contradictions of the cross

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S EAST BENTLEIGH

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT

(SUNDAY 28^th February) 1988

 

 

We move today to what we might call our second Station of the Cross, our second reflection of the significance of Lent. Today we have to reflect on the moment that the bloodied Jesus lifts the beam of the ruthless, vicious instrument of his imminent death, the cross.

But I want to take us our text this morning a verse from our Old Testament reading.

My son, God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.

For I believe there is a fundamental link between the vivid story of Abraham and Isaac, which has so tantalised artists and authors down through history, and the events of the cross on the skull-shaped hill beyond Jerusalem, Golgotha.

There are many links of imagery, links that fascinated the theologians of the early church – for example the connections between the young Isaac struggling under the weight of wood that was to be the instrument of his sacrifice and Christ struggling beneath the weight of his cross. But these are, I believe, less important than the connection between what we might imagine to be the feelings of the father, Abraham, as he leads his son to apparently inevitable death and the feelings of God the Father as Jesus the Son heads to his own lonely death.

Imagine the pain in the heart of the man Abraham as he spoke those words to his puzzled son. Imagine the desperate hope in his heart that somehow all this would work out alright and the boy’s life could be miraculously spared.

For God the father of the son Jesus there can be no such hope. For Jesus there can be no other culmination of a life spent exposing the civil and religious hypocrisy of his time. The Son Jesus is, of course, the lamb as well, and there can be no other option.

With this in mind let us return to the moment that Jesus lifts up his cross and sets out for the place of crucifixion.

Pilate, the bewildered consul, has bowed to the demands of the raucous majority who have cried out for the blood of Jesus. By bowing it to the wishes of the Pharisees he has averted a riot, yes he has also risked appearing to be a walk over for the whims and fancies of these strange and powerful religious leaders. And so, having quite literally washed his hands of the whole troublesome affair, he attempts one mast and puerile joke at the expense of the Jews. He places a sign at the head of the cross announcing,

Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

 

He knew how scorned the town of Nazareth was, making his jocular claim almost a contradiction of itself,

Can anything good come out of Nazareth? (John 1:36).

 

Perhaps on the other hand he simply saw how tragic and deflated this man now seemed to be, this once charismatic leader, this tall poppy, now bruised, bleeding and with seemingly no remaining followers. Or perhaps he saw this mocking gesture, as a way to end any militaristic dreams of a Jewish uprising against Rome. Here for all to see was the end of one pathetic specimen who had claimed to be the Messiah-King of the Jews.

Whatever Pilate saw before him,  we must ask ourselves the question, “So what?” Is this man now staggering out of the city of Jerusalem merely another humanitarian inspiration? Is this so-called King of the Jews merely a good man who held high ideals but who in the time of crisis was no more or less than a Mahatma Gandhi, a Martin Luther King, a Steve Biko? Is there a difference?

What is the meaning of the Cross?

There can be no doubt that in one very real sense there is no difference between Jesus, Ghandi, King and Biko. The deaths of all these men are testimony to the way in which the rich and powerful treat the powerless who dare to challenge power. Each man, Jesus, Ghandi, King and Biko, and countless others besides, is whether knowingly or otherwise participating in the concern of God “to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” But there is a fundamental difference, a difference ultimately discernible only by the eyes of faith.

For by faith we make the claim that the cross that Jesus carries out of the city of Jerusalem is not the final word in the relationship between Jesus and the world. It is not merely that the cause of Jesus continues after his death, as some theologians have been understood to claim, for if that were all there would again be no difference between Jesus on the one hand and Ghandi, King and Biko on the other.

The difference that we believe in faith is that the life of the very man Jesus continues, defeats death, and thereby pronounces a new word of liberation that is not merely political but is political as well as being far, far beyond the realms of politics. Christ then, as he takes up his cross, takes up not only the instrument of his death, but the instrument of God’s great irony, the instrument by which God transforms death into life.

