The Reverend Nancy Barnard Starr
7 June 2015, St Alban’s
2 Pentecost
Love’s Redeeming Work
When I was a girl, my mother would ring a ship’s bell at the back door to tell us to come for dinner. She rang and waited, and rang again, but the woods around our house were too interesting. Only the cat would answer; he knew dinner was waiting. In time, we came, too. But the bell has rung, and so we are gathered this morning!
Jesus’ family, his mother and brothers, appear at a house near Galilee. It is time to come home. But people fill the room and he must see to their needs, physical and spiritual. In a society where family was so important, it is a radical idea to think of these as one’s family. In our lessons today, a nation chooses its way and receives the prophet Samuel’s anointing of its king. And Paul, always envisioning the next world as this earthly one collapses and fades, tells us that though we fall, we rise in Christ; we are eternally God’s. We are home safe.
One of my teachers used to say, whenever there was disagreement and conflict over church matters, “Get a bigger room.” Pay attention to need.
Jesus’ ‘inclusive outreach’, to borrow theologian Elizabeth Johnson’s words, is a visible sign of God’s compassion for us. He liberates the marginalized and converts the powerful. (168-69) He is the risen life. To say he is otherwise is ‘incorrect and even blasphemous’ says Johnson, a Catholic feminist. Jesus has pitched his tent among us. And the crowds see the hope of their homecoming with God.
In the news thousands of people wash up in swollen boats on unknown shores, carrying their cargo of human need. They are not so different from us. We have have our virtues and vices, too. The issue is overwhelming and raw. Br Curtis Almquist writes: “The way that a dividing wall of hostility between peoples is broken down is not by berating or convincing the other person, the other tradition, that we are right. Dividing walls of hostility are dismantled when people enact a tacit covenant with one another: respecting the dignity and the integrity of the other.”
Sin is anything that separates us from God; systemic sin captures the innocent along with the guilty in its nets. Instead of a garden, these people have found death and devastation. They, too, carry an image of what has been, and what could yet be. Some are escaping their own pasts, but others hope for a future to unfold.
“I am sorry to come to your land,” said one man, weak from his voyage, as he and his party reached Italian shores. “But I had no where to go.” I am sorry for the beastly horror that forced his people to leave all they knew, relatives and friends, and grasp for landfall in unfriendly waters. The needs are immense. How can we not embrace with heart and dignity people in desperate need, alongside our own people who are struggling to care for their families? It is a question for Christians everywhere. Pay attention to need. In the midst of a housing crisis, in the chambers of our heart, in our prayers, let us try to build a bigger room.
I once worked at a women’s refuge run by the Baptist Church, a place overflowing with mothers and children. My boss called me a ‘pool of quiet’, because I listened. It was a privilege to hear them. Once the women felt safe, their stories emerged. Some were from here, but others were Croatian, or Russian-speaking, refugees twice over. One woman told of carrying her young son for days, fleeing Serbian forces. She left her beautiful city by the sea. She kept a postcard of it, white buildings rising high over the water’s edge. It was like paradise then.
“I am sorry to come. I apologise for my need.”
People recovering from difficult circumstances can become ‘wounded healers’. So these women in refuge began to write about what had happened to them, about their children and their dreams for the future. They put together a booklet called Our True Stories and left copies for those who came after.
In her book Calling, A Song for the Baptized, Caroline Westerhoff tells of a young lawyer who left her position at a large law firm to help women and girls in a ‘bleak housing project’ find self-esteem and value, and grow into self-assured people. Through her caring, injustices were dismantled and victims set free. God works to create a new family, the church, a house of souls that cannot be plundered or destroyed. In the midst of life’s storms, Jesus stands in the house of our souls and binds Satan. The floodwaters recede and God’s profound light saturates everything. Our presence and prayers make all the difference.
“Try to keep up,” my mother would say as we walked home at dusk. “Whistle,” said my Dad. This is how to outwit the darkness that would stifle the habits of grace we inherit, the indelible mark of love in our baptisms, when we are claimed as God’s own. Keep connected, no matter what happens.
Paul says in Corinthians that though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed. We become in the words of Bishop Selwyn, ‘all light.’ A person’s ‘enlightened will’ lives in an atmosphere of love, said English physician and priest Martin Israel. Love is at the heart of things, the secret of a Christian life.
Communities and together and scatter; the good remains. It passes on to new circumstances and places of opportunity. Many of you have worked to build up others in your lives, and to heal with a kind word. Did you know what you were building then? The poet James Baxter writes, ‘Lord, Holy Spirit, in the love of friends we are building a new house.’ -- ‘Heaven is with us when you are with us. Guide us, wound us, heal us. Bring us to the Father.’ (NZPB 157-8)
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in his Trinity Sunday sermon last week, considers it is the task of Christian communities to make sense of God for the world. He writes: “A British theologian … describes the church as the interpreter of the gospel. The challenge is that we are to be community that is both such a blessing to its society and so different from all other communities that when people look at it they see the reality of God… Where there are Christians, people should know that the hungry will be fed, those who are hurting will be healed, those who are lonely will be loved, those who are in despair will be brought hope, those who are disruptive will be taught to do the right thing… [by loving example]. To live with Christians in such a community is also how we find freedom from the pressures and worries of all our lives. In such a community the life of the Trinity is made visible, and in such a community we find our sure defence against all that life can throw at us.”
We embody the gospel. The Church exists at the boundary of hurt and grace, standing as evidence of God’s care on earth. That kind of care was there for a young couple in their grief, in the form of ‘voluntary grandparents’, who came to Eucharist as they often did on an ordinary summer day. The young couple carried a precious story that morning, the remains of one loved. After the service, the priest led the people to the beach, where he walked with the couple into the sea swirling with ashes, unashamed to get his vestments wet. I have never forgotten him.
Such moments are difficult to explain. The experience of this kind of love renders us clear-eyed, wise, moved by grace. It makes our hearts full. It surprises, and it heals. So I imagine the wounded in body and spirit carrying their anxieties, hungers and fears, people who were no relation to Jesus. “I am sorry to come… I had no where to go.” And Jesus reaches, radically including the other person and calling him brother, sister and friend.
The Book of Common Prayer tells us that God binds both those we love and those whom we hurt into the communion of saints, the whole family of God. And we are one, as we were meant to be. The bonds of God’s love exist as possibility in all whose lives intersect with ours. God makes a home here. For it is here we receive sacred bread to nurture us, shield us, guide us -- and bring us here and now to the Father and Mother of us all, whose name and purpose is Love. Amen.
