hoping against appearances

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH

of St PAUL THE APOSTLE

DUNEDIN

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (7^th April) 2019

READINGS:

Isaiah 43: 16-21

Psalm 126

Philippians 3:4b-14

John 12:1-8

These are strange times in which to have the role of interpreting, breaking open and making meaning of ancient words of scripture. Thirty-plus years ago when I set out on this journey it was, perhaps, all a little theoretical.

We were aware, yes, that since July 16, 1945 humanity had, for the first time, the ability to destroy itself and its planet, but on the whole things looked fairly hunky dory. The Berlin Wall would soon crumble, though perhaps we weren’t expecting it yet. We had more or less survived a Reagan presidency and its obsession with Star Wars. There were concerns about apocalyptic issues, and Tiananmen Square was a brutal obscenity on our consciousness, but apocalyptic’s complex messages and convoluted assurances seemed on the whole rather abstract.

So if in 1989 I was preaching from these poignant words of Isaiah I suspect the message was reasonably theoretical. Isaiah’s original audience had been through brutal exile, and he whispered surprisingly unpopular words of comfort and promised return to prosperity and peace. Like collective Stockholm Syndrome subjects the Israelites weren’t particularly interested. Israel and its old fashioned god was so 150 years ago, why wouldn’t Isaiah just shut up and go away?

And that was about it, really. All a bit abstract. “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.” I mean why would you? Babylonian exile was a bit of a doddle, collective amnesia a fine state to enjoy. Pass another piña colada, please, and slip Milli Vanilli or the B-52s on the stereo.  

Yet since then, if I can borrow TS Eliot’s phrase again, so many certainties have crumbled. As a person called to preach I have to self-assess: am I merely slipping into the potential apocalyptic idiocies of old age? Am I merely succumbing to the over-abundance of information of the ether-highway in an age of Trumpianism and a growing white supremacist profile? Timothy McVeigh aside, was white supremacy even a Thing in 1989. His act of evil was still six years into the future then anyway. To speak of the God of Israel and of the Cross was so comfortable then.

There were tiny hints of darkness even then as we strode into a brave new world, hints that all was not well in the Garden of Eden. Rachel Carson of course had issued her prophetic howl years earlier, but there were one or two other more recent troublesome signs. The Middle East would not go away, Terry Waite was a captive, and yes, Tiananmen Square. But they weren’t even a glitch in the matrix – just temporary if tragic parentheses in the human and cosmic progress we were experiencing. God was in God’s heaven and all was well, and it was comfortable enough to believe. Just like it was fairly cruisy in exile in the sixth century before the Common Era, too. If we were inclined to believe in God and stuff, it was neither too costly nor too totally weird.

But “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Since then it is as if the former western world, the Global North, has been driven into exile. Slowly the accumulated symptoms of ecological, economic and cultural collapse have gained exponentially in accumulated weight. Eden is burning, and few of us have the ability to navigate the resultant blanket of smog. Is there hope for our mokopuna, not to mention countless of our neighbouring species, on a planet whose death appears far more imminent than we could have dreamed in our wildest nightmares thirty years ago? “It was so easy then,” sang Carly Simon, but it’s the older lyric of John Lennon that seems more apropos today: “Christ you know it ain’t easy,” and if Lennon meant it as a curse, I mean it as a stuttered prayer.  Yet the gospels suggest Christ does know how hard it can be, because Christ is the face of the unseen God who walked the harshest road of all.

Yet this is when faith’s traction bites the road. This is exactly when we stand on the shoulders of the Isaiahs who tried to speak of God over two hundred years of catastrophic upheaval. [For those being confirmed today this is indeed a time in which the faith in which you are confirmed and in which we are challenged to stand with you becomes most pertinent. The assurance of things hoped for against all odds]. It is in these circumstances that the call to hold to the promises of an unseen god become most difficult to hold to and yet – and yet that is the challenge to which we are called, to which we make claim in our worship. This is when we are called to live out that choristers’ prayer, that “what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives.” 

Those who heard the words of the original Isaiahs may never have seen the outcome and fulfilment of their daring promises, their words spoken of hope against all odds. We may not either: the cataclysms of mother earth and of decaying civilizations may outlast our brief existences. The time scale of scripture, and even more so the timescale of divinity, is beyond our comprehension. Nevertheless, as the apostle Paul bravely affirmed against all odds, we are called to “strain … forward to what lies ahead.” What lies ahead, the doctrines of Christianity tell us, are the futures of God: “O let me see thy footprints and in them plant my own.” It is not easy to believe this stuff – not as easy as it was thirty years ago, straining forward to what lies ahead, though probably easier than it will be thirty years hence. It is not easy, but like the grieving, sensual, aching Mary we are called to pour out our love in costly, priceless hope. It is to against-all-odds hope that we are called, and it is in against-all-odds hope that our risen Christ will lead us, stumbling, on, murmuring the psalmist’s prayer:

May those who sow in tears
    reap with shouts of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
    bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
    carrying their sheaves.