The Glory to be Revealed: Sermon Preached on 23nd July 2023 (7th Sunday After Trinity)

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Romans 8: 12–25; Matthew 13: 24–30, 36–43

“I consider the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

On Friday evening, I was out walking near North Wilts Golf Course, when I stumbled across a field full of poppies in rich evening light. I wandered along the field margin entranced by magical scenes, like the single sunflower, presumably the result of a stray seed, adding a dash of yellow to the reds and greens. Overhead, the larks sang.

At times, I was quite overwhelmed by beauty. I found myself thinking of the struggles I’d had in life – the very unlikely and occasionally painful path that led me to being a country parson in Wiltshire, which I could never have planned for myself and which nobody could have predicted. I thanked God volubly, moved almost to tears with joy.

Of course, life isn’t always like this. To turn on the news is to be confronted with catastrophes, from a heatwave in southern Europe that seems to intimate environmental disaster to a war in Ukraine that seems to be locked into a deadly stalemate in the trenches.

Still harder to bear than these terrifying but systemic problems is our own suffering and the suffering of those we love. I was reading an article in The Tablet yesterday by the Oxford-based Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe. Timothy is to my mind the best popular theologian in Britain today, capable of explaining difficult concepts in understandable language to ordinary Christians. He revealed that, last year, he had survived a terrifying and risky 36-hour operation for jaw cancer. Although initially it seemed to have been a complete success, recently his consultants had picked up signs of fresh pre-cancerous cells in his jaw. The random operation of fate can sometimes be terribly cruel.

If all there were to the world were the stories of humanity’s struggles to survive and struggles with one another, the world would be a grim place. Yet we see signs everywhere, like the beauty of a field of poppies, that our existence is much greater and more magnificent than the hardest parts of life would indicate.

For example, if I am capable of being overwhelmed by the beauty of a field of poppies on a gorgeous summer evening, it begs the question why human beings have a sense of beauty. It isn’t necessary for evolutionary purposes: we can survive and produce the next generation of humans without it. In a similar vein, why do we have the capacity to feel awe? Why does love seem to be the single most transformative aspect of human existence?

We live in a civilisation which is obsessed with measuring and quantifying. Yet the most important things are often the things we can’t measure, the things we can’t control with a neat set of rules or verbal formula – like beauty, hope, and love. One of the strangest things about the present moment is that judged by what we can measure, our lives are better than those of almost anyone in history. We live longer and healthier lives, with better and more varied food, more entertainment, and more freedom than almost everyone who came before us. Yet far from being grateful, many people are angry and angst-ridden. The more we have, the more we fear losing it, and we find ourselves demanding still more. In this world, we seem unable to be satisfied.

If we take Jesus Christ seriously, then He wasn’t was a teacher of wise sayings to help people live a satisfying life on Earth. He was pretty clear about that. He pointed to something beyond here, to an eternal destiny. The way we respond to the beauty of nature or art makes no sense in evolutionary terms, but instead points us to the possibility that we might have been created for more than this world.

In today’s Epistle reading, St Paul writes about the afterlife in poetic language; the only sort of language capable of helping us so much as perceive some shadows of it. Paul says that the sufferings of this world are as nothing to the glories of the world to come; that the whole of creation is groaning in labour pains for the new creation that is about to be born. The poppies and the sunflowers and the larks are groaning for what is yet to come, something that will not be some sort of eternal extension of a perfect day on Earth – for that would be Hell rather than Heaven – but our transformation into something unimaginably different, even as we remain ourselves; something no more conceivable by us now than a caterpillar could conceive of growing wings and flying.

In that coming creation, St Paul writes that we will not be God’s servants, but his children; co-heirs of the Kingdom of God along with Jesus Christ. What does that mean? If we could understand it, it could hardly be worth believing in. Yet we see flashes of it in this world, when we love and are loved, when a piece of music or art or architecture touches the depths of our soul, or when we wander into a field of poppies on a July evening as the larks sing out around us.

Now, along with that beautiful vision from St Paul, in today’s readings we can’t escape Jesus’ uncomfortable parable about the wheat and the weeds. None of us likes to hear that anyone is to be thrown on the furnace of fire, even evildoers — perhaps just in case we might be one of them!

Yet this tells also us some reassuring things: it tells us that there is a moral order to the universe and a moral purpose to our lives; that good and evil are real, and are choices between them matter; it tells us that God is a God of justice and that the good deeds that we have done, often unseen and without reward on this Earth, have been seen by Him.

At the same time, our own experience and indeed the witness of other parts of the Bible, is that people rarely can be neatly defined as good or evil. We all have dark sides to us. Conversely, Jesus’ parables also celebrated the idea that those thought to be wicked often end up being redeemed.

Stranger still, the sides of our character that most risk being toxic in some circumstances are often the ones that makes us a blessing to the world in different circumstances. We all have wheat and weeds growing inside us, and we can’t always tell which is which. Never forget, that for wheat farmers, poppies are nothing but weeds.

I think that all of us should have a healthy respect for God’s judgement, but few of us have grounds to truly fear it. God knows us better than we know ourselves and His judgement of us is more generous than our own; we are often ourselves our worst critics.

But if you’re worried that you might be one of those who should worry about God’s judgement, remember you have the sacraments to nourish you, the Bible to guide you, and if you truly and sincerely confess your sins to God at the start of any service of Holy Communion, just privately between you and God, then the priest will pronounce absolution on them. If you feel you need some more formal process of personal confession, you can always ask to see me or another priest.

Let me conclude with some words from Fr Timothy Radcliffe, discussing his response to hearing that his own death might be imminent: “I’ve never been in the presence of anyone who found [the end of life] terrible. You die into eternal life, the longed-for-home that haunts the human heart.”

May you be rewarded with flashes of that longed-for-home in the beauty of art and nature and the love of those you treasure, and may your Heavenly Father receive you all into it at the end of your earthly lives as His heirs and children.

And now to that Heavenly Father be all glory, praise, and honour, and to His Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, and to the Holy Spirit who is their love for one another and for us. Amen.