here your proud waves shall break

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH
ORDINARY SUNDAY 12 (June 19^th ) 1988
 

 

Come thus far, I said, and no further: here your proud waves shall break.

                                           (Job 38:11)

 

There is an awful lot of water in today’s readings. And yet we should not be surprised at this. There are few symbols in ancient thought more powerful then the two great symbols of fire and water. Both are symbols pregnant with meaning, pregnant with the daily experience ancient cultures would have had of those elements as simultaneously powerfully destructive and powerfully creative forces. Few symbols could more accurately convey to rustic tribal peoples the oar and majesty, the creativity and terror of God.

Water, which shall be our focus today, is for example both the destroyer of the world at the time of the Flood, yet at the same time the means by which the world was redeemed from its bent towards degradation and self-destruction at that time. Water at the time of the Exodus is the agent by which the Egyptians are destroyed, and at the same time the agent by which the children of Israel are delivered. In Christian thought, water is a vital symbol of our death at baptism, but it is also a symbol of our rebirth. In water we die to sin but are reborn in the possibilities of the Kingdom of God.

As an aside it should also be noted that rivers represent a powerful symbol of the experience of death and judgement in Greek and in mediaeval Christian thought. At death one descends to the River Styx, or to the Lethe, the first a river that must be crossed, and the second a river whose waters induced forgetfulness of the past, deep within the underworld.

So the sea was frequently a thing of terror to the people of Israel. It is no accident that the great apocalyptic vision of the coming world in the Apocalypse of John affirms with joy,

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.
The first heaven had disappeared now,
and there was no longer any sea.

More, then, the surprise when the psalmist rejoices,

                      Those who go down to the sea in ships
                      and follow their trade on great waters,
                      these men have seen the works of God
                      and his wonders in the deep.
 

What the psalmist has recognised is terribly important. So often we seem to see God as present only in the things we see to be good. God created, shall we say, the sunshine but not the hurricane, the butterfly but not the European wasp. So often we want to see God only at the level of all time nice guy, the God of “all things bright and beautiful,” but cannot cope with the notion that seemingly bad things occur within the creativity of God. So many Christians lose their faith when all is no longer sun and roses.

It is imperative that we accept the bad with the good within God’s creation. To return to our symbol of water, it is obvious that water is an element that we cannot survive without, and yet at the same time water has the power to destroy us, even to destroy our economy. There was a dark side at creation as well as a light side; life can and must consist of suffering as well as joy.

And yet the doctrine of creation, the belief that God created all things, implies for us an enormous message of hope. If God created all things, made possible the processes by which the earth and the universe have come to take the shape they now have, then God is equally in control of all things. God is the source of the energies of the universe, the source of the orderliness of the universe.

I hear so much that passes for Christian teaching that is no more than some Pagan belief in a struggle between a good God and an evil demon-figure. Proponents of this kind of teaching claim to believe that they know the outcome of this Titanic struggle in advance, for it is written in scripture, but it is an outcome known only to the elect, and of benefit only to the elect. The remainder, according to this form of teaching, will remain unfortunate prisoners and subjects of a powerful and evil being, the devil.

Such thought gives far, far too much kudos to the power of evil in our midst, far too much glory, ironically, to the being we might know as the devil. Tragically it also detracts from the magnificence of God.

So once more I draw your attention to those few lines from the Book of Job. The speaker asks,

Who pent up the sea behind closed doors
when it leapt tumultuous out of the womb,
when I wrapped it in a robe of mist,
and made black clouds its swaddling bands?
Come this far, I said, and no further.
Here your proud waves shall break.

 

Even the catastrophes of nature then, even the most terrifying forces of the natural realm are within the control of the creator. Now as Christians we must add to that clear Old Testament message the New Testament message of the Cross. To the good news of Jewish theology that God is utterly in control even of the most terrifying forces of the world is added the Easter message that even the seemingly utter disaster of death is transformed into resurrection, transformed into unendingly good news.

That is why our gospel reading today depicts Jesus as having command over the elements, over the storm. Jesus the Son is to be identified with God, has control over creation in the same way that God the creator has control over nature – and shares likewise in the power to transform the tragedy of death into the mystery of eternal life.

That message can, sadly, be turned into something cheap and facile. Because God has absolute control, absolute power, we can choose to neglect the important social, economic and political, even the environmental issues of our day. We can say as some fatalistic Muslims do, “it is the will of God.” To do so would be irresponsible. God has given us the responsibility to tend this earth, as we hear in one version of the great Eucharistic Prayer at the Communion. God has given us the responsibility to see Jesus in our neighbour, as we learn from the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  God has called us to continue the work of Jesus in his absence, as we learn from our belief that the Son ascended to be with the Father. He has sent us his Spirit to empower us for continuing the work of the Kingdom, as we learn from the events of Pentecost. But he has also given us the sure hope that all shall be most well, as TS Eliot would say,^[[1]] all shall be well.

