Introduction

In a culture obsessed with autonomy and comfort, we often struggle with commitment. Yet at the heart of the gospel stands an unshakeable truth: God’s faithfulness never wavers. Even when we are faithless, He remains true to His character and promises. This Remembrance Sunday sermon explores how the Spirit cultivates faithfulness in us, calling us to commit to Christ, community, and place in a transient world.

Greater love has no one than this, that they lay down their life for their friends. And on this day we remember the courage and the sacrifice of those who have done just that in the cause of freedom. That kind of loyalty, of commitment, of duty, we see in it parallels of the greatest sacrifice of all that of Jesus Christ himself.

But I think that as we remember, we need also to be willing to recommit ourselves to living courageously lives of love and faith and sacrifice.

There is a hugely influential sixth century text called The Rule of St. Benedict and it laid out the pattern of monastic life and prayer which was used across the centuries and is still used to this day. But it also came to define some of the foundations of Western society and democracy. So much so that St. Benedict is the patron saint of Europe. It’s a remarkable text. However, it begins with a rather uncomfortable passage where Benedict castigates the kind of monks who go wandering around from place to place and never commit to any one community or teacher. For St. Benedict those who cannot commit will never learn or grow. And I can’t help but wonder what St. Benedict would say of our society. For we have taken the freedom that has been hard won for us to an extreme and to the exclusion of almost everything else. We value our autonomy and our comfort over every other commitment. If things are hard, we’ll try something else. If relationships are a struggle, we will move on to a new one.

If a community doesn’t give us what we want, we leave. And as a result, as a society, we are the most transient and disconnected culture in history. We are commitment phobic. We are distracted, unable to appreciate what we have while we have it, always looking for the next thing. And you see that comes at a great cost.

What’s the price that we pay? Well, I think it means that our relationships are often very short term. That we experience isolation and loneliness and feel as if we never belong. I think perhaps even more importantly, it becomes very difficult to really learn or grow or become that which we should be because it’s so difficult for us to be challenged.

We are not used to situations which are uncomfortable and therefore we never really get to know ourselves or really know other people. And so the next in this series that we’ve been doing on the Fruit of the Spirit is faithfulness. And note that word is not faith, important as that is, but faithfulness.

This is not simply about belief, but about commitment, about fidelity, about loyalty and commitment. We might talk about keeping faith with someone. CS Lewis puts it like this. Faith in the sense which I’m talking about here, is the art of holding on to things that your reason has accepted in spite of your changing moods.

And so faithfulness is the very character of God. Did you hear that lovely verse in verse 13? It said, if we are faithless, he remains faithful. For he cannot deny himself. What a lovely phrase. He cannot deny himself. Faithfulness is who God is and if you hear nothing else this evening, hold on to that. God is faithful.

He never gives up on us no matter how far we wander. Like the shepherd who leaves the 99 and heads into the wilderness to find the lost sheep, faithfulness is the very heart of God. And so despite all of our waywardness, despite our inconsistency, as we grow in our relationship with God, as the Spirit does its work, so we will grow in faithfulness.

What does that look like? Well, first and foremost, obviously I think it means faithfulness to Christ. I don’t know if you remember, there was a story in the gospels where the crowds were leaving Jesus because his teaching was too hard. And Jesus turned to the disciples and said to them, well, what about you?

Are you going to leave too? And Simon Peter wonderfully responds, Lord, where would we go? For you have the words of eternal life. And no matter how hard things can be, we learn that God is the source of life and joy. He is our hope and our salvation. We learn to be faithful to Christ even when it is hard. And I think that might be the greatest challenge of all.

Because we are not that good at doing things that we find hard. So perhaps one of the things we need to say about faithfulness is that it is the capacity to hold discomfort. Verse three said, share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. To be a good soldier is by definition, to be courageous in the face of fear.

To be steadfast in the face of pain. And maybe that’s why faithfulness is so hard for us because it is uncomfortable. Did you see the picture that it used like being an athlete, an athlete who can only win the prize by pushing through the pain barrier in order to win? Do you remember at school doing cross country?

