SERMON PREACHED at St LUKE’S, TAIERI (MOSGIEL)
23rd ORDINARY SUNDAY (September
6th) 2020
READINGS
Exodus 12: 1-14
Psalm 149
Romans 13: 8-14
Matthew 18: 15-20
There is an
ancient rule of preaching that suggests as the preacher stands trembling at the
threshold that she or he should seek to glean two key ingredients: what’s
happening here, and what is the good news for us. I would add a third: “so
what” – not as a contemptuous adolescent sneer this last, but what do we do
now?
I wouldn’t say
that in this Sunday of the Year of Matthew – obviously an occurrence somewhat
recurrent in a liturgical preacher’s life ! – the answer immediately slapped me
across the face as I prepared myself for this day. I never reproach a sermon
after it’s one day of airing – I change, you change, the world changes – but I
sometimes allow myself a glance back. Three years ago I was on a complex sabbatical
from preaching duties, so that was no help. Three years before that I seemed to
have vastly different readings – so that was no help. What was God telling me?
I decided to go no further back, and turn once more to the to the present (there’s
no time like it, they tell me).
And what a time:
2020, the year we will never forget. The year in which some have descended into
conspiracy theories, while others have acknowledged that for a whole swathe of
historical and political and even theological reasons we were always going to
have to face brutal crises of economic and ecological collapse, even if we
didn’t expect a return of pandemic. Can readings from what some of my liberal
friends call “an old book” speak to us meaningfully of God’s purposes when
pandemic and economic implosion are sweeping across the globe? Come to think
about, could the biblical texts speak to us even before that, when our greatest
concerns were and can continue to be one day – ecological implosion, the
looming death of planet earth? Can God speak to us through, for example, the
Exodus, three thousand years after the events and on a different quadrant of
the globe?
Let’s set aside
historical specifics. The writers of Exodus were not writing post-Enlightenment
attempts at “reportage” history, were not pretending to generate something akin
to absolute truth the way some people want a writer to do. Philosophers (and I
think on this they are right), will tell us that absolute truth reportage is
impossible. Perhaps the nearest we get to that is police statements, and we
know only too well that they are open to a whole heap of variables. Don’t get
me wrong: there is an Absolute Truth – but it is far beyond our comprehension,
and dwells only within the heart of the God we see only through a darkened
glass.
Exodus is to
some small degree “reportage.” Ancient societies were oral communities, and the
fireside tellings that went on and on – in the aboriginal communities with
which I used to rub shoulders on and on for perhaps 60,000 years – accruing
meaning and symbolism. There are details in the Exodus narratives that ran deep
in the memories of the Hebrew people. They had been slaves, they had escaped,
they had come home to a land promised, they believed, to their ancestors. More
important for us, they had faced a cataclysm, and by the hand of God they found
themselves in a -place of hope. Can that
happen for us, or has God given up on humanity and Creation?
The Hebrews
continued to tell these stories through cataclysm after cataclysm, so we can
safely assume they believed that God did – and we might suggest still does –
take humanity through times of darkness and terror. This doesn’t mean that we
won’t live and die in times of turmoil, nor that bad, even fatally bad things
won’t happen to us. It means that God, who holds us in the palm of those divine
hands, carries us beyond Egyptian pharaohs and Roman conquerors and Black
Deaths and World Wars and cancers and car crashes and COVID-19.
The authors of
Exodus knew that chaos existed. Their forebears had escaped the chaos of
slavery. In their own experience of #BlackLivesMatter they had eventually
overthrown tyranny and exploitation and corrupt and despotic leaders. They
found their own equivalent of a black president – though the pendulum swung innumerable
times in the centuries that followed. They found an ambiguous liberator, in
Moses. They found a Promised Land. They grew into rituals that told them of a
God who hears the cries of the oppressed, whether it be in the brickyards of
Egypt or the plantations of the American Continent or the refugee camps of Kenya
and Jordan and Ethiopia and Tanzania and Manus Island to name just some. They
found empowerment so they no longer had to cry #MeToo to be heard. While it
wasn’t perfect, and again the pendulum has never ceased to swing, they found signs
of hope, signs of justice, since of equality,
and even signs of reconciliation and mutual respect that are a foretaste of the
Reign of God that is yet to come.
Can we?
Many of us, if
not all of us, are on the privileged side of history – so far. Perhaps economic
and ecological collapse will change that. But for now most of us know where our
next meal will come from, will have a roof over our head, and will not die of
cold or starvation tonight. The Hebrew people reached that blessed state too,
after they fled Egypt. They promised then never to forget the God who had
delivered them. They often forgot that promise – as we do. God again and again
used the rigours of nature and politics to remind them and us that we are not gods,
not immortal, not beyond the brute force of judgement. The word “wrath,” in
various languages, is associated with God from time to time. Not the wrath of
an impulsive and evil deity, but the wrath of a God that has little choice but
to bring humanity back to some semblance of justice and fair play – compassion
and justice for neighbours, human and otherwise, with whom we share this
planet. Ours is a time a wrath. Our churches, nations and eco-systems are
collapsing. As Paul says in the opening of his great letter to the Romans, we
are “handed over” to the ramifications of our own decisions and behaviour.
The wrath of
God, though, is not a final word. At the heart of the story of Exodus, and at
the heart of what we believe is the story of the Cross of Jesus, the new
Exodus, is the knowledge that God goes ahead of us. Even when all turns to custard
and we experience closure in our lives God’s footsteps are still warm, and we
are led on to futures as unimaginable as our world would be to those stumbling
Hebrews. Indeed more unimaginable still. For behold, says the author of
Revelation, I see new heavens and a new earth, and the Lamb will be the light
of the City of God.
But we have many
rivers to cross yet.
Nevertheless,
as we remember past deliverances of the People of God, and probably repeat
their recurrent mistakes and descents into chaos, we can do worse in
preparation for our encounter with the God of Judgement, God even of Covid-19,
than to practice peace, peace that is the presence of justice, reconciliation
between fractious opponents that is the presence of love, and practice worship
together that is the foretaste of the eternities of God.
