Readings: 1 Samuel
17:32-49, Mark 4:35-41
Let us pray: O Christ, open our minds to understand more
clearly your word to us. May we know you as a God who never leaves us nor forsakes us but walks with us through the up and
downs of life that we may grow and learn in the freedom of life in you. Amen.
The streets of
Dunedin are hilly on the whole. Had you
noticed? I did when I came here after 20
odd years of walking on the flattish lands of North Canterbury. I was determined to get fit for them but so
often I would look up to the top of where I had to go and would be overwhelmed
– I am never going to make that I would think.
And then I was given a wee hint.
Keep your eyes lowered, place one foot before the other and you will get
there before you know it. And it
worked. I would get to the top and
marvel at how relatively easy it had been to get there in contrast to the
perception of difficulty from the bottom.
Now there is several ways that little anecdote could take us but I would
like to lead us in this direction. I
wondered if it might be that we keep our heads down just a bit too often. I wondered if we too often try to contain
scary and challenging spaces into something that is manageable and containable
as I did just to get to the goal and miss out on some spectacular scenery on
the way. Hey, don’t get me wrong, it is
a great technique to get us up some particular hills, in fact it’s the only way
sometimes, because that is all we can cope with at the time, but I do wonder if
that can become a bit of a bad habit.
Sometimes the
enormity of things can overwhelm us, mystery can be threatening, beauty can be
just too much of a contrast to our particular reality of the time, that which
we can’t see clearly can seem dangerous, full of unpredictable possibilities,
and so we look to our feet.
I love that the
stories of Matariki are all about the stars in the sky – that, if anything is,
is a place of mystery: of inconceivable distance and glorious beauty and yet
dependable constancy. You can understand
why stories were found to kind of explain that vastness, to connect with it in
a meaningful way, the stories of the sisters or the smashed star or the seven
eyes. And I guess in the same way we try
to understand the mystery and wonder of a God who is beyond anything we try to
define by sometimes containing God in stories and words and yes doctrine and
dogma. And that is understandable and
actually required, for we need the stories to reach understandings, to teach
and share the gospel message. But the
problem comes when we do not temper that understanding, hold it in tension with
a sense of wonder and awe of a God who cannot be explained, contained, or
predicted. That’s a pretty steep hill
for many – one where it can be easier to keep our sights lowered with plodding
to the top of the hill our only goal. I hope it’s not too tenuous a connection
for you to see that Peter was kind of doing that in the boat. He was overwhelmed by the moment, thinking he
wasn’t going to make it out of the storm.
He couldn’t see any other possibilities than drowning or the storm being
stopped – his view of God made known in Christ was limited by his own
understandings of the power of the storm and the frailty of the vessel. He didn’t get that there was a third
possibility, riding out the storm, safe in the unexplainable, uncontainable
power of the love of God. And he didn’t
get that in doing so he would experience a God that was greater and just more
than he could ever imagine. He was
amazed at the stilling of the storm – but had he shut himself off from the
greater experience of riding out the storm with God, I wonder?
David, on the
other hand, in facing Goliath, seemed to almost have his eyes fixed on a too
huge a horizon. He came to the outer
circle of the battlefield simply to bring provisions from his father to his
three elder brothers who were part of the army.
But like all young brothers he wanted to see what was going on and went
to find his siblings. And yet when he
got there he found the Israelites cowering from the taunts and challenges of
the champion of the Philistines, Goliath.
They too could see no way of victory with such undefeatable odds before
them. But David, almost musingly we
read, asked “who was this man that he should be greater than the armies of the
living God?” His brothers questioned his
motives, seeing only that he had come to gawk at the battle, but Saul heard the
truth of those words and invited David to his side. Even then it was still about girding David in
all the possible armour to protect him, still eyes down you might say, and when
that failed you almost get a sense of ‘Well this is a young life chucked away
but you have to admire the bravery’. But
David I think had his eyes wide open to the possibilities of God in our human
situations. He seemed rather more prepared than Peter to trust that God was
with him in every step, especially the difficult, beyond belief, places he
found himself – the places where others views were contained by their own
limitations.
Is that what faith
is do you think? Knowing that there is
way more under the sun than what you and I or the whole of creation can ever
perceive or know. I suspect that is a rather fragile definition and is open to
some serious criticism but hey I’ve been brave and left it in. It will give you something to redefine over
morning tea?
But back to the
conundrum we face – how to pause in our walk through life, which can be a plod
sometimes, to stop and lift our eyes to the possibilities of a God beyond our
individual or communal imaginations, to embrace mystery and grow in new and
challenging experiences when they present themselves.
It is at times
like this, at mid-winter, when we are often forced to slow down, to stop trying
to race through life at a million miles an hour, maybe this is the time to
listen to the voice of God speaking to us, encouraging us into new
possibilities, new visions for the transformation of this world we live in.
It’s at times like
this, at Matariki, that we have time and opportunity to catch a glimpse of the
vastness and wonder of a God in the patterns of the stars and the life of the
world beyond. And within that is the sense
of constancy that the Maori people know in the rising of a constellation
faithfully each year – an anchor in a turbulent life.
It is at times
like this, in worship together as the people of God, that we can be open to the
possibilities that living in Christ Jesus will open up for us, if we can be
bold and brave enough to raise our eyes and trust that Christ will still get us
to the top of our respective hills, but with some slightly scary but enormously
fulfilling experiences on the way. Let
us be open to the possibilities of the Spirit in this place. Thanks be to God.
Margaret Garland
No comments:
Post a Comment