Preached Canberra Baptist Church 10th of February 2008
Isaiah 25:17-25, Revelation 21:1-7
Years ago I sat in a church. The sun shone in through the stained-glass windows of the gothic building, as the sun has shone through gothic windows for 900 years. The incense rose towards the ceiling as it has risen towards the ceilings of churches for 2000 years and to the roofs of synagogues and temple for centuries before that. The priests wore their coloured vestments, the robes of a Roman nobleman of the fourth century. As I sat in this congregation on this wonderful occasion enjoying the pomp and ceremony of the service, I suddenly heard words of the One who sits upon the throne ringing out from the lectern as the reader quoted the passage we have heard this morning from Revelation: See, I am making all things new! (Rev 21.5)
I looked at the gothic windows and the fourth centuries robes and looked around and wondered why I was the only person smiling. Why were we not all rolling in the aisles at this outrageous joke? Surrounded by tradition and all the markers of venerable antiquity which are so much a part of the life of the church, the proclamation of the book of Revelation of the dynamic newness that is the work of Jesus Christ was jarring and confronting.
Our two readings this morning, one from the Hebrew scriptures referring to the great hope of Israel for a new world in which they will not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain says the Lord and the other from Revelation one of the last books of the Christian Scriptures, both of them pointing to the hope of a world made new. We, the hearers, are invited to participate in a reality in which former things will not be remembered nor come to mind. We are invited to be glad and rejoice forever in what God is creating. The new thing He is doing.
And yet so often the church is backward looking. We belong to a tradition which looks to the mighty acts of God as they had been manifested in the past. It is not often that people wanting to see the shape of the future come asking the Christian churches to advise and inform them! We have futurology Institutes to do that work for us. Or we can pay big dollars to attend conferences such as the one I was invited to years ago, a conference with “the Change-Masters”, a group which included General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwartzkopf, a number of wealthy property developers and some pop psychology gurus. There was not a theologian nor Church leader in sight.
Perhaps this reflects the Western world's fixation with gradualism in change: the ideological outlook of the West is to see change in incremental rather than radical terms. If you read an article in yesterday’s Australian by Janet Albrechtsen, you would see her applying exactly that logic to our legal system. The church as an institution, however, is even more conservative generally than the cultural outlook around us. Often the church looks back to anchors in the distant past and we live in a world which has a sense of unchanging constancy.
The irony of this is that the Scriptures long for newness and announce change! From the time of Isaiah the ancient prophet, through to Jesus and the early church, Scripture after Scripture invites us to look to the future, to watch for the coming of the Kingdom of God and to invest ourselves in a world that is coming. The first words of the gospel on the lips of Jesus are the proclamation of a turning point in history, the announcement of a new world order (the Kingdom of God) and an invitation or perhaps a command to repent! (Mk 1.15) The simplest translation of this word ‘repent’ is simply a command to change -to change your mind and to change your way of living. This focus on change and newness runs right through the rest of the New Testament. If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation declares the writer of Corinthians (2 Cor 5.17). The book of Romans exhorts us: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God -- what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12.2)
Sometimes in the church we are like that congregation to which I referred in the opening of the sermon – at ease amid all our traditions. The irony is that our message is of God in Christ calling us to a radical sense of newness (a newness in the world and a newness personally that we might be ourselves completely transformed) and all of this somehow lives in an institution that seems to be timeless and grounded in the past. I once had coffee with the current Archbishop of Sydney Archbishop Peter Jensen at the time he was principal of Moore College. I had travelled to visit him with a mutual friend who despaired of the diocese of Sydney can ever doing anything creative. In the car on the way to the college I challenged our mutual friend as to what the diocese should be doing. “That’s easy” he replied. “I have a three word business plan that would lead to be renewal of every aspect of the dioceses work: Bulldoze anything Gothic!” Whether it was buildings, liturgy, vestments, church order, prayer book – if it was vaguely gothic, get rid of it.
I'm enough of a conservative to be wary of his proposed solution. The problem remains how do we participate in the newness of Christ when we live in such an inherently conservative institution? I want to suggest some ways we might do that.
The first thing we need to do is nurture at the heart of the church's life the vision of a world renewed! Both Isaiah and John (who wrote the book of Revelation) were not working in contexts conducive to the triumph of God's purpose. If you read the first part of Isaiah chapter 65 you will see a deep critique and lament of what was happening in Isaiah's time. A vision of the new heavens and new earth was offered to a world of diminished religious practice, cynicism and rebellion. John was writing in prison during a time of persecution. Both of them realised that the seeds of renewal and change lay within the purposes and power of God not in the social and political potentials of the society of which they were a part.
