“On Pleasing God"
We must accept the peace and stop fighting the war
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Text: Romans 5:1-11
Just over 10 days ago, some of us were privileged to hear one of the most moving, and yet at the same time, disturbing speeches that I have heard in years. For those who were in attendance, forgive me for the repetition; for those of you who were not there, this was an inspiration. The woman who spoke was called Siphiwe Hlophe, from Swaziland. She was addressing the Churches-on-the-Hill gathering on an “Evening for Africa.” On a very cold and bitter evening with not much heat in the building, this woman, who had come from the heat of Swaziland, addressed us on a topic that was not only dear to her heart, but also that had completely encompassed her life. The subject was not a happy one. It was, of course, about the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa, and most especially in her tiny and, as I have witnessed in person, beautiful, little country.
Siphiwe is a wife and mother, and yet she stood before us on behalf of the Stephen Lewis Foundation as someone who, herself, has HIV/`AIDS. She has been a faithful spouse and a good and a caring mother, yet she has contracted this terrible disease. She did so, she told us, with a ring of regret and a catch in her voice, because her husband, like many of the men in her society, had been unfaithful, and brought AIDS into their marriage.
She has had to suffer the stigma of having this disease. It was inconceivable to many of the people in her community that she had done nothing wrong to contract it; she was now somehow the carrier. She became a pariah: Rejected, often misunderstood by her family and friends alike, she lived and still lives a lonely existence. Nevertheless, she recognizes that she is not alone in her plight, and that there are many thousands in her own society and country that suffer from exactly the same virus. She is working now with the government to try to bring an end to the spread of HIV/AIDS. She is doing it by appealing to the world community to help pay for anti-viral drugs and to make sure condoms are available; to educate the men in her society as to what their behaviour is doing, and how destructive it is to their communities; for more training; and, unfortunately, for more orphanages for the many orphans that are being created.
Siphiwe speaks clearly on behalf of so many silent voices, in what is for her a very personal story. After she had finished making this emotional plea and I had given my words of thanks to her for speaking at the Churches-on-the-Hill event, she took me to one side. She knew that I knew her homeland and that I understood the plight of her people, some of the behaviours, attitudes and approaches. She said something to me that, frankly, I found astounding, inspirational, troubling, all in one. She had intimated this in her speech, but she said it more clearly to me:
Deep down, Reverend Stirling, the reason why I have come to a church today is to plea with people to pray, because I realize that the behaviour of many of the people in our community will not change unless their hearts are touched by the Lord Jesus Christ. I hope that you will pass that along, and I hope that will be part of your prayers.
We will do everything in our power, we must do everything in our power to stop the spread of this disease, but one part of the solution is to change behaviour. That means changing hearts and attitudes and minds. So, I am fulfilling my promise to her today.
Now, I want to tuck away that statement for a moment, and turn to our text from the Book of Romans. This text has been considered by many to be one of the greatest of all the texts in the Bible. Certainly, it has had the greatest effect on the Church, for you will find that it was this very text that changed the heart of Martin Luther, and thus began the Protestant Reformation. Years later, it was through reading Luther's commentaries on this passage in Aldersgate in London that John Wesley felt the Spirit within him to begin the revival that was to lead to the Methodist Church, and eventually, to Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in that tradition. This great text of the Reformation leads me to honestly say to you that even I stand before you today completely and totally and utterly convicted of its truth. Without the truth of this passage, I do not feel that I would have been called to the ministry.
This text is so important that it really should be read next Sunday, which is Reformation Sunday. (But this is my birthday and I will preach on what I want to, and I want to preach on it today.) Whether on Reformation Sunday or not, these words ring true: “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is those words that have repeatedly shaken the foundation of the church. Whenever we get lost, whenever the church starts to stress things that are not central or not important, it is precisely this text that brings us back to our very reason for being. “Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” But what precisely did Paul mean by these words? And why are they important?
Well, they are important because one of the key questions that people who have a conscience and who are searching ask is, “How do we please God? How to we please our Maker and Creator, the Lord of the Universe? What are we to do to make God happy with us?” And secondly: “How can we rejoice in our spiritual situation? How can we have joy and gladness and thanksgiving in our lives in the light of our existence?” Paul, as a lawyer, answered this by giving a very legal argument, and a very simple one. He said that after Adam, after sin was introduced to the world, and before the coming of Jesus Christ, humanity was as if it were in enmity towards God, separated from God, at war with God. While there were attempts to deal with this enmity and the brokenness of this relationship by trying to make ourselves look good before God by obeying the law, all these attempts were failing to convince us in our hearts that we were in the right relationship with almighty God.
