The Gray Monk

“He, therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God, who hath also given unto us His Holy Spirit.”

One of the difficulties of having the same set of readings year on year for this service, is that, if you were the preacher last year – what are you going to do with them this time round? Well, fear not, I haven’t recycled last year’s sermon!

Today’s readings do present us with something of a challenge, but the epistle we have heard today, is in fact the concluding remarks of a much more important message. Paul is exhorting his readers to Christian living; something which requires much more than simply living by sets of rules. This is about faith rather than belief, about living by values rather than by rules and about showing in one’s life, the things one professes in faith.

Thessalonica was, in Paul’s day, the capital of Macedonia, a vibrant, multi-racial and multi-cultural society typical of such an important Provincial capital. Not unnaturally, this also meant that the fledgling church he and Barnabas had founded there was subjected to enormous pressures from all sides, Jew and pagan. Many of its new adherents were complete strangers to a religion that demanded a different approach. Demanded, in fact, that you lived according to the teachings of the God you worshipped, rather than simply tried to keep him off your back. For that is the striking difference between the worship of the temple and that of the Christian Church as it has grown from these early beginnings.

Christians met to celebrate their redemption and their God’s sacrifice for them, whereas those who visited the temples of Venus, Zeus, Vesta and others did so in order to appease a God whose only interest in humanity was to use them for amusement. It must have come as something of a shock to many gentile converts, that this God that they now embraced, actually loved them, cared about them and didn’t see them as some sort of plaything. It would have taken them some time to realise that because this God was so different, that the purpose of worship was not to appease him, but to genuinely worship in thanksgiving, praise and teaching so that they could fully appreciate his grace.

Small wonder then that Paul, Peter, John and the others got so worked up whenever some false apostle tried to lead their carefully nurtured flocks astray.

The seeds of faith planted with such care by the apostles and nurtured by their acolytes were fragile and it does not take a great deal of imagination to see that every new argument by those that sought to change the gospel message to one of mysticism, or to draw it back into a web of rules and rituals, could so easily destroy everything. Faith requires constancy, it requires love and it requires a degree of labour to reach fulfillment. That is the underlying message of the story of the gentile woman who asks for healing for her daughter. It is her persistence, her determined faith in the face of insult and refusal that finds confirmation in Christ’s final response.

“Great is thy faith, Be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

Faith sets us apart. It is by faith that we are saved, not by adherence to rituals, to attempts to appease God by observance or even by attempts to buy our way in by means of “good works”.

“For I say unto thee, unless thou become as one of these, thou shalt not enter the kingdom of Heaven.”

We are nothing less than children in the eyes of God, and unless, like children we can set aside our pride and accept the sacrifice of our saviour Jesus Christ as the gift it is – unearned, undeserved, but given in love – we cannot be truly saved. As our collect for this morning says
“Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves; Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls.”
Surely this encapsulates the essence of our faith, we have no power to help ourselves in the life hereafter, this is the gift of God alone.

No sacrifice to any of the manmade Gods of our forebears could help us in this, for surely they reflected our natures, projected larger than life and all the more ugly because of it. Worship of these idols certainly didn’t constrain the worshipper to live according to a set of values between visits to the temples, but Christianity does, and that is the building block which builds our faith. You cannot live by the Gospel values without discovering a vast well of faith within yourself. No matter how difficult and troubled life may be, if you have discovered that wellspring within yourself you can endure the most incredible hardships.

On this the second Sunday of our Lenten journey of preparation, we should consider carefully the call from today’s readings to seek to build our faith so that it too can become as strong as the woman’s was. This is the faith for which there is no mystery, there is certainty, for which there are no barriers, merely steps to be negotiated.

In Paul’s day the Jewish congregations with which the early Christians met and shared the synagogues gradually came to view the newcomers with something like contempt. They despised the new Christian’s for their non-adherence to the laws requiring circumcision, the shunning of certain foods and the host of other “rules” by which the devotion of any Jew was measured. Paul says to us, as much as to them, we cannot despise what God has given and still call ourselves faithful.

The lesson for the Thessalonians was that there was a new game in town, a new way to do things, which required commitment more than observance, faith more than belief. For those witnessing the miracle of the gentile’s daughter, it was the same, sacrifices and observance did not heal the girl – her mother’s unswerving faith made it possible for Christ to reach out to her.

The lesson for us is there for us as well. It is not our observances that will distinguish us in the eyes of God, it is our faith. We cannot despise someone and still claim to be “in faith”, because faith is to love God. If we show that faith in our lives, day-by-day and week-by-week, we too will receive the acclamation,
“Great is thy faith, Be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

Amen