SERMON PREACHED
AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH
ORDINARY SUNDAY 31
(30th October) 1988
We are today once more taking part
together in a baptism. It is my understanding that when we bring a child to be
baptized into the Christian faith we are binding that child to the love and
service of God. But what is it to love and to serve God? Often I hear people
professing to believe in God, as if that were all it entailed to be a
Christian. Yes something like 70%[1]
of Australia’s population claim to believe in God; we would be hard pressed to
claim that 70% of Australia’s population were Christian.
So what is a Christian? What are we
asking of these children that we are about to baptize today?
This morning, as on every Sunday,
we have heard the Two Great Commandments. In one New Testament scene, which
appears in various forms in each of Matthew, Mark and Luke, a scribe comes to
Jesus and asks him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus replies,
Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one; and you shall love
the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all
your mind, and with all your strength.
Jesus, in replying thus, is more or
less quoting the summary of the Law recorded in Deuteronomy, beside which all
other law and commandments fade into insignificance. Stemming from that command
there is an additional command,
You shall love your neighbour as
yourself.
Amongst those 70% of Australians who claim to believe in God are a large number
who would often bewail the fact that our young people today are no longer
brought up to know the Ten Commandments. I often hear that complaint, both in
private conversation and in public lamentation, the latter normally being tied
up with complaints about contemporary morality. Yet I am left to wonder the
purpose of learning the Ten Commandments. All ten fade into insignificance
beside the commandment to love God and neighbour, and no amount of rote
learning of commandments will assist us in carrying out that decree.
If in fact we were able to claim
that we had in our lives carried out the first of those great commandments,
then all the other commandments of the Old Testament would fall into place, and
we would indeed be able to claim that we not only knew but lived
the Ten Commandments. That we lived not only the Ten Commandments but also the all
but innumerable[2] and
less well known commandments of the Old Testament Law. But what is seen clearly
by Jesus, and by those who sought to follow Jesus from the very first, is that
no one can claim to have earned the favour of God by living a good life. As
Paul expresses it, “All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God.”
We fall short not only by our own
sins, but because we are caught up into the entire web of human sin. I may or
may not have committed any recognizable sin today, but either way I am caught
up in and involved with the human sins that produce the atrocities of Auschwitz
and Jonestown, or the horrific statistics of domestic violence, including
incest and rape, or the consistent ecological destruction of our God-given
planet. We are all enmeshed in the web of human failure.
So it becomes
little more than hypocrisy to demand of any generation that all will be well or
would be well if only they had learned their Ten Commandments. Even were we to
know every law of the Old Testament, to the extent even of rigidly observing
such gems as, “when you build a new house you are to give your roof a parapet,”
and “you must not wear clothing woven part of wool, part of linen” (Deuteronomy
22: 8, 11), we would still fall short of the command of absolute love demanded
of us by God.
Observance of the Law must
be a response on our part to our prior love of God. It is therefore
insufficient to claim, with 70% of Australians, that we believe in God, but
imperative that we seek not merely to believe in God but to love and serve God
with all the energy and commitment that we can muster.
Yet even that is only the second
part, as it were, of the story. Because the message of Christmas is that it is
God who takes the initiative in relationship between divinity and humanity. Indeed,
that is a message consistent throughout both the Old and the New Testament: the
initiative is God’s.
We can only love God, therefore, in
response to the knowledge that God has first loved us. We cannot love God as
some abstract being “out there.” One statistician defines 16% of Australians as
“believing secularists.” These are people who neither attend church nor pray
regularly but who believe “without a doubt” that God exists. The writer adds,
One wonders what “belief in God” actually means for the “believing
secularists.” It is not likely to mean anything like fervent commitment to a
specific biblical God demanding loyalty and worship.
Hans
Mol, The faith of Australians, 133).
We cannot love God as an abstract,
but exclusively as the God who reveals himself in the events of the first Good
Friday and the first Easter Sunday, the event of Christ. So, Jesus tells the
sympathetic scribe, we love God in the first place because he is one God, not
merely one of many – “Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one” – and then, as the events of Easter remind us,
that the extraordinary depth of God’s love is revealed in the agony of the
cross.
God demands nothing less than
absolute devotion. Such devotion must accept that the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ is the event in which God ultimately reveals Godself
to humankind. Such devotion must then continue into the service and obedience
that should be the hallmark of Christian faith.
It is to that service and obedience
that I believe we are baptizing Melinda Lee and John to whom I have spoken in
private about the meaning of baptism. But to us all here there is implicit in
the ceremony that we are about to join in a grave responsibility to ensure that
the faith community is a community centred on Christ, to the exclusion of all
else. Stemming from that centring on Christ it is to be a community dedicated
to love of our every neighbour. Only when we seek to accept the love of God as
revealed in Christ and in response to that love seek to turn to love and serve
God – far more than merely to believe in God – and to serve our neighbour, are
we able to help these two children grow up to desire for themselves the
promises of baptism. Only then will our Lord turn to us and say, as once he did
to a visionary scribe, “you are not far from the Kingdom of God.”
It is in the Kingdom of God that
the poor are blessed, the meek inherit the earth and children are welcomed as
images of true belief.
No comments:
Post a Comment