Readings – Habbakuk 2: 1–4; John 20: 24–29
“…there is a vision for the appointed time.”
It hasn’t been much of a summer, has it? Even by Wimbledon fortnight standards, we have had a depressingly heavy dose of rain. We are promised rather better for the next fortnight, and the wet start to the summer means we shall appreciate it all the more if we are indeed blessed with a fine spell in the next few weeks, when the days are still at their longest.
The desert blooms briefly in South Africa’s Namaqualand region as winter ends. © Gerry Lynch 27 August 2011
On the other side of the world it isn’t high summer, but the depths of winter. In August, when winter starts to give way to springtime, something remarkable happens in the deserts that straddle the border between South Africa and Namibia. Normally almost completely barren, for a few weeks the desert blooms with carpets of flowers, sometimes stretching for miles in brilliant purples, oranges, and bright yellows, all giving off the most wonderful perfume. It is as if heaven has suddenly broken into the mundane world.
The same thing happens in a few other spots around the world as winter ends, where a desert approaches a western ocean coast and the rainfall patterns are favourable – in parts of Chile and California and Western Australia. The barren desert blooms with billions of wild flowers, and it comes and goes in a few weeks, and then the barrenness returns.
There is a vision for the appointed time… wait for it.
This is one of the more pessimistic times any of us have lived through. The desert has plenty of charms and compensations compared with the barren dryness of our culture and our political discourse.
It is not, despite all that, a time that quite matches the mood of hysterical doom-mongering that dominates our media reporting and especially our online discussions. I remember the 1980s, which were at least as politically divided as the current era, and also a time which in this country and generally in Western Europe was marked by much more politically-motivated violence than today, both in terms of terrorism and of street fighting. Most of it is now forgotten. The threat of war with Russia was quite a bit more intense then, with TV shows like Threads depicting the likely consequences of a nuclear war for ordinary people in grizzly detail. We also had a thousand miles of fortifications through the middle of Europe with easterners routinely shot dead by their own governments for trying to cross them. I am not going to join the panic-mongers just yet about our own situation, even if the United States seems to be in the grip of collective insanity.
Yet this is indeed a time of staleness and stagnation, when our films are all remakes, and the television full of repeats, and the repetitive political arguments sound like the last fifteen years never happened. It is genuinely a time of low morale in the Church and low morals in public life.
Like Habakkuk in this morning’s reading, we station ourselves on the ramparts of our decadent and frustrated civilisation, keeping watch to see if God will finally answer the many complaints about our situation we find ourselves heaping at His door.
Yet there is a vision for the appointed time, even if it tarries. God tells us that we must wait for it.
We are profoundly shaped by a world of highly-efficient consumerism that teaches us that if we click a button on our screens whatever we order should be with us by the next day at the latest. That affects how we view politics, and our public services, and even how we relate to one another. We get angry when we can’t have what we want when we ask for it. But the world doesn’t work like that in anything much more complicated than ordering a new lawnmower or downloading a film.
In teaching us that patience is unnecessary in waiting for goods, there is a risk that we lose the capacity for patience with other people. In a world of electronic buttons for muting and blocking and changing the channel as soon as someone we dislike appears on the screen, are we at risk of losing the gift of tolerance? Are we now unable to tolerate things and people we dislike for the sake of a society where everyone has a stake?
More than that, as we surround ourselves only with those we like and agree with, we are at risk of telling ourselves that we are the good people and those whom we dislike and disagree with are bad people?
But we aren’t especially good people and certainly not perfect ones. That’s why Jesus taught us to pray that God would forgive us our sins as we forgive other people their sins. A genuine liberation arrives when we embrace that we are not meant to be perfect people, for then we can begin to love ourselves for the flawed people we are, and to love our neighbours for the flawed people they are.
God always works through imperfect people. Even the apostles, who had the privilege of eating breakfast with God every day for years, weren’t perfect people. So, this morning we celebrate the feast of Thomas the Doubter. Where would the world and the Church be without our doubters? Where would any of us be without those willing to ask awkward questions, to disturb consensuses and traditions that have become stale and stifling, to blow the whistle or play the devil’s advocate? There are times when doubters can be negative drainers of our energy, putting the brakes on interesting projects and shooting down our best ideas. At other times, they are worth their weight in gold, when they point out uncomfortable realities everyone else knows about but wishes to avoid.
For all of us, our greatest strengths and worst failings are very often the same characteristics, just expressing themselves in a different time and place.
That Peter was such a bossy boots, always liked to be in charge, always thought he was right even though he was so often wrong – although to be fair, he could at least have a laugh at himself on that score. At the same time, he was the rock on which Christ built the Church, his charisma and confidence leading him all the way to Rome – and his martyrdom.
Meanwhile, John sometimes treated Jesus as if He was his personal possession, insisting he was the special disciple whom Jesus loved. Simon the Zealot and Matthew the tax-collector: when those two got arguing about politics, it must have made our family rows about Brexit sound like lullaby-writing competitions. And as for those Sons of Thunder… oh, my goodness, James and John, what a pair of loudmouthed narcissists. And that was even before you met their crazy mother!
They were all good enough for God, good enough to build the Kingdom in ways that changed the world when the appointed time came, when the Holy Spirit fell on them and faith blossomed like wildflowers in the desert when winter gives way to springtime.
For us, as much as for them, there are appointed times, when it all comes together, when we know that our waiting is over and we find that, for all of our flaws, we are indeed playing our parts in a divine vision.
Pray that you and I will see the appointed time together, in this country and here in St John’s, and then find ourselves shouting with Thomas in delight, “My Lord and My God!”
And now to God be the glory, the Father the creator of all life, the Son the restorer to new life, the Spirit who breathes in all life, now and forever, as is most justly his due. Amen.