Of this there can be no rational proof. It is only by faith that we can affirm the exciting belief that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God. But having made that leap in to the language and thought patterns of faith, we can then make the further affirmation that God makes himself known to humankind precisely and only in Jesus, and particularly in Jesus as revealed in the events of the cross which he is now taking up and carrying to the hill of crucifixion.

It is the Cross which stands at the heart of all that Jesus stands for, and it is the Cross which is the inevitable outcome of his teachings. It is then in the Cross that we find God revealing himself to us:

You do not know me, nor do you know my father. If you did know me, you would know my father also                                                                                 (John 8:19).

 

When we know and accept for ourselves Jesus and all the ramifications of the cross he is now carrying we accept the will and the love of the Father. While we may or may not affirm or continue the works of other great liberators of history without ultimately affecting our relationship with God, that is not the case with Jesus. By the cross we stand or fall.

The irony of the cross haunts human history. It is the utter reversal of the ways of the world. It is the absolute abnegation of power by the one who had access to absolute power.
                                                                (Richard Holloway, The Way of the Cross, 37)

Saint Paul puts this in another way.

While Jews look for miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom, here are we preaching a crucified Christ, to the Jews an obstacle they cannot get over, to the pagans madness, but to those who have been called … a Christ who is the power and wisdom of God.
                                                                (1 Cor. 1: 22-24)

 

I wonder if Christians have ever really grasped this message, or whether the Cross is too stupid for us, too, to grasp?

The Cross can never be pretty. It can never be merely decorative. Although we used to speak of the comfortable words of Christ we must never understand the gospel as comfortable in the modern, lounge suite sense of the word. Christianity if it is to be Cross-centred, can never be a religion that leaves us secure in our existing state, but one that must constantly pummel and torment us into new stages of faith and humanness. The comfort that the Cross does provide is the mysterious truth that it is precisely in suffering that our God makes himself known. Where pain is there God is also.

And that is why I chose the verse from Genesis as my text. In fact the writers of that passage in Genesis were probably writing the story in order to persuade their people to turn away from human sacrifice to the less ghastly option of animal sacrifice. Yet there is nevertheless in the passage a powerful image of relevance for us. For the symbol of the steadfast, obedient, but inevitably suffering, grieving Abraham can stand for us as a reminder of the suffering, grieving God, Father, Son and Spirit, as Jesus picks up his cross and trudges towards the place of the skull.

There is of course more to the gospel than Good Friday, more to the gospel than the scandalous event we know as the Cross. But until we have grasped the terrifying concept that the Cross in all its bitter pain lies at the heart of our faith, until we have grasped the Cross, we cannot begin to experience the glorious resurrection that we celebrate at Easter and every time we participate together in the Eucharist.

Says Richard Holloway,

it is the weakness of God we see on the Cross, the weakness of God that reverses and contradicts the strength of the world.

Let us learn to take on our shoulders the contradictions of the Cross.

Conversion of St Paul

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

FEAST OF THE CONVERSION OF St PAUL

(Sunday 24^th January) 1988

 

Paul. Saint Paul, once Saul, who in his enthusiasm for his faith as a Jew used to persecute the embryonic Christian Church. At three points in the New Testament first Paul (chronologically) then Luke tells us of the enthusiasm with which this young apprentice Pharisee had set out to persecute the new set of followers of Jesus the Nazarene. Paul, a man whose letters boil with nervous energy. Paul: the most significant and farsighted theologian in the history of the Christian faith. Paul, the author of our New Testament reading today. Tomorrow is the feast commemorating the conversion of St. Paul.

I’m not convinced we should call the experience that Paul underwent on the road to Damascus a “conversion.” It was not that he was requiring a conversion to the service of God, for as a trained Jewish theologian he was already a far more dedicated servant of God than any of us are ever likely to be able to lay claim to be. Rather, the events of the road to Damascus were something of a reawakening, a new insight into the relationship of God to humanity. Later he came to realise the place that the Jesus-event had in this new insight, but that was to come later.

Paul. In the last few years I have come to love this man. There was a time when, like many opponents of Christianity, I saw him as the arch-distorter of the teachings of Christ. Later I came to see him as the arch-conservative foil to the more liberal theologies of, in particular, John, but perhaps also of our Lord himself.

