Sermon for Unity

New Malden

22 January 1985

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Year after year we pray for unity and we are right doing this but we must also remember that God does not work our salvation one-sidedly without our co-operation. Has not Paul said to us that we are co-workers with God? Would the Incarnation of the Son of God have occurred had not when the time was ripe a Maiden of Israel been able in perfect faith, humility and obedience to accept the awesome message of the Archangel and say, “Here am Iб the handmaid of the Lord. Be it onto me according to His will.” Had our salvation taken place if the Lord Jesus Christ Himself having identified with mankind, being Man in the full sense and also in the perfect sense of this word had not really died upon the Cross a human death and risen from the grave by the power of God.

So when we think of unity we are right to turn to God for help but we must also take our own responsibility for the loss of it, for the continued loss and also for its gradual restoration in the hope of the final revelation that we are all one in the one Lord, possessed of one faith, one body, the temple of the Holy Spirit, together, all of us, sons and daughters of the most High. And in the daring words of St. Irenaeus of Lyon at the turn of the first century, in the Only-Begotten Son all mankind become the only-begotten son of God. At the moment when the hopes of a man-made unity began to waver, when theological commissions, dialogue, discussions were proved increasingly barren, however necessary, Michael Ramsey who then was Archbishop of Canterbury said that unity was not something that could be built, manufactured by human efforts, that if we only became true Christians we would discover that we are possessed of unity, because indeed how can we think of a church that would be one, one in Christ and one with Christ, truly become the body of Christ and the temple of the Spirit, if each of its members remained secular and pagan in outlook and in behaviour? So the answer which Michael Ramsey gave many years ago was – holiness is the way to unity.

And what I want to speak about tonight is something which I face day after day and which I believe each of us should face: am I a Christian? And to what extent am I already a Christian and to what extent am I still one who is not reborn by the power of God. We can turn for criteria for ways of judging ourselves in a variety of directions. Remember what we have heard lately in the reading of the Gospel. Does one collect good fruit from bad bushes? Is it enough to say, “Lord, Lord,” in His temples, work great works in His name to be one of Christ’s disciples? And so the first question which I would ask you, asking myself all the time the same is, when I speak of the Gospel, which is Good News in translation, what is in my own experience and life, what is new and what is good in the message? Don’t escape the question by saying “The salvation of the world has come,” ask yourself what has happened to you personally. Has at any moment the Gospel of Christ introduced, brought into your life newness or is it an old tale, which you have received in inheritance from generations past and which you accept because there is no more convincing alternative?

There was a moment when this news was brought to pagan world by men and women whose life had been transformed by it and who were prepared to die for others to be possessed of the newness of this wonderful proclamation. What about us? Is it new at all? And again, what is good in it? Is it a way of behaving? If it is that then we stand condemned by the way in which we behave. Is it a lofty theological and philosophical teaching? That is not salvation. What is there which is good to such an extent, in such a way that everything is changed for me because of what it has got to say?

I discovered the Gospel as a young man and I know what newness means and I know what good news mean. It was the end and the beginning. The whole world became different for me and inwardly things were changed beyond recognition. Ask yourselves whether there was any moment in your life when however surreptitiously, however lightly you felt that the word which Christ spoke to you in the Gospel, which what the Apostles proclaimed to you resounded in your souls as a song of victory to which you can answer only “Amen” and “Alleluia”, glory be to God for this. I know that in the Christian countries in which we live this experience is difficult to possess, it is infinitely sharper, clearer in countries where the Gospel has not yet come or in the countries of persecution where the Gospel is denied, rejected and the followers of Christ are persecuted, – then the line of demarcation is clear, it is really coming from darkness into light, from death to life, but in each of us, for each of us there must have been a moment when we said, what I received as an inheritance which I accepted perhaps credulously or perhaps trustfully from my parents and my Christian past, has come true – I discovered that it is true. It is important to discover that.

You remember probably a passage from the Gospel of St. Matthew, the very end of it in which Christ says to his disciples, “Go to Galilee, there you will discover Me, you will meet Me.” And isn’t it natural for us to say, “What was the point of going to Galilee when Christ was there?” I heard an explanation of it from an old priest whom I revere. He said to me, “Galilee stands for that time in the life of the Apostles where step by step they discovered who Christ was – a boy among boys, but unique; a youth different from everyone by some sort of beauty and shining of holiness; a man endowed with the wisdom they had not met before and then their master, their teacher, their God. Galilee had been for them the honeymoon of their discovery of the Son of God become the Son of man come into the world to save. Later Judea had been a period of tragedy. Christ sent them back to that moment when everything was blossoming out, when all was possible, where their souls were coming to life, and when they have become his disciples and followers.

Each of us has got in his life a moment or a period which is similar to this Galilee, to this period when everything was fresh and new, and alive, and beautiful and when we felt that everything is possible, when indeed we could look and see things as God sees them – however dimly, when we understood that the thoughts of God are above the thoughts of man and the ways of God above the ways of man and that we, we were called to follow these ways and to share His thoughts. It is only if we can recapture the newness and the goodness of the message that we can say that we are Christian in a living manner and not simply possessed of age-long memories that affect us not more than old books, old buildings, old tales.

