The poplars lining Sandspit Road are now well on the way
into leaf. Last week was the Spring
Equinox in the southern hemisphere, so that’s a kind of milestone each year. At the South Pole the sun rose above the
horizon, where it will stay for six months, day and night so to speak. So Mother Nature is looking up. In last Friday’s talk, centred on the
lectionary gospel for last Sunday, I touched on gloomy issues about faith and
the world, and we went home chastened and puzzled. Then during this week I looked at the gospel
for this next Sunday, and… oh dear. It’s
all about duty and not getting above ourselves.
The Old Testament reading is from the Book of Lamentations, and the
Psalm is 137, the one about weeping by the waters of Babylon and hanging up our
harps.
I decided it was time to remind myself where the light is
shining, to rejoin the world of spiritual fun.
A useful ploy in this spiritual circumstance is to consult Rowan
Williams, one of the luminous Christian teachers of our day. Dr Williams did not let me down. I found a sermon of his commemorating John
Wesley. Rowan Williams describes John
Wesley as a hugely passionate but deeply fallible man, with his muddle and silliness, false starts,
disastrous misjudgements, wrong turnings… and that’s just the start of what
we may celebrate about John Wesley:
Wesley’s gospel is
that our first task is to trust God…
Our identity before God will come from God, insofar as we simply go on
with him, patiently opening ourselves to his patience with us, and patiently
staying with each other in our risky and muddled lives. This is not a Christianity without struggle,
without discipline, and without judgement.
It is hard to keep that openness, that habit of trust – we need
disciplines for that, silent listening for God, standing before the Christ of
the gospels, joining in the church’s act of praise. We need to learn real repentance and honesty,
to accept our mistakes as real, and never to be so paralysed by or ashamed of
them that we are afraid of ourselves and our own perceptions and choices… Beyond this stumbling and confusion… God
still holds a future for us in his hands.
Thank God for a saint
who had to live his life so embarrassingly beyond the conventions… Thank God even for the 18th
century Church of England, so clueless about how to handle a man so irresponsibly
devoted to God that it forced him into wandering and exploration, folly and
blundering – and unshakeable witness to free and full grace.
There is much more in that sermon… There is no safe place, there is no safe
life, there is no safe and sure religious belief and practice. What there is, is faith, hope and love, as St
Paul put it. If we are concerned to
change this desperately cruel and sad world, the only pathway is the change in
ourselves brought by God, in our attention to God. We become women and men of peace and love and
justice. We become unafraid of change
because we know change in our own hearts and lives. We do not have enemies and we do not resolve
disputes with violence of any kind.
That is gospel, good news.
We are free… to weep with those who weep -- in Syria we see a fraction
of their pain and bear it with them -- and we rejoice with those who
rejoice. We set aside the need to appear
otherwise than we are, and we have set aside also the fear of mortality. Death is the final mystery, and we will be
invited into it by God in love and trust.
No comments:
Post a Comment