Sermon: Evensong Sixth Sunday of Easter

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 5th May 2013

Service:

Choral Evensong

Readings:

Matthew 28: 1-10, 16-20

Those who go out weeping bearing the seed for sowing

Shall come home with shouts of joy carrying their sheaves.

Psalm 126.6

Today is the Sunday commonly known as Rogation Sunday. I have to confess that it is something that has previously passed me by in my Christian life. Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up in the deepest countryside where perhaps the rogation customs may still prevail. But it’s not a rural/urban thing. After all, communities that have no fields or farms in them can still celebrate the deeply agricultural harvest festival.  

Rogation has a practical origin and a spiritual application. The word rogation comes from the Latin rogare, ‘to ask’. The practical bit of rogation is about sowing the seed on the land and asking and trusting God for its growth; so the spiritual application is about careful, patient and attentive expectation. Likewise harvest is about thanksgiving for something that the land has yielded. Often we get the two muddled up. So we sing ‘we plough the fields / and scatter the good seed on the land / but it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand’. That classic harvest hymn is actually about rogation first of all.

I can safely say that never before in a sermon I have ever quoted from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And indeed I have never quoted the odious, quintessential spoilt brat Verruca Salt. But I am going to tonight because Verucca Salt is the antithesis of both rogation and harvest. She wants it all and she wants it now. Take this dialogue between Verucca and her overindulgent father.

Verruca: ‘Gooses! Geeses! / I want my geese to lay gold eggs for Easter’
Mr. Salt: It will, sweetheart
Veruca: At least a hundred a day
Mr.Salt: Anything you say
Veruca: And by the way
Mr. Salt: What?
Veruca: I want a feast.

Poor Mr Salt promises Verucca all these things when we get home. But that not’s good enough for Verucca:

I want a ball / I want a party / Pink macaroons and a million balloons / And performing baboons and ... / Give it to me / Rrhh rhhh / Now!

‘I want it, and I want it now’ is the refrain to Verucca’s tirade. That onslaught of impatience is uncomfortable. Perhaps that’s because deep down we recognise it in ourselves; even if we bottle it up much of the time. Verucca is a caricature of the greed and impatience to which we are all prone. We see it in the acquisitiveness encouraged by advertising, we see it in the idea of instant makeovers, whether that’s of bodies, or houses or gardens.

The spiritual life and discipleship demands patient and attentive expectation. T S Eliot says in his play The Rock ‘Take no though of the harvest but only of the proper sowing’. Rogation is the time in the Church’s year when we take thought of the sowing, the proper sowing of cultivation of spiritual habits and virtues, of right decisions and of truthful living.

So what of Rogation coming in this time of Eastertide and just prior to the Ascension? On a practical level the seed is in the ground and all we can do is wait patiently and expectantly. And it fits with resurrection: ‘Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain’. This is the connection with this evening’s second reading. The women come to the tomb but he is not there. The pious interpretation might be to say that it teaches them patience. But is it about patience or impatience? Urgent words flow thick and fast: ‘suddenly there was a great earthquake’; ‘go quickly’ says the angel ‘and tell the disciples’; ‘so they left the tomb quickly’; ‘suddenly Jesus met them’. Then like the burying of a seed of what they thought would happen they are all told to go to Galilee, back to the place where they had first met him, and him them, and there patiently to abide in and inhabit the land where he will be made known: they have to wait.

On the mountain in Galilee Jesus promises his enduring presence with them for all time. And then he will go beyond their sight. All this brings the tension of Jesus’ presence and absence, the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’ of the Kingdom. This is the tension of being citizens both of this earth and citizens of heaven.

The assurance of Jesus’ presence is hard to hold against his apparent absence. Set against his physical absence, isn’t it legitimate to feel impatient sometimes? Impatient for peace; impatient for justice and equity; impatient for the coming of the Kingdom; impatient for him. Can we be patiently impatient? Patience is a gift of the Spirit (Galatians 5.22), and to be impatient for growth necessitates the patience of growing. Patience and impatience are held together in expectation.

Jesus promises that he is with us until the end of the age; he is ‘all in all’. What does that mean to an impatient world and, on a number of issues, an impatient Church? It has to be met in expectation, that patient impatience. There is only one place that we can take our patient impatience. It’s not to do a Verucca Salt, stamp our feet and say ‘I want it and I want it now’: it is to worship, as some of them did on that mountain. It is only when we worship, as the women did and as the disciples on the mountain did, that God’s time and eternity seem to come to us, expectation is set within God’s horizons and we look beyond our own creaturely anxieties, the fact that we are mortal and finite and do worry about harvests.

Abiding with us, in us and for us may the Crucified, Risen and Ascended Lord become the place where all are hopes and expectations are met, and all that is of him be blessed and hallowed. Amen.