St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
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My favourite novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is the story of Jim Dixon, a young lecturer on the staff of the history department of a redbrick university just after the Second world War. Jim is unhappy with just about every aspect of his life: his bumbling head of department Professor Welch and the awful folk evenings at the Welch's that he feels obliged to attend; his sort-of girlfriend Margaret who makes huge emotional demands on everyone; his permanent lack of funds; his work - he respects history but feels things get in the way of teaching it properly. Jim has a feeling that somewhere, somehow, there is a better life for him, probably in London. His story might be depressing if it weren't so funny and so true.
St. Paul was quite right in his Epistle to the Romans;; a lot of us spend a lot of time doing things we don't want to do because that is for some reason is how life ends up. He clearly understood the complexity of motives that get us into the situations we resent: loyalty, duty, guilt, and sometimes a real belief in what we do which is then negated by the 'things that get in the way'. There are any number of self-help books around today that offer solutions to people who are trapped in repeated patterns of behaviour that lead them to the same unhappy situation over and over again. Paul didn't have a self-help book - he had faith in Christ. He saw the entrapment that life can lure us into as an evil, and there was only one answer to evil for Paul, and that was the suffering and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Jesus too in the collection of sayings gathered in Matthew 11 saw the sometimes wearisome complexity of life: thank goodness he doesn't tell us to pull ourselves together or snap out of it: instead he says, 'Come to me all you that are weary and I will give you rest'. He doesn't judge us, instead he is just holding his arms out to us, and offering rest for our souls.
Christianity has always maintained that alongside this life with its complex tapestry of banal and beautiful and terrible reality there is a deeper reality, a greater reality. And this reality isn't just a pie-in-the-sky, everything will be all right really belief. Jesus doesn't promise anyone the kind of rest we might want - freedom from effort, from trouble, even from suffering. He says of what he offers: 'Take my yoke upon you and learn from me'. Hard work then. But he compares this kind of work, these burdens with those we pick up in the normal course of life; burdens with no purpose, tiredness with no achievement. In return he offers us the discipline of discipleship and the privilege of shouldering our burdens in a meaningful way, a vocational way; the sense that however trying things are they have a purpose and a dedication that makes them part of a far more meaningful, beautiful completeness. A completeness that we will understand one day, as T.S. Eliot said in Four Quartets, 'the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time'. Vocation is always a journey in which God and others will show us the way to follow, and not necessarily the way we might have chosen. And sometimes all that is required is to look at things differently: this is not my burden this is my vocation: it is my cross and I willingly take it up for him.
Amen.
