Sitting comfortably
Sermon on the First Sunday after Trinity at a Zoom service for the Ministry Area of Bro Tudno
The Ministry Area’s order of service with the lections, including a poem in addition to the First Reading and the Holy Gospel, can be found here.
Are you sitting comfortably?
I wonder whether it was June in our reading from Genesis this morning.
It’s certainly a long midsummer’s night in Eden. We’re presented with that majestic setting of the scene, as we encounter, with Adam and Eve, “the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” — “in the evening breeze” (Genesis 3).
Things are about to fall apart, of course; but in that scene-setting sentence, there’s a glimpse of what we were created for: a comfortableness in God’s intimate presence; you and me so peaceful and unperturbed in creation — in Eden –; and God easily, readily, unremarkably walking nearby of a June evening, savouring with us the cool of the day. No need for pity and hope here, no need for sacraments and signs; but unity, Adam and Eve the priests of all creation, the Creator well-pleased, sitting comfortably — revealer, revelation and revealed-ness but one.
Are you sitting comfortably?
There’s nothing comfortable about Jesus in the Gospel according to Saint Mark.
This is the Gospel that will be our companion for the next seven weeks. We’ve spent some time over recent weeks listening to passages from the Gospel according to Saint John. In John’s Gospel, Jesus will sit by the lake for ages to teach the crowd; he will stay at the supper table late into the evening to exhort his disciples; he will kneel in the garden through the early hours of the night, as his disciples sleep, to talk, and talk, and talk to his Father.
But in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is abrupt, irritable, all elbows, always on the move. It’s a Gospel where things interrupt, where stories jostle impatiently, crashing one through another. Demons shout out at him, his disciples are forever confused, crowds crush around him, hands reach out to touch his cloak, waves beat at the boat, Salome dances her death-dance, the harvester with his sickle is at hand, and Jesus dismissively shakes the dust off his feet and moves on. In Mark’s Gospel, nobody, not even Jesus, sits comfortably. Revelation feels like it’s violently, confusingly, carelessly, urgently breaking through.
You can feel that discomfort in today’s Gospel reading. Jesus is pursued by the crowd — hungry, thirsty for his teaching; and by scribes from Jerusalem — there to prod and persecute. Jesus’s teaching is vital, passionate, uncompromising: “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit,” whoever rejects Christ’s revelation of God’s ways, “can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” And, observing this chaos, and worried for him, his mother comes. “And they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’” (Mark 3).
Are you sitting comfortably?
Idris Davies was born in 1905, in the Rhymney valley. It was an uncomfortable childhood. His father was a winderman — responsible for the wheel and the lifts that plunged the colliers into the depths of the earth. From the age of 14, Idris Davies himself worked underground — until an accident in which he lost a finger at the coalface, and his active participation in the General Strike of 1926, made him unemployed. He described the next years — most of his twenties — as “the long and lonely self-tuition game” — but from which he emerged, in short order, as a student, then a teacher, then a writer, then a poet. T. S. Eliot was among his admirers; and if abdominal cancer hadn’t overcome him on Easter Monday in 1953, at the age of 48, he would have become one of the great poets of the twentieth century.
In our poem this morning, stood at his vantage point above the town, he is both uncomfortable and comfortable. Looking down at a Saturday night’s escapism in the valley below, you can sense, viscerally, his concern for the crowd, his appreciation for their need for “One night of tinsel, one night of jazz,” matched to his conviction that Gwyneth and Blodwen and the “slim young men” deserve better, are worth more that this mix of sorrow, bread and circuses allowed them. And, yet, you also sense that here is somebody at peace with the universe, with being, with himself; or, if not quite at peace, then at one with the revelation of life and his participation in it:
And you shall listen then to the silence
That is not silence, to the murmur
Of the uneasy centuries among the ancient hills and valleys
As here you stand with the mountain breeze on your brow.
Are you sitting comfortably? The Jesus of Mark’s Gospel reminds us that we shouldn’t. Jesus should be jostling us. His vital, passionate, uncompromising message should make us uncomfortable.
Are you sitting comfortably? So you should; or at least such should be your soul’s desire. Know that peace, yearn for Eden’s evening breeze, at the cool of the day; feel it, even now, sometimes, on your brow.
