Showing posts with label inclusivity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inclusivity. Show all posts

Sunday, 19 January 2014

Thinking with the heart, grace and inclusivity



Epiphany 2 (2014) Year A RCL Principal

Come and See

First up, a little thought which I did say to the sermon Circle I wasn’t going to share, but it leads me into what I want to say this Morning too well to keep to myself.  It’s not the pig with three legs joke, but it is about animals…

A man takes his dog to the vet and after an examination the Vet takes him aside and says, I am very sorry but your dog doesn’t have long to go, now, and all we can do is make him comfortable.

The man refuses to believe it and demands a second opinion. So the vet agrees and whistles – from the back room comes a tabby cat which sniffs around the dog lying prone, pokes it and then looks up at the vet, shakes its head and dolefully says ‘meeow’.

Then the vet whistles again and in comes a beautiful Labrador, who proceeds to sniff, and nuzzle, and check out the other dog.  She also looks up, shakes her head and says, “rawwr”

The vet says, I’m so sorry, it’s certain. To which the man says “OK, how much do I owe you?” – “A thousand dollars” replies the vet.  “What???” says the man.  “Well,” responds the vet “my consultation was only a hundred bucks, but with the Cat scan and the lab work….”

So, that extremely tenous link brings me to the snippet of information I really want to start with.  With the increasing ability of CAT (computed tomography) scans to read information about the human body I have been intrigued to discover recently that using various technological aids to map the human body it has been discovered that our internal organs - particularly the gut and the heart - have neurons.  That may seem and odd way to start a sermon (along with the vet thing) but it says something quite important - it is not just our brains that have the ability to think, but our hearts and our gut too! 

It’s something I mentioned last week in our Iona service when we invited you all to enter the river of prayer and faith which is represented by the river running into our font.  Entering the river like we enter the story - not just with our minds, but with our hearts.  We are invited to engage with and encounter the stories of faith on an emotional level - again I pay tribute to our First Nations Brothers and Sisters in being able to feel stories and share stories by heart - by which I don’t mean by memory, but by heart.

I can’t stress enough just how much I feel that emotional engagement is something we as people of faith need to rediscover. In a world where many are unsatisfied by rational argument, where people want not to just explain mystery but experience it, where doctrine is rejected but story is valued - where the Church is seen not as a family of faith, but a club of those who follow certain rules and regulations - into this world we have a story to speak, a spirituality to share and a love to give.

And our heart is underrated - at least in western Christianity.  We have bought into the rational thinking of the enlightenment, we so often prize thinking, even without realising it.

When I brought back the creed into worship there were a number of people who were very pleased about again having something that was part of their experience of worship, part of their history, part of their tradition.  Those who have expressed some concern - despite me trying to reassure us all that this is not an attempt to force us down a route of doctrinal conformity - have done so because they feel that in saying a Creed they are being asked to say things they don’t ‘believe’ in.  It’s an interesting use of the word believe, a very post enlightenment, rationalist use. It’s not a use that the early Church would have recognised, nor one that many of our Christian ancestors would have understood.
To believe is to feel, not just to think! Really? I hear you think.  The word be-lief which is our English translation of Credo in Latin, or pistos in the Greek - is actually to have an alliegance to, it is to trust, to give creedence to, meaning to rely on, to lean on, to ally one’s heart to.

We have tied up our understanding of ‘believing’ to mean ‘intellectual assent to’ - wheras I believe it is better expressed as ‘grasp’ or ‘cling to’ or ‘hold tightly’.  When we recite the creed together we are sharing the story, clinging to something greater than ourselves, being a part of something that stretches back centuries.  I would say that it’s about saying ‘I cling to the mystery’ though I don’t pretend to have intellectually got it all together.  Bishop John Shelby Spong put’s it beautifully (and thank you Sarah for the link to this piece) in a Q & A from 9th January that addresses Creeds:

“I see this creed primarily as a love song that our fourth century ancestors wrote to sing to their understanding of God. I have no problem in joining in the singing of this ancient love song, but it would not occur to me that saying these words in worship somehow committed me to a literalized belief system....”

