Sermon: Mattins Sixth Sunday of Easter

Preacher:

David Martin

Date:

Sunday 5th May 2013

Service:

Choral Mattins

So God created man in his own image
Genesis, chapter 1, verse 27

Glorious things of thee are spoken, o city of God;
Psalm 87, verse 3

Your life is hid with Christ in God
Colossians, chapter 3, verse 3

The Bible is a storybook with pictures, a narrative with illustrations. My three texts offer us three pictures, three illustrations, the first of peaceful life in the perfect garden, the second of building a city and extending its citizenship to the stranger, the third of passing through death to ‘the resurrection and the life’.

The first story in the book of Genesis, chapter 1, comes to a climax with the creation of man in the image of God and with the role of male and female in subduing, tending and enjoying the natural environment, seeing that it is good. The whole chapter offers a vision of orderly progression from God the creator to man and woman the procreators. In most of the early creation stories of the Near East God creates man as a slave; in the Bible man is created as viceroy to God, God-like in his own dominion, supreme in his own sphere. This is a world where there is abundance, where man is at home in Nature and in harmony with all other creatures. He does not work, kill for food or till the ground, but gathers what is provided. He is without anxiety for the future or guilt about the past because he lives in an eternal Now.

It is all rather like Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb and the weaned child plays unharmed on the hole of the asp. Some people occasionally walk out of ordinary life into this harmonious world, for example Thomas Traherne in his Meditations when he saw ‘orient and immortal wheat’ and thought ‘it had stood from everlasting to everlasting’. In this timeless world he knew ‘no churlish proprieties or bounds nor divisions’. There is nothing especially Christian about this picture because it depicts man generically, humankind at large, people at home in a world free of what Traherne called ‘poverties, contentions and vices’. You can’t have Christianity before the clock starts ticking. Untimely events have to occur, good and evil have to enter the world, something has to go very wrong that mars the image of God in man and requires restoration, renewal, and costly redemption.

Start the clock. Man and woman are rudely pitch-forked out of the garden and discover the need to work and the passage of time, where the fruits of the earth and the fruits of human labour ripen and wither, burgeon and decay. They become self-conscious, guilty about what has been done, anxious about human predators or natural disasters. They struggle over scarce resources, they engage in rivalry for pre-eminence, they find themselves implicated in murder and above all in danger of death. A brother dies at the hand of a brother, as Abel dies at the hand of Cain, or a brother steals his brother’s birthright, as Jacob purloins the birthright of Esau.  

Threatened with violence and calamity people try to insure themselves against the uncertain future by binding themselves together with covenants based on promises and penalties for those that break them and fail to honour their commitments They gather together in tribes and often regard those within the tribe as fully human, endowed with reason, born to rule, and those outside the tribe as less than fully human, as children, born to obey. The Egyptians enslaved the Israelites as a dangerous minority; once delivered from bondage in Egypt the Israelites invaded Canaan, claiming it as their own and driving out or exterminating the inhabitants of the land. The victim became the oppressor.

So we come to our second text from psalm 87: ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken, o city of God’. Men, living under the regime and constraint of time build cities. They wall them about for security, mark out boundaries, and erect temples on high places to the protecting gods. They confer the rights and establish the duties of citizenship. Cities are founded on territory, property and boundaries and have tragic potential for evil as well as for good: Cain the murderer founded the first city. There is Sodom where there are scarcely any righteous, and there is Nineveh where all repent in sackcloth and ashes; there is Babylon the great doomed to fall soaked in blood, and  there is Jerusalem the city destined as the capital of the wise king yet a byword and a ‘hissing’ for faithlessness and idolatry. The city offers protection for property and settled legal redress, but also provides opportunity for tyranny and rapacity; it offers freedom but also anarchy and licence; it is a centre of creation and invention, which may include murderous weapons of war and musical instruments to restore the mad to their right mind. Psalm 87 ends ‘Singers and dancers shall say ‘The source of all good is in you’’. Psalm 87 also ends by extending the rights of the native to whomever wishes to accept the duties of the community and enjoy its privileges, because we are all humans ‘made in the image of God’. Nobody is by nature inferior, literally idiotic and outside the city.

We come now to our third text, from Colossians: ‘Our life is hid with Christ in God’. The writer to the Colossians wanted to say that Christians are free from occult forces and cosmic powers, and from the ritual requirements of circumcision that identify people as strangers to the covenant people of God. The law that condemns us on account of sin is set aside, nailed to the cross, and replaced by grace. Christ entered the faithless city not as a conquering king but as a lowly prince. He does not inflict violence but endures it. By the offer of himself, even to the death of the cross, he restored the marred image of God in man to its original brightness.

Christian baptism, according to Colossians, assures that our fallen nature is renewed because we all share in his death and his risen life. The depredations of time are reversed and all things made new. That may seem a very long way from our shabby everyday experience in a distinctly fallen world, but in the visionary words of Colossians it means that whereas once we were aliens and set apart, now we are reconciled and included. The gates of the universal city of God are never closed. We are invited by grace to stand within the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem, because in the words of Colossians: ‘There is no question here of Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all and in all’.

Let us pray from the Proslogion of St. Anselm:

I confess. O Lord, with thanksgiving, that you have made me in your image, so that I can remember you and love you, but that image is so worn that it cannot perform that for which it was made, unless you renew and refashion it.  Amen.