St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in the Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr in the City and Diocese of Cap Town on the Fourth Sunday of the Year, 28 January 2007

This week a remarkably talented young man came to play his accordion in this Cathedral. It was a hastily organised concert at the end of a work-day. No more than a hundred people came to witness his skill. They sat here in the enervating heat of a scorching Thursday afternoon – and as he drew the contours that blew patterns of sound from a black box, all who had come soon found themselves transported by a strange and haunting music, at once plaintive and sparkling, wet with tears and radiant with joy. Mario Batkovic, the young accordionist, was born in Bosnia. His early childhood was spent in the grip of a tragic civil war of devastating proportions. His family escaped to Switzerland where he grew up and where he now lives.

It is the music of the Balkans that sings in his heart, with its evocative gypsy melodies and arresting Zigeuner rhythms. As the evening grew cool, and the Cathedral emptied, he and I talked about music, and passion, and loss and hope. Then he said the unforgettable thing that brings him into this pulpit with me this morning. He told me about a gypsy musician scarred by the hand that fate had dealt him, doubly outcast and mired by the war and its aftermath. This gypsy musician had in his repertoire a favourite song – it sang about life, about its wonder, and its worth. 'It's too early to be lucky,' the gypsy sang, 'and it's too late to be sad.'

Es ist zu früh, um glücklich sein und zu spät, um traurig zu sein. 'It's too early to be lucky and it's too late to be sad.' The words remained with me, repeated themselves in my brain, and soon they took up lodging in my heart. The words turned into something like a proverb – the harvest of wisdom distilled from centuries of living with suffering and joy, loss and new beginnings. 'It's too early to be lucky and it's too late to be sad.' I found myself thinking about we respond to crisis. How in the face of emergency, the wish for luck comes so naturally to us, and also, just how spontaneously sadness comes to settle in us. In the face of the hard knocks of life, most of us immediately feel either unlucky or sad. Why me, we ask. What rotten luck, we say. Or the weight of sorrow comes to cover us, to weigh us down, like a dark cloud rolling over the mountain on an already gloomy day. There are no words, just a burning in the depth of the bowels, a slow watering of the eyes and the heaving of sighs. In the face of trouble we wish for a better hand, a more felicitous roll of the dice, or we embrace despair and sink into its melancholy.

'It's too early to be lucky and it's too late to be sad,' the young accordionist repeated, and to ensure that I grasped his meaning, he said, holding my eyes with his: It's too early to be Swiss and it's too late to be a Balkan boy. Then the smile that had hovered over his face all the time, danced across it, as he sparkled into laughter. It was Thursday evening, the twenty-fifth of January, the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. My thoughts for days had been about this sermon, the thirteenth chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians, and about Jesus speaking hard words to his own people, about inclusion and exclusion, diversity and salvation, about his being rejected, and having to run for his life.

There were many widows in Israel, Jesus said, when a devastating drought came over the land. Yet it was not to one of those widows that the prophet of the Lord came to bring miraculous succour, but rather, it was to an outsider, despised and detested, that relief came. 'How come she's so lucky and I'm so sad?' they must have thought then. 'How dare he tell the story to make the outsiders the recipients of blessing and the faithful insiders the losers?' they must have thought as they listened to Jesus. There were many lepers in Israel when the prophet healed the military commander of the King of Aram of his leprosy. 'How come he's so lucky and I'm so sad?' they must have thought then. 'How dare he tell the story to make the outsiders the recipients of blessing and the faithful insiders the losers?' they must have thought as they listened to Jesus. It's too early to be lucky and it's too late to be sad.

Wishing for luck and falling into sadness have one very important dynamic in common: they both declare us cut off from the situation at hand, powerless and useless. They both view the situation as hopeless, the end without a beginning, the beginning without a future. When the Corinthians found themselves embroiled in in-fighting, jealousy, suspicion they sought to save themselves through the pursuit of spiritual gifts as though they were so many qualifications. St Paul exhorted them to a more excellent way. This more excellent way went beyond apostleship and prophecy, transcended powerful works of healing, and surpassed speaking in tongues.

Entering into a community of love, this according the Saint whose conversion we celebrated on Thursday is the more excellent way, it alone is the way that works. Not a fatalistic yearning for better luck, nor a defeatist despair, but an embrace of the possibility of cooperation and community, compromise and consensus. His word for this embrace is love – that best of human dispositions that is patient and kind, is not envious or boastful, does not insist on its own way, is not irritable or resentful, and does not gloat over the mistakes or failures of others.

What would life look like and feel like, if in a crisis and at those perilous forks in the road, we neither cursed our luck nor gave vent to our melancholy, but turned instead to look one another in the face with sincerity, took one another by the hand, gave one another the benefit of the doubt and sought in a consensus of commitment and compromise to uncover truth and live in peace. St Paul's word for this choice is love – that best of all human dispositions that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Faith in the promises of God and in the abundant new life that Jesus offers, this is the starting point, not some lucky throw of the fateful dice. Hope in the integrity of humankind, the wonder of life and the splendour of living, this is what pulses in our hearts, not a despondent unhappiness that yearns sadly for what isn't. 'It's too early to be lucky and it's too late to be sad.' Beyond luck and transforming sadness there is this more excellent way, a way that turns fate on its head and takes the mickey out of melancholy. Beyond all things, with the power to transform all things, and the embrace to enfold all things, there is love.

Everything else is passing – our guesses about the future, our windows into ecstasy, our treasure houses of knowledge – they will fall short, and they are all incomplete. Love alone survives – for love never ends, it alone can grasp the whole picture, the height and depth, the length and breadth of things.

For faith, love and hope remain, these three. And the greatest of these is love.

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