Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Text: Acts 17
Timothy Eaton Church is surely a bit of an anomaly. It is situated in North America, in a land in which it is virtually impossible to play outdoor team-sports for five or six months of the year, in a city dominated by ice hockey, American or Canadian football, basketball, and baseball yet, TEMC has not one but two of its three ministers on staff who are passionate about another kind of football and a team that plays thousands of miles from Toronto, in Manchester, England. I don't know how this can be. Surely there is not another church outside the northwest of England with two ministers who are quite dotty about Manchester United, but then again, “All things are possible with God.”
With that attempt at an apology for my opening illustration, Manchester United have been in the news again. Their central defender, Rio Ferdinand, and manager have had a slight disagreement about t-shirts. The bigger issue is that there has been an ongoing problem in the sport with racism. In a recent U-21 match, Serbian spectators apparently gave Englishman Danny Rose an awful earful over the colour of his skin. A year ago, a Liverpool player was banned for verbally abusing a black United player and, about the same time, the English national team captain was caught in a nasty verbal volley toward Anton Ferdinand who plays for Queen's Park Rangers. The English Football Association has been trying to stamp out racism for years but unfortunately, according to writer, James Martin, the attempts have been weak, marked by hypocrisy, idiocy, do-nothing measures and double standards that have failed. The latest ploy by the Football Association was to have players wear t-shirts with the words “racism - kick it out” on them during warm-ups. Rio Ferdinand and a handful of black players, treated it as a sham, something politically expedient but failing to do anything real to address the problem. They refused to wear the shirts. The word is that they are forming a new, black players' union in an attempt to achieve real action and real reform. They feel that the Football Association has left them; they feel out on their own and constantly let down.
That feeling of being left by the governing body, reminded me of a situation I encountered at one of our Church Presbytery meetings a couple of years ago. I was sitting next to an older man from another congregation. I knew him reasonably well and we chatted on and off during the meeting. It was a usual Presbytery meeting with one issue in particular garnering the attention of the floor. It was one of those debates about boycotts and my friend rose to address the issue, speaking intelligently about it and pointing the presbyters toward Christ and alternatives. The debate continued and, in spite of my friend's plea, the vote went the other way, substantially so. My elderly friend looked absolutely dejected. We spoke afterward and he said to me, among other things, “David, I've been in the United Church since I was a boy, I feel like my church has left me… I feel like my church has left me.”
That encounter along with others has caused me to ask something that is, perhaps, a bit awkward. I'll come to that in a moment but this is Reformation Sunday in which we celebrate the reformation of the church during the 16th century at the hands of Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, arch-bishop Cranmer and others. The 16th century was the hay-day of the Protestant movement as they affirmed the authority of the scriptures, the centrality of God in Christ, and the importance of faith over the tradition and sometimes wayward practices of the church. I was reading about the Reformation recently, and in my reading I learned that scholars are not so sure that we should use the word “Reformation” with a capital “R.” Scholars today are seeing no one time of “Reformation” but a lot of little reformations changing the course of the church in various localities and at various times. Some even see the church as always reforming and it is with that in mind that I have started asking, and here's the awkward question, “Has the mainline church reached the point of needing reform?” When we think of the United Church of Canada, formed on the great ideal of Christian unity, with a goal of Christianizing the entire social order of Canada; when we think of this great liberal church that has been in the forefront of social issues across the nation; do we dare ask if it needs a reformation?
One indicator what we do may be the widespread decline of it and other mainline churches over the past 50 years. Some blame the rise of secularism for that, others suggest that the affluence of our nation is affecting us. But there are also those who suggest that we have lost our focus.
