Being Tolerant and Open to All: Melting Pot or Tossed Salad?

John 4. 5-42

Once again, by remarkable co-incidence, our Gospel reading for today coincides very nicely with our sermon series about 'Marks' - or characteristics - of an authentic church.  We have so far covered six out of the ten topics that I want us to explore.

• We've thought about how we need to reflect Jesus' priority for the poor and the sick.  
• We've explored how wide and generous is God's grace to us. 
• We've mused about how to understand sin as the absence of Love, and 
• how Christians need to be producers not consumers.  
• Two weeks ago, we considered how we can have an intelligent understanding of Scripture; 
• and then last week Fr James invited us to think about how to blend the scientific with the mystical.

Now, having listened to the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, I'd like us to think about how we are called to be 'tolerant and open to all'.

The Samaritans were people who lived in what had been the Northern Kingdom of Israel.  Their capital city, Samaria, was located between Galilee in the north and Judea in the south. The Samaritans were a racially mixed society - with both Jewish and pagan ancestry. Although they worshiped Yahweh like the Jews, their religion was not mainstream Judaism. For example, they accepted only the first five books of the Bible as canonical (or legitimately from God), and their temple was on Mount Gerazim instead of on Mount Zion in Jerusalem (Jn 4:20).

The Samaritans of Jesus' day were strict monotheists. In some respects they were more strict than Jews about the commands of the Mosaic law, especially the sabbath regulations. In some ways there are similarities between Samaritans and the stricter forms of Islam that we encounter today.  They were fiercely bound by rules, and utterly convinced that only their interpretation of Scripture was the right one.

The Samaritans were despised by ordinary Jews, and they believed that contact with a Samaritan would contaminate them.  For example, Jews who were traveling from Judea to Galilee would cross over the river Jordan, bypassing Samaria and then cross over the river again as they neared their destination. The Samaritans also hated the Jews just as much! (Lk 9:52-53).  And as our Gospel story for today tells us, Samaritans and Jews would not normally even drink from the same well.

Can you imagine, then, the reaction that Jesus would have got by spending any time at all with a Samaritan - let alone asking for water from their well?  Even today, people get very twitchy indeed if our leaders have any kind of contact with people we hate.  Many of the negotiations which took place with the IRA in the 1990s had to be done in secret, because the public would not have stomached our leaders talking with terrorists.  If you listen to any political radio debate today, it is often striking how many political opponents won't even sit in the same studio as each other.  Instead, the interviewer has to ask questions of one side, and then later put the same questions to the other.  It's as though politicians fear that if they sit in the same studio as someone from an opposing view-point, that they will somehow be contaminated by them - or that supporters will think they've gone soft.

Sadly, the same is true in matters of religion and morality too.  Many high-church or orthodox leaders will simply have nothing to do with, say, evangelical or charismatic Christians - and vice versa.  Different Christian groups look down on each other with disdain, believing somehow that God has shown only them the correct way to worship, and the only way of interpreting the Bible.  Across different faiths, it is sad but true that many senior Christian leaders have never set foot in a mosque or a synagogue. Many Muslims and Jews have never entered a church.

Jesus cuts through all this stupid separation between peoples.  He asks for a drink from a Samaritan well, and then enters into a tolerant an open debate with a Samaritan woman.  Among many topics that they range over, a central one is the question of where it is most correct to worship God.  Jews had a temple on Mount Zion, and the Samaritans had theirs on Mount Gerazim.  Which one was right?

But notice how Jesus doesn't let himself be drawn into the question of who is right or wrong about where to worship.  Instead, he cuts straight through such petty issues, and points to a much deeper, greater truth.  "The time is coming", he says, "when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth".  In other words, he says, the question of where to worship is so much less important than the question of how to worship.  Wherever worship happens, it should be done in 'spirit and in truth' - or perhaps we could say, with the soul and the mind, or with spirituality and integrity.

