Sermon: Choral Mattins Trinity 21

Preacher:

David Martin

Date:

Sunday 20th October 2013

Service:

Choral Mattins

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 18.1M)

For the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed...
Isaiah, chapter 54, verse 10

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together....
Luke, chapter 13 verse 34.

The theme suggested by our readings from Isaiah and Luke is clearly Jerusalem but both readings need to be set in a wider context.

The book we call Isaiah has three authors. The first Isaiah addresses a Jerusalem that is rather too comfortable with itself. The second Isaiah, the author of our text, addresses a people exiled in Babylon and yearning to return to Jerusalem. Second Isaiah speaks of Jerusalem as a mother who after many trials gives birth and rejoices once more in a vision of a return to Jerusalem. Our appointed Psalm 147 conveys the same message: ‘The Lord rebuilds Jerusalem; he gathers in the scattered Israelites’. The third Isaiah wrote after the people had returned. He was unhappy with the leadership of the people and contemplated a shift from a tarnished and local covenant to a universal covenant that includes all humankind.

Our New Testament lesson from Luke shows Jesus warned by friendly Pharisees that he is in danger but determined to go to Jerusalem and appeal to her though he knows all too well that this is the city that murdered the prophets and stoned God’s messengers. Reading backwards and forwards from our short passage we see Jesus warning those who expect to inherit the kingdom of God by right that they may be disappointed. Jesus has a vision of people coming from North and South, from near and from far, to sit down in the kingdom and enjoy the banquet God has prepared for them that love him. The covenant is not abrogated though ‘the mountains depart and the hills be removed’.  But it is opened up to all those who are ready to receive it.

There are several themes twined together in these passages from Old and New Testaments. In Isaiah there is exile and return, there is desolation and restoration, there is warfare and peace, and there is first an exclusive covenant and then an inclusive covenant. In Luke there is acceptance and there is rejection. Jerusalem stands literally at a cross roads and has a choice: it can accept the inclusive covenant of God’s peace and choose the way of the Lord of Life, or it can reject God’s messenger as it has done many times before. In the dramatic events of Holy Week Jerusalem does both. First the crowd cries ‘Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord’ and then it cries ‘Away with him, crucify him’. The words of second Isaiah in the chapter immediately preceding our reading are brought to pass: ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; and the chastisement of our peace was upon him’.

With those themes in mind I want to think about what Jerusalem has meant in Christian history and what it means for us. There are two trajectories. One trajectory follows the line of Jerusalem seen as the ideal city here on earth. The other trajectory follows the line of Jerusalem as the heavenly city above which is ‘the mother of us all’ and the shared inheritance of a redeemed humanity.

The ideal city here on earth takes many forms. One is a Christian city like Venice or Rome. Venice saw itself as the enlightened city, the gate of heaven and the herald of redemption. It was a mythic projection of course, but humanity always imagines the perfect and realises it in imperfection. In any case in human history the perfect as a social system has been too often the enemy of the good and ended in tyranny. The heavenly city imagined as part of a Christian Enlightenment was also a mythic projection, an impossible dream of brotherly love, but it found partial embodiment in Philadelphia.  Another form of the heavenly city here on earth is the monastery, for example the Abbey of Melk high above the Danube. The monastery of Melk embodied a different dream: here was the theatre of God’s glory where sacred and secular power came together. It had a fresco of the New Jerusalem at its heart and looked onto a paradise garden with streams of living water and abundant fruits to gladden the heart of man. The world’s great faiths each in their own way imagine the gardens of paradise as well as holy cities. Gardens and cities go together.

 In 2004 the politician and historian Tristram Hunt published a book about New Jerusalem built here in England among what William Blake called ‘these dark Satanic mills’. He traced the origins of urban planning in the deadly murk of the industrial revolution: Joseph Chamberlain and the Municipal Gospel in Birmingham, visions of civic spaces and city parks in Leeds and Glasgow, the new creation of places like Bournville and Letchworh that half-realised the dreams of the Quaker Ebenezer Howard in his book ‘Garden Cities of Tomorrow’.

The Kingdom of God is not a template for the realisation of an ideal city or even the story of a return from exile to a promised land. When Francis Thompson wrote his poem ‘The Kingdom of God’ subtitled ‘In no strange land’ he described it as the world invisible that we see, the world intangible that we touch and the world unknowable that we know. Jesus never said what the Kingdom was only what it is like. The Kingdom of God is within you, invisible to the naked eye but present in every offer of the gift and every intimation of the banquet to which each and all are invited. As Luke tells us, not one of us is there by some assumed right of membership but we are included by grace. The Kingdom of God is no bigger than a mustard seed but it grows silently to become a great tree that offers shelter to those who nest in its branches. It is the yeast which slowly penetrates the dough. It is the moment of release when the chains fall off and we say that whereas we were blind now we see. It is the time of reconciliation when we recognise what has been broken and seek to recover and redeem what has been lost. It is established by freedom and realised by justice and inclusion.  It is not to be located in this place or that but makes itself known where faith, hope and love take precedence over getting and spending and the waste of our powers in self aggrandisement. The Kingdom of God arrives with the declaration of peace through the expenditure of sacrificial love.

‘For the mountains shall depart and the hills removed but my kindness shall not depart from thee neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed’.

Let us pray:

‘My soul there is a country
Afar beyond the stars
Where stands a winged sentry
All skilful in the wars’
If thou canst get but thither
There grows the flower of peace,
The rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress and thy ease’.
Amen.