Sermon 26th March 2017

Today, our Vicar, Cameron Barker, continues our Lent Series based on Philip Yancey's "Vanishing Grace". The reading is from Mark 12 verses 13-17.    

"In a time of division and discord, grace seems in vanishing supply.”

Well, today never was going to be a start-the-sermon-with-a-joke Sunday. Not given where we’ve gone in these churches in the past 4 weeks. We’ve plunged into the bottomless depths of God’s amazing, glorious grace that come free of charge to people who don’t deserve it: to people like us. But Philip Yancey’s introductory words to our Lent book, Vanishing Grace, took on a whole new meaning at 2.40 on Wednesday afternoon. Grace wasn’t anywhere in sight as division and discord struck in the deadly form that Londoners have long known was likely to happen in our city again. But those shocking events add to the urgency of finding meaningful answers to Yancey’s follow-up questions: “Why [is grace in vanishing supply]? And what can we do about it?”

Of course the picture, and the debates, are far bigger than we could hope to deal with today. But for us to be looking at this final section of Yancey’s book, the part entitled Faith and Culture, on this of all days feels very relevant; and very real.  We don’t yet know the personal history, or the detail of what motivated Khalid Masood to do what he did. What we do know is that for some parts of Islam this kind of act is how faith should be lived out. Shocking and abhorrent that certainly is to a Christian way of thinking, and faith-living. But we can already hear again on social media the loud voices of those who would tar all religions with the same intolerant brush; and it makes our task of living, and being, God’s Good News to God’s world all the harder.

So never, I’d suggest, have Christians more needed to “Be ready to speak up and tell anyone who asks why [we]’re living the way [we] are, and always with the utmost courtesy”. Peter wrote those words (as the Message version expresses them) to people facing the death that soon afterwards caught up with him because of his faith in a hostile world. That’s not a fate that often befalls Western Christians today; but the public arena is increasingly a place where we struggle to gain a hearing. And followers of Jesus need to ask him what he wants us to do about that, because this is where, and how, we’re to live out our faith. It’s not simple, much less easy; but, as Gill reminded us here 2 weeks ago, Jesus has commissioned us to carry his message: to all people; everywhere.

Key to how we fulfil that calling not ‘just’ effectively but in God’s best way is this arena of faith and culture. It’s not least why Yancey wrote this excellent book in the 1^st place, of course. He has – prophetically, I believe – perceived the worsening failures of God’s church in the West (or the global North, if you’d rather) to live out Good News graciously and generously. So much of that failure is around our collective confusion about the best model to adopt for our life in this world. Yancey lays it out brilliantly in this final section, which of course I’m urging you to read. Yes this has been our Lent book; and some will have been reading a section a week. If you’ve not done, perhaps not even started, it’s definitely worth doing at any time; and particularly for this final part of it.

Of course I won’t be able to cover what Yancey spends fully 50 pages on! But I will point you to his brief summary of the 1951 classic book by the theological ethicist, H. Richard Niebuhr. Based on 19 centuries of Christian experience, in Christ and Culture Niebuhr set out 5 models of, or for, relations between church and state. As well as a biblical basis, each of them has its cons as well as its pros – all of which can be clearly seen from how they’ve played out in reality. Yancey is quick to wonder if any 1 model can ever be right; and experience shows the wisdom of staying open-minded about that. There’s always been real need for Christians to discriminate about which parts of their culture they engage with, and how; and that’s very much true now.

It’ll help just to mention Niebuhr’s 5 models not least because the title of each makes fairly clear what it is. Christ ABOVE culture harks back to the days of the Holy Roman Empire – when Emperors knelt before Popes. At the other end of the spectrum are people who separate themselves from it, believing that Christ is AGAINST culture. Thirdly, there are those who follow John Calvin’s model, of Christ TRANSFORMING culture; trying to make earth more like heaven. One alternative to that is Martin Luther’s way; of there being two parallel cultures. In that Christ is IN PARADOX WITH culture, then; as the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world somehow sit alongside each other. And finally there are those who identify Christ WITH culture in some way; usually resulting in faith being absorbed in the culture that they’re working in.

Obviously this is one of those teasers that is aimed at getting you thinking about what you think, and why. Whether we’re conscious of it, or not, we’ve each adopted a model for our relating to the world around us; because we all have to do that every day! Hopefully it’s at least in some way modelled on what we’ve read about Jesus; though (as we’ve already seen) that does open up a wide range of options. One of the passages that many people turn to is the 1 that we’ve had today. Both Yancey and Tom Wright are quick to point out that this isn’t Jesus establishing a universal rule for how to relate to wider society. It was a situational 1-off: yes, it’s both brilliant and sharp-edged; but it’s for a particular occasion. Of course there are important lessons to be learned from it; but they need careful thinking through and working out in our own circumstance.

