Sermon - John 6 - Despondency

  Trinity 12                         St. Peter’s                      27/8/23                                

Family Communion                                   John 6:35, 41-51

A few days ago Hilary and I read Psalm 88. Now one of the strengths of the Psalms is how unfettered they are - all human life is there - every mood represented - but having said that there is no denying Psalm 88 is on the gloomy end of the spectrum - even its heading calls it ‘A prayer for help in despondency - it’s a glass at least 3/4 empty kind of psalm

So the psalmist writes : I am overwhelmed with troubles and my life draws near to death. / You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths. / You have taken from me my closest friends  and have made me repulsive to them.

 Darkness is my closest friend.

At least 3/4 empty. It is gloomy, but for many of us it will ring some bells. It’s part of being human 

So however happy we are, however satisfied with our situation simply living means we will have picked up some baggage - the things we remember when we wake in the night, the situations we could have handled better, the words that shouldn’t have been spoken, the friendships that have soured, we’ve dealt shoddily with people we love,  we should have offered help  but didn’t/ couldn’t, opportunities we’ve missed….   

But we also carry things not our fault - the  losses we’ve suffered, those times where there was no right thing to do, and the things that were good but not easy, that you wouldn’t want to change but still they have a weight to them  

And we carry cares for the people around us, the  situations we hoped might have worked out a bit better for friends/family. Life is messy, and there isn’t always an easy way out of our own particular quagmires. 

But though despondency is very common it doesn’t have the last word on the human condition. 

Two things we can say in the face of it. Both are of grace - the first is a common grace  grace we tap into simply because of the way we are created - whatever our faith or lack of it common graces will touch us, whilst the second grace is Christian.

A for instance of  the first.

The radio programme Soul Music doesn’t use the word grace but it’s what it majors on. It’s half an hour of people talking about why a particular piece of music matters to them - I often remember somebody who explained how at a time in his life when he was deeply unsettled - for something good - but still unsettling and a chance hearing of Tallis’s Spem in Alium  knitted him together - he said it gave him consolation. 

Despite   all that is wrong, all that is painful, all that has to be carried - whether good or bad - despite all of that - sublime beauty still exists in the world - whatever baggage we are carrying doesn’t leak out and set the world’s mood - and this being put in touch with something larger than us, something which is good restores a sense of proportion

Not just music, not just art, not just poetry,  consolation can come in all sorts of ways - through nature - a storm, a starry night, dawn. Through people - an unlooked for kindness, sometimes one can feel carried by the energy and joy of others. 

We read something, hear a casual remark and know that this person has trod where we are treading. We are not the only ones.  

What is consolation? How does it work? It is surprising we can feel better even though nothing has changed. Consolation in this sense comes not by addressing a problem and solving it - how could it - nothing can make good a loss or call back the words you wish you’d never said, life will continue to be messy. But things don’t have to be relevant to be helpful and  consolation often comes at us slant. I am met and I am given proportion. I feel weighed down, but something so touches me - beauty, goodness, love - that I am enabled to take my eyes from my own burden and look beyond it. 

The world is not just about me.

The consolation of this common grace restores a sense of proportion in the face of despondency.

The Christian word goes further than proportion and gives us a new perspective. Where  Jesus meets us consolation shades into hope.

In the gospel reading a grumbling crowd comes up to Jesus - they are hungry, they want a sign, they want change, they want a king or at least a military leader and He is only a local boy - all that they are carrying spills out. 

Just as consolation comes in slant so too Jesus doesn’t address their particular concerns head on, but where consolation says look beyond your burdens, Jesus says look at me. ‘What I am offering you is more than a temporary fix, ‘I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”.’

When we review our life and burdens in the middle of the night an underlying question is, ‘Is this who I am?’  Jesus responds to that by saying ‘Who you are is not who you are alone, but who you are together with me.’ He doesn’t dismiss what we are carrying, but He doesn’t let it define us. He sees us as human not just the sum of our words, decisions, actions, burdens. Look at Him, go to Him, eat of the bread. He is out true home rather than those things that we continue to carry. 

We will never find hope if we just look inwards, hope comes from following Jesus, drawing close to him. 

There’s a passage in Kathleen Norris’s Dakota which blurs consolation and holiness - which points to meeting God in the place of consolation.

‘The high Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often acts as a crucible for those who inhabit them. Like Jacob’s angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it before it bestows a blessing. This can mean driving through a snow storm on icy roads, wondering whether you’ll have to pull over and spend the night in your car, only to emerge under tag ends of clouds into a clear sky blazing with stars. Suddenly you know what you are seeing: the earth has turned to face the centre of the galaxy and many more stars are visible than the ones we usually see on our wing of the spiral.

Or a vivid double rainbow marches to the east, following the wild summer storm that nearly blew you off the road. The storm sky is gunmetal grey, but to the west the sky is peach streaked with crimson. The land and the sky of the West often fill what Thoreau termed our ‘need to witness our limits transgressed.’ Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the holy.’ 

Life has rough edges and loose ends and we are bound to pick up baggage along the way. It’s the human condition. But we can know consolation - something good, something beautiful touches us so we can look beyond ourselves. It restores a sense of proportion in the face of despondency.

