A Sermon preached on Easter VI, May 25 at St. Augustine's, Wiesbaden
Acts 17:22-31,
1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21, Psalm 66:7-18
Today we are
commemorating the feast day of our patron saint, Augustine of Canterbury.
Actually it’s tomorrow, May 26, but somehow I don’t expect to see too many of
you in church on a Monday! A group of monks led by St. Augustine, their prior,
were sent in 596 by Pope Gregory the Great on a mission to England, to the
Kingdom of Kent. The Kentish King, Ethelbert, tolerated their presence and
allowed them the use of an old church built on the east side of Canterbury,
dating from the Roman occupation of Britain. This church of St. Martin is the
earliest place of Christian worship in England still in use.
After four years St.
Augustine managed to convert Ethelbert to Christianity, though Ethelbert’s wife
Bertha, who was already a Christian, might have helped too! With the king, the
kingdom soon became Christian. So the see of Canterbury and its Cathedral
Church, and the preeminent position of Archbishop of Canterbury in the Anglican
Communion, all owe their establishment to Augustine’s mission. Interestingly
Pope Gregory gave Augustine considerable freedom in his mission to adapt to
local custom and to use ‘best practices.’ In one letter Gregory writes, “If you
have found customs, whether in the Roman, Gallican, or any other Churches that
may be more acceptable to God, I wish you to make a careful selection of
them, and teach the Church of the English, which is still young in the faith,
whatever you can profitably learn from the various Churches.” This is advice
today’s Roman church sometimes seems to have forgotten
There are both similarities
and differences between St. Augustine’s mission to the English, and St. Paul’s
to the Athenians that we heard about this morning. Both were sent to places they
had not been to before, though Paul would have felt more at home in the Hellenistic
culture of Athens, than Augustine among the Anglo-Saxons. On the other hand unlike
Athens and despite the claim sometimes made that St. Augustine converted the
English, the British Isles already contained a lot of Christians. In those
areas not completely overrun by the illegal immigrants of the day, the
Anglo-Saxons, British-Roman Christianity, often also called Celtic, still
flourished with different practices that would not be unified for another sixty
years. And remember St. Augustine was given the use of a Christian
church. So he will have encountered some knowledge of Christianity.
Paul had no such luck.
Instead he cleverly uses a shrine dedicated to an unknown god to introduce his,
our God as what the Athenians had been worshipping all along as unknown. In
fact both he and St. Augustine were very willing to use local customs, poems, traditions,
or philosophy to argue their case – Paul quotes a line from Greek poetry to
prove a point. They both engaged critically with the culture and religion of
their day and they are willing to use elements of it if it helps to get the
core message of Good News across.
We have no record of
St. Augustine’s preaching. But we can assume it will not have been vastly
different from what St. Paul proclaims. And that echoes what Jesus tells his disciples
in today’s Gospel. It’s an incredibly encouraging message. “The God who made
the world and everything in it” (Acts 17:24) is not the distant and at best uninterested
god of Greek philosophy, nor the often vindictive and violent god of Anglo
Saxon mythology, but a God who is not far from each of us. Jesus tells his
disciples that this same God will send them the “Spirit of truth,” which will abide
with them, and be in them. That’s pretty close!
And this is not just
about proximity. Paul tells the Athenians that we are God’s offspring. He does
not mean this in a physical sense. The Athenians knew all about the exploits of
Zeus, the chief god in their pantheon, who seems to have fathered a child somewhere
almost on a weekly basis. Being God's offspring is another way of saying that the God Paul proclaims, offers
us the intimate and loving relationship of a parent to a child. In Jesus’ words we are
offered the chance of becoming part of the existing, loving, mutual
relationship between him and the Father: “I am in my Father, and you in me, and
I in you.” (John14:20) We will be joined to Jesus and the Father by an
unbreakable bond of love. A love demonstrated by God’s gift of his Son, by his
Son’s gift of his life and new life for us all, and by the gift of the Spirit
as helper, comforter, and advocate.
As I explained earlier,
our patron saint was a missionary, which according to one definition is someone
“sent by God and by God’s church to bear witness in word and deed to God’s
action in Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.”[1] I am sure that this church’s founders meant this missionary role of being a witness in
word and deed to God and God’s action to be part of our calling, our DNA you
might say, and that this church was never just supposed to be a little corner of
England in a foreign land. That is something we no longer are, if we ever were.
Just look at the variety of languages we will hear in 2 weeks at Pentecost: Greek,
Aramaic, French, Italian, German, Danish, Finnish, Afrikaans, Farsi, Swahili …
oh and English too. This is also reflected in this church's official mission statement:
Our mission is to fulfil our promises to Jesus Christ through word and deed by proclaiming his love to all. Our ministry
is to all people, regardless of their cultural, national, ethnic, or religious
background, who seek fellowship in the baptism of Jesus Christ.
As parishioners of St.
Augustine’s church we are called to be missionaries to the people surrounding
us. 2,000 years after Paul and 1,500 years after Augustine, we have the same
core message to proclaim and the same dispensation to adapt to ‘local customs’
to make it understandable and relevant. Like Paul and Augustine, God expects us
to engage critically with the surrounding culture and ideology and to offer a
radical alternative: that has not changed.
Today’s culture does
not have distant gods, but an absent god: We offer the creator God who is never
far from us, and whose Spirit is with us forever.
Today’s culture has its
own violent, selfish, and jealous gods or idols. We offer a God of love and a God of relationships
and an ideal, if not always the reality, of a selfless community joined to one
another and to God by bonds of love.
Today’s culture holds
up the ideals of self-realization and self-reliance: it’s up to us! We offer
mutual help and support and God’s support through the Spirit that gives us strength,
energy, guidance, and life.
“If you love me, you
will keep my commandments” Jesus says in today’s passage. In the next chapter
of John’s Gospel he defines what he means by this: “This is my commandment,
that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12) You all are the ‘one
another’ we are supposed to love as Jesus loved, but it doesn’t stop there. The
one another of Jesus’ command includes those outside our doors. Letting
them see and hear and experience how we put this commandment into effect is
what will make us worthy successors of our patron saint, St. Augustine of
Canterbury.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment