Sermon for 11th January 2009

I speak in the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Let’s look at what is on the table to deal with this morning. First, the readings.

We go from the story of the Creation in Genesis to Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist, and – if we take them in chronological order – to St Paul’s baptising the Christians in Ephesus and the Holy Spirit coming on them.

Then outside the church, the story that presses on us every day is the terrible business in Gaza.

And finally, as they say on News at Ten, (but not yet in this sermon!) there is the atheist bus campaign. The buses have a silly banner on them where the Bovril advert should be, which says, ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’.

OK. Now as Jamie Oliver would say, we have assembled our ingredients.

The theme of the Bible readings is pretty clear. God created the world, and the human race in it. However, first time round, Adam, the archetypal man, fell from grace and became subject to sin and death.

But God so loved his world that he sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world, to enter into our human nature and atone for our sin by his sacrificial death. But more than this, he rose again – he defeated death, he defeated the power of sin. He was the second Adam, this time without sin; he did not fall, but rose, was resurrected, into glory.

Paul’s baptism of the Ephesians shows that even after Jesus’ time on earth, if we

believe, and if we repent, he will give us the power to amend our lives, and to be his representatives, to be a power for good through the Holy Spirit.

But still there is evil. Man is inhuman to man. Professor Avi Shlaim, an Israeli who is now a professor of international relations at Oxford, wrote this week,

‘The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel’s insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash.’

I will come back to this.

Let’s start at the beginning, with the Creation. 12th February will the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Today I’m not going to get into a deep discussion of whether the theory of evolution means that there is no God, no creator. The atheist bus people - and Richard Dawkins, who is an atheist bus person – have latched on to the idea that just because, according to the standards of scientific proof which we now take for granted, we can be sure that the world wasn’t created in 6 days in about 4,000 BC, it must imply that there is no Creator.

Actually that’s very poor logic, as Aristotle could have told them. Aristotle recognized the idea of an unmoved mover, an ultimate creator. Almost by definition such a divine operator would be beyond our understanding. The story in Genesis is just that, a story. We can’t know how God created the world – but just because we can’t say which model of JCB he used to dig the foundations, it doesn’t make it meaningless to tell a story which affirms in a picturesque way that He did do it.

But it’s beyond doubt that the world was created, and that it’s imperfect. Whether you characterise the problem as the work of the Devil, or whether you simply say, as St Paul did, in Romans 7,

‘I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. … But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.’

It’s the way that we are made. We are like the first Adam.

But then today we celebrate, we remember, the baptism of Christ. God said, ‘You are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased’.

But what is baptism all about? What was John the Baptizer, and later in Ephesus St Paul, doing?

Baptism is a sacrament, which is described in the Book of Common Prayer as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given to us…’

An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace – a sort of dramatic representation, like a play or a film; but there’s more to it than a play or a film, because we don’t just watch, we take part. We act out the story, and the Holy Spirit brings us the inward and spiritual grace that is represented.

In baptism, the symbolic meaning of being submerged in water – or just splashed from the font, unless you’re caught by Archbishop Sentamu for a chilly bath outside York Minster – is that you are going down, being buried, dying, with Christ. And coming out, or being handed back by a relieved vicar to Mum, is symbolic of Christ’s resurrection, his rebirth into new life.

It was an old idea even before John the Baptist. Jews had always had ritual washings for converts from outside Judaism, and the prophets had consistently preached that God would forgive those who repented of their sins.

So John was baptising and preaching a message of repentance; what was new was that he said that Jews as well as non-Jews needed to be ritually cleaned, washed, in baptism; and that someone would come after him who would cleanse and renew people’s hearts by the Holy Spirit.

So the message in St Mark’s gospel is that through baptism God’s grace, the power of the Holy Spirit, is available for us all. You don’t have to be Jewish. You just have to have faith, and repent of your sins.

Then when you are baptised, you have symbolically died and risen with Christ. As St Paul puts it, like the Ephesians you are then ‘in Christ’, part of the ‘Body of Christ’, which is what his church is.

St Paul spent a lot of time wrestling with the fact that in the Old Testament, the Jews were the chosen people of God, his elect; but when Jesus came, they rejected him and got him put to death.

In the end Paul reasoned that Christians, irrespective whether they had been Jews or non-Jews, through their faith in Jesus Christ had become in effect the new Israel, the new chosen people.

So much for theological explanations. Where does it all take us in the face of disasters like the situation in Gaza?

I think that one clue comes from what Prof. Shlaim was saying in the piece I quoted. You remember,

‘The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. …’

But Jesus has changed this ‘Biblical injunction’. Let’s remind ourselves what he said in the Sermon on the Mount.

‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, … if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other one also.

…. You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.’

This was revolutionary 2,000 years ago, and it certainly still is. Unfortunately, the Israelis and the Palestinians still think in terms of retaliation. Even here you sometimes read about the Sermon on the Mount being ‘Utopian’, impractical, and so on. But it works!

if you think, perhaps the most successful peace-making after years of violence on both sides, was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa; perhaps it isn’t too surprising that this was led and inspired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu – and there’s no doubt that he was inspired by the Holy Spirit.

If ever there was a Christian enterprise, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was it. Let us pray that Christ’s wisdom and inspiration will come upon the leaders in Gaza and their sponsors in the international community, and that peace will come very soon.

And what about the atheist bus? As usual, the God that these people are on about doesn’t sound very familiar. Why would you ‘worry’ about God? If you are a Christian, you should be very happy about Him, rejoice. ‘Rejoice, the Lord is King’. God is love, not a source of worry.

More seriously, ‘stop worrying and enjoy your life’ seems to say it all about atheists. ‘Don’t worry about other people, just enjoy yourself’ is the message. Not much help for the starving from you, Mr Atheist.

But our Lord said, Love your neighbour as yourself’. That’s more like it.

Amen.

©Hugh Bryant January 2009