Seeking God in a world that loves to hate and hates to love

Preacher: The Rev’d Dr Lynn Arnold AO, Assistant Priest

Readings: 1 King 19.1-15a, Ps 42, Galatians 3.10-14, 23-29, Luke 8.26-39

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be worthy in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.

Last Sunday we began the week with a joyous occasion at Evensong celebrating the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth. Within hours that joyousness would be overwhelmed by the events of hate and terror in Orlando. The killer in Orlando had expressed homophobic hate and a commitment to Islamic State.

Then by the end of the week, hate and terror would strike again, this time across the Atlantic in Burstall in northern England where Jo Cox MP was shot and stabbed, dying within hours;  her killer later shouting in court “Death to traitors! Britain First.”

To cap it off the news of the week brought other stories such as Igor Lebedev, deputy chair of Russia’s parliament, commenting on gratuitous violence exhibited by Russian soccer fans in the streets of Marseille, saying: “Well done lads, keep it up!”

The new normal seems to be hate and violence. And not just in primary incidents of hate, but also in reactions to those incidents. Hate has been consistently proferred as a response to hate – just listen to talk-back radio or read letters to the editor. A particularly notable response of hate in the face of hate was that from a supposedly Christian group. A church in Westboro, Kansas, announced yesterday that they were going to protest in the wake of the Orlando shooting; their protest is to take place at the funerals of victims of the massacre – but their protest will be homophobic, against the victims not the perpetrator. In a perhaps unintended irony, and demanding their right to free speech, they have called on the police to “fulfil their duty to take responsible steps to keep the peace” to protect them from mourners at the funerals who might, in their grief and distress, object to their protest.

The events in Orlando, Burstall, Westboro and Moscow were all filled with hate – but they were not isolated, not somehow separated from the real world in which the rest of us live. For they are the world we live in; they occurred as an integral part of that very world in which we now live; these eruptions of hate and violence were emblematic of a world where to hate is symptomatic of what we are becoming. I have found myself feeling of late that it has become a collective default of our world to seek, in response to any crisis, to hate. It sometimes seems to me that there is a spirit abroad that not only feels it has no option but to hate, but that actually wants to hate – that feels cheated if not allowed to hate. Where’s my right to free speech? You’re all just being politically correct! Both those reactions miss the point – of course, in a democratic society, people should have a right to free speech; and it is certainly true that political correctness has often reached the stage of the ludicrous, mocking the very principles of fairness it seeks to promote. But why aren’t we so much more appalled at a surging collective spirit that so wants to hate? Why does that not disturb us much more?

Is it because the world actually wants to make a theology of hating? A baal of a god that will smile inanimately on the world’s rituals of hate? I recently read an article by a Prof David Engelsma entitled “Hating the haters of the Lord”, who wrote of ‘perfect hatred’ and described it as:

Perfect hatred is hatred that is thorough, complete and extreme. It is not half-hearted hatred. We see those whom we hate as completely disgusting and we firmly regard them with abhorrence. We will their destruction, their eternal destruction.

These were not the words of an Islamic hate cleric, but a protestant theologian and tenured academic.

This has indeed been another week where the beauty of God’s creation has been struck by great winds of hate, that figuratively split mountains and broke rocks into pieces. And then a fire of reaction came afterwards. These cataclysms and conflagration echo our reading from 1 Kings 19 today. But in our reading, the key message of that passage was that the Lord was in none of these cataclysms. So where was God?

In his poem, The Sleeping Lord, David Jones wrote:

Does the
land wait the sleeping lord
or is the wasted land
the very lord who sleeps?

In our cataclysmic world where hate and violence have become the defaults, does that mean that God is asleep to all this and that we live in a world that, as our psalm this morning said, shouts out “Where is your God?”.  A world that then demands we take matters into our own hands.

In such a world, where God is denied, humanity seeks to create its own perfection through means it knows best over countless millennia of experience – the instruments of violence and hate for it is incapable of doing so through any other means. In H G Wells’ ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’  the main character justifies his ministry of violence:

And I have almost achieved perfection of a divine picture. It is pure, harmonious, absolutely incapable of malice.

That was a novel, and we see the parody for what it is; but is it any different from the God-rejecting reality of the world we currently live in? That purports to believe in a better world but one built through crusades, jihads, pogroms, campaigns of hate?

Or does it mean that, like the groaning creation that we read about in Romans 8:22, we find ourselves pleading, as people whose hearts are full of heaviness, deeply unquiet within, but nevertheless putting our trust in God? Seeking a God for we know that we, by ourselves, are incapable of creating anything incapable of malice.

Last Wednesday, here at St Peters, distressed at the slaughter that had taken place in Orlando and the hate and terror that had underscored it, Evensong was extended with a time of prayer and candle-lighting for those who had died and for peace in our broken world. It was a deeply prayerful time. After it had finished I wrote a social media post that said:

The bells have tolled, the choir has sung the Nunc Dimittis [Now lettest thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation], the prayers have been prayed, the candles for the victims of hate and terror in Orlando have been lit and the congregation has gone home. Blessed are those who mourn.
Through the cataclysm, we had come together not to doubt the presence of God, not to imagine him sleeping, but to wait upon him – to wait for the still, small voice that would speak to our heaviness and unquietness. To speak more to our troubled hearts than responses of hate could ever do.

