Monday 2 July 2018

Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 17 June 2018 Pentecost 4


Readings:  Ezekiel 17:22-24  2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17  Mark 4:26-34

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.

We hear in the letter from Paul to the church at Corinth: ‘So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!’

Today I would like to focus on those words, see if we can find a way to truly embrace the concept of us becoming a new creation in Christ– what it means for us, what it requires of us.

That is a truly ambitious ask and of course we won’t get anywhere near it but I hope we will find some points of entry for us to take away and pursue.

Laying some groundwork, we remember that Paul is continuing to talk into the situation at Corinth where he has been compared to other preachers, leaders in the church and has been found wanting.  He carries on his persuasion that our giftedness is from and for God, that is only when our home is in God alone that we can discern the path God wants us to walk, and to do that we have to put away that which was and become a new creation in Christ.

And this takes some absorbing really.  New in Christ, put away old things, begin anew – there are some challenging concepts for us here.

The gut reaction, for me anyway, is to think about what it is that we are going to lose.  Pretty natural I suppose.  We value who we are, what we have, how we live.  A vast majority of us like to have some control over our lives, some of us more than others, and we like to have some idea of where we might be going before we commit.
The sharp tongued response might be to quip that we are in the wrong faith if that is what we believe – something that perhaps Paul might have challenged us on if he were here.
Because as Christians we commit to giving our lives to God; we commit in our baptism, our professions of faith, our affirmations that Christ Jesus is the very centre of our lives – we commit to being born anew, to giving up self and following Jesus. We say the words, often.  We live the words, sometimes….

This time, maybe it is helpful to first of all say what becoming a new creation in Christ doesn’t mean.

We don’t become a helpless people subject to the whims of a capricious God.  We are in relationship with God, made in the image of God and know well the journey we embark on as followers of Jesus – he makes no bones about the path we travel – he came to this world to teach us and show us - and in the end to die that we might be assured of the full love of God for all humanity, for all creation, in all time.

Our lives are not directed/choreographed from on high nor are we subject to a random preordained series of events written in some book somewhere.  We do not fall from God’s grace through our behaviour and we do not forfeit God’s love after three strikes.
A really common misunderstanding is heard in this story of a woman who was astonishing the people around her by her resilience and attitude to her fifteen year debilitation journey with cancer.  She was asked time and time again – how could she still believe in a God that did this to her?  That God allowed this to happen to her?  How many times have we heard God directly blamed for all that goes wrong?
Her response: ‘God was not the source of my cancer, God was the source of my strength and determination’.  Battered by her struggle to defeat cancer, she discovered through the experience that she was never alone – when she was in remission or when the news was grim.  She sensed God’s presence in the exhausting chemotherapy sessions, the kindness of care, the times of both hope and despair. Always, Christ was in her and she was in Christ. We all know people like this – and possibly we farewelled one of them this week.

And thirdly we are not about to become an amorphous lump of sameness – although some would like to make us this way.  Our very humanity, our diversity continues to be celebrated, and the fact that we approach God from various perspectives, differing understandings reminds us that our God does not belong to any particular strand of orthodoxy,  is in fact more everything than we would ever allow if left to our own limited imaginations.  If Christ is in us and we are in Christ the diversity of gifts and approaches continues in the life made new. 

So how does acceptance of new life in Christ happen – how do we set aside our own controls, our sense of loss of self, our plans for the future and allow the presence of God in us to be a stronger voice for who we are than our own?  How do we empty ourselves of our ambitions and our interpretations and be open to the new way that is Christ within us?

To perhaps begin us on our way here, can I share another story – this time segments of a tale from Rachel Remen in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom.

Rachel begins with these words: “I was thirty five years old before I understood that there is no ending without a beginning.  That beginnings and endings are always up against each other. Nothing ever ends without something else beginning or begins without something else ending.”
She tells of the time she was learning to make jewellery and had made a silver ring, cast it actually.  The design was the head of a woman whose long hair, entangled with the stars, wound around your finger as the circle.  Quite difficult to make, she was very proud of it and it was greatly admired by others.  There was a jeweller who ran a gallery up the coast and she was encouraged to go show it to him which she did.  She left it with him as he was going to recast it for copies to sell.  There was a storm setting in when she left that got quite wild and violent and in the morning she heard that a section of the road had fallen into the sea taking some buildings with it.  And it turned out her ring was now somewhere in the ocean.  Her parents castigated her: one said how stupid she had been to trust her ring to a total stranger and the other for being careless with something so valuable.  Her decision, her fault.  She couldn’t help looking at her empty finger, unable to believe it had gone.
Yet as she stood on the cliff overlooking the ocean that had swallowed her ring, she came to realise that landslips had been happening for millennia – it wasn’t a direct attack on her ring, in fact there was nothing personal in it all – just the inevitable cycle of nature.  She looked at the space where the ring had been and suddenly, empty was not a bad space, it just was.  It was a big space and there was a sense of curiosity creeping slowly in – what would come to fill up this space?  Would it be another ring, different, from someone else?  For the first time, she says, she allowed empty space to just be – she had begun to trust that it was also a beginning of something else – and she waited for what ever that might be with sense of excitement and anticipation instead of loss.

Might this be what being made new in Christ is about? 
 Allowing the old to pass away, not forgotten but rather let go, making room for the indwelling of a God whose purpose is way bigger than we could have imagined ourselves and who, in Christ Jesus, invites in us a sense of anticipation and excitement at the possibilities of what might be when everything is made new.

We pray
Loving and living God – help us to lose our apprehension of a future without us completely in control and place our hope in Jesus, your son and a man who trusted you to point of death that we might know new life?
Help us to realised that empty and new is not so scary when we anticipate a new life build on your faithfulness and love?
Give us the courage to believe that with us in Christ and Christ in us we can move mountains, endure onslaughts and transform this world in the name of love? Amen, let it be so.

Margaret Garland

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