SERMON
PREACHED
at
the CHURCH of St JOHN, WAIKOUAITI
Te
POUHERE SUNDAY / OS 12 (23rd June) 2019
READINGS:
Isaiah 42:10-20
Psalm 42
2 Corinthians 5:14-19
John 15: 9-17
For a few minutes we are
going to place ourselves into the sandals of the ancient Hebrew people. We
should do this more often: there are many ways in which their suffering
prefigures and encapsulates every people’s life-experience. For now let’s just
accept that they too are sufferers of the human condition, that condition under
which we stumble in the 21st Century, nearly three thousand years after
them.
Frustrated perhaps,
grief-stricken perhaps, the great poet-prophet Isaiah – actually the second of
at least two Isaiahs – sought to bring comfort to his troubled people. He did
so with a suitcase full of bewildering images, the best known of which is
probably that of the suffering servant.
Isaiah himself was
probably referring to the Hebrew people themselves as the suffering servant of
God. Their task, as he understood it, was to reveal the one Creator God to
God’s world. But centuries later it became the turn of the early Christians to
make sense of the new realities they in turn were experiencing. They too were
seeing the collapse of old certainties and safeties. They suffered the corrupt
practices of the deteriorating, oppressive Roman Empire. They saw the
certainties of the Hebrews’ faith in YHWH crumbling around them … Roman gods
were sexier and easier to follow. They had encountered the rumours of the
Resurrection of Jesus, and subsequently experienced the powerful sense of his
unseen presence in their fellowship and worship. All this was confusing enough.
Yet more even confusingly, some of them who had chosen to follow the new
Resurrection faith were hated for their troubles, as they trusted in and followed
their crucified Messiah.
So some of the Christians’
new teachers turned for inspiration to the powerful yet enigmatic images coined
by Isaiah. They did not have access to the writings we call the New Testament.
They had the Hebrew Scriptures, and they had new lenses, new life experiences
through which to read them. They turned to the shadowy figure we know as The
Suffering Servant. It is, as is so often in the case in our scriptures and
tradition, a strange description of a Saviour, a Messiah, or indeed of God,
though nearly 2000 years have perhaps hardened our hearts to the strangeness. They
have done so at great peril to our witness.
That this Suffering
Servant messiah sacrifices himself to bring hope, redemption to the world
ceases to surprise us. We’ve heard it all before. Yet to most in the ancient
world this was an obscenity. Gods might be a bit odd, even naughty at times,
and might kil
l each other from time to time, but on the whole they tried
to keep from getting themselves killed, and certainly didn’t put themselves
deliberately on the scaffold of human vulnerability. This servant does, and so
had the Carpenter of Nazareth that the early Christians were now calling
divine. Strange.
Isaiah’s strange message
to the Hebrews had been that they were called to suffer, to be sacrificed, to
be like a mother opening her life to the physical pain of child-birth and the
emotional pain of child-rearing. This is no place for a god to belong, no way
for salvation to be brought about. Isaiah was almost certainly pilloried for
his claims: the Christians were.
The first Christians held
tenaciously to their strange belief that Isaiah’s message had something to say
about Jesus Christ and about the role of the Church, the body of Christ in the
post-resurrection world. The earliest known reference to Christians depicts us
as idiotic believers in a crucified donkey. Perhaps in the 21st
Century we need to learn how to look idiotic again?
Because we try not to; but
when we try not to we forget that the great apostle Paul was adamant that he
came like a fool to the people he met. We have cosied up for too long to the
institutions of powerful societies, have come too easily to believe that the
institutions themselves are the gospel, and that the madness of a suffering
servant or a crucified God has nothing to do with us.
As we watch Western
society crumbling around us we are frightened, like drowning sailors afraid to
reach past the logs that we are clinging to, in order to grasp hands reached
out to us, the hands of a suffering servant reaching out to us from the place
where despair meets hope.
That place of encounter
is the Good Friday Tomb of Jesus It is the place a god should not be, the place
that we find it easier to make tame or dismiss altogether. We do so because it
doesn’t really fit our view of the universe in a post-Enlightenment, rational
world. In rural regions we are powerfully aware of the departure of shops and banks
and post offices and police stations and churches. Where we still have them we
cling to them tenaciously as if they were the good news of Jesus Christ.
They are not, and neither will we be bearers of Good News as we cling to them.
We cannot sing the new
song that Isaiah commands us to sing, cannot sing anything meaningful in a
world whose societies are crumbling, certainties dissolving, ice caps melting,
skies overheating, if we cling to false gods. The God of the Suffering Servant,
the God opposed to false securities, is tearing them down. Outsiders like
Dennis Glover and Maurice Shadbolt saw the safety nets crumbling a long time ago,
but they found no resurrected Jesus to speak into the vacuum that was forming. We
must do so, for that is our task.
To do so we are called to
surrender the false gods, the shibboleths. That always hurts, but the false
securities are deafening all of us to the new song that Isaiah sang and the
early Christians sang and Christians are still singing in genuine place of
persecution (or places of genuine persecution). These are painful, uncertain
times, but we are called to bear Christlight in them. Only then will we really
sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, give glory to the Lord, proclaim God’s
praise in places of raw vulnerability and pain, or experience the glory of the
God who transforms death into life.
We are called to be a
resurrection people. We are called to hope against all that is rational, for
our loved ones, for our loved
institutions, for our loved but abused planet; our hope will become real when
it is focussed on the heart of the gospel, on the death and resurrection of
Jesus, and we surrender our attachments to the peripherals. These are difficult
times, but the one who passes through suffering and death into resurrection and
the mysteries of eternity is the one who wants to lead us on.
May God help us to
surrender ourselves, all that we are and all that we shall become, in the
service of the Servant who turns suffering into joy, and death into life.
AMEN
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