On the eve of the opening of our new Parliament and the change of government and all of the hopefulness that is attendant upon the apology to the stolen generations, in sight of the Ideas Summit and all of the gathered creativity of the nation, it is wise for us to remember the power of newness lies ultimately with God. Much as we applaud such initiatives we are a people who look even further forward, a people whose hope is nurtured by the far vision of a world completely renewed. Something of this gentle scepticism about the promise of the present is revealed in a Leunig cartoon in yesterday's Age. You may know that Leunig is a Christian. His cartoons are very subtly imbued with the Christian worldview. In the cartoon a speaker in a kilt stands before an audience under a banner announcing Brainstorm ‘08. A member of the audience says to the man in the kilt “We thank you for your presentation Professor McLintock, but you haven’t explained how the nation is going to benefit from your solar-powered bagpipes …”
Now the challenge of the church is to ask ourselves whether we really believe that it is God who promises a new world and that new world will come through the gospel, or whether in subtle ways we too are placing our faith in some variant of the solar-powered bagpipes. Or are we completely unconcerned and just happy living in yesterday and not really having a commitment to the future at all? What is the Church here for? What is the purpose and objective of our worship and activity? Well it’s to nurture that vision of the world renewed, about newness in general - a word that Sir Alan Walker used many years ago to sum up in one single word the meaning of the gospel and our response to it. Newness.
The challenge is whether we really believe that newness is the fruit of God's action in our lives and in the world.
To the young people of our Church I would say to you that there is no power transforming the world that is greater than gospel of Jesus Christ and there is nobody more empowered than those who surrender their lives to the gospel of Jesus Christ understanding that it is to give oneself to the renewing of the world. When your elders in the church forget this message and settle into a comfortable pattern of worship and social life it is the young people who should be disturbing us and challenging us so that our lives and our world are renewed through the spirit of God.
One of the most depressing things that I ever heard was to talk to two young people in a local church in another state who bemoaned the fact that the search Committee for their new Pastor had been taken over by the Radicals. These kids were worried because the search Committee was a bunch of radicals who were going to lead the Church in a difficult way. I said “What do you mean the Radicals have taken it over?” With glum faces they said “Mum’s on it”. When mum is the Radical, the church is in trouble. Change was never going to be an easy or smooth process for us and if the newness of God is to touch us as a congregation we need our prophets and stirrers, as much as we need our pastors and administrators.
To the older people amongst us I would want to say that newness is not just the province of the young or the energetic. In some ways the challenge of change is presented most starkly to those of us who are older. We feel the processes of change at work within our very bodies and in our families. We see the world changing around us in ways that are unfamiliar and sometimes threatening. Getting older is a process of change, a process that can be profoundly challenging. Yet part of the invitation of faith is to welcome change, to see in change God's grace to us and new challenges and opportunities opening for us in which we can triumph through the power of God's spirit at work in us.
One of the best parts about being a minister is that you get to go and visit people. Visiting people you get to see how they handle changes and adversity, blessing and sadness. Friends, there are some people in this church who are an absolute joy to spend time with. They have known times’ hand upon their bodies in ways that are painful and limiting, sometimes frustrating or even humiliating. Yet they are filled with joy, because they sense the presence of Jesus in their life and they know that their life in the Spirit means that they are renewed every day and their lives shine out with this power of newness. As I face some health challenges myself in coming weeks, I want to acknowledge them and thank them for their inspiring example of the way they have shown me how to live with a sense of excitement and joy even in the face of illness and surgery. It’s a very real sense that we minister to one another and your presence does matter for others around us.
In our last Deacon's meeting we grappled with the issue of the church budget. You'll have read in the bulletin that we are several thousand dollars behind what we had hoped would be our giving, but that was not the main focus of our attention. We grappled with the issues of how we give our money to our brothers and sisters in the Third World. Do we give it wisely and well? How do we know that it's being applied where the real need is? Above all, what can we really do, given the enormous complexity and scale of the problems that the world faces? A knowledgeable adviser whom we turned to for some advice about what was happening with one of our projects told us that in that particular country, however bad things might look upon the television, they were actually worse in reality. We grappled with the issue, what are our few thousand dollars here and there going to do in such a situation?
We need to take newness seriously, to believe in, and work for, a world that is renewed! We focus not upon the limitations of what we can give, because Jesus told a parable about a widow who gave two copper coins. We focus not about the limitations of what we can do, (and we’re all limited in some way by health or inexperience or age) because as Paul said “It is when I am weak that I am strong”. We focus not upon our lack of knowledge, or the absence of political power or the fact that we are not esteemed or honoured in the world, because as the writer of Corinthians said: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are nothing, to reduce to nothing things that are.” (1 Cor 1.28-29)
Our task as disciples of Jesus is to focus on and claim the newness that is in Christ! We look for that renewal of our minds and our being that comes from knowing the presence and power of the spirit of God. We look towards that renewal of the world that is the ultimate work of God – a work in which we all are invited to participate. We look for the newness of God at work in our humble community and in our own lives whatever our limitations, whatever our challengers, whatever the things that hold us back.
See, I make all things new! says the One upon the throne: May that power of newness be seen in those of us who worship Him and follow Him!