But in recent years I have discovered him to be neither. He isn’t conservative, and he is certainly not out of step with the teachings of Jesus. I have come to realize as I have studied him just how great his genius is, and, together with that, how close he was to the heart of God. Before all others he saw the significance of the Easter message, saw the central place the event of the Cross must take in Christian thought, worship, and service. Before all others he saw the relationship between the Old Testament Torah, or Law, and the New Testament message of grace (charis). I could rhapsodize for a long time about the merits of this saint, Paul.

And yet he never, of course, rhapsodized about himself. But more than that, he barely ever writes about himself. Luke tells us far more about him, and adapts his biographical details to his own proclamation of the gospel, far more than Paul ever tells us about himself. From his Letter to the Galatians we learn a little about him, but only because he uses the information about himself to further his argument with the people of that region. He speaks about himself only to prove a theological or pastoral point. He lives according to his own famous maxim,

I have been crucified with Christ, and I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me (Gal. 3:20).

 

The essence and meaning of the life of the servant of Christ is not self, but Christ, and the crucifixion of Christ.

But where and how did this first great theologian of Christianity learn his trade? Where did he learn the truths that he was later to proclaim with such vigour to the Church? Often the impression is given that the very experience he underwent on the road to Damascus, the blinding light and the voice from seemingly nowhere, that this event, somehow infused to him an instant theology, an instant insight into the teachings of the Christians he had enthusiastically persecuted.

It is perhaps more probable that in his contact with what he saw to be a heretical sect he had himself absorbed something of their thought. But what he emphasizes is that his knowledge of Jesus Christ was given to him by no one; that it was the result of his own encounter with God. He tells us in the letter to the Galatians that after the Damascus experience he travelled immediately into the region he called Arabia, not stopping at all to sit at the feet of the Christian teachers. Instead he would have begun once more to read the Old Testament scriptures, this time in the light of his new insight that Jesus had truly risen from the tomb on Easter morning. For that was the discovery he made on the road to Damascus at the time of what has come to be known as his conversion.

Luke tells us in Acts,

after he had spent only a few days with the disciples in Damascus he began preaching in the synagogues, “Jesus is the Son of God.”  (Acts 9:20).

 

Wild horses, as they say, would not have restrained Paul from communicating something of the new theological insight he had been given, but he also knew that his time for a more complete ministry to the Church had not yet come. According to his own account,

I did not stop to discuss this with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem … but went off to Arabia at once (Gal. 1:17).

 

So far, then, we have discussed two important points concerning Paul’s life: the first is his obedience to the implications of the new insight he receives on the road to Damascus, and the second is his willingness after receiving this new insight not to rush into rash or  naïve  action, but instead spending first three, and then a further fourteen years preparing himself for the ministry that he now knew himself to be called to.

But I think there is a third significant lesson to learn from this great man of God. I have alluded to it already, for it was this aspect of Paul that eventually conquered all my doubts and cynicism about the man and convinced me that it was indeed he that had seen so clearly to the heart of the Christian gospel.

For it is Paul who sees how central to faith and theology the Cross must be and is. He writes to the church at Corinth,

I resolved to know nothing when I was amongst you accept Jesus Christ, and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2).

 

A useful exercise that I thoroughly recommend – indeed, If I could I would legislate! – is that sometime in the near future you sit down and read one or two of Paul’s letters at a sitting. By hearing or reading only a small fragment of biblical literature at a time we lose so much of its real impact. If you were to sit down and read full epistles of Paul you would quickly discover that he adapts his style and content to the audience he is dealing with. In his letters to Corinth and Galatia he is issuing a stern reprimand to believers who have, in his opinion, strayed from the core of the gospel that he has preached to them. To the church at Ephesus and at Colossae, he writes enthusing at the strength of their faith. To some churches he wrote demanding a stricter observance of Old Testament principles, while to others he emphasizes the contrast between the legalism of the old order and the emphasis on grace and faith in the new. But always at the heart of his teaching there is Christ and the Cross.