Jesus, then, cuts through the petty squabbles of humanity (the questions about who is right or wrong) and points us back to the source of all life, our heavenly Father.  He reminds us that we are all children of God, and we are all capable of worshipping God in spirit and in truth, not least through him who reveals to us what the Father is like.

An authentic church, then, is one which, following Jesus, refuses to let itself get locked into silly debates about what is right or wrong about our religious practices.  An authentic church, is one that recognises that people have a wide and varied understanding of God, and that no-one but Jesus himself can legitimately claim to be right on almost any topic you care to mention.  Is it right for women to be Bishops?  Only Jesus knows.  Is it right for gay people to be married to each other?  Only Jesus knows.  Is it right for priests to wear robes, or would a shirt and jeans be easier for non-Christians to relate to?  Only Jesus knows.  Is it better to sing ancient hymns to the sound of an organ, or to crank up a drum-kit to the sounds of Graham Kendrick?  Only Jesus knows.  Is the celebration of the Lord's Supper properly called a 'Mass' or a service of 'Holy Communion'?  And should there be 'smells and bells', or not? Only Jesus knows.  And fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on your feelings in the matter) he is not recorded as having said anything at all about such matters - at all!

An authentic church, then, holds onto its theological views and its traditions rather lightly. But it doesn't stop searching for meaning and for truth.  True tolerance, between people of different beliefs, is not about creating a melting pot, where all ideas are up for grabs, and where nothing matters any more.  To worship God in spirit and in truth means that we have to keep on doing the hard work of seeking God with heart and mind.  The word tolerance doesn't imply the creation of a blended soup, where all the flavours run together until there is no distinctive taste at all.  Rather, true tolerance is more like a tossed salad.  Flavours (or ideas and views) find a way to live alongside each other, accepting with humility that no-one but Jesus has the authority to judge between different ideas about God.  An authentically tolerant church takes seriously the command to 'judge not, lest ye be judged'.  It focuses, instead, on helping all people, wherever they come from, whatever their background, to begin to see God in spirit and in truth.

This is, in fact, one of the specific and deliberate features of what it means to be Anglican.  The Anglican church is a messy place, without a doubt.  We argue and debate all sorts of different understandings about tradition and theology.  We have charismatics and orthodox churches.  We have liberals and conservatives.  We have traditionalists and modernists...but we are all Anglicans.  We all worship, in each Diocese, under the authority of one Bishop, whose role is to be a focus for unity for an infinitely wide and diverse bunch of people.

In May, I will be travelling back to Ghana, to spend time with my friend Bishop Matthias and his clergy.  Matthias and I disagree on almost every aspect of theology and church practices that you could mention.  He believes in the reality of Satan; I don't.  He believes that women should not be priests, let alone Bishops; I do.  He believes in robes and high church liturgies...I'm really not that bothered, either way.  He is convinced that we should drive on the right hand side of the road, I am wholly committed to the left!  But, despite all these differences, we are friends.  Despite our sometimes passionate arguments on a whole range of topics, he is going to install me as a Canon of his Cathedral in May.  Despite knowing that I disagree with him on many subjects, he is going to embrace me as a brother, and give me a seat of honour in his Cathedral.

That, my friends, is what authentic Christianity looks like.  It's a Christianity which does not judge another person, but which is tolerant and open to all, without sacrificing one's own beliefs.  An authentic church - which I dare to suggest the Anglican church is, at its best - embraces difference, throws people together like a tossed salad, and adds the dressing of love.

Amen.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Sermons in this series:

1) Introduction

1a) Reflecting Jesus' priority for the poor and the sick.

2) Having a wide and generous understanding of God's grace - Jesus poured out grace and forgiveness to everyone he met.  Are we the same?

3) Understanding Sin as the absence of Love - How should we understand Sin?  Breaking Rules?  Who decides what is Sin anyway?

4) Encouraging Christ-ians to be producers, not consumers - We live in a consumer society. Is there a danger that some of us ‘consume’ Christianity?

