Truth and Consequences: Sermon 9 September 2007
I don't know if you watch Frasier on television; the comedy about a radio psychiatrist in Seattle, who tries to sort out other people's lives while he's living a life that's just as complicated. The theme song talks about "tossed salads and scrambled eggs - they're calling again..." Those are his on-air patients, people struggling with things that can't be reversed, can't be undone in their lives. Because you can't un-toss a salad, or un-scramble an egg.
Irreversibility. We all have to live with it. Here's a poem about it. Don't let the word "poem" freak you out. You'll know this one:
Mama, just killed a man;
Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead...
Consequences. Isn't that why Bohemian Rhapsody has such a resonance with us? I mean - who understands the words anyway? I’d thought for years that the middle section of the song referred to some ferocious lady called “Miss Miller”. “We will not let him go...Let him go Miss Miller...” In fact, that’s what I still hear, even though I know that the words are “Bismillah!” - Arabic for “if it please God...”
And the lyric is a sort of meandering, spaced-out sequence of passing thoughts strung like pearls on a thread. Ah, but there is a thread! And the name of the thread is - consequences.
Everybody understands consequences. Or do they?
We are horrified, from time to time, to hear about schoolyard killings in the United States. Teenagers, sometimes very young teenagers - sometimes pre-teens - bringing guns to school. And we ask, helplessly “How could they do it?”
And the answer to that question is often terrifyingly simple. The children (which is what they are) who did such things didn’t understand the consequences. They didn’t know that what happens when you point a gun at someone and pull the trigger, whether they live or die, is irreversible.
Because it isn’t like that in the films. Or on television. And nobody told them. In a terrifying number of cases, the young perpetrators of awful, awful things just didn’t understand that what they had just done was irreversible. Because the first people to tell them were the policemen who arrested them.
“Oh, come on!" you say, "surely everybody knows...” Maybe that’s what the parents of some of these youngsters thought. Everybody knows that there are consequences...” So they didn't tell them... Or maybe they just brought them up shielded from consequences...
I have no idea whether, in the story of little Rhys Jones, shot dead at the age of eleven by a teenager on a BMX bike, there is some horrible extra callousness at work; there probably is. But whatever has twisted the life and mind of an adolescent, barely more than a child, into the kind of being who could do such a thing, somewhere in there will be an element of inability to see and feel the consequences. Not just the consequences to him, when he's caught. An inability to take in what it means for a family, for friends, for a whole city, that he did what he did. Several people interviewed at Rhys's funeral, trying to cope with those consequences, said to interviewers that they were sure that whoever had done this would turn himself in that night. He didn't. He is still able to live with the consequences. Maybe he will always be able to live with the consequences. But only by not looking at them. And he will never be able to escape them. They will distort his life forever, one way or another.
He's just running from them.
It isn't flippant to suggest that Bohemian Rhapsody has a strange diagnostic insight into a culture in which things like this can happen.
Mama, just killed a man,
Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead...
Two lines, and you’re trapped inside a suffocating, unchangeable situation. You don’t know the circumstances, don’t know what happened or why, beyond the brute fact.
But you also know that that brute fact can’t be undone. And if you know that, you understand the second, different sort of irreversibility that Bohemian Rhapsody - and life - are about.
...life had just begun,
And now I’ve gone and thrown it all away....
Life’s like that. You are only free before you make your choices. Choices are about just exactly how you throw away your freedom. And if you think that you can keep your freedom by not making any choices - well, that’s a choice, too. And if you choose not to exercise your freedom, by making your whole life into a rigid clench, or by avoiding choices and commitments - you find that your freedom has drained away just the same. Maybe more.
Because to throw away your freedom by making commitments, whether they work out or not, is to have something, to do something - to live. And the person who made commitments, did irreversible things, whether they worked out or not, was at least brave enough to have lived.
That’s where the world was, in 1975, when Bohemian Rhapsody came out. Since then, have things changed? Yes, and no. What we have developed, what our culture has developed, since then, are ways of seeming to live without consequence. Techniques of reversible living. From virtual reality to cosmetic surgery, via clouds changing to sunshine on the Lawyers4U or National Accident Helpline adverts, we live in a world that lets us undo the consequences of things - or which holds out the promise. We can kill reversibly, have reversible accidents, reversible sex, in this consequence-less world.
The old "real world" where people suffer things, and do things, that are irreversible and that have consequences, still pokes through occasionally. It can still jag and scrape us. We haven’t managed to buck the reality of that world. All we’ve managed is to push it away. But for the most part, we can keep it at a distance. We can choose - and this is where Bohemian Rhapsody is almost a prophetic text - in a world where, when all is said and done, where all the consequences have poked and prodded us, to believe that
Nothing really matters any more...
Because nothing has consequences that can't be changed...
Would any of you think of building a tower without first sitting down and calculating the cost, to see whether he could afford to finish it? Otherwise, if he has laid he foundation and then is not able to complete it, the onlookers will laugh at him. “There is the man” they will say, “who started to build and could not finish...”
