Thursday 21 July 2016

Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 10 July 2016 Pentecost 8

Readings:  Amos 7:7-15,   Luke 10:25-37

We pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our rock and our sustainer.  Amen

Sitting at my desk Friday afternoon, getting on a bit of a roll with Amos and Samaritans, procrastinating a bit as is my want by flicking across into Stuff – and then I read about the shooting of 11 people at a protest rally in Dallas – four/five dead.  Those shot were police who were presumably keeping an eye on a protest ‘black lives matter’ rally about the shooting of innocent black people by police.  Words fail.  Hatred rules. Lives ripped apart.  What is going on?

Those of us reading through the books of the bible have struggled with the violence and hatred of the time but we have to honestly ask if our time is any different from that say of two and a half thousand years ago.

Then as now there is mindless violence.
Then as now there is retribution.
Then as now there is the slaughtering of the innocents.
Now and then there is greed and a protection of self whatever it takes.
Or, here is a thought:
Now and then that is all that seems to make the headlines.

And that got me thinking.  Then and now the world, life is not all about horrible stuff, there are stories of hope and kindness and compassion.  In first and second Kings there are stories of peace and gentleness and justice – it’s just that they are few and far between, rarely reported.  Today there are remarkable and everyday stories of neighbourliness and compassion and forgiveness.  They just don’t seem to make the headlines.
And I had to ask the question if we, as a society, have a propensity to wallow in the horror stories and respond as I did with a complete loss of perspective and a sense of a black hole that the world has gone down. 

Do we allow our headlines to feed our fears and does the new global communication world we live in encourage our despair. 

Blogger Jeremy Spain thinks so - in a piece titled ‘A small God in a big world’[1] he reminds us that Jesus came not as a headline act but as a baby, that the deluge of what is wrong with the world doesn’t give us much space to contemplate what is right: he says
 “Imagine how different the world must have been even 100 years ago. Imagine how much bigger and more mysterious the world must have been without Google Maps and Google Earth, without Buzzfeeds that reduce our ever-shrinking ordinary world to a series of tragic headlines and newsfeeds that reduce our ever-expanding social world to a series of one-way conversations 140 characters-deep and 10,000 friends-wide. Imagine what it must have felt like to not feel like you are at the center of every event and every relationship on earth. Imagine a world with board games and the great big woods outback. Imagine what it would feel like to be as small as a human being…..
 You’d almost think the highest point of our nation’s freedom, that of its speech, is now being used to paralyze us. It’s like the headlines that feed us the bad news of the world have left us no room to speak about anything else, anything less important than politics or less complicated than the economy or less alarming than proofs of the immanent threat of radical Islam. How inconsiderate it would be to speak needlessly about the daylilies beginning to bloom outside with all that other stuff happening outside…”
He restates the answer to the question: 
Q: “When did we see you hungry and feed you and thirsty and give you drink?”
A: “When you didn’t see me on a screen and when you gave me more than your opinions.”

Let’s think about the good Samaritan story –  even without the advantage of the world wide web, the bad press for the Samaritans had done its business – they were despised foreigners, with a faith that had developed differently and were not to be trusted let alone associated with.  Samaritan was the shock word that Jesus used to tell this story of what it means to be a neighbour – even the lawyer wasn’t quite able to say Samaritan when asked to identify the neighbour – he skirted the issue by saying ‘the one who showed him mercy’.  Nowadays some could equally say insert the word Muslim or Asian or Sikh – and what has the western Christian world overtly despised for two thousand years - Jews.  Different, despised, responsible for all that is wrong with our world……..easy to demonize.

But actually, says Jesus – we can’t do that.  For kindness shows us who acts as a neighbour, not culture nor faith nor nationality – but kindness and compassion.
And our kindness is personal, relational, small in the scheme of things and unlikely to make the headlines.
It can come from the most unlikely of people, be shared into the scariest of places and it is not to be refused because we think someone unworthy or ‘different’.

So let’s not be undone by the violence and hatred and inhumanity that we can drown in in the world today.  Let us instead practice what it is that we are made to be – the loving people of God walking in the way of Jesus.  ‘Let us live in a world close enough to touch, low enough to look in the eye’; says Jeremy Spain. He reminds us that God speaks in a still small voice, not with a foghorn, and a still small voice require physical nearness to be heard. 
We can lose ourselves in caring for the things we can do nothing about and not see the neighbour over the fence who is in need.
We can despair at making a difference to a world that seems to be imploding and forget the teaching of Jesus that from a small seed of love expressed, amazing things can happen.  Each little act of compassion has the capacity to turn the world on its head.  Believe it!

So instead of being overwhelmed by the state of the world, let us focus on being who Jesus tells us to be - a good neighbour, getting to know those around us, offering and receiving a helping hand and building relationships with all manner of people, even those, especially those whom society would have us cross the road away from  – for it is there that we will find God at work in our world.

We finish with words from Brian Wren

We are your people, Spirit of grace,
you dare to make us to all our neighbours,
Christ’s living voice, hands and face.

Spirit, unite us, make us, by grace,
willing and ready, Christ’s living body,
loving the whole human race.

Margaret Garland



[1] https://jeremyspainhour.com/2016/06/29/small-god-in-a-big-world/

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