Sermon
preached at Squamish United Church
DO YOU HAVE A BURGLAR-PROOF FAITH?
Luke 12: 32-40.
Hebrews 11: 1-6.
Sermon
preached at Squamish United Church
DO YOU HAVE A BURGLAR-PROOF FAITH?
Luke 12: 32-40.
Hebrews 11: 1-6.
What is your “take” on religious faith? Are you “high-church,
or low church? Or, as Jonathan Swift satirized the two theological
positions, are you a “Big-ender”, or a “Little ender”? Sadly, there
are still parts of the world where the choice between God and Mohammed,
between Jew and Gentile, or between Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant beliefs
offers an excuse for murder, rape and ethnic cleansing. But in Canada,
we pride ourselves on being a multi-faith community- we have our Sikhs
and our Muslims, our Hindus and our Jews, our Bahei and our Zoroastrians,
as well as strongly resurgent indigenous religions.
Especially within the United Church, we have learned to accept a
wide range of perspectives on faith. Those who have watched TV productions
of the PD James mysteries can sense her commitment to the “Big-ended” ritual
and pageantry, the solemn chants and incense of the Anglo-catholic tradition.
In Squamish, most of us perhaps live at the “Little-ender” part of the
ecclesiastical spectrum, expressing our joy in popular songs, and finding
peace and contact with the ultimate ground of our being through quiet introspection
and meditation. Our readings this morning offer further perspectives
on faith. Luke puts into the mouth of Jesus some of the favourite
texts of the evangelical preacher. Jesus will soon be back to dispense
stern justice (Luke 12, v. 39): "if the housekeeper had known what hour
the thief would come, he or she would have watched and not suffered the
house to be broken into." You can almost smell the sulphur and see
the flames rising from the printed page! “I have come to bring fire
to the earth” “The servant who knows what his master wants, but has
not even started to carry out those wishes will receive very many strokes
of the lash”. God is about to return with all the subtlety of a trigger-happy
home-invasion artist. And we had better hand over our faith without
too much of an argument- “Simply believe, and you will be saved.”
This is an uncompromising message of judgment and salvation- something
that can fill a vast stadium such as BC Place. We can hear the urgent
voice of the revivalist swelling in the final fervour of the altar call.
God is no doting mother hen; He (it always seems to be a he) is coming
in anger just as unexpectedly as the local burglar, and we had better be
prepared for His arrival.
The evangelist who has rented BC Place might justify the process
on the basis that the early apostles were not above a little grand-standing.
Strident preaching works for some people. We are created not only
intelligent, but also emotional beings. So why not allow God to speak
to us through our emotions as well as our minds. Christine could
tell us about John Wesley, a very careful and methodical man, who yet allowed
his heart to be “strangely warmed” by the preaching in a small chapel at
Aldersgate, in North London.
But the twenties and the thirties showed us the dangers of charisma,
as powerful speakers sported black or brown shirts, wearing jackboots instead
of dog-collars. The Nuremberg rallies revealed how orators can influence
human emotions for evil, as easily as for good. And in what claims
to be one manifestation of the Ulster Presbyterian Church, a fanatic “Little-ender”
such as Ian Paisley can still whip up hatreds that wreck years of patient
work for peace. If we base our faith on the mindless repetition of
one liners, we can find emotional calls for faith and repentance, and perhaps
hear the beautiful precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. But we must
also face some pretty seamy passages: the God who tests a father's faith
by seeing if he will kill his son (Genesis 22, v. 1-14), and the king who
pushes his servant into the forefront of battle so that he can steal his
wife (2 Samuel 11, v. 2-17). We learn about the perfect cure for
homosexuality: let your daughters be raped (Genesis 19, v.8), and we find
the way to ensure peace in Kosovo or Belfast: kill every male in the city
(Deuteronomy 20, v.13). Hardly great texts if we are going to interpret
them one sentence at a time.
As the year 2K approaches, we are moving into what the Chinese might
call interesting times. Automation and a ruthless depletion of natural
resources have made the employment market as uncertain as in the dark days
of the depression. Repeated opinion polls show Canada is perilously
close to splitting asunder. And an ever-growing world population
threatens the very survival of our eco-system. In such a dangerous
world, many people want a simple, and a certain faith. They don’t
get very excited if theologians tell them the Virgin birth is a great metaphor,
and the resurrection a wonderful piece of allegory. Northrop Frye’s
"Great Code" is not for them; a "myth is as good as a mile". And
they still find people with charisma, those who can spell out the answers
in words of one syllable. Ban all blacks! Cut welfare cheques!
The Front Nationale wins the Municipal election in Toulon, France, and
the mayor promptly proclaims "La peur de la police, c'est le commencement
de la sagesse"- Wisdom starts with fear of the police.
