SERMON PREACHED AT THE ORMOND CHAPEL
HOSPITAL
HILL, NAPIER,
NEW ZEALANDORDINARY SUNDAY 13
(28th June) 2015
Readings:
2 Samuel 1:1,
11-27Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43
There are
some desperately broken hearts in the stories of our faith on this day. The
bereaved heart of David cries out from the pages of faith-history, reverberates
through time as he grieves beyond words the loss of his beloved friend Jonathan.
We need not turn this into a celebration of gay love, as some have done, though
nor need we decry the love of human beings for members of their own sex,
sexually expressed or not.
This though
is greater than the love of eros-passion, as the these days derogatory-sounding
aside of “surpassing the love of women” is designed to tell us. This is the
love of those who stand side by side, through thick and thin, who have as we
like to say today, one another’s back. But as the hard words of the psalmist
(always a part of a funeral if it is to be correctly taken) remind us “our days
are like the grass: we flourish like a flower of the field. When the wind goes
over it, it is gone.” So are the deepest human loves and friendships, including
those of married love but not limited to them. Such loves are restored to us
only in the promise “but your loving-kindness O Lord endures…” and in the
belief that God’s resurrective love conquers even the brutal separation that
death is.
Strangely
the brief and timeless lament of David over the slain Jonathan has given us the
cry “how are the mighty fallen,” yet in more recent parlance that has been
turned not into a heart-cry at the fallibility of all human aspirations and
achievements but into a tall poppy syndrome sneer at the fall of those who
over-reach their allotted place. Such a reversal of the original meaning is a
travesty: here David laments the highest degrees of love, for one day even they
must, having flourished like a flower of the field, nevertheless succumb to the
wind, sudden or gradual, of mortality. We know that.
Though disguised in the cut and thrust of first century church politics, Paul too
is crying out at the plight of those whose lives are experiences of brokenness
and neglect. He and the Jerusalem Christians, probably including Peter and James
the brother of Jesus, agreed on very little. When though it came to the
compassion to be shown to the poor and especially to those starving for their
faith (for that is a theme previously addressed between the lines in 1
Thessalonians) there Paul and the Jerusalem pillars could agree: “It is a
question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need.” Amen
and amen, though we churches of the Global North or former West too often
forget to remember the redressing of obscene disparity that may well dull the
reverberations of our prayers.
But it is
to the desperate hearts around Jesus that we must most often turn. What of the
soldier whose child is dying? Childhood mortality was brutally common in the
first century, but ever since soon after our ancestors climbed out of the
primeval swamp we have desperately loved and wanted to pre-decease our
children. This man dwells at the threshold of the grief that only those who
have outlived their children know or understand. Yet greater even than his
desperation is that of the hated and abused and unclean woman who scared-dares
to touch the hem of the passing robe of Jesus.
These
are cries of desperate hearts. Where is God when it hurts, when
the heart-crush is so great we can no longer carry on? Suicide and substance
abuse rates suggest that the rates of loneliness and despair are as high now as
at any time in history. Prayers stay unanswered – and I won’t even attempt to
gloss that statement with the kinder “appear to stay” unanswered. Prayers stay
unanswered – and as our communities increasingly harden our hearts either to
the naïve capitalist trickle-down theories of noblesse oblige or the social capital theories of communal
responsibility more and more desperate human beings fall through cracks. Where
is God when it hurts, and where is God when our neighbour hurts?
Where is
God when a pan-handler approaches us, a beggar confronts us, a busker from the
hard end of the economic equation plays for us? I am not naïve: we can’t solve
the suffering of our world by handing out our loose change, but at a time when
there are few safety nets and not even many ambulances at the bottom of the cliff
I suspect we are cauterizing our compassion when we set ourselves a steely
stare and walk past those who are or who purport to be needy. Aid agencies may
well tell us that institutional change needs to be made to address the plight
of the poor, but that doesn’t help the broken alcoholic sleeping under a
bridge. Slowly our hearts are hardened and in any case we find more and more
reasons to keep the dollar in the bottom of our purse or pocket.
In
cauterising our hearts to the cry of the grieving or the hungry or any of those
who Jesus calls “blessed” in the Beatitudes, we are generating a sclerosis of
our own spirits. I am increasingly moved by the Jewish teaching of the sparks
of light that we are commissioned to carry across our corners of the universe.
It may not be profoundly sensible in terms of social theory, but the dollar you
place in a beggar’s hand – or of course the sandwich or coffee you buy her –
may just be the in-breaking of divine light into a hurting heart. It may and
probably will not achieve lasting change to unjust social structures, or even
to the beggar’s long-term future, and there will be some who have the gift to
address those too (as our Marks of Mission remind us), but it will momentarily
touch a life with warmth and Christ-light, and as a side-effect chip away at the unfeelingness, the sclerosis
of our own hearts and souls. The hippies are right: practice random acts of
human kindness, for these sparks of compassion are sparks of the love to which
we as bearers of Christ are challenged.
We will be
ripped off. We will see our dollar for a sandwich turned into a dollar for a
beer. We will find that the recipients of random acts of kindness are not
always sycophantically grateful or obsequiously appreciative. Why should they
be, or more to the point, why should we be expecting thanks? Jesus challenges
his followers to act out their compassion and justice in secret. It’s not a bad
rule, saving our heads from swelling and our hearts from making generosity all
about us. It may however be a part of, as Leonard Cohen put it with Jewish
wisdom, “the crack in everything that’s where the light gets in” for donor and
recipient alike.
Jesus went
on his way and two lives were restored, and many more touched, as they would
later be by the Jerusalem Collection so feistily championed by his follower
Paul. That touching of lives dwells at the heart of Jesus’ challenge to us to
do likewise: never to be so hardened of heart that we cannot touch and strangely
warm and encourage the lives of those we meet each day, however foolish our
actions are in eyes of the wise and the prudent. Similarly we must never be so
hardened of heart that we cannot open our lives to the love of a friend or a
lover. In both cases our hearts must be so set beyond the limitations of human
sight that we begin to see glimpses of the source of the light that gets in
through moments and actions of love.