Sermon for 21 Trinity

Where are you from? What are you studying? What do you do? How has your term been so far?

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that most everyone in this room has asked or been asked questions like these at least once since arriving in Oxford.

As quotidian as these questions may be, and however often we may find oursleves posing them and answering them, I am convinced that they serve an important function in our lives and in our shared life, because these questions are an entry point to our stories.

Not just the anecdotes that we share as conversations and friendships grow and develop, but the actual stories of our lives.

Unlike the complex and interrelated series of events that make up the physical process of the world, which go on regardless of our reflection or observation, the passage of each one of our bodies, hearts, and minds from birth to this very moment in time, consitutes a story — we make sense out of our experiences by relating them to one another, highlighting some events and dminishing others, until we are able to articulate the shape of our lives in terms of a sometimes frayed and reparied whole, a story that we can share so that others are afforded some insight into our experiences of the world and the sense we have made of it.

As we do this, we are able to share ourselves with others, and as we share our stories, we may find that they being to intertwine. As we share experiences and reflections on life and the world, sometimes our stories overlap and share resemblances even as sometimes they bounce off one another in moments of scandal, confusion, and bewilderment. And sometimes, we encounter moments in our own experience, times of confusion or failure, in which the meaning we had attributed to the course of our lives becomes ruptured, and the story terribly interrupted.

In such encounters of dis-connection and misunderstaning, we may find our own stories caught up short, out own interpretations of ourselves and the world inadequate or confusing where once they had been consoling or obviously sensible.

I believe that we find Jesus in just such a moment in our reading tonight from Luke’s Gospel.

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Jesus had been teaching and preaching for years by this point, and it had all amounted to very little.

Like the prophets before him, Jesus had come with a message of repentance and that message had, broadly speaking, been rejected. As the Flemish theologian Edward Schillebeeckx put it, in historical terms, Jesus was a failure. In spite of everything he did and said, his people had not listened.

The story that Jesus had thought his life would tell had been interrupted. The life-stories of those he met and had attempted to teach had not blended well with his own, and one can almost hear a plaintive cry in jesus words, ‘but my yoke is easy, and my burden is light!’ The Jesus of today’s reading seems a confused and disheartened man. A failure who sees more failure yet to come.

The Biblical stories, both those in the Gospels and those that Jesus would have read in the Torah and the Prophets, are remarkable for the amount of failure they contain. The community leaders have Ezekiel put to death, and by tradition, the king has Isaiah sawn in half. And in thier lifetimes, people largely ignored what they had said. Our tradition has a way of holding up as examples of spiritual excellence people who are historically terrible at what they set out to do.

For many of them, their stories end in confusion and discontentment, and it is only in retrospect, even in later generations, that the sense of their lives is discoverable, even shining brightly through history.

However gratifying this vindication might be from the perspective of the afterlife, however, it is not much of a recommendation for the prophetic life, or indeed, for the life of repentance to which Jesus was calling his people. Nor should it be.

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At the time Jesus of Jesus’ life and work, his homeland was occupied by the armies of the Roman Empire. Traditionally, Roman religion, like that of the Greeks and many others, envisioned the ultimate meaning and value of a life in terms of the fame that persisted following one’s death: how many remember you, for how long?

Value was something imputed on a life by others, by the honour bestowed on one’s life in death. The sum of one’s deeds given immortality by those who remember them.

This is like, but then again unlike the failure that Jesus faced, just as it is like and then again unlike our own failures and disappointments.

Unlike the prophets, whose words were later understood and valued after they had died, the Christian faith insists that it was both because of and inspite of Jesus’ failures that his mission ultimately succeeded. Though his life ended in crucifixion, his work continues in the Resurrection. The scandalous and somewhat offensive claim of the Christian faith is that failure situated in God’s love is transformed into something altogether more wonderful even than success: failure becomes life itself for those who had thought themselves dead.

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My yoke is easy and my burden is light, Jesus says. If that is so, one must wonder why, this way being so easy, it was not more widely taken on by his contemporaries, why it ended with his death.

It is, I believe there is a difference between easy to take on and easy to accomplish. The way that Jesus proposed and embodied was one simply of trust: of trust that however difficult and disappointing and confusing life may be, it is conducted in a context of ultimate and unchanging love, love, as Dante says, which moves the sun and other stars. This kind of trust is easy to propose, but difficult to maintain. We all know form the stories of our own lives, how difficult it can be to believe in a beneficent ground to being when things have really taken a turn for the worst.

GK Chesterton once said that the problem with Christianity is not that the way of being it proposes has been tried and been found wanting, but rather that it has been found difficult and left untried.

It baffles our instincts to believe in the face of the worst not that ‘things will work out OK in the end’, for that is the fantasy of we whose lives are cradled by privilege and prestige, but rather that however desperately our lives may seem to fail, there is a more fundamental peace and wholeness that remains available even so, and that that peace and wholeness can make new even the pieces of our life when it has fallen apart.

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The stories of our lives are punctuated by failure and disappointment, and yet we are always invited to begin again. So, if you take nothing else from my words tonight, I hope you will take this: you are not the sum of your deeds, nor is your value the sum of your marks or the length of your CV. It is my hope and my prayer for each of you that the story of your life is finally one of surprising joy and many fresh beginnings grounded in love.