ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

TRINITY 1, 2010 HIGH MASS

Sermon preached by the Vicar

A few days ago I received a letter from Canon David Hutt who was with us last Sunday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood. Let me read to you some of what he said.

'I really am most grateful...for the opportunity to celebrate last Sunday.....In my diary I've noted: "A day to be remembered and treasured...I had forgotten, to a degree, the power of place and was profoundly moved by the experience (and privilege) of standing before that high altar again. I recall - with gratitude - the depths of the silences, the laughter and the happiness in the courtyard afterwards...truly a sense of homecoming."

These are words written in gratitude by a priest to the parish which was once in his care.

This morning we have heard another extract from a letter. It was written by the apostle Paul to a church which he had founded in Galatia. Paul usually begins his letters with an expression of thanks. At the beginning of the Letter of the Philippians, he says, "I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now."

So it is significant that the letter he writes to the Church in Galatia has no such thanksgiving and after the opening and address and greeting says:

"I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel...."

Paul's anger at their infidelity, his concern to put them right, leap from the page. Even when read all these years later, either in measured tones during the liturgy or in private, they have the power to shock.

When that letter had been delivered to the leaders of the church in Galatia, it would have been read out to the congregation at worship. It is not difficult to imagine that they must have found it very uncomfortable listening. Some would have been looking at their feet in embarrassment. Others would have been seething with indignation; thinking how dare he speak to us like that.

Canon Hutt will not expect his letter to survive except perhaps as a small footnote in the history of a small parish in central London which someone might unearth generations from now. Paul's Letter to the Galatians has, in the providence of God, survived to be included in the canon of scripture which continues to be read in the Church as the revelation of God's purposes for his creation.

So Paul's letter became part of the Church's tradition: but a part which has not lost its capacity to shock and question the Church all these years later. It still raises the issue of the relationship between revelation and tradition.

Paul sets his gospel over against all religious tradition handed on by human authorities. He poses two urgent problems for those who preach the gospel in any time, in our time. First of all, can the Christian message be formulated as a tradition, or is there something about the gospel that resists fixed traditional formulation? If the latter is the case, can a community build its life on the basis of the gospel?

Secondly, should preachers of the Word claim the same sort of unmediated authority that Paul asserted for himself? And if they do, are they in danger of grounding their message on an appeal to their own private experience?

The Church has historically accepted Paul's claim to be a witness to the risen Christ in a way that sets him apart from other Christians who have subsequently experienced the presence of Christ. Paul's claim to be a special apostle to the Gentiles has been acknowledged by the Church. His surviving writings have been collected and canonised as authoritative guides to Christian faith and practice.

Yet there is a certain irony about this development. Paul, the apostle whose message was neither conveyed nor authorised by any church, becomes the source of a body of binding ecclesiastical tradition. More than that, Paul actually encouraged this development!

He commended his churches for keeping the traditions he had taught them. He scolded them when they failed to do so. Even in Galatians, he expects his readers to hold fast to the form of the gospel they have received from him. Paul's letters give ample evidence of the gospel that can be expressed in fixed formulations that command the assent of the community. What we are doing this morning as we celebrate the Eucharist reflects that tradition: 'For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me."' (1 Corinthians 11.23f)

He is no advocate of a free-form spirituality in which each person s listens individualistically for messages from God; effectively inventing their own private religion.

Paul sees his ministry as only making sense if it is really true that his message has been given to him by the God who created the universe and chose to rescue fallen humanity through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So this passage is no license for the priority of private religious experience over entrenched tradition. The dichotomy posed in our passage this morning is not between individual and tradition but between God's gospel and human tradition.

True authority resides in preaching that expresses the revealed gospel message. Paul did believe that this message has a way of unsettling stable structures of the present age, because it constantly calls a community to measure its life against the ultimate truth of the gospel. Every practice, every institution, must be measured by the ultimate vision of freedom and unity in Christ.

Building stable community structures in the Church is not easy: ask the Archbishop of Canterbury. One of the reasons why the Galatian Christians found the message of Paul's opponents so tempting is that it offered the apparent security of fixed rules and structures. Paul resists their teaching precisely because he sees it as turning the gospel into a domesticated human tradition. This is to make the church into no more than another cultural community among many; even if it is one in which one might advance "zealously" if one plays by the rules - as Paul had in his former life in Judaism. The Gospel, he insists is something wholly different, a message from God that breaks in on our religious culture from outside and transforms everything.

Then what should we make of people who claim direct access to God's revelation - unmediated by any tradition? Can Christian preachers and teachers, evangelists and missionaries claim privileged access to revelation? The answer is both No and Yes.

No, we cannot say that we are among the original witnesses to the resurrection as among these Paul was "last of all". Standing close to the revelatory event of Christ's death and resurrection, he was given a special commission to take the extraordinary news to the Gentiles - proclaiming that Israel's God had now acted for the salvation of the whole world. In that sense, Paul's message is unique but, at the same time, our calling to proclaim the gospel is similar to it. We continue to believe and proclaim that the story of Jesus Christ is the revelation of God's purpose for creation. So while we cannot replicate Paul's experience of revelation, we do continue to see the world in the light of that same revelation that he announced.

There is a crucial distinction here. Those who lust after experiences of continuing revelation easily fall into fantasy and delusion, and the history of the Church is littered with such people, but those who attend steadily to the once-for-all revelation of Jesus Christ are given a truthful vision of reality as it is in God's new creation.