get out of gaol? yeah nah

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and  St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday (July 2^nd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 24: 34-38, 42-49, 58-67

Psalm: Song of Songs 2: 8-13

Rom 7: 15-25a

Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30

 

Confession time: Matthew is my least favourite of the four gospel-accounts. He seems to me to be the most ready to cite Jesus-sayings that cast us and almost everyone into pits of hell fire and destruction. The little chunk missed out in this passage is precisely one of those glimpses: woe to you because you didn’t repent.

I’m not one for cutting out pesky passages, and part of my love of being a lectionary-based church is that I have to grapple with them – and together with you, in step with you, do so every few years. I never look back, incidentally, on past sermons: I have changed, you have changed, the world has changed, though as it happens last time I was with you wasn’t a Matthew year anyway.

But what do we do with pesky passages? Cherry pick? I think not. Leaving that bit out, that bit about woe, is a little naughty … “it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon than for you.” Tyre and Sidon were destroyed by God, according to the legends, in reality with the help of horrendous military action on the part of, first and unsuccessfully Nebuchadnezzar, and subsequently, brutally, by Alexander the Great.

The frenetic global warming we are experiencing, exponential as it is, may one day be seen likewise to be the work – or punitive permission – of a Creator God disappointed with the way humanity has looked after this beautiful planet and ignored a century of increasing warning signs.  

Dig deep enough beneath the modern lands of Lebanon and you’ll find Tyre and Sidon. But they are almost a side bar to our Matthew passage. Here Jesus simply laments, and the Creator God he dares to call Abba, Father, also laments. We played the flute and you did not dance. We sang a dirge and you did not mourn.  

Humanity is not just shuffling deck chairs on a sinking planet, but partying while we can. Humanity’s response to the majesty of creation, has been not to dance but to fell virgin forests, to fill waterways with plastic petrochemical sludge – you know the general scene. It’s not pretty, and neither you nor I have a get out of gaol card.

All of which would be bad news. Indeed some of the charlatan churches exacerbate the bad news with a “beam me up Scotty theology”: don’t worry about planet earth, because God is going to whisk us out of here. I think not. The sun shines and the rain falls on just and unjust alike.

So is this all no more than fatalistic bad news? As Paul often says, a little more comprehensible than much of what he says, “by no means.”

For Jesus does not leave us stewing in the morass of human detruction. He invites us, as it were to enter the manaakitanga, the welcome, the hospitality of God. He generates within us a yearning akin to the erotic yearning that is the stuff of our psalm this day. He generates God-connection which gives us the motivation and the strength to rise above – not outside, but above, in the sense of finding the strength to believe and hope despite all darkness, even during all darkness. 

That’s the essence of “come to me, all you who are weary.”

So it’s not “beam me up Scotty,” though we will all be beamed out in some way at some time at the closure of our lives, but come with me, be with me, know me as we ride through this morass together.

And the added bonus that we have known deep in our hearts since the first Easter – though we  may often forget it – is that the one who bids us “come” has already trodden the track, and is in that way infinitely equipped to take us and all who we love through to that invisible other side that the author of Revelation calls a new heaven and a new earth, and which we can never understand.