What does it mean to be an evangelical Anglican today?

 

Historically…

The evangelical movement in the Anglican Communion traces its roots back more than 250 years, to the era of the famous brothers, John and Charles Wesley in the middle to late 1700s. By that time, for more than a century the church had been falling into increasing corruption, doctrinal error and spiritual torpor. There were bishops and clergy who rarely or never set foot in their dioceses or parishes, choosing to indulge in a life of idle luxury. Socinianism (or what we now call Unitarianism—the denial of Christ’s divinity and the power of the Holy Spirit) was becoming increasingly commonplace in the pulpits. The poor and working classes were at best ignored if not despised. And (little surprise!) church attendance had sunk to abysmal levels.

Into this dark and seemingly hopeless scene stepped men such as the Wesleys, with their fiery preaching of a message of salvation through repentance and personal faith in Christ. But they were not alone. Though not nearly as famous, there were others such as George Whitefield, who is estimated to have brought the message of the Great Awakening to more than ten million hearers in the British Isles and the American colonies. There was John Newton, the former slave ship captain turned hymn writer; Charles Simeon, who influenced hundreds of future church leaders through his fifty-three-year ministry at Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge; the father and son Henry and John Venn, who together with William Wilberforce, Hannah More, Granville Sharp and others worked to abolish the slave trade, reform the penal system and establish child labour legislation, to mention only a few of their endeavours.

In the course of their lifetime they also witnessed the transformation of the Church of England. Through practical biblical preaching, the introduction of lively hymns and consistent pastoral care, the people came back. And Christian faith and values permeated society in a way they had not for generations. From its beginnings the movement was not limited to the British Isles. Through organizations such as the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Church Missionary Society the message was taken abroad—not least to Canada, where many of our western and northern dioceses find their roots in the evangelical movement.

Sadly, within the space of a couple of generations the movement began to harden. In the 1850s a new spirit had begun to arise within the church that came to be known as Anglo-Catholicism. With it came the introduction of customs and practices that had not been seen in the Church of England since the Reformation: candles, coloured stoles and vestments, incense and processionals, to name a few. Evangelicals saw these novelties as a dangerous distraction from the gospel.

Coincidentally another challenge was coming from a different direction. We could summarize it as Darwinism, although it was much broader than that. Suffice it to say that there were those who thought they could use the findings of contemporary scientific research to undermine the credibility of the Bible.

As though that were not enough, there was a third challenge in what came to be known as the “social gospel”, which saw the emphasis move away from personal transformation to concentrate on societal change (both of which had been emphases of the original evangelicals of en earlier generation). The result was that by the beginning of the twentieth century it seemed as though evangelicalism had taken a purely defensive posture. Evangelicals became defined more by what they didn’t do than by the vigorous proclamation of a life-saving, world-changing gospel.

Today the situation has become even worse, where in the United States and increasingly in some other parts of the world, the once honourable name “evangelical” has come to be associated with a particular narrow, mean-spirited and negative political ideology—to the point where some are asking, Have we reached the point where we need to toss it out altogether and find another name for ourselves?

To strike a more positive note, on the other hand, the negativity and insularity of some evangelicals is balanced by a refreshing openness and desire to work together for the gospel on the part of others. Ministries such as Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and Scripture Union and missions like the Overseas Missionary Fellowship and World Vision have always involved evangelicals from a wide variety of backgrounds, with evangelical Anglicans not least among them. And it is now twenty-five years since a group of leading evangelical and Roman Catholic scholars in the United States came together to produce a document entitled “Evangelicals and Catholics Together”. I see these as hopeful signs.

Theologically…

So what do we mean by “evangelical”? It’s important to realize that the name traces its lineage back to the New Testament, to two Greek words: eu, which brings with it the meaning of “good” or “excellent”, and angelia, which means a message or an announcement. Put them together and you get the word euangelion or evangel, meaning “good news” or “gospel”. So who are evangelicals? At heart we are gospel people, women and men and children with good news to share. We think of the words of the apostle Paul in Romans 1:16, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.”

Where does this take us in practical terms? Here is where the four hallmarks or pillars of evangelicalism come in, and they are these:

First among them is the need for a personal relationship with Christ through repentance and faith. This relationship can come by many different means and take many different forms, depending on our background, culture, upbringing, education and a host of other factors. Yet at the core there is that personal walk with Jesus. With Paul once again we affirm, “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him…” (Philippians 3:10). And so evangelicalism is not following a tradition (although traditions are important). It is not being a member of an organization (although participation in the Christian community is vital). More than anything else it is my personal decision to trust in Jesus as my Saviour and to live my life in obedient response to him as my Lord.

That brings us to the second hallmark, which is the centrality of the cross. We believe that by his death and resurrection Jesus has once and for all, unequivocally and irrevocably defeated the powers of evil and death. Nothing that you or I can do can add to that or take the place of it. Jesus has done it all. The old Prayer Book put it well when it referred to Jesus’ “full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world”. It is because of Jesus’ sacrifice and Jesus’ sacrifice alone that we can come to the Father and receive the life that he has to offer.

