Sermon: Cathedral Eucharist - 17 July 2011

 

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford Photograph of Victor Stock

Preacher:
Victor Stock
Date:
Sunday 17th July 2011
Service:
Eucharist
Readings:
Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43
Genesis 28: 10-19a

Gardening books and cookery books have in common the deceitful photograph, the perfectly, elegantly and attractively coloured cake, or the properly gently-steaming, totally digested compost heap, but those of us who cook or garden (or in the Dean’s case cook and garden) will know about false hope.  If the bread comes out of the bread tin without sticking, that’s enough of a triumph, and if the compost doesn’t actually spread bindweed about because we’ve been careful not to put it in the compost in the first place, that’s pretty good.  A few more other weeds are inevitable.  Mind you, years’ ago, when I had a garden in Wiltshire, I managed to rotavate a lot of bindweed into the ground and into the compost, but that’s too depressing a story for today.

So, we gardeners know about Matthew 13.  A man came and sowed his field with good seed, and while everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed darnel among the wheat and made off.  When the crop sprouted, the darnel could be seen among it.  ‘Where has the darnel come from?’, the farmers men said, and the point of this parable is, that’s what life is like.  Shall we go and gather the darnel?  No, in gathering you might pull up the wheat at the same time.  Let them both grow together till harvest and then the reapers have the job of sorting it out. 

But the Bible itself needs some sorting out.  On weekdays in these last weeks, we’ve been reading our way through the smug racial superiority and superior self-satisfaction of the book of Ezra and the savagery of the book of Judges.  Why do we read these stories, these histories of revenge and bloodshed, of cruelty and ethnic cleansing?  Well, because they tell us what life is like and how wrong religious people are, who think that God is the God of violence, revenge and cruelty.  We are invited, when reading such Scripture, to lay life as it is before God, sobered by the fact that human nature doesn’t change and that the Lord’s Liberation Army today, the horrors of Uganda or the Congo, violence, oppression and cruelty of the Middle East, conflict in Afghanistan, all could be lifted straight from the pages of Scripture.  Where is God in all this?  First, our faith is that God is the reaper at the end time, His will be the harvest, and of course God is the question.

What of today’s Old Testament lesson, that ancient story in the twenty eighth-chapter of the book of Genesis?  ‘Jacob left Beersheba and came to a certain place and stayed there that night…  And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to heaven’.  The writer of Matthew teaches by giving us a parable to puzzle over and the writer of the twenty-eighth chapter of Geneses gives us a dream; through both God makes Himself known.  Of course, in Matthew, later in chapter 13, we have the Disciples asking Jesus what the parable meant and Jesus tells them, but I’m sure this is a sermon that’s got tacked on to a teaching meant originally to be teased at, puzzled over and wrestled with, just as all those centuries before Matthew, in the stories of the very beginnings, there is a dream, and in that dream, there is revelation, if we wrestle with it.

Genesis, chapter 28: ‘Jacob left Beersheba and came to a certain place and stayed there that night because the sun had set.  Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep.  And he dreamed there was a ladder set up on the earth’.  And further on, in chapter 32 of Genesis, there’s Jacob again: ‘He took his wives, his maids, his eleven children across the ford of the Jabbok.  He took them and sent them across the stream and likewise everything that he had.  And Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day’.  The wrestling is a fundamental part of our religious faith, which is why Jesus speaks in parables, leaving the parable like a strange Japanese poem for us to wrestle with.  We should be careful of the facile explanation, the too-easy answer, not unlike paintings we don’t understand when we immediately say, ‘What does it mean?’  We want it explained, but what we’re invited to do is spend time before it, letting the painting itself speak.  So it is with Scripture, in parable or in dream, there is the place of wrestling with the text, what we saw last Sunday evening when I was talking about St Benedict, the Church calls lectio divina, the prayerful ruminating over a scriptural story until something breaks through.

So, this morning, on the last day of the Choir term, when we’ve had tremendous services and celebrations, much to exalt and not a little to amuse, and we’re all tired, let’s remember that Scripture ‘teaches us slant’, in odd ways.  Sometimes through the disagreeable and the distasteful, as in Ezra, Nehemiah, Judges, and the rest, sometimes through what seems at first a much easier story about gardening, as in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, or a lovely story of a dream in the twenty eighth chapter of Genesis, all lead up to and away from that wrestling we find in the thirty-second chapter of Genesis.  ‘He said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking”, but Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me”’, and it’s in the wrestling and the struggling that we are blessed.  After intelligent Bible reading, attentive worship or thoughtful, careful prayer, Jacob’s words in Genesis might be ours: ‘”Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it”.  And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place; this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven”’.