in a rusty holden?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

FIRST SUNDAY OF CHHRISTMAS

(December 29^th) 2024

 

 

READINGS:

 

Psalm 148

Colossians 2: 41-52

Luke 2: 42-52

 

 

Although I recall rarely attending church in my childhood, at least until I was sent off to a church-based boarding school at some ridiculously early age, (my parents being true to the British traditions), I nevertheless recall some bible stories from my loosely religiously based correspondence education.

The story of the child Jesus in the temple was not one of them. The Jesus I encountered, if I encountered him at all, was likely to have been meek and mild, or as the hymnist put it, in a much loved carol that we are not singing today, “Christian children all must be /
mild, obedient, good as he.”

I am not sure how far I would have travelled had I retorted, during a correspondence lesson about meek and mild Jesus, “yeah, sure mum,” (or indeed “mother,” as she insisted), “you mean meek and mild like the little fellow who caused his parents to turn back after three days of arduous journeying because he had chosen not to hop in the car for the five day journey home?”

Admittedly some concern would probably need to be raised with Oranga Tamariki when parents head home and don't notice for some three days that their oldest child is not in the back seat of the Holden.

Luke alone tells us this story. For any of us who have experienced the shock of realising we lost a kid in the shopping centre the sinking feeling that Mary and Joseph must have  felt as they realise Jesus wasn’t in the back seat is a shock not easily forgotten. Anne Is always quick to point out that she has never had this experience, but I have to confess that my now 30 something-year-old daughter was indeed left behind in a department store in Adelaide, when the chaos of keeping an eye on six energised children became too arduous for her frazzled parents. She seemed to survive the misadventure – we found her happily sitting on a counter consuming aeroplane lollies or something similar, supplied by the retail stuff, entirely unconcerned about her missing parents.

But why does Luke tell us the story? It is the only story from the period between the infancy of Jesus and his adulthood that made it into the canon, that is to say the gathered works that became our scriptures. If you should ever Google “infancy stories of Jesus” you will find there were many circulating, but they were not considered solemn or in some way edifying enough to become scripture. Yes even they point to something about the life-transcending nature of the child born in Bethlehem.

Myths, in the true sense, are never designed merely for entertainment but as vehicles of a deeper truth. I have a hunch Luke told us this story for two reasons. 1) Because it was true and too well known to be suppressed, and 2) because it serves to remind us that Jesus was precisely not mild and obedience at least in the sense that the actually quite profound hymn-writer Cecil Frances Alexander appears to convey. (Alexander was no slouch as a hymn writer, and I suspect her mind was focused more on the obedience of the later, adult Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, than on the strong-willed child who chastised his parents for not working out where he was, after costing them an extra six days journey).

For those of you who know my love of travelling Australia, incidentally, that roughly translates as driving from Melbourne to Alice Springs before noticing that the kid isn’t in the back seat and having to turn and go back. And, as Bishop Kelvin Wright points out in this week’s gospel conversation, it is also a wry indicator that Jesus does not, will not turn up in the places most likely for a young, perhaps early adolescent and growing boy. I regret to say that were my children lost they would be unlikely to be found in a church engaged in deep intellectual conversation with the clergy.

So Luke wants us to know that Jesus does not fit neatly inside the cardboard boxes of our expectations. He never has and never will. When we have tried to make him the blonde-haired blue-eyed hippie, or perhaps 19^th century poet of much western Christian art, he has eventually broken out to become an archetypal Middle Eastern shepherd figure, in reality a carpenter, more closely aligned to the texts in which we find him.

When we have attempted to make him some sort of a moral teacher chastising those who deviate from middle class niceness, we find him hanging out with hypocrites and has prostitutes, not, admittedly condoning their vocations, but making clear that in his view it is the systems of exploitation rather than the desperate choices of those on the edges of society that are his deepest concern.

As we move into a new era of being church, of being Christ-bearers in a post Christendom era (thank God) I suspect we must learn to extrapolate from this and other infancy stories of Jesus not some heavy and rather joyless finger wagging his finger, but demonstrating eagerness to explore truth, justice, and compassion, the hallmarks of righteousness, to use a biblical word, that is taught in the temples and churches or faith when they are on course.

