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Saturday 16 March 2024

Cloudy God, Fast God

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 17th) 2024

 

READINGS

Hebrews 5: 1-10

Psalm 119:9-16

John 12: 20-33

 

[The wondrous thing about the small slice of the letter or, I suspect, sermon to the Hebrews that we have read from [at St. Peter’s] is that it can be made to mean almost anything. There is a long-standing tradition when persons are ordained of delivering them a congratulatory card, reminding them that they are “a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” 

The "who/what" of Melchizedek aside, beyond a fleeting Hebrew Scripural mention, tbere is a truth in the cards doled out to neo-phyte clergy. Yes, in orthodox theology that are priest forever in some way, but they were on the day before their ordination as well. The English and Latin languages have done us a great disservice, for different Greek words for priesthood have slid into Latin and English usage, but I can safely say that it is the intention of the church that those of us who wear our collars back to front are not priests in any different way to the way in which you the people of God are priests, and that is the priesthood into which we are baptised.

We are of course baptised into Jesus and he fulfils the priesthood that the author of Hebrews is cryptically writing of. You and I in exactly the same way, regardless of our neck apparel, participate in that priesthood. There will be more of that on other occasions, but basically the unfortunate English word describing the “priesthood” into which I am ordained and you are not has nothing to do with the priesthood of Melchizedek.

But although I primarily want to talk about the gospel reading, and briefly at that, it is always worth checking the ways in which we can distort scripture. In the gospel reading the focus is the glorification of the true priest. There the word in Greek is hieros, from which we get hierarchy, the ordained priesthood with unfortunate collars is depicted by the  word presbuteros, from which akmost ironically we get the word Presbyterian. 

I remember well my head of seminary thumping the desk and exclaiming there must be no hieros, no hierarchy in the church.

But of course there is in our denomination. It’s just that there shouldn’t be. And I’ve made that clear as mud. Enough.]

What is of this glorification of which Jesus speaks? Very little in John’s account of the gospel is weightless, and  “glory” is one of his key words. John depicts a scene foreshadowing in which God extends divine relationship with the Jews to a relationship of God  with all people.

Most of us belong in that category.

It is outsiders who have come longing to see Jesus. It is to primaril them that Jesus addresses his thoughts on glorification.

“Glory” in the Hebrew scriptures was the sign and prerogative of God. Jesus begins talking to the Greeks about it in the context of prediction of his own suffering and death. Something very strange is going on. To the Greeks the concept of a God suffering was impossible. To the Jews, as we will see in Paul’s writings, the possibility of God’s death on what Paul calls a tree, a wooden cross, was obscene.

Jesus here sets out to identifies himself with God and God with impossibility, even obscenity.

We will be doing a lot of hard work in our liturgy over the next two weeks. Next week we will, though for most of the last 20 centuries the church has forgotten it, look at the way in which we have sought God in the wrong places. 

Certainly, yes, the Hebrew scriptures speak of the glory of God, the shekinah, in a pillar of fire by night and cloud by day, majestic and terrifying. As I was wonderfully reminded during my all too short sojourn in the Northern Territory, there is little that is more majestic than cumulonimbus clouds soaring tens of thousands of metres into the air. Bright light of any sort in the night sky, such as the terrifying grandeur of a volcanic eruption, or God forbid the towering inferno of a high rise building caught alight, are a deeply unsettling sight

Yet Jesus turns the gaze of the Greeks and Jews alike elsewhere. Next Sunday we will enact the desire to see him enter our world and overthrow corruption. If I can find some palm branches in time, we will at least symbolically cast them before his feet, as he comes to our place, comes as a conqueror. Then he will turn that our expectations upside down, for he will come in peace, and will continue in death.

Even the great passing miracle of the resurrection which we will finally encounter on Easter day will be something no newspaper of the time, no cameras, no human eye could capture. God is too fast to be captured, as the poet R. S. Thomas reminds us.

