This is one of the hardest sermons I’ve ever had to write. Those of you who’ve had to endure my sermons before probably recognize a certain pattern to them: find the common theme between all three lessons, get off on a social justice rant, wax poetic about God’s Love and grace, quote some long dead mystic or philosopher, and slip in one or two references to God as a “She”… Which is all fine of course, since I keep it under 15 minutes, and if can do that, then it doesn’t matter what I actually say.

Well, it’s not so easy this time. I’ll try and keep it short, and before it’s over I’ll have quoted at least one saint. But the actual content is a little difficult to navigate. First, I’ve been given this great passage from Genesis in which poor Jacob has to work seven years so that he can get married to Rachel… actually, so that her father can pass her along like a piece of property… and the morning after discovers that he was actually given Rachel’s sister, and has to work another seven years for the girl he actually wanted. With its rather charming description of the wedding night, how could you go wrong?

Okay, well, if we take it as an allegory rather than a 2500 year old episode of Days of Our Lives, we can see a stirring parable of the steadfast and enduring Love of God. Oh good, I’m starting to satisfy another part of my quota.

Then we get the Gospel lesson, in which Jesus is talking about the furnace of fire and the weeping and the gnashing and the separation of the evil from the righteous… Not really easy material to work with. What am I supposed to say? I could take the heavily beaten track and act the part of the flamethrower, working myself up into a big ol’ preach about how “God hates all the same people we do! And when the final trumpet of God’s judgment sounds, all them people who had different political views, cultural practices, religious dogmas, lifestyles, fashion sense, and sexual orientations than us will burn in Hell. Hallelujah! Glory!”

Well, that won’t work out so much. It’s just too darn easy, and if you want to look for your comfortable, ear-tickling worldly philosophy, then being told that God hates all the same people you do is where you’ll find it. Plus, we’ve had more than our share of it in the church in recent months. I lost track of how many times I’ve had to sit and listen to learned men who don’t really know any gay people condemn them as part of some evil agenda, as though the head offices of the Illuminati were decorated by Those Design Guys. Disinterest in hearing more of the same is why I didn’t exactly jump up and volunteer to go to National Convention this weekend. Godspeed you Caroline!

And on top of all that, I’ve felt the sting of those condemnations from my fellow Christian brothers and sisters on more than one occasion. Whether it’s because I dress in black and have funny hair and wear nailpolish, or whether I actually believe in evolution and “Thou shalt not kill”, or because I think that gays should be allowed to be as miserable as straight people, I’m going to Hell for some reason or other.

If I were presumptuous enough to imitate the genius of Dante by populating my own Hell, one would be far more likely to find a George Bush there than a Mahatmas Gandhi, serenaded by Toby Keith rather than Bono. But that just isn’t my faith. That’s not the Christ I love and the God I’ve experienced. My faith is the faith of Julian of Norwich, the Mediaveal woman mystic who said: “I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, and never will be. Because He is God, He is good, He is truth, He is love, He is peace; and His power, His wisdom, His charity and His unity do not allow Him to be angry… God is that goodness which cannot be angry, for God is nothing but goodness.” It is the faith of Saint Paul who wrote: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Oh wait!... I feel it coming on!... Here we go!... [CRICK NECK] Social Justice Rant time!

Okay, maybe we can understand these passages by looking at their context. After all, the Bible wasn’t just beamed down, immaculate, from Heaven. It was written by people in a society, addressing specific issues of their time. Likewise with Jesus, Who wasn’t simply some archetypal character in a mythic story. Much of the strength and relevance of Jesus and the Bible is that they’re deeply human… They’re involved in history and society and the human condition. Their timeless universality comes exactly from the gravity of the human reality they address.

Let’s look at what Paul is saying when he speaks so beautifully of God’s steadfast and enduring Love for us, like Jacob’s love for Rachel (Hah! I’m tying them together!). This poetic turn is nested within a passage where Paul rallies himself and the Church in Rome against the ever-present persecution they were threatened with at the hands of the Empire. When he asks “If Good be for us, who is against us?” and “who will condemn us?” it isn’t the peevish opinion of an otherwise comfortable, middle-class suburbanite who suddenly finds their privileges being “oppressively” extended to people they don’t particularly like. No, Paul is speaking to people who were forcing the grave reality of torture, mutilation, imprisonment, bloodsport and death; suffered not because of who they were excluding, but rather who they were including in the form of slaves, women, Gentiles, and other undesirables.

We can see this in our Psalm today as well. This wasn’t simply a pithy affirmation of how neat God is, nor an ethnocentric hymn about how much better the descendants of Abraham are than anyone else. When they were singing about their inheritance in Canaan, they were singing it from the shores of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where they were being held as captive slaves by Babylon. This was a cry of solidarity, a cry for justice.

This same context of persecution and imperial domination is the one that Jesus spoke to. When He spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, He wasn’t speaking only of a utopian fantasy or a spiritual estate. When He shared these dreams, He was also sharing a political vision of a world order in marked contrast to the world He was living in; a world of injustice and malice where a military power swept over the known world, conquering in the name of ‘peace’ or ‘freedom’ or whatever words they use, aided by the religious elites using the Word of God for their own advantage.

So when Jesus preaches of Hell and the fiery furnace, He is expressing His righteous indignation at a whole system of cruelty advanced by men of greed, hate and war. Do we really think He is giving us excuse to condemn people different from us to Hell, simply because of their difference? He who spoke with women and Samaritans? He who saved an adulteress from stoning and surrounded Himself with tax collectors, children, Zealots, lepers, the mentally ill, blue collars and white collars alike? Goodness, He even celebrated the faith of a slave-owning Centurion; one of the very military oppressors themselves! I think any such justification is stretched, to say the least.

Without a constructive alternative, even a righteous anger and a just condemnation of injustice can be useless… Reduced to a hopeless and cynical exposition on how everything sucks. We know everything sucks, so what do we do about it?

Any change must being within, for social change begins with a spiritual change. It was only once we recognized the equality of men in God’s eyes that we could even conceive of ending the evil of slavery. And it was only upon recognizing the equality of women that we could end the evil of institutional sexism. These movements of the Spirit allow people to put down their arms, share their wealth to better the health and opportunity of their neighbours, and recognize the sincerity of marital commitments made between two people regardless of race, class, or gender.

And for this, we must open ourselves to the Spirit. We can’t reach that point, we can’t move forward and progress without being called by God Herself. HAH! The easiest thing in the world would have been to write up a sermon of hate against whoever made me feel all icky and uncomfortable. But God plants within us this seed of righteousness in soil cleared by the thresher of humility, and waters it with the Spirit so that our secret longings may come to glorious bloom amidst the thorny brush of our weak and corrupted will. This is what we mean by predestination: that God chooses to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

This Spirit is our yeast, our pearl, our mustard seed, our treasure, which we are willing to give all – even going to the slaughter like sheep (if only we rich Westerners could be so lucky) – to pursue. And nothing can separate us, or anybody else, from this treasure of God’s great Love. Let’s see… three lessons, waxing poetic, social justice, old dead saint, God a She… Yep, that’s about right.

Amen.