The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

This week’s report on Securing Dignity in Care for Older People focussed attention on the need for nurses in particular to respect the dignity of older patients as they care for them in hospitals and care homes.  It was perhaps surprising that consultants had to be hired to spend a whole year discovering something so blindingly obvious, but I suppose a suitably weightyresponse had to be made to last year’s report from the NHS Ombudsman, which drew attention to the problem in the first place.   Elderly patients who have relatives and friends to sit with them, making things easier by helping them at meal times, cleaning their specs, fixing their dentures, just being there as a familiar reassuring presence, are the lucky ones. There are others, often lonely, distressed, withdrawn into their own confusion, who are heavily dependent on the awareness and sensitivity of the nursing staff.  It’s not easy for hard-pressed nurses on a busy ward to find the extra time that it takes to listen attentively to older patients who may be alienated and confused by the hospital environment, as well as having both physical and psychological difficulties in communicating their needs.  We should be deeply grateful for the commitment of those that do manage to do that little bit extra for their patients most of the time – as so many do.  
    That little bit extra, hard as it is, is one practical example of the life of self-sacrifice, which I have been asked to focus on this morning in our series of sermons around the theme of ‘no commitment without action’.  In our gospel reading Jesus warns his disciples of the suffering and sacrifice which he foresees for himself, challenging them – and us – to take up our cross and follow him.  This is dangerous ground.  The Church has been far too ready in the past to misuse our Lord’s teaching to impose submission to suffering and sacrifice on Christian believers as if it were of value in itself. This lamentable distortion of Christ’s teaching particularly facilitated the oppression of women by the male hierarchy of the Church, an outcome which cannot have been intended when Jesus used the inevitability of his own suffering, as a man, to bring home to all his followers the likely cost of their discipleship.  Our readings from Genesis and from Romans were not about lives of self-sacrifice – at least not about self-sacrifice in the grinding, self-denying way that such language often conjures up.  They were about faith – the faith of Abraham, which was reckoned to him as righteousness. 
      Abraham’s exemplary faith showed itself not so much in a life of self-sacrifice as in a life exceptionally receptive to God’s guidance, and obedient to his will.  Abraham grew up in Ur and Haran, great cities of the fertile crescent irrigated by the Tigris and the Euphrates.  It was there that he first learned to put his trust in the one true God.  So when it came into his mind that this God wanted him to leave his prosperous and comfortable life behind, he applied himself to making all the necessary preparations before setting out, with his wife and his nephew Lot and a substantial caravan of servants, flocks and herds and possessions.  When he left Haran, he did so without knowing where his journey would end.  His new home would turn out to be in the land of Canaan, but when he arrived, there was such a severe famine that he had to go on across the Negev desert into Egypt, and live there for some years before coming back again.  In Egypt he had trouble with Pharaoh who fancied his wife Sarah, and even when he had begun to make his home in Canaan, he had to fight a battle against seriously unequal odds to rescue his nephew Lot.  What with one thing and another it was some 25 years before Sarah bore the son Isaac whose birth would begin to make good God’s promise that he should have descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven.  
    God took care of Abraham through all these vicissitudes, but it would be wrong to suggest that they did not entail any sacrifice on his part.  His friends and family would certainly have advised him not to set out from Haran in the first place.  For many years, as Sarah grew old without bearing children, God did not seem to be in any hurry to deliver on the promise which Abraham had taken on trust.  Later on, the horrifying story of Abraham and Isaac shows how complete was his faith, even when required (as he supposed) to sacrifice murderously the only imaginable means to the fulfilment of the promise God had made to him. Whether we are dealing in all this with history or myth, the story of Abraham is essentially a tale of unwavering faith in the God whom he trusted to the uttermost. 
      But we have reached the point at which Abraham’s experience differs most sharply from that of Jesus. Abraham didn’t have to make that terrible sacrifice.  His hand was stayed by the sudden bleating of the ram caught in the thicket.  Whereas for Jesus there could be no such miraculous intervention. There was no stopping the crucifixion.  If we are called to take up our cross and follow him, does that mean that we too must be willing to go all the way to that extreme point of sacrifice?  Down the centuries, there have been all too many Christians whose faith has indeed cost them their lives. Sadly, there are still places where faith is that dangerous.  But for us, as we worship safely in this beautiful church, the question sounds and feels unreal.  The position of Christianity in our public life may be increasingly questioned, but we are not about to be persecuted for our faith.  So what might it mean for us to be called to take up our cross and follow him?  
      Might Abraham help us to answer that question?  Abraham did not know God as his Father, but like Jesus he was deeply attuned to the will of the God whom he knew only as the source and origin of the direction he felt called to follow.  He might not have dared to believe, as we do, that God loved him. But he trusted him. And that was enough to lead him to take up if not his cross then at least his trusty staff, and to go, time and again, where he felt sure that God was leading him, whatever the cost might be.  
      And perhaps that is what it should mean for us.  Doing the right thing, as we prayerfully discern it to be, may very well take us out of our comfort zone.  As individuals or as a church we may be called, as Abraham was, to set out on a journey – a venture of faith – without knowing where it will lead us.  We may be called, as Abraham was, to give up some of those things about our life as it is, that we value most, and hold most dear.  But if we are serious about seeking to discern and to follow God’s guidance, if we are willing to embark on that venture of faith, to go with him into the troubling unknown, I believe we shall find, as we stoop to shoulder our burden of responsibility, our labour of love and care – our cross – that some of the weight is being carried for us by One who for our sake would not be deflected from his path of suffering and self-sacrifice, even Jesus Christ our Lord.