Perspectives - Sermon 31st January 2010

Jeremiah 1:4-10 ; Luke 4:21-30

A couple of thoughts to start us off today.

Firstly, one of my heroes of the faith is Justin Martyr, who lived from about 100 to 165 AD. As his name suggests, he died for his faith, but he is also very important for being perhaps the first in a long and deeply healthy Christian tradition.  He was steeped in philosophical learning, and believed that it was tremendously important that the Christian faith be expressed in such a way that it spoke to the learning of the world around. He understood himself as in some sense a Christian philosopher, and he understood the Christian faith as able to stand up to the rigours of careful thought and honest debate.

But he had his quirks. One of them was that he had a fascinating attitude to the symbol of the cross. He saw it everywhere. You or I might look at a window, with its struts, and see the shape of the cross there, or see two pieces of wood in a building, or a scaffold, or part of a cart, and maybe, especially perhaps at Easter, our mind would jump to the cross of Good Friday, the heart of our faith.  But Justin sort of turned it round. Instead of letting these things remind him of the cross from time to time, he saw them as really and always pointing to the cross. Once Christ had died on two pieces of wood, that’s what two pieces of wood at right angles always, really, meant. The symbol filled the world. The pattern was out there, in the way the universe was constituted.

Second thought. See if you can identify these. They’ve all been on television currently or recently.

You’re looking back, apparently from the back of one car, at another, a big, flashy American convertible, driving down a broad city avenue, skyscrapers soaring on each side. It’s clearly a hot day, and the huge buildings are slightly fuzzy in the haze – but suddenly you realize that bits of them are actually free-floating in the air. The big American car follows you down the canyon of glass towers, and they and these free-floating bits of skyscraper suddenly start coalescing, coming together into a pattern - something you realize you are going to know, when you see it.

Suddenly – there it is! But the car rolls on; as soon as it comes together, the pattern begins to disperse. There was only one point on the road, one place, where you could see it from. And you aren’t there any more.

Or try this one. Seeing through the camera’s eyes, you’re walking round a grubby London council estate, like something off The Bill. It isn’t high-rise, but the flats are built on levels, in galleries, and there are brick-and-concrete staircases and stairwells – square,  angled tubes - at different angles joining them up. You come round the camera, and a shape – the same shape – starts to coalesce. Again, it comes together, and again, only for a moment.  The camera walks on, and the shape disperses.

The shape is, of course, a huge number 4.

It’s the Channel 4 station ident – what used to be called “logo” – and it’s been assembling itself like this since the channel opened. Originally, it was just coloured lines coming together, and it was very controversial.  Some people hated it. Now, it exists in a number of variations on a real-life theme, but with an important twist. Whether it’s hay-bales seen from a car, piled in a summer field, some of them, you realize, weirdly floating in the air, and one of them mysteriously on fire, or motorway signs, cranes  and gantries, or a tangle of electricity pylons on a landscape, or a dockside, with its loading-cranes and containers viewed from what seems to be a fork-lift truck, the movement on most of these contemporary versions of the Channel 4 logo is supplied by us – by our viewpoint tracing a path across a mixed-up tangle of mundane, boring shapes, which suddenly get weirder and weirder and more suggestive until finally, the whole pattern is there.

Two points; firstly, it’s to do with perspective.

Secondly, what makes these adverts so compelling is the way they emphasize movement. Our movement. The old Channel 4 logo used to come together before your eyes. You just sat there in the one place, in your armchair. But with these, you are carried along to a point at which you can see a pattern that is there. You are brought to the point – the one point – from which you can see the pattern complete.

Perspective.

Perspective is a lot to with the way the Bible works. Perhaps everything. Some people are horrified at that thought. The Bible, they say, works the same way wherever you stand, looks the same, and represents the same things whatever angle you come at it from. But it doesn’t. There’s nothing static about the Bible.The Bible is many things, but one thing it is is a community journey – the story of a pilgrim people. It starts with Abram, not exactly sitting in an armchair in Haran, in front of the television watching the early Channel 4 logo come together before his eyes, but certainly content, settled. And God says to him “Come with me to a place you’ve never known, a place I will show you – and see what the view is like from there. See how your perspective on things will change on the journey. See what patterns come together as you travel with me!”

Moses, the Egyptian prince has a colossal shift in perspective when he sees things through the eyes of a beaten Israelite slave, and takes his side, and again, when he has to flee for the murder of the Egyptian slave-master, and again when he sees what looks like a burning bush, and has to walk up to it to see what’s going on there. And again, and again...

And the Israelites themselves find their perspective shifted from a slave people to a liberated people to a people trapped by the sea, with Pharaoh’s army coming up behind them, to a people brought through to safety.  Suddenly, the whole pattern of their lives has changed, from slavery to Exodus, and liberation. And centuries later, that same pattern, forgotten in despair, becomes the new pattern of hope for the exiles in Babylon. A new liberation, a new Exodus. But they have to arrive at that point of despair before they can see it.