Thirdly, there is the unique, divine authority of Scripture. That is, that through the prophets and apostles of the Old and New Testaments God has uniquely spoken—and continues to address us today. Some people like to refer to the three-legged stool of Scripture, reason and tradition as the basis for our authority. For evangelicals it is more like a tricycle, with Scripture as the front wheel with the pedals. It is Scripture that is always the final arbiter and that provides both the power and the direction to the other two. But there is more to it than that. Evangelicalism involves not just an acknowledgement of the authority of Scripture. It also involves a love of Scripture. Evangelicals aren’t people who merely own Bibles. They are people who, in the words of the Prayer Book, “hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them”. They study them, ponder and discuss them because there they find the words of life.

Finally, but far from least, there is engagement in mission. This is an act of obedience to Jesus’ great commission to be his witnesses and to make disciples (Acts 1:8; Matthew 28:20). Just as much, however, it arises from an unquenchable desire to share the good news of what God has done for us in Christ and is doing in our lives. In the words of the great Sri Lankan preacher, D.T. Niles, it is “one beggar telling another where to find bread”. Of course mission is far more than words. It is seeking to be as Jesus in the world, in whatever context to live out his command, “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you” (John 20:21).

Currently…

This brings us to evangelicalism in the world today—and I’d like to give specific attention to our Anglican setting. First of all, although we may not see much evidence of it in our little corner of the world, we need to recognize that we are the exception. The Anglican Church of Canada, along with most other Anglican bodies in the western world, is declining at an alarming rate. A recent report commissioned by our House of Bishops suggests that if the current trajectory continues, there will be no Anglicans left in Canada by the year 2040.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, where Anglicanism is fired by an evangelical spirit, there is exponential growth. Where is the largest Anglican population by attendance in the world? Nigeria, with more than twenty million members. Nigeria is followed by Uganda, with eight million, and then Kenya, Sudan and India, each numbering five million. More than half the world’s Anglicans live in Africa—and with few exceptions they are evangelical. In many cases, particularly where they border with Islam and in countries where corruption and violence are endemic, theirs can be a costly faith. Yet the church grows—and they look with sadness and horror at what they see as the spiritual deadness of the church in the west.

However, there are signs of hope, even here. Allow me to name a couple. One of them is the Alpha Course. That ten-week programme, which continues to bring faith and renewal to a widespread constituency, began in an Anglican congregation, Holy Trinity Brompton, just over forty years ago. By the latest count it has engaged more than twenty-four million people around the world. Curiously, it has been taken up with enthusiasm by the Roman Catholic Church in Nova Scotia, where it has been the source of powerful renewal. Yet it is largely unknown or ignored by Anglicans.

Secondly we need to recognize evangelical Anglican scholars and writers. A generation ago men like John Stott, J.I. Packer and Michael Green were among the best-selling Christian authors in the world. Through their books and their teaching they called their readers to a serious engagement with an intellectually honest, spiritually challenging evangelical faith. Today their place has been taken by people such as N.T. Wright, Alister McGrath and Fleming Rutledge. We should be grateful for Wycliffe College in Toronto, too. It has an international reputation for academic excellence and is the largest Anglican seminary in North America.

Thirdly, while there are numerous thriving evangelical Anglican congregations across the country, you need to look to the north if you want to see a whole evangelical culture—to dioceses like Saskatchewan, the Yukon, Caledonia and the Arctic. I have been privileged to visit a couple of them and I have been humbled by the depth and sincerity of evangelical faith that I have found there.

Yet let me say that I think that the battles that once raged over stoles and candles have only served to divert us from what it means at heart to be evangelical—and I am grateful that by and large those issues are in the past. If we are to be true to our evangelical heritage (and far more importantly, true to Jesus and his mission) then we need to go back to those four pillars: to engage in a daily walk with Jesus, to recognize that our only hope is through what he has accomplished for us through his cross, to absorb his word into our practical everyday lives, and to engage in his mission, seeking to live as Jesus in the world.

Sermon – “Dead and Alive” (Romans 6:1-11)

Eighty years ago these words by were being sung for the first time on Broadway:

In olden days, a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking.
But now, God knows,
Anything goes.
Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose.
Anything goes.
If driving fast cars you like,
If low bars you like,
If old hymns you like,
If bare limbs you like,
If Mae West you like,
Or me undressed you like…
Anything goes.
The world has gone mad today
And good’s bad today,
And black’s white today,
And day’s night today…
Anything goes.

Cole Porter’s lyrics, once regarded as racy, seem tame by comparison with what is everyday experience nowadays. In many ways they express the spirit of our age: “Anything goes.”

Perhaps it should not surprise us that there is nothing new in that perspective. I suspect that, if you looked, you would find its promoters right back to the dawn of time. The author of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament experimented with this lifestyle. “Come now,” he said to himself, “I will make a test of pleasure. Enjoy yourself… Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them; I kept my heart from no pleasure…” (Ecclesiastes 2:1,10).

Back in the first century there were those who suspected Paul of espousing just such a philosophy. It all arose out of his radical adherence to the great Christian doctrine of grace. This is the teaching that Paul has been at pains to expound through the first five chapters of his letter to the Romans: that eternal fellowship with God is not something that we earn (whether through obedience to the Law or by any other means). Rather it is a gift that we receive as we put our trust in Christ. As Paul wrote elsewhere, “by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” I rather like Eugene Petersen’s rather expansive treatment of these verses in The Message:

Saving is all [God’s] idea, and all [God’s] work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving.

