Sermon for the 2nd of October, 2022, St John the Baptist
Someone left The Times in a coffee shop on Friday. I started reading. I
happened on an article reporting what causes the average British person to have
a bad day. According to new research, it said, Britons endure, on average, 84
bad days a year. What are the causes? I was intrigued. 55% said, a bad night’s
sleep. Fair enough. 33% said, losing a purse, phone, or keys. Yes, I thought, that
would be frustrating. 30% said, trying on clothes and finding that nothing made
me look good. Shrinking a favourite jumper in the dryer would do it for 15%;
28% said getting a parking ticket would ruin the day; for 16%, it was having a
bad hair day.
And the ways people coped? 44% became more aware of what it meant for
Mercury to be in retrograde (the planet being associated with dampened spirits),
and some became more superstitious (avoiding cracks in pavements).
Not ranking up there on the list, apparently, was awareness of the casualties of
the war in Ukraine, media-induced teenaged suicide, or the ever-more
destructive hurricanes caused by global warming. Faith, or prayer, likewise,
didn’t seem to rank up there as a possible recourse.
I find myself feeling more and more marginal to what is usually reported in the
culture around us: the strangely-named prophet Habakkuk, for me, echoed more
exactly what I have been feeling.
He said to God:
Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law becomes slack
and justice never prevails.
But if we are affected more deeply by the deaths in Ukraine than how our hair
turned out today it would be good to know what we are supposed to do about all
that is wrong in the world. And I am not sure that the Gospel passage sheds
light for me on this!
I don’t understand many of Jesus’s sayings. The parable of the dishonest
steward, the parable of the talents, and others....they mystify me; they keep
disturbing any sense I have that I know what Jesus was trying to get across to
his followers then, and now.
Look at this encounter of Jesus we are given for today:
Increase our faith! Increase our faith! his followers clamour to Jesus—-give
this faith to us! Give it to us! We are here; we are ready; give us this and we will
be as you want us to be!
But instead of giving a direct answer to the very specific question they throw up
at him, Jesus says that if they had faith (implying that they don’t), they could do
anything.
Many of Jesus’s sayings seem harsh to us, bewildering. They were remembered
as short, dramatic encounters re-told verbally again and again, because the
impression they made was deep, and unforgettable. But I think that part of the
reason they were remembered is that they were meant to provoke, to stir up, to
unsettle, to leave the questions unanswered as expected, in a neat and tidy way.
We are meant to go back to these encounters again and again, to re-examine
what Jesus might have been pointing us toward as a greater and larger truth
about who we are and what we are placed on this earth to do.
Look at the second part of the Gospel passage. It seems to be a description of
the usual treatment by masters of slaves—-not even thanking them for the hard
labor they have just completed in the fields nor inviting them to share in the
dinner at the table that would have been welcome as they still recovered from
the day’s work, but expecting them to go about their serving and attend to
themselves later.
They will only have done what they were expected to have done.
This kind of treatment appears to me as patently un-Christian, insensitive, and
ungracious.
How do we apply this to ourselves, if we consider ourselves to be, if we try to
be, faithful servants of Jesus? We are trying as best we know how!
Hear that last verse again: So you also, when you have done all that you were
ordered to do, say, “We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we
ought to have done!”’
A lot of people are hard enough on themselves—-they don’t need this kind of
talk!
But here is another way to think about what Jesus might have been trying to
say:
We will not have earned, in old-fashioned language, our “heavenly reward,”
because we have measured up to our own standard of good works or good
behaviour or good anything, but by an unassuming steadfastness in going about
the business of living the Christian life as Jesus set it out. As we put together
what that is, having listened to and read and thought about these encounters of
Jesus that fill the Gospels, in slightly different versions but always with the
same driving end: to be a grace-filled opening, a window, for others, to the
presence of God in the world.
Each of us is given a different task, a different life.
To fulfil one’s given task is a beautiful thing, expecting no particular reward....
In the end, it is a matter of grace that we share eternity in God’s presence.
I love this passage from the second chapter of Ephesians:
But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even
when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ
—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with
him in the heavenly places..., so that in the ages to come he might show the
immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by
grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is
the gift of God.
Frederick Buechner, one of my favourite novelist-theologians, wrote: Listen to
your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the
pain of it no less than the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your
way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all
moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
Increase our faith! Increase our faith! I ask this—I think that, actually, contrary
to the latest research, many others also ask God for this.
We are up against daunting odds in this not only imperfect but violence-torn
and tragic world. How do we survive, much less live out our lives with greater
faith? How do we read the daily news without being overcome by the sense that
we can make so little difference to the disasters, wars, ills of all kinds that
sweep away others who share our world?
The prophet Habakkuk proclaimed in our reading for today:
For there is still a vision for the appointed time;
it speaks of the end, and does not lie.
If it seems to tarry, wait for it;
it will surely come, it will not delay.
the righteous live by their faith.
How can our faith increase?
We re-read the Beatitudes, the accounts of Jesus’s compassionate healing, the
words of reassurance he gave to those who were beset in his own time.
We keep community—we worship God together, each week—-week in, week
out.
We sit in silence and we pray for God to come to us, to make his presence felt.
As we practice our faith in these ways, our faith will increase. Let us just
continue to go about our business of living, centering the whole of ourselves in
these ways, as best we can.
Because it is not a matter of obtaining a reward, but of embracing the grace of
God that has already been poured out upon us.
May we embrace this grace each day, in thankfulness and in joy!
Amen!