THE FIRST CRISIS COMMITTEES John Papworth being a sermon to the congregation of St. Mary's Church in Purton Wiltshire
(Sunday 19th May 2002)We celebrate today a major event in the history of our Church. Some would say it is the event. Indeed some of us might say it was a major event in the history of the world. The spirit of the Lord descended on the apostles. How or why this happened is one of the major mysteries of life. What is clear is the dramatic effect the event had on all those whose lives were touched by it.
By their fruits ye shall know them. It was an event which gave the apostles a purpose and a goal in life, it also gave them something more, it gave them the courage to affirm it.
Just think for a moment what that means. For us the cross is a hallowed symbol of salvation, we are so used to seeing it and acknowledging it that sometimes we are apt to overlook that for the early Christians it meant something quite different. It is of course one of the most excruciating forms of torture and death the human mind could devise.
For that was how the Roman world was governed, by the fear of Roman authority, and as if that were not enough there was the method the Roman authorities were able to kill two birds with one stone, they could terrorise the early Christians and entertain the Roman mob at the same time by starving some captive lions and then releasing them in an arena along with people who had been found guilty promoting the teachings of Our Risen Lord.
There were no doubt other refinements of Roman ferocity inflicted on the early Christians, but despite this, so inspired were the chosen twelve, for by then Barnabas had joined them to replace Judas, that Christian communities were alive and flourishing all over the Mediterranean world. Communities to whom Paul was writing letters, large numbers of them and only some of which may have survived.
But we need to reflect on the immensity of the task those early Christians undertook. Paul was born ten years after the Pentecostal experience, that means by the time he reached adult status the crucifixion was an event which had happened twenty years earlier, yet in those two decades the teachings of Our Lord had inspired the founding of these numerous communities and fired the imagination of the Mediterranean world. And the trigger which had inspired this work was the feast we celebrate today, the Feast of Pentecost.
I have my own personal cause to remember this anniversary, for it was at Pentecost, sixteen years ago, I was ordained to the priesthood in the African Cathedral of The Holy Cross in Lusaka.
I was ordained by a black bishop, a good saintly man who has since gone to his fathers, and I must have been one of the first white priests to have been ordained by a black bishop.
In no time I found myself, as a part-time, non-stipendiary priest, as the priest in charge of a large congregation in one of the poverty-stricken shanty towns of the capital city. My church of St Mary the Virgin consisted of a long hut with a bare concrete floor. The only furniture was an altar table and two or three chairs for church elders.
The choir numbered about 30, mostly teenage boys and girls and the only musical accompaniment was a drum. Everybody stood, or sat on the floor and the Sunday School met in the yard outside, often in the hot baking African sun.
But of the devoutness of the congregation and the dedication of my church wardens there could be no mistake. Every aspect of the service was treated with the utmost reverence, and we have the missionaries of the Victorian era to thank for the existence of the church there at all. It was a scene which could be repeated in many parts of Africa and indeed of the former colonial world. Small, local churches sustained by devout faithful Christian believers who were converted to Christ in the heady days of the sovereign overlordship of colonial powers.
Today the empire has gone and so too have the trappings of empire, but the Church remains as a constant feature in the life of people who are now citizens of a free commonwealth.
At a later stage I found myself as the Acting Dean of the Cathedral, barely one year after ordination, and that fact alone gives us some indication of the scarcity of human resources for maintaining the Church triumphant. For it is the Church triumphant; for whatever may be happening in Europe, where church numbers dwindle as secular consumerism has become the gospel swamping peoples lives, Africa is witnessing one of the most rapid growths of Christian belief in the world.
And whatever role I take in Church affairs, and it is one with no other intention but to serve, I find myself constantly comparing my approach with that of those early Christians who were fired with the spirit of sacrifice and service at the Pentecostal visitation.
I remind myself they were prepared to risk all. They confronted the utmost terror and horror of Roman power, aware, it would seem, that everything depended on their inspiration, their dedication, their determination and their constancy and courage to make the teachings of Jesus the bedrock reality of the lives of everyone.
They know that they would confront the disapproval of their respectable neighbours, they knew they would be subjected to the jeers and the screams of hatred and derision of the mob, that they would be regarded as beatniks, anarchists, oddballs, loonies, batties, enemies of the people, extremists, fanatics, fundamentalists and so on, but they persevered.
They persevered so that today we find ourselves members of a worldwide church which unites an immense variety of peoples of different languages, cultures and condition, inheritors not only of a common gospel and creed, but of an immense wealth of noble buildings, sacred music and profound liturgical experience. And yet we have to acknowledge that in many ways the teachings of Christ seem to be having less and less influence on the general direction of our social order, so that a gulf seems to have opened up between what we profess and preach and pray about in this wonderful church, and what is going on in the world outside.
Sometimes it seems that something called economics has taken over and is running all our lives, and I often find myself wondering how it all started and how we can get back on track. In former times we publicly celebrated special saint' feast days, today we talk of bank holidays. We were once wont to make our own entertainment, with our own songs, dances, games and parties, now it all seems to be in the hands of economics, especially through the medium of television, and television seems to me to be utterly devoid of vision and full of the works of satan.
Only the other day I heard our Prime Minister urging we should bury our country in some EUropean economic plot because of its economic advantages, as though Britain were simply some gigantic shopping mall. And he could do so openly, publicly, with no suggestion or awareness that in saner times he was advocating treason. Perhaps he was forgetting that our country is an identity, it is a culture, an immense body of tradition, beliefs, understandings, usages and, above all, of moral and religious beliefs.
Sometimes it seems to me that we are confronted with the same challenge that confronted the twelve apostles all those centuries ago, how to project the gospel of Christ in face of the satanism, secularism, hedonism, and atheism which now seems to dominate all our lives?
If we are to do this we must be prepared to be dismissed, as they were, as freaks, as fanatics, as disturbers of the established order and as people in no way to be taken seriously. It is my hope and prayer that we shall be ready to face this challenge, that we understand that we need we have to be imbued with the same inspiration, dedication and determination, the same constancy and courage to make the teaching of Jesus the bedrock reality of our lives, in the knowledge that if we do so, like them, we may change the world, and that indeed we may yet save it.
AMEN.
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