Rachel weeps again

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 10 

THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (June 10th) 2018

READINGS:

1 Samuel 15: 34 – 16: 13

Psalm 20

2 Corinthians 5: 6-17

Mark 4: 26-34

In passing last week, slightly cryptically, I alluded to the bitter media images that were emerging of the children stolen from mothers’ arms by the law enforcement agencies of the United States of America. I alluded too, to the razor wire policies of the Australian Government.

I suggested that it is possibly only the remote position that we enjoy on God’s globe that is so far protecting New Zealand from the brutal decisions that other nations are facing, and many making badly, around the plight of the wretched of the earth.

Since last week, my news feeds have been peppered by reports of US attorney-general Jeff Sessions and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders demonically abusing the writings of Paul. They used texts wildly disassociated from their context either in history or even within the letters from which the texts, like migrant children, have been torn. They used texts, as it happened, that Southern US slave-owners used to support slavery, that some biblical teachers used to support Hitler, and that were used to bolster the apartheid regime in South Africa.

I have mentioned before that I believe, at least at one level, that we need a licence to read the bible. Sessions and Sanders alike have failed their licence test.

As it happens, and as I understand it, immigration violations are a misdemeanour, and not a breach of criminal law. They therefore do not warrant the inhumane tactics the US and Australian governments in particular are using. Refugees are protected under international law, granted rights to seek asylum. The processes by which their claims are ratified or rejected must, like the justice system, err on the presumption of innocence, not guilt.

You may well ask what this has to do with our gaggle of readings. Text wars, of the demonic sort used by Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, are evil, demonic. Nevertheless, scattered amongst our texts from different centuries and settings there are clear indicators of the response the biblical texts and the God of Jesus Christ demand of those who claim divine go-ahead. “The Lord does not look at the things humans look at. Human beings look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

A text such as this – in essence repeated so many times through our scriptures – makes it clear that we would treat with manifest suspicion any use of the texts of our faith to justify violence and hatred. Whether we are looking at Mexican, Guatemalan, Bangladeshi or Iraqi refugees, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or atheist refugees, our scriptures challenge us to look at the human heart, not the head dress or clothing or rituals of those who desperately seek a better world for their children.

Some may recall the words of singer song-writer Sting: “We share the same biology, regardless of ideology / Believe me when I say to you, I hope the Guatemalans love their children too.” Except he wrote “Russians,” but the song remains the same: Tongans, South Africans, Britons.

Compassion, forgiveness, justice. These should be hallmarks of our faith. These should be the conspicuous advertisements of the credibility of our faith in Jesus Christ our risen Lord.

Sometimes they are. The earliest Christians, I am frequently reminded, were conspicuous in the dog-eat-dog environment of the crumbling Roman Empire. They were conspicuous for the love they displayed to the most vulnerable members of their community. I own an old King James Bible in which a previous owner had scrawled next to the Jesus commands to love neighbour, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, that his words referred only to the neighbour who is Christian, the hungry Christian, the naked Christian, the imprisoned Christian. How sad that this bible had been so manipulated by those of the Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders school of distortion. How sad that the previous owner of that bible had not noticed Jesus’ tête a tête with the Samaritan woman, or with lepers and widows, cast by powerful gate-keepers to the fringes of society.

Compassion, forgiveness, justice. I’ve spoken so far of the big stage environment of world politics. But let’s momentarily change the order around. Forgiveness, compassion, justice. The big international stage dimensions of justice are comfortable to speak of. But what of forgiveness? I speak to myself. Those who know my story will know that I have wrestled long and hard with events in the last five years that have been hard to forgive – and which need never be forgotten, for it’s not the same thing. Perhaps slowly I have got, perhaps only “am getting” there. I have cited and recited often the psalmist’s many cries of fury against those who uttered calumny and lies, if I may borrow biblical words to disguise the depth of my feeling.

“God forgives you. Forgive others. Forgive yourself.” They are easy words to pronounce but we grow into forgiveness only with the help of God. Our task is to implore the transformation of our hearts by the Spirit of God so that the words are not mere doggerel but offering of our heart-space to God, so God can work there, transform and heal us.

Compassion: do I allow my heart to be vulnerable, to reach out to those known and stranger to me, whose lives are heavy? Do I in words and actions ask “are you okay?” Our task is to implore the transformation of our hearts by the Spirit of God.

For to become the mustard seeds of faith, to be signs of resurrection, of death-conquering hope, to be agents of the work of God in God’s world we are not called to build walls and barricades, to distort texts, all to prop up our hatreds. No. We are called to become vulnerable, to look into the eyes of Rachel weeping for her children in Ramah (Jer. 31.15), or the mother in a leaky home, or the person who often shares a pew or a communion cup with us, and to know that what we do to and for them is what we do for and to the heart of God, and will speak immeasurably louder than our words.

TLBWY