Sermon 19th March 2017

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, continues our Lent Series based on Philip Yancey's "Vanishing Grace". The reading is from Luke 7, 18-23.

Is it really Good News? 

I don't know exactly why this suddenly became something I had to do. It may be because my twin brother and I have a certain significant birthday coming up in a few days. It may be because I am realising that, at 86 and 85, my parents really are getting elderly, or it may be because others in their generation in our family have already gone. Anyway, for whatever reason, I have spent a fair bit of time in recent months looking into my family history. So, last November, I managed to find the exact field where my Great Uncle was captured during the First World War, on the Somme battlefield. And Jennie and I stood there exactly one hundred years to the day since his capture. And I gave my Dad all the details so that, while he is still with us, he could complete the missing pieces in his scrapbook of all his Uncle's war memories. And then for my Mam's 85th birthday last month I wrote up an account not only of the beloved Grandma she lived with as a child on the banks of the River Tyne, but also I managed to discover for the first time the previous four generations, back as far as a baptism in 1795, all within a few streets of each other on Tyneside right down by the river.  Again I wanted her to know this, while she is still with us.

It felt good to do this, not only as gifts for my elderly parents but also for myself, because my family history is part of my identity. And for each one of us that family history, that part of our identity, is interesting and unique, whoever our forbears were and whatever they got up to, good and bad! No wonder programmes like "Who do you think You Are?" can be so fascinating. I was able to affirm a bit more of that North Eastern part of my identity two or three weeks ago by going to a lovely concert near Kings Cross given by 4 musicians from the NE coalfields where I lived until I was 12. The songs, the accents, the characters, the ways of doing things, all reminded me so much of my childhood and it felt really good to re-engage with that part of my identity, especially as so much of those communities has since disappeared. And each of us will have our own stories of our family identity, of where we come from and who we are.

I have seen this theme of identity, of what makes us who we are, coming up time and again in different contexts in recent weeks. I read on the BBC website about the European Parliament's chief negotiator Guy Verhofstadt describing the more than one thousand letters he has had from UK citizens who do not want to lose their relationship with Europe, mostly he says, driven by a feeling that they did not want to lose their identity as Europeans, post Brexit. "Am I British or am I European?"

Then just this last week I watched with some amusement the battle that no doubt is just beginning between Nicola Sturgeon and Theresa May over Scottish independence. "Am I British or am I Scottish?" A question that has bubbled away for centuries coming up again. Since, between us, Jennie and I can say with certainty that our children are part Scottish, part Welsh, part English and quite possibly part Irish, oh yes and definitely part German, I am not too sure what to make of all these questions!

And in a different context I read a stunning and brave book called "Fathers & Sons" which explores the true stories first of a man's struggle with his own identity when he has little or no contact with his own father and then later his struggles when he realises that his daughter is actually, in reality, his son because that is the identity that that child just knows is true for him. The Financial Times describes it as "a dazzlingly beautiful memoir". It deals in part with our identity as male and female, our gender identity. "Am I male or am I female?" It's the BBC's Book of the Week starting tomorrow at 9.45am on Radio 4. You may actually know some of the people in the book very well because it is by Adjoa's husband Howard, so you might like to listen to it.

And on a similar or at least related theme I read the letter to all of us in the Anglican churches, from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York dated February 2017 on the issue of same sex relationships, the issue of our sexual identity. And what stands out for me in that letter is the call for a radical new Christian inclusion in the church. No person, says the letter, is a problem or an issue. All of us, without exception, are loved and called in Christ.

And then finally I glance at one of the many books by the undoubtedly superb scientist Richard Dawkins, this one called The Blind Watchmaker and I feel again not only the serious discomfort of seeing faith in God the creator attacked - I can take that - but also the sense of deep unease that if science says there can be no God, that our identity in this universe is that we are on our own, then it seems to me there must surely be consequences that I feel are negative and life limiting for our human race.

I set out these examples and issues about identity at some length because it seems to me they tie in well with what Philip Yancey is wrestling with in the third section of his book "Vanishing Grace" that we are looking at this Lent. I have read much of Yancey's other work over the years and, I may be wrong, but as much as anything he seemed to me in his earlier books to be urging Christians in a still largely Christian based culture, certainly in the USA, to rediscover the glorious truths of the riches of God's grace in forgiveness, healing of relationships and healing of communities that seemed to have been lost in the way many Christians spoke and behaved, especially to those outside the churches.

