sometimes with words

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
33rd ORDINARY SUNDAY 
(November 19^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS

Judges 4: 1-7
Psalm 123
1 Thessalonians 5: 1-11
Matthew 25: 14-30

 

I don’t know about you, but every time I read or hear read that passage (Matthew 25: 14-30) I find my ears ringing with that favourite phrase of Matthew, “wailing and gnashing of teeth.”

At the very beginning of what we might call the theology of preaching is, or should be, the question “where is the grace?” or, or perhaps and, “where is the good news?” in the selected scripture, in the delivered sermon.

I stand in fear and trembling.

I want to break open that reverberating sentence, those gnashing teeth,  with a thought that I heard tucked away in Bishop Steve’s reflections on this passage in our Gospel Conversations this past week. 

Many years ago, to digress for a moment, Vietnam vets wore patches or bumper stickers with words to the effect of “when I die I do not need to go to hell, I’ve already been there.” It has seemed to me ever since that there is something profoundly theological in that statement, whether or not the carriers of the slogan meant it to be so.

The scriptures are a complex collection of writings, and in the brutal game of text wars, which is a spiritually obscene game, scriptures can be used to prove almost anything. But as a big picture observer, I tend to emphasize that broad overview of where the scriptures take us. With regards to something called hell they take us from countless Old Testament texts in which no consideration of post-life is given at all, to lurid presentations of Gehenna, a place perhaps like the peat swamp fires of northern Russia or the vivid imagination of Dante, a place of eternal and relentless burning.

I think we choose our hell. Psalm 139 reminds us that even there God awaits us, if we but open our eyes.

In the writings particularly of Paul, and in many of the attitudes, if not the vivid metaphorical stories, of Jesus I find the suggestion that the Vietnam vets were right.

It wasn’t Vietnam, but I made the mistake of watching Saving Private Ryan before I went to bed the other night. Fortunately I can sleep through anything once my head hits the pillow, but in those infamous opening scenes on Omaha Beach, it is very clear that many of the victims of war, and indeed a myriad other forms of human abuse, have seen the depth of hell. As they are this day in Gaza, in Ukraine, and the Israelis saw when besieged by Hamas, as women see in Afghanistan, and freedom fighters in Myanmar. Each day.  And many elsewheres, too. 

Bishop Steve I think hinted, as he dealt with the gnashing of teeth of this penultimate Jesus parable, mused on the ways in which we choose our own hells. Though in war, tragically, they are chosen for us. In hellholes of domestic violence they are chosen for us. Even in illness they are chosen for us, and we must cling to the slivers of light and hope that we can find. While some find some light others will not. In Private Ryan they did not. 

Particularly in his opening of the remarkable letter to the Romans, Paul indicates that, exceptional circumstances aside, humanity chooses its own hell. We allow ourselves to be given over to the implications of a judgementless universe, to existence devoid of judgement, of values, or hope, of vision beyond little more than immediate gratification. We choose our hells.

Sometimes they choose us, of course. But the God of the Cross, the God of Good Friday, whispers the profound words of Easter and does not leave us in any hells. We won't always find him, but he finds us. That's why the military chaplains kept going on Omaha Beach, even though bibles will sometimes wash up in the blood-stained waves. 

In his parable Jesus, as he speaks of talents, speaks of the opportunities and the abilities we have been given. He puts to us not a guilt trip, but the simple and really rather sensible question, “have we made enough of them?” Without going into the mathematics and vast capitalist economics of his parable he simply indicates that there are those who in the encounter of gospel help and gospel hope will spend lives enflamed and enriched by divine love, sharing, even propagating divine love. Those who bury it away in the depths of dark and damp ground will not. 

The sun rises on us, love surrounds us. We need only seek to replicate that, duplicate that, hand that immeasurable benefit on to touch the lives of others in any way we can. When we can. Thus we proclaim the reign of God (sometimes we might use words). That to me sounds a whole lot better than gnashing our teeth as we bury God’s goodness in the sand.

Amen.

v