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.