And so in response to Paul there were those who were asking, “If being reconciled with God is entirely a matter of his grace, of what he has done for us in Christ, then does that mean it doesn’t matter what we do?” “Indeed,” they were saying, “if we take your argument to its logical conclusion, then perhaps we should sin all the more, for then we will receive all the more of God’s grace.”

Although there is no evidence that anyone in the Roman church was seriously proposing that lifestyle, it has cropped up in the church from time to time. Some of Martin Luther’s radical disciples taught something like it and he condemned their teaching as “antinomianism” (from anti, “against”, and nomos, “law”). A century after Luther, during the Commonwealth period in England, there arose a movement called “Ranters”. The Ranters believed that as Christians they were not constrained by any provisions of the law, that whatever was done in the Spirit was justifiable. Rejecting organized religion and all forms of religious and moral restraint, they saw nudism, free love, drinking and swearing all as valid expressions of spiritual liberation.

The Past

Needless to say, Paul is eager to defend his teaching against such arguments. And he does so through an experience that was common to all of those to whom he was writing: baptism. Most of those in the Roman church would have been first-generation Christians. And so their baptism would have been something that they remembered, I should think, vividly. Remember that in the church’s earliest days baptism almost always followed directly from conversion. On the day of Pentecost the three thousand new believers were baptized almost immediately upon their response to Peter’s message of repentance and faith. The same was true later of the Ethiopian official, Simon the magician, Cornelius and his relatives and friends, Lydia the cloth merchant, the jailer and his family at Philippi, and Crispus the synagogue official and his household. So when Paul calls upon the Romans to remember their baptism, they are looking back at a close-knit series of events that formed the key turning point in their lives.

To be baptized was a radical act of identifying totally and wholly with Christ. We see that in Paul’s use of the preposition “into”. It is a word that indicates action, movement, direction. Almost without exception, when people are baptized in the New Testament they are baptized into: into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, into the name of the Lord Jesus, into Christ. Being plunged underneath the water was a dramatic participation in Jesus’ death on Golgotha and his burial in Joseph’s tomb. The old Prayer Book of 1662 put it this way, in the exhortation that followed baptism:

[Remember] always, that Baptism doth represent unto us our profession; which is, to follow the example of our Saviour Christ, and to be made like unto him; that, as he died, and rose again for us, so should we, who are baptized, die from sin, and rise again unto righteousness…

So it is that, going back to the earliest liturgies, baptism has always included a form of renunciation of sin. The questions that are put to candidates before their baptism in our Episcopal Book of Common Prayer are clear and forthright:

Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?
I renounce them.

Do you renounce all the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?
I renounce them.

Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?
I renounce them.

Paul puts all of this in blunt terms: To have been baptized, to have repented and put our faith in Christ, he says, is to have died to sin. But what does this mean? Does it really imply that sin lies entirely in our past? I think most of us would confess that such is not the case. As we shall see in the next chapter, even Paul admits his ongoing weakness in the face of sin. “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” So how do we come to terms with what Paul is saying here?

The Process

John Stott explains it well in his commentary on this passage when he uses the image of marriage. He asks,

Can a married woman live as though she were still single? … It is not impossible. But let her remember who she is. Let her feel her wedding ring, the symbol of her new life in union with her husband, and she will want to live accordingly.

Then by analogy he asks,

Can born-again Christians live as though they were still in their sins? … It is not impossible. But let them remember who they are. Let them recall their baptism, the symbol of their new life in union with Christ, and they will want to live accordingly.[1]

So it is that when we put our faith in Christ, when we are baptized into Christ, there are four things that are happening. First of all, we are receiving the full benefit of what he has done for us through his own death and resurrection—the forgiveness of our sins, reconciliation with God, and a new life as subjects of his kingdom and members of his family.

At the same time we are entering into a whole new commitment. In the gospels Jesus challenges us to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily and follow him. And Peter echoes, “To this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps” (1 Peter 2:21). What Jesus and Peter (and Paul in this morning’s passage) are talking about is a daily dying to sin and rising with him.

Just as it would be wrong for a married person to behave as though they were single, so it is unthinkable, once we have committed ourselves to Christ, to suppose that sin does not matter. Paul makes that emphatic after he asks the hypothetical question, “Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?” His answer: “By no means!” The words in Greek are far more emphatic: Me genoito! Various translations have rendered it in different ways: “Of course not!” “I should hope not!” “Certainly not!” “Never!” “No, no!” the New English Bible puts it. Or as J.B. Phillips translates it, “What a ghastly thought!” In every case the words are followed by an exclamation mark. The short story is that Paul could not be more unequivocal. Even to entertain the thought that sin could be consistent with life in Christ is anathema.

A third thing to remember and related to this is that what Paul is writing about is a life-long process. This is implicit in his use of the word “walk” in verse 4. Think too of Jesus’ parables of the kingdom that we have been hearing in our Gospel readings in recent weeks. They all have to do with process, with growth: seeds coming to life in the soil and eventually producing grain in abundance, a tiny measure of yeast in a lump of dough causing it to rise into a loaf of bread, a mustard seed growing into a bush big enough that birds can nest in its branches. That process is not always uniform. In fact it is rarely so. We all have our ups and downs in the life of discipleship. There may even be occasions when we mess up royally. But do we not revel in them? Do we celebrate them? No, we repent and return to the Lord.