5) Having an intelligent understanding of Scripture - How do we approach the Bible?  A hand-written text from God?

6) Blending the scientific with the mystical - Was the world created in six days?  How did Noah get all those animals onto the Ark?!

7) Being tolerant and open to all - How do we connect with other human beings?

8) Embracing tradition while being open to the contemporary - How can we honour the old and embrace the new?

9) Understanding that forgiveness is How the World is Set Right - Is forgiveness the answer to the World’s problems?

10) Being a Eucharistic Community - How does taking Jesus into ourselves help us?

Blending the Scientific with the Mystical

This sermon was delivered by Rev'd Dr James Grenfell on 16th March 2014

Text:  John 3:1-17 (The Gospel for the 2nd Sunday of Lent)

This morning we’re continuing in our series of sermons reflecting on the marks or characteristics of an authentic church and we’re going to be thinking some more about the relationship between our faith and science. Because one sign of an authentic church will be its ability to relate to other ways of seeing the world with humility, maturity, and confidence. One of the most successful and dominant ways of seeing and interpreting the world for the last 300 years has been science. So how we’re able to relate our faith to science is a good test of how we might be able to do it in all sorts of other areas too.

The relationship between faith and science hasn't always been a good one. You might remember that in the 17th century the Roman Catholic Church put Galileo on trial and then locked him up because he dared to suggest that the earth went around the sun rather than the other way around. And it’s not all been one way traffic either. Much more recently, in the last five years, there has emerged a new and much more aggressive form of atheism. It’s led by a group of scientists, the new atheists, who argue that belief in God is a primitive and a dangerous delusion. Religion is a cause of so much suffering and violence in our world that it should no longer be tolerated. Those scientists and their supporters state that religion should be actively resisted and wherever possible, abolished.

But to help us think about this some more, I want to tell you a story about James Usher. James Usher was an Irish bishop in the 17th century, the period when modern science was just beginning.  He spent decades calculating with painstaking accuracy the exact dates of the events in the Bible all the way to Genesis. He was helped greatly by those big family trees you get in the bible.  Those longs lists of descendants in the Old Testament which tell you who begat whom and which often helpfully include how old people were when they had their children. Bishop Usher managed to fill in a couple of crucial gaps by using other historical sources. He got back to the year when he thought creation took place and then  he tried to narrow down the date. He reckoned that God had an interest in mathematical harmony and so it was logical that he would have chosen to create the world on a date when the sun was at one of its four cardinal points: middle of summer or winter (the longest or shortest day, or the beginning of spring or autumn (when the clocks go forward or back). Then, looking back to Genesis, he read that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden had fruit on that was ripe. It must therefore have been harvest time in the autumn. The nearest Sunday to this date and therefore the Day on which Creation was completed was 23 October 4004 BC.

It’s easy today to laugh at Bishop Usher’s efforts or to feel sorry that he wasted so many years of his life in trying to calculate all this. Because what we can see now is that Bishop Usher was simply on the wrong track. The Bible isn’t some sort of scientific textbook and the Bible isn’t meant to be used to give you a scientific answer as to exactly when and how the world was created. The Bible contains all kinds of crucially important truths about God, about ourselves and the place we have in God’s creation. But those truths aren’t scientific ones and if you read the Bible looking for scientific type truth you’re left with a very distorted reading of the Bible and end up with answers a bit like Bishop Usher.

You can see the mistake being made the other way around too, by scientists this time. Richard Dawkins, probably the best known of the new atheists does just this. He claims that God is just like a scientific hypothesis and that you can test God using scientific methods. When you do that, he says, you find that God doesn’t exist. I don’t know about you but the God that I believe in isn’t going to be threatened or constrained by the test that some scientist has dreamed up for him. Nor can I imagine what kind of proof there would have to be to convince me that God doesn’t exist. But it wouldn’t look like a scientific proof - I’m sure of that.

