3rd Sunday before Lent

Readings: Jeremiah 17:5-10, 1 Cor 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26

 Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day – and if you don’t remember that, you may be in trouble with your significant other, if you have that kind of arrangement. If you are from the Orthodox tradition, Valentine is upstaged in the Christian calendar of saints by Cyril and Methodius, who took the Gospel to the Slavs from Macedonia and created the Cyrillic alphabetic script. But I’m keen on Valentine, mainly because we know very little about him – or them – since there were at least three third century Valentine martyrs, two in Rome, and one in North Africa. Our lack of knowledge of the details of particular saints however, never stopped a flourishing trade in relics developing. You will no doubt know that some of the relics of one of the Valentines are now in Dublin, in the Whitefriars Carmelite church in the centre of that City. A few years ago, I was once in that Church on my way to visit a friend there. The Church was full of scaffolding, as they were doing work to the roof space. Above the scaffolding, out of sight from the ground were workmen, whistling, banging, and making lots of noise. At ground level with me was a woman who was standing before an image of The Virgin and lighting a candle. The noise of the workmen above was obviously irritating her, and eventually she shouted out to them, “You up there, if you’re God, will you please shut up, as I’m trying to talk to your mother.” A pilgrimage to Valentine could indeed lead us to different places. Joking apart, I always take heart from the very tackiness of much of the Valentine’s industry, as it seems, at bottom, to be giving the same message as today’s readings – Choose Life. So, it’s those simple two words I would like to speak about in 8 and half minutes today. Choose Life. Two thoughts for the day.

Choose is the first word. Jeremiah offers stark choices between life affirming water fed roots and a death dealing, dry meanness with no roots. In other places in the Old Testament, we read this, “Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be.” Scripture presents these choices in many different places. In the Bible, we often see tension between different philosophical schools, some of which emphasised the role of free will, like the underlying rationale of contemporary affluent liberal western democracies, which deify choice above all things. Herein lies the key. The biblical message is “Choose Life.”  This is quite different from the role of choice in contemporary society, which mainly means choice of what you can buy. A Jordanian friend of mine says provocatively that the apex of the development of liberal western democracies is the possibility of choosing between thirty-six different types of breakfast cereal in the supermarket. But Scripture presents a different kind of choice – we see the driving impetus that being rooted in faith is life giving, not death dealing. Or rather, it should be.

Now to the second word - Life. What insights does our faith give us into what is meant by life? Is it simply a biological function? According to family legend, when my nephew was a few hours old, I asked my brother “What can it do?”  To which he relied “The usual life functions.” Or is it something more? Paul in writing his First Letter to the Corinthians clearly locates life in the Resurrection. He says, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ we are of all people most to be pitied.” So the Resurrection is the defining characteristic of what is meant by life. Let’s press on and try and locate what is meant by life in the New Testament. We constantly hear this phrase from Jesus, “You have heard, but I say to you.”  What does this mean? One of the possibilities, and the one that makes most sense to me is this. The first is that the Gospel message is not a new legalism – the old law said this, but the new law says this. It is something far more radical than that. Rabbinic argument was based on the phrase “I hear …but you must say.”  This was used to distinguish between the unchangeable text of scripture, and its many valid interpretations. I hear is an interpretation, but you must say means what the words of scripture actually say. Jesus takes this known convention, and not only inverts it, but locates the true meaning in himself – “I say to you.”  In other words, you will find life not in a new set of commands and restrictions but in me, the Resurrected Christ.

In this Christ is drawing on the deepest resonances of Scripture, which will also point us to where we find life. Go to the Hebrew word for life – haye. Like all Semitic languages, this comes from a verbal root – it’s the verb to be. Take the example of Moses on Mount Sinai, when he asks of God, who shall I say has sent me, God replies “I am.”   Now add to the fact that Hebrew, like other Semitic languages, has no tenses, then I could be translated I was or I will be or as I was who I am and will be or I will be who I was and am. Now there’s a mind teaser. And it was not for nothing that existentialist philosophers and theologians of the twentieth century got particularly keen on this. God, in this scheme of things becomes the ultimate reality, in which each and every one of us is caught up. God is the ground of all being, and therefore life in God, is to be caught up into eternity with no beginning and no end. This is the new community and the new life into which Christ invites us, through our baptism into his death and Resurrection. This is Life itself, because we are structurally and atomically part of this new reality of God with no beginning and no end. Christ is saying in the Gospels, look no further than me. I do not have a new set of rules, or a new philosophy, but in me you will find not only the deepest part of yourself and your true identity, but you will also find life. This is a message for each of us individually, it is a message for the Church, and it is a message for our society. This is our true identity. Put simply, we are an Easter People.

So, there it is as we celebrate Valentine, we choose life. Whatever we do, therefore, as a faith community bearing the name of Christ, should be life affirming, not death dealing. As we emerge from pandemic to endemic, I do believe that we are particularly well set in this church for many reasons, but I offer you three USP’s, to use business terminology. First, we are a sacramental open church, offering live worship which renews and strengthens us, not least our mental health. Second, we are blessed to have significant grounds for which we have exciting development plans– with an orchard to the east, a Quiet Garden to the south, and a wildflower meadow to the west- all as pollinators for our bees, which we also plan to increase. This too, roots and grounds us in God’s creation and feeds the soul.  Third is our music, which we are also expanding this year, with an additional Choral Scholar and plans for children’s and schools’ workshops. At the same time, the plans we are working on for our building are also life affirming, as we wish to hand on something better than that which we inherited to those who follow us. Our building and this plot of land we inhabit can do so much more in reducing our carbon footprint and helping life on our planet. This too is life affirming. The new spaces we have created for community use are choosing life – life for people of all shapes and sizes who use this building 7 days a week. The list of what we are doing is long, and you can see all the ways your Parish is choosing life through our Annual Report to be published soon. Under God, all things are possible, the transformation of our lives together, the transformation of our buildings, the transformation of our community and society, and even the transformation of you and me. The message of the Gospel is open to each and every one of us. “Choose Life.”  Let’s do it.