Sermons

Sun, Jun 13, 2021

A new creation

Series:Sermons
Duration:13 mins 27 secs

I have an admission to make:

I’m not an artist.

I certainly didn’t inherit the artistic genes that run in my mother’s family.

Her father was a pupil of Sir Hans Heysen’s.

He was a very gifted painter…

or, he would have been, if he hadn’t been a chronic alcoholic.

But I can’t draw.

I can’t paint.

And I certainly can’t sculpt.

As I have mentioned before…

I have a completely non-pictorial imagination…

and I lack the ability to visualise.

I can’t look at an object or a scene…

then close my eyes…

and visually recall it or reconstruct it.

And I certainly can’t interpretively re-create it.

So I find it hard to comprehend the whole creative, artistic process.

Although a pale shadow…

perhaps the closest that I come is in trying to write a sermon:

reading the text set for the week…

and reading some commentaries and newspapers…

then pondering;

thinking about my life…

thinking about the life of the people in this congregation…

thinking about the world;

and then waiting; 

often staring at a blank computer screen––

sometimes for hours…

waiting for some inspiration…

waiting for some idea to pop into my head that will bring together the reading…

the world that gave life to it…

and our particular context;

trying to find a “way in”––

some interesting story…

some way to make a connection.

And, so often, in the writing, it doesn’t quite end up where I thought that it would.

In the process, it seems to take on a life of its own.

Sometimes it’s easy.

There’s a sort of stream of consciousness:

connections simply happen…

images drop…

words flow.

Sometimes–– 

perhaps more often than not–– 

it’s a really hard slog:

writing a paragraph or two at a time…

then re-reading…

modifying, editing, and deleting…

and re-writing.

And perhaps, therein, there’s just a hint of how Picasso describes the process:

“Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction”.

That’s most obvious, perhaps, in sculpting––

a piece of wood or stone is cut and chiselled…

destroying what was, to make what will be.

And before that, of course…

a tree was felled…

and a piece of stone was quarried.

The act of creation always involves some form of breaking, discarding, and remaking…

of starting and restarting.

But I don’t think that Picasso was just speaking purely on a physical or material level.

I get the sense that the destructiveness that’s part of the creative process… 

is also something that’s internal;

something that the artist experiences in the act of creation.

Like my maternal grandfather…

for so many artists creativity and self-destructive demons seem to go hand-in-hand.

For the artist, the act of creation can…

so often…

be a tortured and painful experience––

psychologically… 

even physically.

“Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction”.

 

Our reading, this morning, from the Second Letter to the Corinthians is…

arguably…

one of the most theologically dense pieces in all of Paul’s known writings.

His focus, here, is on the implications of the death of Christ.

He declares that Christ died for all––

for all without exception or qualification––

which, Paul claims, means that all have died.

It’s not that Christ died in our place as our substitute…

paying the penalty that we deserved––

a penalty that was demanded by an angry, vengeful God.

There’s no sense here of what’s known as “penal substitution”…

that is…

the “God-is-angry-at-our-sin-and-punished-Jesus-in-our-place-without-which-we-couldn’t-be-forgiven” theology.

Rather, drawing on the way that the ancient Israelites understood sacrifice––

symbolically…

metaphorically…

sacramentally…

existentially––

Paul claims that Christ died as our representative

as, in a sense, a sign of our remorse…

as a pledge or commitment to put to death within us all that is unworthy…

all that is not of God.

And that, for Paul, is universally inclusive:

Christ died for all––

without exception… 

without qualification.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that all people know or recognise it…

or that they accept it…

or that they appropriate it.

But for those who do recognise and appropriate it––

for those who “live”––

it means a completely new way of living…

because, having died with him, we have also been raised with him.

Who we were is dead, and buried.

Who we are now––

and who we will become––

is something entirely new.

Who we are, now, are people who are motivated by––

who live out of…

and who manifest––

the love of Christ.

Who we are, now, are people who no longer regard anyone “from a human point of view”.

In other words, recognising who we were and who we are now…

means that, for us, all worldly values and distinctions are rendered irrelevant.

They, too, are dead and buried.

Through the death and resurrection of Christ…

we are no longer bound by the stigmas and categories of our society and culture;

we are no longer bound by political allegiances and ideologies;

we are no longer bound by the constraints of status and class;

we are no longer bound by constructions of race or gender, ethnicity or privilege.

If we have died and been raised with Christ…

we can no longer see anyone according to ordinary human ways of seeing or perceiving.

If we have died and been raised with Christ…

we can no longer judge anyone according to ordinary human values;

we can no longer cling to our stereotypes or prejudices;

we can no longer engage with our world as we always have;

we can no longer take refuge in inherited beliefs and dogmas.

It demands of us a completely new, transformed way of life.

Nothing can stay the same.

 

And yet, in a sense, even that doesn’t go far enough.

Paul wants us to understand just how comprehensive this change––

this transformation––

has been; 

and how radical it ought to become.

Thus, he suggests…

“If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away…everything has become new”.

Note, he doesn’t say, “if anyone is in Christ, he or she is a new creation”.

Rather, “there is a new creation”…

or, literally in the original Greek, “it is a new creation”.

If anyone is “in Christ”––

if anyone knows him or herself to have died with Christ…

and to have been raised with Christ…

if anyone is immersed in Christ…

and immersed in his values and way of seeing…

if anyone is motivated by and shaped by the love of Christ––

then our whole way of being has changed;

or ought to change radically.

Indeed, Paul contends, everything has changed…

everything has become new.

If anyone recognises that he or she has died and been raised with Christ––

and strives to live and love as Christ did––

then it is, metaphorically, as if the world as we have known it has ceased to exist;

and a brand-new creation has come to be.

Theologically…

metaphorically…

each act of faith…

each loving, Christ-like enactment… 

is an act of world re-creation.

 

And the wonderful irony…

of course…

is that if we all recognised that… 

if we all started to think like that…

and if we all started to live like that…

then…

very soon…

it would, indeed, be manifestly true.

Powered by: truthengaged