Epiphany 7 (Year C)

1Cor 15.35-38,42-50; Luke 6.27-38

In the name of God, Creating, redeeming and transforming.

I, and other preachers here at the Cathedral, often begin our sermon with that invocation of the Trinity, inviting, in my speaking and your hearing, God the Holy Trinity to be at work. That we might be caught up into God’s work of creating, redeeming and transforming. But how, in particular, does that work of the Holy Spirit, the work of transformation, happen?

In his first letter to the Corinthians, as he reflects on the resurrection of Christ, Paul writes this: The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.

We are those who live between dust and heaven; we bear and embody the dust of the earth and the possibilities of heaven. And that is a useful framing for what the work of transformation might be – the discovery of the possibilities of heaven in the dust of the earth from which we are made. But that way of describing it doesn’t quite answer the question, how that transformation happens. To explore that we need to turn to our Gospel, and hear again Jesus’ words, this next section of his Sermon on the Plain.

Jesus said to his disciples, ‘I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.

If those words are to effect the transformative work of the Holy Spirit, then they need to be heard not as a list of, almost impossible, instructions or demands. And more as an invitation to exercise our imagination; for the muscle of transformation is our imagination. In situations of conflict, in the presence of enemies, our human brain instinctively goes into flight (and we flee) or fight (and the punches begin to fly). In the very basic scenario that Jesus presents us with – of someone striking our cheek – Jesus invites us to do neither. Neither flee the scene or hit back; but instead offer the other cheek also. At the most basic level, Jesus is asking us to do something different to what we most instinctively do. And to discover what that might be takes an act of imagination. What might happen if this were to happen; if we acted as if something other than tit-for-tat were an option?

Religion is often reduced to ethics, to a series of does and don’ts, of rights and wrongs. And in that situation the job of the sermon is to tell us, and others, how to behave. Jesus’ invitation that we love our enemies becomes something that we tell others that they must do. ‘You must love your enemies’. What right do I have to say that to a Ukrainian, or an inhabitant of Gaza, or a survivor of the Holocaust, or of the Rwandan genocide. None. Especially not when I know I fail to properly love even those close to me, nevermind any enemies.

But faith is not a list of commands; it is an invitation to exercise our imagination so that in the dust of which we are made the possibilities of heaven are discovered and lived out.

We meet in a building, a cathedral, which like churches before and after it, is a testament to the power of human imagination; to the creative possibilities that can be created in and from the dust of the earth. A cathedral is like any a work of art, or piece of music, or creative project – it exists as testament to the human ability to conjure up the previously impossible, the unimagined, and as an invitation to continue that journey into the as yet unimagined. It is testament to the ongoing work of transformation, the power of the Holy Spirit. ‘To body forth the form of things unknown’ as Shakespeare described the work of imagination.

CS Lewis, writing of his life before his conversion, his awakening to, Christian faith, when he was a Philosophy Tutor in the 1920s, said this: ‘The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism’. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.’

His coming to faith was about the healing of that divide, that contrast between dry rationalism and the work of imagination. He recognised that the things he loved could feed what might be possible in the real world. The possibilities of heaven can be imagined and created from the dust of the earth. The work of the Holy Spirit is in the exercise of our imagination, and in the bodying forth the form of things unknown.

That is why the closing words of our Gospel reading, of that sermon from Jesus, are so crucial: ‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap.’ Jesus invites us into imagining a world of plenty; where forgiveness has primacy over retribution; where we assume there is plenty to go around rather than a scarce supply we all need to fight over; where we treat one another not on the basis of pre-existing judgement and condemnation, but as those in whom the possibilities of heaven are present.

Faith is the imaginative urge that inhabits a place of generosity, grace, forgiveness. The place of transformation. We are here to participate in that work of transformation, the transformation of broken bread into the body of Christ, the work of the Eucharist, but that’s a whole other sermon.

The poet-priest, Malcolm Guite has written a poem in response to our Gospel reading entitled As If. As he wrote it he realised it was responding to Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem If. A poem often voted our nation’s favourite – you may well know it. Kipling concludes his long list of If’s, in this way:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

In Kipling’s poem we are invited to imagine how we might earn the Father’s approval and inherit the earth. By filling the unforgiving minute with frenetic activity. Guite wants to turn that on its head, and invites us to see that our imagination needs to begin in the faith and hope that we have already been given all we need, all that our imagination and the Holy Spirit needs to work on. We are not in the business of earning approval in an unforgiving world; but, in this Cathedral, as the storm rages outside, we are invited to imagine the possibilities of heaven in a world shot through with grace, love and mercy.

As If, by Malcolm Guite:

The Giver of all gifts asks me to give!
The Fountain from which every good thing flows,
The Life who spends himself that all might live,
The Root whence every bud and blossom grows,
Calls me, as if I knew no limitation,
As if I focused all his hidden force,
To be creative with his new creation,
To find my flow in him, my living source,
To live as if I had no fear of losing,
To spend as if I had no need to earn,
To turn my cheek as if it felt no bruising,
To lend as if I needed no return,
As if my debts and sins were all forgiven,
As if I too could body forth his Heaven. Amen.