘blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’) was triggered by news reports that a leader of Windsor Council called on police to clear the streets of ‘beggars’ in advance of the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle on 19 May. Royal wedding: Windsor council leader in begging crackdown call. BBC News, 3 January 2018.
[2] David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation. Publishers notes.
[3] Wikiquote: St Francis, 'Preach the gospel, and if necessary use words.'
[4] The Bruton and Cary Deanery Mission Plan is published on the Deanery website: Living and Telling The Story in Bruton and Cary Deanery. This talk is the second of a series of five on the themes of the Deanery Mission Plan: Vocation, Evangelism, Community, Formation, Communication.
[5] Inclusive Church Radical Welcome Course introduction.
[6] Inclusive Church Statement of Belief. The Lent Meetings planned are based on the Inclusive Church Small Group Study resources.
[7] Ali Campbell, Home is where the faith is; so focus on the family. Church Times, 12 January 2018.
[8] Jim Wallis, The Heresy of Ideological Religion, Sojourners, February 2018.
Comments