SERMONS

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Sean Gilbert

Christ Church  5 November 2006
Mark 11:28-34.

I conducted a wedding yesterday afternoon. Wonderfully set at Tapestry Winery McLaren Vale, it was a genuine celebration of love, beauty, life and of hope for the future. Indeed it is always a privilege to have the best views in the house and great audio clarity for that matter!

Wedding ceremonies always beg the question for me about the nature and content of love. And not simply in a romantic sense, however important that might be, but as a quality of being, a practicality, a dynamic in relationships that always has the potential to serve the world, incrementally, if not dramatically sometimes, for the better.

And when you stop and analyse it, all the great religions of this world – Christianity being one of them – have at their very epi-centre, the call to grow in love for the benefit of all, to break free of the constraints and demands of ego, so as to give and live freely in a spirit of goodness and grace.

But how easily the words slip off my tongue, and yet how exacting is the reality and the call… Still, this was the compelling vision of Jesus and the fledgling Christian church, although you would hardly know that at times given the emphasis put on just about every other thing under the sun in the name of religion. Arguments about externals, the secondary considerations, and not about what literally lies at the heart of the matter. Conveniently so, I sometimes think.

So when Jesus says pointedly within an argument about what is most needed for faith: “Hear, O Israel, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength”, and that “you shall love your neighbour as you love yourself”, he a
is narrowing, or simplifying it all down. For the Christian life is the gracious life, and the life that finds its energy and motivation in the recognition and worship of God, even participation in God. To be sure, it is the spirited life, alive to possibility, awake to empathy, tender in its forgiveness and yet strong in its desire for justice, unrelenting in its determination to see others be free in themselves, and not constrained by my will or my words.

So in many ways, it has little or nothing to do with going to church or doing highly visible things. But it has everything to do with going to church and even doing highly visible things if it serves the exacting and life-long call to love with one’s heart, soul and mind.

The poet, Wendell Berry puts it like this:
                       
                        Whatever happens,
                        those who have learned
                        to love one another
                        have made their way to the lasting world
                        and will not leave,
                        Whatever happens.