Sermons from St Faith's
How Many Times?
Dr Fred Nye, Reader Emeritus,
3 August, 2014
One hundred years ago
today, Germany declared war on France; and
tomorrow marks the centenary of Britain’s
declaration of war against Germany, on 4th August
1914.
In recent months we have heard much about the
origins of the ‘war to end all wars’; the complex
web of political, social and economic factors that
was eventually to leave 16 million dead and 20
million wounded. And behind the explanations and
the statistics there is a deeper story, the story
of human fallibility and frailty. In all wars, all
conflicts, we see the effects of human fear
and lack of security, the corruption and
abuse of power, the injustices placed upon the
weak by the strong, and the despair and
smouldering resentment of the subjugated. And we
see the devastating results of ideologies that put
dogmas above humanity – whether the totalitarian
dogmas of Communism or National Socialism or of
fundamentalist Islam. Perhaps, more than any of
these, we see the unthinking and often brutal
depersonalisation of human beings: we end up
referring to them as ‘terrorists’, or as members
of an ‘evil empire’ or - most chillingly of all –
just as ‘targets’. Modern warfare with its cold,
remote, computerised killing - by missiles, air
strikes and drones - increasingly distances itself
from all human contact. So what chance now for
compassion?
Jesus our Lord enters our world with an ideal and
a vision so breathtakingly different that is
difficult for us to grasp, let alone to
share. He encourages us to love our enemies
– even more to turn the other cheek and try and do
good to them: ‘if someone steals your shirt, give
him your coat as well.’ He warns us against the
hypocrisy that can’t see the lump of dirt in our
own eye even though it is right there in front of
us. And above all he tells us to forgive, and to
go on forgiving, just as in Christ we ourselves
are forgiven; ‘not seven times, but seventy times
seven.’
Our Lord is the incarnation of forgiveness and
reconciliation. In his earthly ministry he healed
the sick and restored them to their families and
communities. He befriended the poor, the alien,
the sinner and the outcast, his care and concern
extending to include the Jews’ religious and
political enemies, the Samaritans and the Romans.
And he added great poignancy to his own parable
about hypocrisy by holding up, to his Jewish
followers, the generosity of a despised Samaritan
as an example of forgiveness and compassion.
And I hope you won’t mind me saying this, but I
think we miss the point if we interpret Our Lord’s
passion and crucifixion solely in terms of our own
personal salvation. Jesus’ radical vision of
justice for the hated, and compassion for the
enemy was anathema to the political and religious
authorities of his time. When he went up to
Jerusalem for the Passover, he knew that
confrontation was inevitable. By entering the city
on a donkey, and scattering all that money in the
Temple, he was stating his position once and for
all. In his Father’s Kingdom, the Kingdom of
heaven, there was no room for corruption, or
hypocrisy, or the abuse of power. And we know
where those two acted parables were to lead him.
On the Cross we see the ultimate act of
reconciliation. It was not only the veil in the
Temple, the barrier between God and humanity, that
was torn: all the barriers that separate us from
one another were destroyed. As Paul says in the
Epistle to the Ephesians: ‘He is our peace:
in his flesh he….has broken down the dividing
wall, that is, the hostility between us’. We might
think of the Berlin wall, or the West Bank wall,
but sadly there is nothing new about either of
them. Paul was almost certainly familiar with the
wall in the Jerusalem Temple that separated Jew
from Gentile, and which was death for a Gentile to
cross.
We often give lip service to forgiveness,
regarding it as a potentially ‘good thing’ rather
than, as Jesus did, the very key to salvation.
Perhaps this may be an unconscious way of trying
to avoid it, as in our heart of hearts we all know
how immensely costly and difficult reconciliation
and forgiveness can be. It is very hard for us to
risk losing face, to make ourselves vulnerable, to
turn the other cheek, to make the first move. We
have only to think of the recent hostilities and
controversies that have blighted our own Anglican
church: it seems that divisions among Christian
communities are the norm rather than the
exception. So how can we achieve the seemingly
impossible task of embracing forgiveness and
reconciliation, a task that seems so at odds with
our basic human instinct of self-preservation?
Put simply, God does in us and for us that which
we cannot do on our own. But we have first
to come to terms with ourselves, to love ourselves
a little more, to understand ourselves a little
better, and to realise the breadth and depth of
God’s forgiveness for us. Unless we can do this,
and go on doing it, how can we begin to
understand, let alone forgive, anyone else?
Fortunately we are not left to struggle on our
own: we are provided with what the Prayer Book
calls the ‘means of grace’: the ancient gifts of
the scriptures, and of prayer and
self-examination. And I hope you won’t mind me
putting in a ‘plug’ here for a great treasure,
which as Catholic Christians we paradoxically tend
to avoid, the Cinderella sacrament of confession.
Perhaps it would lose some of its terrors if we
remembered its other name, the sacrament of
Reconciliation.
So here we are this morning – a rag-bag army of
assorted and mostly aging Christians, all with
different hopes and fears, gifts and failings,
gathered round the altar in a half empty building.
But this is the Lord’s table, and here we can all
share equally, for we are all equally loved,
accepted, and forgiven by the Lord, the Lord of
Reconciliation. And startling though it may be He
has provided plenty of empty places among us -
perhaps (who knows?) to welcome people we might at
first sight find different, or strange. Our Lord
sends no-one away.
And we gather round an altar bearing a small jar
of wine and some scraps of unleavened bread,
perhaps enough to feed a few but certainly not a
multitude. But remember how our Lord fed the five
thousand. If we can only allow it to happen
all that love and grace that we receive at his
table will begin to multiply and spill over from
us, bringing reconciliation to others. In
Archbishop Justin Welby’s words –‘To be the object
of God’s grace should be utterly overwhelming,
leading to far more than we contain’.
Every day on the calendar brings a reminder of
some horrifying consequence of human
conflict. This coming Wednesday, August 6th,
is the 69th anniversary of the nuclear attack on
Hiroshima. The world will not be fully reconciled,
nor our souls fully transformed, this side of the
grave. But with God’s grace we can make a start.
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