SERMON PREACHED at St BARNABAS’,
WARRINGTON
ORDINARY
SUNDAY 11 (13th June) 2021
Readings:
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
Psalm 20
2 Corinthians 5: 6-17
Mark 4:26-34
As the beautiful simplicity of
Jesus’ mustard seed parable reverberates in our ears, I want immediately to befuddle
you by diving into the complexity of Paul’s strident, complex arguments with
the Corinthian Christians. As Jesus delivers beautiful rural imagery, I want to
delve into the murky depths of Corinth, pretty much the sin city of New
Testament times.
Go figure!
For I believe the Corinthian
texts are a powerful twenty-first century message. Running throughout Paul’s
argument with the Christians of Corinth is his determination to counter an “eat
drink and be merry” selfishness that had become the
hallmark, not only of the city, but of the city’s Christians. Worse: the
Corinthian Christians were determined to out eat, out drink, and out merry
their non-Christian counterparts. Ironically they were determined to do so
because they believed that there encounter with Jesus gave them permission to
do so. Look at us: we know Jesus, we are saved (whatever that means), we can do
anything. Okaaaay.
Or, to put it in contemporaryish
terms, me now for there may be no tomorrow. Aren’t we all just “looking for a
little bit of hope these days,” as British rock band Bastille put it a couple
of years back? Yet, like most of human history, their hope offered little more
than a one-night stand, “I'll be your rabbit in the headlights / We'll never
get to Heaven.” It was the same message that Jim Morrison roared out a
generation earlier, “Hello, I love you won’t you tell me your name,” and the
same desperate emptiness the Corinthian Christians were espousing: “I’m free,
because freedom existence only in the moment.” T. S. Eliot put it another way,
generations ago (but not as long ago as the Corinthians):
She turns and looks a moment in the
glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought
to pass:
“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s
over.”
Paul would have none of
it, but Paul was never particularly popular in Corinth. He offered a
Jesus-message of a new creation, but it was somewhat of a long way off. Be
disciplined now, he said, because in a life and a world you cannot see you will
have the glorious experience of bliss. It’s never been a message that sells
well, and I admit there have been many times in my life that “eat drink and be merry for
tomorrow you may die” seems far more attractive. Yet I suspect me now, or “I know
what I want and I want it now,” while timeless mantras, are mantras related to
greater despair, hopelessness, and the horrendous suicide rates that are a
tragic underbelly to youth experience today.
It’s not easy. Paul suggests over and again that the experience
he had and we can have of the risen Christ breaking into our lives, and reasserting
that awe-experience from time to time, is what Paul called an “earnest” of the
greatness, the unbelievableness that is to come. But pie in the sky is easily
mocked. Paul was easily mocked. Yet we have glimpses, and those glimpses are,
it is hoped, more powerful than “I'll be your rabbit in
the headlights.” “Eye has not seen,” Paul had written earlier, also as it
happens, but not coincidentally, to the Corinthians. “What no eye has seen, nor
ear heard, nor the human heart conceived … God has prepared for those who love
him.”
Jesus, the rural,
wandering Messiah, had told of a mustard seed. Paul doesn’t often repeat Jesus
sayings – he didn’t need to as they were well known in the new Christian
circles in which Paul was moving. But
Jesus had spoken often in weird, wonderfully poetic parables, and he told one
of mustard seed. It was simple enough. A tiny seed becomes a large and impenetrable
bush, offering, in its shade, shelter and protection to many birds. Elsewhere
we find Jesus suggesting that God rather likes birds, for not one sparrow falls
without the Father knowing, and we can surmise, caring. But I digress.
The mustard seed parable
operates on at least two levels. In the encounter with Jesus and the Kingdom of
God that he enacts, proclaims, brings, we find the challenge of justice. Where
there is no hope of justice there is no hope at all, even if, for some such as
the black slaves of US history, that hope is beyond sight. There is also
challenge: we are called to be bearers of that hope. We are called to bear,
proclaim, usher in glimpses of that justice wherever we see its absence in the lives
of people, species, our planet. If we don’t then our silence speaks volumes of
hopelessness.
But we are called too to
rumour mustard seeds of resurrection hope – hope that emptiness and despair, where
rabbits in headlights are not the final word. But it’s not easy to fix our eyes
on a more distant goal. The seed that we have, and are, and are challenged to
cast to the winds is tiny and vulnerable. It’s not east to believe]e in the
bush that may in the purposes of God emerge. Yet as individuals, and a parish,
as a diocese, even as the western mainstream (traditional) church, that is what
we are called to do – and called to believe that God can and will do the rest even
when we cannot see it, may nor, probably will not live to see it. The seed will
grow. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and while “assurance” is an optimistic
word it is a word that we are challenged by: live as if. Live as if love. Live
as if justice. Live as if judgement. Live as if love has the final word – even over
death.
It is pie in the sky. Yet it is, as Paul and his Jesus alike proclaim, the pie we are called to live and in turn proclaim. It is the pie, the resurrection and justice pie we are called to be, with the help of God, as a first fruit of that further pie. We are called to be rumouring pie in a pie-less world. It is preferable, I think, to being your rabbit in the headlights. But our history reminds us that our pie is credible only if we rumour it with integrity and compassionate action in all we undertake.
May God help us so to do. Because it's a tough call.
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