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, Cape Town, on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, 22 March 2009

Today is Mothering Sunday and with Anglicans throughout the world we give thanks for and honour our mothers. If we had any doubts about the heroic and dedicated self-offering that motherhood means, we were reminded of the wonder of motherhood in a tragic and distressing story that has been front-page news in our city this week. Unabantu Mali, just a year old, was vomiting and suffering from diarrhoea. He was a very sick little boy, who had spent the previous week in the Red Cross Hospital for gastroenteritis. So his grandmother walked to the clinic in Nyanga for help, clutching the letter from the hospital referring the little boy to the local clinic for further treatment. Officiously, and apparently without a shred of concern, she was turned away: the clinic had reached its quota of children for the day even though it was just after nine o'clock; she should come back tomorrow. Desperate now, with the sickening Unabantu strapped to her back, Mrs Mali walked to the Community Health Centre in Gugulethu where, in the same bureaucratic and insensitive way, she was turned away again. Frantic about the seriousness of her grandson's condition, in the face of indifference and insensitivity, she refused to give up. So she set off to a third clinic, the Maternity Obstetrics Unit in Gugulethu. Although it is almost impossible to believe, she was once again turned away without receiving any help at all. Heartsick and anxious, she set off on the long walk home. When she finally arrived, her spirit broken by her inability to find help for her helpless and desperately sick grandson, she took him off her back to feed him. The little boy was dead. Things are falling apart.

After months of seething unrest, the situation in Madagascar exploded this week. Deaths in the streets, democracy unhinged and the rule of law denied. Another coup d'etat added to the alarming list of assassinations and seizures of power on our continent - in Mauritania, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and now Madagascar. In Zimbabwe, although things are said to have changed they appear to remain the same. Things are falling apart. New chapters are written daily in the heart-rending saga of the Holy Land, the super-powers play a power-game, the leaders of Palestine and Israel strategize, and the people – mothers, fathers and children, old and young – are shot in the street, their homes destroyed and their future obliterated.

Here at home in our own nation, tempers are at the boil in some quarters as we approach our national elections next month. Some of us are apathetic, others are confused, and many feel that whether they vote or not will make no difference. We seem far from the dream of a rainbow nation that inspired the work just 14 years ago. Things are falling apart.

There is something inescapably distressing about being human, isn't there? Made for the stars we grub around in the gutters. Given the best of gifts and a harvest of talents, we squander, despoil and devastate them. The freedom to choose the best becomes in us a craving to destroy, a compulsion to dominate, the urge to break down and bring low. Where we could be understanding we are harsh, where we could take the risk of trusting we are belligerently suspicious, where we could give the benefit of the doubt we are overbearing and sceptical. Where we could choose community we are self-absorbed and self-serving.

There is something inescapably distressing about being human, isn't there. We recognise these failings in others, and, if we are honest, we know them in ourselves. In the corridors of power and across the boardroom table, in the affairs of nations or in the concerns of families, when we act together as mobs or when I look into my own heart, I recognise these failings. We fall far short, you and I, our communities, our nation and the world – we fall far short of the best we can be. And so it is that war and civil strife are more characteristic of humanity than peace and justice; suspicion and hatred define us more accurately than ubuntu, the spirit of community, interdependence and reconciliation.

Into this bleak and desolate picture a shaft of light is breaking, in the distant east the first light of dawn falls on the broken and sick world that we have made. Even as we are dead through our trespasses, says the writer of the letter to the Ephesians, even while we are the putrid decaying stink that we have made of our humanity, even now, the light breaks in. 'But God!,' the writer proclaims, 'but God!'

'But,' is a little word, a disjunctive, that writes a separation between what comes before and what follows after. On the one hand, humanity collapsed upon itself in pride and self-destruction, in greed and arrogance. On the other hand, the grace that seeks us where we are lost, that finds us and restores us to what we created to be,. On the one hand, a fallen humanity, on the other a redeeming God. 'But God!' the writer says, 'But God!'

From Genesis to Revelation, 27 times does this glorious and clarion call cry out: “But God!' The waters swelled and swirled around the Ark where Noah and his people and his animals were huddled. The waters raged and foamed for one hundred and fifty days, and then we read: But God remembered Noah and God made a wind blow over the earth and the waters subsided. As though St Paul were writing about our own day and time, he writes in the letter to the Romans: While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. We were dead in our sin, cast into outer darkness, weighed down with the wages of sin – then comes the bright light of the Gospel But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. But God!

This is the wonder of the Gospel, this is our story, this is our song, that God breaks into history and changes its course, that God breaks into our lives and invites us to live in a new abundant way.

God so loves the world that no sin or falling away, no fault or evil can come between us and our God who loves us. God makes a disjunction between what we have made of ourselves and our world, and what we can become. Always and ever there is the redeeming cry, 'But God!' The disjunction opens a new path before us. Evil cannot continue, darkness will not endure, despair will be overcome. 'But God!' opens path that leads out of darkness into light, out of anxiety into serenity, out of every bondage and captivity into the freedom that is the inheritance of the children of God.

For the God who made us, sees and knows us for what we were made to be, just a little less than angels. 'What a piece of work is a man,' says Hamlet to Rosencrantz in Shakespeare's words:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.

It is in our creation that the 'But!' of God has its beginning. It is in our Saviour's incarnation and life that the 'But!' of God breaks into our history. It is by our Lord's passion and death that 'But God!' saves us from all that threatens to diminish and destroy us.

This 'But' of God is nothing simplistic or naïve. The 'But' of God is an offer of a new way of life, a new way of being human in the world. The 'But' of God invites us to turn away from all that is dark and death-bringing about us, it summons us to break our ties with selfishness, avarice and greed, it calls us to shake ourselves loose from indifference and apathy.

Our history is inescapable – it is one long saga of war and violence, greed, oppression and injustice. Our personal stories are indisputable, they are one unbroken narrative of pride and arrogance, petty feuds and score-keeping, loneliness and alienation. Across all of this God writes the bold line that cancels it for ever and in the disjunctive cry calls out the 'But' of our salvation, freely offered, earnestly pledged, graciously given.

May the grace of God move us and the love of God draw us to be what we are, the beloved of God.

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