Ascensiontide and Education Sunday
Alison Vance gave our theme introduction on the theme: Learning from Many Faiths; the reading was from Luke 6:27-31.
Matthew's version of this teaching (Matt 5, 43ff) starts ‘it was said .. love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say, ‘Love your enemies...' This points to what, perhaps is the force of this passage. Not as we may sometimes have supposed ‘Be nice to your enemy while hating everything he does and everything he is and wishing he would change' but ‘Treat your ‘enemy' as you would your friend'. So how is our ‘enemy' defined? Luke ‘s passage defines it as someone who hurts you. Someone who wants what you have. Someone who hates you. But more important than defining enemies is treating even these as friends and so defusing enmity. Are members of other faiths our ‘enemies'? Do they hate us? Want what we have? Hurt us? Or are they just people whom we perceive as ‘different'. Jesus challenges us to treat even truly hurtful people, and all the more these merely different people, the same way as we do our friends. Do we expect our friends to change their views to match ours? Or our partners, siblings, colleagues? I suggest we respect their views. The best way to show respect is by demonstrating our willingness to learn. It is that willingness to learn that the Faiths Forum of the University nurtures.
The Faiths Forum, established in 2008 is made up of members of all of the student faith societies, members of the University´s multi-faith Chaplaincy team, and members of the Union of Students. This project encourages inter- faith dialogue and collaborative action within our University communities and aims to reach students with a Faith and those with none.
The forum meets regularly in term time with the following aims:
•to work together within the University and the Students' Union
•to organise multi-faith events
•to highlight important events and activities relating to faith
•to improve awareness of faith in the University
•to give a voice to all of the student faith societies
•to utilise the skills and experience of the various student faith groups and to appreciate the value of our diversity
The Forum aims to increase knowledge and understanding of Faith in all students, thereby educating the young people who will shape our future.
I have discovered that embedded within all faiths is an incarnation of the idea of doing to others as you would have them do to you. If mutual love is implicit within so many organised religions why one asks is there still so much religiously-related oppression, mass murder and genocide? A simple answer is a historical inability from people across a broad faith spectrum to convince followers that enacting the golden rule applies to all humans, not merely to fellow believers. The sheer welcome the multi faith group received on a recent visit to the Gurdwara (Sikh temple) is indicative that enacting the golden rule does not have to be difficult. Sikhs demonstrated Guru Arjan's teaching "No one is my enemy, none a stranger and everyone is my friend." (Guru Arjan Dev : AG 1299). One can remain true to one's faith without denouncing others. The faiths forum is an area for mutual learning and respect. The feedback which the forum gets from students is immensely positive. They really like events like the informal inter-faith cafes and visits to learn about other places of worship as they get people together and form new friendships. People express that it's a great way to learn about other cultures and faiths which is really important when our graduates are entering a global workplace. It's also really valuing faith and talking about it openly which should be done, as opposed to not talking about it because faith is often perceived in society as an awkward thing to talk about.
Different faiths often hold similar values. Our relationship with God can be strengthened by showing God's love by learning from others.
R&S 538: Teach me, my God and King
R&S 679: The Lord's my shepherd
Amid the clamour of the world
R&S 492: Dear Lord and Father
Thursday was Ascensiontide, and here's the Ascension story from Acts.
When Jesus' disciples had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?' He replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.' When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up towards heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.'
Jesus' friends must have wished they could stop learning. Every time they thought they'd got him sussed, Jesus would say or do something new, something unexpected, and they'd have to start working it out all over again. Even now, after God has raised him from death, it's still going on. They think, they hope, they've got God's plan finally sorted out. This must be the time when Jesus brings God's kingdom in and the happy ending starts. But typical Jesus, when someone brings the question of a timetable up, he doesn't give a proper answer. Don't try to pin God down! he warns. It doesn't work! But when you need it, God's power will be yours, to tell the whole world what I mean to you. And just as someone's about to say, What? he leaves the conversation, hanging in mid-air, a scene our Ascension window tries in vain to picture. He's not going to spoon-feed his friends the right answers. They'll learn only by working it out themselves. But the mysterious men in white give them a hint. Don't stay put looking up to heaven for the answers, they advise. Jesus will be back, but not how or when you expect, so get on with it! Faced with this, what do the disciples do? They meet together; they recruit new leadership; they pray.
They prepare, however uncertainly, to learn whatever it is God has to teach them. And maybe we in St Andrew's stand in a somewhat similar place today. Like all Christians, we have God's promise that if we ask for help, we will find it. But we don't know, any more than the disciples before Pentecost knew, exactly what form it will take. And for us too, there would be no point in God just telling us. It's this business of learning. Being given information doesn't always help us learn; it's finding it out for ourselves that counts.
Take the example of Broomhall Music, our recent concert. It's taught us what a complicated and fragile business it is working with our local communities.
We started out with the best of intentions, but we didn't get everyone on board who originally showed interest, and we didn't get everything right in our planning. Yet who could have guessed before the event that two of our lead singers in Captain Noah would turn out to be people with only a slight connection with our church? Who could have predicted the wonder of listening to instruments all the way from China? And next time we organise an event and invite our friends from Broomhall and beyond, we'll know what areas to focus on, and we'll do it even better.
Learning from others beyond our own group is a key aspect of education. Our church meeting on Saturday morning discussed the possibility of developing our work in the community, making St Andrew's a community centre as well as a church. That's a huge task. Yet others have done it before us, and we will need to ask for advice from local churches and the URC Synod, to find out what problems to avoid, what solutions may help us. Alison has been looking even more widely in her learning. She told us just now about the University of Sheffield Faiths Forum, where students from different faith communities find out about each other. And like us in the Muslim-Christian dialogues, she's discovering that we have a surprising amount in common. Would you believe it, our own dialogues have been running since November 2006? Our next meeting will focus on what we have learned since then, and it'll be good to have some of you there who've been in that dialogue from the beginning.
Education can be a painful business, especially when it challenges what we think we know, making us examine our preconceptions and rethink cherished ideas. So teaching must also be a pastoral, shepherding task. Marion has told us today about the pastoral work that formed such a large proportion of her workload when she was in teaching, and I know she's not the only teacher whose support and encouragement have helped their pupils to become better human beings as well as sharpening their intelligence. The pastoral task involves giving nourishment as well as guidance, loving care as well as discipline; the best teachers stay with us in memory long after we have left their classes, encouraging us through dark times as well as cheering us on when we achieve our dreams.
Here in this church, each of us can be teachers, if we dare. But do we dare share our own discoveries about faith, bad and good? The aspects of which our life-experience has convinced us? The areas where we doubt what we once held to be certain? Those of you with sixty, seventy, eighty years of being a Christian can be great resources to people like me with fewer years under our belt. Yet those of you whose faith is fresh and exciting can teach the old-timers to look again at what we may take for granted, and to value it more highly. Each of us, from the oldest to the youngest, has something to teach, if we will learn from one another.
Teaching isn't always fun; Jesus knows that for sure. The only way he could teach us about God is through an object lesson: to show us that God's love never gives up, he has willingly gone through darkness for us, pain, death. We may never know who in Isaiah's time was the suffering servant described in our Hebrew Bible reading this morning, but as Christians we believe the reading also has something to say about Jesus: our teacher, who sustains us every new morning with his promise of power from on high. He himself has been taught by God. He knows from Gethsemane how painful obedience can be, when the way ahead is uncertain but looks bad. Yet our teacher trusts that God will not let him down. And so his disciples, including us, can do so too.
