Sermon for St Peter’s Bramley, 2 October 2022
Readings: 2 Timothy 1:1-14 and Luke 17: 3-10
It was the first week of a new school term, and the teacher had realised during the holidays that not many of her class seemed to be friends with each other. So she set them a challenge: not to make the most friends themselves, but to see how many other students they could get to form friendships among themselves, by the end of term.
Paul and Tim were friends already, and competitive about everything, from who could run fastest to who could eat the most pizza without being sick. They enjoyed the challenge, but went about it in different ways.
Paul was the technology wizard of his class. Within days he had set up a new Whatsapp group, ClassFriends, and used every means he could to advertise it. Through texts, tweets, posts and e-mails he tried persuade everyone to join ClassFriends.
Tim was no good with phones and computers. He was also very quiet. But for the next two weeks, at lunchtime and in the playground, whenever he found a classmate on their own he stopped to talk to them for a few minutes. After a couple of weeks he started introducing those boys and girls to each other. And in the last week of term when it was Tim’s birthday, his mum let him invite them all to his party. They ate plenty of pizza, and they played the sort of game where players answer trivial questions about themselves.
On the last day of term the teacher asked how everyone had got on. Only Paul and Tim had anything to report. Paul proudly announced that eight people had joined ClassFriends and were now messaging each other. Tim asked how many others in the class could say what someone else’s pet was called and the name of their favourite pop star. Sixteen hands went up. The teacher awarded Tim the prize – as much pizza as he could eat without being sick.
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Churches, of course, are not quite the same as schools. Our purpose is different, but there are some similarities. Just as passing exams is not the only point of being at school, so learning the Bible is not the only point of coming to church. The friends we do or don’t make at school will shape our experience there for better or worse, and may last for life. Just so, the friendships we make at church will do the same. Paul Bayes, the former Bishop of Liverpool, wrote this:
“[Since the 1990s], community, one of honest and supportive friendship, has emerged as more and more important. … Evangelism can only be built on a commitment to friendship.”
At this time when we start to see two groups coming together – the existing congregation from St Peter’s and the grafting team from St George’s, it will be important for all of us to make the effort to extend our existing friendships, to include new people into the networks we already have, and to find new ways of building friendships. As our story showed, one-to-one conversations are a more effective and lasting way of doing that than some hi-tech solution that only creates online connections.
In his book, Paul Bayes goes on to explore the different types of friendship we find in the church: the friendship offered to newcomers that goes beyond merely welcoming them at the door; the friendships built outside the walls of the church by people inviting others into their homes for coffee or food; and the sense of shared community grown through small groups.
Deep friendships, because in reality they will need to survive and thrive in the ups and downs of church life. In the first verse of our Gospel reading, when the disciples say to Jesus “increase our faith!”, that is their response to his instruction to forgive a friend who sins against them seven times a day and each time asks for forgiveness. If his own disciples often annoyed each other, it’s no surprise if it happens here, and our friendship needs to be deep enough to accept that.
There is a wider purpose of such deep friendships, beyond the value they have of themselves. They are the foundation for what we are trying to build together as a church. As friends, we can have a more effective mission to our community, reaching out together to draw more into our circle of friendship. What sort of people do we need to be to enable that to happen?
* * *
The Church of England, it must be said, loves nothing more than a new slogan. The book I quoted from was called ‘Mission-shaped Parish’ which was a slogan of the Noughties, but much of the thinking then is still valid. More recently, the church nationally has adopted a new slogan, a new strategy: ‘Simpler, Humbler, Bolder’. In the words of the present Archbishop of York, “These three words are not strategic aims, they are virtues that we believe God is calling from us at this particular point in our history. They run through our vision and shape all we do and all that we are.”
We can see these three virtues of simplicity, humility and boldness throughout the Bible, including in today’s readings. When Paul writes to Timothy of the ‘sincere faith that lived in your grandmother and your mother and now lives in you’, he is praising the sort of simple but deeply-rooted faith in Jesus that is passed down from one generation to another, the kind of sincere faith that many people recently have commended in our late Queen. When the disciples ask Jesus to ‘increase their faith’, they are asking for that same simplicity of deeply held trust in him that enables them to live in deep friendship with others.
When Jesus tells those same disciples to fulfil their duty in the spirit of ‘unworthy servants’, he is commending a particular form of humility, one that recognises God’s presence in even trivial or unwelcome tasks. Martin Luther once called humility “the greatest of Christian virtues”. This isn’t the humility of Uriah Heap, it’s the humility of the monastery, where tilling the fields and chanting the psalms are equally holy activities. As the poet George Herbert put it, ‘who sweeps a room as for thy laws, makes that and the action fine’. But it’s also the humility of Moses, who we are told was the humblest man on earth, despite having led a whole nation out of slavery and met God face to face.
But simplicity and humility, although essential values for the Christian life, will not enable us to fulfil God’s call to mission without the balancing value of boldness. In the story of the two schoolboys, it was shy and humble Tim who had the boldness to reach out and start to bring strangers together as friends. In our Bible reading, when Paul writes to Timothy of God giving us a spirit of power, love and self-discipline, perhaps that combines all three: the simplicity of love, the humility of self-discipline and the boldness that comes from the power of the Holy Spirit.
Paul also urges his friend Timothy to ‘fan into flame the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of hands’. Most of us in this room will at some point in our lives have had our faith confirmed by a Bishop, with the laying on of hands. While Bishop Arun won’t be laying hands on each of us physically this Thursday evening when he comes to induct Julia into her post as Rector, it will be a suitable occasion for each of us to renew the vows we made at baptism or confirmation: to come to Christ, to turn to Christ, and to trust in Christ.
We might also wish to recommit ourselves to building deep friendships within the congregation. And to consider what gifts God might have given each one of us for his service, that he now wishes to fan into flame as we enter into a new phase in God’s mission to Bramley though us, his Church. We can ask the Holy Spirit to come and make us simpler, humbler and bolder, or in the words of our closing hymn today, ‘kindle the flame of sacred love, on the mean altar of my heart’.
Amen.