"Christ and the City"
The responsibility of urban Christians.
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 23, 2002
Text: Acts 21:26-39
At exactly 9:20 a.m. this past Friday, I reaffirmed and re-pledged my troth. I did so in a barber's shop surrounded by a group of men, no less, who wanted to express their sincerest condolences to me, as an Englishman, on the loss of our game in the World Cup.
I pledged my troth, not to my wife again (I think once will suffice in that regard), but I pledged my troth of love to this city. For where else at 9:20 on a Friday morning would you find an Italian comforting an Englishman in the presence of a Scandinavian and a Korean before having your hair cut by an Irishman? And - to allow an Irishman to cut an Englishman's hair without any worry is a test of faith, don't you think? I couldn't help but think what a great and a wonderful city this really is.
I've been thinking a great deal about this city over the last few days and weeks. I have been thinking of us because of the internecine conflicts that seem to ravage so many cities throughout the world. Whether it is Kabul, or Seville, or Jerusalem, it makes no difference. The fact is we in this city are truly and sincerely blessed. And as our great city continues to emerge and continues to grow, I think we Christians have a lot of questions to ask ourselves about the relationship between the Church and our Lord and this city.
This city is, without doubt, one of, if not the most, cosmopolitan cities in the world. I couldn't help but enjoy over the last few weeks walking down the streets of our city as people have had flags attached to their cars, waving nearly every single banner under the sun from nearly every continent that we know, celebrating the World Cup of soccer and doing so openly and gladly and without shame.
Outside the coffee shop that I go to regularly, a couple of days ago there was an English flag, a Turkish flag, a South Korean flag and a Brazilian flag (which I regret was flying). There was an Argentinian flag, a French flag - I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Yet everyone was able to fly them in the greatest freedom and laughter and joy, celebrating where people came from yet at the same time being fundamentally Torontonians and Canadians - just with different flags on their cars.
As this world continues to expand in its population, more and more people are gravitating to urban centres and Toronto, in many ways, leads the way in this global urbanization; but it is bringing to mind, I do believe, great questions about the nature of the city, for in some ways we are almost moving towards the great city-states that existed in Greek times. Cities are taking on greater importance in the cultural and the historic life of nations, of continents and of the world.
In fact, many people will now not say first the country that they are from, but the city in which they reside, for cities are taking on a whole new meaning and a whole new dimension. As people come to this city from so many countries throughout the world, being from Toronto carries even greater international importance.
This city is not only important in terms of its size and urbanization, but also for the questions it causes us to ask about its nature. As Plato asked about citizenship in the republic or the state, so we are asking questions about the ideal city as it exists today and what the nature of the city should be.
If you don't believe that this is an important question not only for our city but for the whole of the country, I heard a staggering statistic a few weeks ago. In an address to a club meeting I was attending, a city councilor stated that the City of Toronto's municipal government is the sixth-largest government in the whole of Canada. After Canada itself, Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta, the next largest government is a municipal government: the government of Toronto.
So, my friends, what happens here has a profound effect economically, politically, philosophically and yes, even spiritually, on the rest of the country.
Now, I want to look at this, this morning, precisely because in our text we have the Apostle Paul declaring his allegiance first of all to his city. The story is a funny one: Paul has come into a city and he has been ridiculed. A radical group of Jewish terrorists had been running around murdering people in the streets.They would kill Jews whom they felt were having too close an alliance with Rome. They would walk through the crowds and simply stab them in the back and then they would cause riots and make life fractious in the city.
The Apostle Paul moves into all this and the powers that be see an opportunity to point a finger at him, and so they accuse him almost of being one of them. They bring him before the Roman authorities and ask him whether he is in fact a terrorist. He begins to speak and they are astounded because he speaks such wonderful Greek. This is not an Egyptian Jew, they think, this is a man who has been brought up in a Greek setting. Then he speaks the words (and I love the King James Version best of all): "I am a citizen of no mean city. I am proudly from Tarsus."
And why would he make the city so important in his life? Well, for a number of reasons.
The first is that this great city of Tarsus from which he came was cosmopolitan. This was no narrow-minded Jew. This was no narrow-minded man at all. This was no terrorist. This was a cultured man from a cosmopolitan city that was known throughout the world as a source of trade and of commerce, just like our own Toronto. It was the capital of Cilicia, a powerful province - just like Toronto. It was along the River Cydnus, where, in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Antony declares his love for Cleopatra as she emerges from a boat. I think it's probably for that reason that it was Antony who made the City of Tarsus a Roman city - probably as a result of his wife badgering him, or something like that. But it became a powerful city, did Tarsus.
