SERMON

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2003

CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER

There dwells in each of God’s creatures a great collection of longings, the table of contents of the human soul.  We all long for wholeness, peace, love, and an assurance that life is good.  Such longings are not the wish list of materialism, though some would find their soul’s fulfillment in things and power.  The lepers, whose stories are given to us today, remind us of the human need for wholeness, healing, and the desire to be clean and free.  People in days long past feared lepers and did everything they could to avoid them, even setting them into colonies of the diseased.  Leprosy meant the opposite of all the longings of the soul.  But God comes to these suffering souls and reverses their plight, and they are free to live among their neighbors again, clean and welcome.  Thanks to God’s mercy, these people experience the change to wholeness. 

The search for the good life brings us ultimately to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the only real and viable destination for our desires.  Only in God’s grace do we find our longings made real and possible.  I repeat the words of Jesus, “I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.”  The hymn with which we shall conclude our liturgy today combines one of our tradition’s greatest tunes and words for us to sing and ponder.  In these three verses stands the truth of the Gospel, the message of hope and the good life.  Let me read them. 

                        Love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down,

                        Fix in us thy humble dwelling, all thy faithful mercies crown.

                        Jesus, thou art all compassion, pure, unbounded love thou art;

                        Visit us with thy salvation, enter every trembling heart. 

                           Come, almighty to deliver, let us all thy life receive;

                        Suddenly return, and never, never more thy temples leave.

                        Thee we would be always blessing, serve thee as thy hosts above,

                        Pray, and praise thee without ceasing, glory in thy perfect love. 

                        Finish then thy new creation; pure and spotless let us be;

                        Let us see thy great salvation, perfectly restored in thee:

                        Changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place,

                        Till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love, and praise. 

It seems to me our persistent longings are for God alone, as Psalm 62 says, “For God alone my soul in silence waits.”  We long for that love which excels anything else we have or aspire to in this life.  How we want unbounded love, to receive it and to give it, to be capable to love, to live in the image of God.  Our other less loving pursuits crowd out the compassion we so admire in Jesus.   We desire that quality intently, but we forget to carry it with us.  We earnestly wish for the good life, and God offers it to us.  The hymn expresses our desire: “let us all thy life receive”.  Our deep longings ask for an infusion, so to speak, of the life of the almighty, a taste of what the massive grace of God means, just a sample, a glimpse, a touch, not the whole thing.  

In order for God to complete the creation of the universe, you and I must catch the message and let it inhabit our very souls.  God has begun in Christ a new version of life, the new creation, as yet unfinished, seemingly elusive.  “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”  And so we keep looking and wishing and longing for the vision of God, the city of God, the ascendancy of God in our time. 

Rarely, at least in my memory, have the terrible currents of world events begun to form into a flood of potential disaster as they do today.  People are afraid.  Children ask questions filled with anxiety, and their parents and teachers search for sustainable answers.  The center, as Yeats said years ago in other terrible times, does not hold.  The world seems to be spinning out of control.  We toss around expression like ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and all that kind of apocalyptic imagery all too easily.  Our normal, everyday longings intensify.  Peace, love, wholeness, and the assurance that life is good elude us.  Like the shepherds of Bethlehem at the first Christmas, we are sore afraid, but sadly we do not hear the angelic voices.  We hear threats and testimony, denials and accusations.  Old loyalties are strained and seem to falter.  We pray for peace and there is no peace.  The horizon opens to fire and death. 

You and I, as faithful Christians, cannot hide in our basements.  Grocery lists of supplies will not sustain our lives in such times.  Simple answers do not seem to nourish our souls.  We are indeed sore afraid.  And well we might be.  Yet, can we surrender to fear and hopelessness; can we cease our longings, cancel out our dreams, and run into the wilderness of despair?  I think not.  The divine love calls us.  God’s compassion bids us imitate.  Note well, that the hymn prays God to ‘finish’ the new creation, not end it.  We can opt for life in spite of the horrible portents and words all around us.  In point of fact we must opt for life, the good life, the abundant life that heals, restores, nourishes, forgives, and exalts peace.  Christian hope brings us back into the circle of possibility and a good future. 

My soul-friend John McDargh gave me a copy of a fourteenth century poem last time I saw him.  Composed by a man of India, a person who embraced more than one spiritual tradition, a mystic, a clear thinker, the poem opts for life.  Let me share some of the poet’s wisdom with you at the end of this, my final sermon, at this Church.  I speak in a time when our faith faces the choice of being strong or growing feeble.  I speak at a time when we are fearful and could try to run and hide.  I speak when more than at any other time in memory we need to focus our longings, to surrender not to man’s war but God’s peace.  The words of Kabir:

                        Friend, hope for the truth while you are alive.

                        Jump into experience while you are alive!

                        Meditate … and think … while you are alive.

                        What you call ‘salvation’ belongs to the time before death.

                        The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic spirit    

                        just because the body dissolves –

                        that is all fantasy.

                        What is found now is found then.  If you find nothing now,

                        you will end up with a cramped apartment in the City of Death.

                        So plunge into the truth, find out who the giver of wisdom is,

                                    believe in the great mystery. 

You and I are called to face the reality of our time.  We are called to plunge into the truth, to find out who the giver of wisdom is, to believe in the great mystery, to receive the life that God gives to us, and in the end to realize that our longings for peace, wholeness, love, and the abundant life come from the giver of wisdom, God in Christ Jesus.  Let us be ready to burnish our faith and walk in the shadow of the Risen Christ now and always.

AMEN.

                                                                                    The Rev. Richard H. Downes

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