light in darkness

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday 17 (July 30^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 29: 15-28

Psalm 128

Rom 8: 26-31, 38-39

Matthew 13: 31-43, 44-52

 

 

I’ve kind of ignored Paul for the last four weeks, but I want to spend a few moments of your time (and God’s) giving the somewhat prickly saint a little bit of oxygen. 

My comments on him in the pew sheet notes this month [not online, sorry!] have been a little underplayed, but that is not out of any disrespect. Paul is an intensely deep thinker, as well as a stern but compassionate pastor. His writings deserve and stand up to the deepest levels of analysis. 

One of the most precious books on my shelves is a commentary on Romans several centimetres thick and, I am told, weighing just under two kilos. Unfortunately at the moment it is languishing in Green Island.

Why, you might ask, should Paul matter? Some see him as the great destroyer of the accessibility of Jesus. 

I think not.

Paul is the great interpreter of the Jesus-event. Jesus taught primarily in simple, broad and generally rural brushstrokes, word-pictures that offer vast interpretive possibilities of the God-culture by which he calls us to live. We’ve been seeing that the past several weeks.

But the Jesus-event, as scholars have described it for decades now, is not just his teachings. Rapidly the followers of Jesus came to see that his teachings, his entire life, death and resurrection, were inseparable. They saw that the events surrounding what we would now call his incarnation were utterly consistent with his teachings, were the embodiment of his teachings, in a way that one else, Paul included, could claim. Jesus, enfleshed in humanity, could not see that.

And he didn't write anything after the resurrection (or any other time, it seems). 

In writing to the Romans Paul was digging deep into that Jesus-embodiment. Unlike his other letters, Romans was written to an “audience” many of whom, most of whom did not know Paul personally. The letter is not corrective surgery like some of his letters, or what scholars call exhortative, like a coach yelling encouragement from the sideline, like Philippians. It is more or less a compendium of his understanding of all that Jesus was – and is. 

So Romans in particular is not readily adapted to two minute slices on a Sunday morning, and warrants two kilogram commentaries. Maybe we’ll dig deeper some time down the track, over good coffee. But that must wait. I, like Paul, need to win your trust.

Amongst other things, and especially in the few verses we just read from Paul, he is taking the whole of the Jesus-event and telling us to be encouraged, that we are not alone, that we can make it through the trials that human beings experience, whether in the 60s of the first century, or the equally calamitous 20s of the twenty first century. He wrote – or spoke – from his own deep experience.

For Jesus, Paul is constantly emphasizing, is all that we need to know or can know of the God who holds us in resurrection light. 

The event of Jesus’ resurrection, Paul is adamant in his letters to the Corinthians, cast light over every human life. And, he further emphasizes, that resurrection-event is implanted in our lives by the Spirit of Pentecost, who is all that we can long to know of Jesus, embedded in our lives, closer than our breathing.

So in this Romans passage today he speaks of the Spirit who dwells within us through thick and thin, holding us in the mystery of resurrection light and hope that is beyond human comprehension, yet strangely, in small glimpses, not beyond the comprehension of our spirits. 

Those unsustainable but irreplaceable moments in which we sense the presence of the eternal.  whether that presence be glimpsed in the depths of the night sky, the tonalities of fine music (regardless of our taste!), the love of a friend, the strange hints of eternity in liturgy presented well. 

These moments, Paul tells the Romans and us, sustain us through the direst personal or cosmic crises. As it happens, we too can by the grace of God be vehicles, channels of these moments to those around us.

Paul should know! He was sustained through dark times. So, he emphasizes, are we.