Sermons

The Last Sunday of Trinity Season
Sunday 29 October at 10am

Simon Cowling
Readings: Isaiah 55. 1-11; John 5. 30 - 47

A couple of weeks ago my mother-in-law (this is not a joke, by the way!) showed me a bible which had been used in the late nineteenth century by a Mrs Helen Jackson, one of my mother-in-law's ancestors. She particularly wanted me to look at some loose papers inside the bible which included flyers for a number of evangelistic missions in places such as Brighouse and Cleckheaton. Mrs Jackson had been a peripatetic evangelist, moving around large swathes of the West Riding of Yorkshire and conducting one-woman missions in a variety of what would then have been called non-conformist chapels. Mrs Jackson certainly worked hard. The flyers advertised missions that began on a Sunday and continued every night of the week that followed, concluding on the Saturday afternoon - presumably to give Mrs Jackson time to move on to her next booking. But the papers inside the bible also included a record of a long-forgotten children's competition in a now defunct weekly newspaper, the Christian Herald. The competition, which ran over six weeks, had as its stated aim an increase in biblical learning among the young. Contestants were required to identify twenty-four different scenes from the bible, given in the form of simple line-drawings. The answer had to be given by quoting the exact chapter and verse portrayed by each drawing. The prize was £100 - a huge sum in Mrs Jackson's time. Some of the pictures were straightforward - the Prodigal Son made an appearance, as did the Lost Sheep. Some of them were more tricky - I'd certainly have struggled over the picture of the Persian emperor Artaxerxes talking to Nehemiah, if Mrs Jackson had not helpfully put in the appropriate reference for me. Even she had left some blank, though history does not record whether this was due to her imperfect recall of scripture or to the more pressing matter of her very full schedule.

Today is Bible Sunday and our two readings, in different ways, direct us to the place of God's Word in the life of the Church and in the lives of us as individuals. The writer of our Old Testament reading is looking forward to the return of God's people to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon some 550 years before Christ. God's Word, we learn, is 'like the snow and the rain that come down and water the earth'. Just as water, in the form of snow and rain, helps crops to grow, so God's Word will, God assures his people, enable fertility; it will 'do everything I send it to do.' In our reading from St. John's Gospel, Jesus is getting to grips with the opposition of the Jewish authorities after he has healed a man on the Sabbath at the Pool of Bethzatha. In the face of this opposition, Jesus proclaims his status: 'What I do, that is, the deeds my Father gave me to do, these speak on my behalf and show that the Father has sent me.' We'll explore what I take to be the crucial link between our two readings in a moment.

By way of background I want, on this Bible Sunday, to say a word or two about the place of the bible in the life of the Church. One of the things we ought always to remember as Christians is that the church existed before the Christian scriptures. For early Christians the scriptures meant what we call the Old Testament. The communities of Christians to which Paul wrote at Corinth or Thessalonica or Philippi did not have the Gospels of Matthew or Mark or Luke or John. The two letters Paul wrote to the Corinthians, for instance, deal with very particular issues of concern to that early Christian community, such as whether or not it was okay to eat meat which had been sacrificed to idols, or to pursue a fellow-Christian through the law courts. Neither the Corinthians nor Paul could ever have supposed that these two letters would still be read two thousand years later, far less that they would be regarded as scripture. Although Paul's letters may well have been collected for more general use within the wider church by the end of the first century, it was probably not until the third or fourth century that the church finally came to a mind about the precise contents of what we call our New Testament.

I said just now that the early Christian communities did not have the Gospels of Matthew or Mark or Luke or John. But what they did have, because it had been brought to them by Paul and by the other apostles, was the Gospel - that is the Good News of Jesus Christ. In what is probably the earliest part of the New Testament, the first letter to the church at Thessalonica, Paul uses the word Gospel, Good News, no fewer than six times. It is the call to proclaim and share this Good News that drives him on: 'We brought the Good News to you, not with words only, but with power and the Holy Spirit.' This Good News that Paul talks about is not a text, it is not lifeless letters on parchment. This Good News is a person, Jesus Christ, the one who, in the words of another New Testament writer, 'reflects the brightness of God's glory and is the exact likeness of God's own being.' The early Christian communities, then, in forming themselves around the Gospel actually formed themselves around the person Jesus Christ and so began the story of the church as a living body of witnesses to him. And these early Christian communities were the environment in which the Christian scriptures as we know them were produced. Both church and scripture bear witness to Christ, but it was the church which came first.

So back to our readings. You will recall that the passage from Isaiah speaks of God's Word doing what God sent it to do; and that Jesus, in John's Gospel, speaks of being sent by God. 'to do the deeds my Father gave me to do.' For the writer of Isaiah, God's Word is not to be understood as a text with content. It is rather, in the words of one writer, 'the instrument by means of which something is brought about'. Or, as we might say, when God speaks, something happens; God's Word is a Word that does things. For Christians, Jesus is God's Word, the Word which, as we learn at the start of St. John's Gospel, became flesh and made his dwelling place among us. In Jesus we understand God's Word to be fully present, accomplishing God's purposes through the things that he does, accomplishing a reconciliation between God and humanity by means of the cross and resurrection. God's Word is a Word that does things.

Finally back to Mrs Jackson the evangelist, or rather back to that bible knowledge competition. It would be interesting to put those pictures of over a hundred years ago in front of a congregation today. In general, knowledge of scripture is in steep decline and that is something that should concern us all: to most people, including many who worship in church regularly, the bible is, literally, a closed book. Yet in our concern about that we should never forget that we cannot be saved through the bible, through mere knowledge of a text. The bible is important in the same way that the church is important: both witness to Christ, God's Word which was from the beginning and which we are called to proclaim to the world. Amen.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay - Charity Number 1131904