Of course today is also Remembrance Sunday, and the collect prayer I used at the beginning of our service reminds us of that, and of our desire and longing for a peaceful world - for a peace that surely will only come when all submit to the rule of God. A peace that will only come when all become disciples, when all say “yes” to God’s call.
Jesus said to the fishermen Andrew, Peter, James and John that he would make them “fishers of men”. Christianity is an evangelistic faith; we are called not only to have a faith that we practise, but to share that faith with others. I’m not sure that this means we have to turn people into identikits of ourselves, in fact I’m sure it doesn’t mean that; but that the way we live and speak and witness to our faith should bring others to know God, and to know him as the source of love and peace and justice and righteousness.
Two marks of that witness should surely be comradeship and sacrifice, so that connects discipleship into the great themes of Remembrance Sunday, when memories, perhaps fading memories of comradeship on the field of battle are linked in with our necessary and I hope heartfelt remembrance of the sacrifices made in war, whereby our freedom and nationhood have been preserved.
I have a number of friends who don’t believe, some of whom would call themselves atheists; a couple of them are quite active campaigning atheists. You might describe them as evangelistic in the opposite direction to my evangelism and that of Andrew and Peter and James and John. And they get quite angry when they tell me that Christianity has had two thousand years to persuade the world of its truth, and it’s spent much of that time stirring up trouble and fomenting wars. If that’s what believing in God does, they say, then maybe it’s time to see what not believing in him might achieve.
I try not to say too much about Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung and a number of other atheist leaders who seem to have caused a fair bit of war and done a fair bit of damage in their time; not to mention Adolf Hitler, with his own crazy dreams of Arian supremacy. Religion is not the problem (no, not even Islam). To be fair, atheism is not the problem, either, per se. The problem is extremism; whatever sort of extremism it may be, religious, political, philosophical, racial, the mindset that says I am right (indeed, I am in possession of all the truth) and therefore you are wrong, is poisonous, dangerous and damaging. It’s such a short step from “I am right, and therefore you are wrong” to “I am human, and you are something less than human.” Hence Hitler’s final solution, copied since then by Pol Pot in Cambodia, by the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi, and in so many other places where the reality of bloodshed has been concealed under the careful phrase “ethnic cleansing”.
The sad thing about extremism is that it’s also seductive. Kids of an Arab or Asian background from caring suburban homes are attracted by extremist Islam and seduced into terrorist acts at home or else travel to join Isis in Iraq or Syria or the Taliban in Pakistan or Afghanistan. A generation earlier kids from caring suburban homes were attracted by extremist Marxism or Maoism to join the Red Brigades or some similar group. It’s always happened, I guess; though maybe today the social media speed things up.
I spent some very uncomfortable time last week trying to be an honest broker, the only person two sets of people who wouldn’t speak to each other were prepared to speak to. I’d love to tell you that I sorted everything out and that all is love and peace. It isn’t, I didn’t, I’m not sure yet even how to begin. The same incident as described by each side . . . well, they’re so far apart you wouldn’t imagine they were talking about the same event at all. How do you mediate when each side is determined to put the very worst possible construct on what the other side has done or said? How do you mediate when person A says, “I wouldn’t even breathe the same air as person B”? Extremism is that racked up large scale. No-one is really listening any more; it’s all disinformation; it’s all propaganda. But I haven’t given up, and I won’t.
Jesus called Andrew and Peter and James and John to be disciples. Later on, he also named them apostles. Apostle means someone sent with a message; disciple means someone who learns. We, like they, need to be both. I once shared in the wedding of two people who’d been living together for many years. The wedding itself was taken by Michael Hooper, who at that time was I think still Archdeacon of Hereford. He admitted that years before his word to two people living together outside marriage would have been to tell them they were wrong: simple, unequivocal and, dare I say it, a bit extremist. But he’d learned, he told us, and grown; now he would want simply to hear their story, and rejoice with them at all that they had that was good, before then perhaps saying to them, “But there is more you could do, there’s more you could have.”
That applies across the board. We are disciples, and we don’t stop being disciples. The ones Jesus first called went on learning all the way through the Gospels, and they still had lots to learn after that - read Peter’s story as told in the Acts of the Apostles.
And we’re apostles, we do have a message to give, a word to share - but two things to say about doing that right: the first is that we’re true to our Lord only when our actions and our words match up (read the Epistle of James to see what that might mean); the second is that Gospel speaking begins with listening and learning. We share our faith far better when we discern and praise what is already good, than when we leap in to condemn what is wrong. When I worked for a mission society I was always told that those with whom we share and speak the faith are all of equal worth to ourselves; we’ve no right or call to speak down to them.
And yes, like me last week, we’ll often feel uncomfortable, maybe vulnerable, if we’re taking this discipleship and apostleship thing seriously. We might well be in the middle when it could feel safer to be on one side or the other. But here’s where I stand. I believe that in Jesus I have found the truth, or I might better say, I have been found by the truth. But I don’t believe that makes those who don’t believe what I believe, or think how I think, wrong. I have things to tell them, but I may also have things to learn and to receive.
Everyone I ever see, whatever they believe or don’t believe, is already loved by God; that’s what I believe about them, and it’s what I believe about God. That doesn’t mean I’ll only say nice things to them. Last week, if it taught me anything, has taught me that sometimes you do have to knock heads together, though of course, brother, I am doing this in love. But disciples and apostles have to learn to be peacemakers and bridge builders. That’s what God wants from us; that’s what God wants for his world. Religion that divides and oppresses is not true religion; and the same can be said of politics and philosophies. The simple prayer I know I need to pray more often than I do (and boy, did I need it last week) is this - let there be peace on earth, Lord, and let it begin with me. Amen.
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