this is your moment

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

SEVENTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (February 19^th) 2023

 

READINGS:

 

Leviticus 19: 1-2, 9-18

Psalm 119: 33-40

1 Corinthians 3: 10-11, 16-239

Matthew 5: 38-48

 

 

It fascinates and saddens me that we followers of Jesus, the radical teacher of grace, have spent so long making the doors of faith difficult to open. Jesus the compassionate and unjudgmental judge, who welcomed the outsider, is the wone Christians claim to follow. Yet the Christian community has spent so many centuries setting up new barriers, replicating those that Jesus, and his very different followers Matthew and Paul, each in their own way spent an adult lifetime trying to pull down. Like the scribes and the pharisees we have spent so much time erecting not the porous boundaries of Jesus’ mission, but obscene walls, rules and regulations that make it so difficult for the lost and lonely to find comfort.

And of course I generalize. But our track record isn’t brilliant.

If you heard my Gospel Conversations this past week you will have heard that message loud and clear: too often we are a community of exclusion, not embrace. You would have hear Peg Riley’s tears, as she alluded to occasions in her life when the Christian communities have sought to exclude her. You would have heard Damon Plimmer’s measured reflection emphasising that the Christ who said we are salt, are a “good enough people” as I put it last week, without trying to find airs and graces to better ourselves, and worse to better those who might put a toe in our doors.  You would have heard Anne van Gend rejoice in the hand of God acknowledge the hand of God in our often clumsy attempts , turning darkness into light in the lives of those we cross paths with in our daily rhythms and routines, even when we don’t feel we’ve done very well.

As we look at our struggling church and churches it is only natural to wonder where we lost our people, where we went, arguably, wrong and lost touch with society. Yet we as individuals and collectively have done our best to put a decent foot forward; imperfect though we are, says Damon Plimmer, we are God’s imperfect people.

No doubt at this stage in the life of our parish we are all terribly, painfully aware of the frailty of our existence. Where is God in this? This struggle, apparently a losing one, to keep our metaphorical doors open (because our literal doors closed years ago). Where is God when we’re tired?

Of course over the years we’ve made errors. We have through history turned people away sometimes violently. In more recent decades we have still, while not emulating the Spanish Inquisition, nevertheless turned people away for not being Anglican enough, clean enough, straight enough, musical enough, in one dreadful case that I will never forget, pakeha enough. Clergy in particular have paraded their biases and pretensions. Don't get me going on that!

Yet paradoxically there is a deeper sense in which God does say to you “well done good and faithful servant.” Against the odds in a post-Christian world you have dragged yourself out Sunday by Sunday, maybe other days too. You have cleaned, welcomed, sung, played, even prayed! Believe me, I have not been a particularly good at loving my enemies – and in my small and unimportant way I seem to make a few.

Yet the paradoxical message that we have missed so badly over the centuries is simple. You and I are who God has put here, on this day, in this lifetime, for God’s unseen purpose. Mistakes, dear God, yes. But again and again God says, “Come on, let us start again, let us try again.” And God says to us also, “you do not see whose lives you have touched, who's darknesses have been turned into a lighter place through your being there.

I do not know your moments, and you do not know mine. I’m not even sure if I know mine or you know yours. But I know, looking back, that there have been moments when my life has been touched by the ridiculous serendipity of God, and I believe that we too may have been instruments in touching the lives of others. The irony in today’s readings is that we pretty much fall short of the demands of them all. But let’s put the guilt away. In all our failings, and there will be a few, there is a deeper text … you are who God has chosen for this journey and this moment in cosmic and human history.