In short, though, Jesus showed little concern for what might be called ‘secular politics’. Jesus lived in an era when politics mattered at least as much as it does today, but they usually had more immediate, and dire, consequences then. Paul’s approach was very different, as he made use of his Roman citizenship to the full. But the core message of the New Testament is this: however necessary government is, and one means through which God works, it’s no friend or sponsor of faith. Jesus and most of his 12 disciples died martyrs; and persecution was a regular fate of Christians in the era through until Constantine’s conversion. The detail of the conflict may have changed since, but Christians today do still need to be just as wise, and cautious, in our dealing with both government and culture.

Yancey proposes his own 5 guiding principles for how Christians might go about doing it; and yes, I think that they are well worth reading, and thinking about! Here’s just a taster of the conclusions he reached in his exploration of vanishing grace in this time of division and discord that we live in. The key aim is to find more grace-filled ways to present the message that Christians believe in to those who don’t. So the best starting point may well be, Philip Yancey says, to recognise that clashes between Christ and culture are unavoidable. On no less than 51 separate occasion Jesus confronted injustice in the New Testament – and so Christians have been doing the same in his name ever since.

Those battles should be picked very wisely though Yancey says; and that’s his second principle. The danger is to go off on some tangent, and make that a central issue. The non-controversial example he picks is Prohibition in U.S. That became a battle-ground for some people of faith who were determined to save others by legislation from what they saw as bad choices. Of course not everybody agreed that they shouldn’t be allowed to drink, and soon it all got very ugly and messy. Some Christians refused to let go of their attempt to transform society, and so cost themselves the chance to explain the important part: why they were doing what they did.

Third, then, is the principle that Christians should fight their battles wisely also. In a liberal democracy everyone is compelled to recognise others’ rights; even when we fundamentally disagree with their positions. The Gospel commands us to love our enemies as well as our neighbours, remember! To gain a hearing from a post-Christian society that’s already sceptical about our beliefs and our methods grace is far more likely to be well met than the sort of strident name-calling or condemnation that we hear all too often.

The 4^th principle is closely related: in engaging with culture Christians need to distinguish the immoral from the illegal. God’s commands can’t be made law, after all! Martin Luther King Jr said it best: government can require a white man to serve black people in his restaurant, and can stop whites from lynching blacks, but no government can pass a law to force a white person to love a black one. That requires a transformation of the heart; and that is the realm of God’s grace alone.

Yancey’s last principle is that the church must use caution in its dealings with the state. The church works best, he says (and I’d fully agree) as a separate force. It needs to be a conscience to society, that keeps itself at arm’s length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture; and the more perilously it risks losing its central message. The state will often try to use religion for its own purposes; but when it does so the gospel itself changes – and always for the worse. Contrast the Confessing Church and the Protestant Reich Church in Nazi Germany, for example. No, the church can only be the church if it follows Jesus along the road that leads to the cross; to that place where power and self are sacrificed so that all can find forgiveness and new life in his grace.

In the last pages of his book Philip Yancey returns to the 3 categories of people he’d detailed earlier. Gill spoke on how Pilgrims, Activists, and Artists might be the most effective dispensers of God’s grace in a world that’s thirsty for it. As ever, that sermon is on our website; or you could read Yancey’s own thoughts on that, of course. In this revisiting he talks about each of them as potential ‘holy subversives’ (what a phrase!) He’s very clear in his conclusion, that Christians mustn’t retreat from the challenges of our culture. Nor can we, he says, demand that a religious theocracy be set up; because history shows how that has been equally disastrous. Christianity works, and is, best as a counter-culture. It grows most effectively from the bottom upwards; because at its heart the message of Jesus is about self-giving, not self-imposing. He, Jesus, has provided the model of risky subversion for Pilgrims, Activists and Artists each to live out God’s grace. Our task is to work out with him how we can each best do that; and then to do it: in our own culture. Grace, after all, comes free of charge to people who don’t deserve it. As those people ourselves, in this run-up to Easter we are to reverse this grace-vanishing trend; and to address the division and discord in our culture; graciously; with God’s Good News for everyone in Christ. So may He give us all the grace, and the strength, that we will need to do it: in His name. Amen.