In our gospel reading this morning we've heard about Nicodemus going to see Jesus at night. Nicodemus, who was a respected Jewish teacher, recognises that God is present in what Jesus is doing but wants to know more. And he has a slightly comical conversation with Jesus and manages to misunderstand totally what Jesus is talking about.

Jesus tells Nicodemus that to enter the Kingdom of God one must be born from above. In fact the Greek word for ‘from above’ (anothen) also means ‘again’ - Nicodemus takes the literal understanding and thinks Jesus is talking about entering one’s mother’s womb once again.

Nicodemus thinks Jesus means entering his mother’s womb once again and he doesn’t get it. He’s further puzzled when Jesus talks about God’s Spirit being like the wind that blows where it likes. There’s another pun here - the same word in Greek pneuma means both Spirit and wind. No wonder Nicodemus was confused.

I think that the ways in which Nicodemus misunderstood Jesus help us to think about how science and faith sometimes misunderstand each other. Science and faith use the same words sometimes but each mean something entirely different by them. Science and faith give us two important but different ways of looking at our world; they have different starting points, and methods, and ways of measuring things; but we need both of them.

Rather than trying to show how different faith and science are, a much more interesting, creative question is to ask what gifts does science bring to faith and visa versa. I think that science brings to faith a desire for clarity, an endless curiosity about our world, and a commitment to the pursuit of truth. Science can also bring with it a capacity for awe and wonder in face of the beautiful complexity and simplicity of our world. Faith can bring to science a different but no less passionate search for truth. Faith can also give to science a proper sense of humility which it sometimes lacks, that there are limits to the truth that scientific reason gives us.
As well as giving humanity enormous gifts, science has also been responsible for great suffering in our world. It badly needs the kind of truth, sense of purpose and moral values that faith can offer.

The languages of faith and science need each other. Ultimately, they both need to be blessed by the Spirit of God who, as Nicodemus discovered, blows where it wills. The immense truths of God’s presence are not exhaustively described by the language of faith any more than they are contained or disproved by science.

So an authentic church community, one which is secure in its identity as the body of Christ will always look generously and critically for the truth about God in other areas of human study.  Only by doing this can we receive the gifts that science and other disciplines have for us.

Amen.

_________________________________________________________________________________
Sermons in this series:

1) Introduction

1a) Reflecting Jesus' priority for the poor and the sick.

2) Having a wide and generous understanding of God's grace - Jesus poured out grace and forgiveness to everyone he met.  Are we the same?

3) Understanding Sin as the absence of Love - How should we understand Sin?  Breaking Rules?  Who decides what is Sin anyway?

4) Encouraging Christ-ians to be producers, not consumers - We live in a consumer society. Is there a danger that some of us ‘consume’ Christianity?

5) Having an intelligent understanding of Scripture - How do we approach the Bible?  A hand-written text from God?

6) Blending the scientific with the mystical - Was the world created in six days?  How did Noah get all those animals onto the Ark?!

7) Being tolerant and open to all - How do we connect with other human beings?

8) Embracing tradition while being open to the contemporary - How can we honour the old and embrace the new?

9) Understanding that forgiveness is How the World is Set Right - Is forgiveness the answer to the World’s problems?

10) Being a Eucharistic Community - How does taking Jesus into ourselves help us?

Having an Intelligent Understanding of Scripture

This week, we are continuing our series on Marks of an Authentic Church.  So far, we've thought about how authentic churches reflect Jesus' priority for the poor and the sick.  We've mused about how wide and deep is the grace of God towards his people.  We've thought about defining sin as the absence of love.  And last week, we focused on how God calls us to be producers, rather than consumers.

This week, I want to do something rather dangerous.  If we are to truly understand what it means to be an authentic church, we can't do so without tackling the thorny subject of the Bible.  This is dangerous ground - because it is ground over which some people have given their lives.  It is precious ground, because people often hold views about the Bible which are deeply rooted in their emotions.  But it is ground we must cover in our search to be authentically Christian.

