Looking backwards/Looking forwards
Sermon preached by the Dean of Wells on October 5th 2014 (Trinity 16)
Philippians 3 v 4b - 14 Matthew 21 v 33 - end
The Autumn lectures this year have helped us think about the process of ageing. On Tuesday of this last week Harriet Mowat encouraged her listenersto look back over their lives, and to discover the wisdom that can be harvested from experience; hard-won wisdom that can be shared with others. Looking back, either with joy or with sadness, is one of the promises of older age. There is, at least in theory, time to stop, to reflect to make some sense out of the varied stages of a life.
Of course reality is more complex. Retirement may come with the challenges of moving home, or facing illness, or coping with a reduction in income and with the loss of fixed routines. Sometimes, the blocks to taking stock and reassessing the past are more personal and more complex. We may feel caught up in the need to defend the significance and importance of what we think we have achieved, and want that achievement to be noticed by other people; or we may feel trapped by the decisions we have taken in past years about work and marriage and home, and we wonder whether these decisions have been the right ones. Now it seems too late to change.
In such circumstances we may cling on to an unrealistic view of our situation, either one that over inflates the ego or one that is too punitive, unable to see the mixture of good and bad in what we have done and in what we have become. Then, perhaps, at some point, we may find that something shifts inside us, change occurs that makes us more compassionate towards ourselves and towards other people, a change that helps us accept the person we now are and the unknown time that remains.
St Paul offers a dramatic example of such a change. As he says in the letter to the Philippians, ‘If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eight day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless’. As we know St Paul’s life changed forever on the road to Damascus as God spoke to him through a blinding light and voice from heaven.
St Paul’s change was not to a different way of telling his past, at least in any conventional sense that looked back on achievements. Instead he talks about regarding past gains as loss for the sake of knowing Christ Jesus as Lord. For Paul, to know Christ Jesus was not to have got some new knowledge that he could be proud about, it was to realise that anything that he achieved was not his own but could only be counted as a gift from God. To put it in simple terms, Paul had not found Christ, but Christ had found him, despite his attempts to create a different and secure identity for himself; an identity that he could measure against the successes and failures of other people.
What was even more significantfor Paul was that this new way of looking at his life was shaped by a revelation of God that turned him towards the future. Whatever he may have done in the past was no longer important, what was important now was what he would become, and what his brothers and sisters in Philippi and the other Christian churches were called to become. The only reality that counted was to share in the power of Christ’s resurrection and the only way to achieve that heavenly call was to share in Christ’s sufferings here on earth. He had to trust in Christ as the shape and source of his life. In Paul’s words he was to live the righteousness from God based on faith.
Paul takes us into another austere and more demanding era than thinking about ageing and what we may or may not have achieved. I suspect that Paul’s words might resonate more immediately if we were a Christian Kurdish refugee in Iraq who had been forced to leave home and fields for a very uncertain future.Paul is asking Christians not to dwell in the past; not to say well, I have done my share, and now I can rest; not to make a compromise that restricts what God may do and require of us in the future. Paul’s words are uncomfortable words.
I found another way into this passage from the letter to the Philippians when I read a sermon by the famous German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann preached on these verses in1937 at an end of year service for the students at Marburg University where he taught. He noted that some of the students might feel satisfied with their year’s work – just as perhaps some of us feel that our lives haven’t worked out too badly and that we have been at least moderately faithful disciples of Jesus. The challenge to them was not to rest on their oars; to know that it is fine to be grateful for the past, but that we should not hold on to the past as our own achievement. The gifts that have come to us over the years are to give strength and courage for the carrying on of future tasks to be performed in the service of Christ.
But there were other students in the congregation who looking back over the last year might be disillusioned by their studies, thinking that they lacked inspiration or power. How could they give thanks and see the past year as a gift? Here Bultmann is at his sharpest. He says that those people, who feel they have wasted the hours and neglected opportunities are to see in this very doubt and despair Christ thrusting into their lives. For it is at that point that they can no longer trust in the previous formulae of success, the litany of their achievements from the past. Remember St Paul who counted the past as rubbish for the sake of gaining Christ. God can take hold of our lives only when we no longer clutch status to ourselves; Christ comes at the point when we know that our own strength is insufficient and can only hold out open hands towards him.
It is in this moment of self-doubt that faith turn usand drives ustowards the future, pressing on to what lies ahead, to the future that God is shaping and wishes to give. St Paul says that future comes in two forms. The first is in the promise of resurrection. The Resurrection reminds us that God will not desert us in the crises of life and even in death, and that God is always the God of life. The second form in which the future is presented is through sharing in the suffering of Christ; for in pressing onwards we remain open to the pain of the world, whether that comes through the events of public history or through the more hidden changes of our physical body. Christians are called know the power of God’s word ‘My grace is sufficient for you; for my power is made perfect in weakness’.
Bultmann says that faith means we are governed by the motif ‘not yet’. The future will have more to show us. But he also says that this is intertwined with another phrase ‘no longer’. For if we live by the call of Christ we are no longer dominated by the successes or failures of the past. And he goes on to say that even in the midst of the complexities and challenges of the everyday this ‘no longer’ can become a triumphant ‘but already’ as we see the pattern of God’s love, of the living and dying of Jesus being worked out in human lives revealingthe promise of the glory that is still to come. ‘But already’ - it is this shared hope that we proclaim week by week through broken bread, and the wine of Christ’s blood poured out in the Eucharist.
Let me end by turning to the gospel reading. This is a parable of Jesus that Matthew has taken from Mark’s gospel turned into an allegory about the church and the Jewish authorities. The parable undermines those who confuse religion, security and power. Matthew writes: ‘When the Chief Priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realised he was speaking about them.’ The powerful have killed the prophets and thrown the son out of the vineyard, and still they want to think of themselves as blessed by God. They cannot understand that God works always with the stone that has been rejected.
The human temptation is always to find excuses to take religious power into our own hands. We try to take it away from God and so we become like the Pharisees and Priests of the parable.But God will not be fooled, his building materials are the despised, the forgotten and the rejected, even the parts of ourselves we have spent years trying to disown. There is no other way than the cross and grave but this humbling is also the way of deep joy, of a joy that come from beyond this world. The words of the Kontakion of the departed familiar from funeral services express this joy almost perfectly. ‘All we go down to the dust, and weeping o’er the grave we make our song; Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.’
John Clarke 5th October 2014