On a smaller than cosmic scale that is the message for us, too, as the community of faith that we know as St. John’s. The message as we trust our nominators and the rest of the incumbency committee to seek a new priest to continue the ministry that Ken [Hewlett] has shared amongst us is quite simply that the work of the Kingdom is continuing and will continue to continue, both during the interregnum and following the new appointment, whenever that shall be. God is in control.

It should of course also be remembered that it is you who are the Church in East Bentleigh. Those of us who are called into your midst to serve you are in the end only here to make possible your ongoing life of worship, of evangelism, of care for one another and of the community. It is for that that we are called into your midst, that and to stand as a sign of your being a part of the wider Church. That is why eventually we must move on.

As you hold that understanding, that it is you who are the community of faith, that it is  you who are the Church, then I believe that it will become increasingly apparent to all of us that God indeed is in control, that all things do indeed work together for the good, and that “the terrors of the seas” will be kept wrapped in swaddling clouds.

 

---

[1] Citing Julian of Norwich, but I either didn’t know or didn’t mention that in 1988.

totally incomprehensible faith

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St Peter’s, Queenstown
THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER
(May 3^rd) 2025
 

Readings

Revelation 5: 11-14

Psalm 30

John 21: 1-19

 

 

You may or may not recall, but during the reading of the passion, On both Good Friday and the Sunday before Easter, there is that moment when Peter denies Jesus for the third time, and the cock crows. Every year as I read that passage this is a moment at which I feel a shiver down my spine. This is probably because I know my own capacity to deny my faith under duress, and history demonstrates that however strong a believer a person is sometimes the sheer psychological trauma of persecution and threats defeats their expectations of faith.

Would I be brave enough when Hitler's brown shirts came marching to my house in the middle of the night, or indeed when Mr. Trump’s goons arrived on the flimsiest of evidence and against the law of the land to drag American residents and refugees off to a Peruvian prison, would I be brave enough to stand up for them? And indeed in the United States where Christianity is being defined as legitimate only when it places trump and his agenda, and for that matter the American flag into a place of higher priority then the cross of Jesus Christ, would I be strong enough to stand up against the tyranny. If I were told that only believers in Trump's alleged form of Christianity were allowed to worship and all others were traitors and subverters, would I be brave enough to hold fast?

The question is more relevant today in the Europeanized world than it has been at any time since the mid 1940s. Never did I expect that I would be preaching at a time when belief in the compassionate and justice seeking Christ put fellow believers in a western nation at risk of their freedom. So the shiver that runs down my spine when I encounter Peter’s denial of Jesus is deeply visceral. We have probably all seen the meme that reads this is so and so, be like so and so. We have in the scriptures the potential meme this is Peter, do not be like Peter.

And I say all this because the scene today is a powerful moment of reconciliation between the disciples, all the males of whom fled from Jesus in his most poignant time of need, reconciliation between them and there is and but absolutely the same Jesus.

Aha, you might say, but was he the same, for no one recognised him? And yet the gospel writers, Matthew, Luke and John are determined to make it clear that in all matters of what we might call mind and spirit, this is one and the same person. Furthermore they are adamant that we are dealing not with some immortal soul but the Risen One, as able as you and I to chomp on a piece of fish. It is a strange detail, but not one to be ignored.

Leaving aside however Jesus with a hungry belly – after all death and resurrection are an exhausting business – the remarkable dimension in this moment is the profound reconciliation between Jesus and his betrayers. We generally refer to Judas as the betrayer, but the desertion committed by all 2018 02 24 1038athe men (And seemingly not the powerless women) was equally betrayal. These betrayers and deserters are here reconciled to their victim. 

For a moment I imagined myself in the shoes of the disciples, mystified by the resurrection appearance, and deeply worried as to how this their friend would treat them after their desertion. And at the risk of becoming a bit mystical and speculative I begin to get a glimpse of what we call heaven. I don't believe we won't see into this mystery that lies beyond our graves nonchalantly demanding our place at the table. But I do believe, with Paul, that's beyond all understanding, beyond all rationality this is the moment that we are reconciled not only with our God in Christ, but with all who we have let down, even betrayed. Reconciled not with an airy wave of the hand, box with those deep piercing eyes and a gesture of welcome so well portrayed in the Narnia stories as Aslan greets the resurrected children.

