Sermon: The Eighth Sunday after Trinity - Evensong

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 21st July 2013

Service:

Choral Evensong

Readings:

Isaiah 25

2 Corinthians 1

I saw the industrial scene said Lowry and I was affected by it. I wanted to get a certain effect on canvas. I couldn't describe it, but I knew it when I'd got it. I've got a one-track mind, he said, I only deal with poverty. Always with the gloom. And for 40 years, he never tired of paining the urban landscapes of Salford and Manchester, and later of the mining towns of South Wales. He captures the everyday life of the working class; the scope of his art is narrow and distinctive. If you get chance to see the exhibition at the Tate Britain, I commend it to you.

Men streaming through factory gates or into football grounds; families swirling around a Good Friday fair; busses, churches, chimneys, mills, dogs, schools, tenements and factories; crowds gathering around the strike meeting, the eviction, the fever van. Lowry had an appetite for the enormity of urban life; packed spaces full of his characteristic stick like people; rather than being monotonous, they reveal a series of individual human lives in community. Poverty and respectability; energy and animation; gloom and magnificence; care, hardship, hope in the battle of life; a strange beauty in this human capacity for resilience.

And such images still reflect the reality of our world. Human lives are beset with affliction and suffering; words and images capture moments of comfort, glimpses of consolation and energy in the midst of the gloom. Detroit today is a city in decline; officially bankrupt; abandoned hospitals, stations and factories; houses shuttered and repossessed. Lonely figures walk amidst the gloom; the population dwindling. Belfast today is a city recovering from the eruption of violence last weekend. In Damascus and Homs the shelling continues; residents are trapped. In London derelict land offers opportunity for development or gentrification as social inequalities widen; in Tower Hamlets two-thirds of the population live in poverty, the rest earn an average salary of over £100,000. Our cities personify the best of human flourishing; and the worst of all that dehumanises.

Yet, we are called to not lose hope; we are called to look for the energy and compassion amidst the gloom. Where do we look for consolation? From whence does a vision for altruism flow from? The biblical narrative begins with a garden paradise and ends with a heavenly city; between that moment of creation and the fulfilment of our redemption we are caught up in the battle of life: compassion and suffering; refuge for the poor and the bringing down of the ruthless. We pray for the gift of resurrection peace, as we did in our intercessions.

Both Isaiah and Paul confront situations of ruin and suffering; yet they both begin with declarations of praise:

I will exalt and praise your name; you've done wonderful things; your plans are faithful and sure.

And:

Blessed be God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ: the Father of all mercies the God of all consolation.

n the midst of the contingencies and fragility, magnificence and care, our resilience flows from praise? The God of consolation equips us to face suffering with courage and to grow in compassion. This is love.

Throughout most of history, the human population has lived a rural lifestyle. In 1800 3% of the world’s population lived in urban areas; we passed the 50:50 mark in 2008 and that’s expected to be 70% in 2050. We are largely urbanites. Our cities celebrate energy and creativity in arts and architecture, in technology, business and learning, in the economic and social capital, in the diversity of languages and cuisines. Our cities are also brutal and exploitative places where the gloom of eviction, strikes, sickness and addiction still draw the curious dispassionate crowds.

It is perhaps on that basis that we can understand the song of Isaiah, which celebrates the demise of the city – seeing the urban setting as a personification of a power that dehumanises. The city’s ruin is an assurance to the poor and needy that God is ultimately on their side; the destruction of the city serves as a warning to the powerful that they will not have the last word.

Set alongside this prophetic plea for justice is a vision of a banquet to which all peoples are invited. This feast is full of the abundance of well-matured wines and the richness of good food. Yet, the material plenitude of such vision is only part of the hope. Death and grief are overcome. Death is that personification of the greatest power than confronts us; that and the ensuing grief is part of the tragedy and perplexity of our human existence. Yet God’s love overcomes it. Isaiah invites us to imagine a better world; a reality for which we hope and wait. Such ultimate joy is seen in contrast to our penultimate reality.

We glimpse moments of such consolation. There is a strange beauty in our human capacity for resilience. There is a great delight in our creaturely diversity: the tenderness of intimacy, the scope of creativity, our ability to innovate and solve problems. Yet there is also a great frailty in the provisionality of our very physicality: our bodies age over time, relationships change, we wrestle with changes to all sorts of social/political contracts.

Paul wrote to the church in Corinth as one who knows the way in which affliction and frailty weighs us down. We can acknowledge the pressures in our own life; the sorrows that lie deep within us of unfulfilled longings or frustrations; we can acknowledge the gloom and hardship manifest in our world. There is something readably intelligible about such afflictions; yet also some that makes the world seem unintelligible and fraught with battle of life. Paul also acknowledges the particular pressure and weigh of suffering that comes from the decision to follow Christ, to walk in his steps.

Every decision is then reframed by the Gospel. Our attitude to wealth and relationships is changed; the vision of the common good pays heed to those on the margins; life, including life in our urban centres becomes more challenging as we engage with celebration, lament and prophetic justice in our cultural, social, economic and political life. The call to love is extended from friends to enemies. For the early church and many in our own time, it the cost of this calling is manifest in the abandonment by family, hostility from neighbours and overt persecution from official powers.

It is into such a context as this that Paul speaks word of consolation. It is a word that appears nine times in the space of a few verses. God consoles us in all our affliction so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with we are consoled by God.

God in Christ suffers with and for us; God the Father of all mercies consoles that we might be agents of consolation. It means far more than soothing sympathy; fleeting in its attention. Such comfort and encouragement in the face of suffering is then rooted in God. It is closely allied to the capacity to endure – to have the courage to face life fully, unflinchingly. We might call this “resilience”: the way in which we cope with adversity in such a way that we are strengthened, find healing and also grow in altruism and in responsible relationship to others.

Lest we think that this is trite or naïve Christian theologising, Justine Allain-Chapman’s book Resilient Pastors draws on psychosocial research, the biblical narrative and the theological tradition of the desert fathers to examine this movement in some depth. Rather than offering a handbook of hints to “make things better” she reflect s on the process of growing in maturity, wisdom and compassion. As Paul writes, our hope for you is unshaken – we share in sufferings; we share in consolation. This is love.

In the words of the Irish band The Script:

It's in the eyes of the children
As they leave for the very first time
And it's in the heart of a soldier
As he takes a bullet on the frontline
It's in the face of a mother
As she takes the force of the blow
And it’s in the hands of the father,
As he works his fingers to the bone.

This is love. This is the hope of the transformation of ruined cities; it is the hope for the consolation of fragmented and fragile lives. It is the hope that wipes away tears and eliminates disgrace. The joy, magnificence and animation that Lowry captures break through the mundane routine and transform the gloom. Our eyes, like his, cannot look away from the world; we are to be affected by it. That is why we are to be rooted in the praise of God, setting our hearts an dminds on the faithful Father of mercies; worshiip renews our vision for a transformed world. We are to walk in it in the footsteps of the one who suffered, consoled and redeems. Christ is our pattern; in him we are a new creation. Led by the Spirit, we are to be agends of consolation, for the sake of the Kingdom.

This is love; from above. God pours his love out on us lavishly and longs to gather all things to himself. We long for the day when God will be all in all: our vision is renewed in worship; we are equipped to live in love.

As the lyrics continue:

This is why we do it
This is worth the pain
This is why we fall down
And get back up again
This is where the heart lies
This is from above
Love is this, this is love.