Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
8/11/15 11.00am Service
You can listen to this sermon here https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/sunday-morning-8-november-2015-remembrance-sundaymp3#t=32:58
Ephesians 4.25-5.5 So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us
speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. 26 Be angry but do not sin; do not
let the sun go down on your anger, 27
and do not make room for the devil. 28
Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with
their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. 29 Let no evil talk come out of
your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that
your words may give grace to those who hear.
30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you
were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. 31 Put away from you all
bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all
malice, 32 and be kind to one
another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven
you. 5:1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved
children, 2 and live in love,
as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and
sacrifice to God. 3 But
fornication and impurity of any kind, or greed, must not even be mentioned
among you, as is proper among saints. 4
Entirely out of place is obscene, silly, and vulgar talk; but instead, let
there be thanksgiving. 5 Be
sure of this, that no fornicator or impure person, or one who is greedy (that
is, an idolater), has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.
‘Remember, remember, the fifth of
November,
gunpowder,
treason, and plot…’
Do you remember?
Our Violinist remembers…
If you haven’t met our Violinist
before,
he
is made from decommissioned weapons
from
the civil war in Mozambique.
I bet he remembers…
Each year, on Remembrance Sunday,
the
United Kingdom stops, and pauses,
and
remembers those who have made what is
often called,
‘the great sacrifice’.
And there are plenty of other
euphemisms that we might use this day as well:
We
may say that we remember those who have ‘given their all for others’,
that
we remember those who have ‘paid the ultimate price for our freedom’,
that
we remember those who have ‘laid down their futures for our future’.
And all the while we avoid actually
saying
what
it is that we are remembering;
which is the bloody and violent deaths
of
countless young people
killed
in the service of their country’s national interest,
many
of them conscripted.
We find ourselves using the passive
voice, rather than the active,
and
so we say that we remember those who have
died in war,
as
if it’s all something of an unfortunate accident,
rather
than that we remember those who have been
killed
because
they were put in front of machines
designed
to end human life as efficiently as possible.
And so we’re back to ‘sacrifice’ again,
and
to ‘the great sacrifice’ that we remember on this day.
And suddenly, in my mind, it stops
being such a euphemism,
because
of course a sacrifice, in biblical terms at least,
is
where a life is taken with specific intent.
The animal, whether it be human or
otherwise,
is
rendered helpless, stretched out on the altar,
and
the knife is put in so that the life is taken,
and
the blood flows out, over the altar, and onto the ground.
And, in biblical times,
the
sacrifice of a living creature had a specific purpose.
It was to remove the guilt of sin
from
the person or people offering the sacrifice.
Someone or something else pays the
price for our wrongdoing,
so
we don’t have to.
I sin, and another pays,
that’s
the transaction of sacrifice.
And that same transaction underlies
the
military sacrifices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
every
bit as much as it did those of the millennia before Christ.
The tendency to require another to pay
the price
for
our collective sin and guilt,
is
a recurring feature of human society,
and we are no more immune to this
than
any generation that has gone before us.
We still send our armed forces on ‘offensive’
missions,
we
still ask young men and women to die in our name
for
the protection of the society that we privilege and profit from.
And we still call it ‘sacrifice’.
And
we might be right.
Did anybody watch Dr Who last night?
If
you didn’t, and you want the most superb exploration
of
the ethics of warfare, sacrifice, and forgiveness,
aimed
at a childhood audience
you
can do no better than last night’s episode.[1]
Let’s listen again to what this
morning’s reading from Ephesians
says
about sacrifice.
5.1-2 Therefore be imitators of God,
as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up
for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
We are to be imitators of God,
we are to live in love as
Christ lived in love,
and we are to understand that
love, in which we live, in terms of sacrifice.
The writer of Ephesians clearly here has in view here
the Jewish system of
sacrificial offering;
where the carcass of the
freshly-slaughtered animal was burned,
causing the fragrant smell of
cooking meat to rise to the heavens.
A ‘fragrant offering and
sacrifice to God’, the writer tells us…
And in place of an animal, he offers us an image of Jesus,
slaughtered like a lamb on
the altar of human sin.
But there’s a crucial difference here,
which is that Ephesians sees
the sacrifice of Jesus
as an act freely chosen by
Jesus.
Here, as elsewhere in the New Testament,
the language of sacrifice is
transformed,
from the Jewish
sacrificial system understanding of it
to an emphasis that Jesus
gave himself as the sacrifice.
There is no reference made to any demand from God that he do so,
he is not the unwilling
sacrifice of the lamb laid out on the altar,
or the person conscripted and
send to fight.
In contrast to the human tendency
to make sacrificial victims
on the altar of our own guilt and self-interest,
we meet in Jesus the novel notion of loving self-sacrifice,
we meet the one who takes
upon himself the mantle of a slave,
and offers himself that
others might live.
