"A Noble Ancestry"
Who we are and whose we are.
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 29, 2002
Text: John 1:10-14; Romans 8:12-17
A number of years ago my uncle in England, an eminent scholar, a principal of a college, a wonderful athlete and a great father, phoned me on Christmas Day to tell me that he had received a letter from a friend. Now, Christmas letters are wonderful things to receive: They often catch you up on family news about people you often haven't seen or heard from in months or even years - they are delightful things to read.
The one that my uncle got was just too much for him to bear. It was from a university colleague and it provided a blow-by-blow description of this pristine, perfect and marvelous family to which he belonged, a family whose daughter that year had graduated with a first-class degree from Cambridge University. It outlined and detailed every brick and piece of mortar in their beautiful new home in the Cotswolds. It gave an account of their magnificent, unmatchable and splendid vacation in Ibiza and went on to say how he had been able to run in a mini-marathon for the first time in his life, at the age of 63. And finally, the pièce de résistance, was the declaration that after an exhaustive study of their history, they now realized that they were related to royalty.
"Well," my uncle said to me, "Andy, my boy, could you imagine if I had written a letter this year, what it would have said? 'My daughter was unceremoniously dumped by a professional soccer player and her name was on the front page of every newspaper in the United Kingdom. My little place was a cottage by the sea and when the storms came up in Norfolk, it blew away. My vacation was cancelled. We were going to go to the Maldives but unfortunately my travel agent forgot to send in the deposit. I didn't run a marathon - I had a hip replacement. And finally, I did some research on our ancestry, and did you know that great-great Uncle George, from whom we all descended, died in a ditch in Kirkcaldy outside of Perth in Scotland? Probably due to an excess of alcohol!' And by the way, the only famous relative I have is you and you're a minister, so what can I say?" Honestly, my poor uncle almost died when he recounted this.
Very often our lives, our ancestry, our backgrounds are not pristine or perfect. In fact, if you were to do a study of the ancestry of Jesus, you would find that there were characters like Rahab the harlot and David the adulterer. He consorted with Bathsheba, a married woman, you may remember, so even his reputation was not what you would call squeaky clean.
It is not our ancestry; it is not the fact that our families and our homes are always perfect, that is of vital importance. It is something else that really matters in our lives. What matters in our lives is not who we are. In other words, not our status, our stature, our accomplishments, our finery, the grandeur of our heritage or lineage - what really matters is whose we are. To whom ultimately do we consider ourselves belonging and for whom do we really have, in past and in our present, a degree of fidelity?
The Scriptures make it abundantly clear that those who call themselves by the name of the Christ Child, who follow in His footsteps, are children of something much greater than our ancestry on earth.
In our two passages from the Gospel of John and the Book of Romans, both the writers give this very same message: "The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God." The Gospel of John puts it this way: "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God."
You see, the Bible speaks of an ancestry of faith. And it is an ancestry of faith that we, ourselves receive by the only one who can draw us into the kingdom, the only one who can bring us into a covenant relationship with God, the only one who can introduce us to this new citizenship - the Christ Child, Jesus of Nazareth. For John, all those who believe in Him are now children of God because of their faith in Him. For the Apostle Paul in the Book of Romans, all of those who believe in him now, it makes no difference whether they are Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. Through faith, we belong to the covenant relationship that God has had with His people from the very beginning.
We are, in fact, inheritors. We are also those that receive the ancestry given us by Jesus of Nazareth. And I can't think of anything as we begin this New Year to ponder more closely than what changes for us when we realize whose we are and what ancestry we actually have. The first thing that is abundantly clear when you read, particularly, the Book of Romans, is the profound sense that our ancestry gives us a new identity.
One of the people who impressed me the most in my younger days was Denton, an Xhosa South African who was a deacon in the church where I was ministering. He was one of those men whom you never forget, particularly during the Christmas season. You see, in South Africa at that time everyone had to carry a pass card, which was a symbol, a statement of his or her identity. Black people could not enter a white area unless they had this pass with them. They couldn't go to work unless they had this pass with them. It was a statement of who they were. It was their ultimate identity and if they were to lose their pass card, they would cease to have an identity at all, they could not work and would be arrested.
