Posted on 06/27/2005 9:26:45 PM PDT by hiho hiho
Let me begin by giving you a summary of the sermon that I'm not going to preach. It's very tempting when we hear the New Testament lesson today to use it as a way of thinking about the Church including strangers. The Church moves from one ethnic group to another and proves that it is adaptable for new people. The Church is always changing itself so as to be a welcoming place for the stranger, the unfamiliar neighbour. And that wouldn't be a bad sermon, but I have a suspicion that it's not quite what the Acts of the Apostles wants us to think about. I have a suspicion that the Acts of the Apostles is here telling us something rather deeper and more central about our faith.
The relation between Jews and Gentiles in the Acts is not simply that of one racial group to another. As the story is presented to us, it's a story about a great crisis over what faith really is, and what salvation really is. The strict believers who challenge Paul and Barnabas and have no small dissension and debate with them - one of Luke's wonderfully tactful phrases - those strict believers are in effect saying it is possible to know that you are in the favour of God. Be circumcised, keep the law, and when you are alone in the silence of your room, you will know where to turn to be sure; you will know what your record is. You will know that you have the signs that make you acceptable to God. To which Paul and Barnabas, and the Church ever since have replied, 'There is no sign by which you can tell in and of yourself that you are acceptable to God. There is nothing about you that guarantees love, salvation, healing, and peace. But there is everything about God in Jesus Christ that assures you, and so if you want to know where your certainty lies, look to God, not to yourself.' Don't tick off the conditions that might possible make God love you, scoring highly, perhaps, and thinking, 'So God must love me after all.' Begin rather by looking into the face of the love of God in Jesus Christ, and then, as it were, out of your bewilderment and your speechlessness at that love, thinking, 'And yes, I am loved.' Not just one episode, you see, in the history of the Church, but almost another Pentecost.
About half way through the Acts of the Apostles, here comes this great event in which the Church together, in a difficult and painful discernment, comes to say, 'It is not in us, but in God, that our security lies, because we cannot assure ourselves, and we cannot heal ourselves, and we cannot feed ourselves. We can only come to God empty-handed, looking into his face, depending absolutely on Him.' We believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will. The grace of the Lord Jesus, which is what the Gospel story is about today. Once again, the strict make their challenge. What is Jesus doing in the company of tax collectors and sinners? Jesus' reply is wonderfully ironic. 'If you don't think you need me,' he says to the strict believers, 'feel free to go.' And we might think he looks each one of them in the eye and says, 'If you don't think you need, you can go.' And there's our challenge. As Christ looks at each one of us, which of us is able to say, 'All right, I don't need you, I'll go.' 'Those who are well have no need of a physician.' So says Jesus to his critics and to us. 'So if you are healthy, you don't need me. If you are whole, at peace with yourself, satisfied in your skin, happy in the world, you don't need me.' And again, which of us will say, 'I am whole. I have finished my work. I am at peace in the world.'
The difficulty of the Gospel is perhaps this: that it gives comfort neither to the legalist nor to the libertine. It doesn't say, 'You can win the grace of God by being good', and it doesn't say, 'The grace of God makes no difference to you.' It sweeps away the cobwebs and the veils, and makes us face a Jesus who says, 'So, do you need me or not? Are you hungry? Are you sick? Is your work, your life unfinished? Because, if you are whole and not hungry, and finished, go.'
Here we are then, this morning, the people who have not found the nerve to walk away. And is that perhaps the best definition we could have of the Church? We are the people who have not had the nerve to walk away; who have not had the nerve to say in the face of Jesus, 'All right, I'm healthy, I'm not hungry. I've finished, I've done.' We have, thank God, not found it in us to lie to that extent. For all the lies we tell ourselves day after day, that fundamental lie has been impossible for us. Thank God. We're here as hungry people, we are here because we cannot heal and complete ourselves; we're here to eat together at the table of the Lord, as he sits at dinner in this house, and is surrounded by these disreputable, unfinished, unhealthy, hungry, sinful, but at the end of the day almost honest people, gathered with him to find renewal, to be converted, and to change. Because the hard secret of our humanity is that while the body has the capacity to heal itself, the soul it seems doesn't. The soul can only be loved into life - and love is always something that we cannot generate out of our own insides - where we have to come with hands and hearts open to receive.
