As probably most of you know by now, this will be my last sermon here for the next two months as I’m about to begin a sabbatical which will be completed after Christmas. A sabbatical, like the Sabbath is supposed to be a time of rest, but such resting is also supposed to be an opportunity for learning – learning about God and oneself.
There is something especially appropriate therefore about the closing verse of our gospel reading which refers to the scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven. A scribe in Jesus’ day was someone whose responsibility it was to ensure that sacred tradition was being handed down accurately and that it was being properly interpreted and applied. But what is meant by the scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven? Literally the text says that he has been ‘discipled’ for the kingdom, or that he has become a learner in the kingdom. Jesus has just asked the disciples if they have understood what he has been saying to them. And they have instantly said, ‘Yes.’ This saying perhaps implies some doubt about the depth of their understanding in Jesus’ mind. The parables he has just given them have in part been about finding something. Perhaps the disciples feel that they have found the treasure or the pearl of great price in Jesus. But now Jesus is telling them that even though they might feel themselves to be equipped by him to teach the kingdom, their learning must never stop, their search must never stop, so that as Jesus’ scribes they will always have something new as well as something old to bring out of their treasury of stories and ideas and wise sayings
We are all therefore, whether we are new or very experienced Christians, still learners – and this old scribe still has a lot to learn. But what we might ask is on the syllabus? Where do I and all of us have to start? Solomon might give us a clue. In his prayer he says that he is like a little child; ‘I do not know how to go out or come in.’ He is talking about leadership and referring to the ability of a shepherd to lead his flocks in and out of the fold in safety. But whenever I read that passage I cannot help thinking of Alice in Wonderland trapped in the hall way at the bottom of the rabbit hole she has just fallen down. The hall is full of doors and she has great difficulty in becoming the right size to get through the door that leads into a beautiful garden. Like so much in the Alice stories the image is taken from dreams which mirror the frustrations we feel in real life – the doors we cannot pass through, the opportunities we cannot take, the hopes we cannot realise.
So Christian learning must have something to do with these frustrations, this inability to pass in and out of the doors we need to get through to find the kingdom. At which point Paul takes up the baton, with the words, ‘The spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what to pray for, but that very Spirit intercedes with sights to deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.’ This seems like a complicated bit of spiritual psychology. But what I think Paul is suggesting follows on from what we heard last week from this great chapter of Romans; there he spoke of our longing to realise in ourselves the fact that we are God’s children. We know we have been saved but we are still confused by the ambiguities of life in which emotion, physicality, intellect and spirit are all combined. We do not yet know what salvation truly is, so we wait patiently in hope. But it can be immensely frustrating to wait for something we can’t quite glimpse and long to pin down; so Paul takes another tack to enable us to realise how close in fact we are to God because of the Spirit within us. We may not know what we need but the spirit does. The spirit is there in our inarticulate longing for something more than we can yet grasp or experience.
All of which points to that central thing which it takes us a life time to learn; that as created beings we are dependent, broken yet sought for and saved. If we take just the first item on that list, what does it mean to know that we are dependent? What is it like to know that from birth to death and in every fibre of our being we are absolutely dependent on the mystery we call God? It is a hard thing to learn, partly because it goes against the grain of growing up. To grow up involves learning how to be separate from and independent of one’s parents; however mature an adult relationship one may then form with a parent, that relationship has to start from a letting go and an act of self assertion. In such a context it makes sense for Jesus to say that to enter the kingdom we have to become like children again. As adults we have to relearn dependence. But what kind of dependence?
It starts perhaps with an acceptance of the present moment and who and how we are in this moment. An acceptance of dependence involves the gradual realising and letting go one by one of the fantasies, hopes, regrets, which keep us focussed somewhere other than the present. Dependence begins with an acceptance that at this moment this is just me face to face with the mystery we call God. Or to put it another way. We may variously pass our time conscious only of the next task to be done, the responsibilities we carry, the illness we have to struggle with, the expectations of those we work for. And again to be truly in the present moment before the mystery of God we have to learn for the moment to put those tasks, responsibilities and anxieties down. To realise our dependence on God we have to practice staying in the present moment and living with this tremendous ‘What if?’ What if the breath I take in, the blood flowing through my veins, the tree I see through the window, the sounds I hear from the street, what if all this is being sustained moment by moment by this mystery we call God? What if this vulnerable, broken, confused, needy yet thankful mystery which is myself, is totally dependent on God, sustained in being and in possibility by God, moment by moment?
Practicing the prayer of dependence, learning spiritually to be a child again, in this way isn’t easy. And that is partly because of a deep seated fear which so easily emerges in another form of the ‘What if?’ question. Take the phrase ‘drug dependence’ and we might see what I mean. Dependence can mean being dominated by something, being enslaved to something. And in talking about God we so often attribute to him a kind of negative dominance; we blame him for not creating a better world, not stopping some tragedy, imposing all sorts of negative rules, or else we reject the idea of dependence because it gets in the way of what we think of as our free will. So we find this deep seated anxiety emerging, ‘What if God is a tyrant?’
So to counter that fear there has to be one final ‘What if?’ question in our meditating. What if my fear of dependence is the very thing that stands in the way of freedom and growth? What if the realisation of my creaturely dependence on my creator will enable me truly to find myself? What if accepting the constraints of age and death and brokenness, I then find myself free to flourish in the creative grace that God pours out on us moment by moment? What if, after all has been said, you and I are the pearls of great price which God is searching for in the markets of this world? Amen.