The Bible is a collection of writings that has been responsible for more joy and, I suggest more pain, than perhaps any other collection of writings in the world.  It has inspired and shaped whole nations, and many world leaders.  It has taught people about God's heart of love for his creation.  But it has also been used to subjugate women, defend slavery, and curse homosexuals.  It has lifted the eyes of the faithful above the daily grind to gaze upon eternity.  But it has also been used to justify war on a vast scale.  It has taught many people the power of living sacrificial lives.  But is has also helped others to justify living in vast wealth, like Solomon.

The core problem, I think, is that people simply fail to work out for themselves what the Bible actually is.  Perhaps the most troublesome phrase, attached to the Bible, is the phrase 'the Word of God'. When many people hear it - and perhaps you are one of them? - they assume it means that the whole Bible contains the very words of God.  They imagine that God dictated the words of the Bible directly to its scribes, and that every word, and every phrase, contains clues about God, or about what God plans for the human race.

People who hold this view believe the Bible to be 'inerrant' (which of course means, 'can't be wrong').  They tend to qualify that statement by saying that the Bible is inerrant in its original manuscripts.  So they are prepared to have some flexibility about how the text may have been incorrectly translated, or transcribed over the years.  But essentially, such people believe that the Bible is an all sufficient guide to every circumstance of human life.  If the Bible says it, then it must be true, they believe.

Unfortunately, this has a lot of important consequences.  Have you heard, for example, about Pastor Jamie Coots, of Kentucky, USA.  He hit the news a couple of weeks ago when he was bitten by a rattlesnake, and died.  He was holding the snake at the time because according to his reading of the Bible, God promised that true believers would be able to handle such snakes, but never die.  Sadly, Pastor Coots was wrong.  His family have lost their father, and his church have lost their pastor, because he believed in Biblical inerrancy.

That was perhaps an easy example to use.  But there are still more important questions.  What do you do, for example, when the human race seems to have moved beyond the Bible's interpretation of how human beings should live together?  We've seen this in the recent debates over Women Bishops.  You see, taken at face value, the Bible clearly teaches that men and women have different roles in society.  And, if we read the text as being inerrant, and the actual Words of God for all time, then there is no way that anyone could agree that Women could be Bishops.

But, human society has moved on - way beyond a text which at its newest is still 2,000 years old.  We understand so much more than our ancestors did about the way human beings are made, in the image of God.  We believe that it is our human qualities which define what roles we may be called to play...not our gender. If God has given us leadership skills, then surely we are called to lead?  But someone who reads the Bible as inerrant really struggles with such an idea.

We then, I believe, need to return to an earlier understanding that the Church about the Scriptures.  In the earliest days of the church, there were lots more Scriptures around.  There was a Gospel according to Thomas, and another of Peter.  Even Mary Magdalene was said to have written a Gospel.  There were, in fact, so many different writings about Jesus, and quite a few older texts from the time of the Old Testament, that the Bishops of the Church had to get together in the 4th Century to have a jolly good argument about it all.  Over a period of some years, and after long meetings in Nicea, and Carthage, they finally arrived at a list of which books should be 'in', and which books should be 'out'.  The ones that were 'in' are (broadly speaking) the books that we call the Bible today.

Well, I don't know about you, but I know a few Bishops!  I try to imagine how I would feel if one of them told me that they had just returned from a series of conferences.  I imagine them telling me that all the books that had ever been written about God had been put in a room, and then after years of discussion they had been separated into two piles...books that were in, and books that were out.  I don't know about you - but the first thing I'd want to do is find out what was in the books that were ruled 'out'!

Let's get a few things absolutely straight...and absolutely in line with the historic teaching of the church.

