SERMON PREACHED
AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH
SUNDAY 25th
SEPTEMBER, 1988
FEAST OF St MATTHEW (transferred)
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For banished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
(from “The Coming,” R.S. Thomas)
So often as I speak to people I am
confronted with the claim “You don’t have go to church to be good.” It appears
that this oft-repeated aphorism is a magic phrase designed to expiate years’ build
up of guilt for not being seen in the church to which we claim allegiance. And
of course, like so many aphorisms, it is true. You don’t have to
go to church to be good.
But also like so many aphorisms, it
misses the point altogether. For no one that I have ever heard has made the
claim that you do have to go to church to be good. Nor have I ever heard the claim that attending church
makes you good. Any such claim would be far from the teachings of Jesus, and
would stand in obscene contradiction to the words of our Lord that we heard
read in the gospel today.
For Christ made it abundantly clear
in his teachings that he did not see his ministry as one of praise to towards
those who prided themselves as being moral and upright religious citizens. Like
many notions that those who do not bother to read the gospels espouse, the
notion that Jesus was on about being good has no biblical basis. He came to
earth, he tells us, “… not to call the righteous, but sinners.” Certainly, he
told many who received his healing love,
“Go, and sin no more,” but perfection is far from human experience, and he is
telling his followers to strive to avoid participating in the world of sin in
which we are all caught up. He is setting an ideal, to which all of us will
fall short.
So if we claim that one does not have
to go to church to be good, we succeed blithely in missing the heart of the
gospel. We set up a religion based on good works, and not one that rejoices in
the salvation and love offered in Jesus Christ. We return to the religion of
the New Testament pharisees, not to the radically new teaching of the Messiah.
At the heart of Christianity is the
belief that we are quite simply unable to be good enough to win the favour of
God. This is, ironically, good news: if we are unable to attain salvation by
our own merits then there is no room for self-righteous pride – there is no
room for teacher’s pets in the Kingdom of God. When we realize that we can’t
earn our own salvation, then we join those people who, in the R. S. Thomas poem
with which I began, reach out their thin arms to the Cross. We recognise our
need of God’s forgiving and nurturing love, and turn to him in the knowledge
that we have no bribes to offer.
In our Lord’s words, then, we are
all in need of a physician. We are all in need of the forgiving love and
empowering Spirit of God. We attend church, then, not to prove that we are good,
or even to make ourselves good, but to discover and to acknowledge before God
that we are not good enough. In the words of the old Book of Common Prayer, words
that are somewhat over-the-top by contemporary standards,
we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness,
which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought word and
deed, against thy Divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and
indignation against us.
Having said that, however, I must
also emphasize that we are not called to remain wallowing in our wretched
state. We may well be convinced of, admit to, our sin, and so it should be. We
should also recognize the very real sense in which we are responsible for the
death of Jesus.
Who was the guilty, who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee;
’twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee;
I crucified thee.
But having made that connection we
must not remain there, must not continue to dwell on our guilt. Instead, we
must accept the healing the Physician has to offer us. In the words of the same
hymn as that just quoted,
Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay thee,
I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee.
(from Johann Heermann, “Ah Holy Jesu”)
As that hymnist emphasizes, no
small part of that movement from guilt must be the service of liturgy, worshipping
together with one another, together with Christians throughout the world, worshipping
God who is Father of the Christ-saviour. That is why we worship, why we
go to church. It is not so that we become good, or so we might look good in the
eyes of the community, but because we there encounter the God we love in a
particular manner.
Then, having worshipped God
together in the context of the eucharist, the great and catholic prayer of
thanksgiving, we are given further responsibility. We are called by God to go
out into the world to love and serve him and to love and serve his people.[1]
“Go in peace,” we say, “to love and serve the Lord.” We serve and worship him by
serving his broken people.
I was hungry, and you fed me.
I was thirsty, and you gave me drink
Says our Lord, and
For inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of
these my brethren you have done it unto me.
Having served and worshipped God in
church, then, we must go out and serve him by serving his people in the
community. And all people are his people. That is the point of connection that
I wish to leave you with today. For today we are celebrating the Feast of Saint
Matthew, and it was he who, in popular belief, came to be associated with the
tax collector, Levi, with whom Jesus went to eat early in his ministry.
Frequently, in Matthew’s account of
the gospel, we find Jesus mixing with the undesirables of society. It is to
that that we are called. We too are called to go into the dangerous places, the
places where so-called good people are not seen, and there proclaim by our
lives the love of Christ. We must be prepared, like Jesus, to get our hands
dirty, to risk the misunderstanding of friends and neighbours.
There, amidst whatever dirt and
misunderstanding we may find, we will begin to be able legitimately to speak of
the God of love.
We cannot proclaim or even know the
God of love until we have first discovered that he is indeed the God who is to
be found in the squalid – or in contemporary jargon the “uncool” – places. We
cannot have the Christ of Easter without the shame of Good Friday.
And one said
Speak to us of love
and the preacher opened
his mouth and the word God
fell out so they tried
again speak to us
of God but then the preacher
was silent reaching
his arms out but the little
children the one with
big bellies and bow
legs that were like
a razor shell
were too weak to come.
(from
“H’m”, R. S. Thomas)
It is to those that are beyond our
church walls, those who may not be attractive to us, that we are called to go
out. For we may be their only taste of the body and blood of Christ.
[1]
While in 1988 I worked hard to utilize inclusive language, and had done so
sitting at the feet of Enid Bennett of the Religious Studies Department of
Massey University, I had not yet considered the use of inclusive pronouns for
the Creator.
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