Sermon for Sunday 25th January 2009

“May we never forget that one day all nations and all people will stand accountable before you”. Words in the prayer from the American pastor Rick Warren at the inauguration of Barack Obama last Tuesday. As Obama takes office, supported apparently by an amazing 80% of all Americans, he will be only too aware of how difficult it is for many nations to account for their actions today.

Obama arrives in office with unprecedented support, breaking as he goes barriers of prejudice and discrimination. And yet his inauguration speech was sombre and serious. There were no ‘I have a dream’ moments that so many people had been hoping for. And I suspect that was deliberate. The problems he faces, including conflict in the Middle East and the global financial crisis, are immense. There are no easy solutions and Obama does not want give anyone false hopes of quick fixes.

One Christian commentator wrote this week ‘society has at its heart a loss of moral value’. The question of moral values has been raised more than once in relation to the actions of bank executives in causing the banking crisis. But perhaps the loss of moral value has been most clearly demonstrated this month by the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Attacks which Israel conveniently managed to turn into a ceasefire just in time for Obama’s big day.

In this week’s newsletter you will see that the UK’s Disaster Relief Committee has been convened to raise money for the reconstruction of Gaza following the devastation wreaked by Israel. We recently screened a film made by the Amos Trust, one of the Bishop of Guildford’s Lent Appeal charities, called ‘Bethlehem Hidden from View’. In it Garth Hewitt comments that the actions taken by Israel effectively to imprison the entire Palestinian people behind a 20 ft high concrete wall are wholly disproportionate to the actions of Palestinian terrorists. The same can be said of the recent military action.

And yet the world, for reasons many Christians simply cannot understand, remains extraordinarily silent. The imbalance between Israel and Palestine is huge. And ironically the USA, our partner with whom we have a special relationship, has effectively funded the devastation of Gaza. Some numbers …

The population of Israel is 7 million, of the Palestinians 3 million.

The Gross Domestic Product of Israel last year was $206 billion – 50 times that of Palestine at just $4 billion. Despite this, US military aid to Israel last year was $2.34 billion. In the same year US aid to Palestine was $109 million.

And now it is people like us up and down the country who have to pay for the desperately needed humanitarian relief in Gaza. And pay we must, because the US and UK governments won’t.

We can argue long and hard about the extent to which Palestinian terrorists have caused the appalling situation their people are now in, but it is innocent men, women and children who are suffering. And this is just one example of a world that has at its heart a loss of moral value. There are we know lots more examples one could give.

It is easy at times like this to have a growing sense of hopelessness. But we can learn something today from the drive and passion of Paul as we celebrate his conversion. Saul, Paul’s name before he was converted, was a zealot, intolerant of the new Christians whose teaching threatened the religious leaders of the time. Saul, we are told in Acts, was at the time of his conversion, ‘still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord’. He was attempting to round up and crush all of the followers of the Way of Jesus Christ, the first generation of Christians. But then God intervened. And after his dramatic conversion Saul’s zeal, his energy and his talents, were put to very different use.

In the same way, when we feel our lives are going wrong, God can turn us around. Give us the courage to speak up for what is right.

When we think of Paul it is easy to regard him as having two contrasting personalities. We know little of his life before his conversion, so we tend to ignore it. We rather assume he became a completely different person after his conversion. But his passion and determination to promote his newly held beliefs, and his success in building up the infant Church, were in fact the same characteristics that made him so feared by the Christian community before his conversion. God didn’t change who Paul was. He changed what he believed and what he did.

And that surely is the hope that is held within us as individual Christians and within the Church. God does act. Sometimes in most unexpected and surprising ways. It may not be as dramatic as Paul, struck down and blinded on the road to Damascus. God cried out to him ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’. That voice of God can be heard today in the grieving parents of children killed in Gaza. It can be heard today in the starving and oppressed people of Zimbabwe. It can be heard in the people around the world who have lost their jobs or whose savings have been decimated by the global economic collapse.

As Christians we can show in our lives that there is a different way of living. We are who we are. The machinery of government and business is what it is. But what we do and what we believe can be different. And what governments and businesses do and believe can be different.

Rick Warren, whom President Obama invited to lead the inauguration prayers, has said “I believe tackling the world’s biggest problems – the giants of spiritual lostness, egocentric leadership, poverty, disease, and ignorance – can only be done through the Church.” It is significant that someone so passionate about the role of the Church in society as Rick Warren was chosen by Obama. And it is a strong reminder to us, as Christians and as citizens, that God should be seen to be guiding what we do and what we believe.

We are living at a time when there much despair and pessimism. There is a real lack of hope for the future and a tangible fear for what it might hold. But the story of Paul’s conversion reminds us that God does extraordinary things. God will not change who our political, business and military leaders are. But he can change what they do and what they believe. And the Church will be a part of that process. And God can change us and support us in our individual struggles, whatever they might be. Through the power of God and the work of individual Christians and the Church, society can rediscover its moral values, and learn to live differently. That is the hope Paul calls us to live and to express.

“May we never forget that one day all nations and all people will stand accountable before you”.

©Revd Robert Jenkins January 2009