Sermon 24 Pentecost 2004

The Sermon by Rev'd Dr. Brian Porter

Senior Chaplain Melbourne Grammar School
and
Hon Assoc Priest St. John’s Camberwell

24th Sunday after Pentecost 2004 - 8.00am and 10.00am

Text: Luke 21: 5-19

St John’s Camberwell
14th November 2004

Preamble from the Pew Sheet . . .

Pulpits were once equipped with an hour-glass. In School Chapels these days an egg-timer would be more appropriate. This is because the TV advertising experts advise that we should be geared to one-minute sound bites because of the diminished attention spans of young people. “If you don’t capture their attention within ten seconds or so, you’ve lost them” chaplains are warned. With greying congregations, the parish church is not so challenged. And after all, those of us in the afternoon tea time of life have learned to snooze with our eyes open. So with Advent and Stir-up Sunday just around the corner with their prophetic notes sounding warning and expectancy, it is a good time to examine – ever so briefly – the role of the sermon in Christian worship. Canon Wentzel of St Paul’s Cathedral wrote recently of the sermon as a communal, ecological and historical act, sacramental, contemporaneous and organic. The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth described the sermon as a Word event, and was on tiptoe with excitement on Sunday mornings: “Something great and momentous is about to happen” he wrote in his Fragments. This morning’s Gospel certainly sounds a note of eschatological and apocalyptic urgency and helps get us ready for Advent. Are your seat belts on?

The Reverend Dr Brian Porter

The Sermon . . .

Rev'd Dr. Brian Porter

This morning’s Gospel is strong stuff which would have deeply disturbed a Temple audience: ‘The days will come when one stone will not be left upon another…Nation will rise against nation…there will be earthquakes...famines and plagues…they will arrest you and persecute you…you will be betrayed…you will be hated.’ But all that did happen and in the year 70 the Romans moved in on Jerusalem, demolished the Temple and dispersed the Jews whose diaspora lasted until 1948 but with dire consequences ever since as we know from the daily news reports and the dying of Yassir Arafat. The Middle East is such a cauldron of ancient animosities.

Now if I said to you this morning that St John’s is in terminal decline, you would be agitated. If I said to you, and you were inclined to agree with me because I stand six feet above contradiction, that the Anglican Church’s explicit evangelism is failing and that its future has little room for the conventional sermon, you might wonder at the time we allocate to it in the liturgy. The balance of Word and Sacrament is dear to Anglicans as a via media church: too much Word and we incline to Bibliolatry with one hour sermons and all the tasteless tedium of American tele-evangelists at 3am in the morning. Too much Sacrament and we incline to superstition with little earthing in Scripture, emotions in overdrive and intellects in neutral. Have you ever witnessed a Polish procession of the sacrament to a Marian shrine?

So what about the sermon? When I was a theological college student in England, my Principal was Robert Runcie who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, confessing a horror as Primate of becoming a platitude machine. He was anything but, deploying elegant language and a strikingly imaginative capacity to engage his audiences. In College the Principal ran a weekly sermon class, the notes for which I came across the other day. Each student had a turn over two years at preaching before the whole College what was called The College Sermon after which the senior students went into a one hour session of forensic analysis. It was a surgical experience I can assure you. We emerged flayed and quivering. The Principal presided over the class having lectured us on the role of the sermon for a whole year beforehand. Some Runcie hints survive in my notes: Spend a week in remote preparation once you know the lections for the day. Choose a theme and write down on a postcard in a single sentence what the point of the sermon is to be. Prop this card on your desk as you compose. Prepare your text but do not be so wedded to it that you forget about eye contact with your audience. Experiment with no notes at all in due course. Know your audience and pitch your remarks to the one member of the congregation who represents the middle ground between PhD and left school at 15. Never underestimate the importance of personal anecdote and story. Preach about God and about ten minutes. (These days in School Chapel the bell tyrannously governs my discourse and limits me to five minutes. If I overstep the bell all hell breaks loose.) Be warned of the danger involved in re-cycling old sermons. In one of Evelyn Waugh’s amusing novels, a retired Indian army chaplain continues to preach from yellow old sermons as if he were addressing soldiers longing for England in heat and humidity surrounded by ravening tiger and exotic camel even though snow is thick on the ground outside the Norfolk church in the bleak mid-winter.

So much for methodology. As Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher in retirement once called out from the pew to a young curate who was straying from the text: ‘The Gospel Sir! What about the Gospel?’ So let’s go back to Luke.

What is the point of this passage? In a word it is the message of Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army: ‘ Don’t panic! Don’t panic!’ We need to trust that even though there is much doom and gloom around in church, society and indeed the world, we are to take heart. All is not lost. As one commentator on the passage puts it (and we should always read the Biblical commentaries by way of immediate preparation so Runcie advised): ‘we are not to let our responses to the hype and horror of accumulating disasters be determined by the one liners of media editors or religious demagogues, but by the Spirit who is the centre of our life and faith.’ Or as the last verse of today’s Gospel sums up: ‘By your endurance you will gain your souls’. St John’s, with all its ups and downs, and the Anglican Church nationally and internationally are not doomed despite the national General Synod’s no to women bishops and the Anglican Communion’s international polarised negativity about a better deal for gays in the Church. Jesus says to all us this morning: ‘I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict’. In other words we are to stay in touch with the depths of what Jesus and the whole Christ event were all about. There is something irresistible about love, even when it is crucified. There is something irresistible about a sense of faith-suffused trust that all shall be well. Things proximate are less important than things ultimate. After all it took nineteen hundred years for slavery to be abolished and two thousand years for the equality of women in ministry to be recognised. The Roman Catholic clamouring, especially from its own priests (for example as reported today by two thirds of all Irish Catholic priests) that enforced priestly celibacy cannot be allowed to last, not even the Vatican Curia, that crusty old bachelors’ club in Rome, will be able to withstand or contradict. Who knows in God’s good time there may even be a woman Pope one day if we continue to hope that the Spirit in her wisdom will transcend ancient prejudice and deeply entrenched male chauvinism?

Endurance. You have now endured ten minutes. Are sermons more often than not endurance sessions? Yes, I must admit from long experience of sitting in the pews, in cathedrals and parish churches and chapels. Often they are. Don’t we long for that hint that the end is nigh? The preacher might utter those magic words One last point and we feel as excited as a Melbourne Cup crowd as the favourite enters the straight. In the Chapel Royal on one occasion as the pulpit hour glass being closely observed by Queen Elizabeth 1 emptied from the top into the bottom, Her Majesty, Gloriana Herself, like a huge painted galleon rose in her stall and commanded the occupant of the pulpit, the Lord Bishop of Rochester: ‘On this matter Sir, we have heard enough’. The earnest Evangelical Bishop, thus chastised, retired in nervous apoplexy to the Chaplain’s Lodgings for a capon and a glass of malmsey… (Refreshments -only tea and bikkies alas- will be served in the Rutherford Room in half an hour).

Let the Collect and lections for today embroider the Don’t panic! of Corporal Jones:
Keep our hearts steady in times of trial… Brothers and sisters, do not weary in doing what is right… Do not be terrified \I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict… By your endurance you will gain your souls.
Amen

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