One of the privileges of being a member of this Cathedral community is our link with Shakespeare’s Globe, just along the river. The new season opened on Wednesday last week – Shakespeare’s birthday - with a production of King Lear. I was hanging around on my crutches beforehand when I was approached by a German television crew.  It’s difficult to hide in a clerical collar, with a badge saying cathedral chaplain and a pair of crutches. They asked me what Shakespeare had to do with church.  My off the cuff answer seemed to satisfy them, but when I think about it now, I could have done better: Lear is to do with all of us, church or no church. King Lear loses everything …home, possessions, the security of family. He is delivered into vagrancy, madness, nakedness and cold – and the loss of love. It relates to all of us – and, deeply at the present time, to our brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe as they contend with loss, exile, corruption and death.   Go see it – and be very moved.

Today we are asked by the Archbishops and by our own Bishop Tom to pray with and for Zimbabwe. We are to pray especially for the dioceses of Manicaland, Matabeleland and Nasvingo, for Harare and for Bishop Sebastian Bakare and his wife Ruth. We are to pray for the Mothers’ Union which has been particularly targeted this week.    We thank God for their courage and pray for their safety. Meanwhile the number of AIDs orphans continues to rise – and average life expectancy has fallen to little more than half what it was 15 years ago. And all the time the chilling threat of arms being delivered to the government. And exiles round the world watching with horror as tension mounts.

The contrast between this hellish situation and the visions of the New Jerusalem from Zechariah and Revelation is blinding. I want to suggest that how we read those passages can make a real difference to us and to our praying. Do we pray for a new future – the restoration of our world? That God will act for good in Zimbabwe? Of course we do. But not at arm’s length. We don’t pray as an alternative to action – but as a way into action. For Christians of the New Testament – and so for us – the New Jerusalem is not so much about the future as it is about the present. Paul understands that: The Jerusalem above is free and she is our mother; and. even more, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews:   you have come to Mount Zion and to the City of the Living God, the heavenly Jerusalem and to innumerable angels in festal gathering. The book of Revelation has been beloved of Christian martyrs throughout the centuries - and for good reason.   This vision of the New Jerusalem is a victory cry – God’s victory – and in claiming our place in the New Jerusalem we are allowing ourselves to be those very leaves – on the trees of the city - for the healing of the nations – the leaves in which God’s sap rises.   :  

When friends talk to me about Christian faith, and why it’s not for them, they hit a raw spot when they say that they don’t want to be dependent on a crutch. They mean that they think we religious people are out of touch, on some private journey which protects us from the pain of reality. And  that we’re over-optimistic about pie in the sky, preferring prayer to action.

You and I know that is not the Christian gospel:  which is anything but passive. Our theology was forged in a time of martyrdom through the early centuries, and in more recent times those who have acted against violence and corruption, in the name of God, have suffered for their stand. That’s the risk they took when they put their lives in God’s hands. Yet most of us are guilty as charged. We preach the cross. We know that all our language about God is embedded in history and culture. We know that and yet we protect ourselves. We mask ourselves with the conviction that we are right and everyone else is wrong - a protective shield which saves us from pain, from the business of working things out for ourselves – and spares us too from listening for the action which God requires of us.

The call to prayer meets us where our hearts are restless for a new world, of course; but when we make space for prayer and silence, we also make space for God to change us. As we pray today for Zimbabwe, we pray for ourselves, for humility and transparency in our dealings with one another. We pray for freedom from enslavement to anything, however good, which falls short of God’s call. We ask for a deepening awareness of  the sinfulness which we share with everyone else: including Mugabe and his henchmen. Bernard of Clairvaux talked about grace and humility rising in us ‘like sap in a tree’. And rise it will as we become aware of our human frailty in relation to the God who creates us for love and is sinless by nature.   It is that ‘sap’ which remakes us as leaves for the healing of nations.

The gospel teaches us that it is this awareness of who we are before God – who we really are – which will bring us the joy and consolation of knowing that we are in God’s hands, whatever happens, and that God’s will is beyond all things. In the measure in which we realise this: the more our hope is in God – and the more, in God’s mysterious economy, it becomes a reality.

I put it to you that, like King Lear, we search for the truth of things through exile, frailty and loss of power. Our deepening awareness of this in ourselves and in everyone else – will open up the possibility that we will know how to bear witness to the Kingdom of God in our midst. Some – especially those struggling in Zimbabwe – are bearing witness physically – with their lives. For us, our sense of homelessness and discomfort and powerlessness is a necessary part of finding God’s path. Bear witness we must to the hope which God sets always before us: that the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations – but if we are to be those leaves, the sap of humility must be allowed to rise within us – so we know that we do nothing without God’s help, that we are slaves to none other, that love is not without pain – and that our hearts will be restless and homeless until they rest in God. Our desire for that changed relationship touches every dimension of our humanity and forces us to make choices that will surprise us by their effectiveness. If we commit ourselves to pray for Zimbabwe today we are committing ourselves (as individuals and as a community) to listen very carefully for what God asks of us.

Both our readings for today are sublime prophetic passages.   Zechariah takes us to the city where children play and where old people lean on their sticks in peace (Zimbabwe has few old people – the average age of the population now 34 – and its children are AIDs orphans, who’ve never received medication and may not live long enough to play anywhere). The vision from Revelation is of Eden restored in the heavenly Jerusalem, where we are given access to the tree of life watered by the river which flows through the city for the healing of the nations. It’s there in the psalm too: You give them drink from the river of your delights, for with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light. There is no temple within the city because it has already become the living temple of God’s holy people who are to pray: ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done – on earth as it is in heaven’. 

The Temple is the setting for the Kingdom, and we are to live it just as the first Christians did. We may find their language strange and their imagery bizarre. For all language is inadequate for the indescribable - and yet the indescribable is already ours.