Whaley Bridge Parish Lent 3 2022
Return to the Lord who will have mercy
To our God who will richly pardon.
We are living through times of change and upheaval, and the future is hard to read. How will things be in two months, three months’ time – will peace negotiation have succeeded, and the tanks rolled back to the Russian border? How will rises in the cost-of-living change things for our neighbours in Whaley Bridge? And what of the pandemic – will Covid have finally become an illness we live with like the flu – or will it be more complicated?
It is a fact that we can never know what the future holds, but at this time, that seems even more acutely true. We live in uncertain times.
And into the uncertainty and unpredictability of our life God speaks. God has a word for us, spoken through his prophet Isaiah.
Return to the Lord who will have mercy
To our God who will richly pardon.
When our life seems secure, peaceful, predictable – was there a time when your life seemed to go along like that? – at those times it can be easier to slip into a self-sufficient mindset. Actually, thanks God, I’m doing OK here, everything’s going fine. It’s nice to know you’re there God, just in case there a problem, but just for now, your get on with your stuff and I’ll get on with my stuff. And if there’s time later, maybe we’ll have a catch up?
In times of peace and plenty we can be tempted to ignore the call of God to our hearts. But when the ground is shifting under our feet, when the peace and prosperity we had taken for granted is called into question suddenly – then things seem different. We long for some sense of sense of meaning, and purpose for the world. We long for a place where hope and confidence in the future is real. We long to be lifted beyond the brokenness of the world into a different kind of realm.
This passage from Isaiah was written to a people whose world like that of the Ukrainian people, had been turned upside down. These words were addressed to an Israel who had been roughly torn away from homes and families and were enduring an enforced stay in a foreign land. This was not the future they had in mind. They always imagined God was restore the past glories of King David again. Instead they were enduring exile.
But God was speaking a word of invitation to them, and God, by his Holy Spirit continues to speak a word of invitation to us now.
Return to the Lord who will have mercy
To our God who will richly pardon.
Return to the Lord. It’s very much the theme of Lent – to draw closer to God, to come back home to God. Any close relationship has its ups and downs, its times of warmth and closeness and times of coolness and distance. If perhaps our relationship with God has become a bit mechanical and loveless, a bit cold and remote – the Lent is a good time to re-calibrate.
In Sheffield there used to be a man who sat on Fargate in the City Centre with a handmade sign saying Repent! Prepare to meet your God! The sign was written in a large angry red letter. I’m sure he meant well, but I used to think it was an ineffective way of sharing the good news of Jesus. And there was something about the hard word “Repent” that seemed to carry a note of threat with it.
And of course, Jesus went around Galilee calling people to repentance – not by carrying a placard, but by sitting around the table with people, by meeting them at the point of their need. The gospel word is for repentance is metanoia which means to turn yourself around, to change direction. Turn yourself around, says Jesus, reorientate your life.
I have always loved this Isaiah passage because the invitation to repentance comes with such warmth, such love. Return to the Lord, who will have mercy. The English word “Repent” can sound rather abrupt, a bit threatening even. But God does not issue threats. God is love, self-giving love, and love is never coercive or threatening. That’s not love, that is abuse. God is love, and God’s invitation to re-orientate our lives towards him comes to us not as threat, but a word of love.
We so easily orientate around ourselves, our own convenience, our comfort, our prejudices, our rights, the boosting of our own status and standing in the world. It’s the religion of me. The worship of the false God of the ego.
Turn away from that stuff, says God in Christ Jesus. Turn away from that and turn towards me. Follow me.
Return to the Lord who will have mercy
To our God who will richly pardon.
The Lord will have mercy.
Mercy is not a word we hear very much these days. It seems to me that mercy is about demonstrating gentleness and kindness within a relationship in which one person has power over another.
This week there was shock and outrage when the 800 P and O workers were sacked over a video call with half and hours’ notice. The Archbishop of Canterbury described this a sinful which the news media found hard to understand. What was terrible was that the P and O boss showed no mercy in that situation. He paid no regard to the dignity of his workforce, of their humanity, or of their vulnerability in that situation. He was without mercy.
Yet the nature of God is to be merciful. God is a great God, almost beyond our imagining. Isaiah captures this for us:
“As the heavens are higher than the earth
So are my ways higher than your ways
And my thoughts than your thoughts”
God is utterly other than us, utterly beyond us – and we are so very small, our lives so very short. And yet God demonstrate mercy in dealings with us. The mercy that Isaiah describes is realised most fully as God comes down to our level and shares our human life.
Let’s imagine a different scenario. Just imagine if, instead of sitting in his swish office, far apart from the daily reality of life working on a ship, the boss of P and O had decided that he would like to understand what life is like as a seaman. He anonymously signed on to work in one of the ships, cleaning loos for less than the minimum wage, and had done so over years. Just think how that would then change things in the relationship between him and the seafarers in his organisation.
That’s the way God does things. We call it incarnation. God comes close to us in Jesus to do as we do and live as we live. And die as we die.
The Christian year finds its climax in Holy Week and Easter because this is the time that we home in on the suffering, death and rising from death of Jesus. As we follow these events we discover what divine mercy and forgiveness really looks like. We find that these are not simply warm words or a fuzzy idea. God’s mercy will go to hell and back for us, for the world he loves, for the world he will richly pardon. In Jesus God suffers with the suffering world. On the cross we see divine mercy made perfect in self -giving love.
In the words of Bill Vanstone’s poem about the cross:
Drained is love in making full
Bound in setting others free
Poor in making many rich
Weak in giving power to be
Weak in giving power to be. In the cross of Christ God gives us power to be, power to be forgiven, power to be loved, power to be freed into his eternal saving love. This is good news. So let us
Return to the Lord who will have mercy
To our God who will richly pardon.