And in a world where the demand is constantly
for others to die that we
might live,
and on a day where we remember the ‘great sacrifice’
that our society has required
of so many,
we have never needed more
a way out of the spiral of
sacrificial scapegoating
than we need it today.
‘Imitate God’, ‘live in love’, what does this mean?
What does it mean for us to live in love, as Christ loved us
and gave himself up for us, a
fragrant offering and sacrifice to God?
What does it mean for us to learn to
move, in our lives,
away
from the seductive comfort
of
asking another to pay the price for our guilt and sin?
Well, thankfully, the writer of
Ephesians doesn’t leave us hanging,
and
he surrounds his theological command to live in love,
with
some of the most practical commands in the letter.
This is not just ‘up there’ as a big
idea,
this
earths itself here-and-now, today, in who we are now,
and
who we will be over lunch,
and
who we will be this afternoon, and tomorrow.
Because it all begins with how we
respond to sin.
Because if we can come to terms with
our own sinfulness,
we
can begin to learn to live differently in the light of it.
Ephesians makes it very clear that following
the path of Christ
is
not about obeying a long list
of
‘that shalt not’ commands.
Christianity is not a sin-avoidance
strategy,
because
as Judaism had already proved, that didn’t work,
and
needed a sacrificial system to deal with human failures to keep rules.
And yet, the irony is that Christians have often chosen
to
see Christianity as a rule-based religion
with
commands to be kept if one is to avoid sin,
or
broken if one is falling into sin.
Rather than abandoning a rules-based
approach to dealing with human sin,
all
too often Christianity has simply re-clothed
the
Jewish Law in Christian clothing,
and
then carried on as if nothing changed at the sacrificial death of Christ.
The Christian obsession with the threat
of Hell in the hereafter
has
become for many the motivating factor
for
ethical behaviour in the here and now,
while salvation has become for so many primarily
about obedience
to
a system of behaviour
which
the church takes it upon itself to enforce
By this understanding, (which is all
too common, I think, in our churches),
if
you want to belong to the church
you
have to not only believe the right things
but
you also have to behave in the right way
with the result that the church comes
to understand itself
as
the community of those who are, on the whole, getting it right,
because
we kick out those who aren’t, or don’t let them in.
And we define ourselves over and
against those outside the church
who
become, in our minds at least, those who are busy getting it wrong.
And so an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality
develops,
which
gives us the mechanism for scapegoating them,
and condemning them to eternal torment
whilst
we congratulate ourselves on having
escaped it.
In other words, we develop a theology
which requires those beyond the faith,
or
those who have fallen away from the true faith,
to
pay the price for our own human failings.
They pay the price to assuage us of our
guilt,
and
absolve us of our responsibility.
Do you remember the old ‘wayside
pulpit’:
‘Which
part of Thou Shalt Not don’t you understand?’
plastered
on the front of a church!
By that understanding, the church
becomes those
who
do understand what ‘thou shalt not
means’
and they become those who, at least in
public,
are
seen to obey the commandments.
It is a troubling fact that for many
people beyond the church
the
sin-obsessed, sanctimonious,
and
self-absorbed attitude of many Christians
is
the first thing that comes to mind
when
they think of Christianity
And the inference of a slogan such as
‘Which
part of Thou Shalt Not don’t you understand?’
is
that the church has it right
whilst
everyone else has it wrong
and
that those inside the church are the saints
whilst
those beyond the church are the sinners
And so the message that the church
sends
about
the good news of the gospel of Jesus
gets reduced to a mantra of:
‘Do
this, don’t do that,
and
avoid the other
or
there’ll be trouble’
And so the perception is reinforced of
Christians
as
people who are always going on
about
sin, sex, and suchlike
whilst
having no fun at all themselves along the way.
Does the way we behave actually matter?
And
how does that relate to what we ask other people to do
when
we get it wrong?
For many, the starting point in such a
discussion
may
be the ‘ten commandments’ of Judaism
which, according to the Exodus story,
were
given to Moses on Mount Sinai,
and came to form the basis of the
Jewish law, or the Torah.
There are many churches
which
have the ten commandments
lavishly
reproduced on their walls,
and generations of Christians
have
grown up learning them by heart.
As we saw last week, however, the
question
over
whether the ten commandments are actually binding
on
those who are followers of Jesus
is
far from settled;
and it’s certainly possible to make a
compelling case
that
the defining feature of Christian discipleship
is
not so much about obedience to the ancient Jewish law code
as
it is about obedience
to
the inner prompting of the Spirit of Christ
As the author of our passage this
morning from Ephesians put it
when
talking about right and wrong behaviour:
Ephesians 4:30 do not
grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the
day of redemption.
The image here is of a stamp,
which
marks something indelibly:
And the idea is that those who are ‘in
Christ’
are
marked with a stamp, or a seal,
which
is the holy character of the Spirit of Christ at work within them.