And that brings me to the fourth aspect of baptism. While we are baptized as individuals, baptism ushers us into a community. Think back to what we say together in this church when a candidate is baptized. “We receive you into the household of God…” Paul’s words in this passage are not in the singular but in the plural. “We have been buried with him by baptism into death…” “We have been united with him in a death like his…” “We know that our old self was crucified with him…” We’re not playing singles tennis here. We’re part of a team. And when we stumble and fall there are others who are there to tend our wounds, to help us to our feet and to get us back onto the field again. Think again of what the congregation promises at every baptism:

Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?
We will.

The Promise

“Dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus”: a benefit, a commitment, a process. And it is also a promise. For while we will never make it in this life, never even get anywhere near, we walk towards the day when we will indeed be dead to sin, when we will be fully alive in Christ. Our walk, the process that was set into motion at our baptism, has a destination. “Beloved,” wrote the aged apostle John, “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). May God keep each one of us faithful along the journey.

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[1]     Romans: God’s Good News for the World, 179,180

Sermon – “No Room for Boasting” (Romans 3:19-28)

If you listened carefully to this morning’s New Testament reading, you may have noticed that there was one word that came up with amazing frequency: six times, in fact, in the first two verses, and then three more times in the last two. It was the word “law”. It is one of the key concepts in this letter to the Romans: key because the Roman church was made up of a mixture of Jews and non-Jews, and for Jews the law was something that was central to their identity as a nation. It marked them off as God’s people. And so the law, and its place within the Christian faith, became a crucial topic. Is it still in effect or do we disregard it altogether? What are we say about Jews who disobey the law, or about Gentiles who keep it?

Lest you think this interest in the law was a bit excessive, let me read you this excerpt from an article in the Wall Street Journal three years ago.

For decades, the task of counting the total number of federal criminal laws has bedeviled lawyers, academics and government officials. “You will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still be trying to figure out the answer, said Ronald Gainer, a retired Justice Department official. In 1982, while at the Justice Department, Mr Gainer oversaw what still stands as the most comprehensive attempt to tote up a number. The effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law. The project stretched two years. In the end, it produced only an educated estimate: about 3,000 criminal offenses. Since then, no one has tried anything nearly as extensive.

None of these studies broached the separate—and equally complex—question of crimes that stem from federal regulations, such as, for example, the rules written by a federal agency to enforce a given act of Congress. These rules can carry the force of federal criminal law. Estimates of the number of regulations range from 10,000 to 300,000. None of the legal groups who have studied the code have a firm number. “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime,” said John Baker, a retired Louisiana State University law professor who has also tried counting the number of new federal crimes created in recent years. “That is not an exaggeration.”[1]

By contrast, the number of laws that Paul was referring to in the Old Testament can be counted. According to the rabbis there were 613 in all—365 negative ones and 248 positive. And all of them flowed from just ten commandments, which in turn Jesus summarized in two: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. It seems simple by comparison.

A Silence: The law makes us conscious of our sin (19-20)

Paul’s aim, as this morning’s passage opens, is to help his readers understand the basic purpose of the law itself. Sadly, there were those who saw the law as a kind of stick with which to beat those who lived outside its provisions. They took great pride in their possession of the law and in their knowledge of the law, but they were not necessarily all that careful about keeping the law. Or at best they were selective about it. While they were fastidious about circumcision, they may not have been entirely honest in their financial dealings. While they scrupulously obeyed the dietary laws, their sexual mores may have been questionable.

In this regard they were really no different from anyone else. We are quick to see others’ flaws and foibles. Yet we are blind to our own—or at best we try to minimize them or make excuses for them. Jesus brought that out when he asked, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Matthew 7:3-5).

And so, Paul declares, God did not devise the law so that we could point an accusing finger at others. Rather (in the words of the New Living translation), “Its purpose is to keep people from having excuses… The law simply shows us how sinful we are.” The version of this passage in The Message puts it even more clearly:

Whatever is written in these Scriptures is not what God says about others but to us to whom these Scriptures were addressed in the first place! And it’s clear enough, isn’t it, that we’re sinners, every one of us, in the same sinking boat with everybody else? Our involvement with God’s revelation doesn’t put us right with God. What it does is force us to face our complicity in everyone else’s sin.

I try to get into the gym a few times each week, and there are a number of us who kvetch from time to time about people who don’t re-rack the weights, who don’t bother to aim when they throw away their paper towels, who don’t flush the toilets … and the list could go on and on. Yet I need to ask myself, what about the times when someone has tried to share something important with me and I haven’t bothered to listen? What about the times when I have promised to do something and promptly forgotten about it? What about the times when I have failed to control my tongue? Suddenly the paper towels seem trivial by comparison.

Paul’s whole purpose up to this point in the letter is to demonstrate beyond any doubt that no one stands outside the condemnation of the law. The law teaches us that we are all without excuse. We have no defense. We can only stand in silence before the Judge of all.

