Sermon: Choral Evensong - 1 March 2015

Preacher:

Andrew Watson

Date:

Sunday 1st March 2015

Venue:

Guildford Cathedral

Service:

Choral Evensong

Readings:

Genesis 12 :1-9

Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 3.8M)

Abram and the Call to Adventure

It was at 9.30 on the morning of Sunday, November 10th 1918 – the day before the Armistice was signed – that my grandfather, Alec Watson, took a walk on the beach that was to change his life. He was a successful pharmacist in Newcastle-on-Tyne, the son of a retired sea captain and still living at home with his parents. But as he walked the sands of Tynemouth that day, he had what we might call a divine encounter. As he later put it himself: ‘My call for missionary service on a memorable morning in 1918 was that I should take up medicine and then offer my services to the Church Missionary Society. The Society was to me then only a name, and joining it to me a Divine order’.

After a series of encouragements and setbacks, Dr Alec and his new bride, Dr Mary, were on their way to South West China – to Pakhoi and then Kun Ming, where they established a hospital and a series of clinics, reaching out to local people and especially to leprosy sufferers. They led church services and Bible study groups for both staff and patients; they persuaded the local governor to grant them land where those who’d contracted leprosy could farm and earn a living; they spoke out against injustice, especially the cruel practices of foot-binding and infanticide. Theirs was a holistic approach to Christian mission. And after 16 years in China, my grandparents were recalled to England, and to the East End of London, where they steered the Mildmay Mission Hospital through the Blitz and beyond.

‘Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”. So Abram went…’

It’s an arresting start to a story which is in reality three stories rolled into one: the story of Abraham, the story of Israel and God’s great story of salvation; and at its heart lies the classic missionary summons, ‘Go’, and the classic missionary response, ‘So Abram went’. The precise nature of the calling seemed worryingly vague: Abram’s vocation was to up sticks and to leave behind all his old securities – his country, his kindred, his father’s house – so as to do what? To ‘go to the land I will show you’, and to become – by means yet to be revealed – a ‘great nation’. And this wasn’t a young man whom God was summoning, a man just exploring his calling, someone up for adventure; and this wasn’t a clergyman or a prophet or priest. This was a farmer in his mid-seventies, whose combination of good fortune and sheer hard graft had established a secure, prosperous life for himself in the land of Haran. Yet there’s no sense of argument here, no discussion even. The Lord said ‘Go’, and Abram went.

There is another element to this missionary calling too, and one that is common to all such callings: the theme of blessing. Abram would be blessed as he responded in faith and obedience. Those who blessed Abram would themselves be blessed. And most significant of all, Abram would be a blessing not simply to his nearest and dearest, to his tribe or even nation – no, here was the promise: ‘in you all the families of the earth will be blessed’. From the very beginning, Abram’s vocation, Israel’s vocation, God’s great plan of salvation was intended to bring blessing to the whole earth.

And so, we read, Abram and his wife and nephew loaded up all their possessions, and he and his household set off for the land of Canaan, building altars to the Lord at Shechem and Bethel along the way. In his imaginative retelling of the story, the author of the letter to the Hebrews pictures Abram as looking forward to the heavenly city ‘whose architect and builder is God’: for it’s that heavenly perspective, that sense of life as a pilgrimage, that motivates the missionary to move from what is known and settled to what is unknown and risky. And as Abram journeyed on, so God indeed made him a great nation, and from Abram came Israel and from Israel came Jesus, and from Jesus came the great commission: and the famous ‘Go’ at the end of Matthew’s Gospel – ‘Go into all the world and make disciples of all nations’ – is part of the fulfilment of the ‘Go’ in the story of Abram, through which all nations, all the families on earth would be blessed.

And the story of Abram and the story of Dr Alec are separated by thousands of years of human history; and Abram is rightly celebrated, while Dr Alec is largely forgotten; and yet in a sense theirs is one and the same story: a missionary calling, an obedient response, and blessing – many blessings - along the way.

And so to today, as this season of Lent gets into its stride; and so to the themes that cluster around our readings this evening – vocation, obedience, blessing and being blessed, a faith that is spelt R-I-S-K. Lent, of course, is set aside as a time of reflection as we prepare to celebrate the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ: and on this second Sunday of Lent, we’re encouraged to reflect on questions such as these: To what am I called? In what ways am I blessed and a blessing? Just how am I called to exercise my faith – to take it for a run, if you like? Has life perhaps become a little too secure and comfortable?

It’s my sense that this whole notion of vocation has been narrowed down over the years: that whereas previous generations of doctors and nurses and teachers, of MPs and bankers and business people, were often working out of a profound sense of calling, quite consciously using their gifts for the glory of God and the blessing of humankind, this language of vocation has increasingly been restricted to religious professionals, to priests and ministers and monks.

Sadly the Church has often colluded with this development. Sunday by Sunday we pray for our vicar and for our bishops – and as a former vicar and a current bishop, I hugely value those prayers; but we don’t pray for the surgeon in our congregation whose skill in the coming week will determine whether people live or die – or the business woman, sitting next to him in the pew, on whose decision-making the livelihood of hundreds depends.

