THE LORD - ABSENT OR THE PRIME MOVER?

Sermon delivered on the 4^th Sunday after Trinity, the 15th June 2008 at the service of Holy Communion by Fr Nicholas J G Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban's, George Town Church of England, Cayman Islands.

Scriptures: Exodus 19:2-8a     Romans 5: 1-8      S. Matthew 9:35 - 10:23

S. Matthew 9:35 And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity.

 

In our human experience it may sometimes seem that God is the absent player in our drama. We have some trouble or difficulty, and we perhaps even ask for it to be removed, but it keeps on and we deduce that the Lord isn’t especially interested. Then we project this mind-set onto the world’s stage, and wonder why God didn’t step in to rescue the boy scouts in Iowa, or the people that suffered from the typhoon in Burma and from the earthquake in China. Or for that matter, for many, why doesn’t God seem to be holding down our utility bills, rather than our income? It is not easy to assure someone who has habituated himself to this mind-set that the Lord indeed knows our situation, that He knows our discomforts and He cares for us. I have for a long time been convinced that those persons who declare themselves to be atheists are at the core of their world-view angry with God, and are getting back at God with the weapon they know best; for the most effective way to express anger towards a person is to ignore him and pretend he does not exist.

Yet if we turn to the Scriptures, there we see God as the active player in the human drama. Now the roles are reversed, because God is the Prime Mover, the Creator of the universe, and moreover, God has demands He makes upon the human players. In the Garden of Eden account, it is the human Adam who is effectively absent, having received a command from God, but seeing his companion being seduced into breaking it, and doing nothing about it at all until he himself joins in the transgression. From God’s point of view, it was as if Adam were absent. And the Scriptural account continues all the way, with God being the active player, trying to engage humanity, and through Jesus the Christ eventually succeeding in doing so, though not without resistance from the generality of mankind at every conceivable turn.

God appeals in our first lesson to what the Israelites have seen. He directs Moses to say to them: "You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself." It was on that basis of an active presence, and their acknowledgment of it, that God established His covenant relationship with them. God promises, You shall be My own possession among all peoples; but such promises are always predicated upon the people’s effective presence to God. That is why the words "If you will obey my voice and keep my covenant" are inserted as the qualifier of the promise. If the people do not remain effectively present to God, a presence that is verifiable by their obedient attention to His will, then His promise becomes effectively invisible to them.

Our second lesson continues St. Paul’s reaching on justification and its consequences for believers. Again, we see God as the Prime Mover of justification. For, as St. Paul teaches, "God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Paul emphasises the uniqueness of this action, by examining whether someone would in the ordinary course of events die for a righteous person or even for someone judged to be a good person. God as Prime Mover on the other hand came in the Person of the Son and died for bad persons, in order to begin a process of making them good, starting by accounting them to be good. Paul also teaches about the process of human cooperation with God in His making us good. As in places elsewhere in Scripture, a chain process is described: "We rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." Just from this description we can see how the human drama relies on God being the active player on which the whole drama depends. Through the action that God initiated, the incarnation and death for us of the Lord Jesus Christ, we have obtained access to the grace in which we stand, and the whole onward process of building us up in Him is made possible by the divine love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

The Gospel today shows Jesus in His typical role as the Prime Mover of His mission on earth, among the cities and villages of the land as He first went through them all Himself and then sent His disciples out as apostles of the Gospel, giving them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction. That mission begins locally to what He calls the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and then it seems finally to be extended as a forecast of the apostolic mission after His Ascension, going throughout the whole earth and involving bearing witness before governors and kings and the Gentiles. That becomes the continuing mission of the Church today in which we too have our part to play. The Gospel shows that it is part of the human drama that was initiated by the Son of God, and is to remain as being conducted in His love and in His Spirit, as we may learn from St. Paul’s words also today.

So whenever we are tempted, and it is a temptation, to conclude that God is effectively absent in our human drama, whatever that may be at the time, it is well for us to take a little time off and read the powerful Scriptures that God has bequeathed to us and see in them through the power of the Holy Spirit the record of the One who is truly active and the Prime Mover, God Himself. A modern catechism of the Catholic Church says this: Christianity is the religion of the "Word" of God, a word which is "not a written and mute word, but the Word is incarnate and living". If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, "open [our] minds to understand the Scriptures." As our minds are opened we will come to understand that the unspiritual complaints of our human experience are deeply flawed and wrong: that far from God being absent from us it is more likely we who are being absent from God: and that He, and not we at all, is the Prime Mover: and that following Him through Christ, His paths may indeed be seen and will prove to be our salvation.