Sermon for February 24th

Sermon:

• I have a tough job in the sermon today. I want to create a direct link from our meeting after this service to a man who lived and died in the bronze age, somewhere between 3000 and 2000 BC. Is it possible? Of course it is possible. 

• The man is the man from the Genesis reading this morning, Abraham and there is a very important connection between him and our AGM and I am going to show it to you by considering 5000 years of history, all of Biblical history and then all of church history and in only 10 minutes. 
• Put on your running shoes!
• The problem for God is how do you fix a broken world? You can reboot the system; that is what he did with Noah,but the virus was still there.
• God chose another path like yeast in dough. It is little but will eventually change the whole dough.
• God chose a man, Abraham to be the yeast and made a covenant with him, which means that they enter into an agreement: God will bless Abraham's family over many generations and Abraham will be faithful to God.
• And so it begins: Abraham has a son Isaac, who has a son Jacob, who has twelve sons, the main one being Joseph. Over hundreds of years the families of the twelve sons grow into twelve tribes. The 12 tribes of Israel.
• Unfortunately for them they are enslaved, but are saved by a man named Moses. God renews Abraham's covenant with him by giving him the 10 commandments on Sinai in Egypt.
• They travel for 40 years until they reach a land promised to them by God.
• There they live for several generations until they decide they want a king. The first king doesn't work out, but the next one is King David who really loves God, and God again renews the covenant of Abraham with him by promising him that he will always have a descendant sitting on the throne in Jerusalem.
• Unfortunately after David dies the people of Israel begin a civil war. The country breaks in half with a series of really bad rulers, but eventually they are wiped off the face of the earth, first by the Assyrian Empire and the the Babylonian empire and are sent into exile. 
• Eventually they come back, rebuilt the temple, but there is no descendant of David on the throne. And it seems as if God has broken the covenant. 
• But then a group called the prophets claim that God will still call up a descendant of David who will sit on the throne in the future, and for Israel this person becomes the Messiah that they start waiting for. 
• They wait a long time. Hundreds of years. 2000 years now since Abraham.
• How am I doing for time?
• By this time the Assyrian empire is gone, the Babylonian empire is gone, the Greek empire of Alexander is gone and now it is the time of the Roman Empire, and into this is born just this Messiah. Jesus from Nazareth. And you know that story, but just to reiterate, God again renews the covenant with Jesus and seals it with his blood. At Easter Jesus walked out of the tomb and began a new covenant to be renewed regularly when his followers come together for Eucharist. 
• Now Jesus had a few followers who were convinced that Jesus was good news, no great news for the whole world. In fact, they thought Jesus was the hope for everyone. And they spread the news by telling people AND living a different kind of life.
• Now get this:
• the early followers of Jesus followed the Roman roads and spread the message of Jesus all around the Mediterranean: Israel and the Middle East, Greece, modern day Croatia, Italy, French coast and Spain and Northern Africa. 
• At first they were ignored, then persecuted and then 300 years or so after Jesus the Roman Emperor became Christian and within a hundred years the whole Roman Empire was Christian. But then the Roman empire started to fall apart form internal problems as well as invasions of Germanic tribes from the North. 
• But eventually the Germanic tribes became Christianity spread all over Europe up into Scandinavia, and eventually the Germanic tribes and what was left of the Roman empire coalesced into Christian nations all across Europe.
• Eventually there were disagreements about what it meant to be a Christian and different nations broke up into different churches, instead of one church. One of them, England, developed a state religion which became known as the Anglican church.
• As you know, England spread across the ocean to North America and set up colonies and in the colonies came the church. 
• The Anglican church in North America started on the East Coast but as Europeans pushed West.
• The first Anglican missionary in these regions was Canon Newton who founded the All Saint's congregation in 1875.
• Eventually the churches in Alberta were grouped over time into three Dioceses. Edmonton became a diocese in 1913, and within this diocese a church was started in Campbells town in the 1950's.
• And here we are over 50 years later about to have a meeting deciding what our next chapter looks like.
• But remember this: we are here today making decisions because we are in a church that came from people who came to Campbell town who were educated by people whose ancestors were taught the faith by missionaries who had moved West from colonists from the East who had come over from England whose national church came from the Reformation split from a church which had its roots in both Roman and Germanic tribes which had learned the faith from the Christian Roman Empire which had happened because Constantine converted and was taught the faith by Christians who were persecuted who learned from missionaries who had traveled the Roman roads who knew the faith from the followers of Jesus who were part of a people who had been told by the prophets that a Messiah was coming. This faith was traced back to David who was king who inherited the throne from a people brought forward from slavery by Moses. The people had grown from 12 tribes who had come from the 12 sons of Jacob, who was the son of Issac who was the son of Abraham, who is our father in faith. 
• (Hopefully less than 10 minutes!)