First Sermon Bro Eleth

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I wonder what your expectations are this morning of this sermon? Is it one that is supposed to wow, challenge, disturb or encourage you? Is it supposed to set the tone? Am I supposed to impress? For, although this is not my first sermon here in this church, it is my first as the vicar of Bro Eleth. Ficer Bro Eleth dw i. that is a title that will take a little time for me to adjust to. I have had my nephews and niece staying with me this week. They sometimes when they want something call me ‘Rev Kev: super uncle’ and have composed the following ditty about me, which goes to the tune of Postman Pat

        

        Vicar Kev, vicar Kev, vicar Kev and his black and white dogs

Early in the morning, when Shaun is always snoring, he will always sing his favourite hymn

I hope I might always be a super uncle. I am not though a super Vicar. Like you, I am called to this place, and in this particular place on the northern edge of Anglesey will attempt to listen to God for myself and for you, but always with you. 

Listening to God is of course part of prayer. If you think prayer is difficult, then you are in good company. The Apostle Paul writes, ‘we do not know how to pray as we ought’. This should encourage, not least because Paul penned some of those most beautiful prayers in the New Testament. His experience though was that it was not always easy echoes ours. I don’t know yet what your prayer lives are like. Mine is shaky. I do want us to look at ways which we can create opportunity to pray. I am advocate for prayer. In part, I stand before you because I have prayed as I have heard God’s call to leave Bro Cybi, a place which I loved, to come to Bro Eleth, places and people that I am getting to know.

Sermons are bi-lingual, aren’t they? For at their best they try to interpret the Scriptures so that we might listen to what God is saying together. It is bi-lingual because we as human beings are attempting to hear the voice of the divine, and although we are made in the image of God, we are not ourselves, divine; which is quite fortunate in reality. The Scriptures were written down in particular languages, not I am afraid were in English or Welsh, but Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek and at a specific time. We therefore try to interpret together what the writers of the Scriptures might be saying to us today. Indeed being a bilingual community, we have much in common with the earliest Christian communities.

I would like you to have the reading sheet, and focus particularly on Paul’s letter to the Church at Rome. This morning, I am going to have a broad canvas rather than go into particular detail. I will at times do the latter.  

The first and blindingly obvious thing to note is that we are coming in half way through a letter to someone else. Therefore we need to be careful lest we jump to assumptions. The letters really were intended to be read as a whole, and would in all probability have been read aloud in one sitting.

The second is that Paul is a theologian, he is therefore someone who thinks deeply and attempts to communicate simply. Paul’s vocation was to make sense of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus to the people of his day, whether they were Jewish or not, rooted in the stories of God or not, indeed I might add whether they were interested or not.

I blog, tweet, do Facebook and the like, but I am not great at understanding how PCs work or the internet for that matter. It just works or it does not. Periodically, I press something, and it asks me whether I might like to reset something or change the normal templates. I usually resist such an urge.

For Paul, Jesus has reset how the world is and should be understood.

Paul has confidence in God.

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? ³² He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?

God must be for us, argues the Apostle, he was prepared to give up his Son for us. Paul draws us on another, that of the story of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice Isaac. Notwithstanding the fact that this is a problematic story, when we attune ourselves to the Scriptures we see that they interconnect. Paul connected the story of Jesus with the stories of the Hebrew Bible that had fashioned and shaped him. They came alive in new ways.

Some of us might be wondering what having an eccentric new vicar will be like. What being one Bro Eleth might mean. I trust and pray that in being together we might rediscover our stories of faith, indeed that we might rediscover that God loves us and is for us.

For Paul, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus give him unshakeable confidence in God.

He asks those he is writing to, who brings charges against them? The answer is no one. As Christians, we can sometimes feel guilty

-       

     There are too few of us

o   How can I share my faith?

o   I hope the new vicar is not going to suggest that.

-      How are we going to pay our way?

o   I don’t want to do another fundraising event

o   It is always the same people

-      What can we do to maintain our lovely buildings?

o   Our families have been here for generations

o   They are all that is left that speak of the community that was

Such things might seem relatively unimportant given that Paul asks us what separates us from the love of God.

Paul is convinced that God is for us and walks with us.

I have three hopes

-       

    That we will become a people of prayer

-      That we will become people who know the Scriptures

-      That we will become people with a story

It may be that we are all those things already.

Perhaps just a little fine tuning is needed.

I hope I have passed the audition and you will walk with me into the future that God has for us.

Let us pray.

(Please note it may be that an entirely different sermon will have been preached)