|
Sermon for Sunday 19 October Text Mark 10.35-45 Thank you very much for inviting me to bring God's word to the Korean community this afternoon. I'm very glad to see some people here I know, with whom I have worked and who have worshipped with our English-speaking congregation. When I had my stroke last May and lost half my sight as a result, it was very, very nice to have been supported by so many of you, both those of you I claimed as friends and those of you I had never met. The communities that support us in our journey are a very important parts of our healing. That is the first point I want to make today. It is important to be surrounded by and touched by this cloud of witnesses. It is a healing presence. The second point I wish to make is a reflection on a particular group of people who emerged from that more generally supportive communities that gathered around me. This group that came to play a significant role in my healing was made up of people who themselves were partially sighted or even blind, people like Ranjit Sondhi who teaches at Westhill College or John Hull who teaches at the University or Kerry Griffiths at the Job Centre who came with her guide dog to visit me. I discovered a whole new community of disabled people who were able to be guides for me, people like David Bailey at the Disabilities Assessment Centre, who walks on two crutches, and a multitude of other people blind or impaired in one way or another with whole I spoke to over the phone or visited in their offices. A network of disabled persons emerged out of the cloud of supporting witnesses who were able to listen to me and understand because they themselves had been wounded. My wife Marieke has always had a saying that the blind lead the blind because they know what it means to be blind. Now I knew personally what that saying meant. So there was this general community of support of the community of saints that was part of my healing, and there was this specific community who could guide me on a pilgrimage of healing because they, too, had been wounded. James and John the sons of Zebedee must learn what this means, for the blind to lead the blind, or for the wounded one to be the healer. They want the privileged positions at the right side and the left side of our Lord, high places, honoured places. They want to arrive without having journeyed, we might say. At the end of the day it is the set of thieves who shared out Lord's crucifixion who wind up on his right side and his left. Jesus says, Mark 10 verse 38: "Can you drink the cup of suffering that I must drink? Can you be baptised in the way I must be baptised?" In other words, are you ready to be wounded, broken? "Yes, we are," they say. But they haven't a clue. Their eagerness to get ahead clouds their judgement. It is something like the young disciple who asks the Zen Master when he will achieve enlightenment, and the Master's answer is that as long as the disciple is asking this question, enlightenment will never come. Jesus cannot grant what James and John ask. The high places in the kingdom can only be found by paradoxically putting them out of mind, by somehow un-willing them, and taking a journey in an opposite direction, toward lowliness of stature, not high places in the kingdom but suffering, despair and marginalisation and woundedness. This leads me to my third point, that healing comes through a journey, a pilgrimage. As the African American spiritual says, "You've got to walk that lonesome valley; ain't nobody going to go there for you_you got to go there by yourself". Our healing involves being surrounded by a supporting community, and it involves guides who have been there before, but at the end of the day you have to go there by yourself. Last summer, for instance, we took our family holiday in France, where we visited Chartres Cathedral. It was the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and the cathedral was the focus of a pilgrimage of young people from all around the world to celebrate that holy day. Thoughout the day they arrived, one group after another, walking in long strips through the city streets, singing songs and carrying banners from their home churches. Pilgrimages like this seem to be a Catholic tradition. You don't often hear of Protestants going on Pilgrimages. Maybe it smells too much like earning salvation through hard work. Protestants depend on the grace of God, so they don't have to do anything like go on pilgrimages. They don't have to have any goals. They just wander around aimlessly in faith that they may wind up in some place important. But Catholics, like James and John the sons of Zebedee, perhaps, have a sense of direction. They know where they want to go, and there is a certain directionality to their spirituality. When the pilgrim arrives at Chartres, there is a maze laid out in tiles on the floor for them to walk through, as a kind of final recapitulation of their journey. It is a winding path that ends in a central circle symbolising a mystical union with God, or salvation, or shalom. It is difficult to put words to it, but it is the end of the journey, whatever that journey has meant to the individual pilgrim. As I studied the maze I began to see how much it mirrored my own life, my own life as a kind of pilgrimage to God. For the first several turns in its winding path, the pilgrim wanders through the middle of the design. Naturally, it is only toward the end of the journey that the pilgrim gets near the centre. Every approach close to the centre of the maze, however, experiences a jarring reversal, as the pilgrim is abruptly thrown out to the maze's furthest boundaries. The design of the maze seems to be saying that as we near the end of our journey, as we begin to glimpse the goal of all our journey, we experience powerful, jarring reversals/ The journey becomes more intense the closer we come to the end. A step away from heavenly bliss and we are plunged into despair, anguish, black nothingness. