SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,
and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17th, 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.