And beyond that mystical imagining I can say little. The gospel writers found that it was beyond their capacity to explain the encounters with the risen Lord. It is equally beyond our capacity to understand what on earth this resurrection business is, or better still what in heaven’s name this resurrection business is. Yet I stand solidly with St Paul, for without this incomprehensible mystery we are simply wasting time, and we all might find better things to do on a Sunday morning. But because of this incomprehensible mystery we can stumble through the deaths of our loved ones and indeed our own dying, and we can reach out our hands to receive these strange elements of bread and wine, as Jesus taught us, and then go out into the world strengthened and reawakened in our totally incomprehensible faith.

live ... truth

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

SUNDAY AFTER THE ASCENSION (May 15^th) 1988

John 17: 6-19

 

Some years ago when I was in the equivalent of year 10 at a boarding school in New Zealand, I was returning to my boarding house from a sports meeting in the city, and on the way home I stopped, as I often did in those days, with a friend for a quick cigarette in the cemetery. Unknown to either of us we were spotted by one of the house prefects who was also returning from the city, and who, when we arrived back at the house separately some minutes later summoned us to the prefects’ study. We were called up to the study separately, and neither knew why, or whether the other had also been summoned. There, independently of one another, we were each asked the dreaded question, “Have you been smoking?” 

Now I was never a brave fifteen-year-old, and was usually very quick to find some alternative to the truth if I sensed that the truth was likely to bring me trouble, that a white lie or six would help preserve me from trouble. On this occasion, however, I quickly realised I had an insurmountable problem or two. In the first place I had not had enough time to shower and change out of the clothes which still had the smell of cigarette smoke clinging to them, nor disguise the smell of smoke on my breath. And in the second place I didn’t know whether my friend had also been interrogated, and if he had, whether he had dobbed me in. I confessed to my crime, knowing that I would be caned. My friend, I later learned, made a desperate attempt to lie his way out of the predicament.

Now there could be three possible endings to this story. I could have been rewarded for my honesty and let off the punishment for my heinous crime. Or I could have been punished for my sins, while my friend’s lies saved his skin from punishment. Or the prefects could have decided we were both guilty and each equally deserving of punishment. I’ll tell you one day what happened.

But I will say that the point that was really at issue that afternoon was not one of a couple of clandestine cigarettes, but rather one of truth, of honesty. Billy Joel sings of honesty as being “such a lonely word.”  It was that day.

And “what is truth?” said Pilate.

Running through all the writings in the New Testament that bear John’s name is a sort of sub-theme of truth. John mentions the word “truth” far more than any other New Testament writer, and only the Psalms contain more reference to the word than John’s account of the gospel. This theme of truth is introduced at the very opening of the gospel account:

the word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

Constantly John is to return to this theme. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and those who abide in Jesus abide in truth.

Truth in John’s thought is much more than mere honesty. But clearly, where there is no honesty, there cannot be even the beginnings of truth. An encounter with Jesus – an encounter that I believe we join in together each time we share in the Eucharist – an encounter with Jesus is an encounter with truth, and with all that truth demands.

So what is truth? That of course is Pilate’s question, but that is no reason for us to shun it. What is truth?

The life and death of Jesus points us in an unmistakable way to part of the answer. Jesus died because he spoke the word of truth in the midst of society’s innumerable means of avoiding truth. He spoke the word of truth that love, not law, is what God demands of all his people. He spoke the word of truth that justice must be a central concern of all people who claim to be people of God. He spoke the word of truth that it is our inner thoughts and deeds that are the concern of God, not our outer shows of  religious excellence. Jesus points us to the truth, and the way of the cross is and always will be the way of truth.

Jesus also reminds us that God is the parent in heaven who discerns motives, not actions. It was not the wealthy, sanctimonious giver at the temple who won the admiration of Jesus, but the poor widow who gave to God not a mere tithe but all of her possessions.

              Sanctify them in the truth; thy word is truth.

Jesus in his hour of agony prays for us, that we might live and be “holy” in the truth. How can we do that?

There are no hard and fast rules. There is only the expectation that we are to live our lives as ambassadors or icons of Christ, that those around us will evaluate Christ and therefore God by what they see, of us, of our actions. So we must evaluate our lives and ensure they are lived with integrity. 

Do we live by any double standards? If so then we must set right such a double standard and seek to live a life of truth. Do we gossip, speaking well of our neighbour behind his or her back without first seeking to bring our grievances and innuendos to the person concerned for clarification and reconciliation? If so then we must curb our ready tongues, seek the forgiveness of God and any who we have slandered, and live instead in truth. Do we say things about people behind their backs that we could not say to their face? Do we build up resentments against one another without airing them directly? If so, then we must once again seek God’s forgiveness and the Spirit’s assistance to help us live together in truth.

