Can you see it?
The 12th Sunday after Trinity
August 30th, 2020
Matthew 16:21-28
Can you see it?
Your life finally in order?
What will
your next ten years look like? What might
you gain? What could you lose? What can
you see? Your next ten years?
Vision is prior to reality, isn’t it?
Not just
for poets. For ordinary folks as well. From making a meal to planning your career to
settling into a realistic retirement you need to see it in your headfirst. Can you see it? These ingredients on the worktop in front of
me will combine thus and so. This I put
into the pan first, at 220 degrees C for half an hour and then down to 170 for
a slower bake. This I will put in the
pan a half hour later. Then I will
finish the whole thing off with a knob of butter and a few herbs. I see that before I start.
The
reality in here, after all, is an analogue of the reality out there.
I can generally trust what’s in here to demonstrate what will happen out
there. If I can see it, I can do it. Your
life in order. Do you see it?
Let’s play with three headings, shall we?
One: You’re going to do what comes naturally or what comes your way or what
lands in your lap. It’s more a matter of
continuity than novelty. You
follow in the family business. You copy
the traditions of your mother and father because, after all, they were good
people and they were all about worthy pursuits and you would be happy to be the
man or woman they were. You’ve been
hearing about family traditions in bits and pieces since you were small. You wear them like a badge. We are, in our family, artisans. We are managers. We are educators. In my tradition we face the world as a family
unit, we are stable mums and dads with family pictures on the wall and so the
stable family unit is what we, my childhood sweetheart and I, will build
together with our happy children. I can
see it now.
Or two:
the slow construction of a life which is your own and which differs thoroughly from what you
grew up with. Darned if you’re going to turn
out like mum or dad – you want to do somewhere different, be something
different – breath different air and so from the first day you kicked off
the traces of family obligation and stuck your head above the parapet which your
aunties helpfully told you was your upper limit, you’ve studied, you’ve
apprenticed, you’ve been deferential and cooperative with all the necessary
idiots. You’ve run the gauntlet. You can see all the certificates
you’ll need, all the increments of education or experience and one by one
they’re falling like soldiers or dominoes or clay pigeons shot out of the
sky. Of course, you’re going to make
it. You can see it happening and it
will. You’ve listened to this sermon. The
vicar of All Saints’ once again has hit the nail on the head and has earned his
bottle of Highland Park at Christmastime.
Vision is prior to reality and I can see it. It will happen.
Oops. It didn’t. Three: you’re rebuilding after disaster.
That’s a skill set all its own, isn’t it? Things went south despite vision and hard
work. The Vicar of All Saints’ is a
pillock – no Highland Park for him. The
climate changed, the lockdown happened, the clock ran out, there were more
assumptions than clear vision, the Guardia di Finanza caught up with me, pride
came before the fall, we were let down by circumstances or by other
people. The business failed, the
marriage ended, our spouse died. We went
splat. And now we have these books
we found in the self-help section of the bookstore – how to rebuild after
disaster. Making the most of a bad lot
in life. What to do with lemons – lots
of lemons. I may be fifty, but life can
again be nifty. And - following six
months of self-pity something akin to a vision reasserted itself. A more modest proposal, without a doubt. A bit less lateral thinking, for sure. We’re serious people suddenly. We are now mutton after all and not lamb. A
bit more keeping our eyes on the furrow ahead.
But one morning, a few months back, despite everything, out of
the blue, standing in line at a check-out, a vision reasserted itself. You almost wanted to turn around and ask the
person behind you, “Can you see it? I
can see it. It is possible. It will be possible again”.
I would like to describe this morning the visions
of two men. Moses and Simon Peter.
We’ll start
with Peter. Peter the fisherman, from
Bethsaida at the north end of the Sea of Galilee. Brought to Jesus by his little brother Andrew,
he was not the first of the disciples, but he soon worked his way up. In last week’s Gospel reading Peter ended
up well top of the heap, didn’t he, having been the only one to correctly answer
Jesus’ question “Who do you say that I am?” He identified that Jesus was the Messiah –
the Christ of God. He received abundant
praise for correctly answering the question.
He got his own set of keys. The
Messiah. Not Elijah or John the Baptist
come back from the dead – not Jeremiah or one of the prophets reinserted into
the world – not something old creaking around again on the earth on bad knees but
something brand new - the One through whose effort and presence God would
remake Israel and, through Israel, the world itself. Well done, that man. And this fact once established: isn’t there is a vision which goes along with
that? Something for Peter to plan for.
Ingredients on the worktop which, according to Betty Crocker or Nigella
Lawson, go into the pot in a certain order.
The messiah strengthens and conquers – he takes what is weak and
makes it strong. And so, it is no
coincidence that in the ministry of Jesus the sick are healed and the lepers
cleansed. The messiah is convincing
– he speaks God’s words with the ring of truth which are proper to them and so
it is no coincidence that the Pharisees cannot best him in making the
Scriptures apply with their primordial meaning.
Even the devil who thinks he knows scripture best cannot outdo him. And so those who are judged and excluded are
readmitted into God’s favour and the pious indignation of the scribes and
Pharisees – supposedly based on the Word of God - is revealed as nothing but
the basest and cruellest prejudice. It’s
happening according to plan, says Peter, it’s just what you said to John the
Baptist was happening. The Messiah
conquers. The Kingdom is emerging. I am a part of this Kingdom. I am a part of this movement. Jesus tells me that I am useful. I know what happens next. I can see it.
We will now move from strength to strength. We will consolidate our forces. The Kingdom will be restored to Israel. It, and we, will emerge powerfully.