I suspect the child Jesus was not sitting at the feet of the temple teachers discussing the finer points of temple liturgy or of meek and mild good manners, but exploring the deep questions of why there is suffering in the world, suffering in our neighbourhood, and how we might bring light to those who walk in darkness.

May God help us to search and apply answers to those questions, answers that Jesus was no doubt very keen to share with Mary and Joseph as they turned and headed once more back to their home in Nazareth.

dare to hope again

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15^th, 2024

THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT

 

READINGS

 

Zephaniah 3: 14-20

For the Psalm, Isaiah 12: 2-6

Luke 3: 7-18

 

John the Baptist stands out as one of the great prophetic figures of the Christian tradition – slightly ironically because he was of course executed before the birth of Christianity. But I’ll just put that out there for a moment.

John was almost a caricature of his own role. Hell, fire and damnation, or at least the great doctrine of “turn or burn,” was embodied in this one fiery kinsman of Jesus.

We need to hold on to that fiery tradition. Christianity without the intense prophetic voices that have challenged society, rocked complacency from time to time, is Christianity neutered. When our voice is cosy and compliant our soul is stagnant.

But there is another form of unsettling prophesy, strangely enough often equally unpopular; that is the voice that prophesies joy, reconciliation, hope, light. That voice appears for example in the writings of the second Isaiah.

It is the voice that startled William Wordsworth leaving him, as he put it, and CS Lewis later echoed, “surprised by joy.”

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,

That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—

But how could I forget thee?

Wordsworth, or his persona, crippled by grief, finds himself startled by the thought he dared to face memories of his lost daughter, dared to be thankful that she has, while far too briefly, passed through his universe.

Any of you who have lost loved ones, especially loved ones of next generations, your children and grandchildren’s generations, know the depths of that struggle. You may know too the tentative nature of any steps towards new hope, new beginnings, in a life post-trauma. Only those who know that journey can speak of it with integrity, and the rest of us can and must only listen.

But sometimes the loss is collective, not individual. Sometimes whole communities experience loss. The loss of lives in a calamitous event – the earthquake or shootings of Christchurch, the fires that have far too often wiped out whole communities in Australia, Spain, or California, the HIV pandemic of the 1980s, or even the slow erosion of confidence in the farming community, brought about by both unruly climate change and callous market forces.

It is a brave prophet who dares to speak of hope, or joy, in such a context. Such speech must never be plastic, trite, clichéd. Indeed, all speech runs those risks until the speaker shows the resilience of a marathon runner, preparedness to listen, to embed themselves with the hurting hearts he or she addresses.

Zephaniah was such a speaker. He dared to speak of hope from within a devastated community. He dared to speak of restoration when all was lost. While Winston Churchill was no embodiment of Christlikeness there is no doubt that he found the words to transform his British people at a time when hope was unimaginable.

The Māori leadership and citizens of military struggle of Gate Pā (Pukehinahina) in the 1860s, or the non-violent Parihaka resistance in the 1880s, were likewise. Their story thank God is far better known in the 2020s than when I was a privileged Pākehā child in the 1970s. Seemingly lying dormant for a century, these prophetic actions and voices inspired those striving for justice ever since, and are now proclaimed widely

Zephaniah dared to speak of restitution of the fortunes of his people at a time when all was lost. At a time when the place of credible Christian witness in society is crumbling, when we are pushed to the outer edges of social consciousness, I believe we are experiencing our Zephaniah moments. I find it weirdly interesting and exciting to see that there has been no mention of Anne’s election in the Otago Daily Times. The ODT in, for example 1954, dedicated some 850 words, about the length of this sermon, to the election of Bishop Fitchett. By the time Bishop Johnston was elected, 1953, interest had slipped to 275 words. With the exception of the world’s first female diocesan bishop, Penny Jamieson, interest has been minimal ever since.

This is a gift from God: like the child born in a manger, or John his cousin-prophet who leaped in his mother’s womb, we are no longer on the radar.

We are set free to be the people God calls us to be.

We are set free, as Zephaniah foretold, to be a people renewed in divine love, justice, peace, hope, standing with the lame and the outcast wherever God has placed us. We can be a people who, by our behaviour, our prayer, our rites of worship and perhaps our words, can be both surprised by and surprise others, with divine joy once more.

