SERMON
PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
of St JOHN
THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
ORDINARY
SUNDAY 26
(September
20th) 2015
Readings:
Job 23: 1-9,
16-17
Psalm
22:1-15
Hebrews
4:12-16a
Mark 10:17-31
There is something deeply sad about the
man who rushes forward to embrace the way of Christ, only to turn away from the
invitation to come, to follow. To be so near, to be all but on-board the train for
which, as the song puts it, “You don't need no baggage, you just get on board,”
but then to walk away disconsolate, is a deeply oppressive image. I’m not of
the “climb on board or burn in hell” school of theology, but have (most of the
time) no doubt about the life-transforming benefits of the embrace of the Risen
Lord. There is undoubtedly so much that can stop us feeling the life-changing
embrace of Christ. There is undoubtedly so much, as the Parable of the Sower
reminds us elsewhere, that lead us from the warm embrace of the Risen Christ into
nothingness. There is, as the Parable of the Seven Demons reminds us, so much than
can darkly replace the warmth of the Risen Jesus when we walk away, but that is
not what Jesus is addressing in this sad story of a man who finds it all too much
before he even begins.
This man is so close to the liberating
embrace of Jesus, but the lure of the fast lane is too great. Jesus of course
goes on to address the immediate question of the hold that riches has on this
symbolic man, but there are a myriad bright lights that blind us to the gentle
candle of Christ-light. How hard for those with wealth, says Jesus, and the
obscene image of the world’s wealthiest devouring the life blood of the poor
might have us rubbing our hands with conspiratorial and delighted agreement,
but if we look only the material wealth of the zillionaires we may end up
embracing no more than an eager socialism of jealousy, and drown from our own consciousness
any awareness of the “How Hard It Is” gaze the risen Lord turns on us. How hard
for those with wealth, sure, and that may well in international terms include
us, too, but I think on the whole most of us think that it applies to others,
and the laying of guilt trips about our place in the richest 2 per cent of the
world will not open the recesses of our hearts to the life-giving Spirit of
God.
But there are other How Hard It Is
scenarios, too, and it is not only the rich man who walks from the embrace of
Jesus.
How hard it is for the self-assured. I
think primarily of those awful caricatures of Christianity who are so conceited
in their hotline to God that they have no hesitation in condemning to hell
those of us who are flawed, uncertain, imperfect, racially or sexually or
culturally or bodily-functionally Other. We have spoken here before of the
outrageous arrogance of the tiny but disproportionately arrogant Westboro
Baptists in the USA, picketing the funerals of those they do not like. But what of we in the highly erudite and
educated Anglican churches, who will often deliberately or inadvertently look
askance at those who don’t know their way around the prayer book, or who are
less well clothed or educated or showered than we are? How hard it is for the self-assured.
How
hard it is for the nonchalant. For those who faithfully cling to old routines
and comfort zones of faith, knowing that they’ve served us well, knowing that
they will more or less see us out if we can be bothered to keep practicing them,
but caring little about the changes that must be made if new generations and
cultures are to be embraced by the healing, forgiving, restoring love of Jesus.
How hard it is for the nonchalant.
How hard for the cynical, the burnt-out,
the all-wise and knowing. Yes, we might say from our position of intellectual
superiority, I too used to believe that sort of stuff, but of course now know
that it isn’t so. A bishop once told me he was tired of burned-out
post-charismatics looking to him for preferment in his diocese in order to resuscitate
their flagging ecclesiastical careers. How sad when we look back on those
liberating days of charismatic ecstasy, days when the love-touch of Jesus was
an immediate and life-changing phenomenon, when we look back though not with
deep joy at the on-going caress of the heart-warming touch of God’s Spirit but
with dry satisfaction that we know so much more now and have left that nonsense
all behind. How hard for the cynical, the burnt-out, the all-wise and knowing.
Yet Jesus is not the purveyor of bad
news. The wondrous dance of the one who is Lord is not a fire that spluttered
and died twenty or two-thousand years ago, but a mad joyous dance that still
goes on. For mortals, says Jesus, it is impossible, but not for God. I think of
the wondrous fertile souls whose eyes light up still after seventy or eighty or
ninety or more years of faith. Their prayers still reach out into a universe
that they know remains deeply saturated with the presence of God. Their prayers
still reverberate in the mysteries of a universe, still seem inexplicably to
midwife change in the circumstances and situations prayed for. Sure: not
always, or the hearts of terrorists would melt and global warming stop
henceforth. But inexplicably, subtly: as the Archbishop of York put it, the
more people pray, the more coincidences happen. For those who enter the dance,
who join Sidney Carter’s Lord of the Dance, the more the universe seems to hint
that despite everything, the dance goes on. How embracing the gospel is for the
dancer.
How embracing the gospel is for the
tenacious (even sometimes those who are tenacious only by the fingernails of
faith). For those who against all odds manage to keep whispering into the ear
of God, and whispering with or without words into human ears about God and about
the mysteries of the Risen Christ. I think again of the mystic Bernard de Clairvaux’s
heart stirring words:
Be thou my consolation, my shield when I must die;
remind me of thy passion when my last hour draws nigh.
Mine eyes shall then behold thee, upon thy cross shall dwell,
my heart by faith
enfolds thee. Who dieth thus dies well.
To
live is to practice for death, and occasionally as a priest I am privileged to
enter the dying space of those who have been embraced by the dance of faith,
tenaciously held to it even by the finger nails of faith, and died singing love
even if the song is silent. How embracing
the gospel is for the tenacious.
How embracing the gospel is for the
joy-filled eternity breather – for those who realise how ever difficult it may
be that the myopic depth of rationalist, empirical vision is not the dwelling
place of God. I’m told I use big words so let me make it clear: how hard it is
for those who will not see past dull. For there, just beyond our small brainwaves
dwells the mad, manic dances of God that I have spoken of before, the dance of
the deity who flings Andromeda and Ceres and black holes and a ladybird’s wing
across the interstices of space. How embracing the gospel is for the joy-filled
eternity breather who sees the poetry of God writ large across the universe. How
embracing the gospel is for the joy-filled eternity breather.
And how embraced by God we can be as we
set aside our wealth (comparative only though it may be) and our self-assurance
and our nonchalance and our cynicism and in our spirits join the dance of the Spirit,
the dance that makes Jesus known to us, the dance that waters the dry bones of desiccated
faith, the dance that can dervish-whirl, first becomes last and last becomes
first whirls us through all the despair and suffering that saturates our
newscasts, the dance that can renew our bones so that we become conduits of
hope and peace and justice here in our lives and our town and wherever God
calls us to dance.
Dance then, wherever you may be, said
Jesus. But the rich man walked away. We though are invited still to dance:
“Truly,
I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or
mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel,
who will not receive a hundredfold now in
this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with
persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. But many
who are first will be last, and the last first.”
The peace of Christ be always with you.
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