SERMONS

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Sean Gilbert –14/3/10

Christ Church                      Luke 15: 1-3, 11b – 32

“Homecomings”

In the early months of 1995 I was hard at work trying to finish and finalize my
Masters Thesis; re-editing, formatting, adding/deleting, in short, panicking! I’d been writing for months, trying to distil and express a richness of thought and experience that had been my privilege to encounter along the way for the previous 2 years. Something kept troubling me though about the thesis title – and here I may be repeating a story I’ve told before – so thankfully one day while standing in line at the local pharmacy, a major penny dropped and gave me the direction I needed.

You see I was writing about God – the trinitarian nature of God no less, and had entitled my thesis, “Reclaiming the Trinity. Paths to faith and liturgical renewal”. Well, in that queue at Walgreen’s on that Spring Saturday morning, I saw something very clearly: Who on earth was I to reclaim the Trinity, as if somehow I had the capacity by virtue of a doctrine and sound reason to put faith and Christian liturgy right! More to the point, I didn’t want to communicate just a formula, a framework, a concept, or an ideology, but I wanted to express a life-giving experience, a knowing and conviction not born of my doing or academic effort, but given freely and outrageously for no other reason than love itself.

“Reclaiming the Trinity” then, duly became “Coming home to the Triune Mystery of God”. (Paths to faith and liturgical Renewal.) Grasping God and being held by God. Homecomings, indeed.

The reason I tell or re-tell this story in the context of today’s Gospel is because the famous parable is similarly not about a doctrine, nor about a concept of God, or even practicalities of the Christian life. It is about the experience of being loved, held/embraced, and being loved out of death into life. And here there is nothing to aspire to or to accomplish or even get right. Yet there is everything to fall into and finally let go of, including our deceits/deceiving, our idols, our notions, our fears, our frameworks. The healing power in us, writes John Vanier, “will not come from our capacities and riches, but in and through our poverty.”

We try so very hard at times – or so it appears to me – to make God real, to make the Christian (church) life credible, demonstrable, applicable...  Yet at its heart - and this parable by consensus lies at Christianity’s heart – the forgiving, embracing, and healing reality of God, comes not by formulation, reckoning or a programme of any kind, but a yielding, if not surrender. A falling into, not a climbing out of.

The boy “came to himself”. One of the most powerful and masterful lines in the whole of the Christian Canon, I believe. He beheld his origin, he saw again his place of true belonging, he re-imagined his authenticity of person; held and honoured in the arms of believing love ... and this will always be the well-spring or stillpoint where all love and charity flows.

St Catherine of Sienna, another great Dr of the Christian church in the 14th century, put it this way:

“I first saw God, when I was a child, six years of age.
The cheeks of the sun were pale before Him,
and the earth acted as a shy girl,
just like me.
Divine light entered my heart from God,
love that did never fully wane.
Though indeed, my friend, I can understand
how a person’s faith can at times flicker,
for what is the mind to do
with something that becomes the mind’s ruin,
a God that consumes us
 in grace.
I have seen (and tasted) what you want,
it is there
a Beloved of infinite tenderness.

 You will notice that from beginning to end, Catherine experiences God and acclaims that to shape and form her, and like Vanier ends not with a notion of tenderness, or a theology of tenderness, or an idea of tenderness, but a heart charged, remade by tenderness.

          “God is forgiveness, dare to forgive, and God will be with you.
          God is forgiveness, love and do not fear...”
is a wonderful Taize chant I hope to end our Good Friday service with in 3 short weeks. (Gott ist nur Liebe) Turned around slightly it might also sing:
          “Forgiveness is God, dare to forgive and God will forgive you
          Forgiveness is God, love and do not fear.”
In other words, God is not merely a dispenser of forgiveness, but the very experience and reservoir of forgiveness itself. And it is into that heart and spirit we as a community are invited to plunge over and over again, to best embody or express the Divine for ourselves and for others. So that we too don’t see forgiveness as a transaction, or a wielding of power, but as an open disposition or a way of being with each other in community.

          Writes Vanier,

                    “To forgive is to recognize once again the covenant which binds us together with those who we do not always get along with well; it is to be open and listening to them once again. It is to give them space in our hearts. That is why it is never easy to forgive. We must change. We must learn to forgive and forgive and forgive every day, day after day. We need the power of the Holy Spirit in order to open up like that...” I say Amen to that!

          We will need the first hand experience of God, in other words, the falling into the embrace of Divine mystery, not just an ethic, a progressive theology, not simply a core value, not even a prepared speech in the hope of a particular result. No, rather a poverty of spirit, an emptiness and longing. It is from this empty, open place, a place of radical and enduring transformation that love in its potential fullness comes to fruition.

          Friends, will we together avail ourselves of that disarming and forgiving embrace?
Will we return again and again to the sacred place of homecoming and a true celebration for the living?

Let us take a few moments for our own prayers and contemplation.