We are joining in the song.  We are feeling the greater story every time we say these ancient texts together.  Likewise the use of a confession in our worship is not about ME and MY BADNESS, but about taking that invitation as a community to both admit our complicity in a world which turns away from God’s love, and to acknowledge our brokenness and hope for healing, laying them before a loving God who opens herself to us and offers us, again and again, new life, grace, and the embrace of being accepted without strings, without conditions, without reason.

So many of our Scriptural encounters are about how it feels to encounter God, and how it feels to be desolate without God.  In our words from the Servant songs of the second book within the book of Isaiah - probably a later writer who added to the original works of Isaiah of Jerusalem - we have a story of faith.  It’s about that profound sense of being completely known and called by God - twice the writer uses the phrase ‘you knew me in the womb’.  It’s a much misused phrase by those who wish to use it purely in arguments about abortion - the sense it is trying to convey is a sense of purpose and of being deeply and intimately connected to God.

It’s a deeply emotive and moving thought - I don’t know about you but some of the most powerful feelings I have are related to feeling known, and feeling accepted and loved - and my greatest moments of despair come when I feel rejected or when I am not accepted as I am.

And our calling as Christian people involves sharing those feelings, and a sense of honesty about our sadness, our loss, our struggles as well as the joy we find in community and with the love of God.  Our stories contain peaks and troughs, good and bad, despair and hope, laughter and tears.

To see the depths and heights of being human and seeking faith we don’t have to look much further than the Psalms.  And today’s Psalm is, again, sharing deep feelings, and sharing a story of a faith journey, ‘I waited patiently for the Lord, he inclined and heard my cry... He lifted me out of the mud and mire, out of the pit and set my feet upon a rock.’

Of course we don’t think this is literal language, it is about that sense of being without a foothold, of sinking, of being lost.  And in contrast to this the Psalmist feels deeply grounded, firmly planted in that sense of worth that God gives.  This is what puts the new song in his mouth, this is the cause for celebration - standing firmly as one who is known and loved by God.  And the result of this is to ‘hide God’s law in one’s heart’ - not in the head, not solely in the intellect, but to hold to the truth of God revealed in the heart.  Remember ‘the law’ in the understanding of a faithful Jew was not the words of law, but the sense of being chosen, of serving and obeying God and of being set free to be obedient to a way which was created for the benefit of humankind - the law designed to liberate human beings from harmful values and practise and bring us into a lifegiving relationship with a loving God.

And as we continue this theme - recognising that there is more I could say from Paul’s words to the Corinthians, but recognising too that we only have so much time here this morning, so I will move on to the real place where I think we can gain a perspective today.  Our words from John’s Gospel,  This is what our Sermon Circle spent much of our time talking about yesterday.  There is much to it, and much I could say - and I must confess that most of my thoughts this morning come from this Gospel passage, even though it is the last passage I want to tackle today.  Here we find the key.  And we find the key,  I would say, in three words.

In our reading from the Gospel today we are again invited to encounter Christ again and to find our place in the story.  This story of the first disciples put in a uniquely Johannine way - just as many of the accounts of events in John are markedly different to the other Gospels.  Unlike the Matthew 4, Mark 1 and Luke 5 accounts where there are nets being mended and fishing taking place in this story we have Andrew and A N Other with John the Baptist who have Jesus pointed out to them.  These two are already followers of John the Baptist, we are told, and Andrew goes to fetch his brother Simon, who later became known as Peter, and show him this individual described by John as ‘the lamb of God’.  These disciples ask Jesus ‘where are you staying’ and are given the response ‘come and see.’

