Abstract
The Hayling Parishes, Portsmouth
In the spirit of openness, I will admit to you that I am writing this sermon having just spent a happy couple of hours on a boat in beautiful sunshine learning how to right dinghys and get their occupants to safety. I appreciate that you are reading rather than hearing this so you cannot see the smile on my face or the slight hint of a suntan that has crept into my cheeks, but it is there nonetheless. I say this not to fill you with envy (which would be unkind) but to signal to you that I write relaxed and with more than a little gentleness in my heart. This definitely won’t be a fire and brimstone sort of a sermon!
In our Gospel reading for today Jesus responds to a lawyer’s question with words that are universally accepted for their wisdom and repeated so often in church as to be taken for granted:
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
Yet this teaching, so simple in its statement, is unbelievably challenging both intellectually and practically.
Let’s look first at our Old Testament reading for today, Leviticus 19. The extracts selected for today are nicely consistent with the commandments Jesus gives us—‘You shall not render an unjust judgement. . . . You shall not hate in your heart any one of your kin.’ This is all good, sound, uncontroversial stuff and there is much more like it in this chapter: in verse 14 we read ‘You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling-block before the blind’, words that argue for justice and inclusion. Yet look a few verses into the preceding chapter of Leviticus and you will quickly find passages about sexual morality that have divided the church for decades, with huge anger and hurt all round. The commandment to love God and love neighbour is certainly the greatest commandment on which hangs all the law and the prophets, but sadly it has not always brought unity of understanding or purpose to the church.
Turning to our reading from Thessalonians we find Paul using an interesting word to describe the offering of Christian love: ‘We were gentle among you’ he writes, ‘like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.’
Paul’s reference to gentleness is worth reflecting on as we ponder what it means to live by the command to love God and neighbour. I write today, as I mentioned, having just got off a boat. Something about being on the water in nice weather always restores my soul to a kinder place. Afloat, land still safely visible, the problems and frustrations of daily life find their perspective. More than that, being on a small boat where personal space is not an option, in situations that can quickly turn critical, imposes a particular generosity of spirit, a degree of good humour. Certainly theological wranglings feel a distance away when a mistake or two could lead to genuinely pressing disasters!
Gentleness, as the preacher with the suntan is discovering out there on the water, is an immense and resilient quality. It’s entirely possible to stay gentle even when there is danger. It’s possible, without contradiction or loss of face, to retain good humour even when we profoundly disagree with the assumptions or attitudes of another person, even when they are too much in our space. The experience of tenderness or gentleness received from God in prayer can be the most healing moment, when our tired and tetchy selves suddenly re-experience our own humanity and find their generosity once more.
My feet back on dry land, I am about to turn again to my emails and my phone messages as we all must eventually, and I know there is a risk that my smile might fade a little when I do. As you too return to your lives having paused to reflect, may it be with the sort of resilient gentleness that can get it wrong theologically from time to time but that never errs in its humanity towards self, others and God. And when you feel you are at your limits may you be blessed with time out in whatever your equivalent of a boat might be, and find yourself restored.