For those who love God
Ordinary Sunday 17: 27th July, 2008
Fr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
The parables of the kingdom are parables that give us a whole range of insights into that breaking through into our perception a key insight. God is actually at work and God is actually able to be experienced. But that does not mean perfection. The striking illustration of this last week was the story of the wheat and the weeds indeed growing side by side. Good and evil side by side. Joy and suffering side by side. All this, even as we are starting to grow in our experience and our acceptance of God with us, here and now. I particularly say this in the context of the events of this last week as they have unfolded with the urgent and tragic need to get Br Chaplain and Mary and their two youngest to Sudan, and even as we now wait for more news of them in such a difficult situation.
I want to describe to you something very special that happened after this mass last Sunday. I went immediately to see Chaplain and Mary. As I looked around the very large number of Sudanese friends who gathered at the Soma home last Sunday afternoon, so quiet, so still, so prayerful — it occurred to me that everyone of them has each probably seen and been subjected to the most dreadful horrors quite beyond imaging for most of us, because of the 21 years of the most terrible civil war and then the experience of the refugee camps.
Everyone who came greeted those already present in silence with a handclasp and then went to offer encouragement to the chief mourner and then sat quietly. From time to time, someone would pray aloud, conveying great resilience and conviction. There were also hymns, introduced with a gentle first line and then sung in harmony by most, in words obviously known and loved. There was food and refreshments. As soon as people heard they came, whole families, with the smallest children most remarkably aware of something important. Chaplain told me that in Sudan this can go on for a week or more. Even up to three weeks. Time stops.
It was simply an extraordinary expression of intense community solidarity and unshaken faith; a faith already fully refined in a most terrible fire. I want to tell you that this was very powerful and very impressive. It was in that strength that Mary and Chaplain went through those awful grey doors to the international departures at Tullamarine, with so many hours of flying ahead of them and all the uncertainties of what might be awaiting them in Sudan. That little family looked so vulnerable, but so brave.
They did make that long journey safely. They are with their family members in Juba now. And we pray for them all.
In the wider Church we have been continuing to pray too for our bishops gathered for the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury. Apart from a couple of little brush fires, there has been as yet very little of substance to be talked about, even online, as the bishops now move into the second week. Some journalists are frustrated by this, but if there is to be a genuine and unfolding dialogue between people of different positions attempting to work towards something both can accept, then this is actually something you talk to the press about at the end, not during. Lambeth is trying to achieve such an outcome. So we need some patience. It may not happen, but then again, for the around a quarter of the bishops including Sydney that are not there in the international power plays that are going on, that absence may yet turn out to be a major miscalculation. We shall see.
There is no doubt that at this time the Archbishop of Canterbury in his chairing of the Lambeth Conference needs the wisdom of Solomon. Our first lesson today dealt with just that passage from 1 Kings. Solomon there asked God for 'an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil' — and a wise and discerning mind was indeed what he received. We remember the stories recounting that wisdom such as the one relating to the two women each claiming the same child as her own, or with the visit of the Queen of Sheba. Now a king is immensely helped by such a quality, but so too, our lessons this morning make clear, is every one of us. We are making choices all the time. We are called to weigh things up; there are as it were forks in our road ahead. Individuals and individuals in community together. There is gift and grace here, and a clear eye.
This narrative about being able clearly to work out what is important and to make wise judgment is the background context given us for our consideration of these further parables of the kingdom in today's gospel — there is discernment going on everywhere here. Someone finds a treasure in a field and then in his joy sells all that he has and buys the field (and the treasure.) Someone else finds that pearl of great price, the one he had been searching for, and he too sells everything in order to have that. The fishermen draw in an enormous catch and then they sort out the good from the bad. The disciples say that they understand all this. They are then encouraged themselves to bring into play all the good and beautiful gifts and discernments they themselves now have, some longstanding and of great tradition and others very new. We are meant to understand that the kingdom of heaven is actually full of people doing just that. That is what this part of Matthew's gospel is telling us.
We take note that all of these examples that we have been given both this week and last are from the everyday present. They are to do with fishing and farming and buying and selling and getting on with what you regularly do professionally. They are to do with living now and not the hereafter. They include that which is beautiful and true and good, right alongside that which is not. But the process of finding God in all of this — or rather of God finding us in all of this — is as understandable and as accessible as any or all of these little examples of human beings doing what they do, when they value something. God at work in our lives, God experienced, God joyfully shared and thanked and worshipped, there this 'kingdom of heaven' is breaking in and beginning the transformation and renewal, that is both possible and promised.
Our second lesson from St Paul's letter to the Romans began with an assertion that is sometimes very hard to say Amen to and yet which draws us to a broader context of the things that happen to us and in our lives — drawing us further than we ourselves can actually now understand or grasp. Paul, we know, had more than his own share of troubles and new directions. He was to die a martyr's death after years in custody. Paul's words were to a community facing ever increasing persecution, people forced to the edge. His message was direct and clear, offering comfort and strength and reassurance, even in a time of great distress and trouble. His words were these:
"We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose". (Rom 8:28)
May this be so.
The Lord be with you.
|
Views is a
publication of
St Peter's Eastern Hill, Melbourne Australia.
|
