handed over ... to what?

SERMON PREACHED at St ANDREW’S, MAHENO

and St LUKE’S, OAMARU

ORDINARY SUNDAY 15 (JULY 12^th) 2020

READINGS:

Isaiah 55: 10-13

Psalm 65: 1-13

Romans 8: 1-11

Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23

I was caught up in a wonderful conversation a couple of days ago, up the road in Omarama, as a group of church members discussed their earliest ventures into faith. Particularly they reflected on their ventures into the scriptures of our faith. Too often I fear we leave the scriptures as a sort of oratorical performance experienced on a Sunday, to be returned to the cupboard after use, stored for the next encounter a week or month or decade ahead. This was not their story. The joy I experienced was powerfully enhanced as two of those present spoke of their journeys in the writings we call Isaiah – though they are probably two or three Isaiahs.

So as I turned to the passages set for this day I heard echoes of their joy of Isaiah-encounter, the joy of the encounters around the table with these and other scriptures that had beamed radiance into lives that were open to the transforming power of sacred writings. Radiance is not always comfortable. I thought more of Isaiah: how challenging it can be to know the crippling weight of judgment that he announced to God’s people:

Ah, sinful nation,
    people laden with iniquity,
offspring who do evil,
    children who deal corruptly,
who have forsaken the Lord,
    who have despised the Holy One of Israel,
    who are utterly estranged!

The first Isaiah was relentless. The people who claimed to be a godly nation were playing games with God. Their prattling on about a god on their side, a god in their sanctuaries, a god to whom they stretched out enthusiastic hands and uttered empty phrases, this prattling was no more than empty verbiage. Yet they prattled on, all the while neglecting justice, compassion, worshipping prosperity, devouring the poor, building mighty towers of self-aggrandizement. They prattled on in self-adoration, while despising the broken and vulnerable of the earth. If we read the Book of Kings we find from another source that they received from God what they deserved: incompetent leadership that sucked them dry, left them to die. First Isaiah was more poetic:

You shall be ashamed of the oaks
    in which you delighted;
and you shall blush for the gardens
    that you have chosen.
³⁰ For you shall be like an oak
    whose leaf withers,
    and like a garden without water.
³¹ The strong shall become like tinder,
    and their work^[a] like a spark;
they and their work shall burn together,
    with no one to quench them.

It went on for maybe a century and a half, that outpouring of God’s wrath. The “daughter of Zion,” shorthand for God’s people, watch as their land becomes a wasteland, that eerily desolate collapsed civilization so brilliantly directed by T. S. Eliot: “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.” Prophets like Isaiah and Eliot offer little relief. Nor does history.

 Isaiah the First even dares to refer to his nation as “rulers of Sodom, people of Gomorrah.” There could be few more shocking likenesses to a people who proclaimed themselves God’s people, God’s nation. Sanctimonious sorts son’t like to be thought of as sinners.

A century and a half later another Isaiah or two began to proclaim words of hope. Their people weren’t particularly interested, of course. They had become contented in their wasteland, not particularly concerned about a troublesome God who demanded a little sliver of love and a few acts of worship. But prophets are never silenced, even when they are executed: “You shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace.” “Whatever,” the ostensible people of God replied. “And we should care why?”

We might well disagree where we stand in this sorry and eternal tale of the people of God. Are we yet to be expelled from our complacency, from our Eden of self-satisfaction? As we devour the resources God provides through Mother Earth, devouring the portions of the less fortunate, as we watch Covid-19 disproportionately but not exclusively affecting the world’s most vulnerable, and as we watch the leaders of the world desperately propping up their crumbling towers, as we watch day by day on our media, it probably doesn’t matter which cycle of Isaiah’s scenes of horror we are emulating. It was ever thus; the God of Isaiah has for ever handed human beings over to the implications of our selfishness.

The words “handed over” are no empty throwaway. Paul, in particular, uses them with the full weight of their meaning: we are surrendered to our impulses, left to our own devices. He uses the idea when referring to Jesus, too. Jesus though when he is handed over to his own devices is handed over to the devices of love and redemption. Jesus, the perfect unpacking of the impulses and the heart of God cannot – or does not – do anything but surrender himself, allow himself to be given over to (Rom. 8:23, 4:25) to the full potential of love. He lives, loves, teaches, suffers and dies, but not for himself. He rises, too: for all humanity. And we are called to respond with likewise-love, likewise-compassion, likewise-justice.

And likewise-joy. For while our encounter with the Risen Christ is clearly not a get out of gaol card, as the lives of many of the great followers of Christ remind us, it is a focussing of our attention. It is for that reason that Paul, in the passage following ours, will declare, despite his considerable sufferings, that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” It is why, indeed, our prayer book, echoing the book we call Hebrews, will declare that we are “called to suffer.” But not end the story there.

As Jesus earlier declared to his followers, we are not left on our own. We are infiltrated by the Comforter, the joy- and hope- bringer who, as we see in the lives of the greatest Christ-followers, will transform even suffering into hope. And while, speaking strictly for me, I may not embody that hope, and whinge at every ingrown toenail or unfair judgement or greater disaster that comes my way, nevertheless we are called to be a people who radiate hope in the midst of suffering. In the midst of the sufferings to which we as individuals, we as church, we as nation, we a humanity, may well be handed over ewe seek to rumour resurrection hope. Then indeed “The strong shall become like tinder, their work like a spark; they and their work shall burn together,   with no one to quench them.”

Our prayer as a people of God, even as much seems to fall apart around us and the old certainties crumble, must be that we are indeed Christ-bearers, resurrection-hope proclaimers, for all our faults, individually and corporately. May God so fill us with divine spirit that we are indeed bearers of the living, risen Christ.