Sermon: 1 Corinthians 9.16-23
Up until a week or so ago, I had such a lovely sermon in my mind for you
today, all about the power of words, of language, of imagery, about how we
learn about God not only from scripture, but from other writing – prose and,
particularly, poetry, theistic, atheistic, and agnostic.
I was going to talk about one of my favourite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
and how, through his extraordinary poems, my recognition of God in all kinds
of unexpected places has been reinforced and sharpened – and of course it's
often in those unexpected places where God tends to be! :-)
So I was looking forward to indulging a bit in that...
But then I learnt that there's a lunch after the service today, and not just any
lunch, but the anniversary lunch.
So I thought, does that mean the church anniversary is today?
Well, no, of course it's not today – it was actually two weeks ago on 25
January – the day which is recognised as commemorating the conversion
and metamorphosis of St Paul.
But I daresay perhaps even Paul wouldn't mind too much if we celebrate the
amazing heritage we've gained from him today instead of two weeks ago...
and so Gerard Manley Hopkins has had to step aside, for one of the greatest
preachers we're ever likely to know – Saul of Tarsus, Paul, the apostle to the
Gentiles, Paul who travelled so far, and wrote so many epistles, and
influenced so many lives, and actually changed the course of history, by his
faith that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah of God.
Jesus himself preached the kingdom of God; but Paul preached salvation
through Christ.
Now it's been said that preachers are a strange lot :-)
We speak truth to power, compassion to the loveless, healing to the sick,
hope to those who grieve.
We give people permission to embrace – or at least not to despair at death...
This isn't a standard occupation.
Many occupations involve meeting needs with a product or a practical
service;
others are to do with identifying problems, making diagnoses, recommending
and perhaps implementing solutions;
most occupations involve 'doing'.
Preaching isn't like that; it isn't about 'doing'.
Someone who proclaims the gospel isn't just doing something, they're being
something, some-one; it's about character.
And Paul – a man with a very strong character indeed - asserted the right of
the apostle, the right to preach – but he took no pride in that right.
Now, I see the opportunity to preach as a privilege – but then, my situation,
our situation, is very different today than it was for Paul.
I'm preaching to the converted – albeit, hopefully, with some challenges to
consider, but you're unlikely to set a lynch mob on me. ? :-)
When Paul preached, he was speaking often to strangers, certainly to people
of very different faiths and cultures – and he was risking his life.
So preaching for Paul wasn't a privilege but an heart-felt obligation, a
commission which he understood came from God.
And, as we heard in the passage from his letter to the people at Corinth Paul's view is that, in order to speak the gospel into being, his own being
must change, and become whatever is real for his audience –
to the Jews, he became as a Jew,
to those under the law he became as those under the law,
to the weak he became weak...
… but without compromising the message.
Paul was actually responding to a situation in the Corinthian church where
some people insisted on their freedom and rights in a way that hurt others,
and fractured the fellowship.
The specific issue was to do with sacrifices to idols, but it's a situation that
can happen in any group, in any church, then and now –
a situation where one strong person or group of people – probably with the
best of intentions - assert their rights, their opinions, to the detriment of
others.
Have you experienced that? Of course you have!
Paul in this passage is saying, to put it very simply, that this is wrong, that our
freedoms, and our sense of rights, must be subservient to the calling to which
we are all called – to spread the gospel of God's love, in deed as well as in
word.
And of course, that's a gospel which holds that everyone is equally valuable,
everyone is equally loved, whatever their differences, our differences.
We diminish ourselves as individuals, and our fellowship as a whole, if we
diminish others.
Now in 1520, the great reformer Martin Luther took this same passage from
Paul's letter to the Corinthians, and he created the third of his major treatises
around it – A Treatise on Christian Liberty.
And in that treatise, Luther developed the concept that as fully forgiven
children of God, Christians are no longer compelled to keep God's law...
however, they must freely and willingly serve God and their neighbours.
Luther stated:
A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.
A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.
Subject to none, servant of all – asserting our rights or our opinions doesn't
quite fit in there, does it?
And neither does the converse fit in – being people-pleasers, being like
chameleons, adapting to changes for the sake of a quiet life, or simply to
attract people to join us but perhaps losing our authenticity and integrity in the process.
But what does fit, what does sound right, is that we have to understand as
best not only the gospel, not only ourselves and where we are, but we have
to at least try to understand, as best we can, the people we're with we must meet people where they are, not where we are And of course there are differences that we will recognise –
differences of nationality, of race, of custom;
differences of doctrine, of practice, of philosophy;
differences of likes, dislikes, histories, life-styles;
differences in the maturity of our faith...
all of which give us different points of view, different strengths, different
vulnerabilities.
