breathe in ... breathe out

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St MARTIN’S, DUNTROON

SIXTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (July 17^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Amos 8: 1-12

Psalm 52

Colossians 1: 15-28

Luke 10: 38-42

 

 

As Jesus and his followers trudge steadily towards Jerusalem they are out of step – cognitive dissonance some people like to call it. Perhaps I'll call it pedestrian disharmony. Except that Jesus knows this – as always I would want to emphasise I do not mean this in a clairvoyant or crystal ball gazing way. No, but he knows that those trudging with him just don't get it. That’s why in Mark’s gospel Jesus keeps telling people to shut up. Shhh. “Wait and see” my mother used to say back in the days one used to get pudding or dessert, and wanted to know what it was we were having. Wait and see.

Wait and see says Jesus, the Cross and Good Friday and the extent to which God’s redeeming love unstoppably reaches.

So, just after a brief powerful lesson that we explored last week, who is my neighbour, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we find Jesus breaking through social barriers; visiting women, making one of them a disciple, and finding more unneighbourliness. The nuisance reality of jobs that have to be done and conflicts that must be resolved breaks in to the idealism of Jesus’ words at the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan, “Go and do likewise.”

But it is not an either/or but a both/and. Martha, my friend Nicki Colledge  reminded us in this past week’s Gospel Conversation, Martha sneaks off to Jesus to get him to sort her sister out. Don’t triangulate, it was suggested, is one incidental message of our scene today. Elsewhere in the scriptures Jesus does not say if you have an issue with your brother or your sister go and drag someone else into it, go and triangulate, but go to them and in love sort out your differences. Mind you, no one ever said that was easy, and I doubt that I practise what I preach. Nevertheless, let’s at least start our understanding of Mary and Martha by acknowledging that whinging to a third party is not the Way of the Cross.

But other questions are at issue here.

We have Jesus breaking through social barriers – he was and is no respector of inappropriate protocols. He here dares to permit Mary the role she no doubt demanded without any great subtlety, that of “sitting at the feet,” a sort of shorthand description Of becoming a disciple. Later the Church silenced stroppy women the likes of Mary, but while Jesus was around in the flesh no one who knew him dared contradict his radical professions and enactments of justice and love. Fortunately the silencing of women only lasted around 1950 years or so. But in this scene we are given a brief glimpse of the reign of God, the justice and equality by which, as Paul puts it, there is neither Greek nor Jew, male or female.

Mary’s life-choice is a dangerous one. For a period – who knows how long? – she dares to shut out the noise and the busyness of the world around her. It is not an either/or, the dishes still needs doing, the income needs earning, the cattle lead drenching, the lawns need mowing. But Mary dares to be still, no radio, no television, no computer, or whatever the white noise of the first century had to offer in order to drown out reality and the voice of God. She faced just the stillness of being. Being with Jesus in the flesh of course, which is not technically available to us. But untechnically, or to put it a better way, mystically, it is. Through that Third Person of the Trinity, Jesus is with us, and we too can pause, in creation, in liturgy, in dreaming.

To do so we have to learn to internalise that wonderful prayer, “Lord, it is night.” In this case it need not be night. Lord it is stillness time. Time just to be. “What is done is done, what is not done is not done. Let it be.” We need to find Mary’s stillness, and thus find the stillness of God, the still point of the turning world, a turning cosmos beyond worlds.

In liturgy – and Martha’s dinner was liturgy – we can at its best find leverage by which we may tap into that stillness. As our church infrastructure collapses it may be our gift to White Noise Generations, our own included: be still. Oh Lord hear our prayer. Be still and know the one the author of Colossians describes as “first born, through whom all things.” be still and find the love and peace and justice of God. Be still. In that stillness find a moment to give thanks. Even amongst the hurly burly of dishes to be done, cattle to be drenched, livings to be earned.

Be still and become Christ to those to whom he sends us. Go out to exhale the Christ who we have inhaled in the silence the Christ who has renewed us