Here is the sermon that I preached this morning. There was quite a lot of chatter about if after the service. Not everyone will agree with me, but as usual, comments and debate are welcome here.
Jesus said, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love”.
The news has been dominated this week with a story all about keeping within rules. Every time I’ve turned on the radio or picked up a paper, I’ve read greater and greater outrage about the MPs’ expenses scandal.
It isn’t surprising.
However, as I’ve been listening to that, I have a slightly different take on it to what most people have. You see, I was a candidate in the last General Election. That person staring out from the front of the newspaper making all the excuses in the world for their bad behaviour – that might have been me.
I’ve asked myself this week – can I know that I would have behaved differently if I had been there?
And I don’t know. And that gives me great pause for thought.
The question of how we decide what to do at any given moment in our lives is one of profound significance. How we decide what to do is often thought to be a religious question. I’ve got my own suspicions about whether ethics is a religious game. After all, I think that it is possible for non-religious people to live just as ethically as those of us who do express our spirituality in overtly religious ways.
I’m suspicious of people who think that Christians will behave any better than anyone else. Experience suggests otherwise.
Like many modern people, my way of thinking about ethics does not depend on anything that Jesus said. So I have to contend with his words and ask very serious questions of myself when I encounter any talk of commandments in the gospels.
If you keep my commandments, you abide in my love.
In most of the religions worth thinking about, there are different kinds of people. Religious people seem to find themselves on a spectrum of belief about commandments and rule-keeping and that spectrum seems to be similar across different faiths.
Are you the kind of person who lives by the book and wants clear rules to keep you in order. Or are you the kind of person who wants to think about motivation – the motivation behind those who suggest commandments and the motivation that you might have for breaking or keeping any set of rules.
Christianity contains both kinds of people. So does Islam. So does Buddhism. So does Judaism.
Are we to be rule-keepers or not.
You’ll not be surprised that I’m more interested in knowing why people make the decisions that they do than in judging them against a set of specific commandments.
For me it is a delight that Jesus seems to have distilled the commandments of old down to “Love the Lord your God and Love your Neighbour as yourself.”
Love is the fulfilment of the law in my book.
Occasionally, I know that I have been a rule-breaker in church. Occasionally, I think that doing the right thing is not necessarily to keep the rules that the community has inherited.
That might seem a rather surprising thing to say from a pulpit – but let me give a good example of it from Scripture before giving a similar example from my own experience.
The first reading this morning had an excellent example. The early church faced a question – what to do about Gentile believers – should they be baptised and accepted as Christian believers or was Jesus’s message only for Jesus’s Jewish friends? In our first reading, it was Peter who went out on a limb. It was clear to him that God was already with those who had joined the community who were Gentiles. “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” he asked. And he ordered them to be baptised.
Peter broke the apparent rule that they community had about keeping the grace of God only for the in-crowd. And he was right to do so. Had he not, there would have been little good news of grace for most of us here this morning.
I have a very simple, parallel example from our own experience. St Mary’s attracts a diverse crowd – people from many churches and from time to time, people who come from different faiths.
The convention in the Scottish Episcopal Church is that we offer communion to all who have been baptised. However, as you know, I tend to go a little father than that.
I say that if you are here you belong.
Twice in the past year, I’ve known that people whose own faith background and experience was formed in the Jewish faith were here at a communion service and seen them come up to receive communion. I’ve been happy to give it to them. Not to do so would make a nonsense out of a faith which was born in a Jewish household meal.
I broke a rule when I did that though I don’t think that I broke the conventions of this particular gathering of God’s people. For St Mary’s is a place of radical hospitality. A place for challenging the very idea of rules that keep people in our out of the kingdom and which might seem to exclude people from God’s grace. As if that were even possible.
I am untroubled by members of my own family (most of whom have a background in the Salvation Army and are therefore unbaptised themselves receiving communion. In fact, those are weasel words – I’m not just untroubled by it, I positively enthuse about it. Similarly, with children who are not baptised yet. There is nothing in the gospels about the order in which the sacraments come to people.
If children are fit enough human beings to eat food with their families at home, I am genuinely bewildered as to why they are not seen as fit to eat the good things from God’s table.
Peter’s experience in Acts seems to suggest that he recognised that God was present with people he did not at first expect God to be with.
That’s my experience too.
I was struck by a comment from someone in the Church Times this week when speaking of her frustration that Christians seem to behave without any faith to believe that children and God know one another already, regardless of our attempts to introduce them.
I know that frustration too.
How do we make decisions about what we do? Do we always keep within the rules or don’t we.
It is tempting amidst all the clamour over MPs pay to think that strong rules will sort out all our woes.
Yet life is not so simple. The MPs actually had rules and a great many of them now perceived to have done wrong were actually keeping within them.
It is hard to win the ethical game, whether you are an MP or not.
Strong rules and strong policing are not nearly so important as the formation of people’s own sense of conscience.
If our faith has anything at all to add to the discussion about how rules should or shouldn’t be formed and made and kept, it is the suggestion that Love lies at the centre of who we are and all that we do.
That love is the starting point and the ending place, the beginning and the end, the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega. It is in the name of that love that you are invited to celebrate at this table and to receive God�s bread and wine. It is the good news of that love that you are invited to celebrate in every other place you go and to take the news of Easter that Christ is risen. For if Christ were not risen, we would not be gathered here.
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