To deviate from truth is sin. That is precisely the meaning of the word “sin.” It is a missing of the mark, a deviation from a true aim. If we are to join in the New Testament notion that Christians will be recognisable to the rest of the world by the quality of their love for one another and for their neighbour then we must emphasise that the great gifts God makes available to us are open to us only when we live a life befitting of Christ. The Christ who died precisely because he confronted the world with naked truth.

Jesus describes himself in the Fourth Gospel as “the way, the truth, and the life.” It is only and can only be when we embrace the vocation to live our entire life in honesty and truth that we can receive the abundant benefits of the life Jesus seeks to liberate all people to enjoy.

Christ is risen?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

EASTER 2 (April 17^th) 1988

 

 
They offered him a piece of grilled fish, which he took and  ate before their eyes

 

 

This morning, and throughout the season of Easter, we made the joyful affirmation, “Christ is risen,” and responded as one voice, “He is risen indeed.”  Why? What do we mean when we make this claim? Or do we just say it because it’s a nice thing to say and it is in the book anyway?

Constantly we find the accounts of Jesus’ post-Easter appearances in the New Testament emphasising peculiar little details about the nature of Jesus’ resurrection body. If we analyse all of these little comments made by the New Testament authors a clear consensus begins to emerge. Jesus was different in appearance to what he had been up to and including the crucifixion, but he was nevertheless quite definitely human. He was able to be touched, to be held, and, in our passage today, even to eat.

Why do the writers of these accounts bother to make these little details known? It was certainly not in order to win more people over to the teachings of the new found Christian faith, for any good Greek was likely to scoff at any suggestion that God should want to raise more than merely the spirit of his chosen servant, would want Jesus to appear to his followers as any more than a ghost.

Quite clearly, then, the New Testament authors included these hard to swallow details about the body and bodiliness of the risen Christ because they saw them as central to the Easter message, central to the Christian faith.

The question I want to ask is, “do we?”

I suspect that were a survey to be done on Christian belief, and the questions were asked, “do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”, many if not most Christian believers would reply, “Yes.” Certainly at most funerals I attend such a belief is often expressed by mourners, and the ubiquitous Masonic rituals affirm belief in the immortality of the soul rather than the distinctively Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.

Is there a difference, or am I simply splitting hairs? I believe there is a difference, and that it is of great importance for our living out of Christian faith. For at the basis of this question is the underlying question, “did Jesus rise?” and its corollary, “Is there a distinctively Christian hope in the face of death?”

When I attend or take a funeral I say this prayer:

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust:

in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

who died, and was buried, and rose again for us,

and who shall change our mortal body

that it may be like his glorious body …

 

In saying that prayer I am expressing the distinctively Christian belief that death is a mere interim, and that the person who we have lost is one with whom we shall be reunited, body and soul, at the end of what we know as time. I am not merely looking forward to a time when my spirit and that person’s spirit shall be reunited, but to a future bodily resurrection.

The belief in the immortality of the soul is an ancient Greek belief that pre-dated Christianity by some centuries. It is not the belief and the Good News for which Jesus lived and died. And, furthermore, I believe that if we are to be consistent and true to the essentials of our faith we cannot hold to a belief in the immortality of the soul. It stands in contradiction to Christian teaching, and is mutually exclusive with Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead.

I do not want to make the claim that I am right and those who hold to belief in the immortality of the soul are wrong. I can make no such claim. I do want to say, though, that they are separate beliefs, and that if we say “Amen” to the Christian creeds by which we affirm belief in “the resurrection of the dead,” or “the resurrection of the body,” then we cannot be a part of any doctrine that affirms no more than belief in an immortal soul.

When Paul and other early Christians proclaimed to the non-Jewish world that Jesus rose bodily from the grave, and that because he had in that way conquered death so his people likewise would be freed to rise bodily from the grave – at the end of time – his hearers would have laughed. No god-fearing Greek could ever accept such a doctrine, because Greeks believed that all matter is essentially evil, and that the body is no more than a prison in which the immortal soul is temporarily housed.

But Paul was saying something radically different. He was saying that God would recreate the bodies of his people, the bodies in which we live and die, and that we shall be bodily raised from death, body and soul together (if we can separate the two), and never again taste separation and death.

Handel grasps the all of this doctrine in The Messiah when he sets Paul’s words to music.

The trumpet shall sound and we shall be changed,
the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised ...

incorruptible.

