Gospel: Gift & Task

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Gospel: Gift & Task 20 June 2010

• 1 Kings 19:1-4, 8-15
• Ps 42, 43
• Galatians 3:23-29
• Luke 8:26-39

Rev. Dr. Raymond Pelly

http://wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/index.php/Sermons

Let’s begin by connecting the key images from this morning’s readings:

• Elijah, terrified, demoralized, standing in the very place where Moses had found himself in the presence of God on Mt. Sinai; standing in the presence of ‘the sound of sheer silence’ out of which, like Moses, he hears ‘the voice of God’ commissioning him to exercise prophetic leadership in Israel. • The demoniac, naked, driven out of his mind, in love with death, stuck in the past, now sitting ‘clothed & in his right mind’ at the feet of Jesus; Jesus who has just healed him & given him a mission of his own, ‘Return to your home & declare how much God has done for you’. • The new converts in Galatia who, having been ‘baptized into Christ’ have now (in vivid picture language) ‘clothed themselves with Christ’ – with the consequence that in their community, ‘there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female’.

Each of the persons named had been up against it in ways that were dangerous or even life-threatening. Elijah was fleeing from the murderous regime of Ahab & Jezebel, people who, in the self-confident modernity of the times, had abandoned the ethical & social constraints of the Sinai Covenant; who were building a rigidly hierarchical social order based on nature worship & held in place by violence.

Or, the demoniac in the Gospel, who, as the word ‘legion’ suggests, had been distressed by things to do with the Roman occupation. Perhaps he had been tortured or had witnessed atrocities. In any event, a broken man; but one healed nevertheless; &, not only that, taught by Jesus to see the all-powerful legionnaires as no better than pigs ‘rushing down a steep bank into the lake’.

Or the newly baptized in Galatia, risking ostracism from a society which believed there was no possibility of contact between Jew & Gentile; that women were inferior to men, should stay at home in respectful obedience; that slavery was a ‘given’, that the household as well as the economy depended on their labour. Now ‘in Christ’ this is all put into reverse; the Church a brave little community defying all the social norms.

So what might be ‘Gospel’ in all of this for us today? What is the x-factor, the fulcrum, the Archimedean point that turns a terrified man into a prophet, a shell-shocked crazy into a normal sane person with a life to live; a bunch of average social conformists into a group bravely spearheading social change?

In the case of Elijah it is ‘the sound of sheer silence’; a silence that is double-edged: a silence that surfaces reality, that leads him to reflect just how dangerous his situation actually is; but a silence that enables him to hear ‘the new thing’, in this case ‘the voice of God’, challenging him to take on the very murderous group that has him on the run.

Or, if we look at the demoniac or the Galatian converts, we’re talking about Jesus in person or, equally potent, the Christ present in preaching, sacrament and community as this Archimedean point. And to get the point: it is the very same God who spoke to Elijah who is present & living in Jesus as the Christ or Anointed One of God. This is why encounters with him – in silence, in personal life, or in society – can have such an electrifying & life-changing effect.

This is Gospel; what Paul names as ‘Christ among you, the hope of glory’ (Colossians 1:27). Or, we might make our own the greeting that Elijah exchanges with his disciple & successor, Elisha, ‘As the Lord lives, & as you yourself live’ (2 Kings 2) – implying that it is only as God lives in us that we ever become fully alive. Or, from last week’s reading from Galatians, ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (2:20) – the old, broken, conformist ego, displaced or replaced by a new identity or new self as gift of God. ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation’ (2 Corinthians 5:17).

To get the full force of this we might reflect what our own besetting sin is, what we need to be delivered or saved from. The word that keeps coming to me is ‘complacency’; & this as the besetting sin of a church, our Anglican Church, that is largely middle-class & ageing. What I mean by complacency is summed up in a poem called ‘September 1, 1939’ written by W.H.Auden just as the 2nd World War was breaking out.

Faces along the bar / Cling to their average day; The lights must never go out / The music must always play, All the conventions conspire / To make this fort assume The furniture of home; / Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, / Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.

Well, that may be a bit extreme, but I hope you can see what he means. Yet we do well, I think, in the light of today’s readings, to reflect on the difference between faith and complacency (or fear, or brokenness, or conformity). I can bring this out in two further poems.

The first is a dirge by the 19th Century poet Matthew Arnold called ‘Dover Beach’ which became the anthem of the Sea of Faith Movement.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar …

The other, by a living poet, Geoffrey Hill, is called Genesis. Here are some words from it:

Against the burly air I strode

Crying the miracles of God …

And where the streams were salt and full

The tough pig-headed salmon strove,

Ramming the ebb, in the tide’s pull,

To reach the steady hills above.

At a time which I’m suggesting is equally (and strangely) one both of crisis and complacency, we have to decide: Am I in my heart of hearts a ‘go with the flow’ person (like Matthew Arnold) or am I, with Geoffrey Hill, prepared to be like salmon leaping up the steps of a weir ‘crying the miracles of God’?

If we are willing (in whatever way) to put our lives into the hands of the living God, we might experience something like this. There is first a judgment (or a wake-up call); then a grace (some healing & gift of new and surprising life); finally, something for you to do. In the end, it has to be concrete, this-worldly & demanding. This is the authentic life of faith, the gift that becomes a task.

Can there ever be life that is more exciting, more freeing, more fulfilling than this?

Dr. Raymond Pelly, Priest Associate raymond.pelly@clear.net.nz