Surprised by Hope - Session 6

[Music] when you visit a great building like Durham Cathedral here it's easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale and scope of the whole thing and you stand and stare at the majesty of the finished construction and it's easy to forget what has to go on around the place and behind the scenes all the time in particular a place like this the stonemasons yard there's also plenty of other people who work around the building plumbers and carpenters and so on but you always have stonemasons because obviously the building was made of stone in the first place and the stone weathers and needs to be replaced on a rolling basis so all the time for the last thousand years there's been half a dozen people at any one time working away in this stonemasons yard but it's easy then to imagine what it must be like for somebody starting out as a stonemason and being given their first project here's a piece of stone and we want you to carve it in this particular way it's got to have a groove here a line there a little wrinkle whatever and when you're doing it and wondering if you're getting it right you might think what on earth is this got to do with that fantastic building just round the back there as you might actually find it bit depressing from time to time but then one day the master stonemason will come take you outside you've finished your piece you've handed it over you're working on the next bit and you'll show you and they're up on the wall of the cathedral is your bit of stone tiny now because it's part of a much bigger construction that you could never have imagined you could never a plan that or done it yourself that you have nevertheless made your small but vital contribution in the same way many Christians find that when they read the Gospels and they hear Jesus talking about what they're supposed to be doing to be doing justice to be doing works of mercy and love to be looking after the poor and being kind and helpful to people and making healing and hope happen they often think to themselves well that's all very well but supposing I am campaigning for justice in my local community and this bit or that and supposing I'm working on the side in a soup kitchen in some back street what's that got to do with those great biblical images about God's kingdom coming and God's will being done on earth as in heaven how can I possibly have anything to do with that and the answer is well it's not up to you to build the kingdom yourself what you're doing is building for the kingdom you're doing work in the present time which will then be collected up and will be part of God's eventual design when that comes about and one day we will look and we will see and we will be astonished and we will be grateful to have had even that small tiny part in the eventual construction [Music] one of san Paul's longest arguments about anything is his enormous chapter on the resurrection which we call first Corinthians chapter 15 which actually draws together the threads of a lot that he's been hinting at throughout the whole letter now if you were I were to write a large section on resurrection and I should know because I've done it once or twice the natural tendency might be to say at the end well if we have this wonderful hope of resurrection therefore let's just sit back put our feet up that's what God is going to do for us at the end so why worry why bother about anything else Paul's ending to that chapter couldn't be more different in first Corinthians 15:58 he says therefore my beloved be steadfast immovable always abounding in the work of the Lord because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain what does he mean by not in vain what's that got to do with the resurrection basically he means that in the resurrection God will transform and therefore reaffirm everything that has been good in this world in this present creation the new creation is not going to be a matter of throwing the old one into the trashcan and making a new one from scratch God is gonna take everything in this present world that bears the mark of his love and His goodness and his power and his healing compassion and that will be the raw material out of which the new one is made and that isn't just stuff that God has put into the world without as it were our noticing it or having anything to do with it on the contrary it includes front-and-center the stuff that you and I are called to do so he says get on with your work at the moment because actually it's not going to waste you may not understand what's going to happen to this little bit of work you're doing for God at the moment but one day you will see in God's new world where that little bit that you were doing will actually fit in but what sort of things is it that we're supposed to be getting on with well if we're talking about an you creation in which God will put everything right at last one of them first and most obvious things is to work for justice now justice is one of those difficult words right back as far as Plato five hundred years before Jesus you find people struggling with the question what does justice actually mean how can we find it how can we be sure we're doing it and all legal systems in the world have had a stab at trying to make justice happen but the fact that it's complex shouldn't put us off from working for it here and now again and again we are hit in the face by the radical in justices of the world it is just unfair that this person is put in prison for a crime they didn't commit it is just wrong unjust that somebody is discriminated and discriminated against because of the color of their skin and so on and so on and Christians have done wonderful work think of those two hundred years ago who campaigned to end the slave trade and to