 

This means that whenever I officiated a funeral I believe – though I cannot altogether explain the mystery – but I believe that the person who has died will at the end of time be raised bodily and dwell in that as yet unattainable form in the nearer, intimate presence of God and God’s people.

Underlying these claims is an even more basic belief central to Christian and Jewish belief alike: God created and saw that it was good. If we hold to a belief that maintains less than the resurrection of the body, then we are denying the goodness of the creation that God has designed and brought into being.

Says one major theologian,

Body and soul are both originally good insofar as they are created by God; they are both bad insofar as the deadly power of the flesh has hold of them. Both can and must be set free by the quickening power of the Holy Spirit.[1]

 

He goes on to say,

Deliverance consists not in a release of soul from body but in a release of both from flesh.

Cullmann here uses the word “flesh” in the way that Paul does, not to mean “body,” but to mean “fallenness” or “sinfulness.” We shall be raised incorruptible.

The reason I stress this is twofold. In the first place it is important that we know and understand the teachings of our faith. If Christianity has not a distinctive set of beliefs then we may as well hand over to the civil celebrants for our weddings and funerals, or join perhaps the Hare Krisna sect, or the Mormons. But if we do believe something distinctive then we ought to know what it is.

But secondly I maintain we should know as Christians how to face the question of death. How should I as a Christian face my death? We know in the light of Good Friday that we cannot sidestep the issue, so how should we grapple with it? And how should I treat the world and the body in which I live, especially in the light of the belief that Jesus saw fit to dwell likewise in this world and in a human body?

The answer is that I should face death with enormous hope. The hope that I and indeed all who God loves shall indeed be raised anew, shall be re clothed in a glorious body as Jesus was, and shall dwell together with God in incorruptible bodies and unpollutable love. And I believe too that I should love and enjoy all that I experience of this creation, this body and this world in which I live, for this as a foretaste of the inexpressibly beautiful re-creation that lies ahead.

Again, I do not want to claim that this doctrine, this belief in the resurrection of the body, (and the coming re-creation of creation, for Christ is only the first fruits of all that is to come), is better than any other, non-Christian doctrine, or that it offers any greater hope to the dying or to the bereaved. But I do want to emphasize that it offers a distinctly Christian belief.

The fact that men [and women] continue to die no longer has the same significance after the resurrection of Christ. The fact of death is robbed of its former significance. Dying is no longer an expression of the absolute Lordship of Death, but only one of Death’s last contentions for Lordship. Death cannot put an end to the great fact that there is one risen Body.[2]

 

Christ, of course, the first fruit of all creation. Christ is risen! When we affirm that, as we have all done here this morning, we affirm also our belief that he has made possible the resurrection of the body for all who are in him. Christ is risen, and we have the witness of his first amazed followers that he ate with them, walked with them, that they touched him and conversed with him. We do not have that opportunity, though we are, I believe, able in a very real sense to do precisely that in the Eucharist in which we are about to share. Christ is risen, and in that faith we are able to go on to face life and death in the shore hope that no thing cannot separate us from the love of God or of those we love in God.

Christ is risen!

---

[1] Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? London: Epworth, 1958, 35.

[2] Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?, 40-41.

that empty tomb

 SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

EASTER DAY (April 3^rd) 1988

 

 

 

It happened just a week later. Fletcher was demonstrating the elements of high speed flying to a class of new students. He had just pulled out of a dive from seven thousand feet … When a young bird on its first flight glided directly into his path, calling for its mother. With a tenth of a second to avoid the youngster, Fletcher Lynd Seagull snapped hard to the left, at something over two hundred miles per hour, into a cliff of solid granite.

It was, for him, as though the rock were a giant hard door into another world. A burst of fear and shock and black as he hit, and then he was adrift in a strange, strange sky, forgetting, remembering, forgetting …

Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

(Pan: London: 1970. 85-86)

 

There can be no new life without death. It is that tension that we must hold in our faith each year, and particularly as each Easter comes around. And, in an attempt to maintain that truth-tension some of you have, over the past forty days of Lent, journeyed with Jesus towards the cross. If you have been following Richard Holloway’s book^[[1]] you will have paused at the Stations of the Cross, dwelling at each station on the cost to Jesus of our salvation. If you have observed during Lent some form of abstinence, it will have served to remind you that there can be no salvation without cost. But whatever our discipline has been, we must be reminded again and again of the cost to our Lord of the glorious festival that we celebrate today.

