May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit

Transcription

1 1 Sermon for 11am Eucharist Sunday 21 st June 2015 May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit I hope you have had the opportunity To look at the paintings in the North Transept The Chris Gollon exhibition, Incarnation, Mary and Women from the Bible And if you have seen the paintings What do you think? I have heard lots of reactions from people Some think the paintings are wonderful. And some don t But I haven t met anyone Who responds with indifference

2 2 Good art challenges us It shows us a new creation And it picks apart our assumptions and ideas We all come to our own understanding Of what the art means We interpret the paintings for ourselves In the light of our own experience Of course interpretation is tricky I am very fond of a Peanuts cartoon Which I remember from my paediatric days Charlie Brown inspects a picture Which Linus has drawn And if you know the characters In these cartoons

3 3 You know that Linus is a dreamy boy Who comes out with deep philosophical truths And always holds a comfort blanket And that Charlie Brown is older than Linus Charlie Brown looks at Linus picture and says This is a very nice drawing of a man Linus, However I notice that you have drawn him With his hands behind his back This is because you, yourself Have deep feelings of insecurity

4 4 And Linus looks thoughtful And a bit cross and says I did that because I, myself, Can t draw hands So with the perils of interpretation in mind I have a question How does our engagement with these paintings Add to our engagement with the Gospel? And specifically today What does it add to our understanding of today s readings? The paintings are of women But in today s readings There are no women s voices

5 5 This isn t really a surprise Because the stories of women in the bible tend to be foot notes to the more cohesive stories of their men; And I have to admit That when I was thinking about our first reading From Job It was only when I saw the painting of Job s wife That I remembered She features at all in Job s story And that Job losses are hers too The story of Job is a reflection On the nature of suffering and the nature of God

6 6 It is rather like a parable In that it tells A frankly outrageous tale For the purpose of disorientating And then reorientating the perspectives of its readers And it suggests that Job s model of God Is completely inadequate Job has expected God to behave As Job has behaved As a patriarch Pious, Benevolent and paternal Job speaks of rights and injustices in the human realm Over thirty-seven chapters

7 7 Until in the thirty-eighth Chapter And our first reading God replies God doesn t speak of rights or justice God speaks of the ordering of creation And of the birthing of the sea The sea which has come from the womb of God God speaks of something so much bigger Than Job s understanding Completely outside Job s imaginings And Job falls silent

8 8 And this Sunday we can t read the line here shall your proud waves be stopped Without thinking of today s Gospel Jesus stills the storm I think it is one Of the stories about Jesus Which if you heard it as a child, you continue to recall with a child s imagination Like a scene in a film

9 9 The darkness The small vessel And the tumbling sea illuminated in flashes of lightning And Jesus Fast asleep in the stern because I have sailed as an adult I have new pictures for this story And a lot of sympathy with the disciples I have experienced, The deep fear of what might go wrong next what might break Whether the ship will founder

10 10 Whether we would lose crew overboard With no hope of recovering them And how with darkness Comes disorientation and fear Tiredness and inability to make judgements I have a lot of sympathy with the disciples So the disciples wake up Jesus Annoyingly asleep in the stern With their angry and panicked accusation Teacher, Don t you care that we are perishing And Jesus rebukes the sea Which becomes calm And then rebukes the disciples for lack of faith

11 11 And the disciples partially recognize that Jesus must be divine Because they know That only God calms the sea Only God can stop the proud waves And as Job is silent before God The disciples are silent before Jesus But say to each other Who then is this? That even the wind and sea obey him Today s readings have a common theme Which is about the limits Of our imagining of God

12 12 the gift that artists give us and which arises from the gift of creativity that they have received from God is to stretch the knowledge and images we hold in our minds and make our imaginations bigger We interpret the world In the context of our human experience Job fitted God into his own image A benevolent patriarch, But that image was not able To contain Job s lived experience Of suffering and loss and pain

13 13 The disciples asked Jesus to save them And who knows what they expected him to do I like to think They thought he would have a bigger bucket to bail with Everything would be pretty much the same But they would be safe and ride out the storm But Jesus did not conform to their expectations Their blinkered hope What Jesus gave them was radical transformation The paintings in the North transept Speak of pain and suffering Of silent misery and despair Even in the joyful paintings Is the shadow of deep darkness

14 14 The pain of the experience of Biblical women Named and unnamed And the lived experience Of men and women today The pain of parents whose son goes to Syria to die as a suicide bomber The pain of a black church community Subject to the senseless violence Of a young white man Staying true to their faith In desolation We are limited by our humanity And like Job cannot make sense Of this pain and loss

15 15 Today s readings remind us That God is beyond our understanding And imagining But our faith is based on knowing Jesus Jesus whose trust in God Enabled him to sleep through a storm Jesus whose trust in God Took him to the shame of the cross And then to resurrection And because of Jesus We can trust in God Who is beyond our imagination As we wait for the coming of his Kingdom

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