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Sermon: The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost Year C - 24th October 2010
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7, 8 and 10am
In the light of the most holy Trinity we come to ponder the world of God that is broken open for us this day. May we learn together from that word. Amen
And yes, I am going to preach from today’s word, specifically from our gospel reading. I want to share with you what has come to me while praying with the reading and I will be talking about goodness and attachments and the kingdom of God. But firstly, I’d like to tell you a little of how I come to be here today and of a very personal way in which today’s gospel speaks into my life and so gives me such a blessed opportunity to speak, with hope and humility, into yours.
Some of you know me, many don’t. I worship most frequently at the 8 o’clock Eucharist, though I am always conscious that I am worshipping as part of a whole community in this very remarkable parish of St Alban’s. Some time over two years ago, on June 28, 2008, the congregation at the 10am Eucharist received me into the Anglican communion, with Bishop Peter Danaher from the Diocese of Bathurst officiating. In the next Parish Magazine, I contributed an article entitled ‘Why Anglican’ where I spoke about the ‘why’ of my coming here from the Roman Catholic communion. On December 4 of this year, by gracious permission of our Archbishop, Bishop Richard Hurford will ordain me a deacon for the Bathurst Diocese. That’s a Saturday, at 10.30am. Please consider this a very warm invitation to celebrate the beginnings of my ordained ministry with me. St Alban’s has a proud history of forming people for many ministries and for the ordained ministry among them. It is such a pleasure and an honour for me to become part of that tradition.
There’s a very direct connection for me with today’s gospel. At the beginning of the same year, 2008, I did some pretty thorough re-furbishing of my house in Chatswood. I had new paintwork and new floor treatments through and new fittings for the bathroom…but it was in the kitchen that I really went to town. You see, cooking is one of my two passionate hobbies (the other is fishing: also, of course, an activity with very direct relevance to the Gospels). So the kitchen was a total makeover and – for a small house, it is an absolute dream of a kitchen. Because I am being ordained for the Diocese of Bathurst, I am leaving my house behind, to be rented out. Which means leaving behind my dream kitchen. And I am attached to that kitchen. I move around it with ease and grace and delight. I produce some quite remarkable meals from it and a lot of very simple ones, too. I love it. And about 4-5 weeks ago, long before Father John did me the honour of asking whether I would like to preach here, I had a moment when I realised that soon I will be leaving this joy of a kitchen behind. I stopped dead in my culinary dance, and said aloud to God: “Dear God: I know you said that those who leave home and father and mother etc for your sake will be blessed. Well…how about kitchens, God? Do kitchens count? Do I get heavenly brownie points for leaving my lovely, lovely kitchen?”
And some weeks later, here I am and here we are, receiving this particular gospel from Luke. Indeed, I am more and more convinced that this God of ours has a gentle sense of humour!
So, to the gospel itself: there are certain things in this story that strike me. Firstly, the ‘ruler’, the important and rich man, follows immediately after the little children: those whom the disciples thought not important enough to be ‘touched’ by Jesus. Yet Jesus nominates these ‘least’ of the crowd as those who hold the title deeds to the kingdom of heaven. That’s what he says: to such as these does the Kingdom of Heaven belong.
Secondly, the rich man (the very rich man) is no despot. He is ‘of the kingdom’ and is faithful to the commandments. He is a Good Man. Jesus knows this, he who looks at us from the God’s-eye view and sees, first and foremost, not the less desirable parts of us, but a work of art, a miracle wrought in love by a lovingly-kind creator. And so Jesus offers this man something very special, knowing the goodness in him. He offers him, not a test (as many would have it) but a gilt-edged invitation, an early pass into the dress circle of the kingdom of God.
Is it any wonder that, finding himself unable to accept this remarkable gift, the rich ruler is infinitely sad? So too, this story has it, is Jesus. He lets the man know that he sees, truly sees, how caught he is…and commiserates with him rather then condemning him.
It seems to me that there is a very profound truth underlying this story, which is less about the ephemeral nature of riches, or other material things or the secular world in general, and even not all that concerned about the nature of “being good” within the law. It is a point about relationship and righteousness. It’s an odd word, “righteousness” because it gets tied up with all the negative connotations of being self- righteous. Biblical scholars stress that the word that we translate as righteousness is better expressed as “right-relatedness”. It is a mark of Godliness, of our being made in God’s image, that we find the relationships in our lives that are apt, appropriate, loving, generous, healthy, mutually beneficial – and blessed. The gospel reading today gives us two images of right-relatedness: the little children and the disciples.
Why the little children? Because they are uncluttered… they have, by virtue of their few years, a singular lack of objects of attachment. Attachment is something that many of the great spiritual leaders of the Christian tradition warn us about. Now I have discovered that I am truly attached to my kitchen: in some way it is knitted up into my sense of myself. It looms large in both my physical and emotional landscape. ( I understand that the word ‘attachment’ comes from an old French word meaning something like ‘nailed-to’ or, more correctly ‘staked-to’. : i.e. unhealthily fastened to.) The objects to which we are attached are the gossamer-seeming but tenaciously strong threads that stop the wings of our souls from flying; or, to use another metaphor, the things that are so worked into our being that we cannot cast off from them to catch the loving flow of the tide of the kingdom of God. And they so very often are not evil or even a tad undesirable in themselves. What they are is always with us and in us. And they shackle us, confine us, and ultimately, they isolate us: from each other, from our true selves, and from God.
The disciples here are finding a degree of freedom from their attachments through right-relatedness. They are un-fastening themselves from their homes, their nets, their tax collector’s authority, their political affiliations, and acting out one of the great truths of Christianity: that being Christian has relatively little in the first instance to do with being good; and everything to do with being in right-relationship to Jesus, the Christ. If we stand in right-relationship to Jesus, much naturally follows: goodness, wholeness and happiness included.
How does this translate to us in the here and now? What does it have to say, for example, to me and my kitchen? Does it require me to renounce my kitchen as sinful? Of course not: though some of my dinner guests have been known to remark that the outputs from it taste so good that they are ‘sinful’! But what today’s word of God – and remember when we say that, that we speak both of scripture and of Jesus, Logos, spoken word of God – asks me to do is to pay attention to how much the kitchen, and what it represents to me, draws me away from the vibrancy, the vitality, that a healthy relationship with Jesus bestows. I can serve the kingdom of God and still hang onto my kitchen…but not as well, not as full-heartedly, not as right-relatedly as I can as an ordained minister in Central NSW. My life-story-in-God tells me that.
What about you? Sometimes the things that it seems that God names to us as our attachments, those that hold us back from the central relationship to which we are lovingly invited, are so dear to us that to let them go seems inconceivable. So it was for the rich ruler, and he departed with both his riches and his sadness intact.
But what if we come to realise that what Jesus offers you and me is not a commandment, but a gift?; not an admonition, but an invitation into so loving and so reciprocal a relationship that we may later wonder what all our attached fuss was about?.
Do we dare, at the very least, to investigate the offer? Do we dare at least to think about it? The man-God who extends the invitation is both patient and unstinting in his generosity. The invitation is endlessly extended to each of us: I suspect at least 5 times every day. The loving whisper comes to us through the noise of daily living: are you lonely? join me; are you tired? rest in me; are you bored? let me entertain you, in love and wisdom and freedom. Is there a price to pay? Yes. We need to let go of things we hold most dear, to find the one who will indeed hold us most dearly.