Prepare ye

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8^th, 2024

SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT

 

READINGS

 Philippians 1: 3-11

For the Psalm, Luke 1: 68-79

Luke 3: 1-6

 

Luke constructed his telling of the Jesus story carefully. He wanted to ensure that his listeners knew that Jesus stood in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrews, while simultaneously representing a new, a unique incursion of God into human and cosmic history. Luke’s time scale is less universal than John’s and Mark’s brilliantly ambiguous references to beginnings.

Luke uses a more subtle literary, oratorical device. He addresses his Jesus account, as well as Acts, his account of the miraculous spread of the gospel across the Roman Empire, to a figure named Theophilus. Nothing is known of Theophilus, and I subscribe to a school of thought that suggests he never existed. Luke is giving an air of solemnity by referring to a weighty, socially important recipient of his letter, designed to encourage the listeners that the account is carefully crafted, and the story is reverberating in august circles.

By this he intended to – and succeeded in – giving gravitas to his story, first of Jesus and then of the work of the Spirit, in pushing the history-shattering good news through time and space. But he plays with us – not for the sake of cleverness, but to remind us that the Jesus story transcends time and space.

To return to my much-favoured phrase from Dr. Who, his air of authenticity, anchoring the story in “the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor,” is “timey wimey.” Our time scheme, our BC/AD, “before and after Christ,” that has more recently become BCE/CE, “before or after the common era,” didn’t exist until the sixth century. Luke uses a time scheme that anchors time in relation to the rulers of the Empire.

Using that scheme we would, I think be in the third year of King Charles. Or perhaps the second year of Christopher Luxon.

But it’s less straightforward even than that. Luke uses different and contradictory anchor points for time: as if he wrote “in the 73^rd year of Queen Elizabeth and the fourth year of Christopher Luxon.” That combination does not exist.

John the Baptist appeared in time, yet out of and beyond time, and Luke wants us to know that. It is as if Luke deliberately said we need  to know that the salvation that John was proclaiming, that Jesus brought, is not limited to a select and rarified group but to all who will hear the good news. He pretends he is proclaiming to Theophilus but knows he is proclaiming that news throughout populations and space and time.

News of new truth, new beginnings, new certainties in the hands of the one who will soon receive baptism at the hands of the prickly prophet.

Why does this matter? It matters because Luke was at pains to explain that the ramifications of his message reached far beyond the limitations that the followers of Jesus were wanting to set. That God is a God who moves beyond, outside and around our expectations. It was as if Luke knew, by experience, the ways in which as followers of Jesus would barricade his truths, reconstruct them in images that were more suited to our ideas and prejudices. He did. His people had always erred, and so have we, for we too are Luke’s people, Jesus-people.

He then goes on, largely in Jesus’ own words, to tell the story of the one who breaks our expectations of God. As these next months go on we will journey with Jesus’ mould-breaking teachings, but in the meantime Luke is simply teaching to be alert, ready and willing to have our eyes and ears opened in unexpected ways.

The implications for us are, as individuals, as parish, as diocese, are the same. We are called to be Jesus-followers in many ways that will be unfamiliar to us. Much that we have loved is being dismantled – our infrastructure, our music (as we see today), our place not being the place that we once had in society.

Luke, as he tells the story of Jesus, holds dear the words of the prophet, centuries before: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

 

advent musings

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1^st, 2024

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT

 

READINGS

 

Jeremiah 33:14-161

Psalm 25:1-9

Luke 21: 25-28

 

In the Seventeenth Century a Carmelite Friar, who took the name Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, regularly penned his thoughts on the life of faith. The came to be known as the “practice of the presence of God,” and in all their simplicity, they came to be one of the most widely printed – and read – books of all time.

Brother Lawrence’s outlook was deceptively simple. Simple, because the heart of this lifestyle was the simple desire to see and to serve God in all he did. Deceptive, because the Carmelite life is marked by daily silence for prayer, structured reading of psalms, and observation of two hours daily of prayerful silence. On top of this the Carmelites are committed to a life of study.