Moses. Moses was minding his own
business in Midian. He was desperately trying to lose
the Egyptian accent which people noticed when they spoke with him. It was an accent worth losing. First,
it was a lie: he wasn’t Egyptian. He’d been a Hebrew child raised like a
dirty secret in the heart of the Egyptian court. Second, it provided a
clue to his past misdeeds. The child became a man back in Egypt and his
identity crisis sharpened. He snapped.
He killed an Egyptian overseer who was beating a Hebrew slave and thus became a
fugitive from Egyptian justice. His picture was in the Post Office.
Moses dodged the murder charge. He walked the width of the
desert and crossed the border into Midian. He married the daughter of a
prominent local family and in what would then have been early middle age he began
to work on his pension. He had a plan. He knew what came next.
This Sunday’s reading begins with Moses following the flocks - a perfectly
ordinary Midianite shepherd on a perfectly regular day with only the barest
trace of an accent. Everything is on track. Jethro, his father in law, will one day gently
pop his clogs. These sheep will be Moses’
sheep.
The recipe for what Moses needed to do next is exactly what every new
parolee needs to do upon his release from prison. He needs to keep his eyes
forward and to follow the path. He’s been given a fresh chance and when
you’re given a fresh start and limited time, you stick to the straight and
narrow. It’s the same at the tail-end of the world’s worst divorce or a
personal bankruptcy or at the beginning of widowhood. It’s what communities must do when a war ends
or after a natural disaster. One foot goes in front of the
other. Direct those fat sheep to market down the straight
path. That’s all. Nothing else.
For pity’s sake, man, don’t get distracted.
Neither of these stories ends up where the protagonists imagine they will
and we must now account for the spanners which God tosses into the works
– into the lives of Peter and Moses – for the left turn which is the defeat of
what they have come to know and depend on for their forward trajectory – for
the end of what they know or think they know - for the knife which now cuts the
fabric, the stone which cracks the base, for the extra last minute ingredients
which make it no longer possible to hold in their heads the very thing which
they thought they saw clearly.
What’s the smile on your face, Peter?
Jesus asks. Did I mention that the Son of Man must
go to Jerusalem, where he will be at the mercy of the scribes and Pharisees? Where he will be handed over to the
gentiles? Where he must suffer and
die? Where everything you see around you
today will, for all intents and purposes, appear to crumble?
You look like the cat what ate the canary, Moses, says God to him. Well done on your rainbow retirement
plan. Have you seen, by the way, this
twinkling light over to your left on the horizon – this amazing bush which
burns without being consumed and which right now is drawing you away from what
you have built as your last reasonable hope.
Oh, and pay no attention to that parole officer yelling at you from the
next hillside and waving his arms. The
bush, Moses. Go and talk to the bush.
So, what’s that all about?
God is not a trickster who hates
order. But our order is not his.
Our comprehension of things is the way we arrange our lives. Our minds produce satisfying patterns of
understanding the way our spleen or our liver produce enzymes. It is the attempt of the organism to control
its future and it is no coincidence that the difference between comprehension
and apprehension is not very much and that we can frequently use them
interchangeably in a sentence. “I
have finally grasped it”, we say to our friends after a study session on a
knotty bit of Maths or Philosophy or Biochemistry. “Nailed it” we say when the exam is
completed. To know something is to nail
it down – to keep it fixed. It is a top dresser drawer well laid out and
organized which brings comfort to us but it is not the wide world and our
conceptions of the Kingdom are not the Kingdom and both Peter and Moses
must step aside to let God do what he will do with them. They stand, after all, in a river and not in a
lake.
Disorder is not a good thing on its own.
Maybe you are prone to disorder. Somebody needs to sit you down and ask why you
have no roots – why you put others at risk – the people you work with, the
people in your family – by the chaos with which you surround yourself. No – these passages and hopefully this
sermon speak to people who, in fact, yearn for order, about something of value
which can only be had by surrendering your traditionally ordered life or the
new life of order which you’ve rescued from the ashes because you’re
surrendering it to something better, to the Kingdom and not simply to some
– I don’t know – Dionysian principle of Chaos.
Moses and Peter stand in the midst of God’s projects.
Moses has reordered his life but the Hebrews are enslaved in Egypt and
it is a strong, resilient and now reordered man to whom God says you will make
yourself vulnerable again because you stand at the turning of an epoch and you
are valuable to me.
“Go down Moses, down to Egypt land.
Tell old Pharaoh to let my people go.”
To what end will you save and not spend?
To what end do you grow strong if you will not lend that strength to
another at your own cost? What is the
purpose of what you have, if not to give it away? What is your membership in God’s Kingdom or
in the Church of God if you will not serve your generation?
I will assume of you, this morning, not only a general religious sentiment about
order and propriety but that you now and here understand – as Peter then and
there did not yet understand – that at the center of God’s plunge into the
world is the Cross and not the Pinnacle of the Temple and that you would,
and in fact will, walk through that unexpected door, that injudicious door,
that doorway which leads to risk and vulnerability and that you are capable of
sacrifice and of making difficult choices which see earlier and, perhaps, more
self-serving conceptions fall to the side.
You will do so for the life of the Kingdom, for the community of the Church
– writ large – of which you are a member, for those you know who suffer and for
those you do not know.
Nobody will remember that you had a lot.
Nobody will remember that it was laid out in the right order. Your community, your family and your friends
will remember you as one who served something beyond yourselves – because you
recognized your citizenship in the Kingdom of God and you recognized where and
when you lived and waded right in where good sense said you should not.
« Then Jesus
told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves
and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life
will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. »
