because of light and love

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

30^th ORDINARY SUNDAY 

(October 29^th) 2023

 

 READINGS

Deuteronomy 34: 1-12

Psalm 90: 1-6, 13-17

1 Thessalonians 2: 1-18

Matthew 22:24-36

 

I find it valuable when reading the scriptures of our faith to make some attempt to step into the headspace, even the heartspace of the central characters. The scriptures were written of course in a age vastly different to our own, stylistically, but on the whole humans are humans, and much of our journey is common ground. We are born, we learn, we love, we grieve. We breathe. We cease to breathe. And here, however stylistically written, we find an account of a great leader, an influencer in ways our contemporary Tik Tok influencers can only dream of, entering into death, that final mystery beyond all our understandings.

Like so-called Dives in Jesus’ famous tale of Lazarus and justice-based judgement, I would genuinely welcome someone popping back from death for a cuppa and a chin wag about the actualities of eternity. It doesn’t happen. As Jesus hints in that story, the human mind would pop with the complexities of never-ending love and life. Rationally I’m with the author of the final chapter of Deuteronomy. Moses breathed his last and the story, though of course not the influence, ends. At first it’s even where our psalm takes us: “like grass which is green, but by nightfall is withered up.”

That of course is the rationalist in me. But the end of the Moses story is not the end of the God story. there is an other dimension that seizes me and drives me on despite all that I see and rationalize around me. But hold that thought for a moment.

But the psalmist does try to take us further. In God there is no unrighteousness, and though the psalmist speaks only of the glimpse of sap and new life in chronologically weary bodies – for resurrection theologies were not as yet part of Hebrew understandings – the psalm closes with bold hope in a God in whom is no unrighteousness. That later Hebrew of Hebrews, Paul of Tarsus, will come to put it another way, trumpeting from the depths of his own journey that death itself, that universal unrighteousness, will be destroyed. Or as the great holy man John Donne put it, still more centuries later,

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

And so into contexts of grief and loss, individual or as horrific and collective as mass shootings in Maine (or Christchurch), or wholesale slaughter in Israel and Gaza, or Ukraine and Russia, Yemen, Sudan, or countless other killing fields, in such contexts we dare to stutter words of hope, and to reach out hands of compassion (and of justice). Paul did that, too, as he wrote to suffering churches, or sometimes complacent and cosy churches, in his ministry. That again is why we need to step into the shoes of the biblical characters.

To speak words of hope is a least one aspect of the love of God, the total love of God of which we are agents. Terribly fallible agents, but God’s totally fallible agents nevertheless. I suspect no hand would go up if we were asked who has loved God with all of heart and mind and soul. No hand should go up. That’s Paul’s point over and again when he talks of sin: all he says, fall short. It’s what Jesus addresses when in the Fourth Gospel he promises an advocate, the one we call Holy Spirit, who can and will pick us up each time we stumble.

Which brings me back to Moses. That great influencer who had no Tik Tok. He got some things wrong in his leadership. That’s why, symbolically at least, he reaches no further than Pisgah – which probably meant, incidentally, no more than “the highest place.” Whatever dwelt beyond the horizon remains inexplicable. But such was the mystery and the awe that Paul and others would experience centuries later that they would proclaim, to borrow Paul’s words, “If we have hoped in Christ only in this life, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

The story of Moses ends not with  TS Eliot’s bang or whimper, or Dylan Thomas’ dying of the light, but with a glimpse of that which is beyond words, the promise that Moses glimpses as his lights go out and a brighter light begins.

And because of light and love, though also because of judgement, justice, forgiveness and reconciliation, we are called to live and proclaim that light even though all many of us manage is a slightly self-conscious mumble. Christ is risen, the first fruits, proclaimed the early church, and so must we.