Denton had the ignominy of having to carry this card around wherever he went. I'll never forget attending a church council meeting the week before Christmas. Denton and I went as the two representatives of our congregation. We had to go into a white area and as we drove along, we were stopped. Denton had to get out of the car, present his pass book, have it stamped and, on the way out, he had to report to a police station to have it stamped again before he could go back into his township. It was probably the most embarrassing thing that I have witnessed in my entire life. Also the most dehumanizing.
But there was something about Denton that meant that in some way this didn't really matter. He rose above it. At Christmas time he would always wear this great big badge on his suit that said: "I belong to Jesus." Now, for most people that would be considered tacky - it's sort of like having a bumper sticker saying, "Honk if you love Jesus." (I never know what to do when I follow someone like that.) But somehow when Denton wore it there was a profound meaning to this badge.
I once asked him why he always wore it at Christmas time and he explained that initially the pocket of his jacket was ripping off and this was the best way that he could pin it in place. But there was something more. There was a profound joy in Denton's life that he belonged to something greater than that which was around him. It enabled him to transcend the difficulties, the ignominy, and often the terrible state in which he lived. It was a statement of faith, identity and belonging.
Within Roman law there was a wonderful concept known as the patria potestas, which was simply this: If an individual, a slave or anybody was adopted into a family and became a Roman citizen, the father or the head of the family who received that adopted person had to do two things. The first was to cancel all their debts and the second, to atone for any bad behaviour. In other words, they had to clean the slate. The patria potestas.
When Paul was writing the Book of Romans, he understood that what Jesus of Nazareth had done for believers was exactly what the head of the family would do for Roman citizens. We are adopted into a new identity and the slate is cleaned. Past sins are wiped away. Things that we have done wrong are cast aside. We had been given a new slate, a new beginning, a new forgiveness, and a new identity. It is precisely that which Denton understood to be his reason for joy and excitement.
I believe that Jesus of Nazareth does the same thing for us. Oh, we will have our memories of things that we have done wrong over the past year. In fact, if you spend time on New Year's Eve recounting all the things you've done wrong, you will probably still be recounting by the year 2004, would you not? I know I would. We will have our memories and they will keep going but there is a sense in which our new identity in Jesus of Nazareth wipes the slate clean. He gives us a new identity. He gives us a new right to become children of God.
When you read the Apostle Paul, in particular, you realize that you have not only been given a new identity, but also a new citizenship. One of the things that I believe really characterizes true Christian living is the extent to which we participate in the civic world around us. There has sometimes been, within Christian history, a withdrawal from the world - a "non-engagement." But I believe that we are each called to be true and full citizens, to be true and full Canadians, to contribute to the lives of those that are around us and to ensure that, as good citizens, we let the light of Christ shine in what we do and say and how we do and say it.
Lord knows we live in a society that needs good and committed citizens who care for the common good and the welfare of our society. And part of being a Christian is, just as Paul understood part of being a Roman was, to make a contribution to the polis - to the political and to the civic life of our world. The Bible also urges us not only to be good citizens, but to rise above that citizenship to something that is even higher, greater and more noble.
In Augustine's "Confessions" there is a rather touching and delightful episode where he, his brother Adeodatus and mother Monica (who was a formidable woman) are on their way back to Hippo after having been in Italy. They come to a place called Ostia, from which they can sail across the Mediterranean to North Africa where Augustine's family lives. Unfortunately, Monica is taken ill and Augustine is worried because he believes that it actually matters where you are buried. He believes that the citizenship and the society in which you live actually has meaning, and for his mother to die in a foreign land would trouble him until his death.
