Sermon Archive
The glory of the Lord shall be revealed
Sermon preached by Robin Boyd at Holy Communion on 4 December 2005, Multi-Faith Sunday
Isaiah 40:1-11 ; 2 Peter 3:8-15a ; Mark 1:1-8
Isaiah 40:5: And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh - all humankind - shall see it together.
I'm not going to talk about my fellow-townsman George Best. But - as people would say in the part of Belfast where he didn't grow up - God rest him! Instead I'm going to start with a somewhat less unlikely saint called Charles Jennens. He was an 18th century country squire; and he was a friend and admirer of George Frederick Handel. Indeed one of Handel's best known hymn tunes, which we often sing to Charles Wesley's "Rejoice, the Lord is King" is called Gopsal after the name of Jennens' country seat in Leicestershire. It was he who compiled the libretto of Handel's Messiah, first sung in Neal's Music Hall in Dublin in 1742. And if many of us admit that our relationship with God is at least partly formed and coloured by Handel's Messiah, then we owe a great deal to this unlikely saint, who had the wisdom and the grace to concentrate the message of the Bible - not into 90 words or 30 seconds, but into a text which, combined with Handel's music, can still lift our hearts and minds to heaven.
Certainly Handel has shaped my reading of Isaiah 40. '"Comfort ye..my people', saith your God". And then, "Every valley shall be exalted....And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed. And all flesh - the whole human race - shall see it together". It's good news; it's Evangel;. it's Gospel; it's praise...Jubilate Deo! It's good news not just because we've entered Advent and Christmas is on the way. It's good news for the whole year; for the whole of life; and for the whole world. Every valley: all flesh: together! So our liturgical context today is Advent 2, and those lectionary passages we heard from Isaiah 40, 2 Peter, and the beginning of Mark's Gospel.
2. But there's another context, because today has been nominated as Multifaith Sunday. How do we relate to people of other faiths? And these days that tends to mean especially, "How do we relate to our Muslim neighbours - the family who run the corner shop? The young man with a rucsac in the bus? The insurgents in Baghdad? The prisoners of Guantanamo Bay? We'll return to that question in a minute.
3. But first our three lessons. Isaiah 40 was written by a prophet whom scholars usually call Second Isaiah, who was, in our media jargon, "embedded" with the Israeli slave labourers in Iraq - actually in and about Baghdad - around 540 BC. And he brings a message of hope: "Take comfort! Cheer up! God is going to bring you home: God will prepare a road for you through the desert. And the whole world will see that you are free at last!" And that did actually happen a few years later when the ruler of neighbouring Iran - Cyrus was his name, Cyrus the Persian, a follower of a very different faith, a Zoroastrian, Cyrus the Parsi - conquered the Iraqis and liberated the Israeli prisoners so that they could return to their own land. History does keep repeating itself - with variations! - in that part of the world! But there's more to Isaiah's message than just that. It's full of joy. It's a message of peace - "Your warfare is accomplished; your iniquity is pardoned"; your joy overflows, so that everyone can see it.
Then the Epistle. Most New Testament scholars agree that 2 Peter, was written well after Peter's time. But it accurately portrays the beliefs and practice of the early Church; and it makes two affirmations which are very relevant as we think of our neighbours of other faiths. (a) It says clearly that God doesn't want anyone to perish, but that everyone needs a change of heart. (3:9) And (b) it says, "We are looking for new heavens and a new earth where justice dwells" (3:13). God wants life, not death, for everyone. And God wants justice for the oppressed.
And then the opening of Mark's Gospel - the earliest Gospel to be written. No Christmas story in Mark. Straight to another desert prophet, John the Baptist. "Prepare ye the way of the Lord". I must confess to hearing those words to the music of Jesus Christ Superstar. And I have a visual image too - that wonderful triptych by the 16th century painter Matthias Gruenewald, where the rugged prophet John is shown pointing with an elongated forefinger at Jesus: but it's not the child in a manger, nor the young man coming to John for baptism, but the crucified, tortured Christ on the cross, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.. John and Jesus, caught up in that confused, multifaith world of 1st century Palestine - Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Jews: and Jesus the Jew. They all - including Jesus - flock to hear John there on the banks of the Jordan. He calls them to a change of heart, a change of direction - and points to Jesus.
4. So what about our confused, multifaith world? How are we, as Christians, to relate to people who follow a different faith? (a) One thing is certain: we must always, at the very minimum, act with justice. Religious vilification should have no more place in our society than racial vilification. The ninth commandment - Thou shalt not bear false witness - is a very important commandment still: and if we make sweeping condemnations of people of another faith; if we allow suspicion to blight our relationship with our Muslim neighbours, then we are breaking that commandment. The Crusades did great harm: and their near explicit re-enactment today is doing great harm - not just to Muslims but to Christians, some of whom are already suffering persecution in Pakistan because of what is happening to Muslims in Iraq. Christians must act with justice towards people of other faiths.