The principal point of the law [wrote Martin Luther] is to make men not better but worse; that is to say, it showeth unto them their sin, that by the knowledge thereof they may be humbled, terrified, bruised and broken, and by this means may be driven to seek comfort and so come to … Christ.”[2]  

A Sacrifice: The cost of reconciliation (21-26)

And this brings us to Paul’s next point. For here we come to one of the most important words in all of Scripture. It is the little word “but”. That little word is the fulcrum on which the whole of the gospel swings. It introduces us to what New Testament scholar C.K. Barrett has described as “perhaps the richest and most important paragraph in the whole letter”.[3]

The law condemns us all. It’s like one of those action-adventure flicks. Our hero is being chased by a band of murderous hooligans. He scrambles over a chain-link fence and into an alleyway. The he realizes that it is a dead end. There is no way out. The thugs move towards him, rolling up their sleeves, drooling at the thought that in a moment they will be beating him to a pulp. Then suddenly you hear the whirring of a helicopter overhead. A rope dangles in front of our hero and he is whisked off into safety as his attackers reach up in a last vain effort to grab him by his boots.

That is the effect of that one word “but”. In the words of the New Living Translation, “The more we know God’s law, the clearer it becomes that we aren’t obeying it. But now God has shown us a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law…”

How has he done this? In three words in verses 24 and 25 Paul gives us three vivid images. The first is “justification” and here Paul brings us into the courtroom. We stand before the judge, guilty as charged. Yet instead of imposing upon us the full force of the law and giving us the sentence we justly deserve, he grants us a pardon.

Paul’s second picture is of the slave market. It comes to us in the word “redemption”. In the ancient world captives of war were often paraded into the marketplace and auctioned off to the highest bidder to become slaves for the rest of their lives. The law teaches us (and rightly so) that we are captivated and enslaved by sin. Yet God has graciously released us and given us a new freedom. “If the Son sets you free,” Jesus promises us, “you shall be free indeed” (John 8:36).

The third place to which Paul brings us is the altar. Paul tells us of Jesus as being put forward as a “sacrifice of atonement”. In the Old Testament atonement always involves sacrifice. This was to underline the fact that reconciliation—true reconciliation, that is—never comes without a cost. It is not a question of just pretending that nothing is wrong. It is not as though we can just leave our sins behind as though nothing ever happened. “The righteous, loving, faithful God,” writes C.E.B. Cranfield, “does not mock or insult his creature man by pretending that his sin does not matter, but rather himself bears the full cost of forgiving it righteously—lovingly.”[4]

A Standing: Made right with God through faith (27-28)

Whether it is as Protestants or as products of the twenty-first century or a combination of both, we tend to shrink from the often gory depictions of past centuries of Jesus on the cross. We prefer our simple, sanitized versions, that work well as a decoration on a living room wall or on the covers of our prayer books. Someone has observed that Jesus died not on a silver cross between two candlesticks, but on a wooden cross between two thieves. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ may be criticized at points but it does bring across the sheer brutality of the cross. There Jesus has taken the full brunt of our sin in all its ugliness upon himself.

Yet the point of all this is not to overwhelm us with guilt, but to draw us to faith. For on the cross we are confronted not only with the horror of our sin but even more with the wonder of God’s grace. There is a prayer in our Book of Common Prayer that begins, “Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace…” The cross stands as the symbol of God’s condemnation of human sin. Yet it also stands as an invitation, in the words that we heard from Jesus in this morning’s Gospel: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Here is how Eugene Petersen puts the final verses of this morning’s passage in The Message: “What we’ve learned is this: God does not respond to what we do; we respond to what God does… Our lives get in step with God and all others by letting him set the pace, not by proudly or anxiously trying to run the parade.” In the cross of Christ God has taken the initiative to deal with sin, yours and mine, once and for all. All that is left for you and for me to do is to trust him.

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[1]     “Many Failed Efforts to Count Nation’s Federal Criminal Laws”, Wall Street Journal, 23 Jul 2011

[2]     Quoted by John Stott in Romans: God’s Good News for the World, 104

[3]     Reading Through Romans, 15

[4]     Romans, A Shorter Commentary, 68

Sermon – “Good News People” (Romans 1:1-10)

Over the course of the summer we will be reading through much of the sixteen chapters of St Paul’s letter to the Romans. John Calvin, the great Swiss reformer, stated of it, “If we have gained a true understanding of this epistle, we have an open door to all the most profound treasures of Scripture.” More recently the great English evangelist, preacher and teacher John Stott claimed, “It is the fullest, plainest and grandest statement of the gospel in the New Testament.”[1]

Nevertheless, I think that many of us would see studying Romans as a daunting task. Although it takes the form of a letter, it is much more than that. It is really a thesis, Paul’s clearest and most complete statement of his theology, of his understanding of Christ and the church, of the human condition and the gospel. If you find Romans difficult at times to follow, you are in good company. Even the apostle Peter confessed, “Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand…”

Author and hymn writer James Weldon Johnson told the story of a preacher who stood up before his congregation one Sunday morning and declared, “Brothers and sisters, this morning I intend to explain the unexplainable, to find out the indefinable, to ponder over the imponderable, and to unscrew the inscrutable.” I don’t lay claim to any such powers as those as we make our way through the letter to the Romans, but I do believe that as we look to the Holy Spirit and allow the Scriptures to speak to us—as the Bible says, to let deep call to deep—we will find ourselves being transformed in the process.