We have much work to do these next two weeks, as we journey towards the moment in which Jesus is lifted up from the earth and begins the whisper that he is drawing all people – people far beyond the boundaries that we like to set – to him.

Friday 8 March 2024

God does not carry a flag

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
& St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,
FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT
(March 10th) 2024

 

READINGS

Numbers 21: 4-9

Psalm 107:1-8

John 3: 14-21

 

In a number of editions of the bible the probable sayings of Jesus are  marked in red. By doing this edir=tors in once sesese helpful, in that they, with some guesswork, separate Jesus from the editors of his and narrators of his life. The process was somewhat spurious, but it can help us generate the remarkable vision of Jesus from the increasingly restrctibe frames of his followers. That was not the intention of the editors!

But if we reconize that there are both Jesus satings the narators' saying in the text then it can soon be seen that the overall emphasis of Jesus is that of welcome and embrace, rather than rejection and exclusion that has so often been the narrative of Christians.

As it happens it is that insight at least in part that gave rise to one of the more significant theological works of recent decades, when Croation theologian Miroslav Volf wrote his influential volume Exclusion and Embrace. Volf studied under my own favourite theologian, Jürgen Moltmann. I tell you all this not to show off but to put this family as it were of interpreters into a context.

Moltmann and Volf alike were exposed to human darkness. Moltmann was a prisoner of the allies during World War 2, although his reflections were primarily borne not of his experiences as a prisoner but on his recognition of the ways in which his people, especially the German Christian people, failed to see the evil growing in their midst. Volf similarly saw the brutality of Serbo-Croatian racial conflict, and the ethnic cleansing, that, like that of Hitler's pogrom, wreaked havoc and slaughter across his native lands of the former Yugoslavia.

Any theology, indeed any faith, that wrestles with brutality and evil and darkness of this depth is never going to be superficial. Speach of the light of Christ coming into the world after the slaughter of thousands, is obscene. Or it is unless it drives deep into the questions of where God is in times of deepest darkness, and unless it is backed up by prophetic action and attitude.

No comfortable or superficial answer will suffice, and a nine minute reflection in the context of a Eucharist in a comfortable country will not scratch the surface of the surface. 

So I can do little more than to drop hints borrowed from both Moltmann and Volf, though I am an inadequate and superficial reader of both. But in the face of bitter division in the cultures of the europeanized world, the internal conflict growing in the United States, the brutal conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the seemingly endless bitter hatred between Israel and its neighbours, we cannot remain complacent. We cannot speak glibly of a light that shines in darkness.

Moltmann’s unforgettable emphasis when reading the gospels was that the work of the Incarnation, the drawing of God into the heart and breath of humankind, that the extent of that work is clear only when Jesus himself, when God’s own self cries out in absolute Godforsakenness in the darkness of Good Friday.

We will to some extent explore the depth of that cry, the depth of that descent into human hell in the liturgies of Holy Week. We are not there yet. Nevertheless, for those of us who have been exposed to the Christian journey of faith we know it’s coming.

In the light of this descent into the depths of human darkness Moltmann emphasised that there is no place where Christlight does not shine. Lest that be some sort of cosy Linus blanket for us, he emphasised too that there must be no place, no difficulty, into which we should hesitate in bearing Christ light. 

I speak as one who lives a cosy life. I try however to grapple with and respond to the facts that Christ is present in deepest darkest hell holes such as Gaza, or the eastern borders of Ukraine. Present too in the loneliness of victims of police brutality. That brutality that is often championed by those crying out with plastic hypocrisy, "Lord, Lord," or who speak out of obscene Christian nationalism. God does not carry a flag. 

If Christianity in any form does not speak out in the face of brutality and oppression then it is, to borrow a German word, ersatz Christianity, a French word, faux Christianity, or arguably an English word, counterfeit Christianity.

