Call & Response

Address given at St Mary's, Nenagh on Sunday 25th August 2019, the 10th after Trinity, year C

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.

‘Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy’.

So says Jeremiah, when he hears the Lord God JHWH calling him to be a prophet.

I feel empathy with Jeremiah. I suspect he was one of those shy introverts who find it difficult to speak in public, to be the centre of attention among a crowd of people he doesn’t know, even perhaps somewhere on the autism spectrum.

I wouldn’t want to compare myself to a great prophet, but I too am an introvert. When I was younger, up to my twenties - perhaps the same age as Jeremiah - I also found public speaking difficult. The mere thought would bring me close to a panic attack – tightness of breath and a racing heart. At first I avoided such occasions, but as time passed I became more confident. I found I was able to teach small groups, and then to speak at large conferences. Much later, when a call went out for readers in the diocese, I realised that I was well able to lead worship, and this was a ministry I could offer to my church. You could say that I felt the Holy Spirit was calling me to it. Now, commissioned as a diocesan reader for many years, I am comfortable leading worship and preaching. But I still get anxious when I think I may have left my sermon notes behind!

This Sunday’s readings are all about God calling people, and how people respond to that call. Let’s look at them in turn.

In today’s 1st reading (Jeremiah 1:4-10), Jeremiah hears God’s voice calling to him.

‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.’ God has known him since before his conception and calls him to bring God’s message not just to his own people, but to the whole world.

But Jeremiah protests that he is young and inexperienced, and God rebukes him. God promises to be with him and to strengthen him. ‘You shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you’.

Then God commissions Jeremiah through the symbolic action of touching his mouth, sending him out to the nations and the kingdoms of the world, ‘to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant’. In other words, to do away with corruption and ungodliness, and to promote ethical conduct and godliness.

And that is precisely what Jeremiah does. He overcomes his fears thanks to God’s reassurance, and responds to God’s call. He becomes the prophet God wants him to be, starkly warning the people of Judah what will happen if they do not follow God’s ways. From his name we get our English word ‘jeremiad’, meaning a sustained invective against the state of society and morals.

Today’s 2^nd reading from the Letter to the Hebrews 12:18-29 reminds us that as Christians we are called to be part of God’s Kingdom through Jesus.

Inspired by the Holy Spirit, it’s anonymous author contrasts how the children of Israel received the Ten Commandments and their Covenant with God through Moses at Mount Sinai, with how Christians receive the new covenant with God through Jesus Christ at ‘Mount Zion, … the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem’.

The response of the children of Israel to the Ten Commandments and the Covenant was one of terror. They saw God as distant and they were terrified that if they transgressed the commandments in the smallest degree a wrathful God would punish them. So, they felt the place where Moses received the coomandments, Mount Sinai, must not be approached, it was taboo: ‘If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death’.

But our response as Christians to the new covenant, mediated by Jesus, must be different. God has come close to us through Jesus. We must not refuse to listen when he speaks to us. Jesus brings us to a new home, Mount Zion, the city of the living God. There we are welcomed among ‘the spirits of the righteous made perfect’. Our response must be to give thanks: ‘Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe’.

In today’s 3rd reading Luke 13:10-17 tells us the story of how Jesus called a crippled woman over and healed her, and how different people responded to it.

He tells us that when Jesus was teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath, he spotted a woman who ‘was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment”. When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.’

It would be futile to try to explain how Jesus cured the woman in this miraculous way, but the effect is clear. Not only her body is healed, but her standing in the community. She must have been on the margins of the comunity, since people then thought that illness such as hers was caused by an evil spirit. But without being asked, in his compassion, Jesus not only heals her, but affirms her as a full member of the community - ‘a daughter of Abraham’. She responds by speaking out and praising God for what Jesus has done for her – something that women were not supposed to do in the synagogue.

The response of the leader of the synagogue was quite different. He was indignant. He knew the Jewish Law prohibited any work on the sabbath, and he kept telling the congregation, ‘There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day’. Jesus responds sharply. ‘You hypocrites!’, he says. You untie animals to water them on the sabbath, so why shouldn’t this woman be untied from her bondage on the sabbath? His opponents are shamed, and the congregation rejoices.

What is the point of these three stories? I suggest it is this.

God calls human beings in different ways to be the people he wants each of us to be. Each one of us is different, and he calls each of us to different things.

·         Jeremiah hears the Lord God call him to be a prophet. This is the Jewish God that Jesus refers to as Father. With God’s encouragement Jeremiah overcomes his fears and becomes the prophet he is called to be.

·         As Christians we hear the Holy Spirit speak through the letter to the Hebrews. It calls us to listen to Jesus, who is God’s Word. And it calls us to respond by giving thanks that we are included in God’s Kingdom, the city of the living God.

·         The crippled woman in the synagogue on the sabbath hears Jesus Christ the Son of God calling her to be healed and to be affirmed as a full member of the congregation. And she responds by simply praising God.

Can you hear God calling to you? I believe that God is calling all of us, all the time. We may not always hear it, but when we do we must listen to his voice prayerfully, no matter how still and small it is. And if we are sure the voice really does come from God, then we must respond positively. We owe it to God, and we owe it to our deepest selves.