On the issue of focus, I have been a part of many meetings of presbytery, conference, and United Church boards and over the years, I have heard many, many things debated. If I were to list the biggest, most significant debates that I have heard, they would be about social issues or justice. We also get incredibly worked up about green or environmental initiatives and fine-tuning our administration and governance as a church. Granted, many of these things may be valuable, but this Spring, I was at Presbytery when the issue of changing the United Church's Basis of Union hit the floor. Churches and Presbyteries across the country were asked to vote on whether to add three recent documents to the Basis of Union which is our denomination's core doctrinal statement. The chair of the Presbytery presented the documents and asked for discussion. There was none. Zero! The vote was taken and we got on with other business. I don't know about you, but it seems a little fishy when an Christian organization can engage in all sorts of debate about divesting from Goldcorp, stopping garbage dumps, or boycotts, but say absolutely nothing when its core doctrinal standard is being altered. Does this say something about where our heart is, or our focus? And so here is the question: “Are we in need of reform?”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed just before the end of The Second World War by the Nazi regime. He is one of the most celebrated churchmen and theologians of the 20th century, some of that because he determined to speak up against the broader church's capitulation to the will of Hitler. Bonhoeffer strongly opposed Hitler's euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of the Jews, he spoke out against wrong, and, in spite of his pacifism, he became involved in the foiled plot to kill Hitler in 1944.
In his early years, Bonhoeffer visited the US and went to school at Union Theological Seminary in New York. While there, he was astonished by the state of the wider American, mainline church. He was able to compare it to a church that a friend took him to in Harlem where he developed a great love of spirituals and the faith of black Americans. But of the broader American church he said this, “God has granted American Christianity no Reformation … American theology and the church have never been able to understand the meaning of ”˜criticism' by the Word of God…they do not understand that God's criticism touches even religion, the Christianity of the church…. In American theology, Christianity is still essentially religion and ethics …. Because of this, the person and work of Christ … sink into the background and in the long run remain misunderstood … it is not recognized as the sole ground of radical judgment and forgiveness.” I was speaking to Dr. Stirling about this, (because besides Manchester United, Bonhoeffer is one of his loves), and he said that what Bonhoeffer was pointing to was the centrality of Christ, the cross, and the resurrection. Bonhoeffer thought that the American mainline church has the outer trappings of religion but no power. Christ is the core of the church. Christ and the cross are where the church's focus ought be.
We've read a passage from Acts 17 today which outlines a sermon preached by Paul to the Athenians. There are a number of sermons in the book of Acts that are moving and if you ever compare them, you will note one peculiar thing. They are not identical. They change. They change with the location and the people to whom they were preached. There are sermons to the Jews, sermons to the Greeks, sermons to Herod Agrippa and a Roman leader. It is quite amazing to see how Paul and Peter use what they know about the people they are addressing to couch the gospel. They preach scripture to the Jews and draw on philosophy and altars to “unknown gods” in Athens to get the message across. Their preaching alters according to the audience. But there is one thing all of the sermons have in common, they all preach Christ. They all focus on Jesus, the cross, and the resurrection as the assurance for what God was doing.
It was that focus on Christ that gave birth to the church. It was a return to a focus on Christ and the Word and faith that brought about reform in the 16th century. It was the focus on Christ and letting the Word speak that Bonhoeffer thought was missing from the mainline American church. He said that it was a church without a Reformation … and I wonder if that focus today on Christ and the cross is something more needed today in the mainline church?
But that may not be all we need. Canadian Catholic scholar, Ronald Rolheiser suggests that the church needs Christ but it also needs a greater passion for Christ if it is really to engage the population.
I don't know if you have ever watched the 1981 Academy Award winning “Best Picture,” Chariots of Fire, but if there is one thing that comes through in that film, it is the passion of Olympic gold medallist and missionary, Eric Liddell. Liddell, as you may know, was born in 1902 to missionary parents in China but returned to his parents' homeland for boarding school and university. At the University of Edinburgh his athletic prowess became known. He was deeply passionate about running, but he loved God even more than he loved running. At one point, his sister expressed doubt about his passion for God and in one of the great scenes in the film, he told her, "I believe that God made me for a purpose: to go back to China. But he also made me fast! When I run, I feel His pleasure... It's not just fun; to win is to honour God." He was nick-named, the flying Scot, and with his talent he took gold at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. But he did not glorify himself as some do, he used his victory to glorify the source of his talent. The victory caused people to listen and he told them about Jesus. Liddell ran with great passion but several times in the film we see that his greater passion was for God. Whether at home and abroad his passion for God was infectious.
