Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost - 23 October 2005 – Rev'd Harvey Smith

The Two Commandments

Three years ago Bishop Richard Randerson and I organised a one day conference for members of our Synod. The morning session was in two parts. We asked the Chief Executive officer of the Auckland Regional Council to come and give us an overview of how the Council saw the region developing in the next twenty years. The second session was led by a Professor of Social History at a local University. He was asked to give his assessment of the Anglican Church and its readiness to participate in Christ’s reconciling mission to the Auckland region. Professor Lineham began with by reading a quotation from a book entitled, “The Death of Christian Britain”.  By so doing he was inviting us to think whether or not the quote might apply to the Auckland situation. This is what he read. 

“This book is about the death of Christian Britain – the demise of the nation’s core religious and moral identity. As historical changes go, this has been no lingering and dawn-out affair. It took several centuries (in what historians used to call the Dark Ages) to convert Britain to Christianity, but it has taken less than forty years for the country to forsake it. For a thousand years, Christianity penetrated deeply into the lives of the people, enduring Reformation, Enlightenment and industrial revolution by adapting each new social and cultural context that arose. Then, really quite suddenly in 1963, something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people, sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significance.

In unprecedented numbers, the British people since the 1960s have stopped going to church, have allowed their church membership to lapse, have stopped marrying in church and have neglected to baptise their children. Meanwhile their children, the two generations who grew to maturity in the last thirty years of the twentieth century, stopped going to Sunday school, stopped entering confirmation or communicant classes, and rarely, if ever, stepped inside a church to worship in their entire lives. The cycle of inter-generational renewal of Christian affiliation, a cycle which had for so many centuries tied the people however closely or loosely to the churches and to Christian moral benchmarks, was permanently disrupted in the ‘swinging sixties’. Since then, a formerly religious people have entirely forsaken organised Christianity in a sudden plunge into a truly secular condition.”

The Auckland Synod was very quick to accept that what was described for Britain could similarly be described for them.

I was ordained in 1968. At that time 97% of all New Zealanders belonged to a Christian denomination. Whilst most people did not go to church, every one knew which was the church they did not attend. 42% of all Kiwi’s were Anglicans and they had their babies baptised, all were married in church and all buried their loved ones in church. Our task was not evangelistic for essentially everyone was baptised. Our task was to care for the people who turned up to church expecting traditional worship services, education for their children and pastoral visiting for the women who almost invariably stayed at home throughout their lives.  

Thirty five years later less than half the New Zealand population choose to belong to a Christian denomination. The Anglican proportion has fallen to between 12 and 17%. The only walk up crowd Churches see are Christians transferring from one church to another.

It did not take a raft of sociological degrees to know that as we hit the end of the 20^th century there was a major disconnect between what the church was on about and what was happening in the community. Most marriages are now conducted by marriage celebrants, if in fact people choose to get married in the first place, funerals are heading the same was as are naming ceremonies for babies.  We could not begin the Lord’s Prayer and assume that everyone would join in knowing it by rote and nothing about the Jesus story could be assumed as known. It is not surprising that the Bishop of Auckland, the largest diocese in New Zealand, called his diocese a missionary diocese with himself as a missionary bishop.

And it wasn’t as if the church was not doing anything in those thirty years. We said ‘no’ to Church Union, ‘yes’ to the remarriage of divorced people, yes to the ordination of women as deacons, priests and Bishops. Yes to the charismatic renewal, yes to the Liturgical Renewal as we produced one of the best prayer books in the Anglican Communion, we said ‘no’ to the Springboks tour, ‘no’ to poverty,’ ‘yes’ to a rewrite of our Constitution which produced a radical plan for the sharing of power with our Maori and Polynesian partners. And whilst all this was taking place the world walked away from us with ever increasing speed and we never noticed. We were so busy producing just the very best Church for God that God could ever want.

Now I hope you will notice that I have carefully not mentioned Australia. That may perhaps make this one of the least contextual sermons you will ever hear preached. On the other hand, you might tell me at some later time that there were resonances in what has been described, such resonances being faint or loud, with what we are experiencing here in Canberra. If so that would place us alongside what has been found to be true in many other parts of the English speaking world. But to proceed with my out of context sermon.

One of the key Christian thinkers for my generation was John Stott, the Rector of All Souls, Langham Place in London. He once wrote this:

“Christians today need to develop the art of double listening. Double listening is the faculty of listening to two voices at the same time, the voice of God through Scripture and the voices of men and women around us. These voices will often contradict one another, but our purpose in listening to them both is to discover how they relate to each other. Double listening is indispensable to Christian discipleship and Christian mission.”

That I think is the trap we fell into. We became single listeners – just to the scriptures. It is not enough.

I am not a great movie goer but Kirk Douglas is a name known to me.  I also know in has later years he has become a writer. In one of his books he tells of his lifelong resolve to pick up hitchhikers whenever feasible. One afternoon he picked up a sailor on leave. After jumping into the car and throwing his backpack into the backseat, the sailor did a double take, then a triple take, and then blurted out to Douglas, “Hey, man, do you know who you are?” 

There are two fundamental questions in life. “Do you know who you are?” is perhaps the most fundamental question anyone can ask. And answer. My answer is basic but complex. It comes from Isaiah 43.4 where God says:

“Because you are precious in my sight, and honoured, I love you”

 And then from Jesus:

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you” (John 15.9)

I’m the one Jesus loves.

The second important question is like the first except for a change of one word.

“From the Gulf War of 1990-91 comes the story of three British soldiers, stumbling in the desert. Separated from their troops in the fighting, they were lost, hungry, and searching for help when they literally bumped into a four-star US American General.

Excitedly they blurted out, "Do you know where we are?" The general stiffened. Upset at their lack of protocol and rituals of respect, he looked down at them and demanded, "Do you know who I am?"

One of the English soldiers elbowed his buddy and mum­bled, "Now we're in deep trouble. We don't know where we are, and he doesn't know who he is."

Do you know where you are, church? And for us in Auckland where the church was, was not where the world is and if you are not close to something or someone, how can you love it?

Remember the words that will come shortly in our service: “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son….(John 3.16)” To which we can add some other words of Jesus:

Jesus said, ‘As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world’.(John 15.9)

Jesus said, ‘I pray that all of my disciples may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me’ (John `17 21).

Jesus said, ‘I pray that the Church be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’. (John 17.23)

We somehow think that the Church is here for us; we forget that we are the church, and we’re here for the world.

Clearly, this out of context sermon has simply sought to have a look at the undergrowth, this mess of tangles and weeds within which the church has become entrapped and in my view largely lost its way. We have seen suggested that knowing who we are and where we are will help us put our energies into God’s direction for our church and that is the direction of loving the world in order that the world might come home to God. Perhaps in amongst all this we might find renewed hope and inspiration from those most basic of Christian teachings, as our Gospel today has taught, we as Christian people are to live as people who love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind and we are to love our neighbour as ourselves. And we will notice that as we place the vertical commandment to God alongside the horizontal commandment to our neighbour we have formed the Cross which brings us to a proper ending point for people who fully love the world will have picked up their cross and followed Jesus.

Harvey Smith.