Grace, and the Cross. In his letter to the Galatians Paul utterly slams those who have not seen the message of the Cross, and who are attempting to legislate that Gentile converts should undergo circumcision. The letter of the Law of Moses, Paul explains, is still insufficient to earn salvation. Grace and grace alone is the key to God’s favour. He writes with no small touch of annoyance,

Are you people in Galatia mad? Has someone put a spell on you, in spite of the clear explanation you had of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ? (Gal. 3:1).

 

What, then, is the link between these three aspects of Paul’s life and ministry, and does this have any significance for us? He is faithful to his call that he experiences on the road to Damascus, but he gives himself time to grow into God and into the necessary understanding of his new found faith in Christ. What relevance for us has the life or in particular the so-called conversion of St. Paul? Passionately, as a result of the development of his initial insights, he proclaims to all his people the message of Easter, that Christ has conquered death, and that our salvation has been won for us not on our merits but through the merits of Jesus himself. How do these aspects of Paul’s life link up, and how do they link with ours?

I think it is in this way: Paul was an ordinary if academically very capable man. He was, like the Jesus he served, an ordinary bloke, one who took his religion as a Jew, and subsequently as a Jew serving Christ, very seriously indeed. He was always alert and open to the possibilities open to him and to the world in God, and as a result of that openness was able to receive and then utilize the insight he gained on the Damascus Road.

And while we cannot really tell what happened on that road, we can give thanks to God that this man was obedient to his discovery, that he did retreat into the area around Damascus and around Syria, and that he did then come back to the churches and proclaim his fiery insights. For above all Paul tells us that it is by the Cross alone that we are able to return to the communion with God we lost in Eden.

Communicate

  

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

ORDINARY SUNDAY 2 / EPIPHANY 2

(17^th January) 1988

In two readings* today we find God radically transforming the lives of otherwise quite unremarkable persons. In the first reading, Samuel and in the gospel reading three of the twelve closest followers of Jesus experience remarkable transformation of their lives.

I believe that the writings of the Bible must always be read with an understanding of the time and thought structure of the various societies in which they were written. Early this century a German theologian adopted the term “de-mythologize”  to mean approximately what I have just said: we must read the Bible with a realisation that it is impregnated with metaphorical language that belongs to a way of seeing the world totally different to our own.

In our reading from Samuel this morning, therefore, we hear of the young child’s experience of hearing God’s voice in the dark. It may well be that if we had had a tape recorder running in Samuel’s room that night it would have picked up no sound. “The voice of God” is a metaphor for sudden understanding or insight that we receive through the grace of God.

I labour this point because I feel it is at best misleading or at worst plain dishonest to speak in this kind of mythological language in the 1980s and ’90s. My friends in the Pentecostal churches to which I once belonged would talk often of hearing God speak to them or of seeing a vision, to the extent that I often came to wonder if we were speaking of the same God, or, worse, whether I had in my conversion encountered God at all. I heard no voice, nor saw any vision, but simply grew in my experience of God’s intangible but transforming love.

But in our gospel reading today I believe we see something quite close to what we might describe as contemporary experience of encounter with God.

Admittedly, our central characters in the gospel reading are encountering the enfleshed, incarnate, human Jesus. But that does not alter my point. For Jesus was not, as films like Jesus of Nazareth tend to portray him, some instantly identifiable “super-guru,” but rather an ordinary Palestinian human being. He was as one song much loved by many of my friends expresses it, “an ordinary bloke.” The man who so impressed Andrew, Simon/Peter, and the other unnamed disciple would have come across to them simply as an enormously holy, God-centred bloke. A man of God, very, very human.

