Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot
Readings – 2 Timothy 4: 6–8, 16–18; Luke 18: 9–14
“…the time of my departure is at hand.”
On Tuesday, I went for a long walk on my day off, as is my wont. It was an extraordinary day for the time of year, almost cloudless and with temperatures in the high teens. As I walked over the fields into Bishops Cannings from Devizes, I was confronted by a magnificent sight – two trees at the very peak of their autumn colour, framing that majestic parish church and lovely village pub with a riot of reds and golds. The light was absolutely superb.
St Mary the Virgin, Bishops Cannings, St Luke’s Day 2022, © Gerry Lynch.
Yesterday, I drove through Bishops Cannings and noticed that those trees had lost some of their leaves in the storms of Friday, and that their colours were losing a little of their lustre. Although the temperatures remain extraordinarily mild for the season, it was a cloudy day, without the translucent light of Tuesday morning. It was still a pretty scene – but no longer possessed of the sort of transfiguring beauty it held just four days before.
Autumn is a particularly transient time of year. Fresh beauties emerge from the landscape and vanish again in a matter of days. Soon will come the bare trees and bare fields of winter. That is also the pattern of our lives. Everything has a finite end, a limit. Nothing lasts forever, and many things that enlighten and energise our lives are around only for a very short span.
The present moment is all we have.
In our epistle reading this morning, St Paul is near the end. He clearly expects to die soon – he has run his race. This has not made him a perfect person, and he still seems to have energy to vent his spleen at those who he feels let him down in his hour of great need, in the passive-aggressive tone Paul often adopts.
I love Paul, and I love his writings, but I can definitely see why almost everyone seems to have lost patience with him at one time or another. Even the man who was perhaps his closest companion, Barnabas, a man so sweet-natured that he was nicknamed ‘The Encourager’, took his leave of Paul once in Antioch when his constant arguing became too much.
Paul was not perfect but, to be fair, at the core of his writings is the idea that salvation is not a reward for passing a particular standard of goodness but something that God gives us as a free gift, because God is love. And for all that Paul was a man with obvious faults, he was also a man with tremendous gifts. Here, he contemplates the end of his life without fear, absolutely trusting God will receive him in heaven.
Sometimes non-Church friends will ask me what I did in work and sometimes the answer happens to be that I spent some time praying with and anointing a very elderly person in the last days of their life.
The reply is always the same.
“Oh, how sad. That must have been distressing.”
Yet these are the loveliest moments of priesthood. There is something unutterably beautiful about being present with someone coming contentedly to the end of a long life lived well, especially if they are gently slipping away with their loved ones regularly present, and more beautiful still when they do so trusting, like St Paul, that they would soon be received in heaven.
Death is part of life. We are not made to last forever – not in this world, anyway. Our lives have a span, just like the leaves on those trees at Bishops Cannings – if we are lucky, there will be spells in our lives which flame out with the sort glory and beauty symbolised by these autumn landscapes. Indeed, we maximise our chances of enjoying those spells if we live lives of faith and trust in God, full of prayer and participation in the Sacraments.
But our lives do come to an end, after a duration that is, viewed from the perspective of eternity, very short. We are finite beings. Thankfully so, because we leave space for others to follow us, to enjoy the great gift of being alive.
It strikes me that the root of many of the systemic problems of the 21st Century world is an inability to accept that we have limits, which drives our need for ever more things and is rooted in our fear that everything comes to an end. Ironically, it is that constant need for more that now threatens the ability of our planet, this beautiful gift that God has loaned us, to sustain human life in any reasonable comfort.
The present moment is all we have. The present planet is all we have.
This morning’s Gospel reading, the parable of the publican and the Pharisee, is in an odd sort of a way also about accepting our limits. There is no suggestion here that the Pharisee is a bad person or doesn’t sincerely try to live, and often succeed in living, a good life.
The Pharisee’s big mistake is to go to the Temple to tell God how awful other people are. He isn’t like the rogues and the tax-collectors, he tells God, forgetting that all of us are God’s children, rogues and saints alike, all of us made by Him, and all of us loved by Him.
Judged by the standards of God, none of us is a particularly good person. We all have plenty of faults – if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be human beings loved by God, but puppets under God’s control. God didn’t make us to be puppets, but to be free creatures, made in His image and likeness. He also made us to be rather limited beings, of limited lifespan, limited physical power, limited intellect, and limited capacity to live up to our most noble ideals.
The present moment is all we have. The present planet is all we have. And our human nature is what God made it to be, and it is not within our power to change that nature. The great revolution in thought that came with the Enlightenment in the 18th Century made us kick against all of those hard limits, and that’s why we’re in trouble.
Yet those limits don’t make us humans a less beautiful or admirable species, as we are at our best. As the great poet Goethe famously wrote “In der Beschränkung ziegt sich erst der Meister”. For those whose German is a little rusty at half-ten on a Sunday morning, we could translate that as: the true master first reveals himself when faced by limitations. The great artist, the great composer, the great author and poet or indeed the great gardener is not undone by limitations in technology or technique, but uses those limitations to create beauty that points to something much greater than themselves.
Similarly, the challenge for our society and civilisation, where so much power and scientific knowledge are allied to so little wisdom and self-knowledge, is to accept and indeed embrace our limitations. It is when we have the courage to accept that, like the publican and St Paul, that we aren’t as good as we might like to pretend to be that we allow God to love us as we actually are, and to guide us to a better future.
That is the way for the human race to protect this fragile world that God has loaned to us, and for each of us as individuals to live on earth in such a way that we love its beauties in their transience and pass on our way contentedly to heaven.
And now to God be the glory, the Father the creator of all life, the Son the restorer to new life, the Spirit who breathes in all life, now and forever, as is most justly his due. Amen.