Brother Lawrence therefore, unlike Yours Truly, was no sort of Christian hippie. Yet for those of us who struggle along with lesser discipline or no discipline at all there are at least the rudiments of deeper relationship with God in his teachings. As George Herbert put it, independently of Brother Lawrence,

Teach me, my God and King,
in all things thee to see,
and what I do in anything
to do it as for thee.

As a professional, and seemingly incurable birdbrain, I have never achieved anything remotely resembling the disciplines of Brother Lawrence or even George Herbert, whose hymn I just quoted. But across the readings of this day there runs the theme of the immediacy of God – an immediately of time and space. God is just there – just here – around and within us, made present to all the degree we need by the one we call Spirit. 

God is present through all time, from pre-time to post-time, though we can never understand this, because we are laid low by timefulness. But perhaps more significant for this first Sunday of Advent, all time is, if I can put it this way, all time is present in the God who is timelessly present with us. And so our readings focus on divine immediacy, preparation to encounter God no longer, as Paul put it, through a glass darkly, but face to face. Face to face: that encounter that the Hebrews knew to be impossible to survive, but for which we are encouraged to practice for by preparation each day.

And while we may never be Brother Lawrences, we are at the very least encouraged to generate, or perhaps to permit, awareness of the presence of God, embodiment of love and compassionate judgement, in our every moment.

babels crumble

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 33

 

READINGS

 

Hebrews 10: 19-25

Psalm 16

Mark 13: 1-8

 

In the Hebrews readings of recent weeks we have been catching glimpses of the Christ who goes before us through the entire range of human experience. Not, of course, the specifics of driving a Mitsubishi or hang-gliding or, yes, running a marathon, nor of being female or wealthy, but the whole range of human emotional response to the world we live in.

I mention “wealthy” because, guiding our understanding of the life of Jesus is the profound insight we can gain from a few sentences in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, that this person who the earliest Christians knew, following the resurrection, to be divine, was also voluntarily emptied of what we might call the privileges of divinity. He emptied himself, as Paul put it, and became obedient to the forces of human existence, to the will, too of God, even to death on a cross. Gods do not generally enter the fully human experience of alienation from divinity, and even of death. I say this because in the Gospel reading just now we see the pre-resurrection, pre-crucifixion even, disciples getting that badly, humanly wrong. The comment made by the unnamed disciple was innocuous enough. The Temple was a massive building, ostentatious, opulent, a far cry from the early Jewish understanding of a God who was comfortable with just a tent.

Which is not to say God did not permit the building of the Temple. Sometimes humanity needs to learn harsh lessons. Sometimes our cathedrals fall down. Sometimes our temples are torn down. Sometimes even our planet heats up, falling foul of human greed, as it accelerates the harsh cycles of nature. Even then we must follow in the footsteps of the One who has experienced all, from conception to birth to annihilation and all in between.

Some of us remember the poem almost always thrown at us in public examinations for literature, Ozymandias. In that poem a megalomaniacal figure, a Trump on steroids, has built immeasurable monuments to his own self-importance. Allusion to Trump is not altogether accidental. Having stood at the foot of one of his opulent towers I cannot ever forget the crushing feeling of revulsion – at that stage I had never heard of Donald Trump – that a person could so ostentatiously proclaim his worth.

But not just him; businesses outdoing each other by pushing their glass towers to the skies to proclaim the majesty of Mohamed Kajoor Alabbar’s Burj Khalifa in Dubai, or the finance company Permodalan Nasional Berhad’s Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur, or Shanghai Tower’s proclamation of it and its people’s self-importance. Those are secular buildings, some proclaiming greed, perhaps at best some proclaiming business success.

Sacred buildings too are vulnerable to the warp and weft of time, nature and politics. The cathedral of which I was briefly dean is facing condemnation, likely to be the second time that building has come down. Christchurch’s Roman Catholic and Anglican cathedrals, however magnificent, fell in a few seconds of natural terror. Darwin’s and Coventry’s were destroyed in war.

 I have no idea of the earthquake status of our stone building (St. Peter’s) but a decent wobble of the Alpine fault, or a careless flame at St Paul’s, could shatter the dreams of our forebears. They are not necessarily acts of God, as insurers used to like to call them, but they are reminders of the vulnerability of existence. And our mokopuna and mokopuna’s mokopuna may or may not survive the ravages of an overheating planet that we are bequeathing them.

