SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH,
WHANGAREI
TWELFTH SUNDAY AFTER
PENTECOST
(19th AUGUST) 2007
Readings:
Jeremiah
1.4-10
Psalm
71.1-6
Hebrews
12.18-29
Luke
13.10-17
I cannot imagine the pain of the woman of our story. I have had
moments of my life that have been dark and filled with relative pain, but hers
is a story of degenerative and crippling pain. There are many such in our
society, and some will be known to you. For some there seems to be no healing
touch of God. For some the healing touch of God is to be seen not in miraculous
healing, but in the equally miraculous ability and God given ability to live on
through pain, suffering yet still finding a place in their lives for the
miracle of faith and prayer.
There is, incidentally, no
miracle in conceited and doubtless faith. For some that is the journey of life:
some never find room for darkness or doubt in their life-journey. Yet despite
the attempts of some callous atheistic barrow pushers to turn it into a proof
of the absence of God, the news that so great a Christian as Theresa of
Calcutta experienced dark nights of the soul, pain-filled periods of doubt, is
not a diminution but an increase in the testimony of their faith. To believe as
Theresa did, surrounded by the deepest degradation of humanity, is to testify
to sainthood. To cry out, as Jesus himself did, ‘My God my God why have you
forsaken me’ is to enter in to the deepest darknesses of existence, and yet to
testify eventually, perhaps even retrospectively, that even there God was to be
found. To continue to believe when every horizon is black is the greatest
testimony and miracle of faith imaginable. I am no fan of the Roman Catholic
processes of canonization, but I have no doubt that in all we know and even
more in what we now newly know of Theresa we have seen the life of a saint.
But the story of our lady of the gospel is also a story of an
outcast. Her doubts may well have been myriad. The gospel vignettes tell us
little of the interior journeyings of the characters we encounter. But here is
no doubt that in first century Palestine
a widow was cast upon the slag heaps of society. One of the reasons for the
rapid impact of Christianity on the Roman Empire was the love and Theresa-like,
Christ-like compassion the Christians showed to those on the slag-heap of the
Empire. A widow was an encumbrance.
But this woman was worse. She was crippled by the collapse of her
body. In her society she would be seen as a dreadful sinner, receiving justly
the wrath of God for her or her relations’ sinfulness. Jesus cut through the
religious holier than thou pomposity: this woman was no sinner but a hurting
human being made in the image of God. Those who stand and pass judgement on the
‘can’t be helped’ aspects of human life, on those whose life circumstances or
lifestyles don’t fit a presupposed moral correctness, need to be very careful
that they aren’t recreating judgementalism in the image of the Pharisees.
Jesus, though, reaches out. If we are to be a centre for urban
mission* we need to see who it is that we are called to reach out to likewise.
Who are the vulnerable in urban Whangarei? Some will be at the low end of the
socio-economic spectrum. The street people who may make our church dirty if we
let them in. Many of these are the rejects, the flotsam and jetsam of callous
government Mental Health policies. Others will be the overworked and
overstressed executives working longer and longer weeks for less and less
return, frustrated by policies of successive governments which seem to do
nothing to keep them and their circumstances afloat. Some will be assets rich,
some will be broken poor. But they will be the people to whom we are called,
Sabbath or not, to speak words of hope and healing.
May it be our
prayer this week that each of us may touch such a life with Christ love in the
week to come.
TLBWY
* The Parish centred
on Christ Church Whangarei was for a period badged ‘centre for urban mission.’
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