Passing the baton

Sermon for Trinity 19C

In the Race of Faith, we’re all involved in active baton passing.

Luke 17: 5 The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ The Lord replied, ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.

^{2 Timothy 1:5}I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands...

One of the biggest disappointments of the Rio Olympics track and field events was the disqualification of the GB men’s 4x400 sprint relay team.

They had run a storming race, beating their own record in training, and thought they would be straight into the final with it. But there was a problem.

Baton passing is a fine art, and you’re supposed to do it within a 20-yard stretch of track. If your foot is deemed to be over the line, even by a fraction, whilst you pass it to the next runner, you are disqualified. And if they progress beyond the line before receiving the baton, the team is disqualified.

Obviously you’re running really fast in a sprint relay, but as you approach the next runner, you must position yourself completely accurately, and so must they; you must slow a bit, they have to start running so as not to lose the momentum, and you must pass it within that very narrow margin of track.

The GB men’s team had run a blistering sub 3 minute heat, which would have put them in the frame for a medal in the final; all the passes appeared to have gone well, but after jubilant scenes at the finish line, news filtered through that they had been disqualified.

They appealed, but were unsuccessful despite video footage being inconclusive. The judges ruled that Matthew Hudson Smith had marginally had his foot over the line while waiting for Delano Williams to pass the baton.

India were deemed to have committed the same offense and Trinidad and Tobago received a lane violation, thus shifting the host team, Brazil, three places up the scoreboard and into the final.

In a similar disappointment, the US men’s 4x100m relay team were also disqualified after finishing in Bronze Medal position, due to an early hand off between Mike Rodgers and Justin Gatlin.

In the nail biting sport of sprint relay, the successful passing of the baton is the crucial lynch pin of the whole race. But passing the baton has its glitches, and those glitches would seem to be rather common.

In the race of faith, the successful passing of the baton is the crucial lynch pin of the whole race. But it too has its glitches.

The fact that we’re here this morning gathered and worshipping is testament to the baton passing of each generation before us, but we also know that there’s been a dramatic falling away of attendance within the C of E lately, particularly in younger generations, and perhaps we might be able to put that down to glitches in the baton passing.

Despite population growth, numbers attending church services has dropped 12% over the last decade and generally speaking many C of E congregations are aging whilst fewer young people (under 50s) are engaging. Less than 2% of the population go to an Anglican church on a Sunday.

It’s a good job that our gospel reminds us of mustard seed faith. With mustard seed faith, we can join in with God in the seemingly impossible task of baton passing.

Let’s look at how we all need to need be actively involved in passing on the baton of faith.

Timothy, had received the baton of faith and it would appear he was a third generation Christian: in the Epistle, Paul refers to the faith that first lived in his grandmother, Lois, and in his mother, Eunice.

Scholars generally agree that Paul is near the end of his life here and that he wrote this letter to Timothy in the mid 60s, so just enough time for there to be a first generation Jewish believer in Jesus, (Lois) who then passed the faith onto her daughter, Eunice, who passed it to Timothy.

Never underestimate the power of a praying parent, grandparent (or partner or godparent for that matter).

In the 98^th year of her life, my Grandmother was known to attend the monthly prayer group which took place up in her local church, as people sat round in a circle of chairs and prayed for the young. Although she could have rested on her laurels, having almost run the race to completion herself, she went to that prayer group because she believed in young people and recognised the need to pass the baton. She was ignited from within by the need to pass the baton. She was in some ways, difficult, uncompromising and a bit of a social snob, but she was unceasing in her prayers for the generations below her to know Christ.

As you get older, it seems you have nothing to lose. If people think you’re barmy for talking about Christ, that doesn’t really matter, because God will honour your mustard seed faith, and uproot mulberry trees into the sea for you. Someone, somewhere, will get the baton from your prayerful witness. If we don’t share the gospel, the baton falls.

So Timothy learnt the faith through his family. But Paul had also been instrumental in his faith journey. We read that he had laid hands on Timothy for him to receive the Holy Spirit, and in the Epistle he encourages Timothy to continually fan into flame the gift of the Spirit that was given him at that time.

It’s the same for us – the best way to pass the baton is to be alive in your faith. The best signpost to Christ is a fully functioning Christian. That’s why we continually need to be renewed in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Timothy’s faith pedigree tells us two important things about handing on the faith (passing the baton).

Firstly, the family is the primary conduit for faith, but each person needs to individually appropriate that faith for himself or herself. Timothy’s faith was caught, but also affirmed individually.

There’s a tension here for churchgoing families.

Children are not easily fooled. They imbibe actions and not just words. What feeds them primarily is real spiritual life flowing out from a lived experience of Jesus Christ. This is more than simply church attendance.

Yes, we long for them to develop church-going habits too, but primarily they need to see a lived daily faith that speaks to life issues at each stage of growing up.