And all of this was at least notionally in the mind of Jesus as he reminded his immediate followers of the vulnerability of human existence, and indeed of all existence. “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” The poem “Ozymandias” tickled the raw nerve of human arrogance; surveying the wreckage of the narcissistic Ozymandias’  shrine to self-importance with the caustic comment, “nothing beside remains. / Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Jesus warned that it would be ever thus. He warned too that human conflicts would go on, and that they would be misrepresented as harbingers of the end of time. The nature of energy and existence is such that one day all that we see and know will collapse around our ears, and the nature of humanity is such that some will make outrageous and misleading claims to be the servants of God during such apocalyptic times.

Have none of this, Jesus indicates but trust in the greatness and the compassion of the unseen God, revealed in him, Jesus, trust in his warming human footsteps through whatever military, ecological, economic, and even medical crises dwell ahead. And always just ahead of us the footsteps of the Christ who has been through it and conquered it all remain warm and secure as we tread our paths.

 

Robes? Not the Thing, please.

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3^rd, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 31 (and ALL SAINTS’, translated)

 

READINGS

 

Hebrews 9: 11-14

Psalm 146: 1-8

Mark 12: 38-44

 

 

If you are in the know you will be aware that today can be celebrated as All Saints’ Sunday. It is a wonderful feast of the church year, and a great counterbalance to the idiocies of Halloween, yet another piece of American commercialism that did not exist for most of us when we were young. Unless of course we watched that critical and iconic American documentary Scooby-Doo. But apart from that? Certainly, I was always unaware of Halloween – though I admit growing up in New Zealand I was at this time of the year building up excitement against that equally ridiculous observation of Guy Fawkes, mercifully banned in Australia, where as many of you know I’ve spent half my life.

Yet by dwelling on the readings that have continued through the past many weeks, readings from Mark and from Hebrews, I think there is a deep connection with the notion of the saints.

By “saints” I am never referring to that slightly bewildering practice of the Roman Catholic communion, one of very few that I don’t agree with, of a coven of elderly men sitting at a board table discussing whether posthumous miracles emanating from a saint’s sarcophagus or bodily remains, or some such, can be authenticated.

When I look back on the saints that have registered on my consciousness, about whom I've often spoken on All Saints Days over the year, saints like Molly and Leo and Ursula* that I’ve mentioned (though not here) I need no greater proof of holiness than that they have dared to struggle on, believing in our invisible God, often against all odds. That they have reached out their hands to receive communion believing that in some way it is for us the body and blood of Christ, against all odds. That they have dared to cling to the hope of resurrection and of justice, often against all odds. They have no shrines or weeping statues.

As we have journeyed through Hebrews in recent weeks I have had to remind us all from time to time that the priesthood of Christ in which all Christians share is the biblical priesthood, and that it is only by an unfortunate fluke of translation that those of us who wear our collars back to front and even sometimes wear dresses on a Sunday have come to be called priests. Let us ignore that word at least in so much as it applies to clergy.

Yet in some ways the word saint has undergone the same corruption as the word priest. It is not often that I say this but with regards to this word it is the Protestant and Pentecostal denominations that have got the terminology right. To be made a saint is simply to be a person who has taken the commitment to open heart mind and soul to the risen Lord. To be a person who has dared, in some cases more daringly than others, to believe that Jesus is Lord. And we can of course argue for a lifetime as to what that means in its out-working, but it is fundamentally the same: to believe that Jesus has entered our lives, and is transforming our lives into his own likeness, despite our flaws and fallibilities, and often our active resistance.

So although I cringe when I hear it, Pentecostal pastors for example are theologically correct when they turn to the congregation and call them saints. I cringe a little because it can sound not so much Christ-righteous but collectively self-righteous, especially as the speaker will always be including him or herself in the description. The emphasis has to be on the holiness and the righteousness of the Christ who calls us not on any residue of goodness that happens to attach itself to the sieve of our lives. And when we forget that, when we parade our self righteousness then we become what Jesus in our passage today highlights as the behaviour of the scribes, “who likes to walk around in long robes and be greeted with respect” etc.

