Trinity 1 Yr a Proper 6 Stjb 18.6.17

Trinity 1 Yr A Proper 6 StJB 18.6.17

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Lord and Redeemer. Amen.

I don’t know how many of you read the Church Times, but I was struck this week with the back page interview with the author Thomas Keneally. A Roman Catholic, born and brought up in Australia with the assumption that he would become a Priest. It was while he was in a Seminary that he began to actually see what the world was like and towards the end of his training he had a breakdown and left. The interview is to publicise his latest book ‘The Crimes of the Father’ which is about abuse in the Church.

Now I am not going to talk about abuse you will be glad to hear, the thing that struck me was how so many of us are totally unaware of the life ‘out there’ away from our own lives. The recent events that have rocked all of us over the last few months may cause some angst. Wherever we come from the shootings, fire, strange political happenings we can hardly have not been affected by at least one of these events. The problem for us as Christians is ‘where is God?’

When we stop and reflect we know that through the work of God in Christ, made real by the gift of the Holy Spirit, the world was made a different place. We also know as Paul tells us that ‘we are justified by faith’, through no merit or action on our part. What does that mean, what does it feel like?

In Chapter 4 of his letter to the Romans we were given a long and complex theological explanation, and it is not a new departure in God’s relations with us, but is characteristic of all God’s dealings with us. Paul now turns the abstract to concrete. So you are justified by faith, what does it feel like? According to Paul it feels like the end of a war. We are now at peace with God. We can think of peace as an inner quietude, but that is not what Paul is talking about, if you read on and know about his life. Peace, for Paul, is a change in the world. At this moment I think we are in the midst of the greatest changes we are likely to see in our lives.

Paul knew what it was like to be in an uneasy and mistrustful truce with God, he tried unsuccessfully from time to time to do God’s will and failed. Peace with God is knowing that you are on the same side as God, difficult when you are in the mist of turmoil, or feel you are. Jesus was sent to show and tell us that we are on the same side as God. Whatever you do or fail to do from now on, you have rights; that signal you are at peace with God’s kingdom.

In verses 2, 4 and 5 Paul refers to hope, his hope is not like our use of the word. He means that we, as Christians, can boast in the conviction that they have a future life with God. In hope there is the conviction, (produced by suffering, endurance and character) that the future will not prove to be a disappointment. Hope may be strengthened by these human experiences, but it remains a gift from God, as the end of verse 5 makes clear. Hope is the beginning and end of our journey. We start out on it because of what God has done for us and promised to us in Jesus. We, often, can feel pride in the way the Spirit has grown in us as we travel, through Jesus this is brought more and more to the fore by this Spirit of Christianity.

It is not ours by right, but simply because the ruler, God, goes out and searches for his people and brings them home. Remember the analogy of the shepherd searching for the lost sheep, when 99 were safely in the fold. We set out in hope and the more we travel, the more we understand the nature of hope. God’s great act of hope in Christ. God simply decides we are his people, while we still think we are at war with Him He has already decided that we are His. Paul tells us that we can boast ‘in our hope of sharing the glory of God’. Later on the chapter Paul returns to this theme.

Tom Wright tells the story of a well known comedian who died and whose obituaries told that he had been estranged from his father and also from one of his sons. Death had intervened and there had been no reconciliation. This made me think of the stories we have heard this week of the telephone calls being made from the burning tower block, they mostly appear to be of love, but those listening find it hard to reconcile the sudden silence with any hope. This is probably the reason there is so much anger around at the moment. So I ask again where was God?

Sadly many live in that state, at odds with family members and others. If you do not know God it is difficult to have a relationship with Him. It is even more difficult to believe that He is there in the midst of the suffering. We have talked of hope, difficult to feel much hope as flames lick up the outside of your block of flats, difficult to feel hope as you open your door to flee and find the stairwell full of smoke. Those, who stood helplessly watching outside wanting the fire people to enter the building and feeling frustration that they didn’t. We, from a distance can understand why they didn’t go rushing in, but hope seems very thin on those circumstances.

I was interested that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, a Muslim, read from Romans at the service held on Friday night in a church nearby. Paul’s words of hope are about reconciliation, reconciliation almost beyond our comprehension, yet I have this hope that the miracle that is held out to us may reach into the misery of those now homeless. Those who have lost loved ones. Those who feel such anger at the situation. So to answer my own question ‘where is God?’ He is right there is the midst of it all suffering with the people and may His hope reach through to them all.