Sermon for the Sunday 17th May 2009

'Abide with me'. 'Abide' is one of those railway words, isn't it? Well, it's not actually a railway word, like 'alight', (as in 'alight here for Woking, the West Country and the North of England', when your train draws into Surbiton,) but it's a distinctive word, that tells you that we're going to talk about something in the Bible.

It means to stay, to stay with or stay loyal to or stand by. So 'abide with me' means, stay with me. I thought that the word which stood out from our gospel reading today was the word 'abide'. Then I looked at Robert's sermon from last week – if you remember, I wasn't actually there, so I had to see it on our wonderful website, and indeed I was able to listen to it, because St Andrew's has a listen-again facility for sermons just as good as the BBC, by the way.

I heard that Robert had been struck by the word 'abide' in the lessons last week as well; in the bit I read today, the word 'abide' appears again – 'As the father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. Just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love...'

Well, I was playing hookey last week in Hamburg, where I was attending a wedding and indeed I was reading one of the lessons in my best O Level German. The wedding was pretty good and indeed it was very similar to an English wedding. The church was beautiful but quite modern – you need to think in terms of the style of Coventry Cathedral because St Nikolai's was built at the same time, in 1962, with a bell tower with a whole wall of stained glass, a big organ, a gallery, and the whole nave being tall and light and airy – and I have to disappoint some of my friends here, but there were beautiful pews, which were extremely comfortable and spacious. The altar piece wasn't by Graham Sutherland but was a striking depiction of the Crucifixion in a very similar tapestry style.

And you know, the people who attended the wedding were pretty familiar – quite a lot of them even spoke English. But seriously, they were people just like you or me, and the gossip and the chat was very similar to what you would hear at an English wedding – whether people had seen each other recently, who was married to whom, how the kids were getting on, all that sort of stuff. But of course, unless you've done the same thing that I've done, which is that all through my business career I had a lot to do with Germany, and therefore got to know people – you might be surprised that these were not goose-stepping Nazis straight out of a Powell and Pressburger epic. Here in England in some people's minds, the second world war hasn't really stopped.

Even though, as we were reminded in Spiritual Cinema this week, in the awful and moving film 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas', the Germans did do the most terrible things in trying systematically to wipe out the Jewish people, I don't believe that Germans today are Nazis. Instead I think that they have reverted much more to their historical stereotype which is that they are very, very like us.

Well, when I came back from my trip to Hamburg, as well as seeing 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas', which turned my thoughts back to Germany, I was also confronted by the scandal of the MPs' expenses. So thinking about the Holocaust and also about our leaders' betrayal of their sacred trust to represent their electors and to consider the interests of the people far above any private interest that they might have, I really did think that the idea of Original Sin had a lot in it, because in all generations and at all times there does seem to be this fatal propensity in the human race to go off the rails.

So who are the 'good guys' in all this? Of course in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, there is this constant thread running through about the Jews, about Israel, being the chosen people of God. They are the good guys, because they are God's chosen people. And what it is that makes them God's chosen people, or fit to be God's chosen people, so that God doesn't disown them once he has chosen them, is that they keep, or are supposed to keep, God's commandments. The Ten Commandments were given to Moses twice (because the first time around, for various reasons the tablets got broken) and the first five books of the Old Testament are essentially about the Creation and the choosing of Israel by God, bringing them out of captivity in Egypt, saving them, and then giving them the Ten Commandments through the prophet Moses.

And those five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, are called by the Jews 'the Law', the Law of Moses (or more correctly, the Law of God given to Moses). What made the Israelites, the Jews, into the special people, the chosen people of God, was the fact that they had Moses' law and they tried to keep it.

Now if we fast-forward to the New Testament, what we read about today is very interesting against that background, because, in the short extract from the Acts of the Apostles which we have read, there is a story about the Holy Spirit coming upon some new believers who were Gentiles, who were not Jews, they were not the chosen people. 'The circumcised believers, [the Jews] who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, Can anyone withhold from them the water for baptising these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have? So he ordered them to be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ.'

Now 'these people', (as you will see from the part of the story which comes before today's lesson), were a Roman centurion called Cornelius and some of the people with him who were perhaps also Roman soldiers. You have to bear in mind that the Romans in the time of our Lord Jesus Christ were about half-way through their empire which began, let's say, about 400BC and ran through for over 1,000 years. At its height the Roman Empire stretched from India and North Africa right through all of the middle East and southern Europe to the British Isles. In geographical scope and longevity the Roman Empire was far more successful than the British Empire, and perhaps the best comparison, to give you an idea what the Roman Empire felt like, in today's terms, is to think of it, at least in its overwhelming power, as being like the USA.

Now nevertheless, even though the Roman Empire was so hugely powerful, in Palestine a system had been allowed to grow up under which the Jews were allowed to have some self-government. Indeed they had their own king, at the time of Jesus, Herod the Great. Herod wasn't really the Jews' own king - he was imposed on them by the Romans – but the idea was that they were to some extent self-governing. But at the same time the Romans were always around, and the most visible presence of the Romans was the Roman army, which kept order in the various territories that the Romans had conquered. At the heart of the organisation of the Roman army were centurions – the name means, a man commanding 100 men. I'm not sure what rank that would correspond with in the British Army today – but let's say that the centurion was about equivalent to a major. He was the principal Roman army officer, and actually, as such, he was a responsible and respected figure.

