Between the cross and a high place
Sermon preached in St Salvator¿s Chapel, St Andrews, on Sunday 22nd March 2009 by Professor John Bryant
Readings: Exodus 20: 1 ¿ 17 and Ephesians 2: 1 - 10
Sermon
Opening prayer
Some of you may have found the title of this sermon - Between the Cross and High Place - rather enigmatic. It is of course a word play on the saying Between a rock and a hard place - indicating that one is totally stuck in very difficult situation. However, I do not wish to imply that we are totally stuck - indeed, as the talk proceeds, I hope you will see that we are being freed rather than getting stuck.
I am going to base the talk on the passage from Paul's letter to the Ephesians that was read earlier and on Psalm 8. More specifically, I am going to use Ephesians 2 v10:
For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do.
and Psalm 8, verses 3-6: When I consider your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour. You made him ruler over the works of your hands ...
So, the main theme, the single take home message if you like is that The events of Easter (summarised as the cross in my title) enable us to be who we are really meant to be (summarised as a high place in my title)
In this season of Lent, one of the things that it is traditional is to 'give up something' - You may have given up alcohol or chocolate, or as one friend of mine - a Christian minister in fact - has done, given up Facebook! Such self-discipline is certainly valuable but it is even more so if we accompany it with something positive ... One thing we can do in our reading and meditation is to 'walk with Jesus on his road towards the cross' ... seeing his determination to go to Jerusalem, listening in to his teaching - especially the teaching addressed specifically to his disciples - , observing the entry into Jerusalem, eventually coming to the most momentous weekend in human history ... I once had the very moving experience of walking the very last part of that journey, the Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross, on Good Friday, with a riot breaking out and much of Jerusalem bristling with soldiers ... not much different from the first Good Friday, except that the modern soldiers were Israeli, not Roman.
Jumping now from that momentous time forward to the present century, some commentators have called Sept 11 2001 'the day that changed the world forever'. I think they are wrong ... certainly it was another very sickening example of how humankind can misuse religion - and we need to remember that Christians are not innocent in this area - as indeed is evidenced from the various memorials that we around St Andrews. The events of 9/11 certainly had wide repercussions but it was not those events that changed the world forever; rather, it was that astonishing weekend in Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago ... a weekend that we will recall in more depth as we celebrate Easter in three weeks time. In the Epistle set for last week, Paul wrote very specifically about the centrality of the cross for Christian believers. In the Epistle for today, taken from the letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes of the effects for us of the death and resurrection of Jesus, reminding us too that this all flows from God's grace ... and to those effects we will return in a few minutes.
So, we can meditate on the journey of Jesus towards the cross ... but it is also good to use Lent as a time to examine our own lives ... and our own spiritual journeys ... and in connection with this I want to go back to Psalm 8 (which is alluded to in today's final hymn) - a 'scientist's psalm' and certainly one of my favourites because it captures for me the awesome wonder of the creation that I see as the scientist ... when I consider your heavens ... the moon and the stars which you have set in place ..Yes but also genes and DNA, the works of your hands ... what are humans that you care about them? ...Indeed, what are humans? ...are we just carriers of the DNA, the stuff of life, at the mercy of our genes ... no Professor Dawkins, we are not merely the carriers of DNA, of the selfish gene ... because, to use a phrase that I tend to overwork, the one who put the code in DNA invites us to call him Dad. In the words of the psalm, he has 'made us a little lower than the heavenly beings' and given us power over the rest of the created order. In this year of Darwin, I suppose that as biologist with a strong interest in genes, I am bound to comment on this ... this is where, if this were a shampoo advert, an American actress would tell us ... pay attention now, here comes the science bit ... and the science bit tells us that the human lineage diverged from the great ape lineage a few million years ago ... that the human brain may be the most complex thing in the universe, that humans are the most advanced living beings on planet Earth, with a range of abilities that do indeed give them immense power ... so the Psalmist got it right ... but there is a bit more ... the Psalmist also implies that we have responsibility - we can link this responsibility with similar words in the opening chapters of Genesis and also with that mysterious phrase ... made in the image of God ... we often unpack this in terms of certain qualities shown by humans that are not shown by other animals ... those qualities arise because we are spiritual beings, thus able to relate to God, knowing the difference between right and wrong and being able to make moral choices... and that is certainly part of it ... but the Hebrew language in those verses implies more (if there are any theologians in the congregation I hope you will forgive me if you feel that I am over-simplifying the meaning) ... the Hebrew implies that we in some way represent God on this planet ... that people should be able to look at us and in some way see God ... which is an awesome responsibility ... so, how are we doing? ... not very well I fear ... children starve while very wealthy people find ways of not paying tax, buildings are destroyed and people killed in the name of religion, people are imprisoned without trial and tortured in the name of freedom, the planet itself is groaning as a result of human mis-use.
