Third Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, 2015 – 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; Psalm 20; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, (11-13), 14-17; Mark 4:26-34
I found myself, this week, unable to write this sermon. Or rather, I wrote three versions of it and again and again it did not ring true. So I have decided simply to tell you why it is difficult to write. Listen to Paul in today’s New Testament reading.
“So we are always confident, even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord….
We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord….
For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.
And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”
These are the words of a man who has been entirely claimed by Christ. Christ who has died and Christ who is risen fills the whole horizon of Paul’s life.
For the love of Christ urges us on, in this work of mission that is Paul’s, in his care for the churches, in affliction and perplexity and persecution it is Christ who is before and behind. Christ has claimed Paul wholly, body and soul. And in claiming him, Christ has wrested Paul out of the world. We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
That is a startling statement. That this human life of ours is not after all the centre and end of our existence; that to live now in the world, in the wake of the death and resurrection of Jesus, is to live always in some way leaning forward, beyond the life defined by these bodies into a life defined by Christ’s death. For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all and so all have died.
All have died, in the love of Christ. In the wake of the cross we live in this world always dying with Christ, like TS Eliot’s magi “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,” knowing that when we are at home in the body we are away from Christ, longing for what is mortal to be swallowed up by life. This is what it means to be claimed by Christ—this being wrested out of the world, this belonging to the cross of Christ.
And this is, it seems to me, a difficult word to hear. Because so often we do not live by it. In the Anglican church increasingly we want nothing more than to be at home in the body, and we are tempted to find in the human point of view the whole truth about life. This is true in particular in two places: in mission and in morals.
How does the church do mission? How are we to invite people in? Make Christ inviting. Make Christ familiar. Make Christ look like the world. So the mega-churches turned churches into movie-theaters with coffee-holders at every seat (and Starbucks in the foyer); sermon became movie-commentary and a screen replaced the cross. It was relevant, they said. But was it Christ?
For Christ has died, Paul says, one man for all. How can a latte—summary symbol of the self-focused life—possibly proclaim the Christ? This was mission that was blind to the cross and in that cross precisely the conflict between Christ and the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, and the world did not know him. To be claimed by Christ is to be no longer at ease in the world, because the world does not know the Christ. To give people the world when they ask for the Christ is to offer them not bread but a stone.
But still we offer people the stone. If a movie-theatre is not to your taste we can offer you Christ at the bar, pizza and Christ, a pool-side Christ, perhaps, why not? There is an easy way to do evangelism. It is the way of the lattes and movie-sermons, the church-at-the-pub. It is the way that seeks to make Christ comfortable.
But Christ is not comfortable. Jesus Christ is the light that lightens the darkness and the joy underneath all things; he is the peace that passes understanding and the truth before which we all will one day have to stand. But he is not comfortable.
He is not comfortable because he does not look like the world as it is. He is at war with the world, and the flesh and the devil. He cries out against the life that turns in upon itself, that drinks its lattes and watches its movies and buys its vacation packages and seeks in the body the whole meaning of life. Jesus stands on the mountain and cries, “Blessed are the poor!” Blessed are the meek and the persecuted and the merciful, blessed are all those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who do not find their satisfaction in this life, who cannot find their satisfaction in this life, for in this life all is not well. Blessed are those who mourn in this world, for theirs is the kingdom of God.
Theirs is the life that is hid with Christ; this is who Jesus is. He is the poor one and the persecuted and the merciful, he is the one who weeps because God’s city does not know the salvation of God. All is not well in the world as it is. That is the whole point of Christ’s birth. That is why he came and healed and taught and fought tooth and nail against all the powers of Satan and man, all the powers that corrupt. That is why he died. To what purpose, then, do we offer people this world back again, themselves, ourselves, all the lost and lonely people in a mirror, thinking to offer them the Christ?
It is not only in mission that we do it. We do it too in our teaching, in the ethics that begins from this world rather than from the cross. We see from the human point of view, and believe that our end is the body. But Paul discovered in the grace of God something quite different. While I am at home in the body I am away from Christ. It is all right not to be at home in the body. We do not have to subject our bodies to countless surgeries in order to feel at home; we do not have to follow desires that we feel at some level to be wrong—it is all right not to be at home in the body because the body’s end is in Christ. It is in Christ that we find the joy we are seeking; he is our heart’s true home. And shall we offer people themselves again in a mirror, [life as an endless solipsistic circle,] when their heart’s ease is to be found in Christ?
When we set our hope on the things of the world; when we find in the world’s vision, these mortal bodies, our truth; when we seek to make Christ like the world so that the world will like the Christ, we forget. We forget the king who reigns from the cross. We forget the crown of thorns by which the world is remade.
For a king cannot reign from a cross, and the dead are not raised. Not in this world. There is no way back from the foot of the cross, from the mouth of the empty tomb. The old world is dead. If anyone is in Christ—new creation! [Not even the rules of syntax can link us to what has gone before.] The new creation breaks the mold. “Everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”
We live in the day that breaks upon the cross. We live in Christ, broken and most whole, dying…and yet we live, uprooted from the world that we know, the comfortable Christ; born into the grace of God. We proclaim a new day. And we cannot do that with the voice and the values of the world that went before. We will not grow the church by making the church look more like the world. How then? How shall the church grow?
David knew, long ago. David who was the smallest of the brothers, too young to be a king. David, whom God chose. David who (just one chapter later) says this, standing with only faith and a slingshot before Goliath, and all the armies of the Philistines. “You come to me with sword and spear, but I come to you in the name of the Lord.”
Come like David in the name of the Lord. That is the one thing necessary. Come in the name of the crucified One. Set Christ—Christ alone—as a seal upon your heart and remember that we have died with him. Our work is this witness, Christ crucified, in all that we think and speak and do. For the battle is the Lord’s and He will give the people into God’s hand. It is God who brings the growth. The seed is already planted; night and day it is growing, unseen and sure. Pray that our church may belong to God’s seed.
