Sermon: Fifth Sunday after Trinity 2014

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 20th July 2014

Service:

Cathedral Eucharist

Readings:

Romans 8:12-25

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 13.1M)

There have horrifying scenes on our news bulletins this week:

Pressure grows on Russia over crash.

Gaza death toll climbs as diplomacy intensifies for truce.

Iraqi Christians flee from Mosul; Baghdad bombings kill dozens.

Colleagues reflected on Twitter:

Can we keep our minds in hell and despair not?

Can we preach on wheat and tares and keep steady?

There is futility and bondage to decay: the whole creation groans with labour pains.

Can we hold on to Paul's vision of cosmic salvation?

Paul engages in theological heart-searching in the face painful tensions within our relationships and within the whole of creation.  He acknowledges our human frailty. Our flesh fails, through weakness and wilfulness.  Paul addresses our anxieties about how to pray and how to live.  He acknowledges suffering; he trusts in God's purpose and the Spirit's power; he does not lose hope. 

All who're led by the Spirit are children of God: we move from slavery and fear to adoption.  We still cry out; but our petitions, longings, thanksgivings and pleas flow from the Spirit's activity within us. When we pray Abba, Father it is the Spirit bearing witness.  As adopted children, we are heirs of the promise of the Spirit of peace; co-heirs with Christ.

Because we are in Christ, we suffer with him; but we will also be glorified with him.

Paul describes creation as subjected to futility and bondage to decay. He compares such groaning with labour pains;  creation is on the cusp of new birth. Creation waits, with eager longing, with hope for something new to be revealed.

The promise of glorious liberty is extended to the whole created order.

We are the first fruit; groaning inwardly as we wait.

Creation cries out: fragile, beautiful, exploited and abundance.

People weep: in Mosul, in Baghdad, in Ukraine, in Syria, in Gaza, in Nigeria.

We weep too: dare we cry out with hope? How do we wait with patience?

In the words of the psalmist: Where shall we go then from thy Spirit; or whither shall I go then from thy presence?   Wherever we roam and rest; whenever our heart breaks God searches us out and holds us.

 

Our hope from our first cry to our final breath is rooted in God.

Creation flows from God's love and goodness; it is full of potential.

Our creatureliness, is a gift in freedom; our world is coloured by ambiguity.

 

A world as fractured needs grace, forgiveness and love all the more.

A world crying out like ours needs courage, resilience and altruism all the more.

A world groaning with eager longing needs hopeful, faithful people, committed to their calling.

In the face of fragmentation, cries & ambiguity, our absolute is in the absolution of God.

Our world, is like the field or garden described in Jesus' parable of the kingdom of heaven.  There are plants and weeds: joy and pain, fulfilment and regret.  Within our own community this week, students graduated; the buzz of Guilfest is underway; people have picnicked on hill and enjoyed Shakespeare. At the same time, the labour wards, intensive care units and theatres of the Royal Surrey are places of anxious waiting, compassion, healing and sorrow.

Let us open our imaginations to Jesus' parable without reducing it to the absurd; let us dare to ask and engage as the disciples did.  The familiar is made strange; the recognisable is disturbing.  The language calls us to a costly way of life; aligned with the values of God's Kingdom.

We want, like those doing the weeding, to root out and destroy all that is not good.  Yet, doing so would destroy the harvest too. The parable reveals the cost of impatience; and the joy that arises from patience endurance.  The farmer waits in hope and confidence.  Reading the parable alongside Paul's vision, we might think of a midwife; bringing to birth new life.

The scale of human tragedy and the complexity of political agendas is overwhelming.  Piece by Peace, the diocesan summer school, offers space to engage without fear with: territorial integrity, religious difference, restoration for offenders and victims, the role of education post-conflict, ministry in the dark places of the battle field, the role of the arts in peacemaking. All this has been undergirded by opportunities to explore what it means to be be at peace with God as we have explored the meaning of the cross, the sacrament of reconciliation as part of the process of coming to spiritual maturity and what sleep tells us about grace, rest and mortality.

We have endeavoured to connect our faith to the choices, demands and opportunities of our daily life; we try to make sense of our world; and to God's purposes within it.  When nights of despair encroach, the psalmist continues to place trust in God: even darkness is not dark to you; it is as light. Learning to live with hope and patience amidst the ambiguity of the world doesn't diminish the reality of suffering; but it calls forth a response in us.

Perhaps we ask, as Sarah Hutton did at her session, 'what is the point of praying for peace?'  She invited us to be informed and specific in our prayers; she encouraged us to engage and to keep going even when it hurts.  Prayer is personal; it changes us.  It is rooted in God that we might be led from death to life, falsehood to truth, from despair to hope, from fear to trust, from hate to love and from war to peace.  Peace begins in our hearts and flows out into our regard for, and engagement with, others.

Amongst those for whom we pray, we might include those who are called to the task of reconciliation: among them David Porter, Archbishop Justin's Director for Reconciliation, and the people with whom he works. Pray too for Russ Parker, who is an international ambassador for Acorn Christian Healing Foundation.  On Friday night, he reminded us that reconciliation is built on remembering, storing telling, forgiveness and healing; reconciliation is an ongoing process. Reflecting on his experience in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Rwanda, he spoke of how healing a nation's historic wounds demands dialogue and active listening: attending to stories, their conclusions and the consequences and offering space for change to take place.

We live in relation to a global cries of fear, suffering and violence; in response to which we pray and offer support to those meeting human need.  It can be just as challenging to face the unclear and ambiguous situations in our own lives.  We are faced with a myriad of difficult decisions; we live and work alongside people we frustrate and find frustrating.  Sometimes we get it  right; on other occasions we fail; more often than not, we don't know the consequences of what we do or say.

Today's reading don't give us easy answers; they do however, assure us that God is in control. Our worship is an intense reminder that God loves us.  God will draw all things to himself - the joyful, the fruitful, the painful the ambiguous.  All our choices, our lives, the groaning of creation, the consequences of violence are held in love of the one who confront darkness and light.   

Here in our worship we find absolution, not just as words of assurance but as an invitation to share in practices that make for peace.  Father G. in Barbara Pym's novel Quartet in Autumn reflects on the sharing of the peace as a friendly gesture or beautiful idea.  Sharing a sign of peace is not an extension of our social interactions; it is an honouring of each other; it's an act of grace reaching out across difference; it is a moment of reconciled community.  We are reminded of our interdependency; we recall that the source of our life is a loving God who reaches out to us.

Reaching out to others in forgiveness and compassion is part of our calling as we are sent out into the world. We are commissioned not in our own strength, but in God's peace.  In all our deliberations, conversations and choices, we try to be the people God calls us to be. We are peaceably ordered by God's governance; we serve him joyfully in godly quietness.

Gods love guides us; when when we wound and when we are hurt; in God we find comfort and courage.  Our hope is in the God who loves, forgives, renews and recalls. Here at this sacred and holy banquet we remember and tell our stories; we receive Christ who reconciled the world to himself as he opened his arms open the cross; may the Holy Spirit fill us with grace; may we glimpse God's Kingdom coming to birth. Amen.