Twelfth Sunday after Trinity 2020

The Gospel reading set for this coming Sunday is Matthew 16:21-28

To recap: in the verses immediately prior to these (Matthew 16:13-20), Simon Peter has declared that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God; and Jesus, in response, has declared, “You are Petros, and on this petra (rock) I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”

‘From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”’

Wow. That is quite a reversal. And that is the necessary point.

And here, I want to note two observations on stumbling-blocks. First, hear the prophet Isaiah:

‘But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread. He will become a sanctuary, a stone one strikes against; for both houses of Israel he will become a rock one stumbles over—a trap and a snare for the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And many among them shall stumble; they shall fall and be broken; they shall be snared and taken.’

(Isaiah 8:13-15)

Second, hear Peter himself, writing towards the end of his life:

‘Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in scripture: ‘See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.’ To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe, ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner’, and ‘A stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall.’ They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

(1 Peter 2:4-10)

God is the rock of sanctuary and the rock of stumbling. Jesus declares that Peter—and by extension, the Church—is a rock of sanctuary and a rock of stumbling. Peter comes to see this as a participation in the life of Jesus, the rock of sanctuary and rock of stumbling.

A word of warning: Jesus is elsewhere outspoken (as are the writers of the New Testament who follow him) against anyone who places a stumbling-block in the way of the young and/or young-in-the-faith. But stumbling itself appears to play a necessary role in growing in faith. That is a recurring theme in Scripture. We do not set out beyond the familiar, without falling into it. This is true even of Jesus: in Mark’s Gospel, he is driven into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit; in Luke’s Gospel, he is driven out of Nazareth by his neighbours; in John’s Gospel, he is thrust into public ministry before he is ready (no one is ever ready) by his mother, Mary; and here in Matthew’s Gospel, he must stumble over Peter in order to set out for Jerusalem, and all that he knows awaits him there.

The arc is this: undergo great suffering, be killed, be raised. This is the invitation Jesus holds out to all who would follow him. This is the secret of life: formation (being formed in the likeness of Christ, by sharing in his sufferings) leading to transformation (sharing in his resurrection, in a life that is at once in genuine continuity with its earlier stages and yet as different as a butterfly from its caterpillar). In the Greek, this is morphoo and metamorphoo.

And the ego will throw every resource at our disposal into resisting this call. Which is why it needs to be broken before we can receive mercy.

I am a runner. The very first time Jo and I went along to the running club, I tripped over an uneven paving slab, was thrown through the air to land sprawling on the pavement, later discovering that I had cracked a couple of ribs which would take six to eight weeks to heal. We had only set off minutes before; were still on the warm-up run, not even the session itself. To add to my humiliation, the whole pack we were running with stopped, and gathered around. There was no escaping attention. Then one of them insisted on walking me back to the clubhouse, getting me a drink, and waiting with me until the others returned, sacrificing her run so that Jo did not have to abandon hers.

That was the night I knew that I wanted to belong to the club. I have had one other fall since, so jarring that my body still carries the trauma, still physically shudders when I recall it to mind. And all I can say is that you are a different runner after you have stumbled and fallen. Not, in fact, a more cautious runner; but freer; more fully present in the act of running; more appreciative of, and closer-knit with, those you go running with.

It is not possible to grow beyond the point you have already reached without stumbling; and only those who have known what it is to stumble can truly offer sanctuary to anyone else. That is the lesson Peter had to learn; and, with him, the Church.

 

Second Sunday before Lent 2020

Lectionary readings: Genesis 1:1-2:3 and Romans 8:18-25 and Matthew 6:25-34

I wonder what things cause you to experience anxiety? I won’t ask you to share publicly. Noise makes me anxious, the radio on in the background, to the extent that it can sometimes register as pain. My wife and children not being in the house sometimes makes me anxious, even to the point of panic attacks; because I struggle to embrace the existence of people who aren’t present, and absence is too close to death. That’s irrational, I know, but there you are. You’ll note, I didn’t ask whether you ever experienced anxiety. I take that to be universal. So, it would appear, did Jesus.

Let’s be clear: when Jesus says, do not worry, he is not saying that those who worry simply lack enough faith, or aren’t doing faith right. Yes, he calls his disciples ‘you of little faith,’ but it isn’t a rebuke, it is an affectionate, diminutive nickname: faith-lets. Those whose faith is not brash, isn’t worn to say LOOK AT ME! Faith that is childlike. When Jesus says, do not worry — or, rather, do not be anxious — he is teaching his faith-lets how to address anxiety with faith.

