being bread in the world

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 18 (August 5^th) 2018

READINGS:

2 Sam 11.26 – 12.13a

Ps 51.1-12

Eph 4.1-16

John 6.24-35

I avoided David last week, though it is worth noting that as a murderer he rates as one of the most abject sinners of the biblical witness. Psalm 51, if not written by David, certainly captures the essence of a failed human being recognizing his need for divine, unmerited, life-restoring grace. For those of us who have not ever laid claim to a blameless life, the words ring powerfully true:

Have mercy on me, O God,
    according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
    blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
    and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions,
    and my sin is ever before me.

Sadly the Church, in many of its forms from left to right, liberal to conservative, has forgotten the radical nature of the grace that David’s abject fall and divine restoration represent. Those from left to right, from liberal to conservative, who have turned God into either a domestic plaything or a distant abstract concept, those who play self-interested games with the gospel tend to forget how powerful, or as John Newton and later Philip Yancey emphasized, how amazing divine grace is.

Grace and restoration are no get out of gaol free ticket. Where civil law contradicts the tenets of our faith by perpetrating injustice and other evils, we are invited by the gospel to civil disobedience and peaceful protest. Otherwise the gospel demands that we adhere to standards and expectations of our given societies’ law. But what of this grace, as depicted in the psalm and in the story of David? 

For a moment let’s not dwell too much on the narrative tragedy of the death of the son of David. The low life expectancy of David’s era provided ample opportunity to believe the punitive wrath of God was at work in myriad ways, and caution is needed if we apply the interpretations of his time to our own. God does not kill babies. But the greater, timeless message is that grace is a measureless invasion of God’s life-redeeming love.

This is not, I emphasize, the sort of airy wave of a hand that has seen sexual predators protected from due justice across the churches. Churches must submit themselves to the authority of a Royal Commission in New Zealand as they eventually did in Australia. Grace is not about the continued protection and employment of predators, but about restitution even of the most despicable human beings after dues have been paid and sentences served. Grace is about ensuring that potential victims are protected and actual victims recompensed as best as is humanly possible. But thereafter, grace is about healing the human heart. Much of its meaning may even dwell beyond our sight, beyond our understanding in those unfathomable realms we loosely call “eternity.” Divine grace is bigger than human deaths.

It has to be so. To believe less, or to dismantle the possibility of healing and redemption, is to leave evil and sin in a state in which it dominates the love and redemption that is at the heart of God. The David story tells us, unfortunately in quite brutal ways, of a God who does not breezily wave a hand at sin and evil, but who demands that perpetrators face their actions. The gospels may have something important to say about restorative justice, but not about some limp and meaningless avoidance of questions of evil.

Christ-followers must hold on to the belief, no matter how difficult it is in an age of disregarded intellect and celebrated infotainment, that God is in control of cosmic and of human history. To believe less is to trivialize the gospel. We must incorporate into our faith the difficult demands of forgiveness, but we must not ignore the demands of judgement. The litmus test for us must be the life and actions and teachings of Jesus. Jesus refused to breezily wave away sin and responsibility, especially as perpetrated by religious hypocrites, but set about restoring the hope of those victimised by society and its prejudices.

 

The challenge for us is to find ways to be Christlike. This is a challenge that can only be met, as we put it in liturgies, by the help of God. We daily participate in and perpetrate an unjust world, and need the help of God to see and redress that. Only as we open ourselves up to the Spirit of the God who is revealed in Christ can we be a people who practise sensible judgement – or at least its more human shadow form, sensible analysis and evaluation. We are called to practise this in the world in which God has called us to live. We are called to sensible action to redress the wrongs, the sin around us. With the help of God we can become signs of those justice-principles that God calls us to be.

We live on a small stage. Nevertheless, however small the stage, we need to practise forgiveness and reconciliation, up-building, edifying love, mutual support and encouragement on that small stage, finding our small part to play. We must be informed participants in the world around us, naming injustices. We must be signs (as the great bearers of God, even King David, were to become) of God’s concern for the hurting. With God’s help and informed dialogue we can learn to avoid knee-jerk and uninformed responses to personal, local, and international events. Instead we can use our strange but profound traditions and scriptures as lenses through which to bear Christlight in our community: sowing love where there is hatred, peace where there is discord – we know the prayer.

As Paul put it to the Corinthians, “as often as we eat this bread, and drink this cup, we proclaim Christ’s death until his coming again.” Our task is to receive this bread charged with the meaning of God’s reconstituting love. But our task also is to be that love, to be God’s bread  in God’s world. Our task is to look beyond a world obsessed with itself and its own entertainment or self-aggrandisement. Our task, as Jon Sobrino reminded us, consists in making “someone else’s pain our very own” and allowing that pain to move us to respond to their need and the unjust structure that created it.

Our task, aided by God’s Spirit, is to be a people who know that if God’s love, revealed in Christ, active and effective in Christ’s life and death and resurrection, can touch and warm and transform us, so it can through our lives touch and warm and transform lives around us, even despite us. Our task is to become bread, Christ’s living bread to those around us. Our task is to be the hands and feet and body and blood of transforming Jesus in the world in which God has placed us. We will do so imperfectly, but assuming our imperfections are not predatory or criminal, and that we turn repentant again and again to the God who transforms us, then we can be the signposts God wants us to be.

TLBWY