Rolheiser says that the church needs to find its fire, its romance, its aesthetics and passion. “What needs to be inflamed today inside religion is its romantic imagination.” We need new Francis of Assisi's, new Augustines, a new Ignatius. We might add from the Protestant perspective, we need new Luthers, new Calvins, new Wesleys, new Bonhoeffers. We need people who know Christ and can instil passion in others as they live and talk about it.
Perhaps, too often in the educated wings of the church, we have viewed religion as a private affair. What would have happened if Paul and Peter and others had kept Jesus to themselves, Christianity would never have got out of Jerusalem. It would have died with the first generation of followers. But those who followed Jesus could not keep quiet, they had seen a dead man walking. I'm not talking about a person on death row and going to “the chair” like that film, Dead Man Walking was about. They had seen someone who had already died, walking. Jesus was alive again and they could do nothing but talk about it. They had a reality before them that was simply incredible. They had seen something spectacular and were so sure of what they had experienced that they were willing to lay their lives down for it. There's tremendous credibility in the lives of the early followers of Jesus and if we could recover even a little bit of that reality, if we could recover Jesus, the horror and love of the cross and the excitement around the resurrection, we too would find passion again. We need people who will take the mantle of the likes of Martin Luther and say, “I follow Christ and here I stand.” We could use a little of that commitment and passion.
Let me end with a little story that I think is very good news. As many of you know we have had some changes in the Church School over the past year or more. I was thankful when several young women and mothers offered to help teach Sunday School last year. We all did our best and ran a very functional program. But after a month or so, two of the teachers came to me and said, “Do you know that the children in our classes know nothing about Christianity.” One said that no one in her class knew the Lord's Prayer. The other said that no one in her class knew anything about the Bible and they couldn't find, for instance, the book of Genesis without looking at the table of contents. There were other things but we had a meeting to try to determine what to do. We talked about what the church is, why parents bring their child to Sunday School, and what the church should be teaching. We recognized where our society is at and determined that the church should at least give children a foundation that would help them through life and face the big questions that come. We thought about education models and I brought up the ancient Israelite model that I had been studying wherein children first learned Torah. What that meant was they first learned to memorize Torah. Vast portions of it committed to memory gave a foundation for the second level of the school system which focussed on interpretation. We thought that perhaps we had got ahead of ourselves in teaching, doing interpretative things before a foundation was in place. People need a foundation that they can later work with, integrate, and use. So we settled on a back to basics approach where children would learn basics about the Bible, Jesus, and how to pray, and these ladies ran with it throughout the year and Dr. Stirling and I did something similar with the confirmation class. And if I can say one thing about these teachers, they have been excited about what they are doing and the children seem to pick up on that.
Over the summer, one of those teachers became our Director of Children's Ministries and also brought in a few new ideas to go along with the approach and “boom!” You should take a look at what's going on in the Sunday School at around ten minutes to ten some Sunday. The children are having a blast and they're learning the basics. Last week, I was told, “we need more teachers.” Two of the classes had 22 children each in them. We held a family night for fellowship on Friday evening and had over 70 people out, 48 of them children. Over the last month, a number of parents have told me that the children are really enjoying the Sunday school. One shared that she used to have trouble dragging her children out of bed on Sundays, now, they're up and dressed themselves before she and her husband get out of bed.
It's early days with a new program but maybe we're seeing the beginnings of one of those little reformations … back to basics, with Jesus placed in the centre. As a minister, I am excited about what is happening here and what we're going to see as we go forward.
As a broader congregation, as well, I wonder what would happen if we make a pact together to put Christ first in all that we do. I wonder what would happen if we uncover some of that passion that drove the early disciples and many others throughout history. I wonder if we could get over the fear of talking about Christ in the market squares of life. I wonder. Let's do it and watch what happens.