And it’s worth considering those few verses carefully.  We have this account which John is keen to firmly root in time, telling us it was about four in the afternoon when this happened, and this question ‘Where are you staying.?’  An odd thing to ask a stranger perhaps, but the author or authors of this Gospel, are another attempt to ground this account.  The Gospel of John wants us to see the reality behind this story -  and the ‘where are you staying?’ is a deliberate echo of the verse we heard just a few weeks back at Christmas from the prologue to John ‘The word became flesh and dwelt among us’  - that word dwelt is a deliberately resonant one - tabernacled, pitched tent, made home.  It talks of the identification of the divine with humanity not just as a bystander but intimately bound up the story, in the reality of being human.

So the answer to ‘where are you staying’ is, at least in part ‘ right here with you’.  But the openness of the invitation is something that deeply resonates with me - those three words.  “Come and see”.

In those words are an invitation to a world of faith, a shared journey, to love, to joy to a life of colour and texture and depth. A life that is not immune from pain or free from suffering but is one which is still hopeful, one that is graced, life - as Jesus himself describes it in the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel - in all it’s fullness.

And I believe - by which I mean I cling to, I give my heart to - in the love which is there in that gracious invitation “Come and see.” That’s the invitation which we as a church are called to give - come and see love in action, come and see faith, come and see mystery, come and see hope, come and see struggle and life, and death, and resurrection, and family, and acceptance and light and darkness and failure, and forgiveness and compassion and trust.  Come and be a part of our journey, come and explore, come and feel, come and share.

It’s not a recruiting campaign.  Because that come and see is not just about getting people through our doors, it’s about us continuing to speak up for justice and to speak out against injustice - here, or on the streets, or in our social action, in our ongoing campaign for full recognition of equal marriage within our wider Church and care for the excluded.  Our speaking out for justice for First Nations and our questioning of the inequality of our society where many cannot afford to eat, or who are abused, or suffering from addictions which consume and control them. Come and see our commitment to radical inclusion lived out.

It’s about taking that invitation with us in our working lives, in our relationships with others, in our homes.  Come and see a God who is among us in love.

It’s about being Christian people - dedicated to one another and to Christ, seeking to live in community, and welcoming all who come to us.   Come and see.  God loves you.  Love one Another. Love yourself.

Amen.  May it be so. Amen and Amen.

Saturday, 24 July 2010

Letting the outside in and the inside out…

It's been far too long since I have inflicted a sermon on you, and this blog is looking sadly neglected. Here's a sermon from a few weeks back! I may well post a few more in the coming days.

Easter 5 (2001) Year C RCL Principal

Acts 11.1-18
Psalm 148

John 13.31-35

Letting the outside in and the inside out…

Early one morning a young man received a telephone call, rather unusually God was at the other end of the line. Hello there, said God, I’m coming to see you today.

Rather excited this young man set about clearing up his flat, tidying up, dusting, hoovering etc etc After a couple of hours of this the flat looked fantastic – and he sat down to wait.

The doorbell rang and, extremely excited, the young man ran to the door – to find one of his friends in tears, they had just split up with their boyfriend and wanted to chat. Very apologetically they young man said he was expecting an important visit and unfortunately couldn’t help. The friend left.

A couple of hours later the young man was feeling peckish, so he made himself a sandwich – and after eating it jumped as the bell rang again – he sprinted to the door, only to find a homeless person there asking for some food or drink. I’m sorry said the young man, I’m expecting someone any minute now – I can’t help and he closed the door.

Some time later, it became evening, and fed up of waiting the young man made himself some supper and sat down in front of the TV, the doorbell rang again and he opened it to find, a Christian Aid collector asking for the envelope which had been dropped off a few days before – sorry said the young man, I don’t know where it is and I’ve not got time to look for it now as I’m expecting someone important soon. The collector went on their way.

Eventually the young man nodded off on the sofa, to be awoken late in the evening by the telephone ringing he picked it up and heard ‘hello, God here’. The young man couldn’t contain himself and shouted – “you said you were coming to see me today and I’ve waited in for you – where have you been?” ‘What do you mean says God – I’ve been to see you three times today and each time you’ve turned me away.”

