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SERMONS Sean Gilbert Luke 4:1-13 Leunig: Let us pray for wisdom…. I’ve mentioned a number of times since returning
from Glastonbury Abbey, about an encounter our group had with the Monastery’s
Abbot. A totally disarming experience in many ways in that he looked
and acted quite ordinary in every sense of the word. In fact, he’d
be lost in a crowd if it weren’t for his black habit and thick
leather belt. But when he spoke about the Christian life - without
a bit of pretence or a note of performance – you knew that within
the ordinariness and earthiness was a spirit long-shaped by the Christian
Gospel, a glimpse even, that faith has far more to do with personal
authenticity and integrity than it has to do with conquering and impressing
the world. It’s a strange twist really. So enculturated are we to see life and faith in terms of accumulation and possessions (conquests), that a conscious movement into the wilderness for the sake of letting go and letting things be, is hardly good business sense. It doesn’t even seem responsible. Foolhardy even. But what Jesus knew, as have all the great spiritual leaders, is that life in its fullest sense, and love in its most potent and fruitful sense, is born not of clutter and confusion, not of a receptive emptiness and simplicity of spirit. So that when one stops and analyses the 3 temptations they are all about but more things to bury the human heart alive under; material things, pride of place, religious idolatry. All that which stifles the human spirit, hinders its creativity, and radically blurs the edges of its intrinsic beauty. Indeed, represses imagination and desire that could otherwise be the very creative vehicle of faith and service to others. So in a nutshell, this reading and this Lenten season have a very positive and life-affirming premise. A discipline surely, but as the word suggests, a discipline to help shape and form healthy discipleship. And again not just in a narrow, even punitive sense, but a discipleship in the mould of Jesus himself – self-giving, compassionate, astute, free spirited and true. All good things born not of accumulating or resting in what is already known, but conceived in humility and openness to the veiled mysteries of life and God. Ten years ago I wrote a Lenten Study entitled “Reaching Out: to Self, Others & God” – hardly a best-seller, but more to the point, even harder to lead because in my mind at least here was some good information I desperately wanted to convey, and therein I think lay most of the problems. Not in the material itself but the immaturity of its author and his lack of simplicity. Too young, too ambitious. My point being, relinquishment, openness to mystery and fruitfulness, can never be dependent on good information, another event or program, a sure-fire strategy or structure. All the things our church tends to value/place its store in at present. To be sure, these also have to be let go of, so as to find the heart of all things Christian, that is, the desire of re-creative love, and only then can we shape things anew. Now it might also interest you – and here’s the ad – that I’m offering these studies again starting March 5th – confident that our sharing will nurture us in the paths we’ve been talking about this morning. I want to conclude with some wonderfully provocative prose, holding in our mind if we can the thought that from silence, from letting go and letting be, from resistance to the temptation to be other than what we are – the vision for a more compassionate and harmonious world is surely born in our midst, over and over again… “Imagine a city where there is no desire. Supposing for a moment that the inhabitants of the city continue to eat, drink and procreate in some mechanical way: still, their life looks flat. They do not theorize or spin tops or speak figuratively. Few think to shun pain; none give gifts. They bury their dead and forget where… A city without desire is, in sum, a city with no imagination. Here people think what they already know. Fiction is simply falsehood. Delight is beside the point… Both the philosopher and the poet find themselves describing Eros in images of wings and metaphors of flying, for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to there, launching the mind on a story. In a city without desire such flights are unimaginable. Wings are kept clipped. To reach for something else than facts will carry you
beyond this city and perhaps, as for Socrates, beyond this world. It
is a high risk proposition...to reach for difference, between known
and unknown. He thought the risk worthwhile, because he was in love
with the wooing itself. And who is not?” So friends, this season of Lent, for all its seeming starkness and self-denial, is actually about the attunement of heart to that which gives life; that which carries yearning hearts from here to over there… that which causes flight of human imagination and compassion.
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