Sermons from St Faith's
'Can we do it...'
Revd Susan Lucas' first sermon as priest-in-charge,
Sunday, March 2nd, 2014
Matthew 17:1-9
I came of age in the 1970s: that meant kipper ties and flares; David
Cassidy – or Donny Osmond; teetering clunkily around on platform
soles; it was before mobile phones, and so meant stretching the
curly telephone wire as far as it would go to get a bit of privacy
for all those intense intimate chats with best friends, away from
prying parental ears – usually sitting on the stairs! And of course,
Saturday Night Fever, and John Travolta in dazzling white…
It takes a degree of cool to get away with dazzling white – as
anyone who has owned a pair of white jeans knows; and dazzling white
at Wimbledon or Lords is always a sight to behold. And then there is
liturgical white – usually resplendent with gold for festivals and
holidays…and there is the white of a wedding, where it is the symbol
of faithful, committed love.
But there are other echoes as well – and today, the New Girl, in my
own newly pressed white alb, I feel a little like Jacques’
description of the schoolboy in the Seven Ages of Man speech in As
You Like It – ‘with shining morning face…walks unwillingly to
school.’ No, I’m not unwilling – I am here with great joy and
full of hope; yet Shakepeare here conveys something of the
vulnerability that shiny newness brings.
All of these themes are present in today’s Gospel; Jesus takes with
him Peter, James and John; and they go up a high mountain – and
mountains are the place of the encounter the living God: Moses, on
Mount Sinai and Elijah, on Mount Horeb; and Moses and Elijah
encounter God – and are sent back to earth, as it were, transformed
– not simply for themselves, but in order to speak out against the
powerful who exploit the weak; Moses and Elijah feed the people when
the rulers cannot – or will not.
They become themselves transformed humanity, in order to give back
humanity to those whose humanity has been trampled. And they do so
not in power and strength – for in meeting the living God, they
eschew the one thing the powerful cannot: they empty themselves of
all power and become utterly vulnerable;
So the dazzling white of Jesus today shows him to be the new Moses,
the new Elijah, the one in whom the new humanity and new creation is
come to us. Not in power and majesty – for the dazzling white is the
dazzling newness of vulnerability – a vulnerability which Jesus
embraced fully – for he is the human one, from the vulnerable baby
in the manger, to the broken man on the cross.
It’s not a bad way of reflecting on the beginning of a new ministry;
for we all – priests and people together – are at our most human
when we say simply, ‘just as I am’ – fully embracing our own
humanity, our ordinariness, our vulnerability; for it is in
precisely this that the glory of God is most visible; ‘the glory of
God is the human being fully alive,’ said Irenaeus of Lyon; ‘and to
be fully alive is to be in the presence of God.’
And to be in the presence of God is to be vulnerable; for to be in
the presence of God is to have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The
response of the disciples, faced as they are with God’s strange
glory, God’s odd mercy, God’s paradoxical power – is perhaps
understandable; there is fear – there is a need to do something,
and, in Peter’s desire to build booths – perhaps thinking festival
of Succoth, or tabernacles – there is a desire to fall back on
tradition, to try to find a place for this in what we know and
trust.
None of this is wrong in itself; the fear of the Lord as the
psalmist says is the beginning of wisdom; but not its end; we are
called to do something real and practical with our faith to help
others; and tradition, rhythm, routine, helps us to practise our
faith, to keep on keeping on.
Yet none of this is quite enough; for, just as more is asked of the
disciples, so more is asked of us as disciples of Christ, baptised
into the death of the Lord; we too are asked to come into the
presence of God in all our vulnerability, in all our humanity – to
be ‘just as we are’ – in all our human glory and brokenness;
Can we do it? Well, we do whenever we feed on Christ in the
sacrament, on broken bread and wine outpoured; for to say ‘this is
my body and this is my blood’ is to say Christ bodies himself into
all this – all that is joyful and sorrowful, all that is wonderful
and wounded, all that is, like the host, blessed and broken.
Can we? For we become what we consume; we become the body of Christ;
for in receiving the body and blood of Christ, we allow ourselves to
become more and more the best human beings we can be – in all our
vulnerability and fragility; and in coming into the presence of God
in that humanity, we discover the God whose nature and name is
relentless, committed love – for us, and for all humanity; and in
that discovery, we become, in Austin Farrer’s memorable phrase,
walking sacraments; for the sake of one another, for our neighbours
in this community – and for the life of the world. Amen.
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