SERMON
Pentecost 14 (Year A) 21 August 2005
During the course of this week we had news of
the murder of Brother Roger, the founder of the Taizé community in France.
Brother Roger was murdered during an evening service by a woman who is reported
to be mentally ill. He was 90 at the time of his death and had spent the last 65
years establishing and nurturing an international, ecumenical religious
community dedicated to prayer, meditation and the service of the poor. The brothers
are committed to material and spiritual sharing, to celibacy, and to a great
simplicity of life. Today, the community is made up of over a hundred brothers,
Catholics and from various Protestant backgrounds, from more than twenty-five
nations.
Over the last 40 years or so Taizé has become
a place of pilgrimage, particularly for young people, who find there a strong
sense of the presence of God, and the example of lives dedicated to peace, trust
and reconciliation. The simple but beautiful music and prayerful, meditative
style of worship that have developed at Taizé have spread across the planet. At
any given moment, somewhere in the world people will be worshipping in the Taizé
style.
The life of this community and its enduring
influence are the fruit of a life lived listening for the leading of God. Last
week Harvey spoke about Mary, the mother of Jesus, about her obedience to
God’s call on her life, and the challenge her response issues to us. Can we
too hear the call of God in our lives and assent to it? Brother Roger’s life
not only asks the same question of us but also provides some clues about how we
might do it.
After all, it is one thing to assent at an
intellectual level. Our very presence here today means that at some level or
other, we have responded to God’s call to us to draw close and to become more
godly in the way we live. But how do we truly find out what God wants us to do?
There are, after all, all sorts of traps and pitfalls.
If we decide that we will follow the rules
laid out in the Bible, we immediately run into problems. For one thing, there
are all sorts of contradictions in the Bible. For another, the Old Testament,
the books from Genesis through to Malachi, were more or less the scriptures that
Jesus knew. And we all know that he broke the rules more than once.
If we then decide to do what Jesus is recorded
as having said, then a whole new set of questions opens up. What does it mean to
live by Jesus’ distillation of the Law: to love God and to love my neighbour
as myself? Sometimes it really isn’t clear what is the best thing to
do. Sometimes we can be sure that we have done the most loving thing only to
discover later that it has had terrible consequences.
There are, of course, those who choose to
abandon any scriptural guidelines and to base their actions on God’s response
to them in prayer. This has obvious risks – how can we be sure that it is
God’s voice speaking in our hearts? There
are many people who have claimed that God has told them to do things which seem
to run counter to all that we know of God. Some have been sane, some not. Many
years ago I was dealing with someone who claimed that God had told him to go out
and kill Vietnamese refugees in Canberra. Breaking all the rules of counseling
(empathetic listening and all that), I thundered back at him ‘God would never
tell you to do that’. ‘Well, I made that bit up’ he said. But not everyone
has as good a grip on reality as he did. How do we know when the voice of God is
truly the voice of God and when it is the voice of my delusions? When, even more
seductively, is the voice of my wishful thinking?
If then, there are problems with all of these
approaches, perhaps then it is really a question of striking a judicious
balance. The classic Anglican synthesis of scripture, tradition and reason has
much to commend it. If we look carefully at the Scriptures, at Jesus’ life, at
the experiences of the church over 2000 years, there is a clear direction towards living prayerfully,
tolerantly, lovingly and fruitfully. This is our primary calling.
But it is not something that is easy for us to
achieve. Indeed, in order for us to be able to enter fully into this journey, I
believe that two things are required of us.
The first is a searing honesty – the painful
kind. The sort of honesty which can look at our shameful, petty, vindictive acts
and thoughts and recognize them as such. We are very good at finding
justifications for our bad behaviour: ‘she deserved it’, ‘it was for his
own good’. ‘I did that because I was abused when I was a child’. But that
does not alter the fact that it is bad behaviour, causing pain to others and
distorting the best of who we are. Do we have the courage to look at our
attitudes, our inadequacies, our passions, our patterns of thought?
We need the sort of honesty which enables us
to face our own beauty, our strengths and to use them for our own good and the
good of others: the kind of honesty which might help us to understand that we
have a unique set of gifts and experiences which are for the service of all
humanity.
The second thing required of us is the
willingness to be wrong. God does not need us always to be right. This is our
passion – always to be right. Indeed, it has so infected our culture that we
hardly ever hear a public figure admit to having been wrong. But it is not
possible always to be right. We can carefully, prayerfully, lovingly consider a
course of action and follow it, believing it to be the ‘right’ thing to do.
And discover later that it has not been – that people have suffered pain as a
result of it, that your own life has gone askew as a result. And if we then
refuse to see that something has gone wrong and that we acted on the basis of
incomplete information, or miscalculation or even outright stupidity from time
to time, then there is no chance to learn, no chance to repair the damage. There
is no chance even to know forgiveness.
Searing honesty and the willingness to be
wrong lead not to despair, as one might fear, but to an understanding of God’s
great love for us, of our dependence on God and to the capacity to change. Fear
not, for the truth shall indeed set us free.
Within the call to us all to live prayerfully,
tolerantly, lovingly and fruitfully, there are and will be other calls: Mary’s
call to bear the Christ child, Paul’s call to spread the gospel to the
Gentiles. Each one of us has a part to play in the Christian community, as Paul
so vividly outlines in the passage from the Letter to the Romans today. But
these are all grounded in and nurtured by the rich soil of godly living.
As St Paul says: may we not be conformed to
this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds, so that we may
discern what is the will of God. Amen.
Sarah Macneil
August 2005