Here are some words from Bob Dylan, written over forty years ago but still very relevant:
I saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a bleeding
Heard one person starve, heard many people laughing
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it's a hard rain that's gonna fall
... so, as we meditate on our own spiritual journeys ... we are bound to recognise that the image of God in us is rather hidden or damaged. I have here a £10 note on which someone has used a marker pen to draw a thick black line across the image of the queen. The image is thus marred but might become even more so if the note is dropped in a muddy puddle or trodden on with dirty boots in a dirty street. The note may well need some attention before we can once again see the image of the queen.
And so now we move to look at Ephesians again and learn that Jesus through his Holy Spirit can refurbish and repair that image in us ... let me look at some of the phrases ... we are raised with Christ - not will be raised with Christ ... we are with him the heavenly realms ...that is, in those realms where God's rule extends ... again, are, not will be ... and this is not achieved by ticking the right boxes (although it is certainly a good thing to obey the 10 Commandments that we heard in the first reading) ... it is a gift of God brought to us by Jesus ... we are, as it says in Chapter 2 v 10, God's workmanship. This came to me very strongly very recently when I was meditating on a painting by a Christian artist ...the painting was called The Autograph Hunters - the figures were presented in a stylised, almost cartoon-like, way, somewhat similar to way that Stanley Spencer paints people. The picture shows a group of people trying to persuade Jesus to sign autographs but he is waving them away. My initial thoughts were on the fact that Jesus is counter-cultural and thus rejects the notion of celebrity. Indeed, he would be appalled by our 21st century obsession with celebrity and the fact that one can become 'famous' just by appearing in a 'reality show' on the telly.... However, I was moved on in my meditation by another thought came that into my mind and lodged there ... Jesus will write his autograph but not on a piece of paper ... we carry his autograph, in the same way that the canvas I was looking at carried the artist's signature ... and the thought that the Holy Spirit had put into my head tied in so well with today's reading from Ephesians ... so as the workmanship of Jesus - autographed by Jesus - the image of God is restored in us: we can be who we are meant to be. Jesus himself affirms this when he says of himself I am the Light of the World and then of us You are the light of the world ... And you don't put the light under a barrel ... being a light involves lighting up dark places and making a difference ... or in the words of Paul, created in Christ Jesus to do good works ... everyone one of us here is in a position to make a difference somewhere.
In Celtic spirituality we speak of living the resurrection - as we journey, we take hold daily of the very power that raised Jesus from the dead, brought to us by the Holy Spirit. We do this through prayer, meditation, reading, silence.
Liz Babbs puts it very simply in one of her poems in the Celtic Heart:
We are people of the Way
Searching for landmarks
For our hearts journey
Listening to the voice of the Spirit
The Holy Spirit is often portrayed as a dove, based on the account of Jesus' baptism ... but I also like the Celtic picture of the Holy Spirit as a wild goose: imagine the Spirit of God as a wild goose, calling in wild places, journeying on strong wing beats....enabling us on our journey to live out the image of God, to visibly show to the world the autograph of Jesus. And sometimes that empowering by the Holy Spirit will be felt very intensely (imagine the intense feeling amongst the Irish rugby players yesterday evening as they won the Championship, the Triple Crown and the Grand Slam!). In one of their songs, the folk group Iona sing of this intensity:
Today the grass is greener than I have ever seen
Today the sky is bluer than it has ever been
And today my heart is beating like I've never heard it beat
And today flowers are growing from the ground beneath my feet
But at other times, the work of the Holy Spirit will be quieter, gentler, maybe almost un-noticed
So, we have journeyed between the cross and a high place ... the high place that God intends us to inhabit, the high place that is me as I am meant to be ... that is you as you are meant to be ... what a difference we can make to this suffering world if we truly live in that place.
Amen