after the siren blows

 

SERMON PREACHED AT MELBOURNE GRAMMAR

LENT 3 (February 26^th, 1989)

 

Been beat up and battered ‘round
Been sent up, and I’ve been shot down
You’re the best thing that I’ve ever found
Handle me with care

Reputations changeable
Situations tolerable
Baby, you’re adorable
Handle me with care

I’m so tired of being lonely
I still have some love to give
Won’t you show me that you really care?

Everybody’s got somebody to lean on

 

Often when I have a few days to spare I will take myself for either on my motorbike or in my car out into the Outback of South Australia or New Southy Wales and explore some of the lonely roads available to me there. It is a way of renewing my batteries – and that of whichever vehicle I take – after too much running around, too much pressure. I usually return greatly refreshed, at the same time glad to be back with my family, but sad to return to the city, with all its smell and bustle.

Often after one of those trips someone will ask me whether I was lonely, alone out there in the wilds of inland Australia.

The question always surprises me. I admit that I have sometimes taken my dog with me, but I have done so more for security than for company. I have often felt utterly alone out there under the stars or the desert moon, but never lonely. There is a great difference.

On the other hand I have in life felt lonely. Take for example the moment when in an inter-house or inter-school cricket match a key player has lobbed a sitter of a catch in your direction and you have dropped it, and you trudge slowly back to your mark. Well the moment at a party when you realise that all your friends have paired off with a girl but you are not sure that you have the same get up and go. Or your friends may not care that you are there at all. Or more recently in life, the moments when I have walked into a hotel bar and realised that I am the only person not covered in tattoos, or perhaps the only person not wearing a tie.

Those are the moments of loneliness. Lonely in a crowd, they call it. The greatest one of all was when I was cox of my school VIII and we had finished and won the national championships, for which we had trained all season. Suddenly I realised that these people with whom I had trained hundreds of kilometres were no longer thrown together with me as my friends, and I ran the risk of being utterly alone. They might no longer need or want me. Lonely in a crowd.

Some members of that crew I have not seen for ten years now.[That was 1989 ... we've caught up many times since]

Then they spat in his face and hit him with their fists.

Others said as they struck him, 

“Prophecy to us, Christ …  who hit you then?”

 

It was the experience of Jesus also to be lonely, actually lonely and rejected by all his closest followers. Lonely in a crowd. Worse than dropping a catch, he was betrayed to death by one of his closest friends, a friend who no longer agreed with the way he was running, as it were, his campaign. And in tonight’s reading we hear of him being deserted even to die alone. Some desertion! In a matter of hours he would cry from the grizzly, fly-blown cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Yet that is precisely why I’m prepared to be a Christian. Somewhere in the tragedy that we will remember on Good Friday is the gospel, the good news that Christians have held dear ever since the first Easter. For as Christians we believe that the experience of Jesus is at the same time the experience of Father and Spirit, and that in some mysterious way all Godhead have experienced the pain of dying alone, after rejection on a fly-blown cross.

If this is true, and of course no one can conclusively prove that, but if this is true then the Jesus Christ of Christianity has something to offer not only to the beautiful people, but to the lonely people, the broken people, the disfigured people, even the normal people.

As we prepare for the second great silly season, the season of Easter eggs and more glossy wrapping, it is this that I would ask you to remember: the founder of Christianity, who was no meep, was prepared at the same time to be both God and to be utterly, utterly lonely.