SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth
OAMARU
and St Alban’s, Kurow
SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (February
13th) 2022
READINGS:
Jeremiah 6:1-8 (9-13)
Psalm 1
1
Corinthians 15: 12-20
Luke 5:17-26
About 15 years ago, when we were living in outback
Queensland, my daughter and I used to go out riding our horses as a break from
my work and her study. One afternoon, as we headed out across the thousand acre
paddock where we kept our horses (catching them in so vast an area was another
sermon in itself) my big thoroughbred and I had a small disagreement. Perhaps
he was spooked by a snake or something, but he suddenly took off in a full thoroughbred
gallop.
We had a few negotiations over his speed and
direction, but like many negotiations there came a moment when I knew the case was
lost. I was kind of winning the directional battle, and he was winning on the
speed issue. I was left with one last futile card in the negotiations, that terribly
lame plea that almost always falls on deaf ears when a horse is bolting. “Whoa”
I cried, desperately. He ignored me, accelerated, changed direction again, and
the next thing I knew the girth had slipped (I had not yet tightened it after
saddling up) and I was flying through the air towards the one construction that
was harder than the ground in that brutally stony outback paddock. We’ll leave
me there.
But I want to suggest that the visceral, fear-filled
cry that I so futilely offered that day was far closer to the meaning of the “woes”
offered in Jesus’ vivid Beatitudes and Woes in his Sermon on the plain. As
Christians we have tended to heart the English word “woe” as a fierce warning,
to listen up or else. Too often Christian preaching has yet again found some
threat of eternal punishment in the woe phrases pronounced by Jesus. Yet the word
translated “woe,” used fifteen times in Luke’s account of Jesus, is far closer
to my forlorn and hopeless “whoa” than any sense of eternal punishment. The words
are a warning, with the plaintive character of a plea. “Whoa,” I cried out to
my horse, “desist, or this will end badly.” Unfortunately he was smart enough
to know it was only me that would end up hurt, and he had some serious eating
to get on with.
Desist, or this will end badly. The words are
directed very firmly at would-be followers. proclaimers of Jesus. He delivers a
series of words of happiness, “blessings,” then offers the shadow side. We can
engage in the hard work of prioritizing Jesus, engage in the hard work of sacrifice
for Jesus, the hard work of identification with the poor the hungry, the
weeping, the reviled, or we can wallow in our self-importance, our comfort, our
luxuriating at the expwene of the survival of others. Luke warned us chapters
earlier that the world of Jesus-following is an Alice in Wonderland,
upside-down world: Mary warned us, rejoicing in a world in which the mighty are
torn down and the lowly and broken exalted. “Which side are you on” asks the
famous union song of the 1930s. Jesus asks the same 1900 years earlier. Blessing,
or whoa?
As you will probably know by now, I have a
deep sense that the crises we are facing in the 2020s, as church and as western
civilization and indeed as human, are what we might as Christians call the judgement
of God. The Greek word krisis – it’s obvious what English word we get
from that! – is used for the depiction of Judgement Day, but it carries all the
connotations of a time of critical decision. Scientists speak of our era in
many terms of judgement, far beyond the eleventh hour, the Sixth Great
Extinction being perhaps the most chilling. The time for “whoa” for planet
earth and species humanity might well be over, though we hope and pray not. We live
in a time, as Covid and a myriad distortions of reality remind us, when we may
well be fling over the ears of creation’s, or Papatuanuku’s furious
determination to buck our presence from her back. There are no cosy prophylactics
for us from that, no cushions, even, to land on. Probably.
But ours is a faith that finds God even after
the deepest whoa. There is for humanity – including us – no get of gaol free
card. Humanity is currently facing what may even be its final crises of global warming,
recurrent virus mutations, and all the unpredictable personal vicissitudes that
stare us down. Jesus’ words to those gathered on the plain pull no punches, and
Nature’s words to us in 2021 pull no punches either. She too can be a prophet
of God. But we are privileged to hear that sometimes faint, sometimes deafening
echo of the words that Paul offered his people, himself in a time of crisis:
hang on to Christ-hope despite all odds, and your faith is not futile. The
Corinthians had forgotten that. Too often I fear we – or maybe I speak only for
me, are Corinthians.
But our task is, enabled by the Spirit of
Christ, to hang on to that Resurrection hope. It is also to bear that Resurrection
hope to those around us as we all pass through a judgement, a crisis time. And
somewhere just beyond our clear hearing, there is as the New Testament writers
saw so clearly, a voice reminding us that we will be welcomed home.
Even as we fly over the ears of our bolting horses of life.
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