It’s not a true story, of course – but a sketch I used in Church when I was younger – trying to get the message across that sometimes we need to think carefully about where God is and what God is trying to tell us. And it ties in well with our readings for this week – or at least I think it does!

Sometimes we in the Church think too small – we put God in a box, or try and contain God within the four walls of our Church buildings – we decide what is and isn’t of God and from God and we seek to trap God in our own perceptions and ideas.

Take the Book of Common Prayer, which we use in so many of our services. We use the prayer book because of the dignity and beauty of its language, because it can aid our worship and add to our understanding of God. It is document of great profundity and depth. But if we were to say that it was the only language we could use to talk about God, and if we were to become ‘prayer book fundamentalists’ then we would be seeking to contain the very idea of God and make claims about the Prayer book that would be unsustainable – claims about the words we may and may not use about God, claims about what God is like, claims about how the world should be.

Our liturgy, like our faith, must be dynamic and must move and grow as our understanding of God moves and grows and as our culture and our world change so must our faith and the language we use to express our faith.

In our reading from Acts for today Peter admits that his narrow ideas of faith were in danger of cutting him off from the will of God. His insistence that the Good News of Jesus Christ was for the Jews, and only for those who were willing to accept the Jewish way of life, could have stopped the Church reaching out to all people. Those who declared that God was only for the circumcised – i.e. only for those who took on Jewish faith first – were guilty of wanting God to work on their own terms, of wanting God to be as they had always known him and of wanting faith to remain as they had always practiced it. It was through that vision of unclean foods being declared clean that Peter’s eyes of faith were opened to a vision which included all people – even the gentiles. Our reading from Acts records Peter’s words:
“I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, "John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit." If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?'”

Perhaps when we are tempted to claim that God is only present in a certain kind of service, a certain kind of practice, a certain way of seeing and doing things then we should ask ourselves ‘who am I that I could hinder God?’

In the same way that our young man at the beginning missed the point, that God visits us in ways we might not expect or want, there is a very real danger that we might miss the point – and indeed miss the work of God – by demanding that only x or y is the way to be Church and that there is only one way of being the body of Christ.

In fact the very thing that should be our priority, the very thing that will draw us beyond ourselves is given to us in our reading from the Gospel of St John that we heard just now. Jesus says
34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.'

It is love that will open our eyes of faith. A willingness to love beyond our own boundaries, an openness to love God and our neighbour, and the willingness to see God in others, even those beyond where we might expect to see God!!!

And this love must begin in our Churches in order that it might be nurtured and grow and spread to our communities. I am often asked by concerned members of our Churches – how can we make our congregations grow? Well the way we will attract people to our churches is through love, and through dedication to God and to one another. This will draw people to want to know about our faith, and the one who is the source of all life and love – God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

And we have ample opportunity to put our love into action in these Parishes – I see every day the commitment of Christians in our villages to the life of the community, to their families, to their friends and neighbours, to the life of our Churches. We also have a great place in which to put this love into practice – our Mission Community

Many of you will have heard me say that apart from the appeal of these five villages and the life of the Churches in them, the most attractive part of this position, from the point of view of a priest applying to serve these Parishes, was the formation of the Mission Community. Beyond the obvious benefits of support and increased resources which come from working together – we have a very real opportunity to put the command of Jesus into action by loving one another as Christians in this Five Alive Mission Community which exists not to take away from the life of individual parishes but to support them and offer the possibility of working together to show the love of God to our villages.

And so we have been given a very real opportunity to learn to love one another and to work together – but none of this will happen if we are not open, as St Peter was, to the vision of God, to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We will not grow, we will not flourish if we do not love, we will not survive as the Church if we are not prepared to think big, to listen to God and to be willing to see God wherever, whenever and in whoever God chooses to appear.