Advice to Ephesians

Address given on Sunday 2nd August 2015, the 9th after Trinity, at Templederry & St Mary's, Nenagh

Today’s OT reading (2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a) is a shocking story, isn’t it?

We heard the first part last week - the great King David, whom God has so favoured, arranged for Uriah the Hittite to be in effect murdered because he lusted after his wife Bathsheba. This week we hear how David takes her into his harem. Word of this wicked deed has got out, and the prophet Nathan confronts David, accuses him and tells him to his face that God will punish him. But David confesses his sin, and Nathan pronounces absolution, saying ‘The Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die’.

You may feel shocked that David was let off so lightly for such a wicked act. However, that is not the end of it - we are told later in 2 Samuel that David was later publicly humiliated, both by family strife and by his son Absalom openly seizing his concubines, much as Nathan had prophesied.

But the truly shocking truth is this: it is the very nature of our God to forgive even the most heinous misdeeds of those who truly repent. That is shocking, because it is so unlike our own nature, but it is also comforting to us as sinners. But notice - even though we may be forgiven, we do not escape the consequences of our evil deeds.

What I want to talk about today, though, is the advice Paul gives to the Ephesians in the 2^nd reading (Ephesians4:1-16)

Paul urges the church as a body to make ‘every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’, while urging individuals to behave ‘with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love’. Put that way it sounds easy, doesn’t it? But the history of the church over 2000 years has shown just how hard it is!

Paul points out the variety of gifts that have been given to the church: ‘that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers’. I wonder if we have come to expect our parish clergy to display all of these gifts at the same time in the one individual. It must be a very heavy burden for them to bear, and perhaps we should not expect so much of any one person.

Paul goes on to describe the purpose of these gifts: ‘to equip the saints’ - which in this context means all church members – ‘for the work of ministry’ – that is, serving others - in order to ‘build up the body of Christ’  - the church as a whole.

Paul calls the Ephesians ‘to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ’. ‘We must no longer be children’, he says, ‘tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming’. Instead, ‘speaking the truth in love’, we must grow together to work like the church body Christ means us to be, ‘joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped’.

Don’t you just love that image of the church as a living body, with Christ as the head!

I believe this advice is just as relevant to us today as it was to The Ephesians.

First, let’s relate it to our own parish. We are very lucky that God has sent us Rev Lucy to be our pastor during the vacancy. In due course we will receive a new Rector, and of course a new Rector always brings change. Most of us are suspicious of change - some changes we like, and some we dislike, and different people like and dislike different things.

I feel strongly that Paul’s words have a message for us in this context: with humility and gentleness, speaking the truth in love, we are called to make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace within our own parish, both during the vacancy and amid the changes a new Rector will bring. We should be careful not to make mountains out of molehills, and not to over-react to the changes we experience.

Second, let’s relate it to our Church of Ireland and the Anglican Communion. I’m sure you, like me, have been reading and hearing in the public media about dissensions in the Church.

In all of this, I think I detect some of the things Paul warns us of: winds of doctrine, trickery, and crafty scheming. It is clear that in many churches of the Communion, including the Church of Ireland, there are those who are preparing for schism. The immediate issues are those of LGBT relationships and equal marriage. But underlying these issues are profound differences in how Anglican Christians perceive the word of God, and the role of the Spirit in interpreting it.

Whatever our own views may be, I feel each of us would do well to respond to Paul’s words, to resist being tossed to and fro by the winds, to speak the truth in love, and to refuse to countenance the dismemberment of Christ’s body. We do not all need to believe exactly the same things, and I for one consider myself in communion with all who confess Jesus’s name.

Let me finish with a prayer for the whole of Christ’s church, by Canon Frank Colquhon:

Heavenly Father, whose will it is

that your Church should be one visible body,

so that the world might see and believe:

draw us and all your people closer to him

who is the one Head, Jesus Christ,

so that we may come closer to one another;

and unite us all in a common concern

to share your good news with others

and further your kingdom here on earth,

in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord: Amen

Creation in Crisis

An address given at Templederry and Killodiernan on 13 September 2009, the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, on the theme Creation in Crisis suggested by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland for Creation Time.