Volf saw this too. As he looked at Christian communities dwelling in the comfort zones of the West he recognised that the popular face of Christianity was one that tended to exclusion, to pushing away the vulnerable, victimised,  oppressed, broken peoples of God’s earth. He saw the persecution and near-genocide of ethnic minorities of the former Yugoslavia. He dared Christians, and continues to do so, to speak out dangerously where there is hatred. To do so whether that hatred be in the name of ethnic otherness, faith-otherness, gender or sexuality otherness, or any other form of darkness.

When Jesus spoke of the Son of Man being lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness, he was speaking of his own vocation to go into the deepest darkest places of human experience. Not for Jesus the cosy complacency of religious surety – which is incidentally the reason I hesitate ever to include “Blessed Assurance” in my hymn lists, however devoted its author and singers mean to be.

No. Jesus was not comfortable with the comfort zones of believers. Jesus was adamant that the Way of the Cross takes us into the darkest ills of human experience.

Given the vicissitudes of birthplace and parentage it is unlikely I and possibly you will follow Jesus into those darkest places. Some of us may experience the personal hells of bereavement, betrayal, loneliness or just common human doubt. It is hard to measure the intensity of hell. But we are the ones who must stand under the judgement that Jesus speaks of,  if we choose to prefer complacency and selfishness to the tough claims of the way of the cross. We are called to open our lives up to embrace, and not exclude, those on the fringes of our s
ociety or of world politics.

Few of us will have to be terribly brave in our lives, and often we will fail, but the story of the New Testament and indeed of the whole biblical record is the story of those who fail yet feel the nudge of God, allow themselves to be picked up, and stumble on again.

On this Lenten journey, as life stands at the moment, few of us are in the places of darkness addressed by a Moltmann or a Volf or a Jesus as he confronted the depths of religious hypocrisy. But we are called to open ourselves up to that possibility, and to the demand of the cross that we live lives of authenticity, of compassion for the suffering and excluded, of embrace to the lonely. And lest I fall into the very cosy complacency of which I speak I too am reminded that I preach not to you but to me and you and us alike.

Friday 1 March 2024

Glyptapanteles and the Gospel

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN,
THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT
(March 3rd) 2024

 

READINGS

1 Corinthians 1: 18-25

Psalm 19:1-6

John 2: 13-22

 

If I were forced to select one biblical passage by which to live it would be this short excerpt from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. One of the advantages of living by the lectionary is that I don’t get to choose my favourite passages all the time but here you have it.

I’ll come back to that in a moment but as we leap for a week or two from Mark to John I must say a word or two about John. Scholars disagree as to when the Fourth Gospel was written most agree it was very late in the First Century after Christ’s death and resurrection. Perhaps about 100 to 105 of the common era. I am conservative in my understanding of how he came to have this writing, and hold to more or less the traditional belief that the now ageing man John realises that his life is coming to an end, not through martyrdom like most of his peers in the church but through the diminishment of old age. And so with the help of a scribe he sits down the events of his time with Jesus, Jesus Incarnate, and in doing so gives us the extraordinary gift of insight into the workings of the mind and heart of the one that he and we call Lord.

But why is this passage from Paul so important to me? It might be summarised by saying that we never can, nor ever will, nor ever should get our minds around the whole Jesus thing. Paul, frustrated by his beloved Corinthians, is edging towards his characteristic prickliness. Because they are edging towards a smart alecky approach to living out the gospel. Look at us, they’re muttering, aren’t we smart, aren’t we good, aren’t we successful?

Paul’s answer is a resounding “no.” He dares to do something that few of us should ever do. Elsewhere, dealing with recalcitrant believers, he utters the famous words, “it is no longer I but Christ who lives in me.” He meant it with all the weight of first century psychology, which of course didn’t exist.

Some of you may know the horrible example of nature red in tooth and claw, the Glyptapanteles wasp.* It devours its host from the inside out, even going so far as taking over and controlling the host’s brain. Paul doesn’t mean anything quite so lurid but now I’ve given you the image you may well never forget it. Paul has a deep sense that as we open ourselves up to the risen Christ in worship, in scripture, in fellowship and in prayer, we become taken over by Christ love We are controlled not in a zombie manner, but by the extraordinary impetus of God’s will to love, God’s will that we “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.”

