Rev R D Drysdale

Dundrod Presbyterian Church

BBC Radio 4, Morning Service (Circa 1975)

Sermon, “Restlessness.”

 The other day, I happened to bump into a friend whom I hadn't seen for some time. In fact, we hadn't seen each other since our college days back in the early Sixties. So I suppose quite naturally, therefore, our conversation soon got round to the changes in our own lives and in our Ulster community since those halcyon student days.

My friend, was profuse in his sympathy for me on being a Christian minister in such a difficult time in our province. “I wouldn’t,” he said, “have your job for all the tea in China.” Indeed, I sensed that he was almost sorry for me.

Now, I imagine that viewed from the outside, as it were, The Church does appear to have taken a battering during these troubled years, and we have seen much of what Christianity stands for trodden under the feet of our violent and secular age. To be a committed Christian in Northern Ireland today is a costly discipleship.

However, in all honesty, I couldn't really share my friend's sympathy for me, simply because from a Christian point of view, no situation, however apparently disastrous, is without its redeeming features and its aspects of hope. Indeed, one of the strange paradoxes or puzzles of Christian experience is this.

That it is often the very godlessness of man that prepares the way for God, and the very breakdown of religion that can throw us back upon that spirit without which all religion is idolatrous. What we as Christians are called upon to do, therefore, is not to sit bemoaning our trials in this world, in a chronic mood of self pity and lamenting how evil are the days and how hostile are the times.

But rather, to perceive those redeeming features, which lie embedded within every time, and to focus upon those aspects of hope, which belong to every situation. 

Now, let's try and do that. 

On one occasion, the Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus, wanting him to provide a spectacular sign of his divine power, and so to prove his Messiahship.

Jesus refused to give any such sign, and rebuked their request with these words, “When it is evening, you say it will be fair weather, for the sky is red. And in the morning it will be stormy, for the sky is red and threatening. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but can you not discern the signs of the times?”

What Jesus was in fact saying is this, that if only we could discern the signs of the times, as well as we can understand the signs of the weather, then we would see that every situation is a potential opportunity for the manifestation of God's power. And every time is an hour for decision about God.

And further, what this means in practical terms, is that every Christian is therefore called upon always to live more positively than negatively. More joyfully than sadly. More patiently than impatiently, and even in a raped and injured society like ours, more thankfully than sorrowfully, and in confidence rather than despair, for the church is constantly summoned out into the storm of event, not to a pious corner of withdrawal from it.

Discerning the signs of the times. It means, then, that as Christians, we will observe the world and our involvement in it, always with hope. The hope of those who cannot but see, even in times of judgment, the presence of God everywhere at work. For our world, in all its sickness and shame, remains God's world.

What then are the signs of our time?

We will each no doubt see our own particular aspects, depending on where we stand. But it seems to me that at least one conspicuous sign is in our time, which I think we could all accept. It is summed up in the word restlessness. We are living in a restless time. We are living in an age when revolution is in the air and change the order of the day.

The old foundations, bulwarks, and structures of society are being violently shaken. As a result, many formerly stable and peaceful communities are cracking under this agitation and falling apart. In the moral realm, Traditional anchors have slipped their mooring, and many are adrift on the seas of uncertainty and doubt.

Conventional values, standards, and principles no longer retain the authority they once had. In this land, we find ourselves a generation held to ransom by gun and bomb. We have witnessed a situation created where human life is cheap. And man's inhumanity to man has plumbed satanic depths. And out across the world beyond our own border, we see this same disruption in many areas, together with its accompanying mood of uneasy restlessness.

The two great power blocs of Capitalism and Communism are being severely rocked. The Capitalist system is caught in the snare of its own affluence. And the Communist ideology trembles at times before the unyielding courage and dignity of the human spirit as an individual like the exiled Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

In the Third World, the poor and the underprivileged grow angry and here and there their anger erupts into terrorism. With what appears to be an ominous impatience, the starving millions cease to be content with the mere crumbs that fall from the rich man's table. And in the midst of all this, there is taking place under our very noses a quiet revolution.

It is the almost imperceptible shit. In the balance of world power, away from the centres of dominance in Washington, Moscow, Paris, and London, to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, slowly we are waking up to the disquieting reality that without oil, even our £20,000 Rolls Royce is a heap of metal, and our modern centrally heated homes cold as a farmyard barn. And sitting in the Far East, watching all this with inscrutable interest, is Red China.

But perhaps you feel that this world view and the restlessness we see there is all very remote from your life and mine. So who cares? Well, let's for a moment narrow down the scope of our vision. As we look at the smaller circle of those ordinary people we know, and ourselves among them, do we not see a restlessness there to?

Is it not there in the frightened child who lives in the narrow streets of our dangerous cities and towns. The lonely old person who approaches the end, alone. The bewildered youth whose life has already become hung up on drugs or drink. The confused secularist whose faith is gone and who can no longer believe.

The wealthy man whose money can purchase so many things to live with, but little to live for. The down and out, whom society has rejected and the church forgotten. The man or woman blinded by prejudice and poisoned by hatred. The innocent and the naive, caught up in organisations from which they cannot now free themselves. The religious man, who with a sense of shock has suddenly come to realise how one of the greatest of all corruptions can be religion itself when distorted and abused.

And so not only in the life of nations do we find a restlessness, but it is there in the experience of individuals all around us, and do we not find it in our own souls as well? For we, too, are part of our time.

This, then, is our world and our age. And it would be both an arrogant and a foolish man, who claimed to have any easy solution to the great problems and concerns that beset us. And yet, to return to Jesus words, if every time is God's time, then ours must be his too. But where, you may well ask, does God come into such a time as this?

Well, the only answer the Christian can give is that long ago, there walked this earth a man called Jesus Christ. And there were those who came to believe that in Him they caught sight of something miraculous above and beyond themselves, and yet capable of utterly transforming their daily lives and turning upside down their world.

For this Jesus entered into their restless longings, fears, and hopes, turning them into a divine discontent, which was satisfied only when they put their trust in Him and followed His way. So that, as the New Testament puts it, the blind received their sight, the lame walked, lepers were cleansed, the deaf heard, the dead were raised up, and the poor had the good news preached to them.

And the world heard. has never been the same since. The spirit of this man walks among us still, and calls us, too, to follow. For this is our situation also, if we only but realised it, that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. An early Christian writer has expressed it so beautifully in that famous prayer, 

“Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God. And our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee. Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.”

Amid all the chances and changes of these disturbing days, it is the love of God revealed through His Son, Jesus Christ, and encountered in His world, that remains fixed, constant, and eternal.

To believe that and to live by that faith is to gain an anchor that holds. And so if we could but see and understand it, it is our very restlessness itself today that signifies our need for God. For it is always the prodigal son gone into the far country and become discontent who is most ready to return again home.

And the gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news, that makes clear to this restless time that the door to the Father's house is still open.

There is a beautiful painting of the resurrection of Jesus, in which that incident is depicted where Mary is sitting outside the empty tomb, staring down into the shadows, weeping. She is weeping because the body of her Lord is gone, presumed stolen from the sepulchre. But behind Mary, coming across the grass with the first rays of the resurrection dawn breaking behind him is the figure of Jesus.

And the question posed by that painting, and to which it seems to demand an answer, is this. Will Mary continue staring down into the shadows, weeping, or look up and see the Christ?

And may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight. Oh God, our Lord, and our Redeemer. 

Amen.