When How Long Ends

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (February 6^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

 

Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)                                          

Psalm 138

1 Corinthians 15: 1-11

Luke 5:1-11

 

One of the great, archetypal human cries is the cry “how long.” This can be the all too human cry when we face our own death and the death of those we love. The answer to that cry can never be more than a guess, filled with complexity, and to be honest pastoral training would tell us that the best answer is neither more nor less than a gentle touch, a squeeze of the hand, a hug, ort the sharing of a tear, whatever the recipient is comfortable with. The cry is somewhat universalised at the moment as even we, until now so quarantined in the south, watch the onward tread of the Omicron variant and wonder how long we have before the mayhem, mild or manic, spreads amongst us.

To some extent that is a different thing. To some extent. We’ve done our best as a nation, we hope, and we must leave the rest to nature, science, politics and above all (for us) God. And it’s of course to that dimension, the unseen, unprovable dimension, that we are forced by our readings (as it should be). The God-dimension. The same dimension that invades Isaiah’s life and challenges, leads him to speak a word of divine wrath to his people. “Through the wrath of the Lord the land is darkened” he will soon say to his complacent people. It’s not a way to win popularity stakes.

Yet in the present we have real parallels with Isaiah’s world. We have a form of American Christianity that has swept the world with obscene distortions of the gospel message – shortly in New Zealand with will have, if organizers have their way, a mission from Franklin Graham, that poor manipulator of his father Billy’s name, coming to spread his hate-filled version of Christianity here. False prophets like Franklin Graham and others who have so distorted the gospel message that former president Trump becomes to them a servant of God, these manipulators of faith represent precisely the corruption of religion that Isaiah dared to oppose. He did so in fear and trembling: who was he to speak out against the popular religious fervour (and self-satisfaction) of his time? But he was God’s chosen and dares to speak God’s disturbing priorities of peace and justice, to foretell God’s desecration of their land – to announce as it were their own version of Omicron sweeping through their lives and no immediate relief from a blight and a plight that could last for centuries if God so wished.

The harsh fact for those who believe that faith in God is some sort of insurance policy protecting us from ill is that the sun shines and the rain pours on just and unjust alike. Those whoso twist Christian forms that believers expected to be airlifted out of apocalyptic trial – whether they be pandemic or rising sea levels or troops massing on each side of the Ukrainian border, these are matters that were ever thus, and no divine airlift is promised to followers of any particular religious belief, Christian or otherwise. Famous passages about rapture, about graves opening and releasing their dead, about farmers buzzed up from their fields as others are infamously left behind, these are not about a get out of gaol for the elect. They are profound passages – like the entire book of Isaiah, or for that matter Revelation – that simply promise that God’s will will be done, that God’s “yes,” God’s final word of justice and compassion will eventually reverberate through the universes, and our death and the deaths of those we love will not have the final say.

This does not mean that those who claim, as we do, to be followers of Christ, are privileged, but neither does it mean that we are left abandoned in an empty universe. Again and again figures like the psalmist or indeed Paul the Apostle urge us to maintain our link with our creating, redeeming, hope-bringing God. We are urged to pray – I don’t think it matters how – and to offer, as we will say later in the liturgy “our thanks and praise.” The great disciplines of liturgy can help us with that, which is in part why we continue this stylized habit of eucharist, this holy communion with God, with ancestors and saints, with one another, Sunday by Sunday and other times besides. Give thanks, says St. Paul, in all circumstances, however gritted our teeth, however dark the horizon seems. Cling to God – and when that no longer works, permit God to cling to you, to me, in all the confusion and doubt -as well as occasional joy and laughter – that surrounds us.

Above all, says Paul, be a clinging-to-resurrection people. Because of that, and because of the divine judgement enwrapped in that, we must strive to be a justice-people and a compassion-people and a love people too. We will not ever make sense of this mystery. We can’t. But it can make sense of us. The hope of the God who brings light out of darkness and life out of death can cling to us, no matter what we are feeling, and even as often as we let God down. Cling to it, says Paul, for without the hope of resurrection we are more to be pitied than all people. Pitied because, having the light, we obliterate the light. One day, one immeasurable day when light shines for all creation and all humanity, at the end of the How Long,  we will be aware that to darken the light with our small minds and knowledges and doubts was futile. So Paul reminds us, firmly to cling to resurrection hope, and to let it cling to us.

To cling to that, and to let ourselves be encouraged by those who have been inspired in dark times and in light, in trouble and in joy, to bear witness through our attitudes and actions and words, to the one who is resurrection hope.