Sermon 13th March 2017

Today, our Assistant Minister, Gill Tayleur, continues our Vanishing Grace Lent Series. The reading is from Matthew 28 16-20. 

Last week we heard from Adjoa a very powerful introduction to the Lent series book, Vanishing Grace, by Philip Yancey. In case you missed it, in her sermon last week, Adjoa covered the first section of Yancey’s book, all about how needy and thirsty our world is for God’s grace, his mercy and unconditional love, and the ways in which we Christians have often failed to demonstrate God’s grace and love, instead sometimes showing un-gracious attitudes of superiority, self righteousness, judgementalism, and meanness of spirit. It’s not surprising that people aren’t interested in the message of Christianity, if that’s what they see in people who call themselves Christians.

Preacher Adjoa spoke very powerfully of the need to live out words from Hebrews chapter 12 that say “See to it that no one misses the grace of God”. No one, no one at all, even those who don’t deserve it, especially those who don’t deserve it. For, as Philip Yancey says, by definition, “Grace comes free of charge to people who don’t deserve it, and I am one of those people”. …Me too…

So, we, our families, neighbours, workplaces, communities and world need more grace, need God’s amazing grace, his love, his mercy, his hope.
But where will they find it? How will they find it?

The Bible reading we just heard may well be one you have heard before. The very last time Jesus’ followers saw him, after his resurrection, and his very last words to them. Jesus said: “Go, then, to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples: baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, 20 and teach them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

Jesus’ words here are known as The Great Commission, as his followers are given the task, or commissioned, to spread the good news about Jesus to everyone everywhere. As his followers, that means the commission is for us too.

But why should people listen to us talk to them about Jesus? Are there ways apart from talking that can spread God’s grace, his forgiveness, love and hope to a broken world?

The second section of Yancey’s book is about 3 ways in which Christians may not only tell but show God’s grace and love to others, to be channels of God’s grace, to be grace dispensers, as he puts it.

The 3 ways Philip Yancey suggests are effective, are as Pilgrims, Activists and Artists.
He says: “While discussing the growing antipathy towards Christians, a friend remarked to me that there are three kinds of Christians that outsiders to the faith still respect: pilgrims, activists and artists. The uncommitted will listen to them far sooner than to an evangelist or apologist. Although non-believers do not oppose a spiritual search, they will listen only to those Christians who present themselves as fellow pilgrims on the way rather than as part of a superior class who has already arrived.
Activists express their faith in the most persuasive way of all, by their deeds.
And art succeeds when it speaks most authentically to the human condition; when believers do so with skill, again the world takes note.”

Pilgrims, activists and artists. Pilgrims first then.

WE have the task of spreading God’s grace, his mercy, love and hope, his truth, as fellow pilgrims. Pilgrims are people on a journey, traveling together, heading in the same direction. But none of us has “arrived”; none of us has overcome all trials and temptations, our faults and failings. None of us has got our lives in perfect shape and none of us has fully become the person God made us to be. We’re ALL still traveling.

Often intending to travel on a good and Godly road, but actually all too often we pilgrims easily stray off course. It’s a fact that Jesus-followers don’t always follow Jesus. Prone to dead ends and detours, we sometimes travel a very different path from the one Jesus laid down.
And it’s SO important to recognise and admit that. SO important to be honest about our failings - and our doubts - as people on a journey, with all sorts of twists and turns, as pilgrim people. The honesty with which we speak of our pilgrim journey of faith, can make all the difference to people looking at us pilgrims, as well as to other fellow pilgrims.

I’m sure we’ve all had experience of seeing a spiritual leader or person we’ve looked up to, put on a pedestal even, and had them disappoint us, let us or others down, or come crashing off the pedestal. But we are ALL imperfect people following Jesus very imperfectly.

