A New Name - Baptism - Ss Peter & Paul

" To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it...." (Revelation 2.17)

Baptism of Charlotte Amelia Hillier on the Feast of Ss Peter & Paul, 29th June 2008

I’m glad I’ve never had to go through the agony of choosing a baby’s names. My most recent great nephew lingered nameless for a fortnight before he became James.

Charlotte can be grateful that she was not born to Puritan parents in the 17th Century. She might have that delightful American name: Through-much-tribulation-we-enter-the-kingdom-of-heaven – the girl wrote that her friends called her Tribby.

Amongst English Puritans, one of the most famous was Praise-God Barbon, the fanatic whose name is associated with the Barebones Parliament of 1653. His brother is said to have been baptized If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned. He was of course known to his opponents as Damned Barbon.

There’s nothing much we can do about the names we are given at birth and most people stick with them all through their life.

But in different cultures and certainly in the Ancient Near East during the centuries our Scriptures were written, name changing was more common.

In the Old Testament we can think of Abram who became Abraham; his wife Sarai whom God renamed Sarah; and Jacob who became Israel.

In the New Testament we have Saul, who we are grateful was renamed Paul – St Saul’s Knightsbridge would never have worked, would it?

And then on this Feast of Peter and Paul, we remember Simon bar-Jonah whom Jesus renames “Peter’ – the Rock.

But what’s the point of these name changes?

In ancient cultures there was something sacred, even mystical about a person’s name. It was as if the name somehow contained their destiny.

[You’re fairly safe with Charlotte – petite, feminine; and Amelia – invincible or industrious.]

And this brings us back to my curious text taken from the last book of the Bible, the Revelation of St John.

In his mysterious and symbolic way of writing, John says that at the last, we will all receive “a white stone in which a new name is written which none knows save the one who receives it.”

George MacDonald, that great Scottish writer of the nineteenth century wrote about this text: “The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it.”

It is, if you like, another way of saying that in heaven we shall at last be the person whom God intended us to be. Here in our present life, we pick up all kinds of baggage which can slow us down and divert us from our full potential.

And part of the purpose of our spiritual journey is to discover that name which God has written on the white stone; to catch a vision of all that we can be in God and to pursue that dream.

That’s the pattern of life you see in the saints. It’s that same Christian understanding of society and of himself, that drove Nelson Mandela.

Sometimes, as with Peter and Paul, there’s an important moment of revelation. For Paul it was on the Damascus road when he has a blinding vision of Christ; for Peter it was the realisation as we have just read, that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

So Jesus renames him ‘the rock’ – the cornerstone of the church that is to come into being.

God’s name for someone, says MacDonald, is God’s own idea of “that being whom he had in his thought when he began to make the child”. In the mind of God, Peter was always meant to be what only Peter could be, and meant to do what only Peter could do.

On this feast of Peter and Paul, when we remember two men renamed to reflect their destiny in Jesus Christ; when we name a baby before God, with all the hopes and expectations we have for her…

It is also a time to reflect on our own spiritual journey.

Are we simply letting events round about us carry us along; shaped by the society and culture around us?

Or is there a spiritual dimension to our lives, which helps us to reflect on our own destiny; on the men and women we are becoming?

For Christians, gathering here around the Table week by week, taking the bread and wine for the journey of life is a way discovering the new name that God has for us. It helps to reflect on who we are and to remind us of who we want to be.

Of course it’s not easy to follow a spiritual path in a society that gently mocks Christianity to death. But if we conquer the temptation to live simply as secular animals and if we look for the hidden manna, the spiritual food which God provides us with, then we will know with St John the Divine and with Peter and Paul:

" To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it...." (Revelation 2.17)
(With acknowledgement for original idea to John Pridmore of the Church Times.)

Persecution - lack of!

Trinity 5, persecution

Ex 19.2-8a; Rom 5.1-8; Matt 9.35-10.8

" suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us…" (Romans 5.3ff)

A lawyer is sitting quietly in his chambers when Satan turns up.

“I’ll make sure you win every case, that you become vastly wealthy, that you are the youngest QC ever, and eventually that you become the greatest reforming Chancellor in history.

All I require in return is the souls of your wife and children.”

The Lawyer thinks for a while and then says, “so where’s the catch?”

Lawyers, like politicians, are one of those groups of people who are always persecuted by public mockery and jokes.

I want this morning to spend a few minutes thinking about the persecution of Christians – or, perhaps more worryingly, the lack of it.