The people who didn't have the nerve to walk away. And because they didn't have the nerve to walk away, the people who not always in an easy or welcome way, find they have more in common than they might have thought. What do we all have in common this morning in this church? We are hungry for God's love, God's truth, and God's healing, and we have recognised that we cannot heal our own spirits, but must come to one another and to God for that healing. Hungry together, reaching out our empty hands together, we discover something about our humanity that we could in no other way discover, and we as an Anglican Communion, a world-wide fellowship of believers, we are saying that from country to country and language to language, and culture to culture, there is always the hunger, there is always the need for love, and at that level our human solidarity is revealed to us as it is in no other way.
Just theology? Just pulpit talk? No. No, in a world where human solidarity doesn't seem so obvious. Next weekend, and the week after that, the wealthy nations of the world will be considering what particular crumbs from their table might fall somewhere in the direction of the needy of the world. In a world where such a meeting is even necessary, we need witnesses to solidarity. We need to remember that those who starve and struggle in terrible violence and deprivation are us, not them - part of one human community, loved equally with the passion of God, invited equally to the table of Jesus Christ. We are part of the civilisation which has somehow got used to the idea that what is good for us in the wealthy part of the world has no connection with what is good for anyone else. We have somehow got used to this, and we as Christians are all too seldom pained and angered enough by this. I spoke during the meeting last week of the vision of the Church as that of a community where the poverty of one is the poverty of all, where the wealth of one is the wealth of all. Where because we recognise our solidarity as human beings, our active compassion for one another is kindled. And in a civilisation that is deeply sick, we need the Body of Christ to be alive and well. And that too is what we celebrate this morning. Invited into the Body of Christ, into those who recognise together their need and their hunger, we proclaim to the world that it is God's purpose that we should live with and for each other; that it is God's purpose that each of us here to be a gift to the neighbour of whatever background, whatever race. 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.' And Jesus says to us, not only as individuals, but as a whole civilisation here in the northern world, the western world, 'So, you don't need me; so you are well?' God help us if we try to turn away from that challenge.
So our being together here, at the table of the Lord, recognising that it is not about us but about Him, that our security lies not in the signs of our virtue and achievement, but in God's generosity - being here on that basis is itself a mark of hope. And those of us who care about our Anglican Communion worldwide - its unity, its life, and its peace - care for it not in order to keep an ecclesiastical institution more or less upright, propping it up with more and more crumbling pillars and struts and buttresses. We care about it because we are part of the Body of Christ and the world needs the Body of Christ. It is hungry for truth and for love. We are here to be fed with that truth and that love in the body and the blood of the Lord in His Holy Sacrament. As we open our hands to receive that gift, so we open them to one another and to the world. We do not have the nerve to walk away. So much the better for us. The appetite for truth is still alive. So much the better for us. May truth and love, the truth and love of Jesus as he sits with sinners, be the motive power of all we do and say in our meetings as Church, in our witness to the world, in our protest against division and violence and hunger. May we say to the whole world that we believe that we will be save through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.
Amen.
***Here we are then, this morning, the people who have not found the nerve to walk away***
Ahhhh!!! The aroma of sweet smelling vomit!
The Archbishop is a wee bit understated. 'colossal gall' would be a good literal rendition for 'nerve'.
And the above snippet was the only part that even began to hint at a sermon of any value for me, the Roman Catholic lady in the back of the room ready with her eggs and tomatoes for the boffins and the theobabblers spinning the Gospel into dross.
bttt
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams.
FReepmail sionnsar if you want on or off this moderately high-volume ping list (typically 3-7 pings/day).
This list is pinged by sionnsar and newheart.
Resource for Traditional Anglicans: http://trad-anglican.faithweb.com
Speak the truth in love. Eph 4:15
Well, my lady, I am Anglican and it sounded sort of okay up to the middle. The part he lost me at was that somehow it was my fault that half the world has not yet climbed out of the Late Stone Age and that it appears to be my job to provide for them materially.
How that relates to saving their souls, which I thought was ++Rowan's day job, I'm not sure, but it has been my impression that the Church is far better served spiritually by adversity than by plenty and satiety. So somehow the halves of the sermon fall each to one side and I'm left rather sad for them.
