leap

 

SERMON PREACHED at St BARNABAS’, WARRINGTON

SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT (28^th February) 2021

 

Readings [altered from lectionary]

Genesis 22: 1-19

Psalm 22: 22-10

Romans 4: 13-25

Luke 13: 20-21)

 

 

Amongst the many metaphors and visual images used by Jesus, images and actions around food and feeding are amongst the most easily relatable. Wine, bread, yeast, these are for most of us highly relatable staples of existence. They are the stuff of everyday. In that alone they remind us that faith can be the stuff of everyday. That is at least one point that Jesus constantly emphasizes. “I am the bread of life,” he famously says elsewhere. Bread may not be critical to human existence, but food is: I am the food of life. Immerse yourself, habitually, in all you know and feel of me.

We forget that. We forget it perhaps because we are too familiar with eating and breathing faith. Those of us who practice faith easily find it to be of the stuff of life to pray, to sing, to mow church lawns and sweep church pathways. There is a sanctity in that. Perhaps because I live with so much awareness of non-faith it always amazes me not only that I see faith in myself, but that I find and see faith in others. Here we are in an infinite, growing universe, surround it often seems by infinite, growing problems, yet there are around us and amongst us, even we ourselves, who are willing to take the leap of faith that all existence is in the hands of a benevolent God.

Sometimes it is a leap. There is much to give us cause to doubt. Our human race does not reflect a lot of the image of God, that image that our scriptures tell us we transport in our very existence. Those we don’t like across the political or racial or gender or orientational divides don’t seem terribly signed with the signature of God. And then, in honest moments, we see ourselves in a mirror or in our mind’s diary and we wonder if we are too? St Paul, not in our passage but elsewhere, reflects grimly that all humanity falls short.  News media remind us daily that he wasn’t wrong. Then he sets the bar a little higher, suggesting that our faith should be such that we are willing to commit infanticide in our obedience to an unseen God; sadly our psych wards are filled with those who have read Paul too literally.

Perhaps I digress? Well yes and no. Our psych wards might be a little less full if we learned how to read these tricky scriptures of ours. Though I am a fan of Paul I’m not sure his reading of Genesis and the Abraham narrative is any more helpful than the Hebrew Scripture original helpful. We must learn to read his writings, too, with caution, for they transformed from topical correspondence to Holy Writ.

But what of a faith in which we learn to throw all caution to the wind. Let’s not raise sabres against our sons, but we might turn to other priorities in our private and our corporate life. We might ask pain-filled questions: can we lose these vain priorities that may actually be distraction? Can we serve, love, trust God with heart, mind, soul but not our desperate emphasis on structures, physical and administrative? Any person who has put up with my thoughts over recent years will be aware that I am often wrestling with the need to lose our false gods, our infrastructure, our shibboleths. I don’t want to place the Isaacs of our existence on the altar of trust, but perhaps we must?

I say “throw all caution to the wind,” and do so advisedly. Many of the great changes of church and society alike have been generated by great and often unexpected storms of God’s Spirit, the one who we variously call breath, wind, the ruarch, the spirit of God. The winds of change that blew the gospel across the Roman empire, the winds of change that for better or worse blew the church into recognition as an official religion of that empire as it crumbled, the winds of change that fired the prayers of the monastic movement, that fired establishment of hospital and university movements, that fired the reformation and its subsequent ripples through time.

There have been counter winds too – perhaps we’ve learned a little more about those in the last four years of American history; demonic ripples like Proud Boys and QAnon will not fade rapidly from our corporate memory. But in this context let’s look to the positive. Our growing understanding of the complexities of justice for minorities, defined by race, gender (not exactly a minority!), sexuality, and what we might call “bodiedness”: these are great Holy Spirit winds of change. Many of these winds have grown outside the boundaries of where Christians have often though the Spirit should blow, outside the confines of church structures and infrastructures, but are the breath of God no less for that. Breathe on me, breath of God. Breathe on us breath of God. Breathe again on humanity and all creation, breath of God.

So it is that we are in this decade being forced by God’s Spirit to throw all caution to the Spirit-wind once more, as economic collapse decimates the church blow by blow, yet whispers the promise of new, more Christ-centred, less human-dependent ways of rumouring resurrection hope in a sometimes somewhat confused and lost society.

What does all of this mean? What does it mean for us as Anglican Christians in a far south-eastern patch of the far south-east corner of God’s globe? It means we are going to be best at being leaven in the lump when we get back to the basics of our faith. Praying, reading – though I would add “understanding,” reading for meaning – the bible, living out the life of Christ, living as a people of resurrection hope, living as a people of justice and compassion, living not as an organization but as a people enriched by the experience of the risen Christ in our midst. It means proclaiming Christ by living for others. It means being conspicuous a little by our oddness – a people of the eucharist, of hymns, of prayers – and a little by our ordinariness, earthed in the rhythms of community life, picking rubbish from the pavements, saving species, visiting the lonely.

It is to this role as leaven in the loaf that we are called this Lent.