AHEM!

(Do I notice what I am wearing most Sundays? Well … yes. As an aside, when once faced with a barrage of criticism delivered to my then bishop about my terrible performance as a priest, I refuted myriad claims except the last one, that I did not look after my robes. I pleaded guilty. I have never quite got the hang of wearing a dress, much less looking after it, as some of you may have noticed!)

No, that is just an ancient and harmless tradition, in the same way that a judge or academic might wear robes in a formal ceremony, to add colour and gravitas. Event Protestant pastors have dress codes!

But if I come to believe that the robes are The Thing, or worse than I am The Thing, then I am revoking my sainthood, in the sense that Paul in the New Testament uses that word. I am becoming as a scribe or a pharisee, as a phylactery-wearing hypocrite seeking aggrandisement as I strut around thinking I’m important.

And, contrary to some Protestant paranoia, the same is true of using the title “Father,” which was something of the norm in circles that I moved in in Australia, and particularly so amongst some indigenous peoples. The title becomes a barrier to my Christ-bearing when I begin to abuse it, seeking power or glory, rather than just seeking by the grace of God to touch a life or two with a hint of divine love. You may of course know it that I haven’t dared to use that title in the New Zealand church, where it is less common. In any case the ordination of women made this a complex deal, and being married to a woman who is a priest has made it more complex still.

Jesus uses the metaphors of robes and phylacteries and titles to describe any way in which we as bearers of his name can mar the integrity of our witness. I once watched a priest clad in all black shouldering mere parishioners aside at a diocesan function (not in this diocese) to get to the goodies at the table before mere hoi polloi. It was a shocking display of phylactery-wearing, father-parading hypocrisy. Sadly some of the tales of abuse that have emanated from the church have far exceeded even that. Our response must always to ascertain whether we are seeking the place of honour at any metaphorical table, or indeed, real table. And if so: desist. 

So, while perhaps at times I lean a little towards what my brother-in-law refers to as a model of unholier-than-thou, I think the combined message about priesthood and sainthood is that the saints are those who are what the Orthodox call a window on Christ. We will have all met some in our lives, and indeed by virtue of our baptism and our growth into baptismal vows we are all amongst them, however flawed we are on our journey.

It’s just that when we begin to believe that this is based on our own merits or significance, then we begin to tarnish that very same sainthood.

So on this day when readings about priesthood, sainthood and hypocrisy all mash up, I suggest the simple message is that we take a long hard look at ourselves, check that that selfhood is not particularly glamorous in its own right, and then get on with the job of opening ourself up to the Spirit of the risen servant Christ.

* Name changed to save her family from embarrassment or coyness

God godforsaken

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 30

 

READINGS

Hebrews 7: 23-28

Psalm 34: 1-8

Mark 10: 46-52

 

I want us this week to set aside the well known passage in which Mark tells us of the blind man beside the road. I want to turn at last to the passages that we have been skirting around in our weekly readings from Hebrews. I do want to emphasise though in passing one important aspect to which we will return of the encounter between Jesus and blind Bartimaeus, and, to give credit where credit is due, to acknowledge that it was Mark, our Mark Wilson who brought to my attention the detail that Jesus asks this determined blind man what it is that he wants, rather than making the assumption that most of us probably make, that the man wants to have sight. Jesus does not impose himself on those he loves, cares for, and heal, and we might remember that it was only a week or two ago that Jesus watched sadly as the rich young man walked away. Jesus does not lasoo people and drag them kicking and screaming into his will.

We will in fact come back to that at the end, but let us glance first at the traditional high priest,  the model of high priest that forms the basis of the argument of the Sermon to the Hebrews, as the author seeks to remind her audience who Jesus is, and what our response to him should be.

The original high priest, Aaron, was appointed by his younger brother, Moses. It may sound like an act of humility on Moses’ part, but was in the text an act of timidity, a failure, which many of us can understand, to trust in God and God’s hand on his life. Nevertheless the high priesthood was established and soon, like that other Hebrew role of king, was corrupted. It seems that Aaron and his descendants faded somewhat from the scene as other forms of religious leadership and even civic leadership took over.

But from the very beginning the role of high priest was tainted and flawed, as we might say it was always going to be because the role of high priest was inhabited by human beings. 