From the very outset Paul makes it clear that his subject and his overarching theme, indeed his passion, is the gospel. He describes himself simply as “a servant of Jesus Christ”—and if you check out the footnote, you will see that the word literally means “slave”. And Paul’s whole task as a slave, his assignment so to speak, is the gospel.

Now “gospel” simply means “good news”, and that is the way that a number of our contemporary English versions of the Bible translate it. Originally it was used of a messenger announcing a military victory, but it has a considerably wider application than that. The passage from Isaiah that Jesus read in the synagogue at Capernaum spoke about good news: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners” (Isaiah 61:1). Elsewhere Isaiah wrote, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns’ ” (Isaiah 52:7). And Paul had come as just such a messenger.

The good news foretold

The first thing that Paul sought to make clear was that the gospel was not his invention. It was a message that he had received and was now passing on. In the ancient world the Romans had a way of conveying messages called the cursus publicus. It was a state-operated relay system, with rest houses placed every eight miles or so. Here messengers would swap out their tired horses for fresh ones, guaranteeing that messages were delivered swiftly and efficiently. The system continued into the fifth century and there was nothing to compare with it again until the development of the modern post office.

That was how Paul saw himself, not as an originator of a message, but as a messenger faithfully passing on the message with which he had been entrusted. “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received,” he wrote to the congregation in Corinth (1 Corinthians 15:1). Now in this letter to the Romans he traces that message all the way back to patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament.

Of this the great theologian Karl Barth reflected,

The gospel is no intrusion of today. As the seed of eternity it is the fruit of time, the meaning and maturity of history—the fulfillment of prophecy… The words of the prophets, long fastened under lock and key, are now set free. Now it is possible to hear what Jeremiah and Job and the preacher Solomon had proclaimed long ago. Now we can see and understand what is written.[2]

Thus as Christians we want to affirm the value of the Old Testament. We believe that in it, every bit as much as in the New, are to be found all the treasures of the gospel.

Perhaps you have heard, as I have, people who reject the Old Testament because the God they find there is a God of vengeance and judgment, and not the God of love and forgiveness that we find in the New. Early in the second century there was a famous heretic named Marcion. The core of Marcion’s heresy was very similar. He taught that there were two Gods revealed in the Bible: the God of the Old Testament, who is a God of law and justice, and the God and Father of Jesus Christ, who is a God of mercy and salvation. As a result he taught his followers to reject the Old Testament in its entirety. But that is the opposite of what we hear from Paul in these opening verses of Romans, and it contradicts the unanimous teaching of the New Testament, not least Jesus himself. The good news we proclaim issues out of the Old Testament like a flower growing from a seed. As the old Sunday school rhyme puts it, “The New is in the Old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed.”

As we read on in Romans, then, we will find Paul quoting from no fewer than fifty passages found in thirteen books of the Old Testament. The largest proportion of them is from the Psalms, and I would like to pause there for just a moment. One devotional exercise that I have found helpful is, as I have been reading through the Psalms, to seek to recognize Christ in them—not just in the obvious psalms like Psalm 22, but to see, for example, that Jesus is the man in Psalm 1 “who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers”; that Jesus is the man in Psalm 25 “against whom the Lord counts no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit”; or in Psalm 40, “who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud or to those who go astray after a lie”. As I have done this I have found the Psalms speaking to me with I richness I might never have otherwise imagined.

The good news focused

The second thing that Paul tells us about the gospel in this passage is that it centers in God’s Son. Twice he describes it in that way: in verse 4 and in verse 9. The good news that we proclaim is not a philosophy. It is not an experience. It is not a code of behavior. Rather, it is all about a person, Jesus Christ.

I have to say that Paul is a little like a pit bull in that regard. And you have to be. It is so easy to be distracted, to be derailed, to find that we are focusing on something other than Jesus. It may be the beauty of the liturgy, or the growth of the church, or the benefits of meditation, or the plight of the poor, or any of a thousand other things. I do not question that all of them are good and worthy, but they are not the gospel. They are not good news unless they emanate from Jesus and direct us to him.

I remember years ago watching John Stott being interviewed on a Christian television program. His interviewer (himself a Pentecostal pastor) kept talking about Christianity. It finally got to the point where, several minutes into the show, John interrupted him and said, “It’s not Christianity we’re here to talk about: it’s Christ.”

There is no power in Christianity. Christianity is a system. The power of the gospel is in a person, Jesus Christ. It is he, Paul tells us elsewhere, and he alone, who is the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24). “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone … so that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28).

The good news fulfilled

A third thing we learn about the gospel in this morning’s reading is that it is for all people. Already in Paul’s day, scarcely a generation after the events of Jesus’ cross and resurrection, the message had reached all the way to Rome. Now Paul had plans to take it to Spain as well. Already it had cut across distinctions of race and ethnicity, social class and gender. Already it was being embraced by people from the lowliest slaves to members of the household of Caesar.

