Trying to make sense of dying and living
Fifth Sunday in Lent: 2nd April, 2006
Fr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Life is never dull at St Peter's Eastern Hill. One of my special highlights for the week came when I was involved in the questions and answers, after I had given a short welcome and introduction to St Peter's to a group of 75 year 9 students from a school in west Gippsland. They are using us as their base for getting to know what the big city is about, over a period of six weeks. They were in the Parish Hall. Now, I'll give you a clue: there is a large statue of St Peter in that Hall. Then came this question: "Who's that guy up there with the chook?" It was a wonderful opportunity to explain the symbols that are always with our patron saint and to have a least one of those students present remind us of the events of the night that Jesus was betrayed.
Every morning this week our early mass was offered. Each morning too free breakfast was provided for the homeless and the needy – sometimes 40 or 50, sometimes 20 or 30. Later on Wednesday morning the words and the music and the smoke of a traditional requiem filled the church and our hearts, as Kate McGuire was commended to her maker. Just as she had most clearly instructed. The wake in the Hall that followed was a happy time, full of remembrances of times past and thanksgiving.
And that evening that same Hall was the venue for the launch of a significant book on the strains and struggles of what it is to be an Anglican in Australia in this generation. There was a large crowd and the press were there. Muriel Porter's new book "The New Puritans: The rise of fundamentalism in the Anglican Church" is certainly worth a careful read. There is more to this than the beating of old drums. There is a new urgency in our consideration of just what it means to be an Anglican and indeed an Australian Anglican. St Peter's and the tradition of the faith that is represented here must be part of this emerging conversation. The uncertain response to those questions of identity and direction that is a fact of life for clergy and laity alike in Melbourne is in part also one of the key underlying issues of the complex and difficult struggle for the discernment of a new Archbishop for this diocese at this time. It is possible that some clearer answers will be forthcoming at the resumed election synod presently set for the end of May. Let us hope so. Some of the fears and some of the concerns that are abroad were most definitely named by both the author and Dr Charles Sherlock, who did the official launch. The speeches from that evening are up on our website (Link...) and will be included in the next Apostrophe, for our further consideration.
And so we come to this morning, reminded as we are by the change in our Lenten array that the time is fast approaching; that what we have been preparing for is upon us.
The fifth Sunday in Lent takes us one stage further in our Lenten journey. If the question being asked and answered in the first three Sundays was essentially 'who then is this Jesus', and if the question last week was what is going to happen through him – and the answer was that he was to be lifted up to die on the cross as the loving sign of the healing and saving power of God for a world that God so loves, then today our gospel returns to that theme:
Jesus says: 'And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself'. In John's gospel, this is the time; this is the culmination of everything that has gone before:
'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified'. It is going to happen by a direct and complete engagement and confrontation with suffering and evil.
The gospel moves directly into the language of sacrifice and death. But this is death that is the necessary and wonderful precursor of abundant new life. John has the Lord for one moment considering whether he might ask the question "Father, save me from this hour? But the answer is immediate: "No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour". In our own lives there may just be such moments. In our discussions on Thursday our group shared some of them. It was very powerful and very humbling. Perhaps our 23-year-old server whose little plaque is there on the nave wall between the second and third Stations of the Cross had similar thoughts as he waited on his landing boat at Gallipoli on that first Anzac Day. He was to be dead within a few minutes.
This is all to say that the issues we are required to attempt to grapple with these Lenten gospels are just about as big as they get. No one can accuse Christianity of seeking to avoid the hard questions. And as we reflected last week, we Christians have for 2,000 years taken over the outward and visible sign of a shameful and brutal form of execution and made that a sign of victory: victory over sin (which is everything and anything that separates us from the love of God) and victory over death (the opening of the way to the life of the world to come, that assurance that there is more to living than just this life).
But perhaps the clearest image that stays with us from today's gospel is in fact the simplest. That powerful agricultural image of a single grain of wheat doing what we all know a grain of wheat does, if it is in the right conditions. Remember growing your wheat on wet cotton wool in primary school? I never myself got it to the stage when there was a full head of multiple mature new grains, but I knew that was where it was headed. I understand the image and the fact. I can attempt to apply it in the way I try to understand what it is to be alive and in due course to face death. We try to make sense of death. We try to place this in the context of the words and actions of Jesus, and his teaching reminds us that the story of death and resurrection is so much part of the natural order of things.
The gospel today is the one that is set for Anzac Day. We are very familiar with our national epic story that finds honour and encouragement in defeat and sacrifice. We are called to honour those who so cared for others or so served a cause that was beyond their own individual self interest, that it meant their death. We are encouraged to see ourselves and our country as the comfortable and thankful beneficiaries of their sacrifice. Most of us would understand this language, even as we grieve the loss, or work for alternative ways that would speak of reconciliation before retribution. So we can move from a familiar natural image – the wheat –, to a familiar national story – Gallipoli – to a very familiar religious story. We are coming to the end of Lent. The ground has, as it were, been prepared. Four successive Sunday gospels have been given to us to help our understanding, to place our searching faith in a context.
Next Sunday is Palm Sunday. We will walk the procession carrying our palms as for the entry into the holy city. We will hear the gospel story of the passion of the Lord in all its formal fullness. It is time to have the story told to us again. This is the story of Jesus' suffering and dying and rising again. This is what Holy Week and Easter are about. In our tradition we spell it out through the unfolding liturgies. We pray and worship the ideas through. We take a lot of time and effort because there is actually nothing more important than this. And now it is time for us to take it in again. What does this say to me? How does this shape how I live and how I might die? How does this help me approach the death of those I love? How do we as a community of faith live this out? How does the re-acceptance of these central truths shape us as a community, in the ways that we live and we love and we serve? Big and challenging questions. Powerful and awesome answers.
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