Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent -11th April 2021: Ephesians 2, 1-10; John 3, 14-21

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

 

In the year 1894 Rudyard Kipling introduced us to Baloo the Bear – in fact he introduced us to Baloo, because Baloo the Bear, rather like Koala Bear is tautologous – Baloo is the Hindi word for ‘bear’.

Baloo is one of the central characters of Kipling’s ‘Jungle Book’ and is the chief ward of the man-cub Mowgli. Walt Disney created one of his cartoon masterpieces when in 1967 he introduced this Kipling story to a far wider audience of both children and adults. It is not only the original story that is so gripping, but Disney employed some very talented song-writers, and the songs from that film are memorable, enduring, and highly repeatable.

Once before I have used a song from the film, but that time is was the one sung by the wily serpent with hypnotic eyes, Kaa.

Baloo’s song is one of the most favourite – ‘Look for the bare necessities’ – a play on the two spellings in English of the word ‘bear’ and ‘bare’ – ‘the simple bare necessities, forget about your trouble and your strife.’

The song continues,

So just try and relax, yeah, cool it
Fall apart in my backyard
‘Cause let me tell you something, little britches
If you act like that bee acts, uh-uh
You’re working too hard
And don’t spend your time lookin’ around
For something you want that can’t be found
When you find out you can live without it
And go along not thinkin’ about it
I’ll tell you something true
The bare necessities of life will come to you.

Baloo is the master of doing nothing that doesn’t have to be done. He will find his little charge, Mowgli, rather a challenge.

We hear often now that such and such or so and so is ‘cool’. ‘Just cool out’, we can be told, ‘relax’, ‘chill’ or that great connection of the two ‘chill-ax’.

This holy season of Lent is a time, in some senses, when Christians are asked to ‘chill-out’, to ‘relax’, as we seek to emulate in these weeks of preparation for Easter something of what is really the eremitical experience, the desert experience.

The irony is that in these weeks of the desert we so often fill our lives with yet more piety – taking on a regime of additional prayer, or bible study, or reading a book that is appropriate for the season. Often a Lent Book will be recommended by the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘Oh we must get that and read it’ and whether we enjoy it or not, whether it leaves us stone cold or not, we force ourselves to read it. We learn more about endurance from forcing ourselves to read something, than from the much praised words of the author of the recommended Lent Book.

Lent is a good time, not so much to take on more for forty days, but to assess what our lives are really like. Let alone the inner journey we may make, a pilgrimage into self -introspection, it can be a time to evaluate the balance in life and faith. We might well ask, what is our main motive for faith; how do we perceive God; how do we assess what our relationship is with God?

For many the response is to get stuck into more work for the kingdom – to do more good for people; or maybe to get to church more often, or to pray more; to give more money to help the church; a congregation might decide to have more committees so that it can get more done, and much more efficiently. All these might be well and good, but always there is that question. Why?

 

The model of Baloo the Bear – sorry, just Baloo – is the complete opposite to that. To many Christians we might say, ‘if you act like the bee acts, uh-uh, you’re working too hard.’ In all my years as a priest I have encountered two kinds of colleagues – those who work themselves into an early grave, and those who need to do a bit of excavation into the word ‘work’.

St. Paul uses this word ‘work’ έργον, in its plural form, in the Letter to the church in Ephesus. Like many of us, the Holy Apostle, is seeking a theological resolution between his new discovery about God in Jesus Christ, and the model of religion that he had been brought up on. It had been the adherence to the law and the works of the law, that had been the outward legitimate ‘signs’ of his faith. But his experience on the road to Emmaus had been something of a liberation – he now understood words like grace and gift. This contrasts to works that win God’s favour somehow – ‘if I do this I will be making God happy’ sort of approach, or worse still, ‘by doing this I will win my place in heaven’.

I think this dilemma rests with all of us. Human life is so deeply transactional at every level that to understand grace is not a natural condition for us. ‘If you do this for me, I will do that for you.’ The church at the time of Pelagius (AD 354-418) had to address this issue. Pelagius argued that it was by human activity that we gained our merit in God’s sight, and that grace had only a limited influence on our salvation. It may not be surprising that he was born, most likely, in Wales, where his better known surname would have been ‘Morgan’ which means ‘the sea’, so his name in Greek is Pelagios, meaning ‘of the sea’. So with his origins Mr. Morgan typifies that rather distinctive British characteristic of ‘God is an English gentleman’ and so long as you ‘pull your socks up’ you will be OK with God. This is transactional.

What St. Paul discovers is that this is not the divine formula. He says to the Ephesians, ‘by grace you have been saved’, and a few sentences later, ‘it is the gift of God – not the results of work’. (Ephesians 2, 9)

One of the Reformation ‘fathers’ Martin Luther, took exception to the Letter of St. James, because of its focus on works. In mediaeval western Europe it was the institution of the church, made rich and powerful by demanding that people had to ‘do works’ to gain divine favour and get into heaven, that had made Catholicism so unpalatable to Reformation leaders. Yet, on reading it, James’s letter is balanced – faith accompanied by grace, and works are colleagues not enemies.

 

We have to find a balance between God’s grace, freely given, and the work to which we are called for the sake of the kingdom. We can’t be Baloo type Christians, nor can we somehow buy our way into heaven by doing and giving.

We do have to strive, because we know we have to strive to overcome the natural transactionalism of our lives; we do have to work for the kingdom, because it is a Christ-like sign in our world, to care for the ‘widows and the orphans’ as the early NT church so frequently mentioned. We also know that there can be no creative faith to be discovered in slothfulness.

On this 4th Sunday in Lent, which we share this year with the Greek Church, our Orthodox sisters and brothers always focus on St. John Klimakos, or St. John of the Ladder. A 7^th century monk from the monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai, St. John teaches about the 30 Stages by which Christians can reach some sort of apex of moral perfection. His ‘pattern of piety’, requires a deep degree of discipline, perhaps a step too far, or 29 steps too far, for many of us. Yet a manual that assists us as Christians to find ways into discovering God’s grace are not to be dismissed lightly, even though spiritual exercises may seem at times like ‘pulling your socks up.’

At the Orthodox Evening Service of last evening these words would have been used: ‘Glorious father John, you purified your soul with the streams of your tears. By your vigils through the night you have obtained God’s favour, and have been raised, blessed are you, to his love and beauty; in which you now rightly take delight, ever rejoicing, devout and holy father, with all your fellow athletes for Christ.’  (from  Orthodox Lent, Holy Week and Easter, Wybrew, p64)

So we have this constant living and necessary relationship between God’s grace, and our striving, our works.  The final word goes to Christ, of course. In this morning’s holy Gospel reading of John, Jesus says, ’Those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds [έργα] have been done in God’. (John 3, 21).

By the way, this might be the first sermon you have ever heard that mentions both St. John Climacus and a bear called Baloo! Remember that, if nothing else.