Sermon Archive
False Prophets and the Challenge of Baptism
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 19 November 2006, the Baptism of Chloe and Max
This week, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, castigated the BNP for their claim that they are Christian-based. Speaking as a Christian, Mr Phillips argued that not only should the church vigorously denounce any political party that so overtly espouses racist policies, but also it should excommunicate that party’s supporters if they come to church.
It seems to me that this provides us with an interesting reflection on the world into which Max and Chloe have been born and will grow up, and the kinds of challenges they will face, in a religious climate far stormier and more uncertain than that known by their great-grandparents.
The first challenge from Mr Phillips is easily met. Racism is a denial of the Christian gospel. We believe that Jesus died for all, no matter what their colour or gender or creed. We believe that each of us is equal in God’s love. I’m hardly making a party political point when I state that any party that tries to justify racism can never be rooted in Christ.
Indeed, one of the strengths of our political system is that none of our major parties claim to be 'Christian' or to represent any other religion - but rather that Christians, as well as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs may and probably do belong to all these parties. Given this, it’s especially disturbing to think that a party might hijack the label of Christian and use it to reinforce a narrow kind of nationalism that excludes people of other faiths; to use Christianity as a weapon in a race war. Christianity is not about excluding others and stirring up resentment against others but about love for neighbour as well as love of God. And it’s about a worldwide community of believers that transcends national and racial boundaries.
Thus far I can go with Mr Phillips, but excommunication is more problematic. Would it be right to exclude BNP members from communion?
Perhaps I’m a rather wet but I don’t like the idea of telling people they can’t come to the Lord's table. 'Sorry, we don’t welcome your sort here!' Mind you, there is an injunction in the old Prayer Book that an open and notorious evildoer should not be admitted to the Lord's table. And it's not so long ago that someone who was divorced needed the bishop’s permission to receive communion. Officially, I would not be invited to receive communion in a Roman Catholic church. And there are also Anglican congregations who would never invite me to preach or officiate because (so they tell me) my acceptance of the ordination of women, or my attitudes to sexuality mean that I have 'impaired' my communion with them.
But I don't like these restrictions, and I would be very reluctant to impose them on others. For one thing we're a community of sinners who fall short of perfection ourselves. For another, we want to be a community in which people can express the truth as they see it, however odious. We want to hold onto our members not cast them away so that we can, as the writer to the Hebrews put it, 'provoke one another to love and good deeds.' In other words, to be a place where those who express un-Christ-like opinions are called to account and offered a different way of seeing things. To excommunicate people would seem to me to speak of a religion seeking to reclaim an authority and authoritarianism which may have suited the middle-ages but is precisely what we don't want now.
I still hold the idea, perhaps naively, that communion is not a meal for the perfect, it’s a meal to help those separated from God to come a little closer, to teach all of us something about the grace and the unrestrained generosity of God's love, to give us something to imitate. Well, that’s my opinion - I don’t claim it’s fully worked out as yet. You may have other ideas.
Where I think Trevor Phillips’s comments have been very helpful is that he’s challenged us to take care of our faith. Who is speaking up for it if we are not? Who has claimed it for their own purposes? Are we saying loudly enough what we believe our faith demands of us and the world, or are we allowing, by our silence, false prophets, false Messiahs to misrepresent Christ?
In Jesus' day too he warned his disciples, 'Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, "I am he!"' Like Jesus we live at a time of upheaval and disorientation. Newness is hard to take and people now as then reinvent old certainties so they have something to cling to lest they drown. Our time, Jesus' time - perhaps most ages offer examples of change that frightens because it seems to knock away the buttresses that define our reality.
Look at Hannah. She prayed in a temple at Shiloh that God would give her a child. That child, her son Samuel, presided over that same temple’s destruction. He didn’t live long enough to see Solomon’s temple but that too was destroyed before it was rebuilt in the form that Jesus knew in Jerusalem. It was this temple that the disciples admire in our gospel reading today. 'Teacher, what large stones! What marvellous buildings!' Like the other temples it must have seemed firm, immoveable, representative of a way of life, a way of believing that could never end. But fifty years later it was gone, torn down, as Jesus predicted.
So it has always been. Great building blocks of culture and faith that seem so permanent are shaken, disturbed, removed. They get in the way, they limit our freedom, our movement. It happened to the Berlin wall; one day it will happen to the wall in the Holy Land. And what is the equivalent for us? What are the immoveable building blocks that get in our way? Perhaps already, we fear, they are beginning to tremble.
So, we hear discordant voices, each claiming to speak for Christianity today, and not just the BNP. Indeed, in a world in which religion is once again claiming centre stage there are conflicting voices in every religion. This is why the commitments we've made in this baptism today are so important. We have committed ourselves to help our children to develop a sense of what it means to follow Christ and to turn away from evil; of why the story of our faith is good news to be proclaimed by word and deed; of why it is important to continue in the breaking of the bread and to honour God in all creation. To help them to deal with a world which is changing, in which religion is used to create danger and fear, and to learn to recognise the authentic voices that speak for Christ - and to equip them to live their faith in a way that blesses the world, that reconciles rather than divides.
The challenges we faced forty years ago are not the challenges we face now, are not the challenges Chloe and Max will face forty years from now. Our task is to help them to let go of the useless and redundant and to discover the timeless values of a faith that can be confidently and lightly carried into their future so that the name of Christ will be cherished and proclaimed as the One who invites everyone, without prejudice, and speaks to them of the generous and healing love of God, in which lies our hope for a better world.
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