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Living Lord, open Your Word to our lives, and our lives to Your Word - to Your praise and glory. Amen.
"When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?" (Lk 18:8)
Commentators agree that what Jesus was asking about was the kind of faith He might find when He comes again. When Jesus returns at the end of human history, to judge the living and the dead, will He find faith that has persevered in prayer and loyalty to God? The parable that Jesus has just told assumes a time of hardship for believers - a time that will require faithful perseverance such as the widow demonstrated. "When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"
I don't know about you, but I dislike being 'labelled'. When it comes to filling in forms and questionnaires, the rebel in me wants to tick all the wrong boxes - just so that no one can pigeon-hole me as a white female middle-aged middle-sized non-smoker, married with 2 kids etc etc!
And yet, like it or not, sometimes we do have to be clear about who we are and what we believe, nail our colours to the mast, stand up and be counted. When it comes to matters of faith, I am a Christian, and I am not ashamed of that 'label'. And, most of the time (!) I am happy for others to know that I am a member of the Anglican Church and an ordained minister in the Church of England branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
But press me to go further and I become uneasy. I'm not Roman Catholic, but I do believe that we should all be 'catholic', in the sense of being universal, part of a global fellowship of Christians. Surely that's what we mean when we say in the Creed that we believe in 'one holy catholic ... Church'. And are not all churches meant to be 'liberal', in the sense of being open-minded and generous in our judgements, rather than obscurantist and prejudiced? And surely the label 'Evangelical' should not be reserved for certain folk who like to wear this badge; it should describe the whole Church of God, in the sense that every church should be committed to the Good News of Jesus Christ as proclaimed in Bible. We affirm in the Creed that we believe in the apostolic Church - meaning that we adhere to the Christian faith as it has been handed down through the generations from the first apostles, those who knew Jesus as their earthly Master and who were sent out by Him as witnesses to His life and teaching, His death and Resurrection.
Compare that, though, with the teachings of many today; 'radicals' who claim to be 'progressive' and who repudiate almost everything which savours of orthodox biblically-based Christian faith. Even certain Bishops of the Anglican Church, like the North American, Jack Spong who visited Malvern last week as part of his tour of the UK to promote sales of his books. In one of these, entitled Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1998) Spong calls for a 'New Reformation' and among his 'Twelve Theses' are the following statements - I quote:
(1) "Theism as a way of defining God, is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being, supernatural in power... prepared to invade human history."
(2) Thus "...it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of theistic deity..."
(3) "The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense".
(6) "The view of the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God that must be dismissed."
(9) "There is no external, objective, revealed standard written in Scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behaviour for all time".
(10) "Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way."
Spong is by no means alone in seeking to jettison traditional orthodox biblically-based Christian faith and attempting to put in its place a reconstruction that bears little or no resemblance to the original apostolic message. Often now, one encounters folk who share or go beyond such views - some of you here today may be among them. Personally I am not, and in a moment I will nail my colours to the mast and wear a different label. But lest you think I'm doing that from the 'safety' of the pulpit, 6 feet above contradiction, may I invite you, after this service, to get some coffee (to warm yourself up) and bring it to the Monk's Stalls where we can discuss alternative views. We won't go on too long 'cause it's better to go home for our Sunday roast rather than have too much "roast preacher"!
So - let's take a look at what the Evangelical label signifies and what response we who wear it would make to those who clamour for a 'New Reformation'. Historically, at the heart of the 16th C Reformation there was a desire to put the Bible back at the centre of Church doctrine and practice. And still today Evangelicals hold the Scriptures as normative for their belief and behaviour. Contrary the accusations of both liberals within the Church and secularists outside it, Evangelicals are not fundamentalists; they do not regard all parts of Scripture as of equal value or literally true. But they do regard Scripture as being decisive for understanding God's purposes in Jesus Christ and the way of life in which His followers are called to walk.
The Bible is essentially a handbook of salvation. Its purpose is not to teach scientific tenets which empirical investigation can show to be nonsense. Holy Scripture is concerned with truths that only God can reveal:
the universal need of human beings for rescue, for "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3: 23);
the amazing grace and love of God who, in spite of our rebellion, has intervened in human history to put us right and do all that is necessary for our salvation, and that it is in Christ alone that we can be 'ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven'; the mind-blowing message of the Incarnation and of the atoning work of Christ on the cross and His physical resurrection from the dead; and the subsequent gift of His Spirit, His divine energy at work in us here and now so that we can be assured that prayer offered in the power of His Spirit reaches right into the heart of God (cf Rom 8: 26f).
These are biblical truths that you and I affirm in Christian Baptism and re-affirm every time we say the Creed. If we decide that we no longer trust the Bible then we are doing more than 'throwing the baby out with the bath-water'; we are casting aside the only reliable "lamp for our feet and light for our path" (Ps. 119: 105) and abandoning ourselves to the powers of darkness.
Remember also that when anyone is ordained in the Church of England, they affirm, and declare their "belief in the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds and to which the historic formularies of the Church ... bear witness". And, in words drawn directly from today's Epistle, candidates for the Anglican Orders of deacon, priest and bishop affirm that they "accept the Holy Scriptures as revealing all things necessary for eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ". Of course, those who are no longer convinced of the truth behind the promises that they have made have the right to forsake it. But then, surely, the path of honesty and integrity for them to take is to relinquish their Holy Orders, rather than to demonise those who still seek to be obedient to their vows.
"When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"
Nearly 2000 years ago, St Paul warned Timothy, "the time will come when people will not put up with sound (Greek = literally 'healthy') doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths" (2 Tim 4: 3-4). That prophetic warning has proved accurate again and again throughout the Church's history. What the Spongs of this generation claim to be new and radical is but a 'fresh expression' of stale old myths; a re-clothing in modern jargon of the same old false teaching that has appeared down the generations whenever there is an outbreak of itching-ear disease.
Reflecting on this passage from 2 Timothy, John Stott (whose theological insights and knowledge of the NT are renowned worldwide) writes this: "To be sure, the church of every generation must seek to translate the faith into the contemporary idiom, to relate the unchanging word to the changing world. But a translation is a rendering of the same message into another language; it is not a fresh composition. Yet this is what some modern radicals are doing, setting forth concepts of God and of Christ which Jesus and His apostles would not have recognised as their own." (The Message of 2 Timothy)
So what's the alternative? It's the same as it's always been. The same advice that Paul gave Timothy holds true for us. "But as for you, continue in what you have learned...". What we have learned is the biblical gospel, vouched for by both the prophets of God and the apostles of Christ, and the faithful men and women who guard this gospel and hand it on through the generations, in spite of hardship and persecution, ridicule and rejection. Holding fast to this God-breathed revelation is not about being piously pompous or self-righteous; it doesn't make one an intellectual dinosaur or an unloving bigot. It is about humbly and patiently persevering in "Preaching the Word":
announcing that 'Jesus is Lord', and living in loyalty and commitment to all that this means.
This will not make us popular or successful, as the world defines such things; but it will determine the answer to our Lord's own searching question: "When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"
Mary Barr
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