SERMON PREACHED AT St
ANDREW’S, OBAN
(Rakiura/Stewart Island)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 21
(August 25th) 2019
READINGS:
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71: 1-6
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke
13:10-17
If I have a concern about the place and the focus of much
contemporary Anglican Christianity, and I do, then it is about the habit of
Anglican Christian leadership and so-called “influencers” to sandpaper away the
inconvenient wedges of our faith. I see this in various forms, and have for
years, decades even. I see in in my travels around this diocese, but I have
seen it elsewhere since the time of my own theological formation three and a
half decades ago. Let me emphasise that I do not see it in the leadership offered by our bishop, nor the
tutelage of Richard, who has ostensibly been your vicar and overseer for many
years now. I just want to put that out there!
Nevertheless there is a common cultural cringe around Anglican and
some other Christian circles at the thought of a God who dwells closer to us
than breath, who clings closer to us than out own epidermis. Perhaps the cringe
is a sort of icky-factor, a paradoxical fear that the God who dreamed into
being our bodies and their functions, is somehow a bit embarrassing to have
around when we do our human stuff.
It is a paradox of course, and one we should learn to live with
once we have made the faith-leap of believing in an invisible Creator God. Do
we believe in a God who lovingly etched the vast palette of our lives, as
Jeremiah and the psalmist he echoes allude? Is it just possible that, if we do,
that God might know our being and its functions, physical and emotional and
psychological and spiritual alike, better than we do? Where then should I run
to be hide from such a god? But why should I hide anyway?
I suggest – though this conversation belongs in a different place
and time once I’ve flagged it – that this may well mean that God has far fewer
hang-ups about our sexuality and other highly personal ingredients of our loves and lives than we or some of the scriptural writers (for they are flawed humans too) seem
to allow. We get hung up on the peripheries – we major in the minors, as one
academic friend of mine put it years ago. Do we really want to limit so drastically
those who love and are loved by the God of the Cross?
Yet at the same this God, closer than our breath or epidermis, is the God of the Cross. This has
nothing to do with what those outside the corridors of faith may believe, where
they might find God. There’s plenty of nature, God’s artistry, around Rakiura
/Stewart Island to wow the hardest hearts with the possibilities of God. But
having made the leap to believe in the God of Jesus Christ, the God who drove
by the divine Spirit the earliest disciples into the jaws of martyrdom in their
dedication to the gospel, then perhaps we could have the decency to continue to
hold to the powerful love-event that seals us within God’s heart. In the Cross
of Jesus we find the incomprehensible extent to which divine love will reach to
reconnect with us: reaching even to and beyond utter desolation, utter despair,
utter god-forsakenness, and even there breathing resurrection hope for those we
love and pray for.
We have an “ick-factor” about the closeness of God for many
reasons. The most ignoble of those reasons, though, is because we want to
generate for ourselves spaces where God is not permitted. Sexuality is one
obvious example, but there are many far more serious examples that we tend to
ignore. Perhaps sexuality is only paraded so readily because for many people it
is easy to feel self-righteous: I wouldn’t do that so those who do should receive God’s wrath. Except Jesus
suggests that it’s not like that: that we all have dark propensities, all are
enmeshed in sinfulness (as Paul would later put it).
But what if God knows my greed, my sloth, my avarice, my – need I
name all the deadly sins that were a useful encapsulation of human fallenness?
I can harden my heart against God – dare I admit I often do? – but in the end
will that as it were grow me godwards? Are not the great lives that have
inspired us godwardly lives that have, often kicking and screaming, opened up
to the God who is in any case already there? God’s “consuming fire” is a
painful place: sometimes it is easier to open our lives instead to God’s
consuming compassion and love, and there let the work of regeneration and
“sanctification” continue.
Jesus is confronted by a woman trapped in her brokenness. There
are for her no power games, only suffering. Jesus confronts those who entrap
the woman in her brokenness, most likely doing so in their own
self-righteousness. There is little doubt to whom Jesus directs his sternest
words. There is little doubt that stern words from the heart of God are always
addressed to those whose lives oppress others. There is little doubt that the
God who is closer than breath or epidermis longs to chisel away the sclerotic tissues
in our being and make us, even us more Christlike. But first we must open to
God the awkwardest entrails of our being.
May God’s closer than life Spirit help us so to do.
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