The Corinthians are not doing that. So Paul takes the dangerous step of setting himself up as an example. He reminds them that he was not slick in speech, or smart in brain, or rich in pocket. He was dependent utterly on the Christ who had taken over his life. So taken over his life that Paul dared to advertise his own integrity as a counter-image to the Corinthians’ sheer arrogance.

Paul dares to remind the Corinthians that he came to them and persuaded them of the integrity of the gospel by sheer reliance on the risen Christ; by absolute absence of trickery. Not look at me, but look through me and see Christ.

The litmus test I like to use in the life of churches, to evaluate authenticity and Christlikeness is that of “who is this about?” Have I, for example, turned worship into a performance of which I am the star, whether I be pastor, preacher, priest, music leader or, improbably, janitor?

As an aside I’m reminded once again of the time that I carried out an emergency Sunday locum in an Adelaide parish, and found myself talking after the service to a man who had just finished cleaning the toilets. He turned out to be a retired bishop, who of course I had never met before, but who I had long heard of as one of the most authentic and credible bishops in the Australian church.

I strive for excellence in many aspects of worship and Christian life – while being fully aware of my own inadequacy. I do so not in the belief that we should radiate excellence for the sake of excellence, but the belief that if we get our balances right, if we use the gifts that God has given us corporately and individually to the best of our ability, then we can be assured that we are authentically serving the gospel of the risen Lord.

As Jesus entered the temple that he saw as the House of his Father he is furious. He is furious because all the potential of the temple to be a place of awe and mystery and sanctuary and justice has been turned into a maelstrom of commerce and cheap plasticity. Our task is to make sure that our small buildings of God must never become such a thing (and let me add I sincerely believe that they have not). But we must always be on our guard. I want to get our assets right at all times to ensure they serve the proclamation of the gospel, and to that we will work and are working together.

In this time of Lent the equally big if not bigger issue is for us to look deeply within ourselves to remember a sort of benevolent form of the Glyptapanteles wasp; surrender ourselves daily to be transformed in the likeness of love, the likeness of Christ, the likeness of lives lived for others.

 * Okaaaaay ... technically the picture isn't Glyptapanteles, but the best I can do ... and it is a nasty bugger

Friday 23 February 2024

two digits from the truth

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, 
and the MISSION HALL, GLENORCHY
 
on the SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (February 25th) 2024

 

READINGS

Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16

Psalm 22: 21-31

Mark 8: 31-38

 

As you may recall, last week we touched on two highly regarded recitations of Mark’s Gospel-account that have gone the rounds of the English speaking world in the decades that I refer to as post Beatles western society. Will you to be at one of those recitations you would have been listening and watching 4 just a little under two hours to hear the 11,300 words delivered. If you were part of a typical audience, and indeed if you were a part of Mark’s original audiences, you would have been spellbound.

You would also probably have noticed that this passage in Mark refers back to an incident some hundreds of words earlier. In Chapter 6 Mark relates the occasions on which Herod and others were asked to explain who they thought Jesus was. Those kind of summary statements are regurgitated in this scene, But the impulsive Peter is prepared to go one step further. There is a sense in which he gets it right, but while the comparison is horrendously unfair to Peter, I’m reminded of moments in which Mr. Trump has been asked to make some comment about or based on the Bible. Some syllables emerge, but they seem to be empty of the powerful insight that is granted Christ-followers through the input of the one we know as Ruarch, Pneuma, Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity.

And as we journey on through Mark’s Gospel, even without the references to the Spirit that emerge in John and Luke and Paul, we will begin to realise that that is precisely the point of understanding to which Mark is leading us. To import from those other biblical writers for a moment, Mark’s point is that until we have encountered the full extent of the descent of God in Christ into human experience, and the ascent of God in Christ into the unimaginable experience of resurrection, we have no grasp of the Jesus event or the Jesus message.