God’s creation is in crisis!

Well, perhaps not the whole of creation, but this planet is in crisis. And it is we human beings who are making an unholy mess of it - this beautiful world, our wonderful Garden of Eden, which we share with so many others of God’s creatures.

There is room for very little argument about the facts of climate change, nor that human beings are playing the dominant role in causing the crisis of global warming.

The message from the climate scientists working in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is very clear. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has gone up, largely due to people burning fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas, but also due to people cutting down forests and intensifying agriculture. This is causing average global temperatures to rise inexorably – by about 1°C already, with more inevitable. As a result:

• sea levels will rise - probably by around a metre by 2100, what ever changes we make now – threatening coastal communities around the world;
• extreme weather events – storms, floods and droughts – will become more frequent, causing increasing death and destruction;
• and eco-systems world wide will be disrupted, with potentially serious consequences for the entire web of life on earth.

Aid agencies like Christian Aid and Trocaire warn, correctly I’m sure, that in the immediate future those most threatened will be the poorest of the poor in the Third World. But as temperatures rise, we will all pay the price.

Scientists also warn that unless we limit global warming very soon, the planet may pass one of several points of no return and undergo run-away heating, with quite apocalyptic and irreversible consequences.

Wouldn’t it be wise for people all over the world to heed these warnings and start to make the changes necessary to limit global warming? The UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen in December will be an opportunity for the leaders of the nations to do just that. But there are wishful-thinkers and sceptics who refuse to believe the climate scientists, and there are those who selfishly procrastinate, waiting for others to act first. Will global leaders rise to the occasion? We must pray that they will.

All this echoes today’s OT reading (Proverbs 1:20-33)

Wisdom is personified as a woman, appealing to the people in the street. She calls them to ‘choose the fear of the Lord’ – in other words to do God’s will not their own. But many – the simple, the scoffers, the fools, she calls them - refuse to listen to Wisdom.

‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Give heed to my reproof’, she begins.

And she goes on to warn them of the consequences of not listening: ‘Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord, would have none of my counsel, and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way and be sated with their own devices. For waywardness kills the simple, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but those who listen to me will be secure and will live at ease, without dread of disaster.’

The climate scientists and the climate activists are calling all of us to change the way we live and work to limit and reverse global warming, in much the same way surely, as Wisdom called the people on the street to ‘choose the fear of the Lord’ in the Book of Proverbs. Will we listen to Wisdom, or will we respond like the simple, the scoffers and the fools?

The climate change crisis is one part of the Crisis of Creation – but not all of it, I think.

We are also experiencing a social crisis on a global scale, where millions of people live on the edge of starvation in the poor world, while millions of people in the rich world live on a treadmill of consumption, using up the earths finite resources at an ever increasing rate which cannot continue. And we are also in the middle of an economic crisis, with asset prices crashing and people being thrown into unemployment, impoverishing millions.

All these crises are I think deeply linked. And as Christians we should be able to recognise the root cause of them all very well: it is human selfishness and greed – old fashioned sins to which people have been liable since the dawn of time.

Jesus challenges us to believe in the good news about God – that if we repent he forgives. And that enables us to follow the way Jesus shows us, seeking and working for God’s kingdom which is coming near. That is the way we must overcome the crisis of creation.

But today’s NT reading (Mark 8:27-38) reminds us that the task will not be an easy one. He tells the crowd and his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.’

Now, in rich Ireland – and compared to many others we are still rich, despite the crash – not all of us are particularly selfish and greedy. But most of us have become trapped – within my own lifetime - in a lifestyle of high consumption fuelled by lots of cheap fossil energy. That will have to change or we will destroy God’s planet for our children and grandchildren. The change can only start with individuals - with you, with me. And the change will be painful.

• Will you deny yourself unnecessary consumption and make a start to tackle the crisis of creation? Will you?
• Will you take up the cross, changing the way you live and work to reduce damage to the planet? Will you?
• The ball is in your court and mine. What will your decision be?