And surely, if we are to talk in the 1980s and ’90s of God speaking to us at all then it is that we should make clear. We are not speaking superstitious nonsense about voices in the dark, (for superstitious such talk must be in the rational era in which we live), but about the knowledge of the presence of God in the ordinariness of our day-to-day existence. God commands us to be Christ to our neighbour, commands us to be his mouthpiece in the world, and similarly gives our neighbour the responsibility, or at least the potential, to be God’s mouthpiece to us. Those, of course, who are “in Christ,” the baptised, the believers who seek genuinely to serve God with all their lives, are better equipped to speak God’s message to us, because they, like a good spouse, are far closer, far more attuned to the Spirit of God, to the heart of the Creator. But, lest that sound facile, let me add that this is only partially true. For an Atheist or Hindu or Muslim whose code is love is closer to the heart of God then the Christian whose code is power, entertainment or money.

And we, too, in prayer and in reading and meditation on the words of biblical and other spiritual writers, should seek to make ourselves, to allow ourselves to be more capable of being, by our lives and words, mouthpieces of the God we love.

It has been said that we become what we contemplate. The reading today from Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, which is, I might add, one of the most difficult readings to be rostered to read, serves to remind us of that fact. Paul wrote his tirade against sexual liberality not because he held any puritanical obsession with the subjects but because he saw only too well that all forms of indulgent self-satisfaction, whether sexual, financial, intellectual, even spiritual, all such self-satisfaction serves only to distract us from contemplation of God, and therefore hinders us from becoming wholly effective communicators of God’s word of love and healing.

Let me tell you a story from my own experience that illustrates the manner in which God has chosen to communicate to his world in this era. I am often asked how I experienced my call to priesthood – many of you will have read this account in a parish newsletter earlier this year. In reply I tell of the occasion when I was hitchhiking back to university in New Zealand, and was picked up by an elderly Catholic on his way home from the races. As we talked he asked me what I planned to do with my arts degree, and having told him I added almost flippantly “of course, if all else fails, I could become a priest.” For twenty minutes that stranger enthused to me about the responsibilities and rewards of the priesthood, Told me of his own sorrow at his own failings, and of his disappointment and self-blame that none of his sons had entered the priesthood – or even kept the faith. The seeds of an idea were sown that afternoon, though I thought little of it at the time.

So: let me leave you with three thoughts. The first is that if we wait for blinding lights or voices in the dark we may well miss the countless opportunities God allows us to know and to be transformed by his love. Andrew, Simon/Peter, and the other unnamed disciple of John the Baptist came to follow Jesus because they were impressed by the sincerity of “an ordinary bloke.”

Secondly, we must not in this era embellish our experience of God. Our experience of God may not be able to compete with the hype that surrounds the promotion of all things from soap to cricket to politics, but nevertheless it is a pearl of far greater price. In this era of gross overstatement we must seek to communicate our experience of God by contrast; we must communicate God’s love in simplicity and gentle understatement.

And, finally, we must be prepared to take responsibility to contemplate God in stillness and simplicity so that gently we may be transformed into his likeness. Then we may, like Jesus, communicate with a word or a touch God’s word to our neighbour.

*1 Samuel 3: 1-10, John 1:34-51

mispat-justice

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

EPIPHANY 1 (January 10^th) 1988

 

In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.

From our Old Testament reading today:

I have endowed him with my spirit

That he may bring true justice to the nations.

One of the perks of being able to preach regularly is that of being forced to grapple with some of the most stirring passages of biblical literature, and, together with the authors of those passages, to wrestle with the very intentions and plans and will of God. Today’s first reading, from the Old Testament, is one of those great passages.

For what we have heard read to us this morning is what the scholars now identify as the first of four poems known as the Servant Songs. These are passages in the second part of Isaiah about some anonymous figure who is set aside in a unique way to be the chosen that servant of Yahweh. One of the four poems in particular will be familiar to lovers of Handel’s music, four he turns part of it into the aria “He was Despisèd” from his Messiah.

“Behold my servant,” says Yahweh, in today’s passage, “whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights.” But who is this servant of God about whom such eloquent poetry has been written? Quite simply, we don’t know. But we do know that Christian theology from its very beginnings in the New Testament began to identify the life, suffering and death of Jesus of Nazareth with the vocation to suffering of the mysterious servant of these poems. These passages would have been as familiar to the authors of the New Testament as the Lord’s Prayer or perhaps the national anthem are to us today. Quickly Christians came to identify Jesus the Christ with the servant figure who is introduced to us in our passage today.

