Sermon: 17 March 2024 Christ Church St Lucia Lent 5Text: Jeremiah 31.31-34 & John 12.20-34Theme: Sir, we wish to see Jesus – marked on our hearts.
Let us pray:
O Saviour Christ, in whose way of love lies the secret of all life, and the hope of all people, we pray for quiet courage to match this hour. We did not choose to be born or to live in such an age; but let its problems challenge us, its discoveries exhilarate us, its injustices anger us, its possibilities inspire us, and its vigour renew us, for your Kingdom’s sake. Amen
Today is St Patrick’s feast day, a wonderful day for all things Irish and green and while this sermon is not about Patrick, I do make the point that Patrick was an evangelist from which, we, in the church in this modern secular Australia could learn much. He really knew the people of Ireland and he would take a different and controversial approach to the prevailing missionary efforts of the post-apostolic early church. Instead of Romanising the people and seeking to “civilize” them with respect to Roman customs, he wanted to see the gospel penetrate deeply into the Irish culture and produce an indigenous movement. He didn’t mean to colonise the Irish, but to truly evangelise them. Patrick knew the Irish well enough to engage them where they were and build authentic gospel bridges into their society and culture. He wanted to see the gospel grow in Irish soil, rather than pave it over with a Roman road. We are going to take this year to truly be intentional about our place here in St Lucia, to learn truly who we are as the people God, and to learn about the people God has placed us within. We need to move from conventional to intentional in all that we do. Now is not the place to unpack more of this but suffice to say it’s with these ideas floating around in my head and heart that I have approached this morning’s Scripture.
In thinking and reflecting upon what it means to be an intentional Christian and part of an intentional community of faith, two verses jumped out of me from today’s Gospel and Hebrew Scripture readings. First, the one from the Gospel. It’s at the beginning and it’s this, “Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”
Sir, we wish to see Jesus. These words are carved on the inside of many pulpits around the world. The idea behind this being that everyone who steps into a pulpit and presumes to preach the gospel needs to think about those words, because the great temptation of preaching is to give our hearers something other than Jesus. “We would see Jesus,” you plead, and we preachers give you our learning, comments on the day’s news, a witty joke or two, but too often there is little of Jesus in our preaching.
But it is not only preachers who do this. There is no doubt in my mind that all around us are people who want to see Jesus. Do they see him in us? Do they see the Servant-Lord who washed the feet of his friends? Do they see the prophet who cleansed the Temple? Do they see the healer who made the blind to see? If we are to let people see Jesus in us, then we must go ourselves and sit at his feet, let him heal us, feed upon his body broken for us, and above all stand at the cross and wonder as the Word that spoke out of the void lapses into silence and death. All of us need to use this coming Holy Week starting next Sunday as an opportunity to refocus our faith on Jesus. Sometimes those who are outside the circle of the church can see and name our problems far better than we can. We all need a lot more Jesus. It’s not only a problem for preachers; it’s a problem for every one of us who are called by the name of Christian.
“Sir, we would see Jesus,” the Greeks said to Philip. We, too, need to see Jesus, so that when others want to see Jesus, they can see him in us. And while seeing Jesus may bring us joy and in fact bring us salvation, I don’t think for us in our day and age that it is necessarily an easy task. This brings me to the verse from our reading from Jeremiah. “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
To preface this verse, I ask have you noticed the increasing number of people getting tattoos? And not just small discrete tattoos but large tattoos covering arms, legs, and chests. I suppose there are many reasons to have a tattoo but I often reflect upon the sad and tragic history to marking people. Certainly, many slaveholders had their slaves branded like cattle. In Hitler's Germany, we know the Nazis, some of them Christian, tattooed captive Jews with ID numbers. Christian soldiers in Bosnia carved crosses into the foreheads of Muslim POWs. These people and their descendants have something to tell us about the pain of the experience -- and the dull ache that comes with knowing that one has been marked and scarred for life. Even those of us who undergo the process of bodily marking voluntarily sometimes find themselves in another place when they no longer want the marks on their bodies. Laser surgery on tattoos is painful and expensive, and removing a brand only creates a new scar in its place.
So many are often stuck with these marks and with whatever statement they make about us, whatever identity they assign us, in the eyes of anyone who sees them. Our marks tell the world what we think is beautiful, or who is important in our lives.
This new covenant with God as recorded in Jeremiah today is actually one tough, difficult proposition. This deal is sealed by the carving of the Law into the human heart, the centre of human life. There is no external marking to identify God's people. The identifying mark is internal -- an inward identity, proven in the God-ward turning of the heart itself. In this new understanding, belief in God touches and tempers the very heart of our human desire, always turning us toward the Creator God, no matter what our circumstance may be. And just as we will be recognised as God's own by this inward turning, God is revealed in the holiness of our lives. This entails for us an awesome responsibility. It means that the world will come to know our God because of what they see in us.
Much as we say we love God; do we not struggle with the notion of submitting to the ministry of this God who wants to touch and shape and reshape our hearts. We resist turning to God because it might restrict our choices. It might dictate our preferences. It adds to our sphere of responsibility, and in our busy lives, we feel that we have responsibility enough already.
We all have families and work and school and civic and political and social lives. Too often the temptation is to turn religion for us into a "social option" much like any other, and we have to figure out how we can fit it into our overloaded calendars. The calling of a life centred on God is not an easy choice when the will of God is not the thing closest to our hearts -- and we do not like making hard choices. So maybe we seek the easy road. We figure that as long as things are going our way, we can't worry terribly much about what might be God's better Way. We might move God to the sidelines and position ourselves in the centre, giving Jesus a tip of the hat on the way to doing what we really want to do.
But that's not what we do when the love of God is grafted into our hearts, when we live in Christ and strive to see God's will for us fulfilled in us. In the darkest of times, whenever our hearts are tempered by God, we will turn to God first. We need to seek the light of God's face, follow God's lead, and make righteous choices that reveal God's glory. That is the promise of the Gospel -- that the power of sin is never greater than the power of the God within. But the whole point of our Lenten season of repentance is that we have to be willing to let go of something in order to live into the power of God within. We have to be willing to relinquish our hold on "stuff" that we value but that stands between us and God. We let go of life as we define it, in order to experience life as God designs it. To experience the glory of God requires us to die in order to live, to shed our cocoons of safety and take flight in lives empowered by God's strength. Such a transformation is never easy, but it is truly possible because of the Christ who endured all of human experience, with all its peaks and pits, to show us the way to live.
So, as we continue our Lenten journey, let us loose our grip on the things that distract us and hold onto God. Let us say that we want to see Jesus and let us pray for growth in the Spirit, that we might open our hearts to the Divine Inscription – the divine marking that helps us move on in the Gospel journey that keeps us ever turning toward God. The Lord be with you.