In Christ,
Deacon Paul+
Somehow, I can't see this sermon stirring Britons out of their spiritual apathy and agnosticism.
So what's your problem with what he actually said? What, precisely, do you find wrong with his interpretation of the story in Luke 5?
Hasn't it always been a Christian duty to help the poor? We can agree that ++Rowan's specific prescriptions for doing so are likely to cause more harm than good, as his understanding of the underlying problem is probably incorrect; however, his main point follows the lines of the parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus, in Luke 16.
It has been, but what ++Rowan is here doing, as is so often the case with people whose secular interests have spawned the Christian Socialist political movements, is arguing in favor of compulsory contribution, as a matter of state policy. That is emphatically against the long and firm tradition in the Church of giving from your own hand (a free rending of the Didache's instruction in the matter).
It ends up being just one more 'you owe for the flesh and I get the moral credit for reminding you'. It quite leaves out of the picture any understanding of what really keeps a culture from fully civilizing - a clear and fair law of property. It sounds very selfish, but then if you can truly and unimpeachably claim title to land, goods and even the services you can provide, then you can that much more clearly give, right from your own hand, to those now in need.
What ++Rowan is proposing is what leads to permanent state welfare as a functional substitute for Christian charity, institutionalizing, trivialing and eventually marginalizing the actual gifts from actual persons in submission to their Lord's admonition to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and house the houseless.
I am happy to help someone in need, but if they personally are going to become a permanent destination for part of my income, then I'm eventually going to have to insist on some compensation more literal than the tax break the government can at any time take away.
I grant that this leaves one group aside: the group that is in dire, chronic and irremediable need, such that they will never be able to provide for themselves. This is the core from which modern welfare provisions grew and upon which they still stand for ethical substantiation. Many in the Third World are quite capable and likely quite willing to provide for themselves, were their society adequately founded to permit orderly and individual commerce.
Had I had the grace of opportunity to address this, I really would have limited myself to seeking to learn and embrace God's eternal Truth and to bring it to those still in darkness. I actually believe that having God's Truth in one's heart and directing one's ways and means is itself the truest and most dependable path to prosperous civilization, not least because of the fundamental admonition against theft and dishonesty. When one fully accepts the injunction to love one's brothers as oneself, all the social mechanism needed to ensure fair, honest and decent commerce follows in train. It is when these virtues are assumed in shadow play that the resulting civilization is faulty and abusive.
That's what I would have emphasized to the ACC.
In Christ,
Deacon Paul+
That's it.
His observation, however, is absolutely correct: there should be no need for a meeting such as the one he describes. His underlying point is that the world is sick (and it is); and the the true hope of the world is for us to work for health for the Body of Christ (he's right).
I've been reading Barclay's commentary on John, and one of his comments has stuck with me: (paraphrasing) It is not "love" to fail to speak the truth.
A healthy Body of Christ requires us to speak the truth; and speaking the truth with respect to the third world means that we must not overlook the bad things that third world countries do to themselves. At the same time, it would be wrong to pretend that we in the First World are not also to blame for some of what has happened there -- you can undoubtedly pick out a lot of examples, some of them done in the name of "love" by our friends on the left, and also in the name of greed by folks across the political spectrum.
I think the former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, is a perfect example of how all of these factors play together. Rhodesia was a place where some people were badly exploited by the "first world" white minority. The "loving" response from the west was to force out the white minority, and to usher in the reign of Robert Mugabe, who has (in lamentably typical African fashion) made things incomparably worse. Who's to blame? Everybody -- not just the third worlders.
We need to be honest about others; but we need also to be honest about ourselves. As ++Rowan points out, we are in need of a doctor ourselves.
As for the third world, I think the answer is "simply" this: to speak the truth about Christ, and how we are to live in Him. The Africans doing a good job of that themselves; the folks in need of a physician on the speaking of His truth is us, not them.
Read: Conservative Anglicans
Conservative Anglicans, and anybody else who place the letter of the law over the spirit of it. (Isn't that the basis of Jesus's conflict with the Pharisees?) I've come across my share of modern-day Pharisees, as I'm sure you have, too. I have to fight hard with myself not to fall into the same trap (which is tempting).
Read: Traditional Anglicans and pro-homosexual revisionists are on EQUAL footing in the Church.
Not remotely what he said.
