Third Sunday after Epiphany
Isaiah 9.1-4; Psalm 27.1, 4-9; 1 Corinthians 1.10-18; Matthew 4.12-23
Church of Scotland, Geneva, Auditoire de Calvin, January 26 2020
“What does the LORD require of you,” asks the prophet Micah, “but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
And here comes Jesus, asking us to walk humbly with him – an early hint in Matthew’s Gospel of who this strange and charismatic preacher from Nazareth really is.
“Follow me,” he says to Simon and Andrew, to James and John. What he says to them, he says to us.
Matthew tells us that straightaway these four Galilean fishermen did that. The fourth Gospel suggests that it was a little more complex. And if we look into the mirror, we can scarcely deny that our own relationship to God and with Jesus is, as they say, complicated.
Why does Jesus ask these four fishermen to follow him? It’s not for their own sake alone. It’s because the kingdom of God is breaking into our world, and we and they are called to be part of that.
Jesus calls them to change, to turn their lives around; but he tells them that the world is changing, that it is being turned upside down – or, more precisely, that an upside-down world is being turned right way up.
The kingdoms of this world are becoming the kingdom of God and his Messiah, and that changes everything. Not just you or me, important though this is, but the whole wide world.
If, then and now, it is not immediately apparent that our world is being transformed – and today that must seem like an understatement – that is, perhaps, because not enough of us are doing enough to transform it.
What does it mean to walk humbly with Jesus?
That was the question I set out with, until I realized that I had no better answer than that provided by John Bell and Graham Maule in their wonderful hymn “Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?” (CH4 533).
So let’s instead look at some of the many ways in which we can evade the call to walk humbly with Christ.
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A first way is to misunderstand what it means to be humble.
When I’m feeling flippant, which happens surprisingly often, I tell people that modesty is my best feature.
But people can be proud of their humility. Consider Uriah Heep, in Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield. Notable for his cloying obsequiousness, he is, in fact, a hypocrite and a complete creep.
Or consider how false Christian modesty helped to drive the young Frederick Engels away from the evangelical faith of his childhood. Writing to the Graeber brothers, his former schoolfriends now in training for the ministry, he complains that the preacher Krummacher tells his congregation to pride themselves on their insignificance.
Understood in such ways as these, humility is just playing games.
Rightly understood, humility is realism: to be humble is to see ourselves as we really are, valuing ourselves neither too high nor too low. This isn’t easy. Telling ourselves the truth about ourselves is something we have to learn to do; we are helped in learning it by seeing God and Christ as they really are.
Sometimes, to be sure, we need to be jolted out of complacency. Other times we may need to say truthfully that, all things considered, we aren’t doing too badly.
The Book of Common Prayer invites us to confess our sins in these terms:
“Almighty and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.”
Thomas Cranmer writes beautifully; and there is much in this prayer to which we can only nod an embarrassed assent. But am I alone in feeling that he has slightly overegged the pudding?
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A second way I mention because Paul mentions it. When people become Christians, we don’t instantly become nice. We may even become less nice.
We can see this at work in the church in first-century Corinth, a church that Paul himself founded. Paul spent over a year with them as their pastor, showing them how to live out their new life as a community of believers in Christ.
After he left, he learned that things had fallen apart. The congregation had divided into factions. “I’m on Paul’s side”; “I’m with Apollos”; “Peter is my man”; and, “I’m for the Messiah”. It’s as if we were to say: “I’m with Laurence” or “I’m with Jim” or “I’m with Mark” or finally, that power-play familiar in the church, “I’m not with any of these, I’m just with Jesus”.
We may not do any of those things. But there can be quarrels among us too.
Half a century ago, Charles Davis was perhaps the best-known Catholic theologian in England. Then, suddenly, he announced that he was leaving the priesthood and the Catholic church and getting married.
When someone asked him how it felt to be outside the Catholic church, he found himself spontaneously answering, “It is as if I had rejoined the human race.” He was not denying the goodness of his Catholic friends. He was talking about what happened to them, and to him, when they tried to cope with their membership of the Catholic church as it then was: “They are unhappy; they quarrel; they lose a sense of proportion.”[1]
This story is not merely about what happened long ago in a country far away. It can happen in any congregation in any church anywhere. We too can become impatient with one another, become unhappy over what, viewed realistically, are trivial matters, or inflate the small change of congregational life into the end of civilization as we know it.
When we do this, we allow ourselves to be distracted from our calling, individually and severally, to walk humbly with our Lord.
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My last example has to do with divided loyalties.
Celebrities like to associate their names with good causes – good for them. But they also like to use their celebrity to mint money – think George Clooney and his Nespresso ads. Sometimes this creates a conflict of interests.
When Oxfam began in Oxford in 1942, its immediate aim was to help the starving citizens of occupied Greece. Since then, it has grown into an international confederation of 19 independent organizations focused on alleviating global poverty.
In 2005, the Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson became a global ambassador for Oxfam.
Six years ago, however, she had a rather public falling out with Oxfam after she agreed to become the face of SodaStream, an Israeli company whose main factory was based at that time in Mishor Adumim, an illegal settlement in the illegally occupied West Bank.
Oxfam opposes all trade from such settlements and argues that businesses operating there further the poverty and denial of rights of Palestinian communities that it works to support.
But Johansson had the courage of her convictions. She dropped Oxfam and stuck with Sodastream.
Oxfam in Britain is not without its faults either, as you may recall.
But this story, again, is not merely about a country far away, of which we often know less than we should. It’s about us.
We would like to walk with Jesus, we really would. But there are other things we would also like to do, and these sometimes clash with following him.
Thomas Cranmer hasn’t got it exactly right. It’s not that we follow too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. It’s that our hearts are divided. We really would like to give ourselves wholeheartedly to God, but our hearts are given, in part, to other and incompatible things.
The question is whether and how and to what extent this is true for each and all of us.
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These are just three of the many and various ways in which we can evade the call to walk humbly with Christ. Reflecting on them, we may be left with the question his followers ask, later in Matthew’s Gospel: “Who then can be saved?”
Let me end on an upbeat note.
John Calvin, whose lecture theatre this once was, and Ignatius of Loyola, the Spanish founder of the Jesuits, found themselves at opposite ends of the Reformation. But they both said the same thing: act as if everything depends on you, but await the results as if everything depends on God.
We must act as if everything depends on us. We cannot rest on our oars, or sun ourselves on a Galilean seashore. That way no fish are caught, and no people either – not even us.
But everything depends on God. It is the Father, acting on us and through us, as he acted and acts through Jesus Christ, who changes our world for good, transforming both us and our societies.
Let us not deny that our faith is imperfect, our hope is imperfect, our love is imperfect.
It is God’s love, shown to us in the face of Jesus of Nazareth, and working on us over the course of a lifetime, that will finally transform the imperfect into the perfect.
It is the power of God’s spirit that will keep us safe and bring our boat to shore.
[1] Charles Davis, A Question of Conscience (London: Hodder & Staughton, 1967), 14.