Sermon at the Sung Eucharist on the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity 2017

Religion doesn’t work, does it?  At least, that’s what popular opinion says.  Religion is just not worth bothering with; in fact, in the wrong hands religion can be very destructive.  It’s fine for hatching, matching and dispatching; and it’s fine for people who want to be ordained and who like that kind of thing, and for bishops and deans and canons of course - but not for most of us, most of the time.  After all, life’s so unfair.  Religion doesn’t stop horrendous disasters from happening, and thousands of innocent people from dying.  Look at the hurricanes which have been destroying the communities across the Caribbean, or the floods and refugee crisis in Bangladesh.  Bad things undeniably happen to good people.  So how can any of us really believe in a God who allows all this to happen?  Life is patently unfair, and religion doesn’t help.  Or as the singer Meatloaf once memorably put it, “Life is a lemon and I want my money back”.

Now the odd thing is that when you actually pick up a Bible and start to read it, you quickly discover that the biblical writers knew all too well just how unfair life is.  Take the prophet Ezekiel, for example.  He goes so far as to quote the people of God complaining on more than one occasion, “The way of the Lord is unfair!”  We’re very hard done by!  Why are we being punished for other people’s wrongdoing?  It’s just not fair!

The problem was that about 540 years before the birth of Christ, many of the leading Jewish families found themselves forced to live in exile, 400 miles or so north-east of Jerusalem, in Babylon.  A couple of generations earlier Jerusalem had been captured by the Babylonian army and everyone was carted off into exile.  So Ezekiel was living in Babylon, along with the second and third generation of exiles – and he heard their bitter complaints.  Why should they still be stuck in exile?  It was their parents’ and grandparents’ fault, after all.  It just wasn’t fair!

But Ezekiel doesn’t duck this complaint.  He agrees with it.  “Yes”, he says, “life is unfair”.  But then he goes on – and I paraphrase:  so there’s no point in sitting around and moaning about your situation.  Go on, get your act together, and get on with your life.  You’ve got a choice to make: to live or to die.  Don’t wallow in the unfairness of it all.  That way is death.  Instead, prepare to return home and choose life!  That is the way of the God of Israel.

Well, that is one approach that the Biblical writers take towards life’s unfairness.  But the Bible doesn’t stop there.

Turn to the Gospels and what do you find?  Jesus is accused of not being fair.  It’s an accusation levelled at him by the religious authorities of the day, the chief priests and elders.  In effect they say, ‘Look, we’re the ones who are obeying God’s law and trying to be righteous.  So why are you showing such favour to this ungodly riff raff, and promising them the kingdom of God?  We’ve worked hard to make sure that we’ll be rewarded by God.  But this lot, these prostitutes and fraudsters, these people couldn’t care less about God’s law.  What you’re doing is not right.  It’s not fair!’

And they have a point, don’t they?  Jesus isn’t playing by the book at all.  Not one bit of it.  And that makes life very uncomfortable for those who want God to play fair by them.

It’s a basic human instinct, isn’t it?  We want life to be fair.  We want good people to be rewarded and bad people to be punished.  We want the innocent to be protected from harm, and the evil to get their just deserts.  Even among those of us who are committed Church members this is not an uncommon point of view.  I well remember a trainee priest who once told me that he had to believe in hellfire and damnation because if the ungodly weren’t going to be punished, well – what was the point of believing in God at all?

But, says Jesus, the kingdom of God simply isn’t like that.  The kingdom of God is open to all, to each and every one of us gathered here today.  And the kingdom of God is open to you, not because you are good or extra holy; not because you come to church.  No – not one of us deserves to be invited into God’s kingdom.  Not even a Dean or a Canon of Westminster.  We can’t earn our way in by doing lots of good works and then receiving a reward from God.  The kingdom of God is open to anyone who comes to recognize their own need of God.  That’s it.  It’s that simple.  And it’s that humbling.  You know your need of God?  Then come, says the Lord, I want to greet you with my open arms of love and acceptance and joy.

You see, the God whom we worship is a profoundly unfair God.  He chooses not to give us our just deserts.  He is profligate, ridiculously extravagant with his love.  No-one is beyond God’s care.  No-one is too guilty or too hurt or too ordinary or too anything not to be welcomed into God’s kingdom.  It’s not about earning anything, or being rewarded.  God’s kingdom is simply about accepting the gift of God’s love.

So - there are no preferential seats in heaven.  No.  And among those of us sitting here this morning – why are we here?  All sorts of reason, no doubt.  But I hope that at heart we have begun to recognise something of God that is true to life as we experience it in an unfair world.  And instead of dismissing God as irrelevant, we’ve come to recognize that the kingdom of God is about grace.  It’s about free gifts given to the undeserving.  And we’ve said our own ‘Yes’ to that free gift of God’s love, a gift we’ve neither earned nor deserved.  All we want to do now is to pass on that good news to others.

It’s all very simple at heart.  It’s the people who know their need of God’s love and are open to receiving it who are welcomed into the kingdom of God, warts and all.

Here’s a poem to end with that says it all:

Exceedingly odd
is the means by which God
has provided our path to the heavenly shore:
of the girls from whose line
the true light did shine
there was one an adulteress, one was a whore.

There was Tamar who bore –
what we all should deplore –
a fine pair of twins to her father-in-law;
and Rahab the harlot,
her sins were as scarlet,
as red as the thread which she hung from the door.

Yet alone of her nation
she came to Salvation
and lived to be mother of Boaz, of yore.
And he married Ruth
a gentile uncouth
in a manner quite counter to biblical law.

And from her did spring
blessed David the King,
who walked on his palace one evening, and saw
the wife of Uriah,
from whom he did sire
a baby that died – oh and princes a score.

And a mother unmarried
it was, too, who carried
God’s Son, who was laid in a cradle of straw,
that the moral might wait
at the heavenly gate
while sinners and publicans go in before,
who have not earned their place,
but received it by grace
and have found them a righteousness not of the Law.

Anonymous