Second Sunday After Trinity

The Sermon recorded for St Bene’t’s online service
for Sunday 21st June 2020, Second Sunday after Trinity
TWELFTH SUNDAY OF LOCKDOWN 

“It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master.”  Matt 10.25

We’ve recently bought a new bible for our household, as if you might think we didn’t have enough already. But this is a different sort of bible. It is called “The Cleaning Bible” by Kim Woodburn and Aggie Mackenzie, Kim and Aggie’s complete guide to household management. Lockdown has meant we’ve had to say good bye to our cleaner and we’ve been trying to learn the best way to clean the house ourselves. You see, I am of the generation of white middle class males who have always had their cleaning done by someone else, and for many years now we have had a cleaner, usually female, usually an immigrant and always low-paid. Now in the new world of Covid when no one else may come into our house, we are doing our cleaning ourselves and for the first time in my life I am learning how it should be done. I won’t quote extensively from Kim and Aggie’s excellent bible, but I can warmly recommend thoroughness and professionalism in the area of cleaning and polishing. And as it happens they definitely rule out the use of aerosol sprays – which seems to fit our post-Covid care for the air we breathe.

Learning this new set of skills has made me realise how privileged my life has been. My upbringing, education and career have followed an inherited pattern fulfilling most if not all expectations I might have had at the outset. My face fitted the Church of England criteria for being a priest back in the 1970s. My life since ordination and into retirement has been if not stress free at least a matter for continuous thanksgiving. But I realise how unequal our society is, especially, as we are learning daily, in the area of race. And I wonder how far, with the privileges I have enjoyed, I have unwittingly been complicit in this inequality. Getting down on my knees to clean the bathroom floor is literally a lesson in humility, and I have used this surprisingly enjoyable task as an opportunity for praying for a more just society.

Today’s gospel reading has Jesus giving instructions to the twelve disciples as he sends them out on their mission. Their mission is going to be sacrificial. They will share his persecution and undergo his suffering.

The first thing he says is “A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above a master. It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher and the slave like the master.” Here he is preparing his disciples to receive the same treatment which he will receive. But to our ears we hear this as a call that between slave and master, between disciple and teacher, there shall be equality.

He tells his disciples not to be afraid: “Have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered and nothing secret that will not become known, What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.”  Here he is reminding his followers that his lot will be theirs – rejection and death – but they are to remember that in the resurrection all will be vindicated, all cover-ups exposed, all secrets revealed, darkness brought into the light. How telling this saying is in a turbulent world where re-evaluating our history has become all-important.

He goes on “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.” This is the second time Jesus has urged his followers not to be afraid, for he knows that fear will bring about the abandoning of their work. Fear undermines the message of love. Do not fear persecution, he says; rather fear God who can consign body and soul to hell, so it is more fearful to disobey God than to be put to death by persecutors.

 Even sparrows, the cheapest living things sold for food, are in the keeping of God: Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.” Here is comfort: our heavenly Father cares for us.

Then finally there is the troubling passage “Do not think that I have come to being peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother. Whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me; whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”  Following Jesus is all or it is nothing, because the mission for which he is preparing his disciples is a total commitment. It comes above family and before household. The end is the cross, and the sacrifice of Jesus is to be shared by his followers.

So, Jesus is preparing his followers for a life of service which is likely to end in persecution and martyrdom. The only way to live this life is to put aside all fear, to depend completely on God and his unfailing providence, and to follow in the steps of Jesus, sustained by his teaching and fired by his example. It’s an inspiring model of discipleship. It reminds me of those other words of Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount earlier in St Matthew’s gospel “Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect”.

This model remains an inspiration, because it connects us to Jesus’s first mission, way back in 1st century Palestine. But it doesn’t fit the call we have received, especially as we remember that we are not perfect, that we are full of fears, and that we depend on people and things other than God. Also we do not live in 1st century Palestine! We live in the light of the Resurrection, in post-Pentecost times, and we share in the apostolic mission of the whole Church.

In such a context, our discipleship is formed out of our own gifts and sins, out of our particular enthusiasms and longings, enriched by our mistakes, deepened by our sorrows and marked by our joy in God.

So what should we do to follow Jesus? As an example of a completely different way, let me tell you about one of my favourite saints, Saint Clare.  Back in 1212, at a young age Clare was inspired by the person and teachings of St Francis to embrace poverty by having nothing. Together with her sisters she formed a Poor Community based at San Damiano in Assisi. She lived there, in seclusion, for 41 years, of which for half she was sick and bedridden. Now that is some lockdown. It was a life of contemplation, reflecting on the poverty of Christ in the Incarnation. In her writings, Clare invites us to focus on a life marked by fatigue, thirst, loneliness, misunderstanding and all the daily business of living. She tells us that we find the highest spiritual realities in the most ordinary. She never separates spiritual experience from domestic work, for there she discovers God in his humanity. Indeed she stretches the logic of the Incarnation to its ultimate: we reach the poverty of Jesus by travelling the very narrow banal path of daily life. She wrote “The blessedness of poverty is inscribed on the monotony of our days.” We find the Lord where we are in a hundred humdrum things.

George Herbert put this another way in his poem, The Elixir, one of our best loved Anglican hymns.

“Teach me, my God and King, in all things thee to see;

and what I do in anything, to do it as for thee….

A servant with this clause makes drudgery divine;

Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine.”

 Our weeks of lockdown are teaching us many unexpected aspects of being human, among them are the loneliness of isolation and the longing love for absent family and friends. At the same time we experience the sorrow and grief at the injustices of our society which Covid 19 has exposed, most notably the disproportionate effect of the virus on the poor, the aged and the Black and Minority Ethnic communities. For those of us not working, or on the front line in the NHS, we can only weep for the suffering of so many.

 And continue, as servants, to follow the Master. The slave, as Jesus tells us, is not greater than the Master; it is enough for the slave to be like the Master.

Richard Ames-Lewis

18th June 2020