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Sermon preached
at Bradford Cathedral
Trinity 15: Sunday Holy Communion 31st August 2008 Communities Romans 12:9-end & Matthew 16:21-end |
"You really ought to camp on site Dad. It's not the authentic Greenbelt experience if you stay off site and drive in each day." That was last year. It was dry and sunny for all 4 days of the festival. So this year we agreed not to stay in comfort locally but to camp on site. Hmm… It WAS the authentic festival experience. More of what happened later. This morning I want to talk about community, or more precisely three communities and two distinctive features. We all need to belong somewhere and we all do belong somewhere. Communities come in all shapes and sizes. The first community to consider is the Christian community in Rome to which St Paul is writing. It produces from Paul his masterpiece epistle; it may be helpful to have this morning's passage open in front of you. Scholars think that Paul wrote Romans from Corinth in about AD 55 or 56. He had not founded the church in Rome but was hoping to visit the city after going first to Jerusalem. This is late on in his work - probably after his third missionary journey. His aim is to spend some time in Rome before taking the gospel to Spain. What Paul didn't know when he wrote this epistle was that he would be taken to Rome as a prisoner and would be executed there. Although Paul didn't know the church in Rome personally he did know they had suffered. Arguments between Jewish Christians and Jews over whether Jesus was the Messiah led to both being expelled from the city because of disturbances; this was around AD 49 when Claudius was emperor. The majority of people left in the Christian church at Rome would have been Gentile Christians. They developed in a different way from the Christian circles that grew out of Jewish synagogues. Claudius died around the year AD 54, and his successor, Emperor Nero, allowed the Jews back into Rome. There was then tension between the Gentile Christians and the Jewish Christians. We can see why the themes in Paul's letter are so pertinent. The Roman church would have to accept that the gospel was for the "Jew first and also to the Greek". Whether Jew or Gentile, central to being a Christian was to be 'en Christo', in Christ. There was no room for hierarchy in Christ's community. As he wrote earlier in chapter 12, the body of Christ has many members with different gifts, and gifts are not earned, they are evidence of God's grace. So Paul encouraged them to (vs 16) "Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are". You may have different ethnic and religious roots from each other, but in Christ you are one. So, vs 9, "Let love be genuine and love one another with mutual affection." So much in Paul's letter to the Romans is aimed at encouraging them, with all their differences, to live as a community characterised by mercy and service. And so to the second community. The one we experienced last weekend in the mud and under clouds (mostly). Of course a very different type of community and yet, it was church - a mixed gathering of ordinary (and not so ordinary) people. For those who don't know, Greenbelt is a long-established Christian Arts festival which explores creativity and theology in numerous different ways. And our children were right - camping on site was the only way to truly commit to Greenbelt. To stay off-site now would feel like a betrayal. To camp is to identify with the 20, 000 or so other Festival goers. It is to help build community, albeit a temporary one. Why? Because to camp is to be vulnerable, to let go of control. One writer put it like this: "Camping adds to the spirituality of the experience… being at the mercy of the weather…calls into question the illusion of control with which we delude ourselves we have in our lives It also (he says) brings us more closely up against the reality of other people. On a campsite you can't distance yourself from others". It is a great leveller, there is no room for hierarchy or holding on to status. Even Douglas Alexander, Secretary of State for International Development was camping. There is something Kingdom of God-like about a cabinet minister squelching his way in the mud to use the chemical portaloo. Camping with thousands around you exposes your own self-centredness, and therefore the need to call on God's grace. We were camping with about 14 others, a community within a community, friends of our children. And they were an example to us. 'Extend hospitality to strangers' says Paul. And they did. The vats of food being prepared for our group were often shared with others who came to visit. One such visitor also came, uninvited, to breakfast each morning, a good hour before we were ready to rise, and made sleep impossible, talking as he did in loud piercing tones. I confess that I was angry and not at all gracious. At that point, for love to be genuine, the best I could do was hold my tongue and let my annoyance pass. 'Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty but associate with the lowly.' His need to belong to this temporary community offering godly hospitality was greater than my need for another hour's sleep! And that brings me to the third community - this one here, the cathedral community. By our attendance this morning, we are part of this community, whatever we feel our level of commitment to it is. Here is a gathering of ordinary, not so ordinary and some extraordinary people, each of us in our own way seeking to make sense of faith and of following Jesus. And in that journey, though we would probably rather it wasn't so, we belong to each other. To be 'in Christ' is to be part of His Body. And like it or not, that gives us a responsibility to try and 'live in harmony with one another.' We have not chosen each other, we may feel we have little in common and we may not even like each other! But we are called to be 'in Christ' together and to build community. And here is the good news. Here come the 2 distinctive features. We are not called to focus on our differences (and try and make others more like us ) but to be outward looking. We build a Christ-centred community to show to the community around us what is possible, and to find ways of serving them. Once again, I want to commend to you the opportunities which are being set up for us but which need your help. Have you thought yet of anyone we can invite to Back to Church Sunday? Or anyone you can invite to the Hope Banquet? Or to the Foundations of Faith course for enquirers, starting on the last Tuesday of this month? Time is short - please speak to me or Canon Frankie about any of those. That's the first distinctive feature of a true Christian community - that it reaches out. The second is that it eats together regularly. One of the greatest joys at Greenbelt was the simplest. Sitting on canvas chairs eating slightly tepid food off enamel plates surrounded by an strange mix of young people, some married, some gay, some single and some strange. Eating together builds community. And in this service we gather around the table invited by the One who calls us and despite our differences unites us. Of course the elements are simple - a little bread and a sip of wine, but they are more powerful than a 5 course meal. 'This is my body - take and eat. The Body of Christ keep you in eternal life'. We need the Body of Christ to keep us following Jesus. I need you and you need me. 'This is my blood of the new covenant'. The old covenant required sacrifices and offerings. Under this new agreement, my sacrifice is once for all and for many. Through it, sins are forgiven. At this table we are brought together, sinners forgiven by the Saviour, forgiven and called by Him to live as a community characterised by mercy and genuine love, a community called be open and outward looking and serving the community beyond. Let us pray… Lord Jesus Christ, take us as we are, broken and weak, feed us with the bread of life, nourish us with your grace and send us out in the power of your Spirit. To your praise and glory. Amen.
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