CHURCH UNITY WEEK
Church of Ireland, Cavan
24 January 2016
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, it is good that we are here during this week of prayer for Christian unity to pray together and to express the faith that we share in common. We are already united by the Spirit living in us, but in our opening prayers we asked God’s Spirit to bring us closer together, to take away the things that divide us, to open our hearts to God’s word and to give us the grace to witness together to God’s actions in our own lives and in our world.
The second scripture reading – the brief passage from the First Letter of Peter – speaks of our great dignity as Christians. “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people”. So we are not just specks of matter in a random universe. We are not on this earth by chance. We have been called and chosen by God. We’ve been called out of darkness into light, from the darkness of disbelief into the light of faith, from the darkness of sin into the light of grace. We have been chosen for a purpose, a mission – to proclaim the mighty acts of God. That is our mission as disciples of Jesus.
That mission is the theme of this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity – to proclaim the might acts of God. We are called to be witnesses to God’s presence and action in the world. We are asked to be witnesses to the life and message of Jesus. To use the images Jesus used in the Sermon on the Mount, we are called to be salt and light. We are challenged to bring the flavour of our Christian values and attitudes to bear on the world we live and work in. We are called to bring the light of faith in God to shine on the relationships we form, the people we meet and all the things we do.
St Peter tells us we have been called from darkness into light. For me, the darkness was well portrayed in a film I saw recently called “Boyhood”. It’s the story of a boy growing up from childhood to the age of eighteen in America today. His name is Mason. His parents divorced when he was very young and the mother is left rearing the children. She’s a very caring mother but up against huge odds. The father is basically a good man but has no job and no money. He takes the children for weekends now and then and is good to them. Two further marriages, two divorces and a lot of darkness and heartbreak later, and the mother is still struggling, at this stage trying to put the young people though college. The father, also remarried, still visits now and then.
Mason is now a young adult and against all the odds he is a pretty normal young man. He is thoughtful, reflective, and desperately trying to figure out what life is all about. He’s trying to make sense of all the good and bad things he has experienced in his young life. Religion has never played any part in his parents’ lives or his own. That is made explicit in the film. On one of the weekends, he and his father have a heart-to-heart chat and Mason asks his dad what life is all about. For once the father is flummoxed but replies frankly along the lines: ‘Heck, I don’t know. None of us know. We’re all just winging it.’ In other words he was saying: We don’t know why we’re here, what we are here for, where we are going. We don’t have a clue what life is about. We just muddle along and hope for the best.
Christian faith cannot rush in with pat answers to such deep questions as these, but we hope that good Christian witness may at least suggest some clues, may cast some light into this darkness so prevalent in the world today. The salt of Christian witness will, we believe, give a taste of hope in this barren landscape and, indeed, in the barren landscapes of our own experience that give rise to desperation, despair and sometimes, most tragically, even suicide.
If someone is living in that kind of darkness, with no faith, no meaning and no light to guide their way in life, it’s almost inevitable that there will be bad decisions made and a lot of hurt experienced by adults and even more by young people. Mason’s parents admit they have made a lot of bad decisions along the way in their lives. If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s no surprise if you take a few wrong turns.
That can happen and sadly does happen in Christian families too. But I suggest it happens, not because we are Christians, but because we often fail to follow the way Christ leads. We neglect the design for life that Christ has given us in the Beatitudes – the passage in the Gospel we have just heard a few minutes ago. Sadly, we often imitate the ways of the world. So the words of Jesus, Blessed are the poor in spirit …blessed are the gentle … blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart – and other words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount like, love your enemies, bless those who persecute you, these words seem foolish or impractical and we can end up adopting the ways of the world.
When G.K. Chesterton was challenged once that Christianity had failed, he replied: “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” Mahatma Gandhi said something similar: “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
Being the salt of the earth and the light of the world means being like Christ. Living like Christ. Trying to follow his teaching, his example and his attitudes. That is a high ideal and a difficult one. But that is how we will be witnesses Christ in the world. That is how we will proclaim the mighty acts of God – his love, his compassion and his presence among us through his Spirit. The question is, how to we learn to live like Christ? How do we learn to be his witnesses, to be salt and light?
When I worked in a school many years ago I used to visit the Home Economics room from time to time. There was a lot of electrical equipment for cooking and sewing in the room. There was a witty poster on display for the benefit of the students to encourage them to learn how to use the equipment properly. It showed two very large elephants with their tusks in an impossible tangle. The caption read: if all else fails, read the instructions!
Most of us are reluctant to read the instructions. If we get a new phone or a new car or some other gadget, we’ll try everything to get the gadget going before reading the handbook or consulting the help page. I’m afraid it’s often the same with living as Christians. Christ has left us his instructions for Christian living in the Gospels, especially in the Beatitudes. We learn to live like Christ by reading his Word, listening to it, meditating on it and praying with it. There was a lot of wisdom in that big poster in the home economics room, not just for students doing home economics, but for anyone wanting to be a good Christian: if all else fails, read the instructions. Even better, read them before all fails, and then we might not fail so often.