But the gospel word is that Christ goes further and gives us a new perspective. Where  Jesus meets us consolation deepens and firms up until it becomes hope. Hope in Him, in His word and His promise of life and He will not disappoint us.

Sermon - for St Peter's Day

 020723                 Holy Communion                          St.Peter’s

1 Peter 2:19-25                                              Matthew 16:13-19

Today is the closest Sunday to St Peter’s day - our patronal festival. A day to be grateful for the way we are enriched by being here, a day too to  look at Peter for hints about how we can better be God’s church in this place and at this time. Peter is a great saint - as much as anyone in the New Testament we see him changing and growing, but also flawed, fallible and forgiven. In our gospel reading we see a Peter whose heart is in the right place but he has a lot to learn, by the time he wrote our epistle he has the voice of a saint. How did he that happen. 

The first time we meet Peter  John the Baptist has just been arrested and Jesus is in Galilee, ‘From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.”  At once they left their nets and followed him.’ 

Perhaps he’d heard John the Baptist, certainly there must have been a restlessness, a hunger about him so that when Jesus called him to follow that’s what he did. He never turned back from this, always his desire was to follow Jesus - we know there were times when his courage or understanding failed, but his love never did.

Following Jesus took Peter to places he would never have gone to by himself, and they met all kinds of people - Jesus would talk to anyone - which itself tells you something about the Kingdom he preached -  men, women, adults, children, rich and poor, fishermen, tax collectors, publicans, soldiers and civilians, zealots, scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees, foreigners, pagans and gentiles, Greeks, Canaanites and Samaritans - he didn’t seem to notice taboos - lepers, a woman with a flow of blood, cheats, thieves and lawyers, wedding parties, crowds and individuals, a woman from Herod’s household, and woman on the verge of being stoned for adultery   Jesus would talk to anyone -in fact he was more likely to be angered by the religious putting up barriers to those they considered sinners than by the sinners themselves. He was not a conventional rabbi. 

As he followed him Peter understood Jesus better. He found that where Jesus was the world was different, the world was truer to what it could be, Jesus carried an honest joy with him and shed it wherever he went. 

In our gospel reading Jesus and his disciples are in Caesarea Philippi and he asks them, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”’

Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.  

Sometimes we caricature Peter as a buffoon - enthusiastic but always putting his foot in it - but what he says here is both extraordinary and brave.

For me - probably many of us- the the word Messiah is a charged word - I think ‘Handel’ - wonderful, stirring. But of course that was not the weight it carried for Peter; for him the Messiah was someone much more dangerous. 

He was thought to be God’s king anointed as spearhead of a resistance movement that would set the world to rights. There wasn’t one clear idea of his role, but many thought it would involve force and overthrowing the existing structures, for instance the Romans. This didn’t make them universally popular and when here had been would-be messiahs before it hadn’t ended well for them.  

What Peter says to Jesus and what Jesus acknowledges as true is risky. Tom Wright puts it like this, ‘the disciples knew they were not only signing on to be part of a prophetic movement that challenged existing authorities in God’s name; they were signing on for a royal challenge. Jesus was the true king! That meant that Herod  - and even faraway Caesar - had better look out. 

The twelve trusted that if Jesus really was God’s messiah then nobody would be able to stand up to him.  

But they misunderstood what Jesus was doing - he wasn’t interested in making Israel or anyone else top nation. Rather he is going to build a community consisting of all those who follow him as God’s anointed king, they will be the seed of the kingdom of heaven on earth.  And this movement starts at Caesarea Philippi with Peter’s declaration.

Peter hasn’t grasped this yet so that’s why a few verses later he gets it wrong

 From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

Peter simply cannot understand how this could happen to God’s messiah - it made no sense to him. This sounds like defeat. 

Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”

 But Jesus has come to bring in the Kingdom of God - and that Kingdom must reflect the character of God so it’s a place of reconciliation place as well as of rescue - it can’t be built by compulsion. 

Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 

Peter didn’t get it at the time and it must have been hard for him to take Jesus’ rebuke so soon after his triumph, but he accepted it. Why? He answered that question on a different occasion

 “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” 

 Throughout Jesus ministry Peter tried failed learned grew, the same process continued once the Spirit had been given.

By the time Peter wrote his letter his understanding of the kingdom and the Messiah’s work had changed so that  what he had said must never happen to Jesus When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. “He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, he now holds up as a model of behaviour for his readers.

What can we learn from Peter? Two things - First, the word that kept repeating in the life of Peter was  follow. That’s what Jesus called him to do and for all his flaws that was a constant. And if we want to mature that, by the presence of the Spirit, is what we must do too. The closer we follow the more we will grow. Jesus alone has the words of eternal life. Second, the community of the church is to be a picture of the kingdom of God - our life as a community can reveal what God is like. An Indian Christian, Pandita Ramabai, said ‘People must not only hear about the kingdom of God, but must see it in actual operation, on a small scale perhaps and in imperfect form, but a real demonstration nevertheless.’