Jesus turned and set his face resolutely towards Jerusalem. He knew something of what lay ahead for him there. He spoke to his followers of the pain he was soon to face, and of the death that awaited him. His disciples were puzzled for here was the one who was to be their king speaking to them of suffering and death. Judas was so confused by this seeming contradiction that he eventually realized that the only way he could continue the revolutionary energy Jesus had originally generated would be to betray him. This talk of suffering and death seemed to Judas to be contradictory to the cause of liberation and freedom. I suspect there is something of Judas in each of us.  Judas simply wished to reap the benefits that he saw the Messiah Jesus to be offering, without recognising the cost.

Peter was no different. When Jesus first foretold the suffering that lay ahead of him, Peter rebukes him. Yet “Get behind me, Satan” (Mark. 8:33) was the harsh response of Jesus.

Why? So often I have struggled with that passage. Why is Jesus so harsh, so rude, to one of his closest followers? Yet the answer is staringly obvious: there can be no joy without sorrow, there can be no hope without despair, no resurrection without the crucifixion. We long for easy answers to the questions of life, and especially to the question of death. But Christianity offers no easy, cheap answer. Jesus, even before his arrest in the Garden, knew clearly that there could be no easy answer. So he journeys resolutely on towards his death, knowing that only in death can life be made meaningful, that only in suffering can new life be offered.

How we would love to sidestepped that scandal of death. We live in a society that pleads to remain forever young. Yet two and a half centuries ago the biting satirist Jonathan Swift exposed that lame hope for the con that it is. In the acerbic satire Gulliver's Travels the hero, Gulliver, encounters a race amongst whom dwell a mutant form of human being, whose mutation expresses itself with the curse of immortality. The curse of immortality? Gulliver, too, poses that question, only to discover that such immortality is a curse because it is death that the mutant Struldbuggs sidestep, not the ravages of ageing. Says Gulliver, with masterful understatement,

the reader will easily believe … my keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated.

 

Life and death are, and must be, inseparable.

Sadly, so many religious enthusiasts claimed to provide an easy answer to the seemingly tragic fact of death. So many, like Judas, like Peter, want to acquire the blessings of Easter, the resurrection, without first experiencing the horrors of Good Friday. We as Christians so often open ourselves to the criticisms of the great atheists that we cling to our piety, our faith, only in order to avoid the bleak fact that we are mortal, that each of us shall die. For even Fletcher Lynd Seagull, in my opening quotation, had to pass through the granite wall of death in order to pass on to new life.

And that is perhaps the tragedy of the chocolate Easter egg and the Easter Bunny. We have allowed these two quite profound symbols of the mystery of the resurrection to be raped by commerce, to be turned into a tragic parody, to be turned into trivia. The egg should be a powerful symbol of new life, a reminder of the potential of humanity in Christ to burst out of the shackles of the grave into resurrection life. And even the rabbit: rabbits’ habits unknown only too well. The rabbit therefore can stand as a symbol of the regeneration that the Easter hope provides us. Yet we have allowed these symbols to become symbols of life without first taking to heart the significance of the cross on the hot cross buns we ate on Friday. There can be no regeneration, there can be no bursting out of the grave, without first undergoing the scandal of death. If we are not to lose altogether the significance of our commercialized symbols of Easter then we must baptize them, proclaimed them as significant only in the whole context of the Christian gospel. For the hope of the Resurrection there is the terrible cost of death.

The Resurrection is never an evasion of death, it is consequent upon death, it only comes when we have plumbed the depths.

(Richard Holloway, The Way of the Cross, 118).

 

The Easter egg can have no meaning unless its shell is destroyed. There is no new life unless the beauty of the egg is shattered. Or, to use another traditional Christian symbol, there can be no bright morning star until we have passed through the darkness of the night.

In the end there can be no proof of the Christian truth-claim that Jesus is risen. We were not there to stand alongside the women at the unexpectedly empty tomb and to hear the declaration, “He is not there, he is risen.” Tennyson, the great English poet, echoes these words in his mammoth work “In Memoriam,” in which he mourns the death of his close friend Arthur Halem.

He is not here; but far away

      The noise of life begins again,

      And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

On the bold street breaks the bleak day.

                                                 “In Memoriam”, vii.

But the resurrection message of Easter is more even than the knowledge that our lives go on despite the loss of those we love, or that the causes for which Jesus lived and died can be continued in successive communities. Those, too, are truths, but hardly the gospel.

For there is good news. It can never and must never be proved, but for me I find in Easter the great hope that enables me to attend and to officiate at funerals, to minister to the bereaved and to the dying, and to face my own inevitable death with greater confidence than would otherwise be possible. For in the message of Easter I hear the good news that we have a God who loves us, and who has created for us an existence far greater than that we presently experience. Who, in the Resurrection of his Son, opens for us a way to experience that internal awareness of his love beyond the limitations of our future grave. In Easter there is no way out of death, but the hope for a beyond.