It’s no different in the Bible. If you look at the people God used to fulfil his purposes, they’re a right motley lot! You’ve probably heard it before, that

Noah was a drunk

Abraham was too old

Isaac was a daydreamer

Jacob was a liar

Leah was not attractive

Moses had a stuttering problem

Gideon was afraid

Samson was a womanizer

Rahab was a prostitute

Jeremiah was too young

David had an affair and was a murderer

Jonah ran away from God

Martha worried about everything

Peter denied Christ

The Disciples fell asleep while praying

Paul was too religious!

And so on.

But God used all of them!

As Yancey says, “Thinking back over Christian personalities I’ve known personally, as well as those featured in both Old and New Testaments, I’ve come up with the following principle: God uses the talent pool available. None of them lived without sin and embarrassing failures. Yet somehow God used them to advance the cause of his kingdom.”

That gives me hope, as I hold up a mirror and see my failings and embarrassments!
We are ALL flawed people, ALL pilgrims who wander off the path, even run in the opposite direction sometimes.

Pilgrims, individually and together.

But even with all our failings, a community of pilgrims supporting one another on the journey, going in a common direction, can be a very powerful witness to the world around us.

The New Testament uses the phrase “one another” many times, and when you read all of them together, they show what a true community of pilgrims would look like. They include
Love one another
Forgive one another
Pray for one another
Bear one another’s burdens
Be devoted to one another
Regard one another as more important than yourself
Do not speak against one another
Do not judge one another
Show tolerance to one another
Be kind to one another
Speak truth to one another
Build up one another
Comfort one another
Care for one another
Stimulate one another to love and good deeds

I wonder how different the church would look to a watching world, not to mention how different history would look, if Christians everywhere followed that model. A pilgrim community.

So that’s pilgrims, one way we can authentically share our faith, share Gods grace, be grace dispensers. Not trying to look like we’re people who have arrived, but being frank about being on a journey.

The second is by being Activists. By this Philip Yancey means Christians who put their faith into action, showing God’s love and grace by serving those in need near or far. Christians who put their money – and often their safety, health or personal wellbeing - where their mouth is, in battles against human need such as hunger, malaria, rape, human trafficking, genocide, victims of torture, those suffering abuse, mental health problems and addictions, to name but a few. I’m sure we can all think of people who have served, fought, campaigned, famous people like Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King or Doreen Lawrence, and perhaps people who we know or know of showing God’s grace in smaller ways – think of Suzanne Windsor serving Bolivian families and prisoners in Cochabamba, or the work done by the Brownies and Scouts locally or some of the projects we support as a parish.

Someone I hadn’t heard of before reading Vanishing Grace, is Miroslav Volf, a Croatian theologian who lived through the Balkan War of the 1990s and all the suffering that bloody civil war brought. Volf says that Christians speaking out about what we believe tends to provoke opposition and instead suggests that we be guided by the Golden Rule, Jesus’ command to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Volf says this means we should concentrate on living out our beliefs, progressing from hand to heart to head. Practical acts of mercy (extending a hand) will express our love (the heart), which in turn may attract others to the source of that love (head beliefs).

Yancey says he believes Volf may have thus framed the best way of communicating our faith in modern times, especially to those Yancey calls post-Christians, those who have been put off or drifted off from the church and from faith. Christians have traditionally stressed “proclaiming the good news” in a direct appeal to the mind. We preach sermons, write books on apologetics, have big evangelistic meetings. For those alienated from church, that approach no longer has much drawing power.

And for the truly needy, words alone don’t’ satisfy. ‘A hungry person has no ears’ as one relief worker told Yancey. A sceptical world judges the truth of what we say by the proof of how we live. Today’s activists may be the best evangelists.

Jesus taught us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth as in heaven”. A sceptic may scoff at such a mirage, yet imagine for a moment a world with no homelessness or poverty, no divorces or unwanted children, no discrimination, no violence, no sexual abuse, no theft or cheating, no addictions, no abuse of the environment, a world in which governments rule with justice and financial institutions operate with integrity and politicians work together for the common good. This is what Jesus’ followers should strive for.
And energetically work for, campaign for, pray for. As activists.