This was our Christian response to the hate unleashed in Orlando. Right around the country, indeed the world, there were many other expressions of Christian solidarity with those who had been killed and wounded in the cause of hate.

In the face of a wasted world that asked: “Where now is your God?”; we waited for the “sound of sheer silence” and then, from that sound, kept our ears keened to hear the still small voice of God.

And the God we waited for was not the baal of the protestant hate cleric or the muslim hate cleric. Not a god of division between the hater and the hated. He was the God of which Paul wrote in our reading from Galatians today:

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

And how should we wait? The psalmist wrote: “As the deer longs for the running brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God; my soul is thirsty for God, thirstly for the living God”

The images of thirst and refreshing water always speak to us. Water, that precious liquid so essential for life, is also a metaphor for the quenching of spiritual aridity that has come in the wake of the world’s wastedness, of its brokenness.

And so it is that the ritual of baptism grew in ancient times. Using water for more than just the quenching of physical thirst but as a symbol of cleansing, purification and later renewal; it spoke to mortal life immersing itself in a sought spiritual power of the water. Water that would later becoming the living water promised by Christ.

John the Baptist baptised Jesus as part of a ritual that had been going on for unknown years before. At that time, it has been suggested that baptism was, according to some Jewish scholars of the New Testament, a cleansing, consistent with Leviticus15:18. But, the moment that John baptised Jesus, the first of two changes in our understanding of baptism occurred. Firstly, as recorded in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, John’s baptism of Jesus enabled a meeting of the eternal, of the divine, with our world, as expressed by the words God spoke to humanity: “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased” [Matthew 3:17]. Secondly, we have the change suggested by Romans 6:1-14 and today’s reading from Galatians, which gave new meaning to the ritual of baptism for all of us. The baptism of Jesus now became an initiation for all the baptised into a new community with a new identity; so that humanity could, in response to God’s words, echo with our own – “Here is Your Son whom You have been pleased to send to us”.

Concluding paragraphs to the 8.00 am Sermon

This morning, in a few moments, we will all participate in the baptism of Matilda Anna Genevieve, the daughter of our dear brother in Christ here at St Peter’s, Lachlan, and his lovely wife, Jocelyn. We, as a congregation of this cathedral community, including our dear sister in Christ, Glennis, great-grandmother of Matilda, will be joined by family, including parents Leonie, Robert and Linda, and Jocelyn’s Godfather, Fr Gregory, relatives and friends in an event that we should consider much more profound than a simple ritual or, as Lachlan light-heartedly said on Friday, Matilda’s first pool party.

What we are about to do jointly is much more than a cleansing ritual; we should seek for it to be a transcendent moment when Matilda, herself, like every newborn, a precious gift of God, an expression of the still small voice of God in our world, will be offered, through the blessing of water, to be in ongoing communion with God. And in that communion with God, to be affirmed in fellowship with all of us here present – a Christian community. To Matilda’s god-parents, you have undertaken a special responsibility to walk alongside Matilda and her parents on her life’s pilgrimages; but all of us here present should feel ourselves also asked to commit Matilda in prayer and, when the circumstances require, in deed, so that she, as she grows older, may truly know the power of the words I will shortly say after I have baptised her, namely that she may know that she has been marked as Christ’s own for ever.

And as we pray for Matilda’s pilgrimage and her unity with Christ, may we especially pray that she may be shielded from the world’s desire to hate by Jesus’ injunction that she love God with all her heart and all her soul and love her neighbours as herself.

So now let us go down to the baptismal font at the western door. And in Matilda’s sacrament of baptism, let us each play our part that she may be baptised into Christ and clothed with him.

Concluding paragraphs to the 10.30 am Sermon

This morning, at the earlier service, all of us present participated in the baptism of Matilda Anna Genevieve, the daughter of our dear brother in Christ here at St Peter’s, Lachlan, and his lovely wife, Jocelyn. We, as the 8am congregation of this cathedral community, including our dear sister in Christ, Glennis, great-grandmother of Matilda, joined by family, including parents Leonie, Robert and Linda, and Jocelyn’s Godfather, Fr Gregory, relatives and friends in an event that we should consider much more profound than a simple ritual or, as Lachlan light-heartedly said on Friday, Matilda’s first pool party.

What we did was much more than a cleansing ritual; we sought for it to be a transcendent moment when Matilda, herself, like every newborn, a precious gift of God, an expression of the still small voice of God in our world, was offered, through the blessing of water, to be in ongoing communion with God. And in that communion with God, to be affirmed in fellowship with all of those present – a Christian community. Matilda’s god-parents were advised of their commitment to undertake a special responsibility to walk alongside Matilda and her parents on her life’s pilgrimages; but all of the congregation were also counselled to commit Matilda in prayer and, when the circumstances may require, in deed, so that she, as she grows older, may truly know the power of the words that I said I baptised her, namely that she may know that she has been marked as Christ’s own for ever.
And as we prayed for Matilda’s pilgrimage and her unity with Christ, we especially prayed that she may be shielded from the world’s desire to hate by Jesus’ injunction that she love God with all her heart and all her soul and love her neighbours as herself.

Sharing in the sacrament of baptism of one of God’s gifts, the gift of new life, always provides a moment for each of us to seek out, in the midst of the earth’s cataclysms of hate and violence, the voice of God that will speak to the heaviness and unquietness of our hearts. May we then be refreshed as the deer is refreshed by the running brooks, as our souls thirst for our living God.