Have you ever had problems with today’s little Gospel reading? I have. It has always seemed to me to be the very opposite of what Jesus usually says. Jesus usually says “Follow me!” Be committed. Get up, leave your old life behind, and follow, and do it now!” Anyone who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is unworthy of the kingdom of heaven! Let the dead bury their dead - you, follow me!” Don’t think about the consequences - just do it...” “Yes, it’s irreversible - so what?!”
The heroes of the Gospel are fishermen who leave their nets instantaneously, tax-collectors who leave piles of money on the table at the Seat of Custom without a backward glance. And philosophers and theologians would later talk about the “leap of faith”, and the heroism it requires, and see this as the heart of what Jesus was and is all about.
And here he is saying “Yes, I’m asking for a leap of faith. Yes I want you to be ready to leave all sorts of things behind. But first, I want you to sit down and work out how much it’s going to cost you.”
And he conjures up the example of a king who sets off to battle, and then realises that his force is half his enemy’s. And he “sends envoys and asks for terms” instead. Do you remember the version of Bannockburn that appears in 1066 and All That? Where the English, who were so used to fighting against vastly superior odds, were so thrown by the Bruce’s mean, sneaky tactic of being heavily outnumbered, that they got confused and didn’t know how to fight the battle? History is full of tiny bands defeating overwhelming numerical superiority. What is Jesus talking about here?
He’s talking about consequences. And about looking at them, because they won’t go away. And he’s talking about a faith, and a discipleship, that’s to do with following him day by day, in real life, where you don’t always know, sometimes can’t imagine the consequences - and sometimes, you’re appalled at the consequences.
He’s saying “Yes, being a disciple of mine makes colossal demands. But if the consequences aren’t real to you, the demands aren’t real either!”
I love “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” The contestants are a study for armchair psychologists. There are those who answer the half-a-million-pound question and get it wrong, and drop back to £32,000. And they aren’t clear (and neither am I) whether they lost £218,000, or £468,000 or nothing because they didn’t actually have more than the guaranteed £32,000. Even more poignant are the people who drop from £16,000 to £1000. I don’t know many people to whose lives £15,000 wouldn’t make an enormous difference. The variety of responses is wide. Some of them are devastated, some of them seem genuinely cavalier about it (“It’s only money...”) and some of them seem in complete denial (“It’s only money... and it’ll be ten days before what’s happened hits me and I’m able to cry like a baby...) Denial, as they say, ain't just a river in Egypt...
There are people whose discipleship of Jesus is an exercise in total denial. Because they feel that that’s what faith demands. That faith means that you simply deny that there are lots of things - and people - in your life with which and with whom you have a network of very complicated relationships. Because you’re not supposed to. Because good little Christians know that that’s not what Christians do. Good Christians can simply sing that “Nothing compares to you...” and close their eyes, and pretend that nothing else in life matters to them but God, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Faith is a warm, fuzzy feeling where "nothing really matters any more". Only God.
And Jesus won’t have it. Jesus won’t allow us to indulge in denial. He tells us to look at our lives and weigh up what we are doing and saying when we confess his lordship.
What Jesus says in today’s Gospel is that you must reckon the cost of everything into your discipleship. What if following Jesus demands that you tell the truth, no matter how unpleasant? And how unpopular that makes you? Isn’t being loving and accepting part of the demand of discipleship? And sometimes you sit down to do your sums and you realise that what you thought was being loving and accepting is really just wanting to be popular, and that that’s something you don’t want to give up, even at the expense of truth. Or what happens if you love speaking the truth: "I always tell it as I see it!" And you sit down and do your sums and realise that what you see as speaking the truth in love is actually you enjoying sitting in judgement on others, and that your discipleship is a cover for some rather unpleasant unexamined things that really need to be looked at?
What Jesus will not have is unexamined discipleship.
Sit down and do the sums, he says.
What today’s Gospel does is tie discipleship into real life. The life of commitments and consequences and irreversible decisions. Of good and bad relationships, of marriages and divorces, of mortgages and job insecurity. And to say “This is where you have to follow me. This is where you have to be a disciple.” No denial, no escapism. Faith, like love, is a relationship in which everything has to be capable of being looked at openly and honestly, or it doesn’t work.
I can try to use faith as an anaesthetic. If I sing enough hymns about how nothing matters but Jesus, the pain will go away. It may be denial, but it works for me.
Only it doesn't... Because it isn't true to real life.
If you aren't counting the cost of faith, you aren't living in the real world, the world of consequences. "Facts are fellows who are hard to knock down!" said Burns. Well, actually he said "Facts are chiels that willnae ding!" Reality is where we have to live. But reality is also where God is, so if our faith is a fleeing from reality, it's also, sadly, a fleeing from God.
But turn it round and look at it from there. Real life - what you go back to when the church doors open in a few minutes - is where God is to be found. Where we have to live, and face the irreversibility of our lives and our histories, and the consequences of what we have done and others have done to us. God's there. That's where we look for him. And that's where he finds us.