Sermon
5th December 04
Roman’s 15: 4 & 13
“Everything written in the Scriptures was written…..
that we might have hope.”
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy.”
At Christmas time every household, each individual, has their own hopes and dreams.
And if we were to go round the congregation, many and various would be the things hoped for.
I don’t mean presents. I mean things like healing and recovery after an operation, or the return of a son from overseas, a trip over seas, or a business venture to make a profit for the first time.
We can and do spend a great deal of time dreaming of what might be in our personal lives.
But the church question is: What can we dream together?
How close to the ancient dream of the prophets would we dream if we dreamed together?
“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together
and a little child shall lead them.”
Poetically what is our current state compared with this desired state?
How far is our society, either in New Zealand or internationally, how far from this cherished dream.
The world at large has many different people, different cultures and religions, many wolves and many lambs, leopards and kids, but only the law can keep them peaceably together.
In 1998, on behalf of St John’s in the city I spent some time in Los Angeles looking at the churches in that great city. I was driven around Los Angeles by a Muslim Taxi driver from whom I gained much real information about the city. One of the things he told me was that in his opinion it was only the law that kept the people in Los Angeles from devouring, hurting and killing each other.
He said it with such intensity, over the course of the two weeks, that I have never forgotten it.
Now of course for the Muslims the law is sacred. The law is holy. For Christians, in the words of St Paul in his letter to the Romans, the law is a necessary evil.
Surely we have a long way to go for the peaceful acceptance of each other’s differences to be accepted and cherished with out the rule of law.
Christian people are those who are held together by this ancient dream of the prophets. Our hoping for it is what draws us into the future. Our God is a God of hope, the source of hope. And who hopes for what he sees.
What we hope for in the future contradicts what we see now. Christian people should be the least concerned about the struggle to achieve the best legal description of how people can be protected under the law, because our future hope is the contradiction of our present state. Our present situation has to be broken down before we can put it together again in new and living ways.
So much of what we see in our present day society is not what we want. But we are drawn into the future by our vision of a much better world.
We here at St Andrews have already gone through a little of this process with our buildings. What we see now is not what we want. What we want, and what we have dreamt about together is the contradiction of what we see at present.
This is how the God of hope works with his people.
Jorgen Moltman the great German scholar puts it like this:
The present time for believers is no longer determined by the past. It takes its definition from the future.
This is true whether we are speaking of buildings or our life together, or any aspect of time. The present moment does not have to be determined by the past. It can be determined by what we hope for into the future.
This is what we have done with regard to our buildings. The Parish Council is establishing two groups to bring our thinking to fruition.
We must also be guided by this God of hope with regard to our lives together. The way we live together is not to be determined by how people have lived together in the past, but by what we can dream into the future. And the dream of the prophets is the mighty dream that holds us steady. The dream became a reality in Jesus Christ, and can become real in us if we dwell upon it and cause our society to dwell upon it until we do not need the law, because as Jeremiah says, the law will be written on every heart and in every mind.
But for the moment the law is necessary. It is necessary to protect those who are different. It is necessary to protect those who are weak, because without the law the majority would crush the minority.
Christian people ought not to be concerned about the need for laws to protect the weak, except that we hope for a time when the strong will be able to self limit their own strength, without need of the law. There are many different animals in the jungle.
The dream is that the wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid.
But the reality at the moment is that wolves would try to make lambs into wolves.
Family life in New Zealand and the way that men and women have been living together has been changing for decades now, and the the problem for the legislators
is how to describe the situation of people legally so that everyone’s rights are respected and people protected.
In order to move into our desired state we are going to need much flexibility of thought and practice.
We will need empathy with those who are different from ourselves.
We will need to be able to compromise in a spirit of good will.
We will require mutual cooperation for the common good. This is the hope that we have within us for the future. This is what we must move toward.
Jesus Christ has already gone before him. We have the example of his life, and the presence of his Spirit. Let us move forward with his grace. |