So that’s baton passing within the family. And research suggests that the majority of people who come to a living faith in Jesus, will do so before their 18^th birthday. So that’s even more reason to pray for your children, grandchildren and godchildren, nephews and nieces.

But, secondly, not everyone is lucky enough to see living faith modelled within their family.

So we also need to be involved in baton passing more generally. This is clearly what happened with the very first believers in Jesus.

Someone, somewhere, modelled Christ to them in such a way that they turned to him and became believers. So someone shared their faith with Lois, Timothy’s Grandmother, and she became the first family member to know Christ. Perhaps it was a neighbour or a friend, someone who pointed to Christ in persuasive words and loving actions.

Paul himself came to faith by what seemed to be a direct intervention of the risen Christ, as he fell to the ground on his way to persecute the young church. He then devoted his whole life to spreading the message, passing the baton. Not many of us will come to faith like that, but you do hear of the occasional experience when God appears to someone in a dream, say, or in extremis.

Paul assumes that baton passing will be one of the chief characteristics of the Christian church. That’s why he has identified Timothy as a successor – a very different person to him I’m sure – but carrying on the race with the baton firmly in his hand.

Investing in successors is a risky business because our successors do things differently from their predecessors.

That’s the nature of baton passing. We need to have humility, and to be encouragers here. As I look back on 50 years of church going the most significant catalyst in baton passing that I can identify in the family of Christ, is the individuals who are encouragers.

The baton, of course, is the gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ, which is for all people everywhere. ‘For this gospel I was appointed a herald, an apostle and a teacher’, writes Paul from prison, and he urges Timothy to ‘guard the good treasure entrusted to you.’

Passing the batons happens in those fortunate families where faith is truly alive, but they may be in the minority. So baton passing is up to all of us.

In looking at this enormous task, we come back to the mustard seed faith.

It’s just as well Jesus talked of faith as having very small beginnings, because otherwise I think we’d be tempted to give up. If we have faith as small as a mustard seed, we can say to a tree, be uprooted, and thrown into the sea, and it will be done, Jesus says.

Christianity started with one person. It spread to 12, then to 72, then to 3000 on the Day of Pentecost. We don’t need to lose heart about passing the baton. But we do need to be actively involved in doing it.

And when we’ve done what we can, when we’ve had faith, and prayed, and cared enough to pass the baton on, in words and deeds, in fact all we’ve done is been faithful servants, and not super human Christians.

And that’s quite a relief too.

Amen.

Luther vs. James

A disgruntled looking Martin Luther. Maybe he was reading the Epistle of James at the time.

James 2: 14-17 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

Down the years the Christian faith has tended to battle with the tension between faith and action.

Things came to a head during the Protestant Reformation, when a priest and theologian called Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517.

These were essentially objections to the status quo in the Church and they sparked intense debate around the authority of the Church and how believers received salvation.

The great cry of the Protestant Reformation which flowed out of this was for a rediscovery of the grace of Christ – that we cannot save ourselves, but that salvation is a free gift.

‘Justification’ is a technical word for salvation, and the Reformation tag line was simple and profound: that justification was ‘by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone’.

Martin Luther (above) favoured the book of Romans, where justification is by faith in Christ alone, so you can imagine why the book of James was not one of his favourites.

As we heard last week, he called it the Epistle of Straw because it seemed to contradict the teaching of Paul and suggest that faith alone was not enough, going as far as to say that faith without action is dead (verse 17).

This is biblically where the tension between action and faith is most acute.

As James writes, if you know someone in need and you say a blessing for them whilst ignoring their physical condition, what good is that?

It makes sense – words are not going to help that person in need – only action will.

I think it’s still a topic today: every time you hear someone say, “I don’t believe in God but I try and lead a good life”, you’re hearing an unresolved tension between faith and action, often based on a misunderstanding of what faith actually is.

We tend to privatise the idea of faith, but in the bible, faith is understood as acting on your beliefs, not just talking about them.

The bible talks of ‘works’ and faith, but they don’w have to be in tension if we remember that good works do not have a role in leading to our salvation, but in demonstrating it.

Someone has wisely said that faith is invisible – you cannot see faith.

So no one know whether faith resides in you until you show it by your actions.

To the outside world then, we Christians need to show that we love God by acting on our faith as well as talking about it.

Actions, as we all know, speak louder than words, and that is what people will notice.

Let’s for a moment look at the twin challenges of separating faith and actions, in order that we might be better at keeping them together. These challenges are typified by two types of people: the good unbeliever and the (forgive me) clueless Christian.

1. The ‘good unbeliever’.

We’ve all met this person – the friend or neighbour, or family member, who appears to be a good person but doesn’t (apparently) believe in God.

So they have the actions but apparently not the faith.

Has this ever puzzled you?

