Broken Moments: Find love here, perhaps?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the MISSION HALL, GENORCHY

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (25^th February) 2018

(first Sunday of an Interim Ministry)

READINGS:

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

Psalm 22:23-31

Romans 4:13-25

Mark 8:31-38

If I were to set a Lenten challenge for us as a people of God I would not ask for herculean commitments of self-denial. I wouldn’t overloading busy days with new commitments. I’d simply challenge me and you to ask “where is the love of God is revealed in each of our weekly readings?” I’m not going to labour through microdetails of each reading over the next several weeks – much less the next several months. I’m not going to forcibly extrapolate love letters from ancient texts. But so often as Anglican Christians we sit here stupefied, passive, hearing readings read beautifully, making little connection between the visions of the great saints and prophets of God and our own lives. So rarely can we make connection between a whole lot of verbiage and the triune God we worship?

Or am I the only reprobate who sites in liturgy hearing “Blah blah blah blah Spirit saying to the church”?

And in Lent? So often we hear only “Blah blah blah miserable sinner blah blah blah Spirit saying to the church.”

Or am I the only reprobate in church? Perhaps it’s too early in our time together for me to confess how mediocre a Christ-follower your Interim Priest is!

Let love be conspicuous. Let hope be conspicuous. Let justice be conspicuous. Mercy, too. All of these and more. “This is my covenant with you,” says God – somehow, who knows how God speaks? He is speaking to a tired old man. God speaks also to his even more burnt out, embittered almost, woman, his fellow-traveller.

Abraham and Sarah: tired, disappointed, yet recipients of words of love.

Actually, at 99 I would not be ecstatic to hear I was to be a father, but let’s assume Abraham and the more reluctant Sarah are products of a different world. Let’s assume the message is more akin to “I will make meaning of all your life and days and you will know eternal love, my friends.” Because I think most of us would like to think that at the closure of our life the God we have sometimes struggled to find might say, “Well done my friend, and welcome, and here’s meaning to it all.” Some like Sarah might laugh bitterly, but God persists, and she too will eventually know the warmth of divine hope. Some, like the billionaires buying up Wakatipu and Wanaka real-estate in apocalyptic binges might mock or panic as God acts in the world. As a Christ-community, our writers suggest, we must see the hand of God even in turmoil, and trust in divine promises however hard it is at times.[1]

God issues a covenant. It all sounds strange to us and I doubt many of the men in the room would leap for joy at the thought that their most private parts were about to be modified, sans anaesthetic, with a knife, but let’s leave the medical specifics. Well done, my friends, and I, the distant remote God, will be your friend and your descendants’ friends beyond all sight and understanding.

For this covenant was a word of love ... of hope, justice, all of that … but let’s stick with love. Love when there seemed to be no more love … okay, or hope, justice. But love. The word “yes” spoken to a people who had lost “yes” and were hearing and uttering only “no”.

A people not unlike our own western, global north – whatever – civilization – who are hearing only the life-denying words of climate change, economic and ecological collapse, US school shootings, failing infrastructure, and the collapse of institutions, our church amongst them. Yet God says “dream a new dream.” As the psalmist in an equally desperate time puts it, “Future generations will be told,” will hear a word and see sights and signs of hope and love. Paul will reassure the wobbling Roman Christians, referring to the Abraham story, that hope trumps despair.

Even the all too human, faltering Jesus deep in the despair of Gethsemane, is given words of reassurance and hope. In the next few weeks we will walk symbolically in Lent towards Gethsemane. Lent is an “as if,” as if we are practising for the tough times of our own and our earth’s Gethsemane. In a way it is not a rehearsal, either, for both Western Civilization and Mother Earth groan under the weight of our abuse. But we are a people of promise; with Abraham, with the reluctant Sarah, against all odds, all appearance and even all seeming experiences of being let down by life, we are dared to hope.

We are called to be a people looking beyond the apparent, looking to the unseen and sometimes even unbelievable. We walk with each other encourage each other (that, by the way, is why at high points in the liturgy we exchange the conversation “the Lord be with you / and also with you”), laugh and weep together in the shadow of the Cross and its never-to-be-denied resurrection. Together we will walk looking towards Easter and the greater hope Easter foreshadows, the hope of the new heavens, new earth.

It’s kind of nice that for a few months our paths have crossed and we can nudge each other along on that sometimes challenging journey of faith.

TLBWY