We welcomed Formation Student Emily Bowser to preach on Sunday 14 November. This is her sermon.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The poetically inclined among you will perhaps have recognised this passage as the first half of William Butler Yeats’ poem titled “The second coming", a poem that has something of an apocalyptic flavour, much like our Gospel reading today. This apocalyptic flavour is perhaps unsurprising in both cases. For Yeats, writing his poem in the early 1920s, he looked out on a world that had been marred by war, uprisings, revolutions, and yes, a raging pandemic, so perhaps it is unsurprising that he felt that things were falling apart. While there is, of course, some scholarly disagreement (there always is), it is generally accepted that the Gospel, according to Mark, was written in around 70CE, at a time in Palestine when tensions with the occupying Romans finally reached a violent breaking point. This breaking point ultimately led to the destruction of the 2nd temple in Jerusalem; it does indeed seem that:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
The reading we have heard today, taken from chapter 13, forms a lengthy speech given by Jesus, this speech is composed as a farewell, as Jesus prepares to leave his disciples and face the hard road that leads to the cross. The langue in this chapter, is, rather disquieting, with warnings of wars, or rumours of wars, not to mention the earthquakes in various places. It is all very disruptive and disturbing. The sort of thing that makes one late for tea.
The Language of this chapter is, almost apocalyptic, and this chapter is often called the “little apocalypse” like making it a diminutive would soften the word apocalypse: a word which to quote Job out of context:
“Shakes the earth out of its place and causes its pillars to tremble."
The chapter begins with a conversation between Jesus and one of his disciples, one of them, looking up in the quintessential awed tourist manner, says
“Well, Gee, these buildings are really big."
(Ok, I'm paraphrasing here)
We might well imagine this disciple admiring the beautifully dressed stone, the height of the buildings in the temple complex and the sturdiness of such an immense structure. This sturdiness is probably also conferred not only on the physical building but also on the institution that the temple represents, a long history, with a further history in the first temple stretching back to Solomon himself. Perhaps as we have travelled around the world. We might have also stood awestruck at the beautiful dressed stone of a cathedral, palace, art gallery or castle and pondered on the history that has bequeathed a sense of permanence to both stone and institution.
Jesus’ prophetic response, as we know, is to say, well, they are all going to be thrown down. Indeed it this is one of the charges brought against Jesus after his arrest. Later alone with his disciples, Jesus begins to teach and to warn of what is to come. We might hear these words feel worried, we might be confused, we might even hear these words with cynical ears; and I'd be the first to confess that these readings with apocalyptic themes make me feel very uncomfortable. It is not just the imagery of destruction, nor is it just the multitude of well-meaning folk (and those who are less well-meaning) who down the ages who have decided that they *know* the mind of God and produce a date with great certainty, only for this date to come and go without event. What makes me uncomfortable is the genuine sense of urgency that is conveyed in this genre-
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
We can perhaps, in 2021, more than other years, grasp something of what it is like to live in *uh-hem* exciting times. not the total destruction witnessed in 70CE, nor the horrors that led Yeats to write The Second Coming. However, what we can say is that not one of the over 7 billion people on this pale blue dot floating in space have been left untouched by events of the past two years and perhaps out of this shared global experience we might now dare to hope to face a global threat. Now you might be saying, what on earth does this have to do with Jesus? So let’s unpack it a little, we are told, and I firmly believe, that each and every one of those over 7 billion people, bear the image and likeness of God, and all of us now face a true apocalypse in the Hollywood sense of the word. Sadly this catastrophe will strike the least amongst us, the poor, the oppressed, people who have barely managed to make it in ordinary times, they will be the first to suffer; indeed, they are already suffering, and in the face of those who are suffering we should see the face of Jesus.
As Christians of the Anglican persuasion, we have some handy dandy "marks of mission" which we can use as a sort of compass to, you know, point us in the right direction as we seek our mission to *be* the body of Christ in the world; and it is the 5th mark of mission that came to my mind as I prepared for this sermon
To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
As we sit here today, in our beautiful Hills surroundings we might feel disconnected from the marring of the good creation, we may not directly see the effects of climate change on the people of equatorial South America who now suffer from kidney disease at an abnormally high rate because of chronic dehydration, we may not see the Island nations who watch with increasing dread as sea levels rise, and we may be isolated from areas of drought from which war may at any time raise its ugly head over scarce resources. This is all very gloomy; however, I won't apologise for this stark message, the truth is often deeply uncomfortable, and often in the truth, it seems that:
things fall apart, the centre can no longer hold
Next week we will celebrate the feast of Christ the King, in which we acknowledge the sovereignty of Christ over the Church and the world. Indeed Jesus is the one we confess as Lord; however, we are not meant to sit idle in the hope of a cosmic rescue plan. Instead like the disciple at the beginning of our Gospel reading, we should to look around and consider the metaphoric large stones and buildings, the presumably secure structures and institutions that are even now teetering on the brink of destruction; some may even dare to add the Church to this list. However, it is into this uncertain time that the Church as the body of Christ can and should stand up and taking the 5th mark of mission seriously, work for justice, we must twist the words of Yeats and become
The best who are full of passionate intensity.
I started this sermon with poetry because poetry speaks when I cannot, so I will conclude with a few thoughts from another poem of sorts. One of my favourite poems is "No Man is an Island", by English poet and clergyman John Donne. This poem, taken from a longer meditation titled “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions” was written at a time much like our own when a pandemic ravaged in Europe, and the church bell rang out almost continually as it tolled for the dead. The poem resounds with a call to all humanity to recognise our common nature, which could be seen as a call to follow the commandment to love our neighbour. The last line of this poem should reverberate like the sound of a great bell, challenging us to behold in each and every human being on earth the face of Jesus.
“And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
The Lord Be With You.