And for once our Hebrew scripture reading provides us with some help, a teaching aid or corroboration from a more ancient time. Because the story of Abraham and Sarah provides some useful parallels as a journey from below par comprehension, and in the case of Sarah, bitter incomprehension, to enlightenment and realisation of the power and majesty of God. That story too is something of which we will gain glimpses in the months to come.

But for now, Mark turns to Jesus and his very stark dealing with Peter’s brash but uncomprehending words. There is no genuine way to wriggle out of the phrase “Get behind me Satan.” Jesus is simply not being warm and cuddly, fuzzy and sweet in this moment of bleak contrast between misunderstanding and understanding. For once I’m helpfully reminded of my Year 5 maths teacher of very unblessèd memory, who when I brought to his desk my maths book with my attempt at the answer of what I presume was a reasonably complex question, exclaimed “close enough” when the answer I reached was only one or two digits from the truth. In many ways that was the end of my mathematical career, but that is another story. The point made here is not mathematical but what theologians call “soteriological” – there’s my Scrabble word for the week – that is to say concerning salvation, or as I would prefer to say, concerning our surrender to God’s immeasurable and unquenchable love.

Peter was right, but if I can now be unmathematical, not right enough. Like the ball of a bowler that shaves the stumps but does not dislodge the bales, this moment illustrates a miss, not a hit, an empty appeal, not a wicket.

Jesus of course goes on to outline some astounding demands of his followers. I for one will admit that I have not accomplished them. Few do. Some would say none do, I though make allowances for those who surrender their lives in martyrdom for their faith or for those whose lives are an immeasurable testimony to faith; I think of a Desmond Tutu or for example a Céire [kayra] Kealty (you’ll have to Google  her!).

For most of us though the journey continues to be a stumbling, meandering, rather Peterish series of blunders, and for many of us, and I think of myself, ordinariness. But that is not the point Mark is making. Or it is, but indirectly. Because in the end the overall story that Mark tells is of ordinary people who dared to stumble, but stumble in the way of the cross. Peter got it wrong, and so will we, but he did stumble on, and eventually becomes the sign of what a life can be invaded by the restorative patient love of the risen Christ made present through the Spirit of God.

[For those of us at Saint Peter’s the banner above my head remains as an enigmatic reminder of the transformation of an ordinary life. While I suspect it is the stuff of legend, it is traditional to believe that Peter was eventually executed by crucifixion upside down, because he felt himself unworthy to be executed in the same way as his saviour. It’s a powerful legend, though somewhat unlikely psychologically, militarily or historically. The Romans were unlikely to acquiesce to such a request, hastening the suffering thereby of the martyr’s death. But it stands outside history, a story inflamed by spiritual possibilities to remind us that all of us who stumble can open ourselves up, often through repeated stumbling, lifetimes of stumbling, to be agents of the Reign of God and its proclamation in word and preferably action.]

Friday 16 February 2024

a man in a hurry

  

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT
(February 18th) 2024

 

READINGS


1 Peter 3:18-22

Psalm 25:1-5      

Mark 1: 9-15

 

Back in the 1980s an actor named Alex McCowan had a huge run of successes performing a recitation of Mark’s Gospel account around the world. His venues included both the Edinburgh Festival and the Festival of Sydney – goodness knows where else. Unfortunately, although I was in Sydney for the festival the week he performed I was unable to get a seat - and that despite my brother being on staff at the festival - because it was sold out.

Even at the time, and it was around the mid ’80s, it struck me as both amazing and extraordinary that in a fiercely secular city at a fiercely secular festival a recitation of one of the books of the Bible would draw sellout crowds – as indeed it was doing around the world, including New York.

