Refreshing lives, transforming faith, at the heart of the community Haere Mai, Piki Mai
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A Sermon by The Reverend Dr Raymond Pelly
Nelson Cathedral
Sunday, 7 September 2008
Readings for Staying Alive:
Ps 149
Exodus 12:1-14
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20
Staying alive – that’s what today’s readings are about. They tell us that staying alive (in God – that’s the bottom line) drinks from three wellsprings: memory, nurturing life in the present, and being open to the future. Each is as vital as the other two. Memory without a future or any life in the present degenerates into conservatism; life now without memory or any real future is like a boat without a keel going nowhere; a love-affair with the future without a vibrant present or a remembered past can be vacuous – like living on dreams and candy-puffs.
So what do today’s readings teach us about staying fully alive?
Of the celebration of the Passover, Exodus 12:14 says, ‘This day shall be a day of remembrance for you’. This remembrance, this memory, is one both of suffering and liberation. The Egyptian slave-masters, we are told, tried to work the Israelites to death; and, not content with that, attempted genocide, the killing of all the male babies at birth. This was the suffering, and it was profound. As we know, it failed. Then, by the miracle of God raising up leaders like Moses, Aaron, Miriam (and doubtless others), the whole amazing process of liberation, of exiting slavery & genocide, was set in train. The sense of joyous new life it released is beautifully summed up in Miriam’s celebration of the new freedom:
‘Then the prophet Miriam … took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea”’.
Exodus 15:20-21
This remembrance, however, is not just broad-brush. It’s extraordinarily precise and particular – real, if you like. The Passover remembrance is on a special day; over a meal cooked in a prescribed way; eaten in haste
‘with your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, your staff in your hand’. Thus is the remembrance of the original event is brought into the present in such a way that people once again can be caught up into this great primordial story of freedom; and this with a view to their personal exodus into what – hopefully! – will be their promised land today and tomorrow. And of course it should not escape us that this is the template for the very particular remembrance of our Eucharist:
‘For on the very night that he was betrayed, he took bread, and when he had given thanks to God, he broke it and gave it to his disciples’ – once again, a remembering of the whole life of Christ through these precise and evocative details; the same sense of celebration and victory; the same anticipation and gift of a God-given future.
The moment of Exodus, however, has to be balanced by another: Sinai or covenant. A freedom without ethics (or structure) will soon prove ephemeral and peter out. Our Epistle & Gospel, true to the spirit of authentically biblical faith, insist on this strongly. The new covenant, like the old, contains commandments – commandments that are commandments, not optional extras.
‘Love your neighbour as yourself’; and this, Paul reminds us, has to do with avoiding adultery, violence, theft, covetousness – and a whole heap of other things. Once again, love has to be real, expressed in the lives we actually lead. Otherwise the remembrance of the life, death and resurrection of Christ becomes empty or, if you like, blasphemous.
Our Gospel takes this one further: there has to be an agreed way of dealing with failures and resolving conflicts in the Church which is fair to all concerned. The early Church felt that, as we do now. We only have to reflect how our Anglican Communion is trying to work out a Covenant that holds our Church together as a communion. The danger of this, of course, is legalism, a premature stifling of new initiatives. In that way each of the steps in the process - one to one; small group; church-wide consultation - needs to be taken carefully and in a way that insures that the people at the centre of the row are truly heard.
And here – since we are talking about flourishing life in the present – for what other time than the present realistically is there? – we could give our Gospel reading a new twist. Instead of talking about sinners or transgressors, why not focus on people who are truly gifted, potential sources of authentic new life? Accordingly, we could re-write the Gospel like this:
‘If a church member shows real signs of new life, why not get alongside him or her, listen carefully to what they are saying, give them the support they need to bring their gift to fruition? Then if there is something truly wonderful (of God), why not convene a support group which could enable the new thing to happen in a real way? Something that starts small may turn out to be a gift for the whole church.’
This feel for flourishing centres of excellence could be the other, creative, side of what is meant by ‘Covenant’. Both, the sense of discipline (of right & wrong) and of the releasing & nurturing of new life, are surely essential to the living of a truly God-given freedom in the present.
And then, finally, there is the great wake-up call in Romans 13.
‘Don’t you know what time it is? Now is the moment for you to wake up from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers. The night is far gone, the day is at hand …’
Now the accent is radically on the future. Do we as a Church have a future? Does ‘God’ have a future in a secular culture? And what of our young people? Are there any in our Church? Questions flood in. Let me, however, just highlight one thing.
Paul asks, ‘Don’t you know what time it is?’; and by that he doesn’t mean clock time: whether it’s breakfast time or Christmas. Rather he is referring to what Ephesians (5:16) calls ‘redeeming’ or ‘making the most’ of the time.
‘Making the most of our time’ – it’s easy to misunderstand that to mean living fulfilled lives by stuffing them to the max with all kinds of experiences. No, not that. Rather, an understanding of time whereby the accent is on the transformation of each person by the grace of God; the giving of glory to God by lives of service that build the kingdom of God. This is how we make the most of the time given to us: not with pastimes that keep the demon of boredom at bay, but by lives respond to the call of God.
To pull all this together: ‘staying alive’: not the lack of a memory in a kind of shallow, weightless modernity; not a blinkered busyness totally absorbed by the present; not a flight from past or present into some unreal future – none of that – rather: a future in the memory of suffering and liberation; and that all summed up in the dangerous – dangerous because it is as disruptive as it is life-giving – the dangerous memory of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – the Christ who sums up in his person all Gods’ authentic dealings with his people in the past, transforms lives in the present, and endlessly opens up the gift of a future for each one of us, now and in eternity – the best image we have of eternity, as St. Augustine first grasped, is precisely the incredible richness (and simultaneity) of this running together of time, past, present, and future.
The Reverend Dr Raymond Pelly
This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr Raymond Pelly at Nelson Cathedral, 7 September 2008 at 8am and 10am
