Emmanuel Church, Bungay, Suffolk

The Minister's Sermons

"Nelson's Anniversary "

by Revd Bruce Waldron - 16th October 2005

READINGS · Deut 34: 1-12 · Matt 22:34-46

Being the anniversary of Trafalgar I've been reading up about Lord Nelson. It's a very interesting story. What intrigues me is how much the famous people of history were so ordinary and fallible. Nelson's private life was very dubious. On his first command he was going to jump ship for the sake of a 16 year old girl. And yet, this man goes down in history as one of the greats of our heritage.

It doesn't take a perfect person to be great. Nelson was a very fallible human being.

Moses was fallible. Time and again, he's on the very edge of a disastrous mess. Time and again, he wants to be anywhere else but where he is and yet there is no person in history like Moses. Unlike Nelson, on his death, Moses doesn't see that he's achieved a great victory. What he receives is the knowledge that he will never see the promised land to which he's led the people through the desert for 40 years. Because of the sin of the people, Moses never sees that towards which his whole life has been directed.

Moses was a long way from perfect and the great heritage he has left behind was carved out of countless struggles and knife-edge experiences, and upon many occasions he really wondered what it was all about and if he would even survive.

Whenever I read Deuteronomy 34, I always have a deep sense of sadness for Moses. He failed to do see he had set out to do, what he spent his lifetime attempting, and yet we know him as the greatest prophet of all time.

What sustained Moses? How did he get through the desert experience of his life?

Nelson's maxim was that "England confides that every man will do his Duty"

Moses maxim was a little different. " I am the Lord your God. You will have no other God's before me."

Moses never allowed any other motive to dominate his life than that he serve God. For this reason, he saw that what he did wasn't for himself but for God and because of this, his work wasn't for now, it was for eternity.

His role and actions transcended the present because they were for the God who both went before and comes after. Moses work was connected to eternity. It wasn't for himself or even for his contemporaries that he gave his life's effort. It was for eternal God.

To work for God is to work beyond the narrow parochial ambitions of the moment, beyond the ambitions that make me feel good. In a relationship with God, I recognise that I am working for a much larger project; the purposes of God in all history. To focus on what I want, for me, for now, is to betray the God whom I serve. Faith can lend us a much larger canvas on which to paint the portrait of our days. Faith rescues us from the narrow vision that thinking centred on the self must bring. Faith widens our field of vision to include the breadth of God's concerns and relativises our natural inclination to a myopic view or what is important.

A faith stance moves us towards thinking in terms of the breadth of history that is God's, not the narrow confines of the moment, not whether I like or don't like the hymns this morning, or whether I approve of the colour of the décor.

A faith stance encourages us to think in terms of the breadth of God's love for all people. Our concern moves from what pleases me to what might bring blessing to others, to what might sustain the gospel message for all people. If the Spirit of Christ is in me then my own concerns become subsumed to God's.

A great vision makes a great person.

Nelson would never have become the great person who gave his life in defence of his land, had he not been able to transcend his earlier focus upon his own wants, and begin to see that his calling was for his whole nation. There was a great change from the young man who was going to leave his ship for a 16 year old sweetheart to the man who's signal to the fleet was "England confides that every man will do his duty."

The Christian has a calling that is even greater than that. That's why Jesus begins to outline how the greatest command is not just to love God but to love the neighbour, because the wholehearted love of God means that the heart is given to God's purpose, not my own. That's why Moses was great. He saw a timeless horizon of God's purpose, where his work would bear fruit in a way to which the present could not possibly testify. What he did was to be faithful to God who is in both our present and our future. And that was what mattered.

I've heard a lot of talk lately about the Church in Britain shrinking. I've heard a lot about predictions for 2030 and 2050. I've heard a lot of talk that seems to portray the only important thing is that what we know won't be.

I think I'd dare to say that what we like and know is unimportant. What is important is that we are faithful to God, not the structures and processes that we are comfortable with. And if we are faithful to God, then God's hand will be on our work, our living, the outcomes from what we do, the repercussions of our lives that echo down through eternal ages, through God's time, not ours.

We need to have a wider perspective than our own eyes can provide, our own satisfaction approve. We can, in faith, begin to see that what we are, what we do, is for a purpose that transcends our time, our horizons, our imagination, and addresses the work of God's purpose in all eternity. Our love is not just for ourselves but because the Spirit of God is in us, it is for our neighbours, and not just for our neighbours of this moment, but for our neighbours of generations to come.

We may not see the promised land, but perhaps we will be remembered as God's people who faithfully traversed the deserts of our times and laid a foundation that is sure for the times of others.

The greatness of our lives, in God's reckoning, will not be measured by our being perfect people, but by our being open to the vision of the greatness of God's eternal purpose, and allowing that greatness to infuse our being with a magnificent vision, the purpose of God in all time and place. May you and I, like Moses, participate in that vision with all our hearts.