God in the meh

 

SERMON PREACHED

AT

St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

ORDINARY SUNDAY 6 (14^th February) 2021

 

 

 

Readings

2 Kings 5: 1-14

Psalm 30

1 Cor 9:24-27

Mark 1:40-45

 

As we encounter Naaman the General we encounter a strange aspect of our own Christian humanity. Here in Waikouaiti, around the diocese, and I suggest around the western world in mainstream churches we are aware of the struggle to keep our infrastructure alive and well, our churches earthquake standardised and insured, our buildings painted and polished, our liturgical vestments distinct, our prayers formalised and carefully structured. I for one am deeply committed to all these aspects of Christian life. But they are not the be all and end all, and we live in a faith-era when God’s Spirit may well be driving us back to bedrock. What is the core of our faith and its practice?

What, says Elisha, if we are looking for the saving works of God in the wrong place? Clinging to the wrong things? What if the works of God, the access to God, the gifts of God are right there before us as we walk and talk and sleep, and we need only to set aside our busy-ness and blindness to see them, experience them, be immersed in them? Or, to put it a more meaningful, active way, what if we set about seeing the hand of God in the everyday, in the ordinary, and indeed discovering that the ordinary is indeed extra-ordinary. Many who work the land are deeply aware of this: nature red in tooth and claw is nature the generous, too: the soils are turned, the rains come, the earth yields its crop (which is not to suggest that the work involved is not often brutally hard). The ordinary is miraculous, and Elisha sends Naaman off to bathe in the river.

Perhaps not an ordinary wash. Bathe seven times, says Elisha. Not an ordinary river, either. In the Jordan, says Elisha. Still, to Naaman the General it seems a little ordinary. I am reminded of the simple rites we have of communion. Go, says Jesus, eat bread and wine. But perhaps not eat as we would at a picnic. Eat with intent, eat with blessing, eat with the knowledge that this is the rite he gives us to knit together once more, to member together again, the whole history of God’s dealing with humankind and indeed all creation. This is the rite we must perform long after our buidings are gone.

As a people of God we must also be able, willing, and ready to see the spectacular in the ordinary. I have been a part of liturgies in which God is powerfully,  over­whelmingly present. I have been a part of (and admittedly conducted) liturgies which been a bit “meh” – preaching sermons is the same. Yet strangely I have often found that what I experience as a “meh” day others experience as a wow day. God will not be limited, thank you very much, to my small feelings.

Naaman was blinded by his own sense of privilege. A leper is normally a pariah, and he was certainly forced further towards the fringes of his society by the debilitating disease. But even in his condition he demands obsequiousness, demands privileged treatment, demands five-star treatment. He receives the outcome he longs for, but not the methodology he thought appropriate. Privilege will blind us to the places where might see God. He attempts to place demands on the ways and places in which God might work: God will have none of it.

I opened with a litany of the issues we face as a western, privileged people of God. Over and over again I have found signs and messages of the harsh warnings the western Christian community is being delivered: we have sat for too long in a privileged state, demanding that our privilege be preserved by God, and demanding simultaneously that God rescue us from the closures that are threating our existence as a visible people of God. As Western Church we are undergoing death by a thousand cuts. Like Naaman we are telling God how it must be stopped and how we must be redeemed. The history of the people of God tells us that God does not desert the People of God – but God also delivers some very harsh reprimands.

I reserve the word “resurrection” for the historically unique event of the action of God in resurrecting Jesus from the dead. My theology is conservative enough to believe in that – however shakily at times – as an event in history. Unseen by humans, though the resurrecting Christ was seen by some and their accounts still reverberate around the globe. Unseen because we cannot see so great a sight as eternity defeating death – but let’s leave talk of that till Easter. I reserve the word “resurrection” for that Easter event – and for the yet to be event of our own resurrection after the last great mystery of our death.

Many of my colleagues through my career have spoken of resurrection as a cyclical thing – daffodils after the winter, church rebirths after closure. I prefer to think of these as “phoenix rising.” Cycles of life – more prosaic than God’s utter, immeasurable redemption of creation. But as a part of the warp and weft of existence they can remind us that God is as miraculously present in the normalities. Then, every now and again God asks us to reach beyond the normalities – to let bread and wine be for us body and blood – to let a moment be charged with the grandeur of God, saturated with the promise of God. Naaman wouldn’t accept that.

But at a time when we are watching God’s stern pruning of our complacent western church, we might find messages of hope amidst the warf and weft of financial and administrative and architectural normalities. Our infrastructures collapse and close and that may be just one more message of God’s work in the world. But God is with us – with us in the closures, in the uncertainties. God, in a sense, asks us to bathe seven times in the Jordan – to take a slightly unusual approach to the strange times we live in, to find the sacred despite the mundanity. Our privileged existence as Western Christians has blinded us to much that we are called to see and be. But God calls us to hold tenaciously to the promise that God is with us always, even to the end of the age: as things get tough we can enter into our phoenix experience of so much crumbling around us, to hold to that promise, that God is beckoning to us to emerge cleansed from the waters into which we are challenged to dip ourselves.