And inevitably when you did cross country, do you remember you got a pain here? You got a stitch. Then, did you know medical science is still baffled by stitches? We still don’t know what causes them, but you only had two choices when you got a stitch and one was to stop or the other was just to push on through.

And if you pushed on through, you’d push past it and it would go away. And I think that’s a really important thing that we need to learn, that we need to be those who don’t give up, we push on even if it’s uncomfortable. There’s a great line in the Desert Fathers, it says this. If a trial comes on you in the place where you live, do not leave that place when the trial comes.

Because wherever you go, you will find that trial ahead of you. Isn’t that good? If you run away from problems, they will always be waiting for you wherever you go. If you find relationships difficult, a new relationship will not solve that problem. You will most likely trade problems that you know all about for problems that you never imagined.

Faithfulness is about pushing on. About commitment when it’s difficult. Faithfulness is about committing to people. You know, we often talk about the importance of community and there is a wonderful community here, but community cannot happen without a willingness to put the work into that and to deal with the discomfort of sharing your lives with other people. Of working hard to build and sustain community.

And all too often we trade the discomfort of community for the ease of isolation. But you know, that is too high a price to pay. It’s important to have healthy boundaries in our life. But when our boundaries become too rigid, they stop protecting us and start isolating us. To be community means to share something of your life and your space with other people, even when it’s inconvenient. It means showing up when you’d rather stay at home. Faithfulness means committing to people. I also quite like the idea that faithfulness means committing to a place. So your great-grandparents, or perhaps your grandparents almost certainly lived their whole lives in one place.

They inhabited a space and by definition of being an English speaking church in a Swiss, community, we are those who have moved. And our lives, are much more transient. And there’s so much that’s good about that. But we need to be really aware of the cost that, transient lives can often simply exist on the surface of things. That we struggle to ever really belong.

One of the things I remember about London was that our communities were often worn quite thread bare because people kept moving on and it was hard to keep building new relationships. We should be really intentional about committing to a place, investing in it. Did you see the picture that the passage used about the farmer who invests in a place and commits to it in order to see the harvest and to see it flourish year by year and generation by generation. If you have no choice but to be transient then you need to be extra vigilant, to be faithful in the short term, to commit to place, to invest in it, for it to be richer as a result of you being part of it, to bless people and to leave a legacy of love and friendship. Faithfulness means committing to people and to place. And of course, one of the things that we do here at church is that we celebrate faithfulness.

We trumpet it as a really important thing. Verse two said, and what you have heard from me through many witnesses entrust to faithful people who will be able to teach others as well. We have this good news of the faithfulness of God, and it is ours to hold, but it is ours to share as well. It is your job to speak of the faithfulness of God from one generation to the next, and as we do that, we value and celebrate faithfulness in one another and in a transient culture, we live that out as these rooted communities of love and welcome.

I think we need to cultivate faithfulness. We need to make commitments, make promises to people and places to be intentional about relationships, not simply to do what we feel like and when things get difficult to move along. Relationships like that are like a good wine which takes many years to come to maturity but how good it tastes when it does.

Obviously in our relationships we talk about faithfulness and marriage is the most profound commitment of faithfulness where people will commit to one another and promise to love for better and worse in sickness and in health until death do them part. We commit to our children. And not only are we faithful to them, but we model that faithfulness to other people and to community.

We cultivate faithfulness in this place and we commit to the fellowship of believers. Change is inevitable in this world but we need to work hard to counteract that innate transience. We need to commit even when it’s difficult or uncomfortable. For that is the way that we root ourselves, that we learn, and that we grow by serving and investing in a place. And that faithfulness reaches into eternity.

We are here because of the faithfulness of generations that have gone before, that have borne witness to the faithfulness of God. And we discover our part, not just in a global church, but in the church, universal, stretching across the ages and into eternity. Those saints who have gone before every tribe and tongue, united in gratitude to the faithfulness of God who never gave up on us.

So cultivate faithfulness in a transient world. My question for you. What relationships and places do you need to be more intentional about? What people should you be making promises and commitments to invest in? And it might be costly, but it is a price so worth paying. Verse one said, you then my child, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

And this saying is, sure if we have died with him, we will also live with him, and if we endure, we will also reign with him. Amen.