I am ascending to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God.

                                                                                                   (John 20:17)

 

In the light then of this glorious morning I can face life. I can face suffering, I can face tragedy, I can face death. For, while Jesus does not remove from us the tragedy of death, he transforms that tragedy into a symbol of hope. Christian faith must never side steps suffering and death, but reveals God in the very heart of tragedy and leads us on into inexpressible ecstasy.

And so this Easter let us join with Paul in that glorious hymn,

O death, where is your victory,

      O death where is your sting?

Thanks be to God who gives us the victory,

      through our Lord Jesus.

 

 

---

[1] Richard Holloway, The Way of the Cross.

proclaim ... hope

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and St Peter’s, Queenstown
SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER
(April 26^th) 2025
 
Readings
Revelation 1: 4-8
Psalm 150
John 20: 19-31

 

 

It’s easy enough to be a part of a liturgical Christian tradition without realizing the extent to which our readings are set not by some personal whim of the preacher, but by some clever people who have worked out a scheme by which we are exposed to as much of the scriptures as we can fit into a three-year cycle of readings. It is fact one of the factors that has kept me immersed in liturgical Christianity, for as one who preaches I have limited opportunity constantly to inflict on you my pet, self-aggrandizing or edifying passages of scripture.

But the pattern the lectionary readings follows, the shape of the church year, is largely based on the chronology of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, rather than that of John. To some extent that doesn’t matter, but it is why we find this scene from John appearing twice in our year, once in the Easter season, once at Pentecost.

Because John conflates the resurrection, and the appearances of the Risen Lord, with the coming of the Spirit. Or maybe Luke, who the lectionary tends to follow, separates them. We can’t tell. Our Tardis cannot take us to those early days in Jerusalem. And while the biblical writers had their own reasons in their own contexts, and the collators of the texts had theirs, centuries later, the critical issue is the gift that the Spirit of Pentecost, the Spirit of Resurrection, brings us. And that is the gift of the experience of the Risen Lord. Not by sight, or by the touch that Thomas sought, but by powerful moments of spiritual encounter. In liturgy, fellowship, in sacrament, and in a different way in nature, creation,  we can from time to time feel the impact of the presence of the Risen Christ.

And we are called to take the gifts that experience gives us, and take them out into the communities into which God has placed us, called us, and proclaim them by our lives, our actions, occasionally our words.

By these aspects of who God is making us, we are called to proclaim, as Paul put it, faith, hope, and love, elements often powerfully countercultural to the  world around us. Other gospel ingredients, too: proclaim justice. Proclaim reconciliation. Proclaim joy. All countercultural in a world that will gravitate always to chaos, gloom, darkness.  That is why we have a photo of children decorating a cross … youth, golden colours, even the shafts of sunlight which have nothing to do with us but everything to do with a God who flings sunlight across universes, all these are bearers of the hope that is in the defeated Cross of Roman torture, the cross of evil. The cross of evil turned bizarrely, impossibly, into the cross of inextinguishable light, and hope and love. The God who resurrects, despite all darkness.

And yes, as every evangelical will rightly remind us, we are called to open ourselves up to, to receive, once and then again and again, the Risen Lord of that Cross into our lives, out actions, our thoughts.  Some of enacted that on Easter Day in a service that includes renewal of our baptismal vows. But we do it every time we make eucharist, as we confess our “not good enoughness,” and hear the priest murmuring God’s words of reconciliation.

Of course these are impossible things to believe, harder still to explain. Harder than impossible. How many impossible things was Alice challenged to believe before breakfast? We are called to believe many more. And we are called to believe just one. Christ is Risen.  For us, with us, in us, and us in him.

So we seek God’s help to be a people proclaiming that hope by our lives and our attitudes.

God, who we see

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S EAST BENTLEIGH

MAUNDY THURSDAY

(THURSDAY  31^st March) 1988

 

Where are you Lord? Sometimes it seems I battle on for weeks and months, there have been years, without the feeling of your presence with me. I have yelled in the darkness “Come to me” and all I hear is the echo of my own voice fading in the night. Where are you Lord? It would be so much easier if there were at convenient times a sign, my own private pillar of cloud by day or fire by night that I could follow in the knowledge that you, Lord, were there. Sometimes I see a rainbow and my heart leaps, until the voice of rationalism within me explains that it is, after all, only the spectrum of white light passed through a prism.

