Sermon for the 9th Sunday after Trinity – 1st August 2021: Ex 16, 2-4, 9-15; Eph 4, 1-16; John 6, 24-35.

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

 

One of the books I read on holiday referred to a kaleidoscope – made up of three Greek words, of course, that means looking at beautiful shapes. Mention of a kaleidoscope took me back to my childhood. By the way, I had my 64^th birthday 4 days ago, so my childhood is now so far away that you need a telescope to look back to it. Anyway, as a child I used to be fascinated by the magical formations that the kaleidoscope was capable of creating. I guess I would have the same reaction even now, despite being red-green colour blind.

This is how the author of that book I was reading described it. ‘At the bottom of a kaleidoscope’s cylinder lie shards of coloured glass in random arrangement; but thanks to a glint of sunlight, the interplay of mirrors, and the magic of symmetry, when one peers inside what one finds is a pattern so colourful, so perfectly intricate, it seems certain to have been designed with the utmost care. Then by the slightest turn of the wrist, the shards begin to shift and settle into a new configuration – a configuration with its own symmetry of shapes, its own intricacy of colours, its own hints of design.’ (A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles, Penguin Publications p 174) We will return to this image of the kaleidoscope.

 

The Book of Exodus, which provides our first reading from scripture this morning, is full of detail about the journeying of God’s people as they seek the ‘promised land’. In this book there is a record of God’s wonderful acts – acts that are supra-natural and in their own way quite wonderful revelations of God’s glory. To contrast these glorious acts, time after time, we read about the grumbling of the people. The leadership of Moses and Aaron was both testing and demanding amidst the people who at times would have preferred the stability and familiarity of life back in Egypt as slaves of the Pharoah.

In the midst of God’s sheer giving of himself, endowing his people with blessings, the people return his generosity by being somewhat normal in their human behaviour – they complain.

Grumbling at God is common in the Old Testament literature; not only in Exodus, but also in the psalms. There is a tendency to sanitize the grumbling by calling it ‘lament’ but often it is just sheer human grumbling. ‘Why did you do this, God?’ ‘Why did you allow this to happen, God?’ ‘Why did you allow us to suffer like this, God?’ ‘If you had been on our side….’ and so on.

This is not such an uncommon human response in our own time, and in our own culture. God is challenged by humans because things happen that they don’t like. Because we are less anchored in our dependency on God in our generation, such questions often lead to individuals simply parting company with God – if God allows this disaster to happen I want nothing to do with him. If this is your God, you can keep him – I don’t want him!

We have to remind ourselves that so often we create God in our own image, forgetting that the reality is the other way around. The God that we create then becomes the God that we knock off his pedestal, when in fact it is our all too fragile image, or distorted image of God, that we react to and protest against, leading so frequently to a loss of faith. God is foundation, not scaffolding.

 

This is not so in the grumbling literature of the Old Testament and the Hebrew people. For them it is acceptable to have a God who is there to grumble at, to complain about – and yet God is still God, and they still have faith in him and depend on him. It is common in some of the psalms for the first part of the psalm to be plaintive, lamenting a human situation, a description of some sort of personal or corporate desolation – the creation of a grim picture, but then, in the light of God, and with the twist of a wrist, the shards of life with all its challenges and tragedies shift and settle into a new configuration as the image of God’s glory appears – ‘a new picture emerges with its own symmetry of shapes, its own intricacy of colours, its own hint of design.’ (Towles ibid p174).

Grumbling is certainly not unique to the Hebrew people. It is all too human, and it all too often leads to division. Over the many Christian generations the ecclesial unity of Christ’s church has suffered from the effects of division. Often this division is based on sound difference of theological perspective – the big question for us has always been, and still is, how does the universal church of Christ find ways of disagreeing well, without acrimony, hatred, and even at times in history persecution. Division causes us to grumble about other Christian traditions.

Within congregations it is not uncommon to find grumbling, and it its worst forms it is destructive, both to an individual’s soul, but also to the common good and the witness of the church in the wider community.

St. Paul addresses this within the early Christian community in Ephesus. There is a diversity of people and opinions within the community, so of course, as is the human ‘first stop principle’ people grumble about others. This dynamic is damaging the unity of the Body of Christ in Ephesus (but Ephesus is not unique).

So St. Paul provides for them a beautiful vision of unity in diversity – a vision that we should constantly remind ourselves of.  Like the coloured glass of the kaleidoscope the church has a rich diversity of personalities, gifts, ministries, and talents, all of which contribute to the Christ-shaped pattern of church life.

Whether a difference is experienced at a local church level, or within some of the bigger picture issues facing the church, the answer is not to be satisfied with being a grumbling people, but a people who can disagree but live together well, with a common purpose, rejoicing in the diversity of God’s gifts, ‘bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’. (Eph 4, 2-3).

Paul speaks graphically of the consequences of division, grumbling, and disunity describing ‘children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming’. (Eph 4, 14).

The vision set out in Ephesians is a vision of church life – of rich diversity, yet unity of purpose. The picture is one of ‘shards’ of colourful people, in the light of God, creating a polychromatic, breathtaking and interdependent symmetry, confident in life together in Christ, and with the twist of the wrist yet another design, with its own beauty lies before us, for there is an infinity of configurations to the glory of God, yet we are still united, bathed in the light of Christ, and gazing as through a kaleidoscope with breathtaking mystery, fixed in the same direction and united in the bonds of peace. This is the ‘measure of the full stature of Christ.’ (Eph 4, 14).  Amen.