Sermon for the 18th Sunday after Trinity

Sunday 15th October 2006

Preached by Rev Paul Hewitt

We clergy were all on a Conference recently in County Donegal, and I would love to have come back this Sunday morning with some greater insight and depth and some greater wisdom to impart to you all; you think going to something like this you would have sermon material to last a month! But I’m afraid not. I look at our several speakers, and they spoke long and eloquently, and I would ask at the end of the day, ‘what were they saying?’ Maybe I have too high an expectation of the high and mighty, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation. At the end of one very erudite ‘lecture’ on the Da Vinci Code (which is a bit ‘passé’ nowadays) the Bishop got up and started to thank this very clever speaker by reminding us of a line or two from the television comedy Father Ted, when Father Ted once said to Dougal, “Makes you think, Dougal” and after a pause Dougal says, “About what Ted?”

There are many great intellects; there are many great communicators and they all display various talents and gifts, but really, you wonder, if you can’t gleam some sort of ‘extra’ insight into your faith from the great and the good, then, are they not just the same as everyone else? Are we not all just in the same boat?

I often come back from these kinds of things in bad form, and maybe it’s just me, although I know it isn’t!

Mark Chapter 10 is often considered a difficult passage to get our heads around. It’s talking about rich and poor and heaven and all the rest. Wealth is a relative thing, and when it comes to Mark 10, we are all incredibly rich; so the comparison is not across the pew in Church, it is something else entirely different.

Verse 21, ‘Jesus looked at him and loved him’, it says, and when he had finished what he was saying in verse 26 it says, ‘The disciples were even more amazed, and said to each other, “Who then can be saved?”’

You know the old Alpha illustration which asks how do we rate ourselves. If mass murderers are down here and someone very good, like Mother Teresa is up here. We might not be as bad as mass murderers, but we’re not as good as Mother Teresa, then perhaps we are somewhere in the middle. But you then have to ask, what is the standard, and the standard is the sky!

Do you remember the guy who did sell all his possessions, his house and car etc. and gave it to famine relief in whatever part of the world it was? If that is the thing that is going to earn you a place in heaven, then there will be only that one person in heaven!

You cannot do any of this on your own. It is laughable. It is laughable to think that we can. And the point that Jesus makes to the rich young man was exactly that. God knows you are not going to sell all you have worked so hard to get. With man this is impossible. Rich, poor, young, old, black white, none of us can do this by ourselves, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God”.

You cannot get in on your own merit, only God can do that for you. Isn’t that what the whole Gospel is all about

I think most of us would consider ourselves fairly ‘nice’ people. Generally speaking, we don’t rob banks, we don’t commit serious crimes, like the rich young man in Mark 10, all these commandments I have kept since I was a boy. But if we measure ourselves against God’s standards, do we realise just how out of synch we are. Many others have had this experience. CS Lewis wrote, “For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was Legion”.

Calvary takes away all of that. Isn’t that the point?

On the 31^st day of July in 1941 in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, sirens announced the escape of a prisoner. As a reprisal, ten prisoners would die – a long, slow starvation, buried alive in a specially constructed, concrete bunker. So all day, tortured by sun, hunger and fear, the men waited as the German commandant and his assistant walked between the ranks to select, quite arbitrarily, the chosen ten. As the commandant pointed to one man, Francis Gajowniczek, he cried out in despair, ‘My poor wife and children.’ At that moment an unimpressive figure of a man with sunken eyes and round glasses stepped out of line and took off his cap. ‘What does he want?’ asked the commandant.

‘I am a Catholic Priest; I want to die for that man. I am old, he has a wife and children...I have no one,’ said Father Maximilian Kolbe.

‘Accepted’ retorted the commandant and moved on. That night nine men and one priest went to the starvation bunker. Normally it would be a living hell, but while they had strength, lying naked on the floor, the men prayed and sang hymns. After two weeks, three of the men and Father Kolbe were still alive. The bunker was required for others, so on 14^th August, the remaining four were disposed of. At 12.50pm, after two weeks in the starvation bunker and still conscious, the Polish priest was finally given an injection of phenol and died at the age of forty-seven.

On 10^th October 1982 in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, father Maximilian Kolbe’s death was put in its proper perspective. Present in the crowd of 150,000 was Francis Gajowniczek, his wife, his children and his children’s children – for indeed, many had been saved by that one man. The Pope describing father Maximilian’s death said, ‘This was victory won over all the systems of contempt and hate in man – a victory like that won by our Lord Jesus Christ’... Makes you think, doesn’t it?

‘The disciples were even more amazed, and said to each other, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.”’