However, throughout the Old Testament there were still signs of how this would happen, of how we could please God. Abraham and Sarah are credited as righteous because of their faith in God, and their willingness to step out of the bounds of their lives to be obedient. Moses, in leading the people into the Promised Land and taking them out of the bondage of Egypt, and handing over the reins to Joshua, was acting in faith to bring the message of God's sovereign favour on the people. The prophets gave us a signpost, they pointed to our faith in God as a way of pleasing God. Then, in the New Testament, the apostle Paul says, “But now, through Jesus Christ, that enmity for once and for all is over. Peace now reigns.” What we cannot do to please God, God has done on our behalf in Jesus Christ. What we are incapable of doing ourselves by virtue of all the good works in the world is now by God's gracious favour bestowed on us through the gift of Jesus Christ, his Son. What we are unable to do, God has done through his Son. Peace reigns because Christ has come for us.
It is that central tenet in Paul's thinking that motivates every aspect of his theology, every aspect of his faith. The war is over; peace between God and ourselves is declared by the coming of the Son. However, the question that we need to ask ourselves, and the salient point this morning, is: “But how then do we live in the light of that peace?” If the victory has been won, if the enmity between God and his people has been washed away, his grace is in place in all our works, either good or bad, and what should we do? The great Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, in his commentary on Romans that shook the church to its foundations at the beginning of the 20th century, wrote: “No treatment of faith is adequate which does not take into account of the people who believe: the we of the Epistle, the new person, the people of the day of the Lord.” Now, he is right! Look at the language Paul uses. He says, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” In other words, Jesus Christ is the way that peace is received. But what about we who are the believers? What about the faith of those of us who ascribe to what he has done on our behalf?
It seems to me that, more than anything else, but we must accept the peace that God has won on our behalf. As we approach Remembrance Day, my mind turns back to a painting that was on the wall in my grandparents' dining room. This painting hung over the table, and it was captioned simply, “We have hope!” For all of us who dined at my grandmother's table, this was very important, because she was the worst cook that God ever put on the face of this earth. In fact, we all used to go to my grandmother's and pretend to eat, and then we would all go out later that night to a fish-and-chip shop, just to be able to have some real food. Grandmother could never understand why there was so much conversation during her meals, but it was the only way we could prevent ourselves from eating her food. “We have hope!” was what the picture said, and the subject was VE Day in London, the millions of people who flooded the streets with their streamers and their music and their song, the buses filled with people, and the people gathered in Trafalgar Square to celebrate the end of the war. It was a profound experience for everyone who was there. But as I looked at this picture very closely, I realized something: Fewer than half the people in the picture were in uniform. The rest were the people in society at large who had poured out in the millions to thank God and to celebrate the peace that they gained that day.
I then realized something else: There were people who experienced the peace and people who experienced the joy, but who had not fought the war. Those who had fought the war had their gravestones in Normandy and Salerno and in El Alamein and in Burma. The men buried beneath the little crosses spread across the fields with the poppies growing beside them, they were the ones who had fought the war, they were the ones who had won the victory and yet, the peace was experience by millions of people throughout the world who themselves had not been on the battle lines. So it is with our relationship with God. It is Christ who has won the war; it is Christ who has paid the price; it is Christ's cross that is the victory; but it is for us to rejoice in the peace and to celebrate it. And just as on November 11 we remember those who laid down their lives in order that we could be free so, too, every Sunday we should recognize that it is by the grace of Christ that our peace is won. When that peace comes, what a change it makes! It creates a whole new society, a whole new world, and for Paul, a whole new humanity.