Read: We pro-homosexual Anglicans aren't going away.
Sounds like you're one of those who claims not to need a doctor. Sorry, but I'm one who numbers myself among the sick who needs a doctor.
Read: Because the pro-homos are not "walking away" the conservatives need to accept, embrace & find commonality with them
He didn't say that.
Read: And for good measure, let's "do it for the children" and "for the needy of the world".
I don't know how you got this: the world is hungry for truth and love, as only Christ can give it.
This is a gospel of moral relativism. No surprise coming from a man who is lost in his own little tornado of radicalism, doubt and unbelief.
You sound like one of the fellows who undertook to debate with Paul and Barnabas....
...it has been my impression that the Church is far better served spiritually by adversity than by plenty and satiety.
"Adversity for thee, but not for me", eh?
We're going to have to leave this as is because I'm clearly making a point you consider ancillary at best and you keep insisting that ++Rowan's indictment is somehow authoritative, just because he correctly recites Scriptural sources.
I will insist that he is at best misapplying the source for partisan purpose and that what you are saying about First World guilt is the primary grounding for reparations (read: international extortion). And I strongly object to the suggestion that Rhodesia was that badly treated. One can say that only relative to other overseas British possessions. Britain, largely now derided for her empire, was on balance a caring and generous colonizer. If I were Belgian, French, German or Italian, then the general picture is far worse, and in the French case, so very widespread. That Zimbabweans are now racist and basically a governmental theft ring appears to be something they have achieved as a local society. You are free to put forward examples of other colonies going into such organized theft. I only know of South Africa, which should thereby claim influence from Holland as well.
Sorry, my friend, but ++Rowan is calling people to repentance for sins they have not committed and for sins committed before those he's speaking to were even born. That's exactly the wrong kind of sinfulness. I am a sinner, no doubt about that, but they are sins I have myself committed. I am not responsible for what other people did here or elsewhere and I am not going to be pressured by whingeing words to pay up for what I did not do, never consented to and would not do unless somebody put a gun to my head (and, if the importance sufficed, maybe not even then).
In Christ,
Deacon Paul+
you keep insisting that ++Rowan's indictment is somehow authoritative, just because he correctly recites Scriptural sources.
The fact that ++Rowan's indictment is in accord with Scripture should be of more than passing interest to someone who styles himself an Anglican.
And I strongly object to the suggestion that Rhodesia was that badly treated. One can say that only relative to other overseas British possessions. Britain, largely now derided for her empire, was on balance a caring and generous colonizer.
One can also say that, relative to our own ideals of Unalienable Rights, British colonialism was only the best of a very bad lot. You're neatly sidestepping the fact that the colonized majority was denuded of nearly all political power -- something about which our own founding fathers took a rather dim view. You're also somehow missing the fact that the white minority managed to be, by and large, very wealthy, whereas the colonized majority tended to remain poor. One need not be a muzzy-headed leftist to recognize that there was something not quite right there.
We can certainly agree that ++Rowan's prescriptions (the likes of which gained full play in Rhodesia) are most likely not correct. But that does not relieve us of the requirement to ensure that our own prescriptions are likewise wrong. (Are you really willing to defend a Rhodesian polity that you, personally, would find intolerable if you were forced to live in it?) If our prescriptions somehow manage to sidestep Scripture -- and I'm not accusing you of that -- then we're on the wrong track.
Honesty is a good thing, especially when we apply it to our own opinions.
No need to play the "open-mouthed amazement at my ignorance" card. I am thoroughly familiar with who Dr. Rowan Williams is, and also his opinions on the matter of homosexuality. I disagree with him on the latter, and I would very much have preferred a different and orthodox Archbishop of Canterbury.
That said, I am also familiar with his actions with regard to the current controversies, and he has increasingly sided with the orthodox majority against the revisionists, even though that stance runs counter to his personal opinions on the matter. The decisions of the current ACC conference are on balance a victory for our side, and ++Rowan supported those decisions.
Am I comfortable that he'll continue to do the right thing? Not at all -- I suspect that some of his motives are personal and political, rather than Scriptural, and that he'll backslide if the opportunity presents itself.
But he's at least doing the right things at the moment, which is much more than I expected -- and it suggests to me that he may in fact be trying to live up to the points he raises in his sermon.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.