Sermon preached by Mark Wakefield on 18 November, 2007
Malachi 4:1-2; II Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19

A few weeks ago I found myself sitting in a really boring meeting at work.    It's got to be one of the disadvantages of working for almost any large organisation - particularly if you are in a management position - that your working life tends to be measured out by meetings.  Of course, many of them are useful and important but in my experience a good few are neither and this, unfortunately, had all the signs of being one of them.

But just as I was despairing of anything of interest ever being said, someone raised the question of what we were going to do about Christmas cards this year. At that moment the meeting sparked into life, particularly on the vexed question of what the greeting was going to be. Was it, as is corporate policy, going to be "Season's Greetings" in deference to those of other faiths and none, or was it going to be robustly Christian and say "Happy Christmas"?

After years of expecting such questions to be met with silence and indifference I was struck by how strongly some of my colleagues felt that the message should be "Happy Christmas". Whether they expressed their view out of Christian conviction or for vaguer reasons more to do with cultural identity I can't be sure but it was the strength of view that struck me as interesting.

All this was reminiscent of the ruckus that broke out around this time last year on the back of some remarks made by the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu. Commenting on a workplace survey that claimed that three quarters of employers had banned Christmas decorations from offices for fear of offending other faiths, he attacked what he called "aggressive secularists" and "illiberal atheists" for trying to throw out the crib at Christmas. It was, he said, the thin end of a very long wedge that had seen Birmingham City Council rename Christmas "Winterval", Torbay remove the cross from its crematorium and Plymouth stop free parking on Sundays in case it offended people of other faiths who worship on different days.

Now, wherever you stand on this - and by the way, I argued for not sending out any Christmas cards at all because I dislike the whole over the top commercialisation of Christmas so much - the Archbishop does have a point that there is a much keener sense of friction on matters of faith now than just a few years ago. There is, if you like, a sense of battle lines being drawn, not only within faith communities but with an increasingly strong lobby of atheists and secularists wanting to evict religion in general and Christianity in particular from the public realm - witness, for instance, the very vocal, often strident debate on faith schools.

Many Christians, me included, can find this very hurtful. A few weeks ago Rowan Williams wrote a typically thoughtful, compassionate article on the legal limit for abortion in a Sunday newspaper. Barely was the ink dry on the page than the Guardian columnist and humanist Polly Toynbee dismissed him as, quote, "a pathetic, weather-vane windbag" and suggested that instead of talking about abortion he should "take his Old Testament beard to rain down hellfire on the City of London" for its greed and immorality.

When I read this article I felt rather angry at - what seemed to me at least - its meanness of spirit and lack of engagement with what the Archbishop was saying. But really, should we be surprised at such treatment? No, of course we shouldn't. On the contrary, we should positively expect it because discipleship - if it's true discipleship - inevitably comes at a price.

In today's gospel Jesus sets out a stark vision of what awaits his disciples. They'll be thrown into prison; they'll be betrayed by people they love; some will be put to death; and all will be hated because of his name. To any normal person - and if the gospel tells us any anything about the first disciples it's that they were very ordinary people indeed - this would be a truly terrifying prospect from which they would immediately want to take flight. And yet they did go on to suffer all those things and it's thanks to the faithfulness and perseverance of those first Christians that we are here today.

Now of course, the circumstances in which we are called to work out our discipleship are radically different from those of the first century AD and for all sorts of reasons but there is one in particular that is worth pondering.

When Jesus spoke those words to his disciples the Christian church wasn't even founded and he had but a handful of followers. Fast forward a hundred years from Jesus's death and the early church had certainly spread and become distinct from Judaism but it was very far from being a major spiritual or religious force in the world.

The event that transformed the prospects of the early church and that fundamentally altered the course of world history came some 200 years later when the pagan Roman Emperor, Constantine, had a dream on the eve of a major battle. He believed that in his dream the Christian God had promised him victory and when this dream duly became a reality, he became a Christian. The rest, as they say is history to the extent that today Christianity is by far the largest of the world's religions with some two billion followers.

Overnight, Christianity went from occupying a marginal position in society where it acted as challenge and irritant to the Roman state - and for which, of course, the faithful endured sometimes terrible persecution - to a position at the very heart of the state itself and from which the church began to wield enormous power.

Remarkable though it may seem, it was that dream of Constantine's and the events that flowed from it that explain why - to this day - the Church of England is the established church of our country with the Queen its Supreme Governor and with senior Bishops occupying seats in the House of Lords. All this is, of course, but a pale shadow of the influence that the Church once enjoyed but it's precisely these last remnants of power that the militant atheists and secularists now have in their sights.

For entirely understandable reasons we find this all very difficult. Losing even more of our position at the heart of the nation's life can feel like the loss of our birthright. But there is, I believe, some good that can come of this if we embrace this challenge thoughtfully and creatively.

The great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was imprisoned by the Nazis for his role in helping Jews to escape Germany and was murdered in the last months of the second world war, spent much of his time in prison reflecting on what the declining power of the church meant for Christians. He knew that there was no stopping it. The world had, as he put it, "come of age", by which he meant that the extraordinary developments of the modern age - particularly in science - had led men and women to increasingly believe that they could manage without God. And against this growing tide of disbelief and indifference the church was powerless, whatever privileges it enjoyed courtesy of the state.

Bonhoeffer's response to this was not to despair. On the contrary, he saw within this development the opportunity for Christians to become more true to themselves and their faith. Why? Because in his words "God let himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross". For at the heart of our faith is this seemingly crazy paradox - that it was only through the powerlessness and suffering of Jesus on the cross that the real power and glory of God could be revealed to mankind. And it was ever thus and will ever be thus because the God in whom we believe is the God of love and if God makes himself known through love and if that is the source of his power, then he must, by his very nature, always run the risk of being rejected.

Bonhoeffer, like so many of the early Christians, paid a heavy price for his discipleship. I pray - as I am sure do you - that we will never be called upon to sacrifice that much. But if, as seems likely, we are entering a time when the church is under attack and threatened with marginalisation then we should surely embrace it as an opportunity to speak more clearly of what we believe.

And as we do so, we must acknowledge with humility that whatever privileged position the church has enjoyed in the past - and however wisely or otherwise it has exercised the power that has come with that - we have no automatic right to influence the lives of others. For the only legitimate power that we have at our disposal is that same power that Jesus drew upon when he went to his cross and which, although the greatest power in the world, is one that constantly courts rejection.

Amen