The Holy Spirit Revealed, Part Two: "Not Alone, You Can't"
Our task is great, but we have power
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Text: John 16:25-33
I was given a great book not long ago, and those of you who know me will understand why I think it is a great book. It is by a man named Franklin Foer, and it is titled How Soccer Explains the World. As I read this book, I wondered if the person who had given it to me was sending me a message. I still don't know what that message is, but that book is the most fitting thing I have read while the world and our city of Toronto celebrates the World Cup of soccer.
As I look around the community where I live, as I stand here on St. Clair Avenue and watch the cars go past, flying all the flags of all the myriad nations represented in this great city of ours, with the odd, inebriated person hanging out of the window screaming his country's name, I realize that the wisdom of Foer's book is very real indeed, for the world really is a global village, and what happens in one part of it has a tremendous effect on any other part. Though not a soccer fan himself, he argues that soccer is one of the great symbols of how the world comes together every four years: in homes; in front of TV sets; and how people, whether they are soccer lovers or not, realize that something big is going on.
This week I sat in the home of friends who attend this church, from Trinidad and Tobago. I was the lone Englishman in the room, watching England play little Trinidad and Tobago. Trinidad and Tobago held England for the majority of the game and, at times, outplayed England. Here were my Trinidad and Tobago friends all around me, jumping up and down. Finally, when England scored at last, I raised my hands in ecstasy - and then I realized I was the only one in the room standing. As I looked down on all these other dejected faces, my pastoral heart went out to them. I sat down, I put my head in my hands, and I said, “Oh, what a shame that England scored!” (I didn't mean a word of it!)
It got me thinking how much the world is changing. Italy plays the United States, Iran is in the same competition as Britain and the United States! Saudi Arabia is playing a country from north Africa, Tunisia! What a world! Isn't it wonderful that the world, with all its problems and with all its conflicts and all its wars does come together? Sometimes it is only sport that can do it. What a shame it doesn't happen more often.
I am always fascinated by all the indicators that come out from time to time that try to measure what the world is like. For example, I read just this week that the Golden Horseshoe around Lake Ontario, that includes our own city of Toronto will in the next 25 years expand from eight million people to some 12 million people. Twelve million people - half the size again in 25 years! Forty to 50 per cent of those people are going to live in already existing urban areas and communities. And that's not because our birthrate has taken off. The world then, is coming to us. It is coming to Toronto in an even more broad and spectacular way than we have already seen.
I am fascinated when I read the Amnesty International reports and realize that for all our desire to be progressive and to be supportive and to be encouraging, the world still has human rights problems in virtually every corner. When I read World Watch, which is published by World Vision, it saddens me to realize that the very latest U.N. statistics tell us that 40.3 million people now live with HIV/AIDS. I read business reports, and I read about the depletion of the ozone layer, and I went on Google Earth and it showed how the ice cap at North Pole is diminishing at a very rapid rate. I realized there is nothing immutable in this world.
Then, I thought, what if we were to do an assessment of the state of the world the way economists assess businesses? Can you imagine, for example, a businesswoman sitting down on Bay Street in her office and seeing what we get everyday on ROB-TV, and finding, for example, that brotherly and sisterly love is down two points, that vanity is up three points, that self-interest is down one-and-a-half points and guarded optimism has remained stable under a lot of trading and pressure. She could conclude at the end of the day that basically nothing has really changed much.
In other words, we need to look at the world with indicators that are not just of business or environment or politics or human and civil rights. It is not just a matter of globalization or health; we really need to think about the world in terms of people's qualities, in terms of people's behaviour, in terms of human interaction. I am sure that at the end of the day, almighty God says of us: “I wonder whether the virtues that I love so much are really being practised in the world that I have created.
That is why I am always fascinated whenever the Bible talks about the world. I am fascinated when Jesus in conversations with his disciples and in prayers to his Father in heaven talks about the world. Now, it is fascinating that all the way through the Gospel of John the same word is used for “world.” It is the Greek, “kosmos,” from which we get the word “cosmos.” This word is used in many different settings and depending on where and how it is used, it says different things about the world. Yet, in all cases, it says something most constructive, for the world in the teachings of Jesus is both a place of challenge and a place of opportunity.
