SERMON PREACHED
AT
THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW
ZEALANDTHE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16
(9th August) 2015
Readings:
2
Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2
John 6:51-58
It was a freezing cold
night, sub-zero in the town in which I was living, when the phone rang. Could I
come up to the Emergency Department immediately? Such calls are rare these days
in clergy life, and this was more than twenty years ago. It is though a night
that I will never forget. The nurses met me at the ward entrance. A young
mother, expecting healthy triplets, had contracted listeriosis, food poisoning,
close to the completion of gestation. The three infants, previously healthy and
viable, had died in utero. There are
no words for the grief I encountered that night.
I speak cautiously, pray
God. Amongst us there will be some of you, and some among those who you love,
who have faced the brutal reversal of outliving a child. There are no words. My
own extended family has known the grief, and there are in any case, if grief
can be measured on a Richter scale of sorts, the comparable if lesser griefs of
children and loved ones effectively torn form the heart through marital
breakdown or sometimes just the vicissitudes of the tyranny of distance. “Shall
I ever see, hold, hear this child again?” may be slightly easier than the heart
cry of David, “I shall never see, hold, hear this child again,” but it too is
a cry that in Hebrew terms is wrung from the viscera of the human soul. “O my
son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you—O
Absalom, my son, my son!” I have no doubt that words close to those were etched
into the soul of that young mother that bitter winter’s night, as together we
cried, and stuttered prayers, and tried to find Christlight in the literal and
metaphorical dark. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my
voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!
I am not a social worker,
nor called to be one. I was staggered at a clergy meeting once when I heard a
group of priests discuss their role as ordained persons without once making
reference to the great sacraments of resurrection hope that we are commissioned
to bear with and within us from the moment our ordaining bishops place their
hands upon us. We all, as Christians, are priests, though some of us are called
to bear that extra signage of presbuteral priesthood, a reminder to us all of
the priesthood of Christ who takes human suffering into the heart of God, and
who brings divine forgiveness and hope deep into the heart of human suffering.
I was not a social worker that winter’s night in rural New South Wales, nor was
I called to the hospital to be one. I was called there to bring some hope that
was greater than the stark reality of three tiny, stillborn but otherwise
viable babies.
Did I achieve anything that
night? I’ll never know. The young woman was from a town 300 kms away, and the
follow-up in resurrection-breathing fell to one of my most gifted colleagues. I
know he spent many months whispering not words of social work, though they too
may help, but words of resurrection hope into the world of that young woman and
her partner. I moved from the region soon after, and never heard the end of the
story, not least because I’m sure it has not ended yet, two decades later. I’m
sure that that to me nameless woman somewhere still inevitably grieves those
three missing babies in her life. I’m sure she will until that great moment
that the disciples came to believe in, that moment of eternal joy when the new
heavens and the new earth are unfolded, and we step back into connection with
all who we have loved and lost.
Because the scriptures,
Hebrew and Christian alike, are adamant that this is where the sometimes
abstract world of faith-speak connects with the all too concrete realm of human
experience. As David cries out in that almost
most poignant of all scriptural heart-cries he cries out in a voice that any
one of us might have wrenched from our guts on any day. It is the cry of a
parent or a partner who receives a police officer’s knock at the door. It is
the cry of the patient who hears the strained words of their doctor. Globally
it is the cry of the desperate refugees who are turned away by the Australian
or British or US government, or conveniently ignored by the New Zealand
government, or who reach the comparative safety of the Turkish border or
Italian coastline only to count the cost of those who are left behind.
Yet that cry of David is
not the end of the story. It is too often the end of the dark movies and novels
that are the expression of the mood of a post-holocaust, post-Hiroshima world
that has for various reasons deserted hope (I think of my tragic all-time
favourite, The Unbearable Lightness of
Being). But Christianity in all its foolishness rumours a different ending.
I suggested that the cry of King David as he laments his third born son is
“that almost most poignant of all
scriptural heart-cries.” The cry of dereliction of Christ on the cross, the
heart-cry of Jesus on the cross, is greater. We can of course all play academic
games in which we point out that those words from Psalm 22, still perhaps best
rendered as “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” were placed into the mouth of Jesus by the
early church and the gospel writers. Fiddle-sticks, I suggest. For the practice
of lament, of crying out to God with the deepest of human anguish (even psalm
137 verse 9’s obscene anguish) dwells at the heart (the Hebrews would say
bowel) of relationship between God and God’s people, and the heart of the
Messiah.
To steal that hope from the
witness of the Christian community, presumably out of a misguided desire to
make Christianity more comprehensible to a post-Enlightenment world, is both
larceny (theft) and one of the greatest enactments of that fourth of the Ten
Commandments, “thou shalt not take the
name of the Lord thy God in vain.” To stand at the hospital bed of my grieving
mother of triplets with nothing more to say than what a social worker or a
psychologist might say, however profound their
work might be, and however bumbling my
efforts might be, is to sell the gospel short. To say or believe nothing more
than a social worker or a psychologist is not to proclaim the Living Word of
the fourth gospel, but a truncated word of humanism, however noble the particular
stream of humanism might be, and many are.
By the end of the
nineteenth century Enlightened Christianity had placidly done away with radical
and other-wordly words of hope and its prickly counterpart, judgement. We may
speak of judgement another time, except for now to say it is a doctrine badly
represented and mistreated, but a doctrine too that is jettisoned at peril. But
by the end of the nineteenth century Enlightened Christianity had only
platitudes about the brotherhood (sic!) of Man (sic!) and the Fatherhood (sic!)
of God to utter. We stand in a similar quagmire today, embracing either a
self-satisfied and sometimes hedonistic liberalism or a self-righteous
fundamentalist judgmentalism.
If our Christianity is no more than an aesthetic
of niceness in every facet of cathedral life then we have nothing to say to the
weeping David as he cradles Absalom (not, you will recall, his first child to
die) or to say to the mother who clutches three still-born infants. If though
our gospel is based on our daily, weekly, over and again encounter with the God
in Christ who in Godself cries out “My God my God, why have you forsaken me,” if
that is the case then our God can turn every pain-filled lament into hope. Our
God can and does turn ashes into beauty, Good Friday into Easter, David’s cry
into the hope of resurrection (which evolves long after David’s journey, but
God is a timey-wimey God). Our God can and does turn your life and mine and the
lives of those we love into the dance of eternity.
That is the gospel we share
if we are indeed a resurrection people, unfettered by the small perspectives of
science and the intellect or the limitations of a mere aesthetic faith. That is
the God of the Cross and Easter, the God who transforms the lament of David and
the psalmist (who may be different!) and the mother of triplets and you and me
and even Godself on the Cross into the joyful, angel-thrilling dance of the
eternity that is God’s and yours and mine.
It is to that God we will
shortly sing (with our hearts) “Blessing and honour and glory and power (though
In Aotearoa we seem scared of that last noun) are yours, now and for ever …
... Amen.”
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