(b) We must also seek to understand them. I imagine that in the past four years most of us have learnt a good deal about Islam that we didn't know before, and that is good. We are learning how much we share with our brothers and sisters of the Abrahamic faiths. When I lived in Gujarat State in India, which has quite a large minority Muslim population, I found it strangely moving to meet people called Ayub or Ibrahim or Yakub or Yusuf or Daud or Suleman. Jews, Christians or Muslims, we all worship the God of Abraham. And when we try to understand people of other faiths, we find that we can learn from them. When I was teaching theology in India, I was involved, with many others, in what we called inculturation - trying to communicate the Christian faith without being tied to an English or Latin vocabulary, especially because we had at our disposal the vast linguistic resources of the Sanskrit-derived Indian languages. St John's gospel uses the Greek terminology of the Logos, the Word of God. Later theologians like Tertullian used a great many Latin terms, like justification, penitence, sanctification and many others; and these have made people think that Christianity is a European religion - which of course it is not. I could say a lot more about that, and about how a great many Indian Christians today want to move away altogether from philosophical language - be it Greek, Latin, English or Sanskrit, and speak of the gospel rather in the language of liberation for the oppressed, food for the hungry, healing for the sick. Hans Küng, the Swiss Roman Catholic theologian, speaks about a "global ethic" with that kind of agenda, and believes that it could go far to solve the problem of lack of understanding in our multifaith society. And I certainly believe that a global ethic of that kind is a goal we should accept and work for. Make poverty history! We're committed to that!
(5) But we also need to look at what for many people is the major problem about multifaith relations: do we Christians have the right to evangelize, to proclaim the Gospel, to hope that people of other faiths may be attracted to Christ? Should the word "conversion" be part of our vocabulary? A lot of our contemporaries would say that it should not. Evangelism in the past has often acquired a bad name, and has been associated with proselytism: using pressure - physical, psychological, financial or moral - to induce people to change their religion. I'm not going to say much about this issue, but I do want to point to a source of great wisdom - that truly wonderful but today sadly undervalued enterprise, the World Council of Churches, whose next Assembly is to be held in February in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
I want to quote just three sentences from a couple of WCC documents, one dating from 1982 and the other from 2000, and both having the words Mission and Evangelism in their titles. While condemning proselytism M&E finely affirms that "each person is entitled to hear the Good News" (para 10).
It goes on to say that Christians "owe the message of God's salvation in Jesus Christ to every person and every people" (para 41).
And in the 2000 document comes the splendid sentence, "We cannot point to any other way of salvation than Jesus Christ: at the same time we cannot set limits to the saving power of God" (para 58).
(6) So - can you have evangelism without aggression? Jesus said, "I have come so that people may have life - and have it in overflowing abundance"(perisson, John 10:10). I'm in the middle of a book which I'd being trying to buy for years. It was originally published in 1984 with the title Jubilate, but it quickly went out of print, and has just recently been republished in an enlarged version called Living in Praise: worshipping and knowing God (DLT). It's by David Ford, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and his father-in-law Daniel Hardy, who until recently was teaching at Princeton. Quite a tough read, but I warmly commend it. A word which keeps coming over and over again in it is "overflow". When we praise God - perhaps in private prayer, or in our prayers in church, or when we sing, or hear the choir singing - somehow the love of God wells up in us and takes us beyond ourselves - in an overflow of praise and joy. Speaking of the eucharist, the authors say, "Through the "cup of blessing" the worshippers take part in the overflow of the mutual blessing of God and humanity" (p 23). Or speaking of the silent worship of the Quakers they say that silence can be "the best way to follow hearing, speaking or acting; the overflow of speech into amazed love" (p 27). Praise - the overflow of God's love - and ours. And evangelism too is like that - the overflow of God's love, and our love, spilling over from the lives of ordinary Christians, sometimes in word, sometimes in deed, sometimes in silence. We don't have to hide our love of Christ in order to respect, defend , and love people of other faiths.
(7) I'd like to end with a memory from India. It was a long time ago, back in the early 1960s when interfaith dialogue had suddenly become important - and possible; and I had a colleague whose fame as a surgeon had brought him into contact with many Hindu friends. With our Indian Christian colleagues we set about organising an interfaith dialogue meeting. The few foreigners were either Irish Presbyterians or Spanish Jesuits - quite a potent mixture! And the Hindus included university teachers and two distinguished public figures: one a well known Gujarati writer called Kaka Kalelkar, and the other a much revered social reformer, who had been a friend and colleague of Mahatma Gandhi, tall, gaunt and elderly, a plain and saintly man, living in utter simplicity in the Gandhian way. His name - not to be confused with a famous younger contemporary and musician - was Ravishankar Maharaj. The theme of our dialogue was "Salvation". We had papers and discussions, all in a very friendly spirit. By common consent the programme did not include verbal prayer together, though we did meditate together in silence. But because we were meeting in a Christian centre - we called it the "Spiritual Life Centre" - where staff prayers were held every morning, we invited anyone who wished to join us for early morning prayers. Ravishankar Maharaj came. Prayers that morning happened to be led by the wife of the minister of the local Gujarati congregation. Her name was Miriam. We all sat cross-legged on the floor. She read a brief Bible passage, and then prayed- simple thanksgiving and confession, and then intercession for the world, for our meeting, for people in need. As we walked over to breakfast afterwards I found myself striding beside Ravishankar Maharaj. He said, "I've never heard prayer like that before. That ben (sister) was just talking to God". And I realised that this simple overflow of praise and loving concern had taken us further in the way of understanding, and witness, than all our discussion.
God's love is for everyone: every valley: all flesh: together.
A new earth where justice dwells....
...in the overflow of God's love.
And to God be the glory.
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