As Christians, we live somewhere between that challenge and that opportunity. Many years ago, I saw a Peanuts cartoon drawn near the end of Schultz's life, which was one of his favourites. Lucy decides that she is going to be a psychiatrist and she puts up her stall, “Psychiatric Help - 5 cents.” Very cheap! Charlie Brown sits down with his head in his hands, and he pours out his soul: “You know, sometimes, I am just so lonely I can't stand it! And sometimes, I don't want to be alone. What am I to do?”
Lucy says, “Try and live in between. That will be five cents. Thank you very much!”
We, as Christians, live in between. On the one hand, the world leaves us with a great degree of despair. The world has its challenges. But on the other hand, the world is a place of great opportunity. As Christians, we live somewhere in between.
It can be a very lonely existence if you just look at the challenges. When you look at the nature of the struggles of the disciples, there is no question that Jesus understood that the world was a difficult and a dangerous place for them. There were times when the disciples were really frightened by the world. Jesus even said that they would be rejected by the world. He warned them that sometimes they would have to get away from the world, that they would have to escape from it. He said that the world would reject them in the same way that it rejected him. He maintained that the world is a place that is fraught with danger and tragedy and difficulty.
When he used the term “world,” he implies at times something negative or pejorative, as in: “The world is a hard place.” Who of us in this life has not experienced the world in such terms? Who of us has not felt lonely - like Charlie Brown? Who of us has not felt the antagonism of the world sometimes to the very faith that we hold dear? In fact, I was reading a statistic just recently about the millions of Christians and people of faith who are persecuted every day.
Sometimes, the world is antagonistic to the faith. Sometimes, we feel as if we do not belong in the world, and that our sense of right and wrong and truth and rights and morality is somehow going against the grain of the world, and we feel the challenge and frustration of not having the world in line with the word of God as we see it. Sometimes, as it was for the disciples, the world is a harsh place full of challenge.
Are we, then, simply to succumb to negativity about the world? Are we, then, to concentrate on those texts where Jesus calls into question the Christian living in the world? Are we to allow those texts to dominate us? Are we simply to become obsessed with all the problems that beset us and feel lonely and alone and frightened? No, because the world is also, in the teaching of Jesus, an opportunity. You can see that manifested in the way that Jesus talked about it.
I was incredibly impressed by what our lay reader, Jean said in her presentation on the Bethel studies this morning. We were not in cahoots when she prepared her message, but she quoted that incredible passage from the Gospel of John, Chapter 3 verse 16. No wonder it is one of the most famous texts! (By the way, I saw it being held up by somebody at the World Cup! They got on television)! “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.”
The world, then, despite all its despair and loneliness and problems, is nevertheless the object of God's love. Even more than that, Jesus says to his disciples in clear, unambiguous terms that he has overcome the world. In other words, he says that he has overcome those things that are a challenge to us in the world: The very sin, the very death, the very immorality, the very conflict, the very lack of truth and justice: These things that you see in the world, he has overcome. Therefore, you have no need to fear engaging the world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer referred to that very sentiment as “holy worldliness,” engaging the world that God loves in the understanding that through Christ the very forces of the world that are negative have already been overcome by the grace and the power of Jesus Christ. Therefore, we have no fear to engage it. We have no reason to feel alone in engaging the world. Christ has overcome all the forces of the world that caused the gospel to be suppressed.
That also says to us as disciples that Christ wants us to engage the world. Far be it from me to quote Karl Marx as an authority, but on this he was correct: “Philosophers spend their time trying to interpret the world rather than what I recommend: to change it.” We can interpret the world all we want. To help change it, that is one of the great challenges of being a Christian. If we simply sit back and throw our arms up and acquiesce to all the challenges in the world and do not have the passion to do something about them, then we have abrogated the very gospel of the incarnation. If I have a special word for fathers today, it is to encourage your children to help change the world for the better, and to do so along the lines of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, understanding that it is he and his grace alone that overcomes that world.
