Sermon by Jan Lee Sunday 27th 2011
Prayer. O Lord, we are in shock and mourning with the Christchurch community engulfed by tragedy. Our hearts go out to the people there. Through the eye of faith we affirm: when it seems too hard to bear, you are the God of salvation, the God who can help. Amen.
Putting Love First
We are all very conscious of what has been happening in Christchurch this past week with the devastating earthquake. Some of us have been anxious about the losses loved ones have incurred and how they are coping. All of us have felt disturbed over the depth of people’s suffering: the loss of loved ones, sudden amputation of limbs, people being traumatized, private property destroyed or damaged, and long-cherished iconic buildings that are no more.
It brings to the fore how vulnerable we are as human beings, how fragile our lives are on our planet Earth. Our world is a wondrous creation, yet it also puts us at risk. New Zealand being on a plate boundary makes us vulnerable to earthquakes. That has become a very present reality for us. Christchurch has been dealt a terrible blow.
Lots of difficult emotions will have come up in us. A journalist Joe Bennett, who lives in Lyttelton above the tunnel, wrote this in The Listener: I can’t get Katherine Mansfield’s The Fly out of my head. ‘There’s a nasty bastard who kills this fly, by dropping blobs of ink on it and watches it struggle out of the ink each time and clean itself and get ready to walk again, and then drops another blob of ink on it and does the whole thing again but more slowly and so on until it eventually drowns in ink.’ And it feels a bit like that.”
We have to admit that we have been placed here in the middle of life and, from our vantage point, suffering is an unsolvable mystery. I put it to you that the meaningful question to ask is not, “Is belief in God unintelligible?” but “Is God a God of salvation – is God one who can help?” The Christian response to the question is a story, the Biblical story of the love of God and the passion of Jesus Christ.
In this dark hour in our nation, I think today's gospel text from Matthew is very relevant. Of the Sermon on the Mount it is sometimes said, "Wonderful words. If only people followed them the world would be a better place!” But it isn’t just about how to behave. It is about Jesus himself; this was the blueprint for his own life. Let’s discover him in it, and replenish our reserves to serve our neighbour well.
A story about three fathers
I’m going to lead into it with a very simple story:
Once there was a father walking though a mall with his two-year-old son. The child was cranky; he kept whining, wriggling and complaining. The father struggled to remain patient.
A story like this doesn’t usually have a happy ending. In another one, a father with an out of control two year old who is walking through a supermarket repeating in a calm voice, “It’s OK, Danny. You can do this, Danny. We’re almost done, Danny.”
Someone asked him, “Is your son Danny having a bad day?”
“My son’s name is Nathan,” the man said. “My name is Danny.”
But then there was a third father who adopted another strategy. He scooped up his little two-year-old grumbler, held him tight to his chest, and began to sing an impromptu love song. None of the words rhymed. He sang it off-key, but as best as he could, he shared his heart: “I love you. I’m so glad you’re my boy. You make me laugh.”
From shop to shop the father kept going, the words not rhyming, and notes off-key. His son relaxed, captivated by this strange and wonderful song.
Finally, when they had finished, the dad went to the car, buckled his son in the car seat, and his son raised his arms and lifted up his head. “Sing it to me again, Daddy. Sing it to me again.”
A bush parable
A couple of days ago – struggling with heaviness of heart - I went for a bush walk. Looking around me, I saw trees that were rotting and dying. I looked more closely – I saw how a decaying log was nursing fragile seedlings. Yes, these seedlings would put down their roots and slowly, gradually grow up tall and lift their limbs up to heaven. From death comes life. Devastation gives away to the renewing Spirit.
It was hard to be heavy for long. I began to get free! Somehow when I was alone with his creation, God sang that song to me. I could be grateful for being alive, on this earth, in this place, during this moment. Being alive and loved by God was enough to fill me with gratitude and contentment – at least for a few moments. Yet that wonderful happy feeling didn’t completely fade away, even after I’d left the bush.
Jesus’ lively sense of the goodness of his Father
Jesus’ words from Matthew flow straight out of his own experience of life. He had watched the birds wheeling around, high up in the currents of air in the Galilean hills, simply enjoying being alive. He had figured out that they never seemed to do the work that humans did, and yet they mostly stayed alive and well. He had watched a thousand different kinds of flowers growing in the fertile Galilee soil and had held his breath at their fragile beauty. One sweep of a scythe, one passing donkey, and this wonderful object, worth putting in an art gallery, is gone. Where did its beauty come from? It didn’t spend hours in front of the mirror putting on make-up. It didn’t go to an up-market shop to purchase fine clothes. It was just itself: glorious, God-given, beautiful.
Of course that was not all Jesus experienced. He had also seen birds fall to the ground dead, and lilies die before they bloomed. And so do people, including those who have placed their trust in God and have looked to him in their need only to find themselves victims of famine, war, flood or earthquake. In Jesus’ day the tower of Siloam, part of Jerusalem’s wall, had fallen down on people, leaving eighteen dead.