And yet a part of me gets it. Mark, and I am conservative enough to see no reason why he may not have been the companion of Paul mentioned just eight times in the New Testament, is a man of urgent passion There is a tendency amongst biblical scholars in my more liberal tradition automatically to assume that whoever is traditionally considered to have been the author of a biblical book probably wasn’t, as you can see by my notes on our reading from 1 Peter. Sometimes I think the scholars are right, sometimes I think they are wrong, and I am arrogant enough to trust my own judgement.

But I digress. Mark, unfortunate enough to be the companion of Paul fell out with the prickly pastor. Many people did. Yet it is a sermon in its own right to know that Mark and Paul found ways to work together despite their differences, resolved their disputes, became powerful forces in the proclamation of gospel hope.

Let us leave that thought there. But we are I think invited to explore the question why did Mark’s gospel account, as admittedly recited by a great actor, play to packed houses around the English-speaking world? And in our reading today we are given one of the most powerful examples of a reason. There is no pause for breath. Jesus is baptised. Commissioned to do God’s work, and immediately sent out to the place of pain, self-doubt and suffering. As it happens pain, self doubt and suffering uh exactly where the story will end. Or, depending on our understanding of the end of Mark’s gospel account, where the story will not end. But of that more in the weeks and months to come.

Mark the writer is in a terrible hurry. He is an instinctive storyteller. He would not top the grade in English classes. John and Luke in particular we are masterful creative literary minds. Matthew too, though perhaps a little more given to hell fire and fury. No, Mark is the sort of figure I often saw around campfires in Australia, perhaps more than New Zealand at least in Pākehā culture, telling yarns. And a yarn, far from being untruth, is often the most powerful vehicle of truth, as Jesus demonstrates in his telling of parables.

Mark is in a hurry. Forty-one times he uses the adverb “immediately.” Were I his English teacher I would mark him down for overuse. But I was not and am not, and thank God the gospel is not dependent on literary snobs. Mark was in a hurry. Perhaps like many of the early Christians this was because he had a pressing sense of urgency, an expectation that the predicted return of Jesus would come soon. We may sneer at that, and many critics of Christianity do, but I fear we do so at some considerable risk. Either speaking in a faith-based way, or in the shadow of nuclear, environmental, economic, or astronomical disaster, or in the shadow of our own mortality, we are never far from the sword of Damocles.

Mark was in a hurry. He tells of a Jesus who is sent from what for most people is something of a peak experience, a rite of passage, albeit one conducted by his somewhat dour cousin John, sent into the harshest, most inhospitable places of geography or of the human psyche. He is sent there to wrestle with demons, however we understand that.

But there in that wrestling, we begin to see the kernel of Mark’s urgent message. Neither demons nor darkness nor death are permitted the final say. We will come to the closing remarkable words of Mark’s original story in several weeks’ time, but many of us will be aware that his ending was so shocking that at least two early Christian writers edited and amended it. Badly, I would dare to say, and it seems to me that their much weaker endings stand in the scriptures as a reminder to us of how we should not water down the shocking news of resurrection.

But that for another time, too. For now, Mark simply wants us to know that it is in the most desolate human spaces that God generates light and love and faith and hope. That, as the author of Psalm 139 put it so eloquently, there is no place, even the darkest depths of hell, where God and God-light are not. Jesus demonstrates the impetus of God to generate hope even in the darkest and deepest of trials.

And as bearers of Christ and Christ light we are called to do so likewise.

40 years after the late Alex McCowan’s recitation of Mark’s gospel account a new actor, Stefan Smart, has been doing the same thing. Like his predecessor, Smart has performed to sellout crowds around the world. Smart has gone a step further and produced a film version of his recitation. That too has taken many secular festivals by storm. It is our task to learn how in a sceptical age we two might be bearers of the shear urgent unstoppable energy of Christ light.



Friday 26 January 2024

future-scaping? no thanks

 


SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the MISSION HALL, GLENORCHY
ORDINARY SUNDAY 4
(January 28th) 2024

 

READING          

Deuteronomy 18: 15-20

As a concession to the 21st  century I have set myself something of a challenge this year. It may sound counterintuitive for someone who has at least some pretence to be a biblical scholar, and who has always emphasised the place of scripture in preaching.

