24 Feb Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany, Year C

19th January, 2025

The Community here at Mucknell is, as with any group, made up of diverse individuals with varying opinions on just about everything! As such, sermons posted on our website represent the ideas of the preachers who wrote and delivered them, not necessarily those of the entire Community.

Some of my happiest memories are of time spent on a farm in one of my parishes up in Nidderdale. Some of you know this story already … a duck sitting on a clutch of eggs was killed by a fox, so the eggs were put under a broody hen along with her own eggs. Only one duckling hatched, and she grew up with the chickens. All was well at first, but the chickens grew up into big hens with long legs, whereas the duckling grew into a long, low arrangement with very short legs …and seemingly unaware that she wasn’t a hen. Rather than join the other ducks on the pond she waddled with the free-range hens. The trouble was that the cows had made a terrible mess of all the gateways, and the fields were pitted by the holes made by their hooves. The hens tripped lightly over the holes whereas the poor duck kept falling into them and banging her beak. It wasn’t a design fault – it was, rather, a case of mistaken identity.

I use the story to highlight a question about human beings: are we what we assume we are? – at all levels?

This is the question for Western society about independence and self-sufficiency ~ is the way we live what we were designed for? … how independent are we, really?

Most folk rarely give a thought to the people who keep the water supply flowing to our taps, or the sewers in good repair… to the folk who are involved in the process of getting the milk from the cow into the bottle or the fish from the sea into the fish-fingers. How independent are we?

How do we respond to the suggestion that we are made as an integral part of the rest of Creation, and one body with the rest of humanity, interdependent on each other and with a role of stewarding the wellbeing of the earth and its resources?

And on other issues, how do we respond when someone insists that there is another way of looking at things? – that we may not be as right as we like to think? Put eleven very different people into a small monastery to live together 24/7 and that becomes a very live question!

Yesterday we began the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ~ and heaven knows we need it! But how do most divisions come about? Though the historic circumstances of each rift are different, in all of them there has been that element of ‘We know we are right and therefore, if you disagree with us, you must be wrong’ … and the arrogance that comes from such an attitude can seal the rift and cause schism.

What is so sad is that we don’t seem to learn. In the Gospels we have the example of the disciples always getting hold of the wrong end of the stick and missing the point. Again and again, we see in them the arrogance and the tendency to exclusivism that has dogged the Church since the beginning. But we see them learning, slowly, so slowly, the humility of Jesus, the humility that comes from a basic respect and love for the other, no-matter how different they may be, knowing that each person is a much-loved child of God.

The Church has always had trouble with the concept of an inclusive God … and those who warm to the concept, wrestle with how to include those who seek to be exclusive… and also, how to keep a sense of perspective. In the vast scale of things, the issues which threaten to tear the Church apart tend to be relatively trivial and pale into significance when we consider the passionate desire Jesus expressed in his prayer to the Father in John 17.

Points of doctrine or practice are argued about without a thought of what is tearing the heart of God: the millions of his children starving, or suffering and dying from treatable diseases, while those who have the resources to meet everyone’s material needs are spending billions on defence programmes and high profile space programmes to gain political kudos…and, at the same time, jeopardising the future of our planet by not attending to the limitation of carbon emissions and the results of global warming.

It’s easy to rant on … but more important by far is to translate the questions into our everyday lives, to examine our own attitudes, to be aware of the points at which we jib because we know – or think we know – that we are right; to be aware of our motives – where we invest our energy so that people will think well of us, rather than responding to need out of genuine concern.

And when it comes to our prayer for unity, are we a ready to allow the Holy Spirit to expand our horizons: Jesus’ prayer was that all may be one, that the world may believe. When he prayed that prayer, there were no such things as Christians: they hadn’t yet been invented! He was praying for those who had begun to respond to his love, those who were beginning to realize that they were caught up in the great mystery of God’s love for and presence in his creation ~ so that the lives of all could be enriched. ~ . A very different vision from an exclusive Church, let alone a Church which is bitterly divided into parties, sects and denominations, each bent on its own correctness, purity and salvation… while missing out on the mystery which would give them more than they ever dreamt possible.

God offering the vast abundance of rich wine and people opting for water. At the moment, the Anglican Communion, and Church of England in particular, is being torn apart by the extremely bitter and judgmental behaviour of some very powerful voices. Currently safeguarding issues have temporarily claimed the headlines, but at a deeper level, there is division over the understanding of sexuality, an issue about which there is no record of Jesus having ever said anything … Again and again in the history of the Church there have been crises of understanding. Often blood has been shed, and each time we have eventually emerged into a fresh and richer understanding of the Gospel’s depth and inclusivity. As we pray this week, let’s ask for the grace to have the horizons of our hearts and minds stretched by the Holy Spirit, so that our concerns can approximate more and more to what concerns God. “Father, may they all be one as we are one – with you in me and I in them; may they be so completely one that the world may believe.” ~ St Paul encourages us to ‘put on the mind of Christ’ ~ which is marked by that humility which values and cares about everyone, whatever they believe or think…. and of course, that includes each one of us – loved and valued by the God who is inviting us to explore ever more deeply the same mystery as we see played out in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that the world – not just the Church – may know the life-giving love of God, being who God created us to be..       

Br. Stuart

Image: Swanson, John August. Wedding Feast, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58581 [retrieved February 24, 2025]. Original source: Estate of John August Swanson, https://www.johnaugustswanson.com/