Albeit many of his contemporaries thought he was, Jesus was never out of touch with reality, neither does he want us to be. Still - has it ever struck you what a basically happy person he was? Oh yes, we know that, according to the prophecies, he was ‘a man of sorrow, and acquainted with grief’. We know that the darkness and sadness of the whole world descended on him as he went to the cross. The scene in Gethsemane, where he is wrestling with his father’s will, and in agony wondering whether he has come the right way, is one of the most harrowing stories ever told. We know that he wept at the tomb of Lazarus, and that he was sad when people refused to trust God and see the wonderful things he was doing. But these are the exceptions, the dark patches painted on to the bright background.
Jesus’ teaching grew out of his strong, lively sense of the reliability and goodness of his Father, the Creator of the world. When he told his followers not to worry about tomorrow, we must assume he led them by example. He well knew that he would inevitably collide headlong with the authorities and drink the bitter cup of crucifixion. But he wasn’t always looking ahead anxiously? No, he seems to have had the skill of living in the present, giving attention totally to the present task, celebrating the goodness of God here and now. If that is not a recipe for happiness, I don’t know what is!
And he wants us to do the same. When he urges us to make God our priority, he’s not talking about a God who is distant from the world, who doesn’t care about beauty and life and food and clothes. He’s talking about the Creator himself, who has filled the world with wonderful and mysterious things, full of beauty and energy and excitement, and wants us above all to trust him and love him and receive our own beauty, energy and excitement from him.
It’s all about priorities
So when Jesus tells us not to worry about what to eat, or drink or wear, he doesn’t mean that these things don’t matter. We don’t have to eat and drink as little as possible, and wear the most ragged and disreputable clothes, just to show that we despise such things. Far from it! Jesus liked a party as much as anyone, and when he died the soldiers so admired his tunic that they threw dice for it. But the point is priorities. If we put the things of the world first, we’ll find it gets moth-eaten in our hands. If we put God first, we’ll have abundant, eternal life - knowing God.
Anxiety suffocates us
Still daily we live in a world filled with anxiety. So it’s easy to let us rub off on us. With the new technology like the Internet and satellite TV – it’s even easier for us to get chained and tethered to the anxiety of the world. Living totally without anxiety may sound to us as impossible as living without breathing.
But Jesus says, “Don’t worry about tomorrow.” While tomorrow is ‘tomorrow’ it is a figment of our imagination. As such it is all too easy for it to engage our worst fears, our lack of trust in ourselves as loved, or the wounds left from past hurts. If tomorrow is to have its worst reality, it will only be when it is today. Most times we find we can handle the real. In Christchurch we see people daily handling the real with courage and hope. One day’s trouble at a time is quite enough.
Cast all your anxiety on God
In his NT letter, Peter enjoins us, “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.” We can read words like this and then feel even more anxious because we worry too much. But we can’t make anxiety go away by an act of will.
What we can do though is use anxiety to strengthen our prayer. I hope the example is not too crass, but I often think of Pavlov’s dogs. They became conditioned to salivate every time they heard the bell because it told them dinner was ready. Similarly, let us allow our anxiety to become a cue for prayer. The anxious feelings may subside; or they may not. Jesus at points struggled with disquietude of heart. All of us do. Our job isn’t to make sure out feelings are ‘spiritually correct’. But as we hand over our anxiety to God, we begin to pursue the peace of God.
Let’s be attentive too to the wonder of God’s action in the world
Suffering like the Christchurch people are facing, might lead us to doubt God’s love and power. But let’s not be inattentive to the wonder of God’s action in creation, in history. We see it through courageous and self-giving human agency. Scripture’s unequivocal and enthusiastic assertion that God rules, is always made in the face of circumstances that seem to deny it. The scene in Gethsemane provides a powerful example. What Jesus wanted in his agony was one thing; what he really needed was another. What he really needed on the cross was the love of God to sustain him and to enable him to endure his suffering in love and to commit his spirit to God. His eyes were not distracted from looking to God and his heart remained fixed on God. To use an expression from the Sermon on the Mount, we could say “his whole body was full of light”. God is inviting us to the same trust.
Let’s ask God to sing us his song
The psalmist in her prayer, that we’ve just read, asked God to still and quiet her soul, like a weaned child with its mother. Jesus took on that mother role when he cradled the little children in his arms. The prophet Isaiah said that it is completely improbable that a nursing mother would forget her child, improbable but not impossible. But God’s commitment and compassion are stronger and more intense than that of any nursing mother. For God such forgetting and forsaking is not even a possibility.
Today we can take up the invitation of our Scripture text to share the happiness of Jesus himself. Today, like Isaiah, we can ask God to sing us his love song: “See, I have inscribed you on the palm of my hand!”
Then we will have the strength of soul to be able to reflect God’s love and peace to one another. In this dark hour in our nation, we are all in this together.
