Faith, love and patient hope

Sunday 19th October 2014.  Trinity 18.  

Last Sunday I went to Mass at a church in Pretoria. As people arrived and the music group tuned up, I prayed for you in the services that you were celebrating in each of the Living Brook churches. The parish priest, Fr Bogdan, was celebrating his first Sunday masses after returning from a holiday visiting family in Poland, and spoke of how he had prayed for his church in his absence too. And during the service he baptised a little girl - while he was baptising baby Kesia, I was thinking and praying about Aidan, who I have the privilege of baptising on my first Sunday back from holiday too. I prayed for Aidan, and for all of Living Brook, that you will grow in faith and love and hope.

Fr Bogdan and I, in praying for our people when we are away from them, followed the example of St Paul. In our reading from Paul's letter to the Thessalonians this morning, Paul (who was probably writing form Corinth), wrote that he was praying for the people there, and his prayer was 'constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labour of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ'.

For the Thessalonians, the work of faith and love and steadfast, or patient, hope, was lived out in a society that didn't support a life following Jesus Christ. In the Roman Empire many gods were venerated, and the message of Paul that there was one God and Jesus is his son was subversive. Giving up all the other gods was going way against the grain. It was like asking a businessman to give up his car and his laptop, or a teenager to give up snapchat. And there was an even bigger problem. Among the gods was Augustus, predecessor to emperor Tiberius. The emperor was revered as the son of god, and effectively worshipped as a god in his own right. Jesus was being put in the divine place of the emperor - a very dangerous thing to own up to in public. This new Jewish God, and his son Jesus were claiming to be senior to the gods of Rome. Jesus himself had established that he was senior to the emperor when he was asked in the temple about taxes. Give to the emperor what is the emperors, he had said, and to God what is Gods. If we believe that God really is the creator of all, then what is Gods includes what is the emperors! The emperor himself, as a human being, belongs to God, and anything paid to him is owed in turn to God. This message was dangerous in Jerusalem, and even more so in Greece. No wonder Paul needed to pray for the faithful people of Thessalonica. There was a lot of pressure not to follow Jesus.

The same is true for us. Following Jesus is hard. Our society does not support the way of faith, love and hope. Britain hasn't always been a Christian country, and sometimes it seems that the priorities of our culture more reflect its pagan roots than Christian ones. In the northern Kingdom of Bernicia, where Northumbria is now, the faith was first proclaimed by an Irish monk from the Iona monastery called Aidan. The King, Oswald, made Aidan bishop and abbot of Lindisfarne - the founder of a new monastery there. Aidan, like Paul had in Greece, travelled and proclaimed a controversial message: one God, whose son died to bring us hope and eternal life. Aidan founded churches. He freed Anglo-Saxon slave boys and educated them for the church. He taught ordinary people how to pray, fast, and meditate on the scriptures. St Bede tells us that he was respected for his love of prayer, study, peace, purity and humility, and for his care for the sick and the poor. On one famous occasion, Aidan was riding home on a horse given to him by King Oswin of Deira, when he met a poor man - and gave the man his horse. To imagine what a gift that was, compare it to this: if you had a really lovely car, an expensive 4x4, say, would you be willing to hand over the keys to a poor person you saw at the side of the road? It would be the equivalent action. Aidan lived without riches (apart from his brief horse ownership), though he could easily have had them, because he wanted to live the way of Jesus. It wasn't the way society did things then, and it isn't now. Praying, living in faith, loving God and neighbour, persevering in patient hope, these qualities go against those of our power hungry, wealth dependant society.

My prayer today for our Aidan, and for everyone in Living Brook remains the same: that you will be strong in faith in God our Father, and his Son Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit; that your love for God and for each other will grow and be a sign to others of the truth of the gospel; and that you will always persevere in patient hope, no matter what opposition you have to face.