All of that is wonderful in itself, and it is the fulfillment of Jesus’ command in this morning’s Gospel reading, to go and make disciples of all nations. Yet it seems to me that the clincher comes in two little words. You will find them at the beginning of verse 6: “including yourselves”. The gospel isn’t just for “them”. It’s for you. It’s for me.

I remember many years ago as a teenager sitting in the office of a local pastor. I’m not exactly sure how we got to this point in the conversation, but he asked me to elaborate what I believed as a Christian. My answer was basically the Apostles’ Creed: that Jesus was God’s Son, that he had died on the cross for the sins of the world… Then he stopped me. “John, you say that Jesus died for the sins of the world, but do you believe that he died for your sins?” At that point I had been attending church for some time, a couple of years or more. I had been teaching in the Sunday school. But I was unable to give a positive answer to his question. What that question did, though, was to set me on a quest that not long after led me into a relationship with Jesus that was truly personal—and I am forever grateful for his willingness to ask it.

It is an easy assumption to make that because someone is in a church—they may even be in the choir or serving on the vestry or teaching in the Sunday school as I was—that they have responded to the personal challenge of the gospel. Erica Sabiti was the first African Archbishop of Uganda. As a young lad he had been a pupil in a church mission school where he had no doubt been exposed to the gospel. He later trained as a teacher in one of those mission schools and then as a catechist in the church. That in turn led him to theological college and ordination, first as a deacon and then as a priest. Yet all that time he would have described himself as being one foot away from the kingdom of God—the distance between his head and his heart. It was only when he went out one day to pray and accepted Jesus into his heart that the gospel that he had heard from his youth became a life-giving reality for him.

Again, as Karl Barth has put it, “What [the gospel] demands of [us] is more than notice, or understanding, or sympathy. It demands participation, comprehension, co-operation.”[3] The gospel is not fulfilled until I appropriate it personally, until I recognize that its message is for me—until I bow before Jesus, its source and center and subject, and allow him become a reality for me today.

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[1]     Romans: God’s Good News for the World, 19

[2]     The Epistle to the Romans, 28

[3]     The Epistle to the Romans, 28

Sermon – “Cleopas” (Luke 24:13-35)

In all the Bible I don’t think that there is a more engaging story, a better-told story, than our Gospel reading this morning. It is recounted with such realism and detail that it is difficult not to imagine ourselves there, walking along the narrow, dusty road from Jerusalem to Emmaus on that first Easter afternoon. The time is almost exactly forty-eight hours since Jesus has been crucified. His lifeless body had been taken down and temporarily laid in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent Jerusalem citizen and a member of the Jewish ruling council. That morning it had been discovered that the final insult had occurred. Jesus’ corpse had been taken from the tomb and nobody was aware of its whereabouts. And so it was not even possible to pay Jesus the final respect of a decent burial. Yes, there had been stories of angelic appearances. But that did not alter the fact that the one on whom they had pinned their hopes was now dead and gone. Not even his body was to be found.

There did not seem to be any point to remaining in Jerusalem, and so the two decided to make the seven-mile walk back to their home in Emmaus. It was natural that both their thoughts and their conversation were dominated by the uncontrollable swirl of events that had brought Jesus before the Sanhedrin, before Pilate and finally to his death. We don’t know at what moment it happened, but somewhere along the journey the two became three.

I suspect that their discussion had become quite animated, to the point where they weren’t really aware of anyone but themselves or of how loud they had become, where anyone walking anywhere near them would have heard every word they were saying. So it may have given them a bit of a jolt when suddenly there was a third voice in the conversation. “What’s all this you’re talking about as you walk along?” Luke tells us that they stopped dead in their tracks, but their surprise could not erase the sadness that was written across their faces.

“Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know what’s happened there over the last few days?” And once again they went over the tragic litany of events that had taken Jesus from them. “And we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.” They were to learn that this stranger knew far more than they had at first imagined. In a matter of moments they found themselves being caught up into the whole sweep of Old Testament revelation. What had happened to Jesus at Calvary was not a cruel twist of fate, but the outworking of God’s plan from the very beginning.

It must have seemed like no time before they were on the outskirts of their village. The time had come for a parting of ways. Yet there was so much more that they wanted to hear. So they pressed upon him (translated literally, “they forced him”, “they pressured him”) to stay with them. Once inside, they brought out some bread and reclined around the low table. As their guest took it, gave thanks for it and broke it, something (and Luke does not tell us what) caused them to realize that they were in the presence not of a stranger but of Jesus himself. They gazed at each other in amazement; and when they turned look again at Jesus, he was gone. Their hearts pounding within them, their legs could not take them back quickly enough to Jerusalem and to the other disciples, to tell them how Jesus had made himself known to them in the breaking of the bread.

A Fable?

Now I use those words very specifically because I believe Luke specifically chose them. They are technical words. We have heard them two chapters earlier in his account of the last supper: “Then [Jesus] took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me’ ” (Luke 22:19). And he uses them again in Acts 2:42 in his description of the earliest church: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” It is clear that Luke is using sacramental language—and from earliest days the church has drawn the connection between what happened at Emmaus and the Holy Eucharist. St Augustine, for example, writing around the close of the fourth century, states, “No one should doubt that his being recognized in the breaking of bread is the sacrament, which brings us together in recognizing him.”[1] And we find it captured in the words of our post-communion prayer: “You have opened to us the Scriptures, O Christ, and you have made yourself known in the breaking of the bread…”

There is a wonderful truth contained in that teaching. The Reformers of the sixteenth century were accustomed to speaking of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as the visible words of God. Just as Christ speaks to us through the Scriptures, we also believe that he comes to us and reveals himself to us in a different way, yet no less real—in a tactile, visual way—as we break bread together in the sacrament. Gathered around his table, Jesus meets with us just as he did with Cleopas and his friend nearly two thousand years ago.