• The Bible was NOT dropped from heaven.
• The Bible was NOT delivered by an Angel, first class from the Heavenly post office.
• The Bible was NOT dug up in a farmer's field as golden plates which could only be read with magic spectacles (like the Book of Mormon)
• The Bible was NOT suddenly discovered in a middle Eastern cave intact and whole
• The Bible was NOT dictated to a single prophet (the way the Qur'an was, apparently, dictated to Mohammed, Peace be upon him)
• The Bible was NOT written by Jesus...in fact the only words he is recorded as writing are some words in the sand which quickly blew away.

So, if that is not what the Bible is...then what is it?

• The Bible is a collection of writings spanning approximately 1000 years, but drawing on even older stories (like the Creation and the Flood) which were handed down by mouth
• The Bible contains a mixture of different kinds of writing - there is poetry (like the Psalms), there is history, there is prophecy and warning, and there are law books.  It has multiple authors across thousands of years. And even the writing of history was different, in those days.  History books of the ancient world were far less concerned about what actually happened, as whether what happened contained a moral or a truth to be transmitted.  It doesn't matter whether Adam and Eve existed or not.  What matters is what their story tells us about ourselves and our relationship to God.
• The Bible is a record of first one tribe, the Jews, and then a wider tribe, the Christians, who caught glimpses of what God was like, and attempted to write down their thoughts.
• The Bible contains some words which we can legitimately think of as Words of God, especially many of those attributed to Jesus.  But is also contains much that is speculative or aspirational.  

Here's the really important fact: we need to be very careful about glibly assigning the phrase 'Word of God' to the Bible.  It contains some words of God, without doubt.  But it is not, in itself, even a full record of the Word of God.  Its primary purpose, is rather to point us to He who was, and is, the true Word of God, Yeshua Christos - Jesus Christ.  But the Bible only points us to Jesus.  It sends us in the right general direction.  But its details should be treated with caution.  Jesus himself never authorised an autobiography.  Much of what is written about him, even by the Gospel writers, is second or third hand.

So, how can we know the mind of God?  If the Bible is not the 'maker's instructions' (as some Christians have claimed) how are we to know how we should act?  How are we to know whether we are even saved?
For that final conundrum, I believe, God sends us help.  He doesn't send a text book, but instead he sends his Spirit.  Jesus is, I believe, the very revelation of God to the world, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reminded the Gospel writers, and continues to remind us, of what Jesus taught.  To quote Dr April LoveFordham, "The Bible is unique, holy, and rich with God's wisdom, but it was never intended to be a substitute for the Holy Spirit's wisdom guiding our lives".

It is, I believe, the Holy Spirit who has guided the Anglican Church (and many others) to recognise and celebrate the ministry of women, despite what the Bible says.  We have the Holy Spirit to thank for the ministry of people like Kim, our Curate, and Joanne, our Archdeacon  It is the Holy Spirit who persuaded the Church to turn its back on slavery and racism, and will, I believe lead the church eventually to turn its back on discrimination of all kinds, including towards those of different sexualities.  It is the Holy Spirit who leads us on.  Not the dead letter of a millenniums-old collection of spiritual writings - but a living, breathing God who by the Holy Spirit keeps on pushing the Church to become more and more authentic.

Amen
_________________________________________________________________________________
Sermons in this series:

1) Introduction

1a) Reflecting Jesus' priority for the poor and the sick.

2) Having a wide and generous understanding of God's grace - Jesus poured out grace and forgiveness to everyone he met.  Are we the same?

3) Understanding Sin as the absence of Love - How should we understand Sin?  Breaking Rules?  Who decides what is Sin anyway?

4) Encouraging Christ-ians to be producers, not consumers - We live in a consumer society. Is there a danger that some of us ‘consume’ Christianity?

5) Having an intelligent understanding of Scripture - How do we approach the Bible?  A hand-written text from God?

6) Blending the scientific with the mystical - Was the world created in six days?  How did Noah get all those animals onto the Ark?!

7) Being tolerant and open to all - How do we connect with other human beings?

8) Embracing tradition while being open to the contemporary - How can we honour the old and embrace the new?