In the mail last week, I received a most delightful book from one of our radio listeners, who I am sure is listening this morning. It is a book about her late husband, titled A Pilgrim's Journey. It is the life and times of the Right Reverend Dr. Gordon Harry Francis. Dr. Francis listened to our radio broadcast religiously in his latter years, until he passed away, and he himself had been a Methodist minister. He had come from Barbados, and had been a minister of Christ in Guyana, before coming to Canada, where he ministered here in Toronto. As I read some of this preacher's sermons, I realized how fortunate I would have been to have heard him. In one sermon he said that we do not understand the full impact of what has been won for us and enumerated seven privileges that come from the peace and grace of God: we are now, because of Christ, children of God; because of Christ, we can rejoice in God; because of Christ, we can be anxious for nothing; because of Christ, we have peace with God; because of Christ, we have contentment in our souls and in our spirits; because of Christ, we have strength for the day; because of Christ we have an unlimited supply of God's love. All I could say when I put that sermon down was “Alleluia!” They are the conditions of the peace.
However, there is a problem. (And I always, have a problem don't I? The problem is that although this peace has been won for us through Jesus Christ, we are slow to accept it, and to make it ours. We are still troubled in our souls and want to justify ourselves. We still want to hang on to the sweet sins and the vices that we like so much. To quote John Calvin, “We still want to have control of the situation.”
We are very much like the slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. I have recently been reading The Civil War, a great book by Shelby Foote. In it, he talks about the fact that in the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, 1863, word spread right through the country that slavery was ended: from Capitol Hill across the city, down into the valleys and fields of Virginia and the Carolinas, and even to the plantations of Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. “Slavery Legally Abolished,” read the headlines, and yet something amazing took place, Foote writes. The greater majority of the slaves in the South went right on living as though they had not been emancipated. That continued through the whole Reconstruction period. The slaves remained locked in a caste system of racial etiquette as rigid as any they had known in formal bondage, and every slave could repeat with equal validity what an Alabama slave had mumbled when asked what he thought of the great emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, whose proclamation had gone into effect: “I don't know nuthin' about Abraham Lincoln ”˜cept they say he set us free, and I don't know nuthin' about that either.” How tragic! A war had been fought; a document had been signed; slaves were legally set free; but they said, “I don't know nuthin'.”
So often, my friends, the world is just like that, and you and I, in our faith, are just like that. The Emancipation Proclamation has been made; we are free; we are at peace with God; the war is over; the victory has been won; but we know “nuthin'.” That victory must be accepted; that victory must be received. However, sometimes we just love to hold on to the control we think we have. We still, deep down, want to be the ones who complete God by virtue of our own actions. That is not possible, says the New Testament.
I read a story about a little town of Genoa, Texas, where an investigation revealed that in one year, 14 of the fires in the community had actually been set by members of the fire department, the reason being that they liked to hear the bells, see the flashing lights, and get in the truck and make a big noise.
In other words, they wanted the conflict, because the conflict made them feel good about themselves.
Sometimes we are like that ourselves. In fact, we are often the last to forgive ourselves for our own sins. When Christ has done it, we still hold on to them, we still want to make atonement for them: We still want to be in control. We like the bells, we like the conflict, we like to hear the sound of the fire engine: We like to be in control.
Sometimes, we just like the sweetness of doing what we want, and living as we want, and acting as we want, outside of God's word. Then, we wonder why we are anxious, and why we don't feel forgive. We persecute ourselves, just like the slave who was told that he was free, but said “I know nuthin'.”
This brings me back to Siphiwe and to Swaziland and to the people who are dying of AIDS. Siphiwe understands, you see, that faith does actually make a difference, and that sometimes it is even a matter of life and death. Looking at her people, she uses as an example Moses setting his people free, but the people of Israel still looking back at the graves in Egypt, still casting their minds back to the death they left behind. She likens her people to the people who had crossed the Red Sea, but are still looking back to the graves, and who have not let go of their control or of their sin or of their pride or of death, and have not accepted the peace and the forgiveness. She knows, like I know, like Paul knew, like Luther knew, like Augustine knew, that it is only when people are prepared to accept the fact that the war is over, that they will see the peace and that their hearts will be changed. My prayer for the people of that continent, for the King of Swaziland, for the people who still hold on to their way of life and their way of acting, is that they may let it go and write a freedom charter, and that HIV/AIDS will be a thing of the past in that land.
In the last few pages of that book about Dr. Francis there is a hymn that he wrote as someone who had come from slave stock himself. He wrote these words from Canada:
So let us rejoice the Saviour has come
Redemption is wrought by God's beloved Son.
Our sins are forgiven; our souls he has freed;
So tell the great story to all who are in need.
Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.