Sermon

March 6, 2005

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on March 6, 2005, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

    I read somewhere a story that has stuck with me. It seems to apply to our readings.  The story is about the 19th century missionary bishop who takes his yacht to a remote island in his diocese to check on the progress of Christianity there. He is delighted to find that there are three islanders who have converted to the faith.  The three islanders seem to be very good and compassionate people, but the bishop is appalled at their ignorance. For example, the bishop asks them how they pray and they reply, “When we gather, we say to God, ‘We are three, you are one, have mercy.’” “That won’t do at all,” replies the bishop. “When you gather you must say, “Our Father which art in heaven…” and he proceeds to spend the day teaching the three islanders the Lord’s Prayer.  Pleased with his day’s work, the bishop takes ship again.  Months later, on his way back through the islands it happens that the bishop anchors his yacht off the same island.  To his amazement, the bishop observes the same three islanders come walking on the water toward the yacht.  When the three clamber aboard they say, “Bishop, we see your ship passing and we must come talk to you.  You see, we forget the words of the beautiful prayer you taught us.  Please teach us again.  The bishop, humbled by what he has seen, replies, “When you gather to pray, say to God, ‘We are three, you are one, have mercy.’”

            This is a sermon about the holiness of moving on.  My apocryphal bishop is hung up on the words of the faith, but finally has the grace to recognize that God is doing a new thing with those islanders, something not bound up in beautiful but archaic word forms. He finally finds the grace to move on to the new thing God is doing.

The holiness of moving on is also a theme in this morning’s readings. In Samuel we hear about Israel moving on to a new king. Samuel is hung up on the old king and his jealous power, but finally finds the grace to anoint a new king—and not even a king that looks the part, but one who pleases a God “who looks on the heart,” “not as mortals see.” Then our Gospel offers us a story of the disciples discovering the holiness of moving on.  Encountering a blind man, they are hung up on the theology of the past in which the man’s limitation must be a punishment for someone’s misdeeds. Perhaps they are also hung up on the religious rules of the day and assume that nothing can be done about the man’s blindness except to talk about it because it is the Sabbath. Whatever the hang up, Jesus moves on. The meaning of the man’s situation, says Jesus is not found in sin, but in the power of God’s love, and heals the man, regardless of the rules about working on the Sabbath. As the story goes on, others also get hung up and have trouble moving on.  The religious authorities can’t see beyond the rules.  The man’s parents can’t see beyond their physical danger.  Only the former blind man really understands the situation: once he was blind, but now he sees—and that is such an obvious good thing that it cuts through all the moralizing and nicety about rules.

For me, the message of all these readings is that in Christ we are always being impelled forward toward the new thing God is doing. As Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams puts it, the significance of Jesus is absolute: “From now on,” Williams writes, “all that can be said of God’s action in the past or the present must pass under the judgment of the cross.” In the final analysis, we will know when God is at work in the world because the new things happening will mirror the all-embracing sacrificial love of the cross.

The family record of the Church is a history of moving on, however reluctantly, to the new thing God is doing.  We moved on from worship in Latin to using the language of every day speck.  We moved on from slavery and racial oppression to embrace God’s love for all races and peoples.  We moved on from excluding women to celebrating women in holy orders.  We are moving on from homophobia to cherish the holiness of the committed relationships of all people.  However reluctantly, the church as a body has learned to practice the holiness of moving on.

That is the good news. The challenge is to keep moving on. Desmond Tutu, speaking to a church group in New York last week said, “Dear Friends, God is saying to you ‘please help me turn all kinds of wilderness into glorious gardens because in God’s world today the fields are covered with weeds and tears of oppression and injustice of abuse and exploitation.’” Tutu urged his hearers “to be on the lookout for other worthy causes because God has no one but us to be God’s partners.” God has not stopped moving on, and we must move on, too.

Personally and individually God asks us to move on.  Failures and past fears, old resentments and animosities, even our ignorance and confusion must not hold us back.  God asks us to move beyond them.  The good news is that we CAN move on because when we do move on, we find God already there waiting for us.  Islanders can walk on water and we can find ways to make the wilderness of hate bloom into gardens.  All it takes is to remember that God moves on ahead of us.  I’m told that the impala deer are capable of tremendous leaps—both high into the air and over huge distances, but they can be contained in zoos by a shallow ditch and a low wall.  Why? Because they won’t leap if they can’t see where their feet will land.  When God asks us to move on, we may be hung up on a similar fear.  But for us, moving on is always a leap of faith.  We may never know exactly where our feet will land, but we know that whenever we answer God’s call to move on, we’ll find God already there waiting for us.  So, may we all have the courage to embrace the holiness of moving on.                   AMEN