You may not have noticed it but most of us are tainted and flawed.

The writer of Hebrews was writing for a Christian audience that was becoming complacent and nonchalant about its faith. She  set out to emphasise the unique nature of Jesus’ life and work, and to demonstrate that that defined him, amongst many roles, as uniquely a perfect, unflawed high priest precisely because he came from the heart of God, was eternal with God, was nothing but God except in so far, as Paul reminded us in Philippians, except in so far as he deliberately emptied himself of divinity to enter into the fullness of grottiness of human existence. I have touched on this before.

The significance of the emanation from God, the son of God, entering into existence is multi-fold. Jesus becomes, as the author emphasises, an unflawed high priest interceding for us deep within the heart of God. There are many ramifications of this that I simply can’t go into in so short a space of time.

However one which is somewhat under explored, though was thoroughly explored by my favourite theologian Jürgen Moltmann, is that the ascended Christ returns to the one he calls “Father,” returns to his previous state of oneness in Godhead, armed with the new experience of being embodied in all the flaws of being human. 

To put that a different way, he becomes aware of all those dimensions of temptation and sinfulness, except, as Matthew and Luke are keen to tell us in their stories of the temptation of Christ, except for the dimension of succumbing to temptation and acting from a heart of sin. Correct me if I’m wrong but none of us achieve that. It is for that reason, if I can put it this way, that he is able to return untainted into the heart of Godhead.

Time and timey-wimey travel beyond our comprehension here, but in simple terms, on a simple human timeline, something then is changed in the very heart of God. Apart from anything else as we find out on Good Friday, God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, God is exposed to the experience of separation from God: God godforsaken. We can never understand that, and let us not try. But it does matter and it is why I add here to trinitarian faith and I’m not a Jehovah’s witness, a Unitarian, a Muslim, even a devotee of the Grand Architect of the Universe, or other choices that focus on a God who remains outside our experience, an unmoved mover, far, far away.

As an aside, much though I love the song “From a Distance,” in which Mary Chapin Carpenter and other recording artists sing of a distant God watching us, trinitarian theology teaches that the distant God becomes human amongst us. Through the third person of the Trinity God enters into and transforms our being to a state in which we can enter into divine presence and divine eternity – but again let us not try to understand this rationally for it is far beyond human understanding.

What though does it matter that God in Christ through the Spirit has entered into our existence and even our individual lives? It matters very little at all unless we are willing to open ourselves up to the constant and ongoing invitation to Jesus to dwell in us, to renew us, to – to use a fancy theological term “sanctify,” or as the orthodox would say, “divinize” us through the process referred to in Anne’s recent book Restoring the Story  as “theosis.” Wesley explains it as “transformed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place.” There is though an onus on us to hand over again and again our lives to the transforming, redeeming love of Jesus.

That however leaves me with one other matter that I must touch on. And here I part company with many of my evangelical friends. For I emphasise in my life and my teaching that we are not “the saved” in some exclusive way, who will see our friends and loved ones, to borrow the title of a ghastly series of so-called Christian films of the 1970s, “left behind,” as God sets out to dispatch to hellfire those who have not made a confession of faith.

Not so. Like the Jewish people of old we are called to be a remnant who pray on behalf of and for those who do not share our faith. Those who are too busy, too sceptical, too rationalist, too unreached to share the love of Jesus that we are blessed with. Scriptures themselves refer to, in the promise to Abraham, the blessing that we have received as children of Abraham,  extending to the children and children’s children even to the 25th generation. That is metaphorical language and we don’t need to count up and down our family tree to see where our loved ones dwell. That is rich metaphorical language that says those who we love and pray for, that phrase I use at the end of each liturgy, are caught up by our prayers into the glorious hope and eternal love of God. This incidentally is a doctrine called christocentric universalism, and a doctrine to which I dearly hold, and which I believe dwells at the heart even of the teachings of Saint Paul.

Enough for now. Except to reiterate that those we love and pray for are absolutely caught up in the eternities of divine love. And except to emphasise that our responsibility is to remain faithful in prayer, in worship ending finding every way we can to enact and if necessary speak with words the good news of Jesus Christ and his resurrection.