SERMON
PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,
and
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
ORDINARY
SUNDAY 18 (August 5th) 2018
READINGS:
2 Samuel 18:
5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians
4:25 – 5:2
John 6:35,
41-51
There are current
movements, consciousness-raising movements, in our society that I believe are
deep stirrings of the Spirit of God. The work of the Spirit reaches far beyond
the confines of the Church. She was, after all, the one who “hovered over the
face of the deep,” the one who, as James K. Baxter puts it, “blow[s] like the
wind in a thousand paddocks.”
In
stressing her work beyond and ahead of the Church I don’t refer to the secular
movements such as mindfulness, or the passion in the last decade for “mission
statements,” all those nonsenses that are generally psycho-babble and
business-babble. Those are too often rites and foci that are processes borrowed
from Christian traditions and then denuded of all reference to God.
I refer
rather to movements that have advanced ahead of the Christian community,
showing love, compassion and justice at times when we are left wringing our hands,
wondering about how to advance past our next financial crisis, or finding new
ways to make those not within our community feel worse about themselves than
they may or may not do already.
One wonderful
movement of God’s Spirit in society is the movement known in Australia as “Beyond
Blue”; in New Zealand and elsewhere it hasn’t a catchy programmatic title, but is
the movement around the world to raise consciousness about the struggles of
those suffering depression, and simultaneously remind us all that there is help
available when all seems too heavy to go on. In New Zealand of course the popular
face of the movement is that of Sir John Kirwan. The campaigns are powerful
vehicles of hope to all who struggle with depression and other mental illnesses,
the immediate sufferer and his or her family and friends. They remind us all,
sufferers or not, that we are not alone. John Kirwan I believe deserves every
iota of his knighthood and other accolades.
There will
be few of us untouched by mental health, and in particular by depression,
though the shades of mental health and depression are often intertwined. For
many centuries church and society acted hand in hand, stigmatizing and
deploring those who struggle with and especially those who succumb to mental health
issues. But these days we have grown to better understanding. We are learning
to reach out. As I said last week: are you okay are powerful words.
When we see
in the Scriptures Jesus reaching out across the abysses of social stigma to
touch those who are ostracized, we are seeing God’s love, God’s compassion incarnated.
In Jesus God’s love is made visible for those struggling with the chemical imbalances
that generate all mental illness. We are reminded that it’s okay to seek help,
and it’s okay (and more) to offer help.
It’s
probable than many of us here can hear echoes of moments in our own life
journey as the psalmist cries out in today’s psalm. I make no secret of the
fact that there has been more than one moment in my own journey, without wanting
to sensationalise matters, where I have felt that those around me would be
better off without me.
They are long past now, but that is not the case for
everyone. Only weeks ago I heard that an old school friend had taken his own
life, and was saddened to hear what I had not known, that he had battled with
depression for years. I say again: I am reminded over and over that as
Christ-bearers and indeed simply as decent human beings the words “are you
okay?” are amongst the most powerful in our satchel. They were words that kept
me from the brink during some dark times. They are words that we must learn to
utter – and follow up on – as we attempt, enabled by God’s Spirit, to be the
hands and feet and body and blood of Jesus, to be living bread of life because
our risen Lord is living bread of life, to be living bread in the world into
which we have been called.
When the
psalmist cries out from the depths across the universe it is still with
vestiges of hope; “with the Lord there is steadfast love.” Sometimes,
inexplicably even that hope dissipates. Interestingly, in Psalm 51, which we
read last week, the psalmist cries: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Paradoxically it is God, God in Jesus, Godself in the very depths of divine
being that cries those words from the cross.
The scriptural authors went to
great trouble to communicate the inconceivable belief that God’s light and life
and hope as revealed in Jesus reaches even into that experience of utter
god-forsakenness. It is God-self, God present and revealed in Jesus, who cries
out to an empty universe. Were that the end of the story our narrative of hope
would be hope-less indeed. We would remain, as Paul put it, crushed, perplexed,
with no in-breaking of light and life at the end of the tunnel and the end of
all tunnels. But we are not called to be a people of hopelessness.
The God who
dies on the cross breaks out of death. This is beyond our comprehension.
Perhaps all we should try to comprehend is that the disciples, the women and
the first witnesses after the women, were dumbfounded by the events of the first
Easter morning, yet they went on to risk and, in many cases, sacrifice their
lives to tell the story. He is risen. If we seize against all odds and hold to
against all odds our “amen,” to that affirmation, if we become the walking,
talking amen, the ratification and even embodiment of the light and life
bringing joy of the resurrection, if we rejoice in the resurrection that is
affirmed in almost every syllable of our liturgies, then we can be the magnets
to Jesus that he calls us to be.
That is why in eucharist we take the strange
action of ingesting that which we are commanded to believe is body and blood
for us. By doing that, we absorb as it were life-giving energies of the resurrecting
and resurrected, sorrow and even death-transcending God. We can deaden our
message of hope if we perpetrate only doubts and barriers of innumerable kinds
to the community around us. Let us instead make it our prayer that we be the
resurrection-rumouring people of God in Wakatipu – or wherever we might be.
TLBWY
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