26th August 2007TRINITY XII

Fr Julian Browning

Isaiah 58 : 9b – 14 ; Hebrews 12 : 18 – 29 ; Luke 13 : 10 – 17

For our God is a consuming fire.   Hebrews 12.29

Faith isn't knowing it all. Faith is not knowing

I think we need a break from St.Luke. The earnest compilers of our lectionary would have us read a Gospel a year, more or less, like a set book for an exam. A worthy idea, but these constant arguments with the Pharisees in St.Luke, a significant part of the teaching of Jesus, have diminishing returns when pursued week after week. So on a Bank Holiday weekend, let's go somewhere  more exciting. Let's go to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says we can go there. We can meet God. And in God's eyes we are not separated from the great community of the past and the future who worship Him in the heavenly city. What's more, there's a sort of Bank Holiday jollity about it all. Seeing God isn't as frightening as it used to be when Moses approached the Burning Bush. We are people of the new covenant.

Now any author, like any artist, struggles with words, phrases, allusions, images, to get across a truth or a meaning beyond the individual words. It's not easy. St.Augustine drew attention to our difficulties when he said that human language labors altogether under great poverty of speech. But the poverty of speech is ours, not that of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. His book bristles with images, which can bring our God to life in our hearts, but the break with the past is now almost complete. Who today knows or cares where Mount Zion is. In the last few centuries, even the least educated person would have heard the phrase and been uplifted, for here is not just the citadel of ancient Jerusalem where the tabernacle, the home of God, was, but the heavenly city, the end of trials and tribulation, the destination of the pilgrim Church. Anyway, it meant something, if only the address of the non-conformist chapel down the road.

Without these images, without the acceptable worship in the company of the angels, without the reverence and the awe, our God is lifeless. Or rather, we start giving him our life. Now that's dangerous. What I mean is that we decide what God should be like: loving, fathering, mothering, letting me do what I like, looking after me and mine, smiting my enemies, and so on. It's very disappointing when things don't turn out as we expect. So we give God the push, yet again. He wasn't a very exciting God anyway, because we had domesticated him, cut him down to size. We had confined him in a beautiful cage, like this church. This is the modern form of idolatry, and there's a spiritual health warning about it in the passage we read this morning, so it isn't just us, there was trouble from the start of the Christian era. Our God is a consuming fire. This is a direct quotation from the great warning against idolatry in Deuteronomy. You can make as many graven images of God as you like, you can set your god against another, but be warned. The true God, the only God worth worshipping, is a jealous God, and he is a consuming fire, who will turn all these graven images of ours into cinders.

Fire is constantly moving, changing, purifying. Fire resists our urge to control it. We can not control God. We are not going to get it all done and dusted. There is no spiritual Home Information Pack telling us exactly what Mount Zion is like. Throughout the New Testament we are warned that we Christians are between the times; we have received the kingdom – the kingdom that cannot be shaken, brought down – this began with the earthly ministry of Jesus, but we must also live in the expectation of a future revelation. That is not just a theological conclusion. This is practical advice for Christians today. We are to be confident, without knowing it all. Faith isn't knowing it all. Faith is not knowing. Some things don't make sense. Maybe they never will in this life. After all, we are only human. But that need not destroy our confidence as Christians in the loving purposes of our God. We have come home, we live and work in the city of the living God. We have accepted the invitation to meet God on Mount Zion, the holy place. That does not turn us into know-alls, reading God's mind, taking God's decisions for Him, much as we might like to do that. You don't play with fire. We go to Mount Zion to worship, and to give thanks for all the blessings of this life. Our viewpoint of God is from where we worship Him. That is the sacrifice we now offer: acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.

When I had finished writing this sermon, I stood in my kitchen, pretending, I suppose, to cook, but actually listening to Stanford's Te Deum. And there is the answer. That is the song we sing on Mount Zion. That is the song of worship we should  sing every day of our lives. That is the stance, the viewpoint, which can lead to a life fulfilled and fulfilling. 'Thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers. ...O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us, as our trust is in thee.'