Pilgrims, activists, and finally artists.

Artists. Yancey speaks of art in its widest sense, literature, performing arts, all sorts of creative expression that can speak very powerfully to society and culture.

He says: “In modern times, and especially for post-Christians, the creative arts may be the most compelling path to faith. Communicating at a more subtle level, they cut through defences and awaken thirst. Someone who would never think of attending church will visit an art gallery or watch a film or play." Or listen to music.

Yancey talks about the effect of art as goads. A goad, such as a farmer might use on cattle, prods to action. Goads clause enough discomfort to get animals - or people - to do something they might otherwise not do. He says history has seen many examples of the creative arts used as goads, and they often rattle the governing powers. An example is Pablo Picasso's huge painting Guernica, which graphically depicts the bombing of civilians. Picasso says that when a fascist officer barked at him, “Did you do that?” pointing at the painting, the artist replied, “No you did!”

Another example is Harriet Beecher Stowe, a radical Christian, who sought to communicate the anti slavery message to many who had blocked their ears to sermons and jeremiads. Choosing another form, she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold 200,000 copies in its first year and as much as any other force goaded a nation toward change. When Stowe met President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he allegedly exclaimed, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!"

She was a Christian author whose art provoked like a goad. And Yancey says others do the same in our day. “On the barren landscape of western civilisation, Christians still cling to a view that ascribes meaning and worth to individual human beings. The novelist Reynolds Price says there is one sentence above all that people crave from stories: ‘The Maker of all things loves and wants me.’ Christians still believe in that truth.” We sure do!

And so Yancey concludes, “While fully aware of its limited role, I remain convinced that we need art now more than ever - the kind of art that humbly creates spaces in our lives. Compared with any other time in history, we moderns scream and shout at each other, and the entertainment media fill screens with images crude and grotesque. The world today contains little subtlety, no silence, few spaces. The year he lived in Bolivia, the priest Henri Nouwen saw a popular film just before Advent. It overwhelmed him. The movie was so filled with images of greed and lust, manipulation and exploitation, fearful and painful sensations, that it filled all the empty spaces that could have been filled by the spirit of Advent, he said.

Christian artists can convey God’s truth and grace, both directly and indirectly, and we need more of them. Yancey says the arts have become a pulpit for culture at large, but one too often neglected by people of faith. NT Wright says that the arts ‘are highways into the centre of a reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way’. Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict 16th, goes further: “The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb.’

So, pilgrims, activists, artists. 3 ways of being grace dispensers.

What about us? How are we going to be channels of God grace to our needy world?
Do these descriptions of the place of pilgrims, activists and artists, strike a chord with you?
Is there one or more that you might perhaps identify with, to a lesser or greater extent?

Maybe it's the pilgrim, on a journey but very aware of the twists and turns of the road and the times we wander off, knowingly, or simply struggling to stay on the path? How frank are we about our failings and doubts, and how well do we encourage, care for and invite others to be fellow pilgrims?

And or maybe you are naturally an activist, with a God given passion for justice, for making the world a better place, for the hungry or sick or imprisoned or disempowered? Let us show God’s grace, love and care in very practical ways, even at a cost to ourselves! We can work, go, campaign, give, support, pray – all actively!

Or maybe you're an artist, with God given creative skill that can express something of his world and truth in ways that touch others at a level deeper than words or understanding. Give your best endeavours to this then!

Whatever ways we are each made, we can all be grace dispensers to our world. It’s not optional remember, Jesus’ words in the Great Commission are for all his followers, including us!

I’ve often heard it said, that when we pray about some ghastly situation in the world, “God why don’t you DO something? How can you let this happen? What are you doing?”

God seems to reply, “Gill, why don’t YOU do something? How can YOU let this happen? What are YOU doing?” Hmm….

So let’s pray now:

Thank you Lord, for your grace, for your mercy, love and hope. Please help us to share that grace, near and far, so that despite our failings, others come to know your grace for themselves. Amen.