Sermon Archive
Rising to the occasion
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 30 January 2005
Micah 6.1-8 ; 1 Corinthians 1.18-21 ; Matthew 5.1-12
Despite last week’s chilling images of Auschwitz, two others I saw on Wednesday are even more deeply etched in my mind. One was of the photograph of a small corner of a vast refugee camp in Congo, even that small corner crowded with people far too many to count, who had fled from Rwanda and were now huddled together, many of them to die from disease, some even from thirst. The other picture was of a mother, small child, and father, who by their dress and appearance could have been any British family out for a walk on a winter hillside under a cloudless blue sky, but who also were refugees, escaping from Kosovo into Macedonia with nothing more than each could carry.
I saw those pictures last week during a teaching session for medical students, on the physical and mental health problems of refugees, both in the camps they escape to, and when they eventually return home or settle in other countries. The question of refugees settling in this country, of course, was the subject of heated political debate also last week; and one on which people have different views. But images like these remind us again of how cocooned we are in countries like Britain against the experiences which so many of our fellow human beings have to endure.
Seeing pictures like these, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of human suffering in the world today and how little any of us can do about it. But one of the encouraging things I brought away from that teaching session was the knowledge that the skills and sympathies these medical students were developing could eventually be used to alleviate at least some of that suffering; and that if previous student years were anything to go by, at least some of them would spend part or all of their working lives in places like those refugee camps or in other disasters and emergencies across the world.
That was made all the more likely, I think, by the way in which their lecturer that morning, who showed them the pictures of refugee camps, spoke with them about these issues from her first hand experience. The pictures were of places where she herself had worked as a doctor. Indeed almost her whole medical career had been spent working for an international medical relief organisation in just such emergencies; and she had only recently retired from the field to work with the organisation’s administration. What she said to the students contained no heroics; it was severely practical about what doctors could and could not do in such situations. But it showed that, and how, they could make a real difference; and the students heard that.
The doctor, as it happened, was someone I remembered as an Edinburgh student contemporary, and she has now come back to live here. Edinburgh is particularly fortunate in the number of people who, having led full lives elsewhere, decide to settle here in their retirement or semi-retirement, and perhaps also to unsettle, in ways that are salutary, the ideas of those of us who have never gone away. The students last week certainly benefited from that. But unless you keep your eyes open, what you can learn from your retired neighbour is often missed.
Among the reasons for this, I think, are our confusing views of retirement today. For some people it is something to look forward to, for others something to dread; some get round it by being only semi-retired, others discover that grand-parenting today can be a pretty full time and fulfilling occupation; but others again find the lack of a familiar routine difficult to cope with, or that time hangs heavily on their hands. Perhaps it was different in the past, when people did not live so long, or conventional assumptions were more religious, and preparing for eternity a real option for many people. But in a secular age, which by definition and in practice is primarily interested in the present and rising generation, and in the concerns of those in the active middle years of life, then for some people at least, retirement can be a difficult time, unsatisfied by the allure of Saga travel brochures.
Now there isn’t any single or simple solution to many of these difficulties, and I can’t pretend that I know any. Nevertheless there is, in the Gospel reading we heard today, something that is profoundly relevant to the difficulties we may encounter at any time in life including retirement, and indeed also to the plight of many refugees.
Before I come to that however, let me just go back to what I said a moment ago about living in a largely secular society. In a secular society, it may no longer be conventional to regard this life as a preparation for something better. But there is of course no evidence either that it is or it is not. The evidence, such as it is, is ambiguous, and to say either that this life is all we have, or that there is more to it than that, is to go beyond the evidence.
Going beyond the evidence, however, is something we often need to do in order to respond to some of the most important choices life asks of us – deciding whether or not to marry, or have children, or what career to follow – the crucial choices are usually made long before we have enough evidence to know (if we ever do) whether or not we have made the best choices. It’s the same too with social and political choices. The House of Lords, for example, is currently examining whether the law should be changed to allow euthanasia in a limited number of cases. If you read all the evidence presented to the Lords and published on their website, you will see that there is a strong case to be made for legalising euthanasia and also a strong case against it. But that is as far as the evidence takes you; and what no-one really knows is whether allowing euthanasia in this country will do more good than harm, or more harm than good.
In order to respond to the most important choices life asks of us, we need to go beyond the evidence. And that is precisely what our Gospel reading today asks of us. These words spoken by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, the promises we know as the Beatitudes, clearly go beyond the evidence – indeed so far beyond the evidence, as to seem at first sight almost against the evidence. In the world as we know it, those who mourn often are not comforted, the merciful often do not obtain mercy, and there is precious little evidence of the meek inheriting the earth. All of that seems true of the world as we know it. Yet the world as we know it also includes this man Jesus who makes these promises, and the countless believers who have trusted in those promises, and in trusting, have been confirmed and encouraged to go on in faith. This also is part of the world as we know it, and so too are all those people, whether believers or not, who have given their lives to the service of others and worked against the odds for a better world.
At the heart of all the Beatitudes there is a reversal of the values which so often seem to win out in the world as we know it. But this reversal also is part of the world as we know it. The evidence then is ambiguous. What the Beatitudes do, is to return the question to us, promising, without being able to prove, that what they tell us is true. The only proof we can have, is the one we discover when we go beyond the evidence and answer with our lives, as with our lips we pray: ‘Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’.
The relevance of the Beatitudes for retirement, for refugees, and for all of us is not something that can be spelt out in the manner of a self-help manual. Everything ultimately depends on the way in which we are prepared to go beyond the evidence, on whether we live as if the Beatitudes tell us the ultimate truth about life, or whether we decide that is just an impossible dream. Our decision, moreover, is only in small part an intellectual one. It is only as we live, in our deepest hearts and everyday habits, as if the Beatitudes tell us the ultimate truth about life, that we begin to understand.
Because the Beatitudes are addressed to each one of us personally, it is for each one of us to answer for ourselves. Each of us has our own problems and each our own opportunities, including opportunities for helping our friends and strangers with their problems, and also for allowing ourselves to be helped when we have problems. This is a matter for practice, not preaching. But in thinking about it, I have found very helpful some words by the American ethicist William May. He writes this. "We face two types of problems in life. One kind of problem provokes the question 'What are we going to do about it?' The other kind poses the subtler question 'How do we behave towards it?'" The first type of problem demands… pragmatic and tactical responses that will eliminate the difficulty; the second poses deeper challenges… The problem will persist… The appropriate question… is not "What are we going to do about it?" but "How does one rise to the occasion?"
Rising to the occasion is not always easy, and sometimes on the road from time to eternity we may begin to doubt if all the toil, struggle and aspirations of humanity are really worth it. Is this world really the vale of soul making the Beatitudes promise us it is? In his poem, 'One foot in Eden', Edwin Muir begins to sound as if he doubts that. He writes:
The world’s great day is growing late, /Yet strange these fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate.
But then he adds:
But famished field and blackened tree/ Bear flowers in Eden never known
Blossoms of grief and charity/ Bloom in these darkened fields alone…
Strange blessings never in Paradise/ Fall from these beclouded skies.
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