the scream of a rose?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and St Martin's, Duntroon

TWENTIETH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August 14^th) 2022

 

READINGS:

 

Isaiah 5: 1-7

Psalm 80: 1-3, 8-18

Hebrews 11: 29 – 12: 2

Luke 12: 49-56

 

 

I’ve probably not confessed to you previously that I count myself, and know some who would agree with my counting, among the word’s most neurotic people.

Nor have I, I suspect mentioned either to you or as far as I know to any other congregation in nearly 40 years of preaching that I was, like many young boys of my generation, a fan of James Bond. I went along the terribly English trajectory, from Famous Five to Biggles to Bond – and on to Alistair McLean. Then, mercifully I finally grew up and became a student of literature, including the post-colonial writings that were (rightly) most scathing about my childhood fodder. And Salman Rushdie too, God be with him. But perhaps it was Fleming’s Bond that did me the most psychological damage. I refer not to 007’s dreadfully chauvinistic and utilitarian attitudes to women, but to a traumatic scene in Moonraker.

Let me explain.

I don’t want to be sexist but I’m going to be, accidentally of course, for those of you who grew up without the reading advantages of a Y-Chromosome, reading perhaps Anne of Green Gables or whatever. Let me introduce you to Gala Brand, probably the only Bond Girl to escape his toxic masculinity (see, I am writing in the 2020s). Ms Brand resists, escapes Bond’s narcissistic overtures. But I’m not going to read the escape passage in a sermon. It’s online!

So no … here's Bond and Brand presumably having together sipped a tequila on the rocks, shaken not stirred. Gala apparently picks something called a bee orchid, ophrys apifera, the British orchid that famously imitates a lady bee and traps a Mr Bee. A honey trap with a difference.

“You wouldn’t do that if you knew that flowers scream when they are picked,” said Bond.

Gala looked at him. “What do you mean?” she asked, suspecting a joke.

“Didn’t you know?” He smiled at her reaction. “There’s an Indian called Professor Bhose, who’s written a treatise on the nervous system of flowers. He measured their reaction to pain. He even recorded the scream of a rose being picked. It must be one of the most heartrending sounds in the world. I heard something like it as you picked that flower.”

Ever since reading that passage when I was about 12 I have been traumatised at the thought of picking of cutting flowers. Ask Anne!

Fleming’s scene was actually based on the research of a nineteenth century Indian botanist, but that need not detain us. My story – and hopefully soon if not already the link to our Jesus scene will be apparent – is all about me. For now.

I loathe picking flowers.

But it is a fine thing to have a wife. Ever so patiently Anne has set about rewriting my clearly tortured psyche. She has not even charged therapist fees – just mandated that occasionally I overcome my phobia and reach with secateurs for a rose.

Unlike James Bond I so far have never heard a scream.

None of which is my point. Because this is a Jesus story, not about me after all. For centuries, long before Ian Fleming, we have read too many Jesus-sayings with the scream of a rose reverberating in our spiritual ears. For too long we have heard the scenes about branches cut off and thrown into the fire as if we were hearing about Fleming’s mythical rose.

An angry God. Not the God revealed on the cross and in the life of Jesus, the God of Jesus Christ who in him reaches out to bring hope to the disadvantaged, the mourning, the bereaved and the suffering.

So not the scream of the rose, as it is picked or the branch and cast into the fires. Are the fires the Jesus message? Or should we hear instead the relief of the plant, relief as the dead weight of decaying branches is taken from its metaphorical shoulders and cast aside?

Fire in the hands of story-teller Luke is far more often about purging – from which word, incidentally, we get “purgatory – and refining than about some eternal torture. Later  we will see flames of Pentecostal empowerment. Friendly flames. God’s flames.  

So what if we realise that the branches cast into the fire are no more than the toenails that we trim and sweep with relief into a rubbish bin? What if we realize that the fires of most of the images used by Jesus are not the punitive fires of eternal torment, a pretty useless form of punishment as no good comes of it for anyone. No: isntead the purging, cleansing fires of divine love, of healing, of restoration to the full and eternal potential with which you and I and all human beings were breathed into existence in the first place?

When Jesus wishes the fires were already kindled, he does so not out of some sneering malice, but because Jesus, the embodiment of divine love, longs for the final and eternal healing. He longs for the moment when all of us, and all who we love and pray for, and all from whom we are divided by our faith-decisions, yes, but sometimes by less virtuous elements too, have been relieved of the burdens and the scar tissues of our lives, and are eternally reunited in the inextinguishable blaze of divine love and glory.