Fifteenth Sunday of 1997

Gather up everything in Christ

In looking at these readings, I didn’t find them to be a particularly prepossessing lot, so I had to do some stretching to try to organise them so that they would say something to myself, and I hope to you, that is useful. Two preliminiers: I think everybody who wants to be a Christian has a text from the Scriptures, or maybe from the writings of the Saints, that has become a sort of lens through which everything else is read and understood. I know that for me it has been the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, the great judgement scene: "I was in jail and you visited me, I was naked and you clothed me..." That has always struck me as a reasonably chosen norm within which to understand everything else within the Scripture: my life, and the whole Christian business. Then there is this odd passage from Ephesians, which is probably not from Paul, but rather from one of his disciples--the thought here is not Pauline. But there is this last line that Katherine read so nicely that is certainly relevant to the Pauline view of things. We’re talking about gathering up everything in Christ... everything is to be gathered up in Christ. So, to put that together with the first proposition I made about us all having texts through which we see everything else, those texts I think can function as a way of giving content to this notion of gathering up everything in Christ.

That’s a pretty large and vague statement: what does it mean to gather up everything in Christ? Well, then you fill it in with whatever. The parable of the Prodigal Son, or God is Love, or whatever else you land on in the Scriptures or the texts that I suggested. But I think all Scriptural texts bear family resemblances, and they all have to come down to this: gathering up in Christ somehow involves stripping away. Every form of the Christian life involves a stripping away. You get it over and over again in the most overt ways: unless you lose your life, you cannot find it; unless the seed die when it is thrown onto the ground, it cannot produce fruit. Stripping away means what? It means that we have to demolish a sort of self that stands in opposition to this business of gathering up all the pieces and fragments of my life in Christ. And this finally gives me some type of leverage with which to get at these texts. We’ve got Amos who’s had everything stripped away from him: he was not a prophet, he didn’t go to prophet-school, his father was not a prophet... he was just hanging out and then God said: "Hey, you... I want you." And then of course in this passage from Mark, Jesus strips away everything and says: "No, you guys just go out and do it. Don’t go out with your camper and your van and your bedroll, just take a stick and go out and do your business..." That is a kind of physical stripping away which gives us an opportunity to ask, what needs to be stripped and where are we going?

Here I’d like to refer, in a sort of convoluted fashion, to my favourite text. What does it take to see somebody in jail, or naked, or hungry, or as a stranger and respond to them? The beauty of that text, if you remember it, is that everybody was quite surprised. The question then becomes: what does it take to transform me into a person who in an utterly spontaneously way responds to the world? That gives me something to fill in the blanks of what sort of stripping we’re talking about. Well it’s the classic religious issue, whether you’re a Buddhist, or a Moslem, or a Jew, or a Hindu, or anything else. All religions have to do with a form of stripping away, they simply have different notions of what you strip and what you strip for. The Jewish-Christian notion of why you strip is to be utterly available to the world and everybody in it, which means that what has to be stripped away is my normal self-serving calculations of "what’s in it for me?" And the more you think about that, you’ll see that it is firmly in place in one's heart and in one's mind. "What’s in it for me" is clearly the operating lens through which I see the world. So I’ve got this lens that gives me a cost benefit analysis of reality, and my life, and my response to everything. And then I’ve got this other thing from Matthew that says: "No, you’re just sort of there, for the world..." This raises some interesting matters and leads us into some mysterious and deep places.

I know all the self-serving preoccupations in myself and I can make acts of will to get rid of them. But I don’t know, and this is the point of that stripping, what new reality may emerge. The stripping is to be done so that something new can emerge, stripping is not done for its own sake, despite what the sort of church I grew up in may say: "Trojcak, the worse you feel, the better you are...And if you’re really miserable, that means you’re doing great." That wonderful thing in the Seminary: we had one day a week where we had recreation for about four hours, and we were enjoined to spend it with the most detestable person we knew... That was a sign of real virtue, by God... If you came back to your room miserable and empty, week after week, then you knew you were really spiritually classy. Well, I think we’ve all had that kind of experience to some extent. So we know what we want to get rid of but we don’t know what it is that is supposed to emerge from the ashes. We don’t know this new self into which we are to be transformed. And the unnerving, and paradoxical nature of this whole Christian business is that we will never know, until we’re dead. We do not know who we will be: Paul says that and the Gospel of John says that. So we work out of darkness, but we know what we have to get rid of and we do it in an act of faith and hope. It is ultimately God’s doing, demolishing in me things that make me unavailable to the world, God is creating, in the wonderful words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, "an immortal diamond" out of this piece of coal.

This is really important because we live in a society where we are radically individualistic... I mean, self-improvement texts are the surest best-sellers. You can improve your sex life, your fly-casting ability, your accountancy, your computer skills... If you write a book that can tell how to do that stuff well, you’ve got it made. That is all part of this terrible individualism which says that the cultivation of my own garden is what is crucial. No, no, no, we have to really resist that because it utterly pervades this society and it pervades my consciousness.

So, that’s why we’re here folks, on this hot Sunday morning, looking at each others, faces and saying: "You and I are going to help each other to bring this off." It’s really nice that we have this choir-like setting, very much like they have in monasteries, so that everybody can see everybody else and look each other in the face and say "you and I are supposed to help each other to do this together." We are all here around this table where the memory of that man who says, "this is me for you, I am here for everybody, for all comers..." So I hope this does something for this hodgepodge of readings and gets us someplace.

To other sermons

RT 5/9/97