end slavery itself they were fired up with a passion for justice and if somebody had said to them oh don't worry about it one of these days God will put everything to rights and that'll be okay so we'll just let the show run for the moment they would have said no God's justice has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth and if we are following him we've got to do justice as best we can in the present we may not get it complete the prophet Micah says do justice love mercy and walk humbly with your God and part of the humility is recognizing that our justice and our mercy will at best only ever be signposts to God's justice and mercy we don't have that stuff in our pockets able just to deal with it right the way through but we have to be campaigners for justice lovers of justice and that means locally in your own town or village or community see what's going on that's out of line name it shame it figure out a wise way of dealing with it but also internationally because there are many in justices after two-thirds of the world is still in massive and unpayable debt to those of us who live in the so called first world we could remit those debts we've done a bit of that for instance with a country like Tanzania whose economy has been completely turned round once they didn't have to pay those stupid debts half of which they incurred because we lent them money in order to buy stuff from us in the first place not least armaments there's a lot of massive injustice is like that and it's time to put them right globally locally wherever it is that is part of the work of new creation but there's something else which goes with new creation which often surprises people and it's beauty beauty again like justice is one of those words which we all know and really love but it's quite hard to figure out what it actually is and what we can do about it and that's been made harder actually for us because in the last several generations perhaps particularly the last 200 years the question of being a Christian artist has got very difficult very contested and I've met many Christian artists who say my church doesn't understand me they don't understand the gifts that God has given me or what I should be doing with them and many in the church are suspicious of art and music and literature and so on unless of course they turn into little dog roles that they can sing as hymns or jaunty little tunes that they can play in worship services or whatever it may be but actually beauty is far more than that and we have a chance in our generation to come right through the middle on this one because if you look at the artistic world there's a whole lot that we can broadly call Brutalism out there now Brutalism started off as a style of architecture just building these great stark square boxes in your face kind of architecture but it's now expanded so that people wallow in the horror of life and the meaninglessness of life and they put some of this stuff into art galleries and expect us to treat it as art and they're saying if you like there you are it's messy it's meaningless but that's the way it is and because that is so shocking and so on people who actually want to express something more gentle more sensitive about beauty often find it very difficult to do so and they often go the other way into what you might call sentimentalism or Keach now if you want to find Keach art the churches aren't the only place where you could find it but that might be a good place to start looking and somehow we have to do something which is neither of those things how can we do that the answer is a proper theology of Resurrection and new creation because the point about new creation is that God is going to take the world as it is with all its pain and suffering and problems this ties in with what Paul says in Romans 8 where he talks about the whole creation groaning in travail together like a woman going into labor and he says then finally the whole creation will be set free from its bondage to decay and share the Liberty of the glory of the children of God Paul has a vision there of the present pain of creation being taken up in the love of God and transformed so that all that his evil will be done away but somehow the suffering and the struggle will then be transformed by that freeing and liberating powerful love of God the same power that liberated Jesus from death will do exactly that for the whole of creation that I would love to see and it would be so dramatic a thing to develop in our generation I would love to see a Christian art that will be utterly sensitive to the present pain of the world without collapsing into Brutalism because it would be shot through with real hope and a Christian art that will be able to express the real hope of new creation which is for the present beauty to be transfigured and made even more wonderful by that future reality but without collapsing into sentimentalism what we need to do is to hold together the pain and the hope and it takes art to do that it takes music to do that it takes poetry to do that you can't just put it in a test tube you can't just sketch it easily and quickly you've got to work at it because here again Jesus wants human beings to be active within this work and part of the point of art is that art is what happens when a human being is so consumed with a sense both of the pain of the world and of the joy of the world that it transforms them and their sensibilities have to pour out onto canvas into stone into dance perhaps into music into drama whatever it is so we have justice and we have beauty both of them are to do with new creation and we as Christians we as resurrection people ought to be saying to God Lord where are you calling me to be in all of this because the idea of vocation which is a