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That "P" Word

17th Sunday : 27 July 2014  : Romans 8: 28-30

At the age of 13, coinciding with the onset of puberty, I suddenly became very interested in the Christian religion. At night time I began reading books about the Bible covertly under the bed covers. When my Father invited me one Sunday evening to go to Evensong I discerned in that wooden Gothic parish church, as the Tudor language washed over us, a dark, mysterious, inviting presence. It keyed in with another experience I had about that time of looking at a field of wheat, and being struck with the conviction that the world of nature was at one with its creator – that there was a power here that was the most vital and compelling element in human experience.

So when Bishop Alan Pyatt laid hands on me at Confirmation a little later it was a decisive starting point in my walk with God. I said a clear "Yes" to God that I have never had cause to regret. Since then hardly a Sunday morning has gone by without me being in Church. The wonder and the mystery of God has drawn me in deeper and deeper. Forty eight years on from that Confirmation Service I can say that it was the most important decision of my life.

But in recent years I have begun to wonder whether it was just me making that decision. Looking back I can see a number of influences that helped to shape that "yes." What about my Father, for instance. I grew up in a household where the male role model regularly went to Church. And when us kids went on strike about having to go to Sunday School he said, "That’s fine – you can stay at home and I will give you some instruction." After a few heavy weight lectures on Old Testament history we were happy to return to Sunday School classes. And what about the Sunday School superintendent Mrs Trebilco. I cant remember a thing she taught us, but I do remember the aura of kindness she gave off, and the personal interest she took in me. This was someone who left the Community of the Sacred Name because she felt that as a nun she enjoyed greater material security than the unemployed she ministered too in the depression.

Traveling further back in time I wonder too about the influence of the Revd David Thorpe who baptized me at St Augustine’s Cashmere. Many remember him as a person of unassuming holiness, and later on as Vicar of St Johns, Latimer Square, he would have a crucial influence in the development of the Christchurch City Mission. I remember stopping at Hanmer for lunch a few years ago while traveling north and seeing David Thorpe in the distance, who lived there in retirement, and who had recently lost his wife. A part of me wanted to rise from that cafe table and walk the several hundred yards to go and shake him by the hand for that great thing he had done for me those many years ago. I ignored the impulse, and now that he is dead I regret it.

Going further back in time what about my great grandfather the patriarch of the Bowron family who led them on their migration from Ilkley in Yorkshire to Pimlico in London, and then across the seas to Christchurch. He was a Wesleyan lay preacher for whom religion was at the center of his life. The whole family went to Church twice on Sundays, and the only recreation permitted on the Sabbath was the family orchestra. They were not, apparently, one of the chamber music highlights of the city.

Thinking about this long line of encouragers who stood behind my "yes" to God I am beginning to understand what Paul meant when he wrote:

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.

Yes, I am talking about the "P" word that Anglicans are embarrassed to hear – predestination.

We live in a time when people are convinced that they are autonomous selves who make their future through a series of free choices. And the evangelical piety that deeply impregnates the background religious tradition of this country makes a big thing about each individual making a decision for Christ. And Anglo-Saxon culture has an inbuilt tendency towards the Pelagian heresy, the erroneous belief that we make the first move towards God. All of which makes us deeply inclined to think of our faith in God as our achievement, something we did all on our own.

So we need a wake up call every now and then to remind us that God went looking for us long before the idea ever entered our minds. For us to even get into the position of making a decision about faith there first had to be a long encouraging, wooing process on the part of God so that we could have that possibility. And the faith that we claimed for ourselves comes to us as an inheritance in which we stand on the shoulders of the people who shaped and formed that decision, some of whom did that work even before we were born. You might like to spend some of today thinking back over the past as to who those people might be in your faith biography.

The punch line of predestination is this. If God has set in motion this process which includes our relational networks that has prepared us for our life in Christ, then think how much loving care he lavishes on us now to sustain and uphold us in our present walk of faith. God understands that we are relational beings who need constant encouragement to continue on the path we set out on. None of us are radically autonomous selves who robotically press on from our original heroic decision. So God is constantly arranging people, places, and things – past, present and future to keep us in the living conviction that we are securely held in his loving arms. The trail back into the past that contains all those people who loved us into faith is also the guarantee that we will never be abandoned as we continue in the way. And we also, pray God, are part of a company of witnesses whose "yes" to God will enable other believers in future generations to stand on our shoulders in the decision they will ultimately make for God.