glory and derision

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

SEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (February 20^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Genesis 45: 3-11, 15

Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40

1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50

Luke 6: 27-38

 

 

At the risk of being somewhat autobiographical the major element of my journey in faith is that it has been the outcome of a very clear choice. A conversion, undertaken in my early adulthood. I was young, perhaps a little troubled by life, the universe and most things. My choice to believe was not in the league of a C. S. Lewis or a T. S. Eliot, two of my great icons of faith.

I make no secret that I prefer the latter, but I know only too well that I can hardly compare my small existence with either of theirs. Still, I decided, in the privacy of my own mind, that I would abandon my atheism, such as it was, and embrace belief in the strange way of Jesus Christ

I say “belief,” but faith is not the dry academic experience that this word sometimes indicates. It was a belief that seized my heart long before the slow tickings of my mind followed suit. “Cardiac,” rather than “cranial” belief. Both though have meandered along in fits and starts in the 42 years and 50 weeks and innumerable twists and turns since then.

For this faith traveller, then, the leap was from no-belief – or belief in no-thing beyond that which I could see – to belief, belief in that which I could not see. Pretty much anything else – almost everything else – was reasonably easy after that. Doctrinally speaking, that is. The actual task of being a follower of Jesus was less easy, and there have been many stumbles, some mildly spectacular, at least in the theatre of my own mind, ever since. But also there has been God’s Spirit.

Nevertheless minor details like the Trinity, Creation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the latter so central to Paul’s belief and proclamation, have been reasonably easy to go along with ever since. Other, what we might call lesser doctrines and miracles have been just that: lesser. The nature miracles, healings, exorcisms related in the texts of faith are not something I dwell on greatly. They are important parts of the story related by the biblical authors, but who knows what underlies them? They point to greater truths, and so be it. “Jesus is Lord,” as Paul emphasized, is the creed that matters, and all else is subservient to that.

But the word “lord,” I’ve come to learn over the years, is of immeasurable importance. That is why I refuse to have it replaced by less important descriptors, like “liberator,” in the collects and other prayers of our liturgy. Sure, our Lord liberates us, and many things beside, but he liberates out of his Lordship, and it is the claim that he is Lord that was the creed by which he lived and died and by which his followers were prepared to live and die.

Paul saw, though, that the resurrection of Jesus was, in the vernacular, the proof of the pudding. Lots of people were executed, especially under tyrannical regimes like that of the Romans. They still are. Almost certainly this day in Myanmar and Afghanistan and countless other sites of oppression activists will lose their lives for justice. Their lives I believe will be caught up into the Resurrection hope of Jesus. Some will be long-remembered. Most will be soon-forgotten. And if that is the whole of the story then we are, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, more to be pitied than all people.

More to be pitied because we have staked our lives on the pie in the sky, and the pie like Jimmy Webb’s infamous cake, left out in the rain, has crumbled into nothingness. It probably didn’t do us any harm, but as Paul acerbically notes elsewhere, we might just as well have lived by a less demanding creed: eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. But resurrection? I can’t prove it. It belongs in that category that Van Morrison called “inarticulate speech of the heart.” It is heart language, unscientific language, but language that can seize and transform our entire lives from the inside out. And however dark life has sometimes been, I wouldn’t be without it (though I don’t wish to be tested too much on that one: “do not bring us to the test,” as one translation of Jesus’ great prayer puts it).

Paul as it happens held to another central doctrine of faith. Perhaps it’s one I’ll go into in more depth anther time, but it’s another that I believe we jettison at great risk. The doctrine of judgement has been abused throughout two thousand years of Christian preaching, turned into a text of terror. It is a text of comfort. It is not “turn or burn,” but “turn and be loved.” It is a doctrine that invites us to turn from a world in which we see only, at best, through a glass darkly, to one in which we see God face to face, know the eternity of God’s embrace, the surety of divine love for us and for all who we love (and countless we do not!). It is a moment and an unseen eternity in which we are asked not about material or more tangible aspects of our being, but about our ability and practice of love. Do we show, have we shown the kind of love that Joseph (no saint, incidentally) shows as he forgives his brothers? Do we show, have we shown the kind of love that forgives those who wrong us, forgives even our enemies?

I don’t. But that’s not the end of the story of judgement, for Christianity has long taught the plea, the judgement that we are seen not as we stand alone, but as we stand in Christ. It is, incidentally no coincidence that my favourite hymn is “And now O Father, Mindful of the Love”: “only look on us as found in him,” wrote William Bright. He added incidentally, for those of us who often fret for loved ones, those poignant lives,

And then for those, our dearest and our best,

by this prevailing presence we appeal:

O fold them closer to thy mercy’s breast.”

I happen to believe that includes all people, but that is a conversation for another time. For now it is all we need to know that on that Day, whatever that means, the God, belief in whom has at sometime captured you and me, will murmur only, “my friend, have you loved?” Our answer, is that and must be that of William Bright, or more correctly that of the Jesus who beckons us come: “only look on us as found in him.”

And however strange that faith in Jesus may sometimes seem, I am glad that 42 years and 50 weeks ago I stumbled into the company of the poet who wrote

They shall praise thee and suffer in every generation

With glory and derision.

                                    T. S. Eliot, “A Song for Simeon.”