Sermon
delivered at All Saint’s Church, Whiteparish, Wiltshire – Sunday 14th
February 2016
Jonah 3;
Luke 18:9-14
May
I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and may these words be a
blessing to all who hear them. Amen
When I first read tonight’s
passages of scripture in preparation for this evening’s service I was
immediately reminded of a story I heard a few years ago which, hopefully, is
very much a one off – as it does not show the Church of England in a very good
light.
The story goes that a new
young and enthusiastic curate became the vicar of a wealthy parish somewhere in
the Home Counties. Having undertaken his
placement training in an inner city he had seen deprivation and un-Godliness in
great abundance and felt that the church had an important place in any
community in shaping people to care more about each other, their environment and
thereby break the spiral of evil he saw about that place.
This young vicar felt that
even in a rich dormitory town close to London evil and depravation were still
present and, anxious to touch the hearts of those less fortunate and to
encourage them to come to church, one day he placed a huge billboard outside
the front of the church which read “All
Sinners Welcome”. It wasn’t long before one of the church wardens spotted
it and began to protest. He consulted the parishioners and they requested the
young vicar to remove it. They argued that this was giving the church a bad
name. Those attending it were good, wealthy and righteous people. They didn’t want
to attract the “riff raff” – especially those with no money – and the sign also
suggested that those attending that church were themselves sinners. The young
cleric refused and there started a battle which involved the archdeacon and the
bishop and the good and the great of the Diocese leading to the young cleric’s
removal and sending to a parish “more appropriate to his calling”.
I tell you this story
because it happened not so many years ago and closely resembles the scriptural
stories we heard this evening. Jesus
said, when similarly challenged by the Pharisees when he called Levi (Matthew)
the Tax Collector and ate with his colleagues, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. But go and learn
what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have not come to call the
righteous but the sinners” [Matthew 9.9-13] and again we read in Luke how
Jesus came and ate in the house of Zacchaeus another tax collector and agent of
the Romans and at the end of the meal declared “Today salvation has come to this house because this man too, is a son
of Abraham; for the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” [Luke
19:1-10].
As we begin our journey
through Lent so the concept of salvation
should be foremost in our minds. From the period from Ash Wednesday to Easter
Sunday is a major journey for all Christians – following as it does Christ’s
own journey from the wilderness and temptations, through the triumph of Palm
Sunday, the highs and lows of Holy Week culminating in the crucifixion and resurrection.
As we go on this Lenten journey of pilgrimage it is good to remind ourselves
why Jesus became incarnate and died on the Cross.
Many of us in the Clarendon
Team will be following Tim Heaton’s study guide “The Road to Heaven” in our Lent Groups. This guide uses the Martin
Sheen film “The Way” to remind us of
five important questions – all connected with salvation:
1. What are we saved from?
2. What are we saved for?
3. Who can be saved?
4. What do we have to do to be saved?
5. How are we saved?
I don’t want to spoil it for
those of you who are doing the course by trying to give you answers to all
these questions in this short sermon but I will try and answer the third
question from my own theological viewpoint – who can be saved?
It is very clear from
Jesus’s teaching and also the moral of the story of Jonah, which Jesus himself
referred to as The Sign of Jonah, that
all sinners are capable of being saved provided that they repent of their sins
honestly and genuinely and agree to sin no more. Jesus did not come into the
world to condemn it, we are told, and did not condemn the woman found
committing adultery – he merely asked her to sin no more.
However, a lesson we do
receive from these readings in scripture is that we must be prepared to humble
ourselves before a merciful God. Humility, repentance and especially
forgiveness are essential ingredients for salvation. The story of Jonah
contains much teaching for us in this regard.
Jonah was sent by God to Ninevah, a Godless city, to warn its king and
people of the need to repent and turn from their evil ways. Jonah, fearful for his own life if he were to
evangelise to the Ninevans, ran away to sea where, as we all know from the most
famous part of the story, he was cast overboard and swallowed by a large fish.
He later himself repented in a long prayer whilst inside the fish and God gave
him a second chance.
Sent off to Ninevah a second
time he arrived and gave God’s message to the people.
But here we see a rather smug
Jonah hoping that the people of Ninevah will not repent and that they will meet
their doom at the hands of a punishing God. Here we see a rather self-righteous
Jonah feeling better than them feeling sure that, unlike him, they will not
repent and will get nuked! As we read tonight, they did indeed repent and God
did not destroy the city. Jonah had
actually done quite a good job – he must have been a really good
evangelist. Instead of celebrating the
success of God’s mission he was given, he sulks because God has actually
accepted their contrition and saved them. The last chapter of Jonah, where he
sits under a fig tree lamenting the saving of Ninevah says much about his
character as being very flawed himself and needing salvation. But for that he
must be prepared to forgive, just as Jesus in the prayer he gave us, the Lord’s
Prayer, puts forgiveness at the heart of it.
Jesus in his parable of the
sinner and the Pharisee makes the point again that for a sinner to recognise
his sin and want to do something about it takes an amazing amount of courage
and humility and an asking for forgiveness.
I wonder what Jesus would
have made of the church I mentioned at the beginning of this short talk? I have no doubt that he would have recognised
the congregation of that church to be very similar indeed to the Pharisees
surrounding the Temple in Jerusalem.
That like the Pharisees they felt an adherence to the law (or in our more
recent examples the ritual of the church) would lead to salvation whereas the
truth is that our God is a merciful God (“always to have mercy we are told”)
and that the true way to salvation is a not just a belief in God’s existence,
not just doing good deeds, not just giving money and time to the church but
having a real and open and loving heart towards his Son, Jesus, which means
being in a relationship with him through the Holy Spirit. That also means
loving our fellow humans – fellow creatures of God and being prepared to accept
them for the people they are.
As the
character Tom in “The Way” finds out,
it is by being with fellow pilgrims, by loving them as God loves us, by
treating others with respect, by allowing them the opportunity and encouraging
them to be saved, that we are ourselves assured of salvation ourselves. Tom at first rejected those who joined him on
the route to Santiago de Compostela as a hindrance to his own journey but later
came to realise that even with their flaws, he recognised those in himself and
they journeyed together with mutual love and respect for each other.
During these coming weeks,
as we progress through Lent, many will have decided to give things up. This
year I have chosen not to give anything up but instead I have decided to
dedicate more time in helping those who might seek salvation. Encouraging others
to find their spirituality and thereby themselves. I work as chaplain to the homeless here in
Salisbury. Many of those I minister to are like those whom the church at the
beginning would have shun from their doors. When I sit and talk to them many
are in places of darkness through events which were not entirely of their
making and their sins very often are brought about by the even greater sins of
others. Forgiveness is what will break this circle and lead to salvation.
Not one of them is past
redemption. So during this Lent, let’s
think what we can do to minister to somebody we know might be struggling and
make them feel that they too are God’s chosen whom he loves and wants to save.
Amen
MFB/71/11022016