He goes to his mother's deathbed and explains his grief and sorrow about the possibility that she may die in a foreign land. And, in what I like to think is typical Monica style, she says to her eminent son, the Bishop of Hippo: "God will know where to find me." For Monica it didn't matter where she was buried, or on which plot of land she would ultimately remain. She knew that she had an identity that transcended her home, that went beyond the earthly kingdom where she was buried to something that was greater - that God will find us wherever we are.
In a very moving essay in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jean Bethke Elshtain of Chicago University suggested that it is precisely that understanding of being citizens of heaven that gives Christians freedom. That we belong to a new body, to a new citizenship, to what is known as an ecclesia - a body, a fellowship of believers, and through that body and fellowship of believers we transcend national differences. We transcend them because we are pilgrims who belong to a church that has no limits or boundaries. Therefore, as citizens we are not constrained or worried by the earthly nation in which we live. Rather we can make a contribution to that nation because we are children of God and citizens of God's kingdom, something that we believe is nobler and better.
Another form of universalism is often spouted forth that transcends nations. It is the universalism that was argued by Hegel and Karl Marx. Their view of the ideal world and the ideal society was of a pristine society that would lead itself to a conflict between good and evil, and in the end good would vanquish evil. It was precisely that attitude, particularly I believe, Hegel, that influenced the Nazis.
Christians don't believe that. They don't believe in some idealized world that will be purged of its problems and made better by a simple conflict. Christians believe in peace - not in conflict. They believe in the reign of God - not in the reign of human beings. They believe that the civic and civil society is something that should reflect that which is of the Christ, humility, love and grace. They believe that our kingdom is not of this world but has profoundly worldly consequences, rooted in the peace of Jesus of Nazareth.
My friends, I believe that right now, with all the world's conflicts - on the basis of religion, or of race or of tradition - Christians can contribute something. Jean Bethke Elshtain understands it better than anyone I have read recently: That we are citizens of this country, yes, but we are citizens and children of the kingdom of God, and that must come first in our hearts and minds.
Lastly, we are also inheritors of something that is entirely new. For the people of Israel the promised land, their inheritance, was a land that was "over there," a distant place to which they would go and subdue and make their own. But the inheritance that Christians are given is not land, it is the inheritance of Christ's love. Even though we might not be pristine or perfect ourselves, it is something we should pray for, because what we pray for actually matters and says something about us.
I read a story recently of a bishop who received a parrot from a parishioner. The parrot caused him a great deal of embarrassment because it used a lot of expletives and inappropriate language. Whenever anybody came to his home the bishop was embarrassed almost to death by this parrot. He didn't know what he was going to do with it. He thought, "I'm going to have to get rid of this parrot. This parrot is going to put an end to my ministry."
Then he ran into a woman in his congregation who also had a parrot. "Look, I'll tell you what to do," she said. "Why don't you leave your parrot with mine for awhile? My parrot is chaste and pure and does an awful lot of praying and meditating."
The bishop replied: "Great, if this will influence my parrot, then sure I'll put them in the cage together. What's there to lose?" He puts the male parrot in the cage and it says: "Hey toots, what's up? Give me a kiss." And the female parrot says: "Yes! Finally, my prayers have been answered!"
You've go to be careful what you pray for don't you? You might get it.
We should be praying this Christmas for that which is truly and rightfully our proper inheritance. We should be praying not just for God to make everything work out beautifully, and next year when we write our Christmas letters, for everything to be as pristine and beautiful as it was in my uncle's letter from his friend. No. This is what we pray for if we truly believe in the inheritance of God: that this year we will be better citizens, that we will be dedicated citizens. But we will be citizens understanding that first and foremost we represent Jesus Christ and that it is His way that should govern our citizenship.
We should be citizens who are not so wrapped up in our past and so concerned or trodden down by what has happened before, but those who have a new slate - a new patria potestas - something clean on which to begin. That our citizenship is not born out of a sense of conflict but out of a sense of peace in the Christ Child, and that with that passion for peace, we work for it and desire it for the world. And above all, we might say, with Denton, that our inheritance is like a monarch: God knows who we are, God knows whose we are and that we belong to Jesus. What better way to enter a New Year? Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.