St Luke’s, Havelock North – Easter 6, 2007 - Sermon

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life.”

Here’s a question for you – why are we here? In a way, of course, it’s the quintessential question of existence, what’s the meaning of life – and no, it’s not 42! Look at any self-help, psycho-babble, new age, be all you can be book and you’ll find this question at its heart, but I’m not talking about that sort of ‘I am the whole universe’ approach that our culture so quickly gets sucked into. When I ask ‘why are we here?’ I’m not inviting you to take a personal inventory of all your reasons for being, rather I’m talking about ‘we’, us – why are we here? I’m talking specifically about the Church, and even more specifically about this church – why are we here?

My interest in this has been prompted by my involvement in the major review of a national organisation I’m tied up with. We’re not exactly new kids on the block, we’ve been around for 130 plus years and have some clear and well defined ideas about what we do and how we do it and even why we do it in a fairly immediate sense, but what we were challenged with early on in this review process was the question why are we here in a much broader sense. In short, we were asked to name our vision, and that’s been an interesting process.

We live, I believe, in a world that is short on vision, and we worship in a Church – capital C – that’s in the same boat – and let me be clear here, I’m talking about vision, not mission. We’ve got mission by the boatloads, but it’s not vision. Mission is about what you do and, if it’s done well, how you do it. Vision, on the other hand, is all about the why. Vision is focused on the end game, the ultimate prize, the biggest of big pictures, and I believe strongly that we live at a point in history where people get so caught up in politics and policies, and theologies and even missions that they lose sight of the big picture, they lose their vision. Or else they never had one to start with.

It’s a simple fact of life, people with visions get mocked. Take our first reading for example. I was talking to someone last week about sermons and they said they were avoiding today’s gospel because it was too difficult and preaching on Revelation instead. Revelation! I was stunned. I confess, I mocked that person. I mean, let’s face it; Revelation is hardly the easiest book in the Bible. It’s confusing and meandering and mostly downright weird, but behind all that, Revelation is a book about a vision – a vision of a new heaven and a new earth, as it puts it at one point. It’s a vision of a time when all the hopes and dreams of God’s people will be realised, a vision of hope.

It’s a vast, daring, and completely unlikely and even impossible vision, but is it really any more impossible than Paul ending up by a river in Macedonia talking to a woman called Lydia? Certainly Paul didn’t think so. He had no intention of going to Macedonia, and no desire to either. But then he had a vision and away he went and ended up visiting the cities of Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth, to name but three, and just imagine what our New Testament might have looked like if he hadn’t – a lot shorter anyway! Not to mention the fact that Lydia went on to become a key person in the early Church and a leader who nurtured many more to come.

Visions sometimes lead us where we really didn’t want to go.

Our gospel reading this morning offers another equally unlikely vision. Jesus is in the middle of his very long farewell discourse, delivering these promises of peace and hope to the disciples before his death. I’m going to die, he says, and everything’s going to be ok. How unlikely would that have sounded? And in its wider context the gospel reading holds out a similar and just as unlikely vision to the Christian community at the time it was written – a community being torn apart and challenged by tensions and struggles and persecutions from both outside and in. How impossible would concepts like peace and love have seemed to such a community?

Visions are often unlikely.

I really want us, as a church, to think about our vision, and I can warn you right now, it’s a word you’ll be hearing a lot more of. I intend to keep returning to it and I want to try to find an opportunity for us to have a sustained focus on it because I believe it’s vital that we do. Without a vision, I believe, we run the risk of just stumbling from fad to fad, picking up on one after the other mission ideas which may all be great, but how do they feed into the bigger picture? Without a vision we will really struggle to answer that question, why are we here?

So we’re going to have that discussion, I hope, and to help us do that I want to offer from today’s readings just a few points that I believe we can see as guidelines to finding a vision, and the first is a vision must be broad.

Our vision, whatever it is, has to be broad enough to include and be owned by all of us and take in the biggest possible picture we can see, and that’s a big ask. The temptation will always be to make it a bit smaller, a bit less daunting, a bit more manageable, but that’s not what a vision is all about. A vision isn’t about what we can manage, a vision is about what we really want to see.

A second point from today’s readings is that a vision must be bold. Some might suggest that bold isn’t a word well suited to Anglicans, but I don’t think that has to be true. Again, a vision isn’t about what might be easy or even possible to achieve. A vision must be bold enough to include the unlikely and not accept that just because something seems impossible that it shouldn’t be aimed for.

Thirdly, a vision must be Bible-based. I have to admit I’m cheating a bit here. What I really want to say is that at the heart of our vision must be Christ, but that didn’t start with B. Of course the Bible is where we get our most clear view of Christ, so Bible-based is ok, although I want to inject a word of caution – when we start to treat the Bible like an idol, it ceases to be helpful. This isn’t the time to go further with that, but it’s an important point, especially at the moment.

So a vision must be broad, bold and Bible-based, or Christ-centred if you prefer. And to those points I want to add a vision must offer hope, and again this is just so important, especially today. Christians have a reputation – some of it earned, some not – for being a negative bunch in our society. We always seem to be standing against something, and that’s not the message of the gospel. The Good News is precisely that, good news – not a promise of an easy life of beer and skittles, but definitely a promise of hope and redemption. At the end of the day the message I believe we find in the gospel is that if our vision is not based on hope, it is quite simply not a Christian vision.

One final point, and this is hard but crucial, once we identify our vision and name it, we must be prepared to measure absolutely everything we say and do against it. This is where the rubber meets the road. Having a vision isn’t about having some nice flowery statement we can point people to whenever they ask what we stand for. Having a vision means walking and working constantly towards it. If something contradicts or works against the vision, we don’t say it, we don’t do it, it just simply isn’t part of our lives.

Now as much as or maybe even more than ever, the Church needs a vision. I really believe that. May God give us eyes to see it, wisdom to comprehend it and the courage to make it our own. Amen.