SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH
OAMARU
NINETEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August
7th) 2022
Isaiah 1: 1, 10-20
Psalm 50: 1-8, 22-23
Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16
Luke 12: 32-40
If I could underscore a
key takeaway from our gospel reading it would be the opening words of this
section of the addresses from Jesus. “My friends, do not be afraid.” There are
though a couple of problems in saying this. One is that humankind cannot bear
very much reality. Psychologists remind us of the degree to which we block out
of the consciousness dimensions of our existence thoughts that are too overbearing … philosophers
in fact will often speak of angst.
How do I understand angst?
It is in reality no more than a German word meaning “anxiety,” that same root word that has been peppered through our Jesus sayings for the last several
weeks. My friends, says Jesus, do not be anxious. And yet surely it's utterly human to be so. For the many of us who have children and grandchildren, what sort
of a world are we leaving behind? And while every generation has doubtless
voiced this question there are for our generation some particularly severe
indicators. My weekly mantra of rising tides, plastic sludge, shaky economics,
and as French author Céline once almost put
it, the cancer that is climbing through our – and he named a vulnerable part of
the human body – even now.
So yeah, we could be
anxious. But the anxiety that leads us to act like possums in the headlights is
on the whole pretty useless. Frozen between fight and flight is utterly
unproductive. And as fight and flight are probably equally impossible we are left
frozen unless we receive outside help. For some that will be the motivational
push of friends around us sharing a common concern, a common anxiety, and
generating enough corporate energy to begin to bite the bullet. For us it can
be that, but it can also be that unseen power, that dynamism of the one we
might call the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of Pentecost. Probably we should
hope that it is a both/and. The both of the Spirit of Jesus and the and of the motivational friendship of those with whom we mix our lives operate in tandem to
help us address the future. And in that teamwork maybe there is something a bit
like fight, fight the destructive forces at work on our planet, fight the
larceny, the theft of a future for our children and our grandchildren. Most of us, it is true, prefer to be lovers than fighters, but perhaps when we realised
that the future is dire, we may feel the winds of God’s spirit filling us with
new energy, new gospel energy.
That though is only
half the story. The second problem in encountering this reading in 2022 is that
we are probably not particularly anxious. We are better at blocking out anxiety
then my last few statements would indicate. We have blotted thoughts of global
implosion out of our consciousness altogether, except perhaps when some feisty floats
a few crazy ideas. We tend not to think that we could be hit by a meteorite at
any moment. We tend not to think that we are like goldfish in a blender. We put
those thoughts aside because to harbour them is to invite stress levels that are unsustainable. Nevertheless the rates of depression and even suicide in our
society suggest that the voices of gloom do break through our protection
mechanisms from time to time. In whatever form anxiety takes there are ways, metaphorical
or literal, in which we recognise that the Alpine fault might shift immanently,
even if we off and immediately replace that thought with the comfort that in
geological terms “immediate” can be a comfortingly long time.
If “immediate” is a
rather flexible formula, then life is much better if we're not Chicken Licken. The
sky probably won't fall on our head, as we subconsciously tell ourselves. Although
occasionally the niggling voice of insurance companies whisper to us that no
this property can't be insured any longer, or no, the current rate you or I are
paying for insurance is simply unsustainable in the face of risk assessment. In
that case perhaps Chicken Licken is more realistic than the infamous ostrich
with its head buried deeply in the sand.
And no, ostriches
don't do that.
But that's a
digression. Or is it? Anne and I have often owned chickens whose fight or flight
response is that glorious one of squatting carefully down on the ground, hoping
that the swooping hawk won't see them. It is a forlorn hope, certainly for
chickens, but even for ostriches when faced with a careering and hungry lioness.
Even flight is better than squat.
But where does this
Jesus saying about fright, about flight, about frozenness leave us? There are, it
seems to me, one or two keys to take from this teaching of Jesus. In the first
place Jesus does mandate readiness. The disaster readiness advocates are
correct, for every household needs supplies for the onset of a crisis. In faith too we need supplies: supplies of grace as it were, supplies of those elements
that Paul calls “fruit of the Spirit.” These are gained only by immersion in
the disciplines of faith. if the master comes, suggests Jesus, we must be marked
by love, the costly love born of discipline, by joy, the deep joy of knowing
God in all circumstances, by kindness, by patience. To radiate these is
not an accident but the results of deep spirit-work. Yet we can enlist the aid
of the Spirit to nurture these fruit within us, by prayer, by exposure to
scripture, by learning, as Paul put it, to give thanks in all circumstances. By
these disciplines we can be transformed, sometimes with some little pain
along the way, into the likeness of Christ.
But in the second
place, though, while we can never be nonchalant about our faith and about the
temporary nature, the fragile thread, of our existence and all humanity’s
existence, we must not despair either. For in this Jesus-parable is an
impossible note of grace. The abiding image of God in this parable is not of a
punitive master, but, if we can generate some degree of readiness, of a master
who does what most gods do not do. He kneels, as the Ghanaian hymn puts it, at
the feet of his friends. No self-respecting God of the first century would do
such a thing.
On the other hand no
self-respecting God of any century would permit him or her self to be crucified.
Would they?
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