By this understanding, the sign of our
belonging to Christ
is
the activity in our lives of the Spirit of Christ in our lives,
drawing
and shaping and moulding us
into
the likeness of Christ.
And this understanding of Christian
ethical behaviour
as
deriving from the activity of the Spirit of Christ within us,
rather
than from our slavish obedience to a list of ten commandments,
is important to bear in mind
when
we consider issues of sin and morality.
Because on the one hand,
this
move away from a comprehensive list of ‘dos and don’ts’
may
seem a profoundly threatening move,
as
it can appear to leave the door open
for
all sorts of moral and ethical ambiguities,
and
yes it does.
But on the other hand,
it
releases those who are ‘in Christ’
from
the burden of meticulous law-keeping
in
order to secure their salvation,
and
it frees them to discover life lived in Christ
as
a positive outworking of the call of Christ
to
follow him and to be his people.
The great German theologian of the
second world war, Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
who
took a stand against Hitler and was ultimately executed
for
his stand against the tyranny of the Nazi regime,
put it like this:
· ‘Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about
courageously and actively doing God’s will’
You see, all of this theology I’ve been
doing
begins
to earth itself when we have to ask
‘how
are we going to behave?’
How are we going to behave when we have
to live in a world
where
people are asked to fight and die on our behalf
What are we going to do, how are we
going to respond,
in
this complex world where people are today dying for us?
· ‘Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about
courageously and actively doing God’s will’
I’m not one to particularly point at
the USofA, but I will…
What
are we to make of Christianity when it is more obsessed
with
a president’s personal life
than
it is with his foreign policy?
· ‘Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about
courageously and actively doing God’s will’
… said Bonhoeffer, in the midst of the
second world war.
All too often Christians have spent
their lives and efforts
in
seeking to cautiously avoid sin,
whilst missing the call to courageously
and actively
engage
in doing God’s will.
For too long, and for too many,
the
starting point has been that of right behaviour,
and those who have been the gatekeepers
of our churches
have
made personal morality paramount
and
excluded those who do not match their definition of it.
And in doing so they have missed the
radical call of God
to
follow him into the world
as
risk-takers for the kingdom of God,
accepting
and welcoming those
whom
others would exclude,
and
embracing those whom others revile.
Which is all very inspiring,
and
from the point of view of many Christians,
all
very radical.
But, I can almost hear some of you
wondering,
does
this mean that ethical behaviour isn’t important?
Does this mean that we can forget about
morality?
Is
Simon saying that sin doesn’t matter?
Well, no, I’m not saying that. At all.
I do think ethical behaviour is
important,
and
I don’t think we can disregard morality,
and
yes, sin really does matter, very very much.
But not in the way that Christians have
often understood it.
You see, the call to live lives
in
obedience to the ethic of the Spirit of Christ,
rather than in obedience
to
a list of commandments,
is not a call to abandon ethics.
It is an invitation to re-think the
basis
on
which we will take our ethical decisions in our lives,
this
morning, over lunch, this afternoon, and tomorrow.
If we start with a list,
and
measure our life, or worse, someone else’s life,
against
that list,
then
it’s quite easy to see where the faults are
and
it’s also quite easy to see where the sins are.
I haven’t murdered anyone, so ‘tick’
I haven’t committed adultery, so ‘tick’
I haven’t lusted after my neighbour’s
ox, so ‘tick’
and so on…
However, this tick-box approach to
personal morality
can
mask a more insidious complicity with sinfulness
that runs far deeper than the surface
actions
which
feature in such lists of behaviour.
I may not have murdered anyone,
but
that doesn’t mean I am free from complicity
in
those global systems which sustain my western lifestyle
at
mortal cost to the poor and disadvantaged
around
the world.
I may not have murdered anyone,
but
that doesn’t mean there isn’t a young man, or a young woman,
out there right now, murdering in my name,
and doing so in order that I might benefit;
paying
the sacrifice, maybe the ‘ultimate sacrifice’,
that I might have my freedom.
I may not have committed adultery,
but
I am part of a society where women are trafficked and abused
to
feed the insatiable demands of the so-called sex industry
I may not have lusted after my
neighbour’s ox,
but
I am part of a society where greed and envy are normative,
where
the pornographic objectification of women is normalised,
where
keeping-up-with-the-Joneses is our national past-time,
and
where competitive consumerism is rampant.
And along with everyone else,
I
seek to rid myself of my guilt, and my complicity in all of this,
by
offloading it onto others,
asking
them to pay the price for my sins.
Who I am, and how I behave, does indeed
matter. Very much.
But
this is far more than a statement about personal morality,
motivated
by a fear of eternal punishment,
or
a desire to condemn others that I might be free.
