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SERMONS Sean Gilbert – 24 September 2006 CHRIST CHURCH Wayville – Mark 9:30-37 I think it would be true to suggest that a gesture is often a more powerful means of communication than one’s words. Words can actually belie or cover a given reality, whereas gestures are not so easily disguised – they seem to be a more integral and honest part of who we are. Words about greatness, words about self-interest and importance, words about words; words about that which preoccupies our minds and most often blinds us to what is most pressing and true. He sat down, called the eleven, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be the last of all and the servant of all.” Then he took a child and put it among them, and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me…” and so again the invitation to engage the heart, not just the mind. I read a wonderfully insightful essay during the week by the theologian Sally McFague,(incidentally in a book with a contributing chapter by our very own Susan Burt), and in it McFague grapples with the tricky notion of “Paying Attention.” That is, of learning to remain open to change and a new perspective by virtue of always seeing something again or anew. She quotes an author by the name of Iris Murdoch in a paragraph that I think is worth hearing in its entirety. (Remembering the banal preoccupation of the eleven disciples in our text) ‘But how can we learn to pay attention to something other than ourselves? What does it mean to really pay attention? Iris Murdoch, the British novelist, gives a clue when she says, “It is a task to come to see the world as it is.” Murdoch’s suggestion is that paying attention is difficult and contrary to how we usually see the world, which is, as she says, in terms of our “fat relentless ego.” She gives a personal example: “ I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. There is nothing but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.” There is a natural and proper part of us, she adds, that takes “a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer, alien pointless independent existence of animal, birds, stones and trees.” The message is that we pay attention to difference, that we really learn to see what is different from ourselves. That is not easy. We can acknowledge a thing in its difference if it is important to us or useful to us, but realizing that something other than us is real, in itself, for itself, is difficult. To acknowledge another being as different – perhaps even indifferent to me, as for instance a hovering kestrel – is, for most of us, a feat of the imagination.’ He took a little child and put it among them, and taking that child up into his arms he then said, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name, welcomes me…” And so can we begin to see what the rabbi teacher is doing here? Because what he is contending with in the disciples and what we daily have to contend with in ourselves are those fat relentless egos. Pride of place, bigger and better, my reality of more importance or significance than yours, or even my problems more pressing than yours. And so in their midst, he places a kestrel, a flower, a sunrise, a little child – it matters not on one level – but he places in our midst the great symbols of otherness, of simplicity and of divinity, and says, look, pay attention, notice the beauty, for in that seeing is the resolution to your anxious way. For these concerns, are in the end, but an avoidance of what is most needed. An acceptance of Jesus and his own words, thereby being a welcoming of goodwill and creative love, an openness to another and an interest in their person, and last but not least in this context, a radical abandonment of power and prestige for the common good. Now I am not so naïve to suggest that such a “Jesus” path is easy (An impossible path, I think Robin Mann described it as last week) but what I am suggesting is that in life, noticing or our paying attention to that which is beyond our being and control; in our beholding of beauty and mystery, lies a certain defusing of the anxieties, the preoccupation of mind and soul, the obsessions which often lead to distrust and even discord. And to illustrate that, How about this great piece of prose from Annie Dillard. “This
Ellery cost me twenty-five cents. He is a deep red-orange, darker
than most goldfish. He steers short distances mainly with his slender
red lateral fins; they seem to provide impetus for going backward,
up, or down. It took me a few days to discover his ventral fins;
they are completely transparent and all but invisible – dream
fins… He can extend his mouth, so it looks like a length of
pipe; he can shift the angle of his eyes in his head so he can look
before and behind himself, instead of simply out to his side. His
belly, what there is of it, is white ventrally, and a patch of this
white extends up his sides – the variegated Ellery. When he
opens his gill slits he shows a thin crescent of silver where the
flap overlapped – as though all his brightness were sunburn… You
know it strikes me that so much of what I think is important, isn’t
really. The ambitions, the aspirations, the performance, or the holding
on to insult or hurt, for what is critical is that I begin to see in
that detail and with that sort of amazement, and that I seek to live
and create, as best one can, out of that amazement. Because that is
where the radical nature of servanthood that Jesus spoke of and embodied,
comes from. The noticing of the other as subject, as person(s) with
great beauty and worth. Not as object, not as utility, not as goods
and chattel in our service. Even a twenty five cent goldfish. To conclude, yet once again the prophetic insight of Jesus in such important human matters, is tremendously hopeful. It cuts through the crap, if you’ll pardon the expression. It turns perspective upside down, and inside out for the sake of a more compassionate and open society; a more just, joyful and attractive world. Thanks be to God. Amen |