The longer version of today’s Gospel includes at least two puzzling statements of Jesus, which is presumably why the verses are left out. (Although at St Paul’s we only shorten readings to make printing the service sheet easier and to allow more time for wine at the end of the service…)

One of the so-called ‘hard sayings of Jesus’ is in the passage we did read: “go nowhere among the Gentiles”. This would seem to re-enforce the teaching of that Exodus reading where God says of Israel: “you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples.” (Ex 19.5)

I don’t want to dwell on this theme, because it is obvious from the way the early church developed and from some of the other teachings of Jesus, that the Gospel was to be preached to us, the Gentiles, as well. Although that still leaves us with the problem, not insurmountable, of the actually words of Jesus

The two other problems are found at the end of the extended reading:

“Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.’” (10.21-23)

The last statement of Jesus as Matthew records it is part of a bigger issue concerning the second coming of Jesus. He and the early church seemed to expect his return as the triumphant Son of Man to be imminent – within their lifetime – only months away. That’s a subject for another sermon on another day.

Although it is worth noting, in passing, that it was this very verse that the 19 year old Albert Schweitzer read in his Greek testament while undertaking his military service in 1894. At a time when many intellectuals were supposing that the early church had simply ‘made up’ many of the sayings of Jesus, he realised that they had an authentic ring about them. For why would the church invent such puzzling and problematic sayings and put them in the mouth of our Lord?

But back to the lawyers and persecution. (What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start!)

Jesus promises his disciples that in the world, they will have persecution. It is a theme taken up by the Apostle Paul and is the context of the ‘suffering’ he refers to in today’s epistle: “we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us…” (Romans 5.3ff)

The problem for many of us in the western church is that society does not hate us and we are neither vilified nor persecuted.

Does this mean there is something wrong with our practice of the faith? Does it suggest that by centuries of establishment compromises, that began with Christianity becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire in the early 4th century and continue today with Bishops in the House of Lords, we have become little more than a spiritual conscience for a secular society?
Well certainly some would have us believe that.

Groups within all religions often claim as ‘proof’ of the rightness of their position that they are mercilessly persecuted. The Albigensians claimed this in mediaeval Europe; the Anabaptists in reformation Europe; even evangelicals and liberal Catholics in the present day Diocese of London. Although, whereas the first two groups were burned and drowned respectively, the latter two groups only exchange snide remarks at Diocesan Synods.

In the early church, there were Christians who thought that martyrdom was such a privilege and a guarantee of a place with the saints in heaven, that they offered themselves to the mob; voluntary martyrdom, which soon came to be condemned by the Bishops. Hardly surprisingly, the Montanists, as they were called, soon died out!

However, there is a much milder form of this still around. You remember CS Lewis’s observation of the way some Christians practise their faith, encapsulated in his comment: “She lived for others. You could tell them by their haunted looks.”

Some Christians live in such a self-righteous and priggish way that they are shunned by normal society.

And some Christians believe such ridiculous things that they are assigned by polite society to the corner where the flat earth society live. They are regarded (to their horror) as away with the fairies. All this has nothing to do with the persecutions of which our Lord speaks.

However, we must not forget that, sadly, throughout the world, there is still much persecution of Christianity, and indeed of other faiths.

It is sobering to remember that there have been more Christian martyrs in the past century than in all the previous centuries put together. The religious freedom we enjoy in Britain is still denied to millions of our fellow believers around the globe, and we should continue to work and pray for their emancipation.

But where does all this leave us personally, as we struggle with the call to be true to our Christian vocation, and yet to be full participants in civil society?

I think passages like today’s Gospel should leave us with a healthy niggle. It should cause us to stop and think about how easily we sometimes fall in with the liberal consensus of secular society.

Sometimes, standing up for our faith and suffering a little verbal persecution, will mean taking an unpopular ethical stance at work or in our attitude towards money, sex and power. Sometimes it will simply be in trying to see the good in someone who has become the butt of everyone’s humour. Sometimes it will be in living below our means.

Jesus reminds us in another passage “Woe to you when all men speak well of you…” (Lk 6.26)

As we reflect and pray about our life before God, day by day, we should be prepared for that gentle niggle, that prompting of the Spirit, that sometimes leads us into patterns of living, which carry with them the mildest of persecutions.

Friends may say behind our backs that we are taking our religion a little too seriously. And they may feel gently rebuked by our life-style. Our popularity may ebb a point or two.

But compared with the persecution many of our brothers and sisters have endured, and still do, and in the light of our Lord’s own sufferings, as Paul reminds us, it is very little to put up with.

And in God’s providence, it is good for us, and for those whom we seek to serve.

" suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us..." (Romans 5.3ff)