So it is that the story of Emmaus provides us with a wonderful parable of the mystery of Holy Communion—and that is how it is taught and preached again and again today. The problem and the tragedy is that for many in the church today it is just a parable and no more. I remember when we were translating this passage from the Greek, my New Testament professor asked the question, “Suppose you were there with a camera as the two disciples walked along the road to Emmaus. How many people do you think the camera would capture: Three? Or two?” And he made no bones about the fact that he stood firmly on the “two” side.

For him and for many others, accounts such as we have read this morning are fables—wonderful fables, no doubt, powerful fables filled with rich imagery and deep significance, that teach us about the experience and perceptions of Jesus’ earliest followers—and yet, when it comes down to it, just fables nevertheless. In Jesus Seminar founder Dominic Crossan’s words, “Emmaus never happened; Emmaus always happens.”[2]

A Fact

I believe that the apostle Paul had exactly such people in mind when he declared, “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain… If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins… If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” The he asserts (and we echo loudly), “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:14-20)

The disciples who arrived breathless back in Jerusalem were not there because they had had some mystical experience breaking bread. No, they were there because they had seen Jesus bodily there before them with their own eyes. He had picked up actual bread and broken it with physical hands. He had spoken to them in an audible voice—and their hearts burned within them.

The good side of the story of my New Testament professor was that his successor was none less than N.T. Wright. His 800-page book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, has been described as the clearest, most thorough and comprehensive study of Jesus’ resurrection in more than a century. Of that conversation that took place along the road, he has said,

Now, suddenly, with the right story in their head and hearts, a new possibility—huge, astonishing, and breathtaking—started to emerge before them… Suppose Jesus’ execution was not the clear disproof of his messianic vocation but its confirmation and climax? Suppose the cross was not one more example of the triumph of paganism over God’s people but was actually God’s means of defeating evil once and for all? Suppose this was, after all, how the exile was designed to end, how sins were to be forgiven and how the kingdom was to come? Suppose this was what God’s light and truth looked like, coming unexpectedly to lead his people back into his presence?[3]

No wonder their hearts burned within them. Their whole world had been turned upside down. They had come to see everything that matters in a new light. And their lives could never be the same again. This is the difference that Jesus’ resurrection makes—and I want to say, it is all the difference.

A Fire

That difference had put a fire within their hearts. Centuries before, the prophet Jeremiah had written in similar terms about his encounter with God’s word: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” (Jeremiah 20:9). Throughout the book of Acts and the remainder of the New Testament we see that fire breaking out in new and sometimes surprising ways. The message of Jesus’ resurrection was one that the church could not contain, even if it had wanted to, so that within a generation there were believers stretched all around the known world.

For those of us who have heard the Easter story for years, there is always the temptation to become blasé about it, for it to lose its newness, its freshness, its radical challenge to all the world’s treasured assumptions—for the fire to grow dim. Even in New Testament times the apostle Paul had to warn the believers in Thessalonica not to quench the Holy Spirit’s fire. And towards the end of his life he found himself writing to his young protégé Timothy, “I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you…” (1 Thessalonians 5:19; 2 Timothy 1:6).

John Stott told the story of Methodist preacher W.E. Sangster interviewing candidates for the ministry. One of them was a rather nervous young man who said he felt he ought to explain that he was rather shy and was not the sort of person who would ever set the River Thames on fire, that is, create much of a sensation. “My dear young brother,” Sangster replied. “I’m not interested to know if you could set the Thames on fire. What I want to know is this: if I picked you up by the scruff of your neck and dropped you into the Thames, would it sizzle?”[4]

I wonder how many of us, if we were really to be honest with ourselves, would be forced to admit that for us the fire has grown dim. Like the believers in Ephesus, we have lost the love that we had at first. We have become lukewarm in our faith. Then I believe we can learn from the two disciples and their experience along the road to Emmaus.

St Augustine observed that when they opened their hearts to Jesus, “unwittingly they showed the doctor their wounds”. May we reveal what lies deep within us to him. May we listen to him and allow him to minister to us by his living and enduring word. And then may we find ourselves saying, “Did not our hearts burn within us?”

Let us conclude by bowing before the Lord and praying together in words from one of Charles Wesley’s hymns.

O thou who camest from above
the pure, celestial fire to impart,
kindle a flame of sacred love
on the mean altar of my heart.

There let it for thy glory burn,
with inextinguishable blaze;
and, trembling, to its source return
in humble love and fervent praise.

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[1]     Letter 149, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on the Scriptures, NT III, 382

[2]     Quoted in N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 656

[3]     N.T. Wright, “The Resurrection and the Postmodern Dilemma”, Sewanee Theological Review 41.2, 1998

[4]     John Stott, Between Two Worlds, 285