Sermon for Rogation Sunday
“I came forth from the Father and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.”
The life of the resurrection is the life of the church. There is, however, the constant struggle to enter into its meaning; in short, to live it in our lives, especially in the face of hardships, sufferings and sorrows. At the very least, it means being called not only out of death as the defining reality of life, but also out of the ways of death which we know simply as sin, which is Paul’s point in this morning’s second lesson from Romans (6. 1-14).
The American spiritual writer, Annie Dillard, marvels at the complacency of Christians, especially in Church, and especially in the light of certain Scripture readings. Given the power of Biblical images, she advises that we should be wearing crash helmets and be given life-jackets and lashed to our pews! There is a kind of shock and awe quality to many a Scripture passage. We become anesthetized because of the calming beauty and order of the Liturgy and fail to be surprised by joy or shocked by fear. Some stories truly are amazing, even shocking, and yet they have so much to teach us. One such shocking and perplexing story, it seems to me, is there in our first lesson which is the story or, actually, the concluding part of a much longer story, known as the story of Balaam’s ass (Numbers 24).
Here is headline news: God makes dumb asses speak. In a way, that means me in the effort to speak God’s word clearly but also you, in terms of your lively participation in the service. The point is that God gives us words to say and think, words to live by and act upon in our lives. We need the shocking and difficult stories to awaken us to the grandeur of God’s engagement with our humanity without which we are dead in ourselves and therefore not alive to God. So what is the story?
