bolting horses of life

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (February 13^th) 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.