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This file is corrupt
Date: 9th September 2007
Preacher: The Revd Canon Dr Jonathan Draper
I have this morning experienced every computer users nightmare: as I went to save my sermon before printing it a message saying it was corrupt – which I’m sure would be the verdict of at least some who had heard it anyway - flashed up and the whole thing disappeared into nothingness. Not one scarp of it left. I do have some idea of what I was going to say, so I’ve done my best to reconstruct it in the last half hour or so. So apologies if this is a little less coherent than usual, though I hope you can spot the difference. It will also have the merit of being shorter.
We have two very interesting and difficult readings this morning. Our first reading is an unusual letter from St Paul written not to a church but to an individual. Paul writes to his friend Philemon, who is also clearly a pillar of the local church, about his slave Onesimus. Onesimus was, apparently, a useless slave and had run away to Paul. Paul has taken him in, found him useful and helpful while he’s been in Prison, and has come to view him fondly as a sort of son. Paul wants Philemon to take him back, to treat him as a brother in Christ, and, to sweeten the pill, Paul offer to make good any costs Onesimus has incurred.
In our Gospel reading we have one of those sayings of Jesus that many wish had been forgotten. Jesus says that if you want to follow him you have to hate everyone and everything else, you have to drop everything, take up your cross and follow him. There are no half measures. When my wife, who is leading the Sunday School as we speak, asked about the readings for this morning, I suggested that the children could make nice, brightly coloured badges to wear back into church that said ‘I hate mummy and daddy’ or ‘send back the flat screen telly and the DVD’. We’ll see what happens.
By the time the Christian faith had been through St Paul’s hands there is adifferent attitude to having and owning things. There were clearly rich and powerful people in some of Paul’s churches, rich enough to have houses big enough for the church to meet in. There were also clearly people who were poor in those churches: poor enough not to have much when they had their common Eucharistic meals. St Paul was more interested in them all recognising that they are all equally sinners and all equally in need of God’s saving grace, than in their economic status. Economic or social status, let along nationality and gender, don’t matter in this: all stand in need of God’s grace.
But it is interesting that St Paul doesn’t question in all this the right of Philemon to own Onesimus as a slave. Paul wasn’t a social reformer like William Wilberforce. Indeed St Paul rarely questions social institutions like slavery in part because he was a man of his time, but also because he didn’t think they were very important because they were about to be made irrelevant by the second coming of Christ. It was much more important to open yourself to God’s grace than to worry about who was a slave or not.
All that may be true, but I would like to take a slightly different lesson from it this morning as well. We need to understand that while many of the stories about Jesus in the gospels talk of him speaking to the crowds, but we don’t always have much of the content of what he said. What we do have is much more of what Jesus says privately to the 12, to that inner core of disciples when he is speaking separately to them. And I wonder if a reading like this morning’s is aimed at them and not at us.
Most of us have enough ego to think that we are the shepherd and not one of the sheep, to identify with the saints and heroes of the faith, but not with the faithful. I don’t think Jesus is calling everyone to that particular kind of discipleship; many are called but few really are chosen. Not everyone is called to be a martyr, or there wouldn’t be much of a church left. Jesus is not calling all of us to that particularly single-minded form of discipleship, but to another form – that of faithful following – which is different, even if not less exacting. We are all called to be Christ-like in our discipleship, but few of us are called to be Christ; we are all called to make our faith the centre of our lives, but few of us are called to be
St Paul, or Moses or David or John the Baptist or Martin Luther King or Desmond Tutu either. Mostly we are called to faithful following, to using the gifts that God has given us to the best of our ability in the service of others. We are the multitude who flock to Jesus to hear words of love and life and who seek to let those words shape and determine our lives; but few of us are the 12, or even the 70; but we can be faithful followers.
The discipleship to which we are called is meant to liberate us to live lives of love and service in the communities and with the gifts we have been given. We are not supposed to feel guilty that we are not something else. Understanding that can be the first step in being set free to follow Christ in ways that lead to the abundance of life about which he spoke so often. Amen.