And the reason why we have to do this, to meet people where they are?...
Not to be wishy-washy liberals, not because we have nothing of our own to
stand up for but in order that we can communicate better –
communicate better with each other, our fellow Christians,
communicate the gospel better to those to whom it's something new,
something different, something unlike what they expected.
And, guess what?!
This is where Gerard Manley Hopkins finds his way in to today after all! :-)
Hopkins took no prisoners in terms of his language and imagery, but
communication isn't always at a cerebral level, and in his poems I believe
Hopkins communicates a fierce sense of God's presence throughout creation,
and can thereby lead us closer to God.
Communication involves listening, just as much as it involves thinking and
speaking so listen to this:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
This poem captures our attention like a brilliant speaker standing in the pulpit.
It doesn't say, as it could have done:
industrial trade and progress are damaging our countryside;
the soil is barren,
animals and people are becoming ever more separated from their
environment...
Yes, that's the message behind it, but no, it doesn't say that in so many
words;
instead, it's full of glory – God's glory, creation's glory - and of challenge.
And in just 14 lines we have the classic sermon of thesis, antithesis and
synthesis:
the thesis is that God’s grandeur is visible in the world;
the antithesis, that man’s sin is visible in the world;
and the synthesis? - of course, that the Holy Spirit seeks to protect us and the
world from all evil.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote that poem in 1877, was a Christian poetpriest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian
poets, as a daring innovator in a period of largely traditional verse.
Brought up by high church Anglican parents, he was received into the Roman
Catholic church when he was a classics student at Oxford, by none other
than John Henry Newman, himself a convert from the Church of England.
Hopkins went on to become a Jesuit priest and teacher – and all his adult life
he struggled with his clear ability to express himself in verse there were long periods in his life when he gave up writing, and he even
made a bonfire of a lot of his poems – but fortunately he'd sent a lot of them
to his friend and fellow-poet Robert Bridges, who made sure that they were
published after Hopkins early death at the age of 44, a victim of typhoid fever.
Like Paul, Hopkins was an innovator – but in his case, he introduced new
forms of expression, different rhythms, different imagery He also coined new words , especially compound adjectives, to create a new
depth of meaning, to capture an idea.
Added richness comes from Hopkins’s extensive use of alliteration,
assonance, onomatopoeia, and rhyme, both at the end of lines and internally
– and you can appreciate all this best by reading his poems out loud – not
always easy until you become familiar with them!
But poems come alive for us when they're read aloud: the sound that the
poem makes as it is being read aloud is a key part of its experience, and
there is no better poet to learn this from than Hopkins.
It's been said that reading his poems aloud is like walking through a jungle!
Sounds clamber over each other, dripping from line to line; surprises lurk
around corners.
And quite apart from his use of language itself, an important element in his
work is Hopkins' own concept – an entirely new concept - of 'inscape' –
which has to do with the individual essence and uniqueness of every physical
thing, and everything's importance in the wider creation.
In poems such as God's Grandeur, Hopkins communicates the certainty of
faith in the language of bright glory, a true statement about the world, this
world we live in: that it is filled and over-brimming with God’s grandeur, looked
over and protected by the Holy Spirit.
Surely this is part of the gospel that we are called to proclaim – that God is
involved in humankind, in the world he created And in one of my favourites of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems, he makes that
crucial link that we sometimes take for granted but should always celebrate the connectedness between people and God:
people who are touched in so many ways by the divinity within the created
universe,
and touched by the sense of God present in our own daily lives God who, as Paul wrote, is our only boast,
God who was incarnate, one of us, fully human –
what greater link and love can there be?
Listen:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
as tumbled over rim in roundy wells
stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is Christ – for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
to the Father through the features of men's faces.
Christ plays in ten thousand places,
lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
to the Father through the features of men's faces...
As the hymn we sang earlier asked: Can we by searching find out God? Yes, for God is all around us,
God reveals himself in expected and unexpected places,
in the features of men's and women's and children's faces in the people we feel most empathy with, and in the people we feel the least;
and most of all, God is revealed in our Lord Jesus, who fully shared our
human life here on earth.
In whatever lies ahead for you, for this congregation, never hesitate to seek
and to find God everywhere, for everywhere is where God is;
never hesitate to communicate that sense of God, of God's love, which is the
gospel;
and never forget to be both perfectly free and the perfectly dutiful servants of
all, respecting one another, listening to one another, making space and place
for one another where each and everyone can be themselves, and more than
that, can become the people that God calls us to be.
And never forget that God loves us all equally, just as we have been in the
past, just as we are in the present, just as we will be in the future.
And to God be all honour and blessing, glory and power. Amen.