June 5, 2016

Linda Murphy

Ordinary 10     Luke 7:11-17

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O God, my strength and my redeemer.

We are in green the liturgical colour for Ordinary Time. Green is for life, growth and renewal. Today is World Environment Day a day to stimulate worldwide awareness of the environment and enhance political attention and action.

Our gospel today is unique to Luke. Jesus restores to life a widow’s son. The reality of a widow’s life in the first century world was threatening at worst, miserable most of the time. A concern for assisting widows throughout the Bible stems from their dire need.

Jesus’ act of compassion in restoring the widow’s son to life would have been perceived as unrighteous behaviour. For a male Jew, the body of the dead was considered unclean, and Jesus would have been forbidden to touch it. His response to the distraught unprotected widow would have been equally suspect. The Life of Brian comes to mind, “He is not the Messiah he is just a naughty boy”. Jesus was here to challenge the status quo.

This act of compassion demonstrates two things about the nature of God. First, Jesus served as a justice-making witness to the provision of God that is available to all. Jesus demonstrates once again God’s regard for those at the margins of society. It is easy for us to forget the risks Jesus took to demonstrate the kingdom of God on earth. This compassion extended to the mother who lived, not to the son who had died. Jesus was compassionate toward her for her sake. He transformed her mourning to joy, her desolation to hope. Jesus also was willing to risk rebuke for exercising God’s special mercy for the least among society.

On Wednesday a powhiri was held here at St Matthews to welcome the City Mission’s new City Missioner Chris Farrelly. Wilf’s speech made it very clear that Chris required compassion for the job or he would be returned to the North. For all of us working at the Mission compassion and empathy are essential qualities that we use and need to assist the desperate people who walk through our doors. We have given out more than twelve thousand food parcels in the last ten months more than we have ever issued and double the number since I joined the Mission. We are seeing new faces every day and the issue of homelessness is constantly in our media. The Mission’s work whether it is a food parcel or finding a home for a homeless person is one of giving hope and with that hope transformation.

When the crowd saw the young man get up and walk they were filled with fear. Fear is an easy emotional state. It’s one of our basic, human default modes. It’s reactive, somewhere deep in the most reptilian parts of our brain; we can tap into fear in milli-seconds. That is not a bad thing when you are in a genuinely dangerous situation. But fear is a dangerous thing when it becomes our default mode. Fear is not an uncommon response in the face of resurrection. That’s especially true when we can’t explain it or understand it. Sometimes we are so scared of new life or new opportunities, whether it’s in ourselves or in others, that we try to squash it as surely as some would silence Jesus.

I would like now to share a story of fear I had a child. When was eight I was given an atlas by a much loved Uncle and I found Switzerland in this atlas and that was where I was going to live, however over time I had forgotten why I needed to live in Switzerland. As an adult I have had no wish to visit Switzerland although we have spent time close by in France and Italy. Many years later I asked my mother why I was so fixated on Switzerland. “You came home from school and had seen a film on raising sea levels and found Switzerland was very high above sea level.” That was in 1959, fifty seven years ago and we were aware or some were and we are still not in any agreement how to manage our environment in a compassionate way. We now know for certain that our sea levels are rising. Many of our pacific islands and atolls are slowly or not so slowly returning to the sea.

Environmental scientists have been telling us for decades that our behaviour and awareness matter. We know that there are changes in climate. We never had an autumn this year we have had summer for six months and now winter has arrived with a vengeance. We know that the seas are rising. But do we realize the impact that these phenomena have on those who live with the greatest vulnerability?

To quote Paul Quintos of the Philippines, an environmentalist, “The poorest people in the poorest countries who contributed least to climate change are also the first and foremost affected by it. While world leaders are haggling over emission reductions and who will pay for the mitigation and adaptation, millions of the world’s poorest populations are daily suffering the consequences of climate change- extreme weather events that destroy crops, livestock and homes, more frequent and prolonged droughts and floods, loss of freshwater supply, increase in pathogens, destruction of marine and coastal resources, ancestral land, food and water insecurity, energy insecurity, and so on.”

The world’s environment is in dire need as the widow was with the death of her son. Perhaps this is the challenge of Ordinary Time: through grace to meet and heal the broken world in precisely the same gesture as we glorify God, to be fully alive in the world God has created and we have damaged, to even in our brokenness we can all take part in healing our world. If we all recycle, clean up the rubbish from our waterways, insulate our homes, walk to the shop instead of driving the car and the list goes on. We have options to holt the destruction of our planet and while the world’s leaders fight over what and how things are done we as individuals can take a part. If each of us change one thing at a time, who knows we may heal our world. The alternative fills me with fear not for myself but for our future generations.

The ministry of Jesus and ours are about addressing real human need and it is about compassion. Such compassion and caring in action has few short cuts to success if any. In the midst of the complexity of human need is hope and the possibility of renewal and life. It is built on the foundation that all people are of value and none is to be dismissed or despised. Our world still needs that kind of good news and our challenge is to become it and help others become it.

Amen.