9) Understanding that forgiveness is How the World is Set Right - Is forgiveness the answer to the World’s problems?

10) Being a Eucharistic Community - How does taking Jesus into ourselves help us?

Producers not Consumers

PRODUCERS, NOT CONSUMERS

Preached on the Feast of the Transfiguration 2014:  Matthew 17:1-9

Today, I want to continue to unpack what it might mean for us to be a truly Authentic Church.  We do so in the context of the Feast of the Transfiguration, when we remember how Jesus met with Elijah and Moses on a mountaintop, where his appearance was transformed so that he shone in dazzling light, and where God's voice was heard telling Jesus' followers to 'listen to him'.

This crucial moment in Jesus life comes at a pivotal point in his ministry.  For a moment, on the mountain-top, he is seen for who he is at his core.  He is the Son of God, the incarnate Word through whom all things were made.  He is served by even Moses and Elijah, two of the greatest men that had ever lived.  By even meeting them, who were dead, he stands as a bridge between this world and the next.  It's a powerful moment, pregnant with meaning. But what is even more astonishing, is what comes next...

...According to the account in Mark's Gospel, this moment is a turning point.  Having been transfigured, glorified, recognised as the Son of God, Jesus comes down the mountain, and then sets his face towards Jerusalem.  He walks, with purposeful steps, towards his death and humiliation at the cross.

This is, I believe, the core of the story.  Jesus comes not to reign in power and majesty, even though power and majesty are at the core of who he is.  Jesus comes not to dominate humanity, but to offer his very being, and his very life, in the service of humanity.  Jesus shows us that God's way is the way of giving and self-sacrifice.  The fulfillment of his earthly ministry will not be to climb onto a throne...but to be nailed to a cross.

This is a theme we will revisit again throughout Lent, which begins this week on Ash Wednesday.  And its a message that the world still doesn't get.  When we look around the world, at all the conflicts that are presently taking place, it is not difficult to see humanity's fundamental failure to understand the servant heart of God.  All the conflicts we observe are ultimately about Power.  Will the Russians control Ukraine, or will the Western Powers?  Will President Assad hold on to power in Syria, or will the rebels?  Over and over again, in Irag, in Afghanistan, in Turkey, in Eqypt, and in a thousand other places of smaller conflict, the issue is about power...power to control others.  Power to impose one group's will on another.

It reminds me of how children behave in a playground.  Gangs form up around a playground leader.  The Gang leader provides identity to the gang, and promises protection against other gangs.  There is no great intellectual idea underpinning these gangs...it's just pure self-preservation, and a childish desire to dominate others, and to own the playground.  It's the Capulets versus the Montagues.  It's the Jets versus the Sharks.  It's the Sunnis versus the Shiahs.  It's the so-called Christians versus the so-called Muslims.

It is not without reason that the Bible refers to human beings as God's children - because that is how we behave.  We fail, again and again, to understand that our Father's way is the way of sacrifice and service.  We completely miss the mark (which incidentally, is an old meaning for the word 'sin').

And this is true of other aspects of our lives too.  Even on an individual level, we act like children in a playground.  We revel, for example, in the fact that human beings no longer think of themselves as servants to one other, but rather as consumers of each other's goods and services.  We live in an age of consumer rights, and consumer watchdogs.  The mantra of any company that wants to make a profit has to be "The Consumer is King".

But along the way, we have constructed a society which would quickly crumble into anarchy and war - in just a matter of days - if just a few of our consumer products became unavailable. Look at how even the threat of a fuel strike has us queuing at the petrol pumps.  If we heard today that Supermarket lorry-drivers were going on strike, how many of us would dash to Sainsbury's this afternoon to fill up our cars?  We no longer grow our own food, or make our own clothes...we consume the food, clothing and energy that others provide for us.  Like children...children who are utterly dependent on their parents.  We have become utterly dependent on those who provide the services we need.