The injunction, ‘don’t do that or
you’ll go to Hell’,
gives
way in Christ to a recognition that it is our actions
which
can cause Hell to come into being in our midst.
Sin, by this understanding,
becomes
less about ‘me’ and my personal ethics,
and more about ‘us’
and
the ethics of our lives lived together before God.
And this isn’t to say that what I do
doesn’t matter,
of
course it does,
but the basis on which it matters
is
not so much a battle against Hell hereafter,
as
it is the battle Hell here and now.
There are many places I could point to around
the world
where
Hell is happening at this moment.
And there are many ways that I could understand
my life,
as
having caused that, and condemned people to it.
Sin, when understood in this way,
takes
account of the effect our actions have
on
those with whom we are called to share this planet.
As the liberation theologian Gustavo
Gutierrez put it:
· ‘Sin is evident in oppressive structures.’
· ‘Sin is the root of a situation of injustice and exploitation.’
· ‘Sin demands a radical liberation,
which in turn necessarily implies a political liberation.’
which in turn necessarily implies a political liberation.’
-
Gustavo Gutierrez
The battle against sin involves politics.
So our writer of Ephesians lists sins:
lying, anger, stealing and evil talk.
They’re exposed with a consistent emphasis
on how they affect
the way people live in relation to
others
Ephesians lists the sins of bitterness, wrath,
power struggles, slander and malice,
and these are contrasted with the
command to be kind to one another
showing
again that those sins which distort human relationships
or
demean and disempower another person
are those which are worthy of special
mention.
By the same token, fornication, impurity, greed,
obscene and vulgar talk, drunkenness
and debauchery
are all presented in the context
of
the way in which they disrupt the in-breaking Kingdom of God,
and
unsettle the dawning of justice, and righteousness, and peace.
But interestingly, the antidote that Ephesians
offers to these sins
isn’t
a command to just try harder to avoid them.
Rather, it is an encouragement to allow
the Spirit of Christ
to
bring into being the behaviours
that
result from having been baptised into Christ.
The naming of sin,
and
the exposing of its effects,
doesn’t lead simply to a renewal of
effort to avoid them,
something
which, as those of us who have tried
to
keep a few new years resolutions will know,
is
doomed to failure.
Rather, the naming of sin,
and
the exposing of its effects,
casts us back on the Spirit of Christ,
who
alone has the power to stamp us
with
the seal of the character of Christ.
Those who have been baptised into
Christ
have
already identified with him in death and resurrection,
just as Jesus himself identified with
us
in
the frail flesh of our sinful humanity.
And as Christ entered our reality of
sin as liberator,
blazing
the path from slavery to freedom,
from
death to new life.
So those who have named Jesus as Lord,
and
have been baptised into his name,
in turn become the agents of liberation
to
others who are still enslaved
by
the destructive effects of sin.
We become the peacemakers;
we
become the heralds of the dawning kingdom of God;
we
become those who will not be complicit with the systems
that seek to ensnare us, and drag us into
the world
of sin and Hell-on-earth.
And it has long seemed to me that the
root cause of sin
is
the human attempt to possess for ourselves
that
which should only be given to God.
Or, to give it its theological term,
idolatry.
Whenever we humans seek to place
ourselves
at
the centre of the universe,
whenever we make gods for or of
ourselves,
or
those things which are dear to us,
we lose our sense of relatedness to the
one true God
who is Lord of all,
whenever this happens,
Hell
and destruction are never far behind.
Whenever humans seek to place our own
efforts, achievements or desires
at
the centre of our world
we open the path to misery once more.
From Flanders’ fields to the shores of
Syria,
it
is human sin that places and keeps people in Hell,
requiring of them the ultimate
sacrifice
for
the sake of those of us who wish to carry on living at ease.
And so by this understanding,
the
baptismal confession ‘Jesus is Lord’
becomes
the most powerful, restorative and liberating statement
that it is possible for a human being to
utter.
Because to name Jesus as Lord,
crucified for our forgiveness,
is
to relegate all other claims on our allegiance
to
their rightful place.
When Jesus is proclaimed as Lord,
offered as a sacrifice for our sinfulness,
his
Spirit stamps us once more with the holy character of Christ,
and calls and equips us for the task of
liberation
as
we join with him in challenging those sinful structures in our world
which
promote oppression, injustice and exploitation.
And as we name Jesus as Lord
we
speak into being a world where sin is rendered powerless
and
where the kingdom values of
righteousness
and peace
and
compassion and kindness
are
released into our midst.
The good confession that Jesus is Lord
brings
that which was in darkness out into the light
and
robs it of its power
releasing
those who speak it to be children of light.
As the writer to the Ephesians puts it:
‘Therefore be imitators of God, as
beloved children,
and
live in love,
as
Christ loved us and gave himself up for us,
a
fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.’ (Eph 5.1)
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