Not only that, Strabo once said that the academy the intellectual, the philosophical and the spiritual life of Tarsus, were greater than those of either Athens or Alexandria. It was a melting pot; a place where different cultures, Greek and Asian, would come together. It was a place, as someone once said, where the world gathers or the world meets; a place of great learning, of great insight and of great power; a city that was not mean by any circumstance.
So the Apostle Paul, you see, understood that his ministry for the one with whom his true loyalty lay, Jesus Christ, had its foundations in his upbringing in the city. He understood that in a cosmopolitan city that was known throughout the world, that had a strong commercial base, a strong academic base, just like our own city, his credentials to proclaim Christ arose. "I am a man of no mean city."
And so I want to look this morning at our city, as if we were in fact carrying on the ministry of the Apostle Paul - which really, as Christians, we are.
The first thing I want to say about Christians and Christ and the city is that we must have first and foremost a sense of belonging; a sense of the culture and the context in which we exercise our ministry.
So often, my friends, the ministry of the Church is very isolated and sometimes, as an organization, the bigger the church the more insular we become - worrying about our own affairs, thinking about our own context, concerned about our own details - all of which need love and attention. We forget, in fact, the culture or the context in which we live. That context and that culture is important.
So often we buy into the whole secularist notion that there should be a complete separation between church and state and the two should have little or nothing to do with each other. Well, while that may be true in a structural and in a political sense, it should not happen in a spiritual sense. On the contrary, for us who are Christians, it should be not that agenda that sets our tone. Instead, it should be our passion as the Church of Jesus Christ to be present, to be active and to be alive in the city. Where we belong and where we exercise our ministry is important.
That's the great wonder of Judaism, I think: that wherever the Jews went they took their context seriously. Whether it was Shiloh or Bethel or Ebenezer, or whether it was ultimately Jerusalem, or whether they were in exile in Babylon, the Jews lived their lives as Jews concretely in the context in which they found themselves. Just so, the continued understanding of our identity as Christians, as people of faith, rests on our living as Christians in the context in which we find ourselves. Ultimately, our sense of belonging is with Jesus Christ, but it must also be a belonging that finds its context in the city.
In 1930, Albert Einstein was giving a lecture at the Sorbonne and when he was challenged he said: "If my theory of relativity is proved correct, the Germans will claim that I am German and the French will say that I am a citizen of the world. If I am proven incorrect in my theory of relativity, the French will say that I am German and the Germans will say I am a Jew."
You see, my friends, ultimately it is the association of our heart that really does in many ways determine our belonging. Our nation's pride comes and goes, but the context in which we minister is important.
This congregation has a unique role to play within the city. It does so on the basis of our allegiance to Jesus Christ, but it does so understanding the context in which we live.
Just this week, for example, I was speaking in a church in Brampton. I had a wonderful time with the congregation, but I was running into people who were recounting jokes and stories that I had told months ago. I thought, "Where are they getting this from?" They were asking after Reverend Harries and saying they had been praying for him, and asking whether I'm getting along well with Dr. Day. What I realised was that there are so many people out there in the city and beyond listening and being ministered to by the worship at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church via the medium of radio, if nothing else.
We are a city-wide congregation and let us not forget it. As a city-wide congregation, it seems to me that rather than being insular we must do everything that we can to be welcoming. As a church with a city-wide ministry, we must have a ministry that opens itself to others, and the way in which this is done primarily is through the great Protestant ideal of the priesthood of all believers: All of you, every member of this church, in fact, is a minister of Jesus Christ within the city.
Some of you are in the financial city and some of you in the intellectual city and some of you are in the domestic city and some of you in the medical city. You are in various places but we must not forget the city as a whole, and we must be free to bear witness within the city, just as the Apostle Paul did. The city is the place where this church belongs.
But there is also a sense, too, that with that goes another word, and that is the word responsibility. A city is a living organism. It is continually changing (this city above all) before our very eyes.
I love the words of Epictetus: "He that serves the state raises not the roofs of the houses but the souls of the citizens."