The Greek word for anxiety is wonderfully descriptive. It means to be pulled apart. That is precisely what anxiety feels like, our lives, our constituent parts, being stretched to bursting. In biblical language, we are heart and mind and strength and soul. Heart refers to our will, to our God-given ability to choose, between right and wrong, good and evil; and the way in which our habitual choices shape our character. Mind refers to our God-given capacity for insight, informing our choices; and, again, over time, shaping our disposition. Strength refers to our God-given power, or force — in the sense used in Physics — to act on the basis of our informed choices. And soul refers to our God-given life-breath, that holds all these elements together as a living person. Here, in this teaching, the word translated ‘life’ — do not worry about your life — is in fact the word for soul, or life-breath. Anxiety attempts to pull the elements apart. It can even result in a panic attack, that breathlessness, or physical sensation of soul-disturbance.

Jesus also says, do not worry about your body. And here, the word refers to your physical body, flesh and bones, that we tend to think of as betraying us sooner or later; but also conveys, in a metaphorical sense, your community. As in later in the New Testament, where the body of Christ is used as a way of talking about the church. Between the bodies that will, eventually, carry us away, and the bodies we will leave behind, there’s plenty of scope for anxiety there.

So, Jesus is addressing anxiety in relation to our selves and our community, to the network of relationships that are an inextricable part of who we are. He is addressing my anxiety over background noise, and my anxiety over the absence of my wife and children. And Jesus’ concern is for wholeness, for shalom.

And the summary of Jesus’ advice is this: desire to know the reign of God over every area of your life, and to know his approval of the life he has given you, and you will find that all these elements that have been pulled apart by anxiety are brought back together. Wholeness.

Again, Jesus’ point is not that if you seek to obey God you will not experience anxiety, but, that if you desire to know God then this is how you can respond whenever you feel anxiety rearing its head. Which, in my case at least, is often.

To help us, Jesus invites us to look beyond ourselves, to notice the sovereignty of God, in creation and in history. I could unpack the verses about birds and lilies, but I won’t — I’ll let our hymn-writers do that for us instead. But, in short, if God is sovereign over our community, however it looks, and over our past or history or story; and if that sovereignty is expressed through delight, through approval and provision; then we can desire to know that in our lives too.

And so, we are invited, in all things, in the place of anxiety, the things we are anxious about, to imagine God’s reign in this place. To eagerly anticipate that this might be so, and soon, and to look for even the smallest signs of that breakthrough. We begin by praising God for who God is and for what God has done and for what we trust that God will do again.

When anxiety caused by noise threatens to overwhelm me, I can choose to give thanks for the gift of life, spilling out, reaching out to connect with others. Give thanks for the enthusiasm of the radio deejay, for the creativity of the guests being interviewed and the songs being played. Give thanks for the people coming in and out of the office at the Minster — an act of will, I can tell you, when every interruption causes me to have to re-route my day. Give thanks for the school children streaming along the pavement past my study, and for every act of goodness that will be worked to mend a broken world through them. Delight in the world God has made, and sustains. Recall the times when he has brought me into the gift of silence, of stillness — and the times when sound has been a gift to me, a blessing rather than a curse. Blessings last through all time; curses are time-limited constraints, and even that constraint is used by God ... and so I might even find myself anticipating the good purpose, as yet unknown to me, that might flow in due time from my present struggle.

When anxiety caused by my wife and children being somewhere else threatens to overwhelm me, I can imagine their workplace, their classroom, their college corridor; imagine God reigning over those places, in sovereign care, calling purpose out of chaos. I can imagine God’s Spirit hovering over my son as he walks home from school. I can anticipate that divine rule extending across all their days; and, yes, one day calling them home to eternity, where, even there, they are held in God’s care. And as I do, a limit is set on the waves. And as I press in, the waves subside. Something like ground appears beneath my feet, for now.

It is a work of the heart and the mind and the strength — our wills choose it, as an informed choice, on which we act, hard though it may be at first, until we find that, God delighting in the soul he has created, our whole being is brought back together. Anxiety is defeated, not once-and-for-all, but, over and over again, day by day.

And in those times when we are simply unable to fight this battle on our own, we are surrounded by our sisters and brothers, by the body of Christ, standing with us and for us; if indeed we are honest about our anxieties, if we do not worry about the body but submit to being tenderly dressed in Christ.

That is the way of faith-lets. And that is why we gather together, Sunday by Sunday, to praise God, to join with the worship of all heaven, eagerly waiting for what we do not yet see.