Starting from Here - Sermon 14th October 2007

Jeremiah 29:1-7 , 2 Timothy 2:8-15, Luke 17:11-19

Strange story, that one about the ten lepers. Nine of them Jesus stigmatizes for doing what he tells them - reporting to the priest. The one he praises is the one who doesn't do what he tells him, but instead comes back and reports that he is cured, and says "Thank you!" What's going on?

You'll all have heard the one about the couple driving in Ireland, who get hopelessly lost in the little lanes.  They spot a local leaning against a gate, and wind down the window to ask him "Do you know the way to Killarney?" He pauses for several seconds, and says "Ah, now, if I were going to Killarney, I wouldn't start from here...."

I don't think of that as an example of that suspect category of the "ethnic joke", still less an "Irish joke".  The Irishman leaning on his gate isn't any sort of stereotype, but the exemplar of a tradition of rather wayward and unsettling wisdom. For me, the stereotypes in that story are the lost tourists - not travellers, but tourists - who have an itinerary, a timetable, that they impose on the world they travel through, even when it doesn't always fit, and a map in their heads that corresponds not at all to the reality of the landscape they are motoring through. And part of the reason I laugh at that joke is that they are me.

In fact, they are all of us. We all have our plans, our imaginings of how the journey is to go, of how long it's going to take us to get from where we started to our goal. Or at least, we all did have. But somehow, the plans we had never quite explain how we wound up here... Sometimes, "here" is a good place, but a place we never expected to be, where we have arrived without understanding. Sometimes, "here" is a confusing, even terrifying place, and all we want is to leave, in any direction. Or "here" may not be marvellous, by any standards, but might still look a lot better than the place we seem to have to go next. Sometimes, "here" is a place we'd love to stop at, to call the end of the journey. But it isn't, and we can't. 

But oddest of all, maybe "here" was never on the itinerary. It may not even have been on the map. If it was, we didn't notice it. But - here we are. Here is the name for the reality we're immersed in right now.

All the old chap  says is "If you're going to Killarney, I wouldn't start from here..." You can almost hear the two tourists starting to say "But here is where we are!!" because that's what we'd probably start to say in the same circumstances. And as we think the words, we can see how they'd die on the tourists' lips. How they'd never get spoken! How they'd mutate mentally  into "That's right!. Here is where we are!"  And how they'd quickly spawn their own next sentence, again unspoken: "And how did that happen...?"

Because the truth is that, wherever we thought was our starting-point, we have to start  from where we are now. And sometimes the journey from where we are now is a different journey to the one we thought we'd be on when we set out originally. And sometimes, too, when we change the journey, when we genuinely grasp that we have to start from where we are now, we change the destination as well. Where we thought we were going - this morning, or forty years ago - what we thought we were looking for, these things can be changed, radically, by the experience of landing up somewhere we never expected, and finding that setting out again is really setting out on a different journey to the one we had thought we were on.

It is a platitude - but an important one - to say that "life is a journey". For us, it's even more important to grasp that "faith is a journey", and a more overarching and radical journey.

One of the great traditions in world storytelling is "the journey home". That's a tradition in our storytelling much older even than the Odyssey, Homer's vast bronze-age tale of the return of Ulysses (or Odysseus) from the Trojan War. Tom Hanks made this point in an interview in connection with the film Apollo 13; why had he been so desperate to film this story? He said: because it was such a primal story, the story of human beings trying to get home against all the odds. Interestingly, the name of Apollo 13's command module was "Odyssey".  It took its name from Stanley Kubrick's epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, which on one profound level is the journey of all things back home to their beginnings. . It marries the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a classical scholar and no mean storyteller himself, with Freudian psychoanalysis, which suggests very powerfully that on a deep level everything we human beings do is connected with the desire to return home to the mother's womb - that's what the floating baby is all about in the final scenes.

But then, if the story of Genesis is the story of Adam and Eve being exiled from the womb-like paradise of Eden, the whole Gospel can be read as the story of our return home to God through the New Adam, Jesus Christ. Paul puts it exactly like that in 1 Corinthians:

For since by man came death : by man came also the resurrection of the dead.

For as in Adam all die : even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

Faith is in many ways the experience of the exile, who has to start from here whether she wants to or not. 

Put slightly differently: for faith, the journey home is a journey into God. And we're obviously not there yet. And until we get home, the experience of faith is that of the exile.  

