Sermon

Trinity 17 - A Sermon about Mission

I’m a firm believer in sermons being topical and relevant to current events. Given the protests that have happened in Wall Street, and that are happening now in the City of London, the gospel reading for this morning seems highly relevant. But I think I’ll leave you to reflect on rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. What I want to think about this morning is mission.

We need to make sure that we are still a missionary faith. You are going to hear the word mission a lot over the next few months: the PCC will write a Mission Action Plan, at our PCC meetings we will ask about how the items on the agenda further the mission of the church, and how the things that happen in here are a missionary activity.

A colleague in Bedford once said that ‘God has no grandchildren’. He meant that a living relationship with Jesus Christ is not something anyone can have ‘for’ someone else; that whilst you and I worship in a church handed on to us by a previous generation of faithful people, it does not release us from the responsibility to have faith ourselves. We are a missionary people, and, as others have said, the Christian faith is always only one generation away from extinction.

If you read the New Testament you’ll see the story of the missionary beginnings of the Christian faith and how it faced the threat of extinction as it spread around the various cultures of the Mediterranean: Greek, Roman, Jewish, Gentile, philosophers and pagans.

I say, ‘if you read the NT’ but we really must read the NT to find out what a missionary Christian faith is like. The letters of Paul and others and the Acts of the Apostles show us so much about the world in which the early church grew up. We are shown birth pangs and rejection. We see that there were people who thought that faith in Jesus was only for Jews; we see people who believed that only those with a special level of enlightenment into secret knowledge were truly elect; we see people who were full of enthusiasm for a short time, but who changed and fell away in search of a new experience; we see people who worshipped enthusiastically but once the ‘hit’ was over their behaviour towards other Christians, even Christians within their own fellowship, didn’t match up; we see people who lost their families and their lives as they tried to be faithful ... and throughout all of this there is a lot of talking. Paul’s and others’ letters are just the tip of the iceberg, a couple of grains of sand in the desert to be more Mediterranean! The few letters we have represent hours? days? years? of conversations, discussions, arguments, a lot of talking.

Now that might sound rather odd in a sermon about being a missionary church, especially in our activist culture. Talking doesn’t sound dynamic or brave. Of course there is also a lot of doing - there is healing, there is taking gifts of money from one church to another, there is being stoned, beaten up, arrested and imprisoned. There is travel - all over the place ... but why? The real question is not what did Paul and others do, but why they did it? Why is any of this vivid parade of humanity, warts and all, written about and passed on to us?

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is quoted in a book about Mission Action Planning. You might know of him as the author of ‘The Little Prince’. Saint-Exupéry is given as an example of how to get people interested in the ‘why’ of mission. Not the ‘what do we do’, more the ‘what do we do it for?’ Saint-Exupéry talks about the best way to get people to build a boat. Giving people the plans and instruction manuals is not the best way to get people to build a boat. Giving people hammers and chisels is not the best way to get people to build a boat. Giving people wood is not the best way to get people to build a boat. The best way to get people to build a boat is to encourage them to yearn for the sea.

Yearning for the sea: Paul and the early church were driven, first and foremost, by yearning, yearning for God and yearning for people to know about Jesus Christ. The ‘how’ of mission came second, first there was the yearning for the sea, yearning for God.

This is part of the Living God’s Love initiative, launched soon after Bishop Alan arrived in the diocese. We might think of Mission first of all as an activity, and Living God’s Love includes the call to Transform Communities. But can you tell me the other two strands to Living God’s Love? They are Making Disciples, and Going Deeper Into God. All three are part of Mission, but right at the heart, the first on the list is about encouraging that yearning for the sea, that Going Deeper into God - just look at the Collect for today. Without this, disciples will ask ‘why?’ and we won’t know what to transform communities into.

In another of the New Testament Letters, 1 Peter, the call to mission and the foundation it is based on is pretty clear:

1 Peter 3.15-16

Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an account of the hope that is in you.

We give an account of the hope that is in us. This doesn’t have to be confrontational or judgemental, loaded with implicit criticism of whatever the other person believes, not at all. In fact the next words of that letter are: ‘16yet do it with gentleness and reverence...’

‘Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an account of the hope that is in you; 16yet do it with gentleness and reverence...’

We must be a missionary faith, and be ready to talk to people about why we do what we do, to offer an explanation, to have a conversation, to say something about the hope that is in us.

Having gone deeper into God, that hope is the yearning for the kingdom of God, a yearning that people might know it in Jesus Christ.

As we look at how to be a missionary church, one question we must answer is how will we equip ourselves to yearn and to have those sorts of conversations?

AMEN

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