But while I do not believe that our practices of faith should kowtow to the busyness and noise of the society around us, so, no, we will not be having light shows and dry ice, I do recognise that we are not as well trained in listening and other habits of concentration as our forebears were.

As I look back over years of listening to four readings each Sunday I wonder if my commitment to biblical exposure wasn't hopelessly idealistic. I recognise that my own eyes would glaze over somewhere near the second sentence of the first reading and the rest would pass me by.

Consequently, I am in all the services of our parish reducing the number of readings – well except at St Paul’s where we’ve only ever had one at least since I started back here. Hopefully this will be an aid to our concentration and absorption. I will still do my best to rotate the readings in such a way that we get as broad an exposure to the texts of our faith as we can digest in a post-modern world.

That said, for those of you who are here week by week you know I’ve been doing this all January. But today is one of those challenging days when I feel to be fair I have to engage with the Hebrew scriptural text, and it is not at first sight the most riveting.

It seems that God in this text is being almost petulant in responding to the Hebrews’ whinging, and provides them with what the author calls, in the voice or Moses, “a prophet like me.”

But the authors are being careful here. The Hebrews were surrounded by cultures obsessed with oracles, soothsayers, the equivalent of crystal ball gazers. Had there been the counterpart of our astrologers’ columns their pages would have been well thumbed as punters desperately tried to discern their future.

Moses, speaking in the name of his God would have none of it. The God of our scriptures is almost militantly opposed to what I call future-scaping.

Consequently the tradition that we know as prophecy throughout the scriptures has nothing to do with Nostradamus and his convoluted nonsense – and I pull no punches there – or to the kind of predictions that say a tall dark stranger will tie up our shoe laces. Indeed, I want to be more militant still and assure you that prophecy in the hands of the servants of God has nothing to do with deciding that Putin, Trump, Biden or any other social and political figure is the Antichrist.

Perhaps this is a moment for me to say if you want to know more of my opinions on the matter feel free to purchase my book: available at a discount rate of only $25!

But I partially jest, much though I would encourage any of you to have a browse through my book. The far more important point is that the role of the prophet in the scriptural tradition is one of interpreting the present in the light of God’s call to justice and righteousness and compassion, interpreting the present in the light of God’s recurrent promise, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the ages.”

At the time at which Deuteronomy was written the Israelites were tempted to consult not only with all sorts of charlatans and to use their often lurid practices as a means to twist God’s arms. Such practices reached even to the extent of child sacrifice, but more commonly involved the throwing of dice like the Book of Mormon’s much loved urim and thummin, the writing of curses on food bowls calling for the execution of the state’s enemies, and a myriad other forms of magical nastiness. Such things grieved the heart of God and the authors of Deuteronomy were very keen to make that clear.

What then for us? I don’t want to say that demons leap out of the pages of astrologers’ vacuous prognostications in magazines and newspapers. In fact I think there is a greater element of the demonic in pseudo-Christians’ writings condemning various portions of society or leaders of society to hell, while often celebrating supposed worthiness of quite obviously dangerous and deceitful social leaders. I probably do not need to identify anyone, and there have been charlatans in every age. I do however maintain rigorously that it is by their fruits, including the fruits of their personal lives, that you shall know the servants of God.

Again: where does this leave us? It leaves us looking for the deliberations of those who urge justice, compassion, neighbourliness, concern for the most vulnerable, and, in short, all that came to be embodied in the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity.

No matter which side of the political fence we sit on in this or any country our leadership will fall short of the glory of God, also known as the fullness of Christ-likeness.

Our task with the aid of the Spirit of Christ is to watch and to look and to ponder and to see in each situation which leaders and which actions best express the values of the God of the Cross.

