Sermon for 2003 April 6, Evensong, St Mary Magdalen, Sheet

Bible readings: Exodus 7:8-24, Romans 5:12-21

I’m touched by the appreciation shown to our little children’s training choir on the last couple of Sundays. Seeing their faces and hearing their pure voices reminds us of something we might feel we have lost. However naughty we know they can be, children can be a great inspiration to us and almost literally warm our hearts in these troubled times. We are urged to have a childlike faith, are we not? After all, didn’t Jesus tell us, Anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it? Instead, we like to over-complicate things, but we simply need the unquestioning trust of a child and faith will be easy. We are like sheep, we have gone astray, all we need to do is follow.

Well, I wish that were the whole story. If the Christian faith were only a matter of shedding layers of adult flab and flim-flam, it may not be easy but it would be clear and in that sense simple to know what we have to do. This simplicity, personified by such as St Francis and some might say our Lord Jesus himself, has long been a much-loved pillar of Christian belief.

But it is one our opponents love to criticise us for. They talk of the value of being grown up. Let me read a provocative quote from Richard Dawkins (yes, him again) in an advert for his latest book. Yes I know, it’s sad, I’m too busy to read the book but at least I can get round to reading the advert: "Is there no catastrophe terrible enough to shake the faith of people, on both sides, in God’s goodness and power? No glimmering realization that he might not be there at all: that we might just be on our own, needing to cope with the real world like grown-ups?" Grown-ups, coping with the real world. A favourite theme of the humanist – faith is a prop which real men and women of mettle don’t – or shouldn’t – need. And with that sense of superiority can come a patronising attitude towards people’s faith, especially other faiths. We’ve seen it I’m afraid in some elements in right-wing evangelical America who are convinced that the people of Iraq not only want to see the back of Saddam but are desperate to embrace the American way. A more amusing example is in the episode of the three pigs – stories about pigs had fallen out of favour in a certain school for fear of offending the Moslem children at the school. It took the Moslem Council of Great Britain to assure the well-meaning teachers that maybe they were missing the point. They didn’t say "please stop trying to humour us" but they might as well have done. And I am sensing glimmers that the backlash against anti-Christian bias – you know, the "No Christmas in Birmingham" sort of thing, has started but with a new tune: let them celebrate their quaint little rituals, they won’t do us any harm. There there, run along.

We need to answer this charge that we are not grown-ups. Frankly it isn’t enough for us to retreat into the certainties of childhood. Thankfully as always we can be guided by what God has revealed of himself in the Bible. Our two readings tonight are only examples, but they are good ones, about being grown up. In our Old Testament reading, we have the first of the ten plagues with which God had to afflict the Egyptians before Pharaoh would let Moses and his people go, preceded by a kind of warm-up act, staffs turning into snakes, a contest between Moses and Aaron, which they won (just): 1-0. Then the plague of blood, the water of the Nile turns blood-red, fish die, the river stinks. Now that first plague is actually a draw, because we are told that the Egyptian magicians did the same things by their secret arts. It’s interesting to read the progression of these plagues. The next one is frogs and again the magicians can do the same trick. But with gnats they fail. Then later the magicians themselves become victims. It all begins to get very serious. Later still it becomes more sophisticated, some of the Egyptians are spared, there is the possibility of redemption if you like, and Moses prays for Pharaoh. But Pharaoh’s frozen heart doesn’t melt until the death of the firstborn and the Passover by which the people of Israel are spared, with all the pain and sorrow that involved, not to mention huge significance for us as Christians. What started almost as a game got gradually more and more serious, more grown-up.

What about our New Testament reading? A classic example of one of Paul’s carefully argued explanations. Sin came to the world through one man but has affected, you could say infected, all people. One trespass resulted in condemnation, one man’s disobedience somehow made us all disobedient. But in just the same way, or in just the opposite way depending on how you see these things, the one righteous act of Jesus in dying on the cross makes many people righteous. Just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign in righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Like many of Paul’s arguments, you could spend a long time on this, but for tonight I just want to remark on one striking thing about this passage. It seems so final and complete. One man’s sin made everything go wrong, one man’s righteous and gracious act put everything right, for ever! Much of the Bible is the story of growth, the kind of childhood of the people of God as they were nurtured and moulded and cajoled, just as a child might be. Jesus told a parable about the vineyard owner who tried harder and harder to collect his fruit until he had to send his own son at great cost. Then he stopped. And there is a sense in which, while God still cares for us, is every day going out of his way to win us over, there was something final and complete in Jesus coming and dying and being raised. He will not come again until the end of the world. We are fools if we think otherwise. It’s something the early church had to be weaned out of, this idea that Jesus might come again at any minute, to clear up the latest mess. They had to be told to grow up and get on with the job of living the Kingdom of Heaven. In a certain sense we are on our own, needing to cope with the real world like grown-ups.

Does that sound a bit uncomfortable, even a bit bleak? How in fact can the child in us meet the adult that we need to be? In my humble opinion, and I mean that because it is a humble opinion, the answer lies in prayer. Now for me to say that is like me saying "The Himalayas are spectacular. I know, because I’ve climbed Butser Hill [local hill in the South Downs]". But prayer is all about walking in step with God, a way in which we can be grown up, not expecting God to pull another trick out of the hat because we are bored, while still being childlike, retaining that simple trust which not even the most mature or the cleverest of critics can take away from us. Yes, we are still growing – so the language of childhood and adulthood is not enough to describe our relationship with God. We are his children, but we are his brothers and sisters. We are nothing compared to him, yet through prayer we are more than something, we are in him and he is in us.

Today is Passion Sunday. This morning grown-ups and children told the story of Jesus’ suffering and death in words and with objects. Those amazing events which we recall over the next two weeks particularly, need to move us as children to want to follow his example and grow and be taught, yet also as adults to hold our heads high and open our arms wide even as we share in his sufferings and death.

© Mike Knee, 2003