Sermon.
St Vedast-alias-Foster, City of London. 28.02.16
Third
Sunday of Lent (Year 3)
Isaiah
55.1-9
1
Corinthians 10.1-13
Luke
13.1-9
Genuinely
a privilege and pleasure to be with you again. And I assure you of my
ongoing prayers for you in your communal discernment process, hoping
the diocese is helping energetically! When I was last here, much
comment was made on the high standard of the sermons from visiting
preachers. And, further, you were kind enough to be kind about my own
effort. This of course means there might be for me, in my
preparations and right now, the pressure of meeting great
expectations. Imagine my delight, then, when I came upon these words
from Soren Kierkegaard [1813-1855]:
'People
have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are
the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that
they are the actors on the stage; he (the preacher) is merely the
prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines.'
A
wonderfully incisive Kierkegaardian insight.
A
different but related point is this: my Jewish friends do not tire of
telling me that the Hebrew verb 'to pray' is a reflexive form
of the verb 'to judge'. To pray is to judge oneself. But (let me
stress) not in the sense of 'to condemn' but rather 'to discern the
truth' about oneself. You know, even without this linguistic prompt,
we know this is right. If we pray - and pay attention (that is: we
don't simply enjoy someone's cadences, or hope for gossip on Mrs
Brown's bunions...) - if we pray and pay attention to our praying, we
will soon notice what moves us, what does not move us, how much
resistance to prayer there is inside us (there will be some), what
draws us in, and what, if we are honest, we are not drawn to pray for
at all. We will be discerning truths about ourselves.
And
here we are, and it is Lent. Lent: the season in the church calendar
when the call to be self-discerning is at its clearest and most
insistent.
Today's
readings bring this home to us. First, from the prophecy of Isaiah, a
question which resonates through the centuries: 'Why do you spend
your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that
which does not satisfy?' Indeed, why do we? Surey there has never
been such a wasteful generation and culture as ours?
If
we were asked in the abstract what our greatest sin was, we might say
'selfishness'. But this question challenges that. A range of
Christian thinkers insist that our root problem is actually that we
are not selfish enough. We do not sufficiently will our own
happiness. We do not seek to be unhappy - true. But we are willing to
postpone or marginalise our happiness and act out of fear, habit,
compulsion, pride (keeping up appearances), and so on. Naturally,
marketing and advertising departments are acutely aware of this, and
manipulate us to buy more, though it nourishes us not.
This
is a good place to return to, again and again, in Lent. How can I be
more selfish? More truly selfish. We know that being purely
pleasure-seeking promises happiness but does not deliver. (If you
don't know, give it try, and get back to us.) We stand a better
chance of sustaining proper, authentic selfishness (as it
were) if we order our lives to fit with our sense of our own
unique vocation, our call from Gd. And if you don't yet know
yours, or have lost confidence about it, don't panic.
Isaiah
again: 'Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while
he is near.' This means not that Gd is about to disappear. Rather
it means it is always good to have a sense of urgency in our
search for Gd. The claim is that by seeking Gd (in the very seeking),
we become more ourselves, the more free to feed on what really feeds
us, to receive what really benefits us.
Our
second reading, from St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians,
however, warns us that it will not be that simple. Yes, there is a
form of wrong desiring, from which Gd can deliver us. But however
'healed' we are, there is a proper form of testing, of temptation,
which will abide, which is ours to deal with. Even the saints – one
may well say especially the saints - experience this. But this
testing is to renew our conscious reliance on Gd, who alone brings
the way out of such testing.
About
today's gospel there is an ambiguity. It refers to calamities
which have fallen on some people in Jesus' day (though if you want to
know more about Pilate's Galilean blood or the falling tower of
Siloam, I cannot help you; there just is no evidence outside the
gospels). Jesus relates these to other tragedies in his people's
past. But the question is: does he mean
- that all disasters, including untimely deaths, are random, and the main thing is to live fully, not ever putting off the repentance you need?
- Or is the main point that life is about to become more and more disaster-laden, as the end - the final cataclysm – approaches?
Unfortunately,
the following parable of the fig tree can itself be interpreted in
either way.
Now,
part of Jesus' message was that the world is about to end –
so-called apocayptic.
I suspect that if we deny that outright, it may come back to bite us.
But we can fairly add that in the history of the Church, too much
insistence that 'the
end of the world is nigh'
has not made for a happy story. On the other hand, wisdom surely
involves a profound if painful acceptance that life
throws random events at us,
both good and bad, both life-giving-and-preserving, and life-denying
and deathly, and the main lesson to learn from these is to live as
well as you can, in each day. In each moment.
And
so back to Kierkegaard: you are the actors, the do-ers; I am your
prompt. I am, then, prompting us to remember
- to seek out our own ways of being better at being selfish,
- to act towards fulfilling our own calling (which is how we get to right selfishness), and
- always to remain urgent in our underlying search for Gd, both when life is broad and pleasant, and when it is narrow and in-human-terms impossible.
I
want to end on a different note. Kierkegaardian challenge is always
good. But it is not everything. It may need tempering by some warmth
from the East. St
John Chrysostomos
of Antioch [fourth century] said: 'The
Church is not a courtroom but a hospital for our souls.'
So,
yes, when we worship, we have a task to do, a task of
self-reflection. And, yes indeed, we worship in order to equip
ourselves for the greater task, of being Christians in the world.
But! But alongside the tasks, there is also the sheer abandonment
to Gd.
Like patients in hospital, we are patiently to trust in the process
of being made well by Gd.
At
the heart of all our overcoming of temptation lies – not some great
project of self-improvement (though that might have a place from time
to time) – lies rather our willingess to stop,
stand, and gaze
on Gd in Christ and the saints.
Or,
to put it slightly differently: yesterday we Anglicans had occasion
to commemorate our own George
Herbert [1593-1633].
So my final reference is one you will I am sure know, but which bears
repeating:
Love
bids us welcome...
We
must sit down, and taste his meat.
Alongside
all our testings, that too is Lent.
Alongside
all our tasks, that too is Church.
Amen.
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