Then we can ask ourselves, have I ever come to a point when like Nathaniel or like Thomas I could bow before the Lord and say, “My Lord, and my God.” If we are here, each of us should be able to say, “Yes, there was a moment or a period, a gradual growing into this or a sudden illumination that was a new beginning of life.” But then we must ask ourselves severely, sternly and lovingly questions. To say, “Lord,” is not enough, it is not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord,” that belongs to Christ. To recognise the Lordship of Christ means to be prepared to listen to every word of His in order to accomplish them, to obey. Obedience means listening. Have we done it? Have I done it? Are we listening to every word of Christ knowing that this is a word that leads me into eternal life and that putting it aside is an acceptance of an existence in which life eternal has no place. To say, “Lord,” means listening and obeying. And in the way in which Paul describes it in the passage to Corinthians which you have heard – at a cost, because the question which Christ asks from each of us, each of us without any distinction, is the one he asked from James and John when having heard of His coming crucifixion and of His resurrection forgetting the ordeal Christ was going to enter and thinking only of the fruits that could be gathered from His death, they said, “Could we sit on the right and the left hand of Thy glory?” And Christ turned to them and said, “Are you prepared to drink My cup? Are you prepared to be merged into the ordeal that shall be Mine?” The word “baptism” means “merging”, “drowning”.

And this question Christ is asking from each of us and what do we answer? Not in words but indeed, what do we do about it? And if we do nothing, if we say to God by the way in which we behave, “To You, o Lord, the cross and the death, to me – the salvation, which You have brought,” we are no Christians. Shame on us!

And then when we say, “My Lord and my God,” what do we mean by proclaiming that He is our God? Do we truly, earnestly take the message of the Gospel that one day came when the Living God took flesh and lived in our midst, in the midst of human history, in the midst of the created world or are we trying, because it goes beyond our imagination or our poor intelligence, are we trying to explain away the sharpness of reality, adulterate the truth, proclaim another Gospel than the one delivered by the Apostles? When we say, “My God,” do we worship Him?

And ‘worship’ does not mean pray or kneel or do any of those pious actions which are so easy to perform. It means something greater than this. The word “worship” comes from “worth”, it means – attach the highest possible worth, the greatest value to the one whom we worship. Is He our treasure, the most precious thing we have in life and the most precious person we have in life, for whose sake we are prepared to let go of even the most precious things? Let us think of that. “My Lord and my God” – we repeat these words but do we live according to our own words? Aren’t we going to be judged by the very words which we pronounce in the hearing of God and the hearing of others?

And now a last point. You remember St. Paul’s words, “Be followers of me as I am of Christ,” and further what he says, “For me life is Christ, death is a gain but I shall remain in your midst because this is more expedient for you.” Life is Christ… Who of us can say any such thing? We can very often say things of the same kind about the person whom we love. My child is my life, my wife, my husband is my life, I would be prepared to pour out all my being to save them from misery or suffering, or death, but what about Christ? Is He a treasure comparable to those whom we love? If not, we are very far from the words of Paul.

And again life does not mean simply a sense of elation, a sense of intensity of being. It means that everything in my life should be the life of Christ pulsing in my vessels, filling my body, my mind, my heart, my will, that is life in the same way in which one can say that a tree is alive when the sap taken from the earth runs through the stem into the branches to the last twig, to the last flower. Is there anything similar happening to us with Christ? Paul says, “We are carrying in our bodies the deadness of Christ, we are dead to everything which is corruption, evil, destruction.” What about us?

And then again, what is our attitude to death? to our own, to the death of those whom we love, to our bereavement? I remember my father when I was a teenager saying to me, “Live in such a way that you learn to wait for your death as a young man waits for the coming of his beloved one.” That is what Paul felt, and when he said in another of his Epistles that to him to die does not mean to divest himself of temporary things but to clothe himself with eternity. Yes, that’s what he meant, but what about us? How often do we shrink from suffering, from the thought of death even in the distance. That is the sharp criterion.

And again, – and this will be the last, so hope. St. Paul says as a conclusion having said that all for him is life, that death is the thing he longs for he says, “Yet, I am prepared to live on because I am needed by you.” And in Roman’s IX he says that he would be prepared to be separated from Christ for eternity if that could ensure the salvation of his people. Now, who of us can say any such thing? Obviously the words of St. Paul about being separated, well, could be called ‘the folly of love’, it could not happen but that is what he felt. Do we feel any such thing?

So let us have a good look at ourselves and ask ourselves, what kind of united Church can God make of people like us – divided within ourselves, divided from one another, divided in groups opposed to one another and then saying, “God, make us one that the world may believe.” Indeed if that happen the world would believe that the impossible is possible but, I am sorry, this is not the kind of thing that can happen because one cannot make a Christian Church out of non-Christian people. I am not accusing myself or you of being radically non-Christian, but we are very-very similar to the curate’s egg and we must have a thought about it, we must really ask ourselves serious questions, and if we pray for unity, be prepared to pay the cost and the cost is not dialogue, is not compromise, is not kindness to our neighbour, the cost is becoming Christian – and that is a very-very difficult thing.