Very recently, my parish priest, the Rev Dr Cathy Thomson, preached a sermon that really made me sit up and take notice. Themes: what should our parish be on about? What is the Gospel? How should we present it to young people? What are we trying to achieve through presenting the Gospel to youth?
From time to time, I find myself wondering whether "liberal-catholic" youth ministry is capable of achieving growth in the same way as "evangelical" youth ministry seems to be. Perhaps this sermon points us towards an answer to that.
I wasn't the only one who found it instructive and thought-provoking; so many of us did, that it was 'published' through the pew bulletin the next week. And here it is:
Dear
Friends,
So
many of you have commented on my sermon of last week, and have asked for a note
of the five dot points which I suggested "summed up the gospel."
Thank you for your feedback. I have
replicated the whole sermon below, and hope that reading it is something you
will find helpful.
Today I have decided not to preach
on the day’s Scriptures, because I would like to pursue one of the issues that came
up at last week’s planning day. It was
suggested that if we want to attract young people to our Church, we have a
prior responsibility to be clear in our own minds about the positive message
that we think we can offer them: one that that they would understand and be
attracted by. I think our challenge is
to be clear about what we understand by “the Gospel” before we attempt to offer
it to anyone else. So what do we mean by
saying that we have the Gospel or “Good news”? Please take a moment to think
about that...
One way to find out what “the
Gospel” is is to go onto the internet where we find a whole range of ways of
teaching the gospel through Youtube. Last night on YouTube I watched a young American
man with long “dreadlocks” who sure enough “rapped” the gospel in four
minutes. Then there was the Pentecostal
pastor wearing a tee-shirt with Jesus as the risen and ascended lamb upon the
throne of God complete with halo, who provided an animated spoken rendition of
the gospel in five minutes. I have to
say I liked their clarity about what they believed; I liked their conviction and energy. I didn’t like their particular slant on the
gospel which emphasised human sinfulness to an excessive and guilt-inducing extent. But to be fair, they did also emphasise albeit
in a rather unorthodox way the immeasurable grace of God that overcomes the aforesaid
all-pervasive sinfulness and guilt. I
decided that although Youtube is a medium very accessible to the young people
to whom we wish to communicate the gospel, it is probably not the best starting
point for developing our own clear stance about what we believe the Christian
gospel to be. I turned as you might
expect to the Scriptures, if not today’s selection. I discovered that there are exactly one
hundred references to the word “Gospel”, otherwise known as the “Good News” in
the New Testament.
[Interjection: I laughed during the paragraph above, because I knew exactly which clips the Rev Cathy was describing.]
Leaving out the fact that the
four evangelists wrote their “gospels” which are essentially biographies of
Jesus, the other ways of speaking about the Gospel are to call it:
·
the gospel (good news) of God,
·
the gospel (good news) of Christ
·
the gospel (good news) of the
kingdom
·
the gospel (good news) of
salvation.
Jesus himself spoke of the gospel
of the kingdom, by which he meant that his own existence heralded the fulfilment
of God’s reign on earth, and that this would bring liberation from the power of
sin and death, and that all people could be united with God into eternity.
The other three: the gospel of God,
of Christ or of salvation, seem to have
the same basic content. Paul sums it up
in I Corinthians 15:1-4 where he writes about what the Gospel is:
3For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had
received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4and that he was
buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.
I think churches like ours that are of a
liberal –catholic persuasion are frightened to own that gospel because we have
heard many reductionist versions of it over the years. Yet surely we can affirm that Christ died for
our sins. We don’t have to say Christ
paid the penalty or took the punishment for our sins, because we know that
punishment notion of Jesus’ crucifixion says that we have a God who requires
punishment (a punitive God). And that is problematic when we hear this God
referred to as in I John where it says that “God is light; in him there is no
darkness at all.” We also don’t have to
say that we are saved by the (precious) blood of the lamb, because we don’t
necessarily find that bloody sacrificial imagery very helpful. But we can still say Christ died for our sins. The rest of the Gospel, according to Paul,
namely that Christ was buried and that he was raised on the third day, is
something that we affirm weekly when we say the creed aloud.
This leads to some rather uncomfortable
questions:
·
The first is: have we fully
appropriated the gospel of liberation for ourselves? Do we live out of the joy and gratitude of
knowing that Jesus died to bear away all our sin and suffering, and have we
allowed that to transform us into people with God-focussed lives? I ask this question because if we haven’t
done that, we will have nothing to offer to the young people, or anyone, who
might come among us.
·
The second question is why do we
want to encourage young people? Is it because
we truly want to offer them the liberating power of the gospel which we know
and can demonstrate in our own lives, or is it that we are afraid that if we
don’t, our church will die? In other
words, do we want to have more young people among us for their sake or for our
sake? Because if it’s the latter, we’re
never going to be able to convince them, and quite rightly, that there’s
anything worthwhile in it for them.
Let me offer a summary of the
gospel that is something of an expansion of Paul’s but which contains the same
basic elements, and is consistent with the way parishes like ours think theologically:
·
The gospel tells us that God gave
creation life, and human beings as part of it;
·
In working out its destiny, the
world is sometimes marked with sin and suffering and human beings contribute to
that;
·
God sent his Son Jesus to live
and work among human beings on this earth, to teach them God’s way of love and to
live a life of integrity and courage;
·
Jesus offered himself as bearer
of all the sin and suffering of the created world so that these could be done
to death on the cross;
·
God raised Jesus up on the third
day as the hope of the salvation of all.
This resurrection is the mark of our transformation as well as Christ’s,
leading to our having a life full of meaning now, and ultimately, life with God
into eternity.
Is this an
attractive gospel to us? Can it be an attractive
gospel to the young people? Well it
seems to me that this apparently amorphous generation of “young people” are
really not too different from the rest of us.
They live fairly pressured lives through work and study and competing
for success in their careers; they often are beleaguered by financial pressures,
a big mortgage, they’re concerned about finding a partner, and when they do
about when to get married, whether they can afford to have children, and when
is the best time to start trying. And
once they have children they struggle to provide for them all the opportunities
they need to grow and thrive and make their own contributions to the world of
which they are global citizens. Statistics
suggest also that they are a generation more prone to marital failure,
homelessness, depression, mental illness and suicide than any before them.
The gospel is a
dynamic meeting point for joy and sorrow, sin and righteousness, violence and
peace, and it is the overcoming of life’s vagaries and challenges as well as
the fulfilment of its promise. Let us
pray God that we as a congregation may have the privilege of sharing this
wonderful gospel with all who are drawn to Christ both young and old, and that
we may know how to articulate God’s saving power in our lives whenever such a
testimony is required of us. Amen
I am encouraged and quite excited at the very positive
response I have had from the parish as we continue to plan our life of ministry
and mission into the future.
With my love and with God's blessing,
Rev'd Cathy.
How about that? What do you think?
