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I Remember

14th Sunday : 7 July 2012 Ezekiel 2: 2-5 , Mark 6: 1-6a

In the novel "One of our Priests is missing;" a callow, inexperienced curate is sent to begin his apprenticeship in one of Britain’s urban wastelands. His mentor, a tough, cynical old priest, takes him out visiting on the first day on the job to meet some of the more interesting fringe parishioners. At their first port of call the curate knocks on the door - it eventually creaks open, an oath is uttered, and the door is slammed in their face. "Why did you allow him to get away with that," exclaims the parish priest? "You should have put your foot in the door." "That man needs you and the grace you bring." "Now try again - this time with some determination."

Perhaps the curate needed some coaching from the prophet Ezekiel, sent to a people who he has been forewarned will reject the message he brings. As one commentator puts it, "Israel will butt heads with Ezekiel, and all that the Lord can do for him is to make his skull as flinty as theirs."

So why does it matter that the people know that a prophet is among them, even if they don’t want to listen to what he has to say? What is happening is that God is opening up a conversation with his people. He is drawing them into a dialogue about who they are, and what they want, and where they think they are going, and he is not going to allow this conversation to be closed down. They are defining themselves in their history as a people in rebellion, a people who are intent on doing things their way. God wants to bring about a change of direction by way of their internal choice so that their story becomes redefined as a people seeking the paths of human flourishing through the pursuing of the Divine agenda.

God doesn’t want to just speak to them from outside their situation by way of external events through the unfolding of a history of calamitous developments on the political front, which is what he is about to do. He opens up an internal dialogue through the agency of his prophets, which while it appears to be going nowhere at present, will eventually become part of the people’s renewed understanding of themselves. A small group will emerge eventually in the years of exile, who will influentially recast the whole story of Israel in a more life giving way. But for this to happen the prophets must decline to be diffident, they must press on to proclaim their message in season and out of season, so that eventually their words and ideas become the bedrock of a new way of the people interpreting their situation. Pioneers must expect misunderstanding and rejection at first.

Moving on a few centuries we come to the time of Jesus, who finds his most ready audience in the northern region of Galilee, the part of the country where he grew up. It was a relatively isolated and very distinctive part of the country. He would have stood out from Jewish people of other parts in the same way that Southlanders do with their distinctive accent. So when he goes home to Nazareth we might expect a warm welcome and a ready understanding from those who know him best.

Far from it! He finds out why the Church in its subsequent pastoral wisdom tries to make sure it never sends clergy to the places where they came from. The mystery of rejection is played out again, and intriguingly it also seems to have a diminishing power on his ability to heal people.

This time faith is the key issue. He is not just a wandering miracle worker and wise sage. He only has those capacities because he is the key person who God is working through. And how you respond to him defines whether you are an outsider, someone who can only be communicated with through riddling parables, or whether you are an insider, who is given the inside running on this new development that God has underway.

In our time the mystery of rejection is played out in a recent development in western culture of indifference to religious claims. This is something not seen before in humankind’s experience, an underlying conviction on the part of many that the Christian God’s existence is by no means self-evident. The pinch point for many of us is that our children, despite every effort on our part to bring them up as informed and convinced Christians, have little or nothing to do with the Church. And God is being steadily pushed out of the key marker points in people’s lives. As one young woman said to me last weekend at Neil Scrymgeour’s funeral, "This is the first funeral that I have been to in a while that has been in a Church."

Here in the secularist west the love of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit has become the love that dare not speak its name. We are afraid of rejection by our apparently unbelieving friends and neighbours. So when they turn to us in their confusion and uncertainty about what life is all about, we are tempted to turn their enquiries aside with irony or anodyne remarks. Or when we hear the faith mocked or denounced we might not have the courage or quick wittedness to reply as one of my Avonside parishioner did, "Yes, I used to feel like that, and no-one was more surprised than me when God moved in on me and turned my world upside down."

As the Church is sifted, and tested, and reduced, it has the opportunity to be purified into a community of deep Christian conviction whose confidence is in God alone, from whom we draw the courage and confidence to speak of him. When we do so we take a risk, particularly when we do so to people who know us well, and who are well acquainted with our track record. They may react with scorn, or sarcasm, but we are in the business of opening up a conversation that does not go away. And rejection is not the worst thing that can happen to us.

How we respond to rejection, disappointment, and bad news is in fact a key test of our maturity of character. Whether your style is stiff upper lip, or a Mediterranean display of feelings doesn’t really matter. As Rowan Williams used to say to us at Mirfield, the sacrament of failure teaches us things about ourselves and about reality that we would never find out any other way. It is an invitation to live at a greater depth than we had attempted before.

I think too of the way the verdict of history sometimes vindicates and upholds those who had apparently failed. This past week we have remembered Thomas Moore, judicially murdered in 1535 by King Henry the 8th, the monarch who seemed to get away with just about everything in his lifetime. Only he hasn’t according to the verdict of history. Now just about everyone considers Thomas Moore to be a man of exemplary integrity, and Henry the 8th to be a psychopathic egomaniac. I wonder too how those who found Thomas Moore guilty and sentenced him to death felt when he said this to them:

More have I not to say, my Lords, but that like as the blessed Apostle St Paul, as we read in the acts of the Apostles, was present, and consented to the death of St Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they now both twain holy Saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends for ever, So I verily trust, and shall therefore heartily pray, that though your Lordships have now here in the earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together, to our everlasting salvation.

I think too of the comedy series "Rev," that has been screening on Prime, with what appears to be very much an insider view of what actually goes on in the Anglican Church. This is the programme that chronicles the travails of a young Vicar recently sent to a large and sparsely attended London Church. In the concluding episode a series of disappointments, frustrations, defeats and rejections sends our hero into a spiral of mordant self-pity as he mopes around the Vicarage, too discouraged to get back into the normal cycle of the week’s ministry. As his low feelings get the better of him he makes a fool of himself at a local costume party by making a drunken pass at the headmistress of the local church controlled primary school. On the way home a police incident car picks him up, as he assumes, for his recent fractious behaviour. Instead they take him to the bedside of a dying woman who wants the last rites. As he concludes this act of ministry in this place of being very much needed and useful in the most ultimate sense he recalls the words read out at his Ordination from the prophet Isaiah, "And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said, "Here am I! Send me."