Now Epictetus was, of course, a philosopher. He was not a theologian, but his point was well taken. There is a need for the church of Jesus Christ to take responsibility for lifting up the spiritual life of our city.
Oh, there are many political and sociological and economic issues that face our city, all of which should be addressed and all of which we should care about. We should be caring about the destruction of our environment and the purity of our air and water. We should be concerned about housing and the fact that there are so many people (and one need only go downtown at this time of the year to see them) who are homeless. We need to look at the moral life of our church, of our city and of the state in which we live. We need to look at the economic disparities within our city; we need to ensure that we continue to be a vibrant economic force, a free force, both here and throughout the world. But those are things that we all can address, and the church of Jesus Christ should be part of that if it cares.
But there are certain things that we should be addressing that are over and above that. It's to do with the spiritual life of our community. Walt Whitman once said: "The greatest city is that which has the greatest men and women."
And so what the church is about is developing the spiritual life of the people in the community. One need only look around us to see the number of people in this city who need liberation and freedom from their addictions. One need only see that this is a city with a tremendous academy, just like Tarsus, a place of great learning, intellect and ideas. Christians should be at the vanguard of addressing some of those ideas and participating in the academy and letting the truth of God be heard and known there.
As our city gets larger and its population grows, more and more people are becoming lonely and isolated and feeling like just a face in the crowd. The church must be a place of fellowship and of hope and a joy for such people. We are in a city where people are unsure what anchors them in this life, especially when even the greatest city in this continent could in fact have a plane flown into its buildings and thousands of people killed. We are so vulnerable, even in the midst of our wealth and our freedom, that there is a need for us to have an anchor in our lives.
We live in a city where sin and avarice and greed are rife. There is a need for an alternate word of an alternate existence, of a new way of life born from the cross of Jesus Christ.
There are so many things that the church can bring to the city, but that is our responsibility and that is our challenge and if we love this city we must rise to it.
But we must also be, first and foremost, a place of prayer. It doesn't matter what city you live in, whether it is Toronto or Halifax or Montreal or Vancouver or Sudbury. It makes no difference. Christians should be a people of prayer.
In that magnificent anthem that the choir sang for us a few moments ago there is that glorious line: O pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
When I run into my Jewish friends, very often their very last word to me is not, as it normally is, Shalom. It is that very phrase: Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Pray for the city, for them the City of Zion, for us the city in which we live and bear witness.
We need to pray for it and we need to pray for ourselves in the midst of that ministry, precisely because our power does not come as Christians from the numbers that we have. Everyone looks at the churches and thinks because our congregations are dwindling, we are a declining power within the city. Does it matter so much? Numbers do not give power or authority. It is not our rightness on any particular social issue that gives us our power or our right to speak. Lord knows we are very often wrong! It is not our hierarchy or the structure of our church governments. It is the extent to which we are faithful and open to the power of the Holy Spirit. That is why, when Paul stood up amidst the crowd and was criticized, as soon as he began to speak there was silence.
Very often, my friends, people look at the church and think that we have nothing very exciting to say.
As I was walking around the church this week, I saw quite a bit of work being done to the building. My mind went back to a story about a church that decided to be air-conditioned, and so it brought in an air-conditioning engineer. The engineer asked the minister what was needed and he said: "Oh well, on a Sunday we have this many people and on a Sunday we do this and we do that and we do the other."
All of a sudden, the engineer just tore up all his notes. The minister said to him: "Well, why are you doing that?"
The engineer said: "Oh, I thought I was going to be putting air-conditioning into a place like a theatre."
The minister said: "A place like a theatre? Well, what's the difference? I mean, air-conditioning is air-conditioning."
The engineer said: "Oh, no! By no means. In a theatre, when the screen comes down people start to get excited. Their hearts race. Their pulse increases. Their body temperature rises and so you need to put a different form of air-conditioning in. In a church, on the other hand …." He ended it right there.
Too often, my friends, the church in the city is nothing more than an obscure artifact of a former age with glorious buildings and lovely language and a few declining and crumbling walls. But not this church; not the churches that continue to pray; not the churches that understand their context; not the churches that understand their allegiance to the Gospel; not the churches that take responsibility for their ministry; not the churches that understand the importance of loving the city in which they live.
For Timothy Eaton Memorial Church and for all the other great churches around us, we understand, like Paul, that we minister in no mean city, and, my friends, we have no mean message. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.