August 31, 2008

Denise Kelsall

Pentecost 17     Exodus 3:1-15     Matthew 1:21-28

I went to Australia on holiday a few weeks ago, to the Gold Coast to be precise, and I had dinner with an old friend who has retired there, mainly because of the weather I must say. His mother had died recently just one month short of her 99th birthday. She had been a faithful Catholic and worshipped at the Italian Catholic church in London for most of her adult life after marrying a British Regimental Sergeant Major in Cairo in the 1933. My friend was unexpectedly surprised and touched by her funeral.

After arriving in England he could not find any record of her funeral arrangements yet he knew that back in the 1980’s or 90’s sometime she had definitely made them. With some help he set to and rang all the funeral directors in London – it began to look rather bleak as the constant response to his query was “Sorry, no record of this person’s arrangements.” Finally he dialled the number of the very last company on the list and amazingly Yes… yes, they had the funeral arrangements for one Elvira Green, all paid up, planned and organized.

My friend was staying in Hammersmith and talked of how the funeral went. It was a grand funeral entourage. He was stunned – 2 large and imposing vehicles arrived at the house, – the car carrying his mother was one of those grand old-time ones like you see in old movies with completely glass sides. As they wended their way across to the East side of London to St Peter’s Church in Clerkenwell Road all the world could see this stately procession with Elvira very prominent in her coffin through the glass.

There were two cars with two drivers and three more men to carry Elvira to her church and final resting place. The journey took well over an hour and went right through the heart of London in the middle of the day, through Piccadilly Circus and so on. I could tell by the way my friend spoke about it that he was deeply affected by it all.

We skirted around the topic of faith and we philosophized and discussed life and how best to live it, as we all do from time to time. Then out of the blue he said to me “It’s so easy to be secular.” And this comment has stayed with me since.

We all know what he means. Our society rolls along in its very secular mode, generally with nary a glance at faith issues or the meaning and purpose of life. Sure – there are those of us who are faithful to a credo, to an ongoing experience perhaps, to a relationship with someone we call God, to a constant quest for understanding and therefore becoming. This often becomes expressed in social justice issues, in liberation of some kind for the suffering, in how we treat each other and how we speak and act towards what’s happening in the rest of the world.

And life goes on.

But sometimes something hits us a bit harder and more personally and we are forced to stop, to go inside ourselves, to re-evaluate and to ponder on it all.

I am not sure that this is exactly what was happening to my friend but his comment to me and this mornings readings all coalesce into a sort of attempt to try and understand what life and God are, what they are about, what they mean in my and our lives and say in our society now where it is as my friend said “so easy to be secular.”

First up – it made me question myself and my role as a priest. Was I meant to try and convert him, to evangelise a sensitive intelligent and worldly nominal Catholic. Or maybe to pray for his mother’s soul, or for him to find what we call God in his life, or to express my own evolving faith convictions and hopes. It made me feel strangely impotent. I didn’t do any of these things but I listened and responded to the conversation with the deep interest and love that good and enduring friendship is. Since then I have questioned and examined myself and my responses or lack of them and the statement he made.

When I looked at today’s readings my first impulse was to be all holy and talk about how in Matthew’s gospel, verse 26, it says “what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life.” Life here can also mean soul – soul, that indefinable person that we are. The verse is right – what is the point of having everything materially that secular life so prizes if you don’t like yourself or cannot live with yourself, if you need more and more to fill the empty void of a life based on what’s outside rather than inside. It’s about staying and playing in the shallows rather than taking on the challenge of the ocean and finding out what really matters in one’s own hidden depths. Often that is where we become more God-conscious.

But the Moses story goes to the heart of things. Moses has escaped death twice, once as a baby and later having to scarper out of Egypt for killing the killer of his kinsman. He’s a shepherd leading his flock towards Horeb also called Sinai, the mountain of God. He probably thought – safe at last! But there’s this bush burning ever so brightly and not getting any smaller. Moses goes to check it out and he hears this voice calling to him out of that burning bush… “Moses Moses” – and Moses replies “Here I am.” To cut to the chase – we all know it is God calling to him from the bush. God wants him to go back – to bring the enslaved and suffering Israelites out of Egypt. God promises them big things – a good and broad land, a land of milk and honey. Naturally Moses is reluctant and says ‘What will I call you?’ God replies, “I AM WHO I AM – tell them I AM has sent you.”

The common interpretation of the Hebrew word for God is Yahweh. Interestingly this name for God is based upon the Hebrew verb “to be.” Some scholars have translated this I AM name for God in Exodus as “I cause to be” or “I bring to pass” or something like “I let be what I let be.” What this infers is that God is dynamic, not fixed – indeed God’s first utterance in the Bible is “let there be light!” This begins the history of letting-be and becoming.

What I am suggesting here is what Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Paul Tillich, Jack Spong, Marcus Borg and so many others hold – that God is indeed the ground of our being and more – that God – I AM is Being and is within all being itself. I AM is in the now and the future, in our being and our becoming – in all being and all becoming irrespective of faith and religion. It is how we live into that self-reflective being that defines us and directs our lives. For us church and faith are part of our evolving and intentional search for the being and the becoming in community – with ourselves and others celebrating together what we perceive as sacred in our midst.

When my friend said “it’s so easy to be secular,” what I believe he was saying is that it is so easy not to have religion. I don’t believe he is without faith but it is faith of a different kind. Faith in kindness laughter and love, and the vulnerability that makes him wonder about the meaning of it all. To quietly remember and wonder at the gifts and grace of his mother who treated him so royally to the end. And perhaps on a warm summer evening to contemplate the Infinite Mystery that we call God whom we see and meet in Jesus.