The Gospel in an ever-changing World
Jeremiah 31: 7 – 14; Ephesians 1: 3 – 14; John 1: 1 (10) – 18
What does it mean to be a Christian in the 21st Century?
What does it mean to be a Christian in the 21st Century? We’re in the final year of the second decade of the 21st Century. It’s fascinating to reflect on the Church in our time. When I think of my own family – I’m thinking of my wife, my parents and our children – we span three centuries. My father was born in 1895. So much has changed in this time. We’ve witnessed remarkable changes over the last 120 years or so which have revolutionised our lives.
What has this meant for the Church universal? What has it meant for the churches in the Western World? We might think that the biggest change is how small the local churches have become. Now that is only a problem if we think we should be like the churches we grew up in or raised our children in. They were large and booming with children. We call the children of the post-WWII era the baby-boomers. That era was merely a blip in the Church’s life during the 20th Century. Now I do not intend to provide a brief lesson in social history. I merely want to point out a few things.
Social change has always taken place. However in our life time the pace of change has increased exponentially. We’ve witnessed the greatest number of changes in the shortest space of time; e.g. from horse and cart to space travel.
Secondly, 100 or less members is now the average size of local churches throughout the Western World. When I attended in 2007 the 8th World Methodist Conference on Evangelism in Atlanta in the USA I learnt that the average USA congregation had around 100 members. I was reminded of these facts in an email I received this week. We are a normal sized church. We are a strong church in good heart, but do we still operate with the sense that we should be bigger? Are we hanging onto structures and practices that really suit a much larger church? I believe our Synods and the Assembly need to address this question too.
Thirdly, the changes in our society present and always have presented a challenge to the church to re-think how it expresses and practices the Gospel of Christ. A cursory study of the history of the Church will uncover this. The difference today is that such changes take place more rapidly than ever before.
I’m not going to provide answers to these questions. Rather the questions are a constant work-in-progress. The answers lie in prayerfully considered experiments, of which some will not work. I have raised these questions because they are relevant to us. They are always relevant. Our texts set for today prompted me to take up this tack. The Gospel according to St John clearly indicates in its concepts and metaphors that the Church is wrestling with this issue of relevance. In fact the writings of the New Testament all reveal that the Christians of the 1st Century wrestled with such issues. Within the first 100 years Christians were adjusting their concepts and understanding of the Gospel of Christ to their new situations.
The Gospel of John is a fine example of this. The Gospel begins with a reference to Jesus being the Logos, the Word of God. This concept was used in Greek philosophy to describe the ‘reason’ or ‘plan’ for the ordering of the universe. John uses it to describe the eternal being of Jesus the Christ. This suggests to us that the Church has moved into the Roman Greek world and beginning to use concepts of the Roman-Greco world to help explain who Christ Jesus is.
The Gospel according to John is usually dated late in the 1st Century or early in the 2nd. My personal view is that it is about 95 A.D. The other three accounts of the Gospel of Christ are earlier and reflect an earlier period in the Church’s life.
John also introduces us to the understanding that Christianity is not something you are born into. That is, you are not a Christian because your parents were Christian. He wants people to understand that the blessing of God is something each individual must affirm. Jesus makes this point by calling people to follow him and emphasising that to do so means giving up all to become one of his disciples. John says this in his opening remarks in his Gospel account.
He (Jesus) was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. [Jn 1: 10-13]
John stresses Jesus’ own people, his family so to speak, did not accept him and that the world did not know him, but everyone who sees and accepts Jesus becomes a child of God. The logic of this is that we only become God’s children when we accept Jesus who has the power to make us God’s children. So John talks in chapter 3 about being born again, or more accurately being born from above. This concept of becoming God’s children, not by natural means but by the means of God adopting us, would not have beend a strange concept to the Roman-Greco culture. The man of the household had the right to adopt. The Roman imperial succession was secured by adoption. For example Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula and Nero were all adopted as adults and thus became emperor.
John makes perfectly good sense when he states that we are not automatically God’s children – that is heirs of the promises of God – but become God’s children by turning to God who graciously adopts us. Paul writes to the Ephesian church saying the same thing some 40 years earlier. He (God) destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ. [Eph 1: 5]
The more we reflect on this account of the Gospel we see how Christian thinkers began to adapt their expression and practice to be more intelligible to the culture of the day. They didn’t change the content – Christ was still Christ – but they did change the way they expressed and practiced the Faith.
One of the things I have noted in the New Testament is that their worship and faith did not depend upon Jerusalem or the Temple. Rather God had set them free from the dominance and significance of the Temple in Jerusalem. Buildings were only important insofar as they served a purpose for gathering together. In reality the first Christians ended up meeting in homes, which also meant they were only small in number.
We learn a few things from these texts today that will help us in 2020.
Change is a constant in our lives. Nothing stays the same. If it did it would mean the end of that thing. Growth requires change. Heraclitus, an Ionian philosopher of Ephesus who lived some 500 plus years before Christ Jesus, wrote: There is nothing permanent except change. We should never resist change but prayerfully and critically embrace it. The fact that people in churches and clubs can have divisions over the colour of a wall is a sign of human frailty. We struggle to apply to our daily living the truth that Clement of Alexandria understood – that God ‘has changed all our sunsets into sunrises’.
Adaptation is required for growth and renewal. The future is ours if we respond positively to the changes it brings and adapt to the new situations, remembering the living tradition of the past.
Knowing our true north is important in navigating the future and what it might bring. No mariner can sail to a new destination bringing their cargo of precious goods with them without a compass. The mariner must know where North is and what his/her position is in relation to true north. We Christians also are given a compass that tells us where true north is and what the cardinal points are. Let us remind ourselves. For the Christian compass of life True North is God: the God who suffers with us and for us. The Christian south is loving God with all our heart, mind, strength and soul. The Eastern point is Loving our Neighbour and the Western point is Loving ourselves.
If we take these as the cardinal points of the Christian compass we can sail into the future with confidence. Let us hold fast to the precious cargo we have, meet and adapt to the new with hope and confidence, then we will see God’s new Sunrise for us.
*******
Peter C Whitaker, Leighmoor UC: 05/01/2020
/ www.leighmoorunitingchurch.org
CONGREGATION TO READ POST SERMON.
Eph. 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. 5 He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace 8 that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight 9 he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. 11 In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, 12 so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. 13 In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; 14 this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory.