Where we value ‘lay people’, as we call them, we all too often do so for what they can do in church: for their flower-arranging skills, their willingness to make the coffee, their ability to lead a Lent group, and of course their financial generosity. The idea that they may have a vocation beyond keeping the ecclesiastical show on the road never crosses our minds, and sadly – if we’re not careful – it never crosses their minds either, because they’ve not been taught to think that way. I’ll never forget Colin, a gentle member of our congregation in Twickenham, who used to hand out the hymn books on a Sunday morning, and was much valued for the warmth of his welcome. And being on that welcome team was an important part of Colin’s vocation, I’m sure; but how foolish if the impression were ever to be given that his day job – as boss of the British Airport Authority, servicing the needs of 128 million passengers each year – lay somehow outside of the call of God on his life!

Abram, after all, wasn’t a priest, or even on the coffee rota: he was a farmer-turned-traveller, responding to the call of God. Alec wasn’t a priest, or even a gifted flower-arranger: he was a pharmacist-turned-doctor, responding to the call of God. And the message from these stories is clear: that every Christian, lay and ordained, has a vocation – every Christian is called to be blessed and a blessing – every Christian is a missionary, sent out into the world to proclaim good news and to be good news. I sometimes think that the most important part of every Eucharist comes right at the end of the service. For just as Abram was called to go and be a blessing; just as Dr Alec was called to go and be a blessing; just as Jesus’ disciples were called to go and be a blessing; so we are called to ‘go in peace to love and serve the Lord, in the name of Christ, Amen’.

This notion of vocation has been narrowed in other ways too, with many seeing it as a young person’s game. We take some risks, we embrace adventure, we discover our vocation, all between the ages, say, of 16 and 30, and then we settle down from then on in. But that wasn’t Abram’s experience as he stepped out in faith at the age of 75. It wasn’t Alec’s experience as he set off for China at the age of 38. Our vocation will change at different times in our lives, that’s the message: so that whether we’re 10, 20, 40, 70, 90, older, we need to be open to the fresh call of God to be blessed and to be a blessing. That’s what makes the life of Christian discipleship such an adventure for those prepared to walk in it: that there’s no point at which ‘we’ve arrived’: no point, that is, until we finally reach that heavenly city, whose architect and builder is God.

Vocation, then, isn’t just for religious professionals; and finding that vocation isn’t just for the young. But there’s a final narrowing of the word that needs to be challenged: the idea that the vocation of the Church itself is to keep its worship going and its buildings going and its finances going – and all for the sake of the small minority of people, a rather ageing minority in many places, who still seem to like that sort of thing.

‘In you’, said God to Abram, ‘All the families on earth will be blessed’; ‘Go into all the world’, said Jesus to his disciples, ‘and make disciples of all nations’. And it’s that little word ‘all’ that blows apart our narrow, often self-centred conceptions of who and what the Church is for.

There are around 1 million people who live in the Diocese of Guildford. There are 200 stipendiary priests, give or take. And if we’re here to bring blessing to all of those in our diocese, the ratio isn’t promising: one clergy person for every 5000 in the population.

But what of our so-called ‘laity’? 28,000 of them will have worshipped in Church of England churches across the Diocese today. A similar number will have missed this Sunday, but are still regular, believing worshippers; and suddenly the ratio is getting more manageable: one worshipping lay person for every 20 or so in the population – and that’s not counting our brothers and sisters from other denominations.

So whether lay or ordained, old or young, we are all sent out from this place tonight to live out our vocations in the week ahead: that calling to be blessed and to be a blessing. I’m not too excited by the clericalisation of the church. Even the notion of institutional survival doesn’t fire me up. But this vision of tens of thousands of Christian missionaries, men and women of every age responding to the call of God, is what has driven me forward as I’ve journeyed on from Notting Hill to Twickenham to Birmingham and now to Guildford.

And just a little postscript: because I visited China in 2002, more than six decades after my grandparents left. On the site of the hospital where they worked was a brand new hospital, responding to the needs of a fast-growing city. Leprosy, I discovered, was gradually becoming a thing of the past. All the churches I visited were packed full of Christian people, part of the amazing revival of the Church across China over the past few decades.

And then, as we walked through Beijing on the final day of our visit, my travelling companion took me to meet a woman he knew who ran a small church from her home. Her elderly mother was in the room and we got talking; and gradually it transpired that, by some extraordinary coincidence, God-incidence, this elderly woman had been my grandfather’s deputy in the hospital in Kun Ming between 1935 and 1938. We were 2000 miles from the city at that point. It was 64 years since my grandparents had left. China has a population of 1.4 billion. Yet through that astonishing coincidence, God was reminding me once again of all the blessings that have come from that walk on the beach, the day before the Armistice was signed, and from one man following the divine summons of his Lord and Master. Amen.