Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Mary’s, Potterne
Romans 5.1 – 8; Matthew 9.35 – 10.8
“God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”
Natural beauty? Kim Kardashian in 2010.
Strong and perfect. That’s what we’re supposed to be. Well, to be fair, we all know nobody is perfect. So, strong and nearly perfect is what we’re told we’re supposed to be.
How often do you see an ugly person on a TV show? Oh, the odd time you’ll see a politician interviewed who is no oil painting, or perhaps a professional sportsperson whose sporting prowess makes them indispensable even if they have a face that could sink a thousand ships. But have a look at the presenters of the chat shows. Have a look at the actors – and even more the actresses. The odd flawed vessel slips through by force of personality – at least if they’re a man – but what is presented to us as what we should aspire to looks a lot different from most of us: far more glamorous and perfect, indeed far more perfect than anyone could be without plastic surgery and stage make-up.
If you look at the influencers on social media, they’re even more perfect. Not a hair out of place, most of them. Industrial quantities of hairspray in use there, so that companies can pay them to encourage us to buy their brand of make-up, or craft beer, or whatever it is. Let’s think through what that implies. We live at a time when some people are famous just for being famous, and this seems to matter to enough ordinary people for it to be worth companies paying people who are famous to endorse what they want to sell us – even if it is an empty form of fame.
So we should aim to be famous, to be strong, physically and mentally, to be attractive to an almost inhuman pitch of perfection, and most of all, to be successful. Failure is for losers. That is the world we live in.
In this morning’s Epistle reading, St Paul, writing to the first Christian community that ever existed in Rome, says something very different about what God thinks about us. He says that we are of immeasurable value to God when we are weak, and when we are still sinners. We are of such absolute value to God, just for being human, just for being God’s children, that God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ to die on the Cross for us.
On that Cross, Jesus Christ was, by the standards of this world, Himself a total failure – strung up like a common criminal, His followers abandoning Him with their fantasies of revolution lying in tatters, the crowds jeering Him. That was appropriate because He was on a rescue mission to failures – the failures that all of us are, some of the time. And that rescue mission was in fact a total success – on the Cross, God Himself faced the absolute worst of human sinfulness and was killed by it. But because, as God, He was the source of life, death could not hold Him and He opened the way to eternal life for all who put their faith in Him.
Now, I can’t prove that to you in scientific terms. I would make the case that this makes a lot more moral and emotional sense of the human experience than the idea that we’re just the product of chemicals combining and natural selection. I think I can make the case that the idea that we’re just the product of chemicals combining and natural selection is so mathematically unlikely as to be almost impossible. But I can’t prove the truth of the Christian faith to you and I don’t think God ever wanted the universe to work in such a way that I could prove it definitively. In the Christian understanding of the world, to be truly free, we need to be free to reject Christianity. God always respects our freedom. Unless our faith is freely given, it is not faith at all, but the product of coercion, which is a very un-Christlike thing.
Paul tells the Romans that we are justified not by our successes or our strength, but by our faith. Now, we can trap ourselves into more dangerous games of success and failure with faith. We can beat ourselves up for not having enough faith; or we can pat ourselves on the back for having a very strong faith. But the truth is that even the tiniest scrap of faith is enough for God, the mustard seed that will, with His help, grow into a mighty tree; and even the most robust faith is, at the end of the day, a gift of God and not something we should be praising ourselves for.
Indeed, one of the best parts of putting our faith in Christ is that we don’t need to pretend about what we do and don’t think. God already knows what is in our hearts. God already knows us better than we know ourselves. We can turn to Him, not seeking a reward but knowing that He already wants to give us better things than we can imagine for ourselves.
Often, the thing we need is help. We need help when we are weak, but a strong person also knows when they need help. In fact, even Jesus asked for help. That’s what this morning’s Gospel reading is about. Jesus called the apostles to assist Him in His ministry of teaching and healing.
We still meet in the name of the apostles. In a moment, when we profess the Creed together, we will say we believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. The Church that began with the apostles is still the Church we are part of today. But when you hear these names, what do you know about them? I suspect very little. Maybe you think learning all about the apostles and what they did with their lives is the sort of thing you learn at vicar school. But, actually, there are a number of them nobody knows much about. Clearly they were all important enough to Jesus to be called by Him, and clearly they were significant enough to His earliest followers to be remembered by name. But in fact, we know very little about Bartholomew or Thaddaeus.
It seems obvious that being famous, such an obsession in our culture, is not very important to God. God is calling you to something far better than being famous – God is calling you to serve Him, like the apostles in whose succession we still meet today.
Perhaps you are old and cannot serve Him except where you already are in the ways you do – that is enough for Him. Perhaps you are already overcommitted with your work and your duties to your family and friends and your church, and cannot take anything else on – that is enough for Him, but be alert for Him calling you to take up something new that may require you to leave old things behind. And perhaps you are at a point in your life where you are seeking guidance on how to serve God better – then listen for Him speaking, and take the space to do so.
Your service to Him will not be for this life only. While fame is forgotten, beauty decays, and strength weakens, faith never dies – along with love and hope, it lives forever, and through the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, if you put your faith in Him, then you will too.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and for evermore. Amen.