Is it only I, Lord, who cries out to see your face? “Sir, we would see Jesus,” requested some Greeks of the disciples. And Thomas, even poor doubting, human Thomas, at least got to place his hands into the wounds of the risen Lord so that he could know for himself that the resurrection was no fairytale. Where are you now Lord, so that I may touch your wounds?

I wonder if your chosen people, the Jews, ever cried – or cry – out to find you in the darkness. Isn’t it strange, even those who did have the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night as they wandered through the desert rebelled and deserted you. Is it so strange that I should cry out and doubt you in the deserts of my life?

And what of the later Jews? Or of the Jews today? They will be celebrating Passover this week. As they celebrate, each household will believe the events of the original Passover to be recreated and made present in their home. They will know again the slaying of the first-born sons of the Egyptians and the merciful passing over of their own first-born. They will know again the passing through the Reed Sea and the closing of the waters behind them, their escape with God’s help from their pursuers. They will know again the joy of salvation, of liberation from oppression. All those years. All those centuries. So long a time has passed since those events of the Exodus and yet they continue to celebrate, continue to re-create and to re-joice in the event today as though they were there.

And in a sense they were.

Even Jesus celebrated the Passover. Matthew, Luke and Mark tell us that the Last Supper was the Passover meal. John sets that final meal on the night before the Passover, and we must accept and understand that each author had his reasons. But certainly Jesus as a Jew and as the first-born son in a Jewish household would have participated in, and, after the death of Joseph, presided over the celebration of the Passover. Is it an accident that John tells us that Jesus knew that he had to “pass over” from this world to the father”? It’s uncanny. That was the night that poor, misguided Judas betrayed him. And Jesus washed the disciples’ feet that night. My goodness, he must have known what was about to take place. And Jesus somehow seemed to know that his own passover  had come, his passing over from life to death, and in him the passing over of the world from death to life.

The disciples must have wondered what was going on that night. John tells us that Jesus is saying that it is an act of perfect love to wash the feet of a sister or a brother. God is love. Does God wash feet? When Mother Teresa cradles the grimy body of a dying child in Calcutta is that a taste of love, a taste of God? And Jesus also seems to be saying at the Last Supper that one must be washed by him in order to be a part of him. Is that a reference to baptism?

Ah, if I could but see and talk with Jesus. There would be so much that I would ask him. Then surely I would weep, knowing fully my blindness and my shortcomings, confessing my doubts and my more than occasional despair. It’s strange, too, how traditionally this day, Maundy Thursday, has been a time of readmission of penitents back into the folds of the church. Many, countless people must have wept tears of grief and joy on this day as they re-entered the communion from which they were estranged. They must feel a little like the prodigal son, returning to the father in shame, only to receive the fatted calf, and to be clothed in the best of jewellery, clothes, and shoes.

I suppose every time we see an act of forgiveness like that we see something of the face of God, something of the loving nature of God?

And there’s another thing, too. It is from communion from which those estranged from the church are barred. John doesn’t tell us, but our reading from Paul does, and so too the accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke: on that last night with his disciples Jesus took bread, and blessed it, broke it, and distributed it amongst his disciples, and took wine and did likewise. He called it a memorial. A memorial of him. It’s funny that he uses the same word that the Jews use of the Passover celebrations.

More than merely remembering the events, but actually making them present, making them happen again whenever and wherever you participate in them. Does that mean that every time a priest in our midst re-presents those actions of Jesus that we can really know Jesus in our midst? That we can truly see Jesus? No wonder that Paul tells us that each time we perform these actions of taking, blessing, breaking and giving that we are proclaiming the death – and I guess too the resurrection – of Jesus to the world. Could it be that the very Eucharist itself – or Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion, or Mass, it doesn’t measure what we call it – could it be that the very Eucharist itself is an act of evangelism, a telling to the world that Jesus is risen, that he is alive, that he is Lord?

So then, in the washing of feet, in the reconciliation of penitents, in the Eucharist, do we not see Jesus? And does not Jesus himself say that whoever has seen him, whoever has seen the Son, has seen the Father? No wonder the centurion cries out, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief”!

Where are you Lord? Sometimes, yes, I will feel you there beside me. But most of the time I do not. And yet I cannot leave you because I see your face. I see your face each time I see an act of love like the washing of feet or the cradling of a dying child, or the healing of a broken body. I see your face each time I see a person forgiven or know the remarkable power of forgiveness in my own life. And – and for me this above all – I see your face each time a priest takes bread, blesses it and says your words “this is my body,” and takes a cup and blesses the wine, saying your words, “this is my blood”, and each time I and others present answer “Amen.” Yes, I thank you Lord that when I cannot feel you I can see you.

Blessing and honour and glory and power are yours for ever and ever. Amen.