But now, as the twenty first century rolls forward, I think he senses an increasingly different context, one in which what you could call our Christian heritage, that underlying identity that we have, in our Western European societies at least, a residual Christian understanding, Christian culture, Christian inheritance and set of shared essentially Christian values, is being increasingly undermined or ignored or questioned and set aside. There are no longer any guarantees that essentially Christian values or ways of looking at the world will remain the bedrock of our society, let alone that those values and ways of looking at the world will prevail. And so, in this very modern world, Yancey asks again the fundamental questions. Is there anything about our Christian faith that actually is good news?

So he asks first whether faith really matters in the sense of asking whether it could at all have anything much to say in a world where we are so much more in control of our lives, and have learned, it might at first glance appear, to provide plenty of worthwhile things and activities to fill our time and to provide sound, rational and good scientific explanations of so much of what we find around us. Is there any reason to think Christian faith might have anything to say at all?

Well, everything is actually clearly not all well with the world, he says. He quotes the US politician Al Gore who said, 'The accumulation of material goods is at an all-time high, but so is the number of people who feel an emptiness in their lives.' Looking at length at our western societies he sets out compellingly and frankly hardly surprisingly - but without wanting to sound just like a typical older person bemoaning society going to the dogs - that we do still have many, many, many problems.

But instead of engaging with these issues in the way that Jesus intended, existing to affect the societies around us, the churches have too easily fallen back behind their barricades, feeling good about being together on the inside and looking critically at those on the outside instead of communicating our good news message by living it out among the uncommitted.

And, fundamentally, a big part of the way the churches have tended to come across for so long, is to give an appearance of presenting the message that God is in some way first and foremost against us and that Christians are determined to stop others from enjoying life. "It is a whisper as old as the snake in the Garden of Eden" says Philip Yancey, that God is trying to keep me from something better and keep me away from something more exciting. Actually, over many years, Yancey says, he has come to believe just the opposite, that God desires the best for us, the life in all its fullness that Jesus promises, that God wants us to thrive, to live with joy and not repression, to live with trust and not with fear. I could summarise this, I think, by saying that what Yancey wants us to rediscover is the abundance of positive, good things that Christianity has to offer, if you like the amazingness of God's grace, in a world that still really really needs that, is thirsty for it, and that unless it rediscovers this positive and outward looking way of living out its faith, then the Christian church will increasingly fail the communities in which it is found.

What, if you like, he is asking, is our fundamental Christian identity? Are we really bearers of good news or not?

And the way he then answers that question is essentially to break it down into three parts.

He asks first what he calls "the God question". It is the question whether there is anyone else there at all or whether God really is an illusion. It concerns our identity in the universe. Are we, and any other intelligent life that may have developed elsewhere in the vastness of the universe, all there is? You will almost certainly be aware of the very serious efforts made in the last decades to say exactly that, that science can answer everything, so there is no need for the old fashioned idea of God and the view therefore that we had better get used to that idea and throw off, some would insist, our backward looking foolishness of faith.

Well, the way Yancey deals with this is this. He does not start by saying well the Bible says that God created the Earth and therefore there must be a God. He stands back and suggests that without God there are questions that science struggles to answer. Like why is there anything here at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? It either just exists because it exists, in all its glory, or it exists and we exist in it for a purpose. For myself I would argue that without God, with only scientific laws at the heart of the universe, you can suggest that the ultimate aim of humanity might be to know all things. But with the person of God at the heart of the universe, I would suggest that the ultimate aim for humanity is not only to know all things but also to love and to be loved. A pioneer in quantum physics called Erwin Schrodinger writes that, "The scientific picture of the world around me is very deficient. It gives me a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order but is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us, which I would suggest includes meaning, purpose, self worth, the ability to put the past behind us and be healed, life after death, hope, justice, accountability beyond the human legal and political systems and the sheer beauty of what we see and hope for...  "Science knows nothing," says Schrodinger, "of beauty and ugliness, of good or bad, God and eternity."

This if you like, is the big picture, and one with which broadly most religions might agree. But it is then, says Yancey, that Christians become more focussed and say that, for us, the good news about God centres on Jesus, like sunlight concentrated by a magnifying glass. Jesus forgave sinners, loved enemies, healed the sick, extended grace to the underserving and he triumphed even though he was a victim of the worst of inhumanity. In short, he showed us a different way of living, a different way of being human, a different identity. And ultimately he demonstrated that evil will not triumph in the end and that death is not the end. Our identity is not limited just to this life, however long or short, however fair or unfair our experience of that might be.

