A sermon by Canon Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Theology, Christ Church Cathedral
12th February 2023, Second Sunday before Lent
Readings: Genesis 1. 1-2.3 and Romans 8. 18-25 and Matthew 6. 25-end
All this week I have been haunted by a scene caught on a television camera in a northern Syrian town following the earthquakes, and the voice of a desperate man standing at the edge of a vast pile of shattered concrete as darkness descended. “I hear them,” he shouts. “I hear them crying out from the rubble and no one comes. No one comes to help us.”
And the blocks he stands beside are immense and impossible to lift. It’s the stuff of a nightmare and neither that man’s voice nor the buried voices he heard will go away. It is not my personal trauma, but the images will remain with me. They have left a permanent imprint, just as scenes of the Twin Towers collapsing on the 11th of September 2001, and the people jumping from the top of them. These images will never be erased. The one a natural disaster, the other a human atrocity. And always, caught up in these events, so many ordinary people trying to scrape livings and livelihoods together.
The wars in Syria have left the people in that country on the very edge and in winter living on that edge is almost unbearable. And yet devastation overtakes them in their exposure and vulnerability. It’s hard. It’s very hard. And then I read the passage from the Book of Genesis that the lectionary prescribes for today: the story of a magnificent creation, and we part of its whole design. And God, having finished the work of creation in all its teeming, cosmic vitality, saw it was “very good”. And ‘good’, in Hebrew, is rich with the sense of all things being well, ordered, peaceful and beautiful. Then there’s the passage from Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus tells us not to be anxious about food and clothing for God knows what we need and if we set our minds on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else “all the rest will come to you as well.”
What can we say? Here is a human situation that amplifies Jesus’ statement that “each day has trouble enough of its own” and here is Scripture. And the tension in trying to bring one to bear upon the other is painful. But if I duck out of addressing this tension, avoid speaking about this tension, then how can the Word of God in Scripture and preaching relate at all to the Word of God received in the Eucharist? The stakes are high because if they don’t relate, then I’m just sugar-coating, and that won’t assist or be redemptive for you, for me, or for any of those suffering as a consequence of those earthquakes.
What I can’t do is explain. Explanations can be comforting. Explanations help us to understand and understanding allows us space for reassurance. But I have none of that space for reassurance. The gospel is on the line in the face of natural disasters and the immense pain human beings experience. Dying may be a great deal easier that living on with the pain of the inexplicable. How do those traumatised by the earthquakes – the children, new born babies, adults all hauled from under the debris after days of being buried – how do they live on and make sense of what has happened to them? How do they continue to live lives that aim at some modest flourishing and well-being?
In this situation, I can only turn to the Cross. Not for an answer, but as a display of crucified love. God’s love. Our reading from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome zooms out from the cross to the fabric of the cosmos: “the whole creation has been groaning in travail…and not only creation, but we ourselves…groan inwardly as we wait for…the redemption of our bodies.” We cry out and that crying is sacrificial. And by sacrificial what I mean is: this defeats our comprehension. This is not time for comfortable words, but a time for a deeply Jewish and liturgical lamentation.
There is one portion in the eucharist that increasingly gains my attention. It comes just after the consecration of the bread and the wine and the acclamation that this is an offering in which praise and thanksgiving are sacrificial. The bread is broken and we all confess both that brokenness and our unity in the body of Christ: “Though we are many, we are one body because we all eat of the one bread.”
On Sundays, like today, the Agnus Dei that follows is sung. During in the week, it is said and, in my priestly training, the priest bends over the consecrated elements and knocks his or her clenched fist against his or her heart. It is an ancient liturgical gesture.
“Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, grant us peace.”
As for sin, I don’t know where that begins or ends. Blaming can be a way of avoiding the truth rather than facing it. And where do you even begin the blame-game when it comes to the devastation of these earthquakes and the human suffering they have brought? No, ‘sin’ is no easy answer; and judgement lies beyond mortal comprehension. So, we’re left with the phrase written deep into liturgical lamentation: “Lord have mercy upon us.” And that is all of us. The entirety of the human race over which the crucified God rises.
Whatever racial, religious and national differences, the people of Turkey and the people of Syria (every single one of them) belong to that ‘us’. They and we are parts of the one broken body of Christ, sacrificed for our salvation, for their salvation. We stand before the cross sharing in their trauma saying to the body of Jesus hung there, “we are the ones for whom you died. Have mercy on us.” We acknowledge the groaning of all creation for the redemption of the body in our incomprehension.
Many of you know of my long friendship with the Jesuits. Yesterday morning I heard directly from Father O’Riordan who is working in Aleppo. He spoke of the fear in the people who have survived, the terror of darkness and the inability to feel safe. Nothing seems secure. The very surface on which they stand and scrape together a way to survive now seems fragile. “We pray,” he said, “for God’s Spirit to enter the trauma.”
Amen to that. While he profoundly laments with the bereaved and devastated, hope comes in the enormous efforts to help made internationally and the outpouring of compassionate support. “Where earthquakes abound,” he said, adopted a phrase in Acts, “grace superabounds.”
Lament is not despair. Incomprehension is not atheism. From the cross, redemption flows, even from the wrists and feet and side of Christ lifted high. Love will be outpoured, sacrificially.
With huge thanks to Canon Graham, my friend and colleague, for allowing me to publish this sermon here.
Consider the Lilies - Clare Hayns 