St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A sermon preached by the Reverend Sarah Rowland Jones in the St George's Cathedral on Sunday, 14 January 2007

Today throughout the world, where Christians gather as we do this morning, the festal shout goes up today: 'Christ triumphant, ever reigning, Saviour, Master, King! Yours the glory, yours the crown, the eternal name!' The festivity comes easily to us, we love the pomp, we revel in the pageantry. What precisely are we doing, though, when we hail Christ as our saviour, our master and our king? Do you need saving – do you acknowledge that you are broken, wounded, falling down, caught in a pit, the wretched and lost of the earth? Am I really in search of a Master – do I earnestly want my life circumscribed by discipline and boundaries? Am I seeking authority and accountability in my life? Do I really want to surrender my free will? Are we honest about wanting to honour and serve a king as his faithful vassals and loyal subjects with our lives and our resources at his disposal? Are we genuinely committed when we lift our voices, sound our organs and blow our trumpets to proclaim to all the world that Jesus Christ is Lord, our saviour, our master and our king?

The feast we celebrate today and which marks the end of the Church year, holds before us our need and Christ's power. Today we are summoned to engage those two realities – our need and Christ's power. That we are broken, wounded, falling down, caught in a pit, the wretched and lost of the earth, and that Jesus Christ, our God who has a human face and who entered our human history, is mighty to save, holds all authority in his hands, and ushers in a new kingdom with new loyalties and new obligations. Having walked with Christ all the year long, the Church now challenges us to understand and acknowledge our need for the power of Christ in our lives, and to affirm and power of Christ to meet and fulfil our needs, more than we can ask or imagine, and far beyond our dreams.

So, behind our songs and trumpetings, behind our stance of celebration there lies a compelling question: do we need a saviour, you and I? Are we broken, wounded, falling down, caught in a pit, the wretched and lost of the earth – and more importantly, are we ready to acknowledge that we need saving? I submit that it is very, very hard indeed for us to accept that we need saving. It is hard for me to accept this simple, human reality. I suspect that it is hard for you too. To accept that I am needy, with parts of me seriously broken or painfully wounded, that I often lose my way, stray far from all that is good and noble and true. This is hard for me to recognise, even harder to acknowledge or affirm. I believe that this acceptance of what I am is so hard for me, because I so desperately need to be perfect and therefore cannot own that I am scarred and flawed, defective in countless ways and damaged in others. I think that you find this self-acceptance difficult too. So often a parishioner, on the verge of major diagnostic tests or even right before surgery, will ask not be put on the prayer list. Is this need for privacy a camouflage for a besetting fear of vulnerability? Is this fear of transparency a mask for an unwillingness to face that all is not well? We need saving you and I, and most of all we need saving from our sinful arrogance that covers over our need for salvation. We need a Saviour.

'O Jesus, I have promised to serve thee to the end,' we sing, 'be thou for ever near me, my Master and my Friend.' Am I ready to surrender my control and be mastered, is the desire for submission so strong in me that I cry out in song and in prayer, 'My Master?' Not so I fear, for you and I hold onto to nothing so much as our control of ourselves, of things, of others, of our time, our talents and our treasure. Not for us the abandonment of self-will, the abdication of self-determination, the resignation of resolve. We will not even share control of the roads we drive on, or the of public spaces in which we walk and work, however can we hand over ourselves, all that we are and all that we have to a Master who will shape our destiny. Ours is a culture of the selfish imposition of 'my way' upon people and things. We define ourselves by our disagreements and segregate ourselves by our opinions. Arduous and gruelling it is for us to make a compromise, excruciating and laden with anguish it is for us to live with concession or conciliation. And yet we make a mighty bungle of our lives, completely befoul our relationships and recklessly squander our talents. We need the authority that gives pattern to our random lives, we must have the discipline that keeps us within the boundaries of the wholesome, the decent, the life-giving. We need mastery, you and I, the kind that holds us accountable for the radiant potential we are and the glorious purpose for which we were made. We need a Master.

Difficult words these – Saviour, Master, King. They undermine the enormous worth our culture places on individuation and self-actualisation. These are not values to be nonchalantly handed over to anyone, human or divine. Difficult words these – Saviour, Master, King. They don't sit well with our emphasis on the dignity of every human person and the inherent freedom that person has to shape their own destiny. There are not freedoms you casually hand over to someone else, whether god or human. And King –now there's a sexist, chauvinistic icon, reflective of the male-dominated culture and religion that holds us in its sway. The feminist critique is absolutely right when it accuses us of demeaning the nature of God by our reduction of God to the patterns of patriarchy. They are right too when they convict us of undermining the full humanity of humankind when we deny that it is both feminine and womanly. All of that notwithstanding what we are speaking of here is our need to be plucked from all that threatens to undermine, diminish and destroy us. We need a Saviour. We are also speaking of our need to be led, moulded, shaped and guided by some personal reality that has an authority to which our whole being gives entire consent.

A King, a Sovereign Ruler, a Monarch is one whose hereditary royal identity defines the reality of public life. In Jesus we have Sovereign Ruler who calls us to a unique public life. Quite different from the public life that jumps out at us from our newspapers and TV screens. The public life this Sovereign guarantees with his life and guards with a sacrificing heart is life beyond selfishness, reaching for generosity; it is life beyond prejudice, reaching to acceptance; it is life beyond counting the cost, reaching for beg-heartedness; it is a life beyond the familiar, reaching for that new thing with which God's love is always surprising us. We want to live in the kingdom of which Jesus is King. We yearn for the benefits of citizenship of his realm. But we are also citizens of another world aren't we – the one in which the most beautiful comes first, the richest gets all the prizes, the most arrogant wins all the privileges. And we find it hard you and I, don't we, to give up this world's values for those of the kingdom in which Christ's rule is supreme.

We are struggling here in this beloved Cathedral to become a reflection in our worship of the image in which we are made, a rainbow nation at worship. This is not a new hope that has come upon us like a bolt of the blue – long ago, when Desmond Tutu was our Archbishop, several Synods challenged us to worship in ways that were simultaneously reflective of our time and our identity as well as remaining faithful to the glorious heritage of faith and liturgy which is ours as Anglicans. It will be good for us to be familiar with one another's languages and customs, although we all can speak English and we all eat tomato bredie. It will be good for us to delight in the hymns which gave the one faith to our very different childhoods – and it will be good to sing the hymns that rise from today's church. As we reach for that generous hospitality for ourselves, so we need to offer it to the many thousands who visit here with us, some to sit and pray and others to join us for our worship. This inclusive generosity requires much of us – it challenges our prejudices, disturbs our comfort zone, threatens our security – and yet it offers us a simple and achievable opportunity to make manifest among us and to the world the kingdom whose Saviour, Master and King we celebrate today.

May God who created us and whose divine image we bear, hold the vision bright before us. May the Holy Spirit give us the grace to be more generous than we thought possible, more patient than we thought we could bear, more eager to learn that we ever were before. And may Jesus Christ our Sovereign Lord, Saviour, Master and King, use us to build his kingdom of love and sacrifice, justice and peace among us.

Back to Sermons page

Mission and Vision | Services | Music | Ministries| History | Glass | Tour | Staff
Cathedral Friends | Publications | Links | Site Map | Home