U-turn

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

THIRD SUNDAY of the EPIPHANY (January 22^nd) 2023

 

READINGS:

 

Isaiah 9: 1-14

Psalm 27: 1, 4-9

1 Corinthians 1: 10-18

Matthew 4:12-23

 

 

 

The great message of Christianity, often either highlighted or parodied in cartoons, is encapsulated in Jesus’ famous words “repent and be baptised.”

As is quite well known, repentance, if we break down the Greek word, is a radical reorientation, a reversal, as we put it in the Ash Wednesday liturgy, “turn away from sin.” But the problem, or a problem, With the Church is that whenever we say the word “sin” we are either saying or being heard to say the word “sex.”

There is little doubt that sex can be sinful. So can a lot of things. I maintain that sex becomes sinful only when it is exploitative, the predatory, reckless, or treacherous. Mine is a fairly liberal view, but I think that there are more important issues on which to take a conservative stance. I would include economic and other forms of justice, environmental, for want of a better word, “husbandry,” perhaps something like “neighbourliness,” or “community building,” even the failure to prioritise God and the worship of God, the connection with God, letting God slip to a neglected backburner, these are greater sources of sin then sex.

For that just happens to be the first of the Ten Commandments, A detail often forgotten as bible-bashers crying out for the re-introduction of the commandments in school syllabuses. It is at the heart of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. in the end it all comes down to the word I just used: reorientation.

For we are called to re-orient ourselves. It is a lifelong journey, and the biblical idea is that it is not possible to undertake successfully without the aid of God’s Christ-bearing Spirit. It is our calling, first as human beings made in the image of God, and secondly as human beings seeking to serve Jesus, and it is a lifelong calling. We tend, as Saint Paul knew only too well, to fall short of that calling, but we are given an escape clause. That clause, that command, is to honest self examination, self evaluation, and as Isaiah makes clear, reprioritization so that the directives of God are foremost in our consciousness. As part of that we are to lift our eyes above the earthbound, lift our eyes and our hearts as it were to the heavens, and there praise the God who we cannot see, but whose signature is all around us, and whose breath energises our lives. We are called in other words to lift our eyes from ourselves, to live for others, to pray for both ourselves and others, and above all as the song put it, to turn our eyes upon Jesus.

It is not, as I often find myself saying, rocket science.

hearing God?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

SECOND SUNDAY of the EPIPHANY (January 15^th) 2023

 

READINGS:

Isaiah 49: 1-7

Psalm 40: 1-11

1 Corinthians 1: 1-9

John 1: 29-42

 

If you are very discerning – and I’m sure you are – you will notice that there is much in the readings on this Sunday of the Three Year Cycle about calling, about being chosen, about chosenness. Isaiah, like the author of Psalm 139, has a deep sense of being called long before actually arriving on the scene. The early Christians used the passage from Isaiah – and that of Psalm 139 – to emphasize the self-awareness, what scholars like to call the Messianic awareness of Jesus, and I’m sure they’re correct. I prefer to avoid seeing Jesus as some superhuman God-Man wandering around knowing everything that is about to befall him. I feel such a burden would make him utterly unlike the humans whose lives he came to infiltrate, and utterly in need of truckloads of aspirin from the future to get through each angst-filled day as his end drew closer.  but I have no doubt that he had a growing sense of the hand and direction of God on his oh-so-human life.

Isaiah described a servant of God – perhaps himself or another prophetic figure, perhaps the Hebrew people themselves – in terms of being set aside and called by God. The Christians saw his words as deeply applicable to the life and work of Jesus, and in turn their own life and work in following Jesus. I think they were profoundly right. I also think it is profoundly dangerous at at least two levels.

I have never heard voices in the night. Perhaps I am a particularly bad Christian, but the only exception to that observation is the drunken voices of passers-by when I have lived near students or a pub or both. I am even suspicious – and this will offend many in the church – who speak in terms of hearing the voice of God, the voice of Jesus. The directive urges of God, yes, though I think the verb “heard” has to be used far more in the sense of “felt” or “assessed” or “discerned” than that terribly aural sense of “hearing.” I’m even somewhat wary of hymns such as “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say,” unless we emphasize that hearing is not auditory. The psych wings of our western world hospitals are too full of those who hear God’s voice, and the pews of our churches – or perhaps the absent presences on our pews – are too full of those who lament that they, like me, have never heard this celestial voice. I do confess that when asked how I ended up as a priest, I sometimes answer that I wasn’t any good for anything else. Psychologists and other therapists would rush me to a couch and series of sessions of self-belief, but they’d be misguided. God’s nudge for me to offer for and subsequently remain in ordained ministry was no different to God’s call for me not to be a linesman or an accountant or a nuclear physicist. There are other roles in life I think I could have undertaken, and there are roles I definitely should not and could not have taken, but the nudges of God led me to this point.

In many ways we’ve lost the sense of vocation. Not the sacramental vocation particularly but vocation itself. The nudges of personality and circumstances and other factors that, for example, careers guidance personnel seek to offer to school leavers are every bit as much a part of vocational guidance and the strange happenstances that led me to this equally strange career. The vocation to be a truckie, which I envy, a policeperson, which I considered, a broadcaster which I have dabbled in … your vocations including the vocations of those who chose what we might call non-stipendiary parenthood: all these can be the nudgings of God. Nursing, teaching, retail, manufacturing, whatever. And, hopefully, in following those nudgings we find a deep sense of fulfilment, and find ways, if we happen to continue to believe in God, to continue to serve the gospel God entrusts to us.

And what is that? I suggest that it is neither more nor less than to continue to open ourselves up to the possibilities of the life God gives us, to thank God for those possibilities, and to do our flawed, or as I always say, “stumbling” utmost to see in us and whatever our vocation might be some glimpse of the eternities, the eternal values of love and justice and compassion and all those things Paul calls “fruits of the Spirit.”  God likes us to rumour those values in the world, so that others’ lives may be touched by the warmth of God’s love.

It's that simple, really. And if we ask God nicely, God sends that mysterious energy who we call Spirit to aid us on our Christ-filled way.