Today’s sermon begins with reference to the film “City Slickers” and one of the final conversations with Curly (Jack Palance) and Mitch (Billy Crystal).
Before the 10am service I had the most perfect conversation with an artist called Chris Wyllie. “Chris Wyllie’s work explores issues of beauty, desire and the legacy of a historic material culture. His command of the medium harnesses the energy of the discarded remnants and anchors them firmly in the moment and experience of the viewer” and “These ideal images set on the detritus of the past create the subtle contrast between the rosy nostalgia and the historic reality” from Chris Wyllie’s website
Chris’s work seems to me to be the perfect expression of the theme of my sermon – God deals with what is and creates a thing of magnetic beauty, even the “detritus of our past”.
Below the sermon audio you will find the sermon text (not quite what was preached).
Sermon Audio – What Really Matters
Sermon preached at Trinity Church, Newport Rhode Island; Sunday July 3rd 2016
The Reverend Alan Neale; “What really matters?”
“What is it that really matters?” Rather naively, really rather foolishly, I thought that a google search would lead me to one or two profound and weighty answers. But none of it… multitudes of web sites each with a cornucopia of quotations.
“What really matters?” I think it would be unbearably cruel of me to ask you now to volunteer some answers… but at least have an answer in mind.
Paul writes to the Christians in Galatia; quite definitely in Asia Minor, quite possibly to a community of pagan Celts. He writes what is sometimes considered an accessible presentation of the more magisterial tome of Romans. And in chapter 6, verse 15 he writes, “a new creation is everything” (NRSV) or “what counts/what matters is the new creation” (NIV), or “the central issue in all this?… it is what God is doing, and he is creating something totally new, a free life!”
This is so crucial, so fundamental, so axiomatic that we imagine Paul snatching the pen away from his ever-patient scribe and amanuensis and then as the Message Translation reads “Now, in these last sentences, I want to emphasize in the bold scrawls of my personal handwriting the immense importance of what I have write to you” (Galatians 6:11).
It has been mused that Paul’s self-named “thorn in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12) was deteriorating eyesight thus he rarely writes in his own hand and relies on the speed-writing of a scribe, a very patient scribe!
For a few moments consider these two words (two words that “really matter” to Paul”- “new creation”, kaine ktisis in Greek.
First “creation”. Two authoritative lectionaries (Thayer and Strong) only find Scripture references that imply a creation out of something. For too long I believed that the power, the majesty of God was shown in creating from nothing (creation ex nihilo); now, with study and experience both personal and pastoral, I believe divine majestic power is declared more clearly in creating beauty from mess, order from chaos, diversity from homogeneity. This really matters!
John had suffered a serious accident that caused radical damage to his right hand. Several conversations with an orthopedic surgeon persuaded him that surgery was essential. Just before the surgery, John asked the doctor, “So, will I be able to play the piano after the surgery?” “Of course,” said the doctor. “Tremendous, I could never play the piano before.”
You see, John expected a “creation” from nothing, a creation divorced from anything pre-existing. He was wrong and so I consider it theologically wrong to assume that divine creation is from nothing.
Second, “new”. “What really matters is a new creation.” There are, sorry about all this word stuff, two words commonly used for new – “neos” and “kainos”. “Neos” indicates a new car, just bought; “kainos” suggests a car so worked upon that is seems as “new”. You hear a piece of music, you read a piece of Scripture as if for the first time (kainos) not as if composed or written for the first time (neos).
Friends, this dynamic is important; I promise you it is a delight to the soul, it is refreshment to the mind, it is a renewal of the will.
Moses, Peter, Paul – each one transformed, created into a new being but not one of them suffered eradication of self before being of use to God.
Jesus takes on full humanity (no quaint ifs, and or buts) so that it may be fully redeemed. Not to accept this is heresy and does harm to our being.
Even the great verse of Revelation 21:1 “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth” uses kainos not neos; renewed not generated.
Friends, this brings balm and joy, happiness and freedom to the soul.
God begins where we are, not where we imagine He would have us be.
He excels in mess and confusion; it is his raison d’etre to be present (so he is named Emmanuel) and then to save (so he is named Jesus).
No woe, no pain; no relationship, no work; no life, no talent need be erased… only renewed. But how? Listen to St. Paul “It is not what you and I do— it is what God is doing.
And listen to Bill Wilson (co-founder of AA) “God is doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves”, “we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” – restore, renew.
Friends, do not surrender to the wretched and devilish lie that we cannot begin where we are – our place, our mood, our person. Often when children despair of their drawings, they take the paper, screw it into a ball and discard. In a child this may be cute, in an adult it is sad.
A priest with whom I worked spoke often, movingly, persuasively of Jesus’ modus operandi… he came to where he, she was; to where they were…
Right now, Jesus is beside us wanting to work a new creation. Surely this is what “really matters”. AMEN