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" we cry. If you never want to experience the intensity of such reversals, don't set out on the journey. If you never want to be wounded, or be torn by doubt and despair, do not seek to walk with God. "Can you be baptised in the way I must be baptised?" Jesus asks. Our woundedness is not healed by being taken away from us, so that we might live life as if made out of non-bio-degradable plastic. Our wounds are healed as we begin to see them as critical steps along the way to God. We think of mazes as involving blind alleys, paths that trick you up by going nowhere, designed to be deliberately confusing. Those are the mazes tourists discover in the back gardens of English stately homes. Mazes made for tourists and for the entertainment of those who live in stately homes are indeed full of blind alleys. But there is no back-tracking, no mistaken directions in the maze in Chartres Cathedral. The path once taken leads to God. The pilgrim follows the turns of the path straight through to the centre with no detours, no mistakes, as all parts of the path lead forward. Think what this means. Times of despair, pain and alienation, times when we cry "Come, Lord Jesus!" in times when we sense our Lord's greatest absence do not constitute a deviation from the journey toward God. There comes a point, usually at that night of greatest despair, when we realise that the Lord they nailed to the cross is already there with us. This, of course, is the fourth and final point of healing, when in the midst of great pain we suddenly realise that there never really was a pilgrimage to take to God. God has been standing there with us all the time, even when we felt ourselves so very, very alone, maybe especially at such a time. At the end of the day, maybe this isn't any point at all, because it seems to cancel all the other points. In the end, it is God who heals, it is God who decides where we stand. The Lords of this world do not understand this. "You know how the men who are considered rulers of the heathens have power over them," Jesus says, Mark 10 verse 42, "and the leaders have complete authority." The Lords of this world seek power, comfort and control at all cost, usually at your cost, or at the cost of those too vulnerable to fight. For the Lord of this world, weakness, brokenness, sorrow are to be utterly avoided. Whole social orders are built on this kind of thinking,, aren't they? And think of the suffering that follows in their wake, thinks of those crushed beneath the boots of the successful. Churches are built on this vision, too. We must be big, successful and happy and avoid pain whatever the cost in the way of turning our backs on controversy. The healthy church, they say, is the church that experiences no pain or despair, to which people flock to be relieved of all the tension of having to live in the real world, turning a blind eye on the cruelty of comfort founded on lies. Our church, the United Reformed Church, is engaged in an exploration of human sexuality, specifically the question of the ordination of candidates for the minister who are in same-sex relations. It would be nice if we didn't have to face this question. Would it be healthy to avoid the pain of this question? Would that be healing, just wishing it away? Can we take away this trauma, any more than we can take away from our children the trauma of growing up? The more deeply engaged by this question we become, the more it seems we are a broken and divided church. It just may be that our healing lies in engaging this painful issue and moving through it together, trying to understand the traumatic divisions we now feel as points of growth. It may well be that as we are willing to suffer for one another's sake, the Lord we long for will be with us. The way of the church needs to be the way of the pilgrim. It has no credentials to heal unless it, too, has shared the wounds of its Saviour and its neighbours, and no gospel to proclaim unless it invites its people into the pilgrim path of discipleship. Our progress toward the healing of our woundedness comes in that critical step taken not forward but backward in company with all who live not in triumph but in hope, and in longing hunger for the presence of our Lord. The Lords of this world come and go. They do not last. But our Lord, our Lord comes. Come, Lord Jesus, meet us in our broken lives and heal us. * * Niemšller: "Die Herren dieser Welt kommen und gehen; unser Herr komt" Rev Dr Tom Arthur
|
|
|
|