Sadly, I fear, this tendency towards consumerism has crept into the Church too.  It is sometimes celebrated in the press that Cathedrals are getting larger congregations than at any time in their history. Great news, on the surface.  But why is this?  Perhaps, for some, it is a genuine love of high quality music and worship.  Perhaps it is a desire to connect with God through soaring music and soaring columns and stained glass windows.  But aren't these, essentially, consumerist desires?  Cathedrals have an uncomfortable fact to face: that many of the people they see, packing into their pews, are only there because they want to have their religion 'done to them'.  They want their priests to do all the work of praying and thinking; they want the choir to do all the hard work of singing.  They want Christianity that makes them feel a bit spiritual, and touched by God, without having to do more than turn-up to be part of it.  Many of them (though by all means not all) want nothing to do with the hard-work of feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, comforting the lonely and the bereaved.  They are happy to throw a few quid into the collection plate, and pay for others to fulfill their Christian duties for them.

This, however, is fundamentally at odds with the kinds of Christian communities that Jesus envisaged.  Jesus wanted his followers to be parts of a body of believers, who acted as salt and light to their neighbours.  He wanted churches to be places where people truly learned the value - to themselves and to others - of putting service and sacrifice first.  He wanted churches that were full of people who produced valuable products for the world - products of love, charity, forgiveness, sharing and community.  He didn't want consumers, whose only contribution was to turn up, listen to the choir, and throw a few coins in the collection in the hope that the building will still be open for the next time they need a bit of spirituality.  He wanted producers who gave and lived sacrificially - who truly worked out what it meant for them to love God, and to love their neighbour as themselves.

A truly authentic church, then, will be the kind of church which is growing up, beyond the playground.  It will be the kind of church which is full of people whose hearts are bent on giving, not receiving.  It will be full of producers, not consumers.

I wonder...which kind of church do you think we are?  Do we, 'listen to Him' - as God told Peter, James and John on the Mount of Transfiguration?  Are we the kind of people who produce more than we consume?  Are we those who are salt and light to our neighbours, offering sacrificial lives, poured out in service?

Or are we, sometimes, those who turn up for church because we like the music, and we want our weekly injection of religion?

Each of us must answer that question for himself...but perhaps some of the questions we might ask are along these lines:

When did I last give a day of my time to sit with a lonely person and offer them love?
When did I last bring food for the foodbank to church?
When did I last offer an hour to make tea and coffee in the Cafe, or after church?
When did I last give up a day to paint a wall, or polish a floor in this building that tries to be a beacon of the Kingdom in North End?
When did I last give an amount of money to the church which really felt like a sacrifice?
When did I last sacrifice some TV time to read the Scriptures or pray for the world?

If the answer to such questions is something along the lines of 'well, quite recently actually' - then I suggest all is well.

If the answer is 'I can't remember' then perhaps some deeper questions need to be posed.  Because these are the sorts of things that authentic Christians do.  These are the signs of an authentic church.

Amen
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Sermons in this series:

1) Introduction

1a) Reflecting Jesus' priority for the poor and the sick.

2) Having a wide and generous understanding of God's grace - Jesus poured out grace and forgiveness to everyone he met.  Are we the same?

3) Understanding Sin as the absence of Love - How should we understand Sin?  Breaking Rules?  Who decides what is Sin anyway?

4) Encouraging Christ-ians to be producers, not consumers - We live in a consumer society. Is there a danger that some of us ‘consume’ Christianity?

5) Having an intelligent understanding of Scripture - How do we approach the Bible?  A hand-written text from God?

6) Blending the scientific with the mystical - Was the world created in six days?  How did Noah get all those animals onto the Ark?!

7) Being tolerant and open to all - How do we connect with other human beings?

8) Embracing tradition while being open to the contemporary - How can we honour the old and embrace the new?

9) Understanding that forgiveness is How the World is Set Right - Is forgiveness the answer to the World’s problems?

10) Being a Eucharistic Community - How does taking Jesus into ourselves help us?