The experience of Israel reflected in the Old Testament is much more one of journeying towards a promised home, or trying desperately to keep a fingerhold on a home they barely have, or being exiles from their homeland, than it is being firmly and contentedly at home in their own place. In many ways, Israel thinking about her own existence seems to conclude that when she is most settled, most "at ease" as the prophets say, things fall apart, she loses the plot, becomes decadent, violent, unjust - and the old shadows return; you have undermined your possession of the land, so you will lose it, you will be exiled, you will be lost among the peoples of the earth, you will be far from home...

The prophets constantly give voice to this dread of exile and loss of home, of course. But of all of them, it's Jeremiah who gives it its most fascinating twist. There is, in the book of Jeremiah a very distinctive, difficult kind of thinking, almost a perverseness, that directs people away from the usual comforts that they seek, as though these comforts themselves are terribly dangerous, a sort of hall of mirrors where everything is distorted, nothing what it seems.

The Judaean people are  trying to get themselves in a frame of mind to resist the Babylonians, the superpower in the world of sixth-century politics; Jeremiah says "Nothing can save you from these people." When they ask if God is going to intervene to stave off what looks inevitable, Jeremiah tells them "No, it really is inevitable. If you are going to look for God in this situation, you're have to find God in defeat and catastrophe."

But when it all happens, when most of the intelligentsia and the people responsible for maintaining so much of the cultural life of the Jewish people are in exile, Jeremiah's response is absolutely fascinating. We can imagine how the exiles felt. And even if we couldn't, we have one of the most striking poems in the Bible, Psalm 137, to tell us. Of course we usually only remember the words that Boney M made famous in their seventies hit, and a few more lines, maybe:

By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres...

How shall we sing the LORD's song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!

But maybe we forget how the Psalm ends - or if we do remember, we think of it as an awful, horrible aberration:

O daughter of Babylon, you devastator...
Happy shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!

Thank goodness Boney M left that bit alone - even the version of the psalm in CH4 (hymn 94) stops at verse 4. It's shocking to find in the Bible (though there are a lot of shocking things in the Bible!) a hymn which finishes relishing the bashing-to-death of babies against rocks - and we need to be very clear that that is what the text is saying. . But the truth is that these horrible thoughts are part of the psalm - and they are part of the psalm because they are part of its psychology.

Psalm 137 is the hymn of a community of people oppressed by a reality they can hardly face. They don't want to be here, and the knowledge that they are depresses them unutterably. And one of the strange things about depression is just how much anger it contains - anger, indeed a violence of thinking, directed inwards, at the self.  There is actually something terribly, hideously, honest about the violent thinking at the end of psalm 137. We lop off those verses for church, understandably, but they are - in all their ugliness - part of the emotional honesty of the poem.

But look at what Jeremiah says to the same people.

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

In other words, recognize and acknowledge where you are! Recognize its hardship, its pain, its humiliation. In fact - buy into it. Embrace it as your reality. If you are going to find God - that's where he'll be. Faith has to start from here. Faith has to start from where you are. Because that's where God will be too, however dark things are.

There is, after all, that other rather good story about the man who has enjoyed himself rather too well, and is discovered by the policeman, scrabbling about at the base of the lamppost at midnight. "I've lost my hose-keys..." he explains. And the polis inquires "Did you lose them here?" "Naw," says the man, "Over there. But the light's better for looking over here..."

So ten men come to Jesus. They have a horrible skin-disease, and beg his help. And he says to them "Go to the priest, and he will tell you, officially, that you are cured. Just that. Nothing else. No ritual, no big spectacular. Just "Go, tell the priest..."

So they go, and on the way they realise that they are healed. And one of them comes back to Jesus, to say thank you. And he is a Samaritan. A foreigner. An exile.

You might ask yourself: well, how, then, did he fall in with nine Jewish lepers, when the Samaritans and the Jews are supposed to hate each other?" The answer must be that, up to the moment of healing, the fact that all of them had been driven out of society, all of them were exiles, all of them were in a place where you really wouldn't want to start making sense of your life, bound them together far more than their differences drove them apart.

And they are healed. And for nine of them, the exile is over. they can go back home. End of story. The old, comfortable patterns can take over. But the tenth - he's still a Samaritan. he's still an exile. And oddly enough, he's therefore the one best placed to see what's just happened. To discover God present in a radically new way. To understand what this Jesus Christ is all about.

In a sense, Jesus Christ says to him "Well, where you are going - I wouldn't start from here. And offers him a new starting-point for a new journey of faith. And the new starting point is Jesus Christ himself...

Where you're going, says the parable, that's where you need to be starting from, too...