Those who seek a more thoughtful approach to the dilemmas of faith might turn to Chapter 11 of the epistle to the Hebrews. This is not the easiest territory for the amateur preacher. When the Pauliste scholar M-E. Boismard wrote an introduction to this epistle in the Bible de Jérusalem, he suggested that the threads of the principal themes were interwoven with a subtlety that surpassed our western logic. The literary elegance of the writer is not what we expect of the apostle Paul. So who was the author? We know that the letter was mailed or smuggled from exile, somewhere in Italy (Hebrews 13, vs. 24). Possibly, it came from Apollos, the Alexandrian Jew who made such a big hit in Ephesus, with his eloquence, apostolic zeal and knowledge of the Scriptures (Acts 18: 24-28). Hebrews certainly offers a message for interesting times! It was written around 67 AD, just before the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. In Rome, Nero, your friendly neighbourhood fiddler, was on the throne. I won't bore you with a long list of poisonings in the royal palace. Enough to say that any wisdom in the first half of Nero's reign faded as Burrus, Commander in Chief of the elite Praetorian Guard, was murdered and Seneca was forced to retire. After a drunken orgy, Nero played his fiddle with more verve than the leader of the VSO, as he torched the entire city. The morning after the night before, it looked as though Rome had had quite a party. It was a shade worse than Kosovo after the Serbs and the Albanians had finished with it. And of course, who to blame for the destruction of Rome but those pesky Christians. Peter was one of the first victims of the resulting massacre. And back in Jerusalem and Alexandria, things were not much better: Jewish uprisings were being brutally suppressed. Our problems of unemployment, air-pollution, and a growing world population pale against this yardstick.
What remedy did Apollos propose for those who were facing such interesting
times? Seventeen times in Chapter 11 of Hebrews, he tells them how
faith had sustained God's people. What sort of a faith is he talking
about? Is it a sudden, charismatically- inspired blind belief?
Verse 1 offers the Apollos take on faith: we are not talking about a transient,
emotional response. Rather, it is a deep-seated trust- "the substance
of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Some people
have argued that there was a subtle shift in thinking as Christians faced
Nero’s terrible persecution. In the early days of the church, the
apostles felt that they had found the Messiah. As Paul tells the
Colossians, God had "delivered us out of the power of darkness and translated
us into the Kingdom of the Son of His love" (Colossians 1, v. 13).
History had already reached its climax; the Kingdom of God had effectively
been inaugurated. But as times got tough, this belief, which Professor
Kelly has called "realized eschatology," gave place to a hope in the parousia,
a future time when Christ would return and straighten out what seemed an
impossible mess. Apollos seems to be saying that faith should look
to an invisible future- the trust that could send Abraham out blindly in
search of a new country and a new home for his family- maybe not a bad
message for a bunch of Albanian refugees as they arrive at a forces base
in Northern Canada, but often interpreted by both evangelists and their
critics as a simplistic promise of pie in the sky, by and by. There
is some element of parousial hope in the message of Hebrews- a belief that
could sustain the young church at a moment when evil seemed triumphant,
and the "little flock" were close to breaking point under the weight of
physical and spiritual trials- Jesus would be back "real soon", and he
would overthrow the evil rulers of this present world. But as we
read the epistle, we find more than the promise of the Christian right,
that a repetition of the Hiroshima holocaust will bring a glorious after-life
for the virtuous. In Chapter 6, v. 5, we read that God's people have
already "tasted... the powers of the age to come". The future may
sometimes be invisible. It may be bigger than one generation.
But it does not rest simply on cloud nine. It can be realized in
all the darkness of this world. Noah didn't know the flood was coming,
but because he built the ark in faith, his descendants enjoyed a richer
life on this earth. And from the faith of Abraham, there sprang a
people to inhabit the land of Israel, as "many as the stars of the sky
in multitude" (v. 12). Space does not allow Apollos to tell of many
others "who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained
promises," and even in Nero's Rome "stopped the mouths of lions" (v. 32).
Luke's gospel takes up a similar theme, urging trust in a combination
of realized hope and a longing for the parousia. Luke is in prison
in Rome, and he utters the catchword of the day- maranatha, the Lord is
coming. But he adds: "be not afraid of them that kill the body, and
after that have no more that they can do" (v. 4). He cites Christ's
question, what do you treasure? Put your faith in an expensive TV
and stereo system or a cabinet full of high-class jewelry, and an urban
mob or a clever thief can steal the lot. Buy expensive clothes, pack
them in a fancy suitcase, and an Air Canada conveyor belt will tear everything
to shreds. Trust in a particular doctrine, and it may be destroyed
by a professor of theology. So protect yourself against home invasion!
Buy some bags that wax not old! Put your hope in a clear conscience,
a concern for others and a commitment to social justice, even in an unjust
world. Solidarity with the poor and the oppressed is a heavenly treasure
that will not fail, even when the property market turns soft, or we face
revolutions, commonsense and otherwise. For where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also.
So much for our personal faith. But what about our church?
Does the shape of our communal faith matter? Should we be “Big-enders”
or “Little-enders”? I don’t think we will solve the tremendous problems
of our world today by tinkering with our liturgy or deciding to break our
eggs at the opposite end. I don’t think it will help to get some
charisma back into our sermons, or to have a few more of those hymns and
choruses that everyone knows and enjoys. We must accept that there
are many possible paths to truth. When we start worrying about the
true date of Easter, or the type of vestments to be worn, Isaiah tell us
that God couldn't care less about new moons, or how we organise our solemn
assemblies. And an evangelism without social conscience will serve
the church no better than the individual Christian. God’s Kingdom
can only be built on social justice: "learn to do well; seek judgment,
relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow" (Isaiah
1, v.11). This is not a simple, high profile message that will pack
people into BC Place. It may seem to pass unheard in a crass commercial
world that cries for cuts in taxation and the punishment of welfare fraud.
But solidarity with the poor and the oppressed is a treasure that cannot
be taken from us.
The faith of today's scripture allows us to understand all of our
puzzling world as "framed by the Word of God" (Hebrews 11, v.3).
And it is a faith, to which we are called "from the rising of the sun to
the going down thereof" (Psalm 50, v.1).
May God grant us the vision, the strength and the courage to seek
this burglar-proof treasure. AMEN.