Inbetweentimes, complacent in peace and wealth under the Kings of Israel and Judah, the community is cruising along when the whole world turns chilly, and a new pattern starts to form up, with God in it in new ways, and it takes prophets like Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah to point it out to them – a pattern of God’s justice, which challenges the rotten ways they have been living, where the poor are exploited and despised, and the powerful just discount them. In fact, what has happened here is that the old patterns which explained God, and their relationship to him, have, for these people, fallen apart. They have lost sight of them. What they remember of God and his covenant is just a sort of guarantee that they are his people, without any real-life obligations to live according to his justice and mercy. But that’s not the pattern, say the prophets.

That’s what the prophets of the Old Testament were – not weird, furious, long-haired predictors of the future, sorts of early models of Nostradamus.  They were basically people whose job it was to say – in God’s name - “Look at that! Over there... quick!” Just like people in a car who see something out there that needs to have attention drawn to it, because it means something.

Here’s this morning’s Old Testament reading, from the prophet Jeremiah. His call, his actual commissioning by God, the job he’s given. Jeremiah’s job will be to draw the people’s attention to patterns which are forming up, patterns which won’t be there forever. They have to be seen and grasped while they can be, because God is in them, and they reveal God.

Jeremiah 1:4-10: 

[HYMN 360: Jesus Christ is waiting]

Luke 4:21-30

I’ve observed to you before that if I were ever offered a grant of arms by the Lord Lyon, I’d take as my motto “And Things Were Going So Well...”

So Jesus comes to the Synagogue in Nazareth. We heard the beginning of this story last Sunday – and things were looking good! There’s a slight overlap between last week’s reading and this, just to remind us of how promising things seemed:

Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?"

These people, who’d known him for years, because he’d grown up among them, are very impressed. They seem to be making a sort of journey of discovery with him, they seem to be moving along the road, as it were, so that their perspective on him is changing. Maybe a new pattern of understanding is coming together.

But it’s not. And it’s exactly on that point that Jesus challenges them. 

You will say, 'Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'" Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his home town...

And things were going so well...

This is the story of what can happen if you can’t and won’t change your perspective. Of what happens if you won’t get up from where you are to see what this Jesus of Nazareth looks like from a different direction.  These are the people who are still stuck in Nazareth, and can’t understand Jesus unless he’s stuck there with them, too.  In the end, they are so stuck with their old patterns that they can’t see the new one coming together. There’s a clear connection here with the way that the prophets of the Old Testament couldn’t make their community see the new patterns, the new things God was doing. And that’s Jesus’ starting point. There’s no honour for a prophet in his own town.

But what happens here is even more radical than that. Because Jesus isn’t just a prophet pointing to the new pattern in which God is to be found. Jesus is the new pattern. Jesus is the new way of understanding God.

And for a moment, that new pattern comes together in the synagogue in Nazareth. Just for a moment. And they can’t see it. And Jesus leaves, chased off by people who won’t understand him because they won’t change their perspective, won’t come along with him any length at all on his journey. That’s the difference between them and the disciples. The disciples may miss a lot, miss picking up on all sorts of patterns and clues – but they are willing to go along with Jesus, they are willing to have their perspective changed, to see things not from where they are, and where they are perfectly happy to stay, but from the new, and often challenging, and sometimes very uncomfortable places to which he brings them. And slowly, they begin to see a new pattern starting to form.

Of course, the pattern isn’t complete. This is the beginning, not the end, of the Gospel story. And by the end of the story, we’ll have another pattern, which sums everything up, and which is, for us, the final, all-embracing pattern of our faith in – as Jurgen Moltmann puts it – the Crucified God. That, if you like, is when we reach the point when all the bits come together, and we have arrived at the one place from which it makes some sort of sense. And that is precisely what Good Friday is.

And that’s precisely what faith is. It’s being brought by God to a point where we can see in the world the pattern of what God does. It’s looking at the world, the real world that everyone else sees, that everyone else has to live in day by day - and seeing it in terms of God. That, is what Justin Martyr saw; the cross, the absolutely authentic stamp and pattern of a loving God’s dealings with a suffering, fallen world, in places where other people saw only right angles and bits of wood.  Justin never saw Channel 4, and I have no reason to imagine that whoever designed the Channel 4 station idents knew anything about Justin Martyr. But seeing  patterns come together in the real world, and finding that they point beyond it to God – well, that’s just exactly what faith does. And our job as the church is to see the patterns, and to point to them. To bear witness to the signs of God’s commitment to his world in Jesus Christ - if we are willing to follow where faith  draws us, and see things from the new perspective to which God brings us.