Perhaps it makes you think it’s not really worth believing if you can be good without God?

There are a couple of responses: when we say that somebody is good, we often have quite a low benchmark for goodness, compared with, say, the expectation and example of Jesus.

Someone called Jesus ‘Good Teacher’ once and he came back with the comment ‘No one is good except God alone’.

I think this is helpful to near in mind philosophically.

If anyone exhibits goodness, it is either coming from within themselves, or er believe it originated in God, even if that person says they don’t believe in God.

Not believing in someone’s existence does not cause them to cease to exist.

Another point is that it’s not so difficult to love and care for your immediate friends and family - Jesus said ‘even the pagans do that’.

Instead Jesus raised the bar considerably when he encouraged his followers to love their enemies.

Of course we love our friends and family – who wouldn’t - but Jesus calls us to love the stranger, the outcast and the person who persecutes us.

It seems to me that that kind of standard is pretty much impossible without recourse to a higher Being.

In addition, people who say you can be good without God, are often unaware of the illogicality of disconnecting morality from religion.

Someone who doesn’t ‘do God’, yet holds to the fundamental equality of all human beings, believes in compassion and forgiveness and self-sacrificial love is actually holding to fundamentals of Christianity whilst perhaps ignoring the first part of the word – Christ.

In a way this separates good deeds from faith.

The entire Law, says Jesus, is summed up by ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength; and love your neighbour as yourself’, so self, others and God are inextricably linked.

Often when we see someone who appears to be good without believing in God, it is likely that they are simply unaware of God’s activity in their lives.

It may even be that their desire for charitable works is a displacement activity for a former faith in God that has become disconnected.

Have you noticed how popular charity events are amongst some people who don’t go to church?

Posters and fliers constantly remind us of the walk or run, or cycle, or swim, or sail or climb, that’s taking place for a good cause, that people have raised hundreds of pounds for?

People fill their spare time up with charity events and it’s all good stuff.

(And of course many Christians and other religious people are involved with this too).

But in all this action we need to be aware also of our inner lives.

Outer and inner harmony of faith and action is the goal.

We often see the outside of someone’s life, we say they’re good; but God sees the inside too, the life of the imagination, the life of the spirit, what we fantasize about; our fears, our day dreams – all these reveal our nature before God and sometimes we need inner healing and forgiveness, or a complete change of direction.

God is as interested in our faith as he is in our action.

2. The ‘clueless Christian’.

By this I mean someone who’s faith doesn’t actually make any difference to the way they live.

They have faith, but no actions.

This is the person who looks into a mirror and goes away and forgets what they look like (see James Chapter 1).

‘Be doers of the word’, not just hearers, says James.

So, trying to do just that, I wonder what you think of when you hear James’s portrayal of ‘the rich’?

He hasn’t really got a good word for them.

They oppress others, take people to court, are given all the best places in dinner parties and are themselves spiritually poor.

Who are these people?

We tend to use the word ‘rich’ relative to those we live amongst, and we compare ourselves with those who are a little bit better off than we are.

But in global terms, most of us are rich beyond the wildest dreams of thousands of human beings with whom we share the earth.

There’s a website (see link) that can calculate how rich you are globally – you put your annual income in and it’ll tell you what % of the population is richer than you and what % is poorer.

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

I don’t have an income, but I’m lucky enough to be married to an experienced teacher.

I put an experienced teacher’s salary into the calculator and I came out in the top 1% of the global rich.

I halved it and still came out in the top 2%.

Okay, it doesn’t account for the relative value of outgoings, but it makes you think.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Refugee Crisis in Europe.

If you think about countries and relative wealth, it’s surely no coincidence that thousands of refugees are now making dangerous, often life threatening journeys from the Middle East and Africa, to Europe.

This is a complex issue possibly involving economics as well as war and violence - but surely anyone who takes their family across the Mediterranean in a rickety over crowded boat searching for a new life must believe that the sea is safer than the land they’re leaving behind.

And that is a terrifying thought.

What this unfolding human displacement shows us is that the gap between the haves and the have-nots, globally, is bad for everyone.

Why should it surprise to us that the poor and desperate what to share our lifestyle?

The refugee crisis is a crisis of conscience for us all.

When the poor are 1000s of miles away, in countries I am unlikely to visit, only on my TV screen when there are no other stories to take the limelight, it’s easy to forget I am rich.

When the poor are travelling across Europe, arriving at a station in Hungary where my daughter recently went Inter-railing; when the poor are dying on train tracks the other side of the Channel right where I recently came back from a French holiday, then being one of ‘the rich’ becomes much, much more uncomfortable.

The Archbishop has put it well; you can look up his thoughts on the subject here: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/5606/archbishop-of-canterbury-on-the-migrant-crisis).

It's a fair balance of belief and action of which I hope even Martin Luther would be proud.