Sermon by Canon Tom Smail. 17th May 09

All Saints, Sanderstead, 17th May 2009
S E R M O N
You did not choose me but I chose you and I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last — John 15:16

On the stone pavement just outside our daughter’s house in Tulse  Hill, there is written in neat and professional black block capitals the following inspiring words. “The only message is that there is no message.”  And that just about sums up the mood of the moment; post-modernity, as it is often called. Ultimate reality is an imper-sonal interplay of causes and coincidences that in the end are not going anywhere, that are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the things that we care about. We try to build societies and families that will give us meaning and purpose; they all flourish for a bit, but in the end the tides of history swamp them and our own death will make an end of us and carry us soon forgotten away. The only message is that that there is no message, no lasting meaning in the midst of things, no overriding purpose in the evolution of things, no reassuring voice from the heart of things, in the end nothing matters, nobody cares, so drink up, fill in your expense claim, eat drink and be merry, because that is all there is and tomorrow we die.  Oh sure there are other better things around, but there are moments when that mood of despairing bleakness lurks in the background and pulls us down into despondency and despair.

There is no message –that is one end of the spectrum, but at the other stands the words of Jesus, “I have chosen you.”  What if the ultimate truth is that behind the mysterious world of which we find it so hard to make sense, there is not a blank bleakness, but a personal  passion, that far from being indifferent to us is watching our every move, waiting for the right moment, and when that moment comes emerging from the mystery walking along the seashore where we are tending the nets of our every day concerns, stopping where we are, making a commanding claim upon is saying “Follow me and I will take you into a life that is not one damned thing after another but has as its goal and its purpose a glorious social personal and human flourishing in a remade world where God reigns.“ Read more

Jesus the Good Shepherd (John 10:11-18)

On my first trip to Jerusalem, I was more interested to see the Temple than anything else.  We weren’t the most religious family in the world, but we knew that our people are special in God’s eyes, and we did what we had to do to make sure God kept remembering that.  So I pestered my uncle, and that’s how we happened to be in the Temple the afternoon a lame man got healed.  My uncle insisted it was a fraud, but he didn’t see the expression on the man’s face.  He was shocked more than anything.  Of course everyone came running, hoping for a show, but the two men who healed him acted as though it was the kind of thing that happened every day.  My uncle didn’t want to hang around wasting valuable trading time, but he let me go out in the evenings and have a nose around.  I found out quite a lot more about these Jesus people.  They were causing quite a stir in the city, with their preaching and healing, and they’d made quite a lot of converts.  I liked them.  They seemed kind and talked a lot about God loving us and forgiving us if we believed in Jesus.  Even after we went home, I never entirely forgot about the Jesus people, and it wasn’t long before they’d spread to my part of the world.  So obviously, I wasn’t the only one who thought they were making a kind of sense.  I used to sneak out to their meetings sometimes to try and find out more.  The main thing they were saying was that you can only find out about God through Jesus.  Like the men in Jerusalem, they too, were teaching that salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved.

All that of course was back then, but what about today?  No other name?  Wouldn’t Christianity be a lot more popular, a lot more palatable, if it were not for this outrageous claim that salvation is found in no one else?  Have we become something of an embarrassment?  What ’s more, are we increasingly snubbed and marginalised by society at large, because we are out of step with the contemporary religious climate.  Jesus the only way!  What arrogance, shouts the relativist!  Christian imperialism, pronounces the secularist!  There can be many paths up the same mountain claim the sophisticated; as such, Christians must learn to be more tolerant.  These views are now becoming fashionable arguments against the bodily resurrection of Jesus.  It commits us, so people are saying, to a politically incorrect view of ‘other religions’.  It means that Christianity possess a truth that others do not.  I don’t know if you have the same thoughts as me and wish it was simply not like this; that the sharing of our message could be more ‘comfortable’  and ‘acceptable’, that we could be nice to people and avoid rocking the religious boat.  After all isn’t there something reassuringly English about being like that. Read more