So here we have this man that we know very little about, except what appears in the story in Acts, called Cornelius, a centurion of the Italian Cohort. So it's likely that he was an Italian, so he was a Roman Roman – although you'll remember that the Roman Empire allowed people from all its conquered countries to become Roman citizens, and indeed St Paul saved himself at one point by being able to say to his captors, 'Civis Romanus sum', 'I am a Roman Citizen', and that entitled him to decent treatment when he had been arrested in the Temple.

In this the Roman Empire was very like the USA, the melting-pot of the nations, where wherever you have come from, once you become an American citizen, it doesn't matter whether once upon a time you were a Russian or a German or a Frenchman or an Englishman. You have become an American.

Well, this was Cornelius, a centurion, an Italian Roman, so right in the main stream of non-Jewish people. This story in Acts, which we read the last bit of, showed that Cornelius and his entourage became Christians and were baptised, even though they were not Jews – they were not part of the chosen race.

They became numbered among the 'good guys', and in the gospel Jesus subtly develops the idea of the chosen people as being those who keep the Lord's commandments; because he gives a new commandment. Remember, he is the Lord, so he is almost in the same situation as the Lord speaking to Moses in the old days, and he is saying, 'This is my commandment' – commandment, like the 10 Commandments – 'that you love one another, as I have loved you'.

So I think that Jesus is consciously reflecting what went on beforehand in the time of Moses, saying that now he has been sent by God, the chosen people are not exclusively just the Jews; that they are anyone who keeps his new commandment to love one another.

Now 'love' in this context is not romantic love, love between boy and girl, but it's – the Greek word is "αγαπη" ("agape") which is sometimes translated as 'charity', so that the commandment would be that you shall have charity one for another. Jesus' new commandment is in fact a dynamic clarion call to go out and do good, to show practical love, and if you do that, then you are indeed one of the good guys, you are one of the chosen people of God.

I suppose we have to enter a small note of caution, which is that, at the end of our gospel reading we come across this phrase where Jesus says 'You did not choose me' - you being the disciples – 'You did not choose me, but I chose you.' So in other words, it's not the case that you can be saved, get out from the power of sin, away from the horror of Nazism or the corruption which we've seen afflict our own politicians, by doing various good works and following God's commandment – Jesus' commandment, to love one another – but it is the other way round. God has already chosen us. If we have faith, if we remember the good news of Jesus – his life, his teaching, his death and his resurrection – if we have faith in it, then we are the chosen people, we are saved.

Because we are saved, the mark of it - the distinguishing mark of it – is that we will feel compelled to keep his new commandment, to love one another. So, as Robert pointed out last week, it has practical consequences. In this church, in addition to all the personal kindnesses which we should look out for and do to our friends and to people we come across, we also have our Outward Giving programme, and what we call our Social Concerns Forum, where we think systematically about what we can do for particular people in need; so after the service the Forum will be meeting and everybody is welcome to go along, to hear and contribute to the discussion about how best to support people, in Kosova, in Uganda and in Palestine, that we have identified for whom we can provide practical support.

And now we are developing a new piece of practical love which is a mission to look after and support people who are affected by the economic downturn. There will be a meeting, open to anyone who thinks that they might benefit from the comfort, support and practical advice which we can give, tomorrow in Church Gate House at midday, when we are going to have a simple bread and cheese lunch and an opportunity to network and find some fellowship, for people who are affected. If you are interested in coming, either to help or to be helped, do come and ask me about it.

So that brings me to the final piece of the jigsaw, which is our other lesson, from the first Letter of John. Incidentally, scholars generally agree that the 'John' who wrote the three Letters and the author of the 'Gospel according to St John' were the same person and indeed most likely they were the John who was the 'disciple that Jesus loved'. So both the Letter and the Gospel of John come from somebody who was very close to Jesus, and certainly witnessed everything that he did.

So in this Letter John is again dealing with the hallmarks of the true believer, and in my Bible this lesson is headed, Faith Conquers the World. And it says, 'For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world.'

If we turn back to the challenging circumstances that I found in this last week, when I was reminded of the dreadful possibility of man's inhumanity to man in the Holocaust, and then perhaps on a different level of evil, but evil nevertheless, when I learned the way in which our elected representatives had got into a culture of playing the system so that perhaps according to the letter of the law they weren't fiddling their expenses - but according to the spirit of the whole thing they surely were – well, when I confronted all that and I compared it with what Jesus is saying in the gospel and what is reported in John's Letter, and in the Acts of the Apostles, I couldn't help feeling that people wouldn't go wrong, if only they paid more attention to Jesus and the Bible, and if we weren't constantly assailed by secularists – people so convinced that they know everything that they don't need to respect the power of the Almighty and recognise their own limitations.

So if indeed I look at what Jesus is saying in the light of these various moral challenges, it does really ring true that, if people kept to his commandments, they would abide in him; they wouldn't stray from him and the power of evil would be neutralised.

So I think it's well worth spending a second week concentrating on the idea of 'abiding'. Let us realise what the full implications are, the challenge that it brings, and let us abide in Jesus' love.

Amen.

© Hugh Bryant May 2009