Pray, Act, Give
Sermon preached by the Dean of Wells at the Cathedral Eucharist on Sunday 31st August 2014.
Romans 12 v 9 –end Matthew 16 v 21 - end
With your service sheet this morning you will have been given a small copy of a poster produced by the Church of England. It shows the Arabic letter ‘N’ that has been daubed on the walls of many Christian homes in Mosul, in Northern Iraq. N stands for Nasrani that is an Arabic term for Christian. If this letter N is painted on your house it means that the brutal Islamic State organisation, IS, expect you to pay a special tax, to leave or to convert to Islam. If you don’t take one of these options your life and property will be in danger.
The poster expresses solidarity with our brother and sister Kurdish Christians who have lived in that region since the second century and who now face possible extinction. It calls for the church to pray and act and give. In the cathedral we have already signalled a commitment to the persecuted church in Iraq and Syria, and in a different way Gaza, by the use of red vestments and altar frontals, and by the place set aside for prayers for peace in the chapel of St Callixtus. In the next week the Chapter will suggest how we might give money to support Kurdish Christians through the Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf. You might also like to act by lobbying the government to speak out more clearly about the plight of Iraqi Christians and other minorities, to increase humanitarian aid, and to offer asylum to some of those who have had to flee their homes. You can find suggestions about how best to do this on the Church of England website in the section headed Iraq.
These are practical ways in which we can use our resources and time to offer just a little help in the face of this tragedy. But what I wanted to do this morning is to reflect, through the readings for the day, on the motivation for Christian involvement with those who suffer whether those people are in Iraq or whether they are much closer to home, people who struggle with illness, with family issues or with unemployment. One of the marks of Christian practice is sensitivity towards the needs of our neighbours, a reaching out to those who have become cast down, to those trapped by circumstances of life that may lie outside of their control. The onset of mental health issues, the loss of a job, the death of a partner or a parent may all upset the smooth running of life that we think of as normality. In fact, it may be that needing the support of other people is God’s way of teaching us that no one is able to stand alone commanding the world to conform to hisor her will.
But responding to the suffering of another also contains a subtle trap. We can become absorbed by that suffering, overwhelmed by the problems of another person or addicted to the next terrible crisis being shown on the news, so overwhelmed that we forget the underlying goodness of life, forget that we have each been created to share in the joy and life of God. St. Paul does not make that mistake. He says that each person is called to bear suffering with patience. But in the 12th chapter of his letter to the Romans he sets this suffering in the context of hope and love. ‘Let love be genuine – love one another with mutual affection’. Love is the underlying song of life and if Christians suffer it out of this context of love – the love of God for his creation, and the love that we offer to each other, love given freely as a response to God’s touch and call.
St Paul says that love that springs from God shows itself in extending hospitality to strangers, in contributing to the needs of the saints, in rejoicing with those who rejoice, in weeping with those who weep. But it goes further. God’s love feeds enemies when they are hungry and overcomes evil with good. Even those who persecute us are to be blessed. But inevitably today we wonder what such words can possibly mean in the context of the letter N and the violence of the so-called Islamic State.
It seems to me that St Paul is pointing to how God’s love is transformative. It is never merely passive, or a vague well-wishing. God is not pleased that people are suffering, that there is slaughter in Iraq, that Kurdish Christians are driven out of their towns and villages. That is not the world that God is seeking. The new creation will be seen only where the divine energy and desire for life combats the forces of death and destruction. It will not come through physical might but by the power of a love that sees each person, however distorted their outlook has become, as a child of God.
If we suffer that suffering has to be faced in the context of the desire to bring life to others. Suffering that is not transformed by love diminishes. We can easily be drawn into the despair of another person. We can wallow in self-pity and think no one else faces the troubles that we face. We can look at the world and assume that there is no way that people of different cultures, races and faiths can live together. We may retreat into ourselves where we assume wrongly that safety lies. Such an outlook that meets suffering in a static way is not unknown in the church. Sometimes in our devotions it can seem as if suffering is embraced for its own sake. We miss the fact that whilst the central symbol of the cross does speak of ghastly torture and death, it is also the sign that God’s love cannot be broken by human sin. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead means that we are always a people of hope, a people who know that God wanted the healing and reconciliation of the world so much that he put his very being, his own Son, at risk in the world.
Pray, act, give. When we think of Christians in Iraq and Syria our solidarity with them is not first about suffering, though it is their suffering that tugs at our heart strings and for a moment disturbs our comfort here in Wells or even in Wallingford. It comes first from a desire to see change, and from a sharing in that ever-present love of God that is still at work seeking to make the world reflect God’s glory, despite all appearances to the contrary. God loves difference. He does not seek to make us all the same, but to create a harmony, a great polyphony of voices and talents that will sing his praise.
In this morning’s gospel St Peter wants to soften the way of love. He cannot bear the thought that Jesus’ commitment to bring life to the poor and powerless will lead him to the cross, to death at the hands of those who rule. And yet Jesus does not back away from Jerusalem although he knows that this will be the place of decision, the place where his faithfulness will be tested to the very end.
In the Eucharist we too are invited to come close to Jerusalem and to share in Jesus’ great sacrifice of love. The bread and wine that are set before us are the same bread and wine that will be shared by Christian sisters and brothers throughout the world. They are guests at our meal in the cathedral and we are guests at theirs, whether the meal is shared in a church, a school, a tent, or on open ground. Jesus is in the midst of every assembly of God’s people calling his children to respond to his love and to believe that the world can be made new.Faithful discipleship is no longer a question of what we ought to do, to care for those in distress, it is about our being, our identity, about who we are as followers of Jesus. We are ‘N’.
The great desert father Anthony was once asked ‘What should I do in order to please God’. He replied ‘Wherever you go keep God in mind; whatever you do follow the example of Holy Scripture; wherever you are stay there, and do not move away in a hurry. If you keep these guide-lines, you will be saved’.
Pray, act, give – there is no room for self-regard or undue sentiment if we are to walk the way of life.
John Clarke