In a fascinating print conversation between Dave Toycen, who is the head of World Vision Canada and Stephen Lewis, who is the head of the United Nations AIDS program, Dave Toycen asks Stephen Lewis about the role of the Christian church with that problem. Stephen Lewis had this to say, and I think it is magnificent:
I see the spirituality of the churches in Africa and Canada, and in them there is a moral dimension and fibre, an understanding that the world is out of whack. That a continent of several hundred million people should be responded to for moral and ethical reasons, and for all the things that the Holy Writ says are important to people of conviction and religion. I can't run around trumpeting that I am a democratic socialist! I'd probably be hanged! But you can run around Africa trumpeting the fact that you are from a faith community, have a life of conviction about the Biblical text in invoking God, and feel there is a higher presence that imparts moral imperatives. These are very powerful truths from the Church and I don't diminish for one moment.
Music to my ears!
It is true that we have a gospel to proclaim, we have the power to proclaim it, and we have a truth to impart. Should we not then have that conviction, and should we not engage the world at the point of its disbelief in the power of that truth? I think we ought to!
A very good friend of mine who is an Anglican minister served in one of the most prestigious churches in Boston, The Church of the Advent, on Beacon Hill. One day, he felt in his prayers that God was calling him to leave that church, but not to go to one of the great cathedrals in New York or in San Francisco or even in Boston itself, but to return to his native Canada! He returned to a fishing village on the east coast of Nova Scotia. He gave up his prestigious church, where he had been teaching some of the leading business people in Boston every week the glories of Augustine's confessions and the power of the Scriptures, and he went to this village because of the problems in the fisheries. He knew that there was mass unemployment because of the fishery crisis 15 years ago, and he knew that they needed a pastor.
Here was one of the most qualified, eminent, articulate, brilliant of all ministers, in a fishing village sitting down with the fishermen on the wharf, whose lives had been destroyed before. I asked him, “Why are you doing this? Surely you know that the church is going to miss you greatly in Boston?”
And he said, “Andrew, I envisage my ministry as a ministry of incarnation. I see that what I do is as an extension of the gospel of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, and I believe in this particular setting I have something unique to offer to people whose lives are being destroyed. I believe I go where I think Christ would go.” That is incarnational ministry. Jesus said to his father, “Father, as you have sent me into the world, so I am sending them - the disciples. They are going out into the world, and they are going on our behalf.” The world is a place that God loves, that God cares for, and in Christ we see it.
There is one last quality to the way in which we engage the world, and that is that you and I and the church need the power to engage that world. That power is honest, and it is called the Holy Spirit. We can't do it alone, but we don't have to. That is the power of the Spirit, the same power of the Spirit that came upon the disciples and enabled them to go into the streets of Jerusalem and into the midst of a world of fear and proclaim the love and the truth of the God who loves them.
The great John Chrysostom, an early church father and writer said that when the church engages the world it needs four things. It needs a whole Christ. In other words, an undivided Christ, a Christ that truly reflects the totality of the scriptures. We need a whole Bible, not a part, not the little bits that we like, and the other bits that we cut out, but the whole Bible. We need the whole church, undivided, united in the power of the spirit. Then, he said, we go into the whole world, which is our parish.
My friends, if I have one overriding conviction in my life, if there is one reason to have a church existent in the world, it is to understand that its parish is the fullness of the world. How fitting it is that on this Father's Day we are talking to fathers in different countries who are listening on the radio and the Web in different corners and parts of this city. We are speaking to fathers who may want Italy to win the World Cup or those who might want Argentina or Iran or Ghana or England. But that doesn't matter! The whole world is our parish. What matters is that we want that world to know and to live by and to be changed by the love of God in Jesus Christ and his gospel.
I can end with no words this morning other than those of Jesus himself, for it is he who speaks to us so profoundly. This is what Jesus said:
Father, I want those who you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. Righteous father, though the world does not know you, I do know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love that you have for me may be in them, and that I myself may be in them.
All this for the love of the world! Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.