noble Christian image comes very strongly into play here sometimes when I've spoken about these things people have come to me afterwards and said that's all very well you've talked about so many issues in the world I can't go and dig a well in Peru with one part of my life and also paint paintings with another I've got to choose rather narrowly fine okay that's why we are called to be members of the body of Christ because we don't all have the same job somebody may be a finger somebody bit maybe a toe whatever it is we've got to find out what our bit is and work at that knowing that that little bit will not be in vain but then there's something else which happens when we start to get the justice and the beauty going we become people individually and corporately as a church through whom the watching world can begin to glimpse something is going on here and we're not quite sure what it is why we should care how we might join in justice and beauty come together in the work of evangelism often Christians imagine that evangelism is just somebody belting out on the street telling people about Jesus and then rushing away before it gets too embarrassing but hoping something might happen well maybe God will honor that - God moves in all sorts of mysterious ways but when you have a community that is doing and seeking justice and doing so cheerfully not in a mealy-mouthed depressing sort of way when you have a community that is generating and celebrating beauty and laying on a splendid music festival or whatever it may be to the glory of God then when you start to talk about Jesus and his life and his kingdom and his death and his resurrection it makes all sorts of sense people can see what it is you're talking about because you're actually doing it on the street and in the community so justice and beauty and evangelism come together these are the things which the community of new creation needs to be working on and evangelism like justice and beauty is something that actually has to happen when people get caught up with it so much when something about the love of God is so transforming them that they just can't help themselves they want to pray for their friends they want to tell other people what Jesus means to them and then they long for the joy of seeing it happen to these other folk as well I could tell you many stories of that from my own life I remember from way back when I was a student one day feeling very nervous when a student who I sang in a choir with said to me what is this Christianity stuff about and I stumblingly tried to explain just a little bit of what it meant to me and then he had to dash off he had an appointment I remember thinking God yeah that's no good you'll forget all about he came to me the next day and he said Tom he said that I'd lent him a booklet he said I went through that book and as I went through that book I find myself wanting to pray and as I wanted to pray I found something happening in my heart and in my life he said something is different what is it what's going on and of course he had become a Christian then and there now I wasn't a very good evangelist just like I wasn't and I'm not terribly good at justice and beauty but when we're doing those things they make sense it's about a world of new creation which happens to individuals but it happens to individuals in order that it can happen through them in the church through them in and for the wider world that's how it all fits together so to come back as Paul says in first Corinthians 15:58 when we're doing this stuff and we can do it in collaboration with so many other people other churches will want to join in other people in the wider community maybe people who don't name the name of Jesus or themselves they will say actually we can join with you on this that's fine since Paul says whatever is noble and true and lovely and of good report if there is any virtue in any praise think about these things be a good citizen explore what is for the common good of all people but if you do it out of the love of Jesus you will find as Paul says in Ephesians 3 that through the church the manifold wisdom of God will make itself known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places it's Ephesians 3 verse 10 a very powerful verse in that letter the causes Paul says what you do in the Lord is not in vain it's not wasted you're not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to fall off a cliff you're not planting flowers in a garden that's one day going to be paved over with concrete you are doing things that will last you can do that as an individual you together can do them as a church go for them it's your birthright in Jesus you are resurrection people you are people through whom hope can come to the world [Music] so when you find yourself thinking as most Christians do from time to time why am I actually bothering to do this particular project to do this little piece of work here to go and help some friend who's in distress or work at something in the community then remind yourself of that line we heard from some Paul remember the work you do in the Lord is not in vain it's back to the stonemason again this stuff that he's doing chipping away day after day working at it shaping it he's not wasting his time it's not up to him of course to build the whole eventual building that's what the Master Mason does is not up to us to build the kingdom of God that's what God does it's up to us to do the particular things that we're called to do the things that will last into the kingdom but the things that right now give hope to the world you

Channel: Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd

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Length: 19min 49sec (1189 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020