Trinity 7 2010 - falling apart/holding together
Colossians 1:15-16, 18
"Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, ..... and in him all things hold together"

Where are we going to turn when life seems to be falling apart?

When death and loss comes, and if feels as though all the joy has be taken out of life?

Where are we going to turn when we feel like strangers in a world where the values we grew up with no longer seem to be recognised.

When a violent and disturbed gunman is the given days of media attention and after his death is feted as a hero?

When neighbours no longer know each other or trust each other, and families scatter far and wide.

When a few grow massively rich, while the majority face  austerity and cuts in pensions, in salaries, in services?

Where are we going to turn when the air is so polluted that some struggle to breathe, and noise so prevalent you could easily forget what silence sounds like?

Where are we going to turn when the world seems to have no centre, no purpose, no direction, everything seems hollow?

Where are we going to turn when we have to agree with the poet who said

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” [W. B. Yeats]

Where do we turn? When things fall apart we turn to Christ, and as St Paul promised the Colossians, we find that in him all things hold together.  Which is not to say the pain and the contradictions, the evil and chaos are magically wiped away, airbrushed out of our lives, or out of the world.  But when we turn to Christ we discover that the heart of the universe is loving not hateful, creative not destructive, life-giving not deadly, and that that is the enduring reality, the deeper truth.  Sin and destruction, selfishness and greed are passing realities, temporary blemishes on a world that was created by and for love, and through Christ we find that their power has been once and for all overcome.

I believe with all my heart this is true: but you cannot learn this by someone telling you, you will only know this truth when you live it out , when you make turning to Christ your habit, when you practice seeing and trusting in God’s love at work in the world.  Perhaps our ancestors were sometimes better than us at doing that.  We are remembering today that this church is dedicated to St Margaret of Antioch,  she was in the middle ages one of the most popular of saints, because there was a text attributed to her, in which she promised to pray to Christ for women in childbirth.  It is hard for us to understand how dangerous and terrifying childbirth then was, with 1 in 5 mothers dying in the process.  So in terror and pain women turned to St Margaret, and through her to Christ.  We may quibble with the theology of using a saint as an intermediary, but the instinct to hold fast to Christ even in the midst of the most terrifying and painful of experiences, is one we can learn from.

When things fall apart we turn to Christ, but we live in a community where so many no longer know Christ, and so have nowhere to turn.  At the end of this service when we are asked to “go in peace to love and serve the Lord” part of our task is to go out and make Christ known to others, so that they too might turn to Him.