On Patronal Festivals and finding encouragement.
St Paul's Cathedral: Third Sunday after Pentecost, 24th June, 2001
Rev'd Dr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
On a day when traditionally John the Baptist is honoured and in the
Cathedral Church of St Paul celebrating its patronal festival in the week
leading up to St Peter's Day on Friday, we are indeed surrounded by so great
a cloud of witnesses. These were followers of the Lord who were in themselves
brave and forthright. They were starting from scratch. They made a difference.
But they also evidenced very human qualities including impulsiveness,
shortcomings of personality that could irritate; that certain scratchiness
that is both immediately recognisable in ourselves often and which nonetheless
makes them much more accessible for us. These are saints of God; people of
heroic virtue, stirrers of hearts, inspirers of souls, changers of lives,
pointers towards their Lord. Yet they were not perfect. But they were called
and they responded according to the particular circumstances in which they
found themselves.
Our Old Testament lesson this afternoon provides the preacher with a most
encouraging thought for the day:
"And you, son of man, be not afraid of them...; be not afraid of their words, nor dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house." (Ez 2:6)
And for a prophet or a teacher, presented with hard or unwelcome challenges,
this is a message of comfort, of more than gentle persuasion, of call. There
is a job to be done; there is a God to be honoured. Get on with it.
Response to call once discerned does not always receive the complete support
of those close by. The New Testament lesson reminds us that responding to
vocation can involve grief and pain for those who care for us, or who do not
quite understand the driving power, the emerging lack of any choice other than
to say yes. As Paul said to his friends, "What are you doing, weeping and
breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be imprisoned but even to die
at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus." (Acts 21:13)
We are also today surrounded by great and pressing need in our wider
community: a need that is indeed deeply spiritual but that is increasingly
more difficult to be able to be met by the institutional Church, as presently
configured and experienced. This is both confronting and challenging. It is
not hard to become discouraged. It is not hard to encounter great resistance
if change is being contemplated in an attempt to address some of these issues
in other ways than those previously tried. The needs and the cherished familiar
pathways to God of the remaining faithful also must be respected and honoured.
There has to be a way that does both.
It is absolutely clear that for a combination of reasons, the Church as a
whole and our Anglican part of it are facing most challenging questions of
direction, of confidence, of hope. In the absence of something quite remarkable
occurring, a very large number of our congregations will simple cease to exist
within the next twenty years. This is a reality that is being experienced in both urban and rural dioceses and it is a matter of simple demographics –
age, ethnicity, population shifts. And there are other parts particularly of
our biggest cities, where our Church is scarcely represented at all.
In many parishes it has been that stalwart generation that returned from or
came of age immediately after the Second World War that has built and
consolidated and exercised the leadership for the whole of the second half of
the last century. This is by no means always the case, but nonetheless very
often so. And they have done a sterling job. Handover must now take place if
it has not already done so over the past decade or so.
But now for many clergy and people, the bitter struggle simply to survive
and to try to maintain the ways things have been, perhaps looking back
particularly to those golden years of the 1950s and 60s, is just about
overwhelming. There is a critical level of people and energy and resources,
below which this understanding is impossible to sustain. There is certainly
potentially not much room left for joy or renewing growth.
It remains true that despite all, wherever and however the people of God
gather to celebrate in sacrament, word and care the grace of God at work
in lives, there God is. True. But there is potentially so much more and so
many more of our people yet to be convinced that our ways to God through Jesus
Christ are what they are looking for or need. Some would want to say now that
our structures and our way of doing things can do much to obscure and to
hinder; that they need to be thoroughly overhauled. This can be disturbing
and frightening to some, a breath of fresh air to others.
It is only now dawning on many that it was the experience of those
expectation-forming times nearly half a century ago which was not at all usual
in the overall context of religious practice in Australia. The norm has hardly
ever been overflowing churches. Still, even taking that into account, we face
genuine and difficult challenges. The path from mainline church to sideline
church is not a pretty one. There is an urgency then to the current calls to
rethink and reassess so much of our institutional structures and ways of doing
things that previous generations may have taken for granted.
This process can be one of hope and it can yet be undertaken with a sense
of promise. Because of course there is yet hope. Partly this is a matter of
discernment: what is essential and what is not. Christians in other places and
in other generations have of course faced far worse. Best of all, even
accepting and acknowledging all these emerging clashes of culture and expectations that are making it so difficult for so many, people are still
coming to faith. People are still searching for faith, growing in faith,
being nurtured in the faith in our various church communities.
We all have these stories to share and it is encouraging to do so. Only
yesterday I had the real pleasure of seeing the excitement and satisfaction
as two more young enquirers for adult confirmation talked eagerly about their
preparation for enrolment as catechumens on Advent Sunday and the ongoing
preparation for their confirmation, along with a number of others, on Easter
Eve next year.
There are plenty of other examples. There is for instance the satisfaction
and comfort that comes from being part of a supportive and caring community at
the time of death. There is the power and timeless strength that is to be
found in the funeral rites themselves; awareness of gratitude through the
tears: gratitude that God is there.
So in the rites of passage, in the regular worship, in the ongoing pastoral
care and outreach – in all the normal things of a community of faith –
there is still that spark of life. For in these most simple things lives are
still changed. God is embraced and honoured. So yes, even in our somewhat
embattled and tired state, the rumour of God is still abroad. Our worship, our
witness, our liturgies have the power to attract, to make and grow disciples,
to give glimpses of the wonder that is God, the grace and the care that is of
God in God's people. It is truths such as these that will sustain us through
the hard transitions that lie ahead. Our institutional structures and
organisation are therefore a second level concern, not a first. They are able
to be re-expressed, refashioned, renewed. But first there is God. We need to
live as Church and as people of God firm in that conviction.
It is sometimes very hard to see the clear points of connection between that
initial vision and call so many generations ago and our attempts to live out
that promise in our own time. So every generation is called to renewal and a
fresh awareness of God. Each individual has a spiritual path to discover and
to follow. Each community of faith is made up of searchers, followers and
fellow travellers at various stages of enquiry and hope. And we all have need
of God and God's grace at work in and giving shape to our lives.
Our lessons this morning reminded us that the promise of God – hoped
for in the former times and fulfilled in the promised one, Jesus of Nazareth,
called communities of the faithful into being. These were to be communities
of accepting welcome, gratefully aware that the gift of life received by each
member made all other points of distinction unimportant, certainly at least to
God. Following God as followers of Jesus the Christ, these communities were
and are the places where the good news can be passed on to new generations.
In that first generation such communities of faith formed around the great
saints whom we honour at this time: John the Baptist, Peter and Paul. In time
there were places of meeting and eventually great churches and other locations
of care and service. We are the beneficiaries of this. These buildings remind
us of the sacrifice and the vision of those who have gone before us. In our
stewardship of this inheritance, we too must consider the needs of those who
will come after.
So there are yet new demands, new hopes, new pressures and challenges that
stand about us. May we in this time when the responsibility is ours, be given
the strength and the vision to respond and to offer, even as these great saints
did, flaws and all.
The Lord be with you.
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