11 About this we have much to say that is hard to explain, since you have become dull in understanding. [12] For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic elements of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food; [13] for everyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is unskilled in the word of righteousness. [14] But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5:11-14)
The sorts of things being said in that passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews will be recognized by anyone who has ever been at school or uni. As we all know, there is a huge ‘learning curve’ to be overcome whenever we start something new: the new knowledge, painfully acquired, is useless to us on its own, but as we keep adding to it, suddenly we find we have enough knowledge to be useful. Even if we are really bad students, if we persevere long enough, suddenly we have a skill that is something we can use.
I have no sense of rhythm and hardly any sense of music. But, all those years ago, half a century it is now, dancing was where you went with your girl: I had to learn to dance. My instructor tore his hair out too. Other students went on to jive and samba, but I worked on the quickstep. Finally I got it, I could quickstep. But I never went on to waltz or to twist or anything else: I could quickstep, couldn’t I? And I did. At the Hurlingham in London, I’d quickstep and Liz’d love it.
But do you know, they never play a quickstep any more. My really rather cool lockstep diagonally across the floor followed by a spin turn never gets used… and there is no way I’m even going to think about spinning on the floor balanced on the top of my head. So poor old Liz, who loves dancing, never has an opportunity… and that is because I never got beyond the very basics.
Do not get me wrong, without the basics, you have nothing. You really must have the basics. But if you stop there, you have missed most of what is on offer. Now get this: effective teaching requires two kinds of people. It requires many, many people who are willing to progress one step at a time and share that step with many other students, and it requires someone to co-ordinate, to lead, to teach the teachers.
That is how the Church is organized, we have Jesus, and we have the saints, that is you and me. We have the basic ideas about Jesus, what happens when we believe, and how we live as Christians. What we do is, we keep helping one another get a grip on those basics; as we do that, so from time to time Jesus gives us a little more understanding that we can pass on. Paul, or whoever wrote the epistle, was tearing his hair out because people had not reached the point where they understood that it was their job really to understand the basics, pass them on, and learn more, too. It was time to grow up.
Oh, a word of warning. There once were people, perhaps still are, who claim to have special knowledge, secret knowledge, special information, that only a few can be trusted to handle. Beware: there is no special, secret knowledge, just open, freely available knowledge; that anyone can understand and apply if they pray, and strive, and pray. It is really just like learning to Samba: it is easy to know what to do, it just takes a lot of effort actually to do it.
History shows that churches have transformed the societies within which they operate. Yes they have. That is what the church is for, it is for being the Body of Christ here in earth, to change the world. That transforming is what Christians do, grown up, proper Christians.
In this parish, we have three congregations, and of the three this is the one that will be responsible for changing this bit of Redlands. This congregation is the only one that does not have an average age well above 60… and so friends, the world is your oyster, you and people of similar age in other denominations…the rest of us are too old to do much changing ourselves.
OK, I know you have babies and mortgages and no time… but you are needed. You are needed to live Christian lives, to show forth the love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit. You are needed to teach the basics to people who do not know them. To teach them by ‘show and tell’, both. You are required to show the fruit of the spirit, and you are required to tell the good news.
Perhaps you are not really sure that God has called you to a role like that? Join the club: all of us in our strongest moments know we have been called, and all of us in our weaker moments wonder whether we are just kidding ourselves. None of us think we are worthy to do anything for Jesus: it is just that He has no one else but us. This is fix that all human beings are in; and it is the fix that Jesus himself was in. Jesus was not God pretending to be a man, knowing at every stage what He’d do, because He was God. Jesus was as human as you and me, and what He thought and believed and did depended on what mood he was in, what he had recently learned, what had recently happened… so that sometimes Jesus knows exactly what he is about, and other times he really wonders.
But He stuck with it, to the end.
Even when there was thunder, which might have been God speaking, or God speaking, but it might have been thunder. What in His strong moments was the voice of God, speaking, and in His weak moments perhaps, maybe, only thunder.
In His humanity, Jesus experienced everything we do; he did His duty to the end, and we can too, with His help. Jesus knew his scriptures backwards, he could argue with the experts. Perhaps we ought to, too. Jesus spent a lot of time in prayer. Perhaps we ought to, too. Jesus spent lots of time just being with people. Perhaps we ought to, too.
The more we learn about Jesus, the more His being a man becomes important. You see, what He did, He did as a man. When He asks us to take up our cross and follow, He is only asking one man to do what another has already done. He most certainly did not want to take up a cross, but did. Very few of us are ever asked to take up a literal cross, to die for the faith. Most of us are only asked to live the faith, and talk about it. I know, talking about it feels like dying… but so does going the extra mile, so does turning the other cheek, so does giving away a jacket to someone who needs one. But we need to learn how to do it. It is the basics, but we need to learn how to do. It is what changes the world.
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