So I can listen three weeks ago at a church near my place of work, to the CEO of a London bank, terminally ill with cancer at the age of 53, with a family still at home, say with apparent ease and even good humour at times over half an hour of talk and discussion, that although his situation is utterly awful and absolutely not one he would want to be in, he can face his future ultimately because of the resurrection of Jesus.

And Yancey then asks, secondly, what he calls the human question, which is why are we here? And the way Yancey begins to answer this is to say that rather than just see humanity as the result, accidental perhaps, of the remarkable processes of natural selection over millions and millions of years, and rather than assume, as some scientists would, that we must therefore, essentially be here, when it comes down to it, to survive, to selfishly pass our genes on to the next generation, our faith allows us to say that not only we who believe, but everyone is of intrinsic value. Where society tends to see the significance of people in what they can build up and achieve and make themselves look like, we who follow Jesus know of one other hope, the good news that a relationship with the living God of the universe is possible and it is a relationship that can fill the human need for significance. To the woman shamed by an embarrassing malady, to social outcasts, to lepers, to a thief hanging on a cross, to a common prostitute Jesus held out the bright promise that significance is not something that has to be attained, but rather something that is given to us from the outside, by a gracious God. Our full identity, if you like, is a gift from the outside, and it is a gift that says we are all equally valued and loved. Why are we here? Yancey asks.  We, all of us, are here because of the Creator's love, who seeks both our flourishing and our response of love and gratitude. "Find out what pleases God" Paul told the Ephesians. We are here to please God. But the good news is that it brings God pleasure to see us thrive. And Yancey concludes here that to the extent we live out to message we says we believe, treating everyone with dignity and worth and measuring success by the standards of Jesus and not that of broader culture, to that extent only will we succeed in serving up good news to a thirsty world.

And then thirdly and finally, Philip Yancey asks what he calls the social question, which is how we should live. And what he says here is essentially that what faith gives us is a basis for a belief that there is good and there is evil, that there is a good way to live. Without God, Yancey suggests, it is very difficult ultimately to argue that anything is really right or wrong. But faith allows us and indeed commands us, to act in a way that may not always appear to be in our own narrow best interests. But if our view of morality and the way we approach what is right and what is wrong becomes too narrow, the danger for people of Christian faith is that we begin to be seen as against the world instead of showing God's grace to the world.  How different, Yancey suggests the world might view Christians if we focussed on our own failings rather than those of society. So often the churches seem to fail to communicate the spectacular good news that everyone fails and yet a gracious God offers forgiveness to all. Fundamentally Yancey is saying that we do have a role to play in bringing clarity to moral issues but only if the vast abundance of our activity is to listen well, to live well ourselves and to engage well with the rest of society.

So Philip Yancey is saying at heart that our faith remains good news because it still answers our deepest questions, because it allows us to claim the value in every human life and because it gives us from outside an understanding of right and wrong that comes from beyond what we can argue and rely upon for ourselves. In effect our human identity is not the limit of who we are and who we can and will become.

I'd like to finish by telling you about a dream I had when I was about 24 and living on Herne Hill Road in a flat just over there. I had come to London to work and been here about a year and my plan was always to go back up north to where I had originally come from, and where I thought I really belonged. And that summer of 1981 I was off to India on a three week trip with three friends. And one morning I woke from sleep with the words "The Potters House" ringing in my ears. What I thought might be going to happen was that God was going to lead me to something or someone at a potters place in India and that there I might discover what he wanted for my life. Nothing happened however during those three weeks apart from me getting seriously ill with an intestinal parasite and having a very interesting time. But some weeks after I came back I was stunned when I opened one evening the Book of Jeremiah, at chapter 18 and saw the heading, "At the potters house". I knew for sure I had never read that passage before, and I read how God tells the prophet that whenever a piece of pottery turned out imperfect, the potter would take the clay and make it into something else. And I realised very clearly indeed that what God was actually saying to me was that he wanted to take me with all that made up my identity - where I came from and where I thought I might live, all the values and understanding and prejudices I had developed until then - and he wanted to mould it into something better if I would trust Him to do it. And I think that is what he has been doing ever since and I know I am still learning. And time and again in the 36 years since I feel I have felt his good news and seen that he has been leading me forward even when I did not trust. Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I too am one of those people.

Amen