Romans 8. 18–25; Matthew 6. 25–34
Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
“…the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”
Can any of us imagine anything more terrifying than an earthquake? In Turkey and Syria last week millions of lives were devastated in the space of a few minutes in the middle of the night. The images on our screens overwhelm us even from this distance; we can scarcely imagine the feelings of those on the ground, sleeping in tents or in their cars amid the rubble.
When I was in my twenties, I took three holidays travelling on my own in southern Turkey, around some of the regions worst affected by this week’s earthquake. Cities mentioned in news reports this week – Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Adıyaman – aren’t abstract places to me. They’re where I met the Arab workmen on the bus who didn’t speak Turkish, let alone English, but shared their peaches with me. They’re where I met the police officer on the first morning of Ramadan who invited me to break the fast in his home with his family that evening. They’re where, a few days later, I found the pub on the upper floors of an office building that was still open in Ramadan, and got drunk late into the night with left-wing political activists while we taught each other Irish and Kurdish folk songs.
It is a part of the world with its troubles, like many places, and also an incredibly hospitable one, rich in music and architecture and human kindness. Its people did nothing to deserve the hell visited on them last week.
Earthquake damage in Hatay, Turkey. Credit – Hilmi Hacaloğlu.
Earthquakes aren’t caused by human beings. The slipping of tectonic plates is simply the way the world works. Their randomness and violence can leave us angry at God. Perhaps all the more when we hear Jesus telling us in this morning’s Gospel reading to look at how pretty God made the lilies of the field and so trust that He will make sure we will have all we need. But sometimes God doesn’t send people what they need to eat and drink or wear. Many thousands of people over the next few weeks, especially in Syria, some of them devout Christians, are going to die from hunger and cold. Let’s be honest about that. A faith that is incapable of being honest about the reality of human existence is a faith that is scarcely worth having.
Stephen Fry, who is a rather crusading atheist, was once asked in an interview about what he would say to God if he found out after he died that there was in fact an afterlife. He responded with honest anger “I’ll say, ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you?’” If the best answer Christians can give to that, or to the dead children under the rubble in Turkey and Syria, is that if only everybody lived as Jesus taught us, then the world would be wonderful, then we deserve to be rejected by the world. If promises of material security – that often seem to be broken – were all there were to the Christian faith, then the world would be right to reject it.
That isn’t the whole story, however. St Paul reminds us in this morning’s epistle that we do not hope for things we see, but what cannot be seen. Our hope as Christians doesn’t lie entirely in this world, but also in what lies beyond it. St Paul writes in this morning’s epistle that the agonies of today are the labour pains that herald the coming glory, which we wait for along with the whole of creation.
The materialistic society we live in can regard this as pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die nonsense, a distraction from building a better world. The Church, frightened of becoming irrelevant in that materialistic society, is self-conscious about this. So it has spoken less and less about the eternal things and instead became obsessed with changing the society around us. The irony is that as we’ve talked less about God, heaven, and judgement, people lost interest in the Church, and so the Church lost a lot of its ability to influence earthly things for the better.
Now, I think our bishops and our archbishop are much better than sometimes comes across from the pages of the Telegraph or the Guardian – for example, I think they’ve done very well with the compromise reached at General Synod this week. I must admit, however, there are times when the guidance from Church of England head office makes me groan. For example, I’ve been told that I should seek to turn you into missionary disciples, who’ll go out and change the world. If you’re up for that, that’s genuinely wonderful. Tell me how you think I can support you. Yet I know how many of you are already a the limits of your capacity, already living out your walk with the crucified Christ in jobs that are demanding, or in caring for sick and frail loved ones, or just maintaining your independence and your faith in the face of old age, infirmity, and pain.
Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel that “today’s trouble is enough for today.” Today’s trouble is, for many of us, just getting through the day, and getting the people we love through the day. Please do not feel that this makes you a less adequate Christian.
At a time when the Church in this country has declined, it is natural for the Church to want to change the world in ways the rest of society approves of, because that would mean the Church could be valued and powerful and important again. Well, I’m all for changing the world for the better if we can, but it sometimes feels the Church is on a bit of an ego-trip, presenting itself as the world’s saviours instead of proclaiming that Jesus Christ has already saved the world. We should also be humble enough to say to Stephen Fry that we don’t have easy answers; that we too sometimes ask God, in pain and anger, what children with bone cancer is about; we should remember that Christ Himself cried out on the Cross, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!”
A faith that is humble like that should remind us that, as Archbishop Michael Ramsey said, “the infinite worth of the one is the key to the Christian understanding of the many.” What we do for those around us, on a small scale, may be precisely what God is calling us to do. Indeed, I find that witnessing acts of self-giving love in the mundane and everyday is one of those things that gives me a glimpse of the coming glory that St Paul writes about.
Another sign of that coming glory is the way a moral purpose and order to the universe seems to be written into our very nature as human beings. That’s why we see those images from Turkey and Syria, we long to help strangers who cannot possibly repay us and whom we probably will never meet.
Flashes of the coming glory also often come to us in music, and nature, and art, and love, when we suddenly realise that everything is connected, and that we are made for beauty, truth, and goodness. These flashes of awareness are transient and shatter if we try to grip them too tightly. If the new creation was something we could easily imagine, let alone find ourselves somehow in control of, it would hardly be something worth taking the leap of faith for.
For it does take a leap of faith to believe that there is a better creation when the present one can at times be so randomly cruel. Do not feel you have failed if, faced with today’s troubles, you find yourself shouting, ‘My God, why have you forsaken us?’ For then you climb with Christ on to the Cross, where He opened the way, for you and the whole of creation, to a glory to come that is so wonderful that we literally cannot imagine it.
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.
The photos are from Voice of America and thus in the public domain. Credit for the main photo from Hatay goes to Hilmi Hacaloğlu and for the banner photo from Osmaniye goes to Onur Erdoğan.