Saturday 20 January 2024

gate-keeping

 

SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
ORDINARY SUNDAY 3 (January 21st) 2024

 

READINGS        


1 Corinthians 8: 1-13

Psalm 139: 62: 5-12

Mark 1: 14-20

 

 

You may notice that the reading from Paul is not the set reading. I would like to claim that this was because I was working to some sophisticated plan, but in fact it is because I read the wrong date in the lectionary.

It is a strange reading. To make sense of Paul at any time we need to know the context to which he was writing. The new Christian believers there were playing up, and some of them are doing so in quite despicable ways.

Some of us will have seen churches with the old pews reserved for specific donors and verboten to mere hoi polloi. But the nearest to reserved family pews we see now is probably at funerals and weddings, when pews are set aside for those most central to the event at hand.

One of many things that was happening in a very bad way in Corinth, was that the wealthy and the powerful had slipped into habits of pride and arrogant self-preferment. In many ways the superficialities of our passage shouldn’t delay us too much. At that level we’re probably going to engage with questions of little more gravitas than whether or not we eat at a Hare Krishna restaurant. Paul’s answer at surface level is simple: will it hurt the faith of those we’re eating with? It’s not a particularly important question outside of Auckland anyway – I’m not even sure if they still run the restaurant that I used to eat and argue at in Queen Street, though I did find one in Brisbane.

But there are deeper questions here. What in my lifestyle detracts from the claims that the gospel makes on me? I remember years ago encountering Ronald Sider’s seminal book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. Sider, an American Evangelical from an era before that phrase was irrevocably tainted,  powerfully reminded Global North Christians like me that our comparative opulence dismantles, for those living and dying in refugee camps, at the claims we make for a God of love.

Where, you might ask, is all that in a passage about food offered to idols? A wonderful Roman Catholic researcher named Jerome Murphy-O’Connor was one of the first to bring to my attention if not to the attention of biblical interpreters full stop, that the poor of Corinth could not afford meat unless it was effectively second hand.

Second hand meat sounds a putrid concept, but what was meant that the meat that was offered to idols and not eaten by said idols was then often on-sold to Corinthians with limited budgets. There are questions of social justice and even education going on here. The so-called “strong” in Paul’s letter, to use a word borrowed from Romans but which does not appear here, are effectively rubbing the noses of the so-called “weak” in their lesser knowledge and faith. The so-called strong were not necessarily spiritually stronger, but economically more powerful: perhaps we can think again of the wealthier families who insured that as they sat in the better pews, closer for example to the heaters: the poor were left with only what the Syrophoenician woman called the scraps left under the table. Paul will have none of that.

The so-called “strong” operating their spiritual as well as their economic superiority. Paul refers several times particularly in the Corinthian letters to those who are “puffed up” with self importance. Here too he approaches the criticisms that Jesus levels if the scribes and the Pharisees in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

Paul had no time, just as Jesus had no time, for any kind of arrogance, spiritual, economic, or worse: both. And the forms that this can take are often very subtle. If the Anglican church has a tendency to its own form of sin it is that we can too easily demand a high level of literacy, and even in some places badges of social standing, to become a prerequisite to membership. I have told here before the story of the tattooed Māori friend of mine who was told that she had come to the wrong church.

I don’t think that is a problem for our faith community. But we are called to look at the sometimes subliminal barriers that we erect around our faith. As part of my historical research I’m finding that with the very best of intentions our forebears in the church contributed to the loss of two generations by somewhat condescending attitudes towards younger generations trying to find their way and their voice in life. The attitude was as if the church gatekeepers of the time had adopted the stance of the strong in Corinth, and the result was the empty pews that dominate our narrative today.

Every time I encounter this passage in Corinthians and its sibling passage in Romans I find myself wondering how we can do better, how we can better exercise the responsibilities of open access to the faith and the joy and the love that we have found in Christ. In the year ahead I hope we can look at many ways in which we as Christ bearers can improve our profile in the society in which we have been called to live. We are custodians here of what is really both a sacred site and a sacred drama. Our task is to make it as open and accessible as possible.