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word:

O God, the judge of all,

through the saving blood of your Son

you have brought us to the heavenly Jerusalem

and given us a kingdom which cannot be shaken:

fill us with reverence and awe in your presence,

that in thanksgiving we and all your Church

may offer you acceptable worship;

through Jesus Christ our Lord,

who lives to intercede for us,

now and for ever. Amen

Love casts out fear

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams preached a thoughtful and challenging sermon at an ecumenical service in Copenhagen Cathedral during the Climate Change talks last December. This is a slightly adapted version. I am very much indebted to him for his insight. And I hope he will forgive me the sin of plagiarism!

‘Perfect love casts out fear’, says St John in his 1st Epistle, as we heard in our opening sentence from scripture.
John is talking about how Christian confidence in God’s love and forgiveness leads us to be fearless. Our confidence, our fearlessness, is built on seeing love at work through us – not just warm feelings or positive emotions or even kind actions, but the love that really sets people free and brings something new into the world: God’s love, reaching into the deepest tangles and knots of our human condition, the love that was the essence of Jesus’s life and death and resurrection.

As Christians, we must be fearless in protecting God’s creation, because when God looks at all he has made he finds it good, as we read in Genesis. We must show in our lives some echo of God’s delight in his creation.We are called to be, God enables us to be, a channel through which God expresses his love for all creation.

Love casts out fear.
If our starting point is the belief that God wants us to rejoice and delight in creation, our whole attitude to the environment will not be anxiety, or a desparate search for ways to control it. It will be an excited and hopeful search to understand it, and to honour its complex interdependent beauty.

If we have any fear, it should be fear of spoiling the heritage God has given us, fear of forgetting the overwhelming scale and depth of his gift and of our responsibility to care for it, fear of forgetting that we are called to show the same consistent and sacrificial love for creation that we must show towards our fellow human beings.

And the truth is that we cannot show the right kind of love for our fellow human beings unless we work to keep the earth a secure home for all people and future generations.

At the present moment, the human species is faced with the consequences of generations of failure to love the earth as we should. Human beings have been polluting the atmosphere and waters, living on the pigs back on non-renewable resources, causing the extinction of other species, causing our planet to warm dangerously – ultimately risking the collapse of the web of life which sustains all species, including ours.

We are not doomed to carry on in the downward spiral of the greedy, addictive behaviour that has brought us to this point. But fear still rules our hearts and imaginations. We are afraid because we can’t imagine how to survive without the comforts of our existing lifestyle. We in the rich world are afraid that the rapidly growing developing economies will take advantage of us. Those in the poor world are afraid that our older, richer economies will use the excuse of ecological responsibility to deny them proper and just development.

So long as this fear dominates our thinking, we are stepping back from love – love for creation itself, which we must look at as God looks at it – love for one another and for the generations still unborn, who need us to do whatever we can to guarantee a stable, productive and balanced world to live in – not a world of chaotic and disruptive change, of devastation and desertification, of biological impoverishment and degradation.

Love casts out fear.
The truth is that what is most likely to get us to take the right decisions for our global future is love.

There is a temptation to underline fear to persuade one another of the urgency of the situation: to say things are so bad, so threatening that we simply must do something.

It would be all too easy, for instance, to enlist Jeremiah’s terrifying vision of the destruction of creation in our 1st reading (Jeremiah 4: 11-12, 22-28) as a stick to wave at doubters. ‘I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins.’ But that would be wrong, I think. Jeremiah’s words relate to his own time and place – the precarious position of the Kingdom of Judah and its people, faced by the rising imperial power of Babylon. Scholars tell us that most likely Jeremiah’s words were remembered, collected together and no doubt edited after the disaster he foresaw had already taken place, after the leaders of Judah had been carried off in captivity to Babylon, where they reflected on what had happened to them, and where as survivors they took comfort from God’s promise not to make a full end of them.

Our situation is quite different. We may be tempted to think bitterly that the human race is still not frightened enough by what is in store for us if we don’t change our ways. But that kind of fear could simply paralyse us, as we all know. It could make us feel that the problem is so great, so insoluble, that we might just as well pull the bedclothes up over our head and wait for disaster to strike. What’s more it could make us just blame one another or just wait for someone else to make the first move because we don’t trust them. We need more than that for lifegiving change to happen.

Love casts out fear.
As we respond to the global environmental crisis as Christians, there are two simple things we can say to ourselves, our neighbours and our governments.

1st: Don’t be afraid – but ask questions.

• Ask how the lifestyle you live looks in the light of God’s command to love God and your neighbour. Ask how Government policy looks in the same context. Ask what would be a healthy and sustainable relationship with this world, a relationship that manifests both joy in and respect for the earth.
• If we really love God’s creation, each one of us will repent of any greed and excess in the way we live – and as Jesus teaches us in today’s 2nd reading (Luke 15:1-10), ‘there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’. We will start to make changes to tread more lightly on God’s world ourselves. Our families, friends and neighbours – even Governments - will notice the changes we make and our joy in and care for God’s world. By God’s grace they will be led to do the same themselves

2nd: Don’t separate environmental concerns from trust for one another.

• In a world like ours with limited resources there can be no trust without justice, without the assurance of knowing that my neighbour is there for me when I face insecurity or risk.
• We must work for justice and strive to build up trust. If we allow God to teach us trust and if we learn to live in trust and seek justice, the whole of creation will feel the effects. Selfishness will give way to liberation, human beings will flourish alongside a flourishing creation, and the result will be to God’s glory.

Let us not be afraid – let us act for the sake of love, not out of fear.