So what is the task of this servant? What is it about this mysterious figure in the Old Testament and his vocation that came so soon to be linked to the vocation of Jesus?

Almost as though these poems were a great symphony, the answer to that question is first given in the line I have chosen as my text today. It is to recur again and again in the following three poems, to be enlarged upon and developed as the central theme of the series. Here again this theme as it is first introduced:

I have endowed him with my spirit that he may bring true justice to the nations.

“Justice,” or “true justice,” is to be the keyword of this servant’s work – and that theme of justice was clearly at the back of the minds of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as they each recorded their account of the gospel, and particularly as they record the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus as he emerges from the waters of the Jordan following his baptism. From our gospel reading today,

No sooner had he come out of the water then he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him.

If not before, Jesus then knew that his calling was to suffer for his vocation, and that his vocation was to proclaim justice to his people, true justice to the nations

Justice. But what is this justice that our Old Testament Servant and our New Testament Christ we are called to live and to proclaim to the nations?

The answer is not easy. The original Hebrew word is mispat, and it appears to mean both a right relationship to God, and, stemming from that, a right relationship to one’s neighbour. It is, if you like, essentially the same as the ancient mosaic law that is a summary of all the commandments:

you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself.

Now, whatever else we are called to as Christians, it is abundantly clear that we are called to strive towards some kind of imitation of Christ, and certainly to imitate his love primarily of God and of his neighbour. We too are called then In Christ to proclaim by our lives, mispat-justice, true justice, to the nations, we too are called to proclaim true faith (love of God) and justice for all people (love of neighbour). We can open our New Testament anywhere and find that message clearly imprinted on its pages. But how do we proclaim this mispat-justice to the nations, to the peoples of the world in 1988? And let us also be certain, as we proclaim mispat-justice to the world we are almost inevitably going to share also in the other great hallmark of the Servant’s , misunderstanding and rejection. The passage quoted by Handel in The Messiah reminds us,

He [the Servant] was despisèd and rejected by men,

a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,

and as one from whom men hide their faces,

he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

 That is the risk of following Jesus. But what is it in 1988 to participate in the godly mission of proclaiming mispat-justice to the nations?

Some of you will know by now that I am opposed to and I am boycotting the Australian bicentennial celebrations. I must emphasise before saying anything further that you should take the stand, and I am not going to respect any person less because they may be responding differently to me on this issue; it is a well-known fact for example, that the archbishop is participating in the celebrations. But my own stand, like that of Gerry Hand, is that I find myself unable to celebrate in these celebrations. That is a personal response to an ethical problem. The point however is that, regardless of where we might rest on the political spectrum, or with regards to the specific question of the bicentennial celebrations, we must as imitators of Christ, as followers of the Servant of God, be prepared to make our voices heard in a call for justice to the nations, a call for justice to the dispossessed of our own nation and the dispossessed of all the nations of the world. As a response to our experience of and love of God we must make our voices heard on behalf of all our brothers and sisters for whom justice is not being done.

My own stand on the bicentenary is just one way, and perhaps some will say not the right way, of expressing my concern for those within Australia and beyond for whom justice is not being done. The point is that we must as followers of Jesus the Suffering Servant find some way of expressing God’s concern for justice in the world.

So then, whatever our stand on this particular issue, the point remains that our lives must be based on a concern to proclaim God’s justice to the nations as we seek to imitate the concern for true faith and true justice that we see in the life of our Lord end of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah to whose life his was so similar. Our stands on issues of justice must not be taken out of a desire to score political points, but out of a desire to communicate to this world something of the love that we experience in the person of Jesus Christ end of Yahweh-God, his father. For that is the God who calls the Suffering Servant and the suffering Christ his “chosen.”

So: as we move through this new year of 1988, let us take to heart the responsibility to be moulded into the image of the one who was the chosen Servant of God, who is called to proclaim true faith and justice to the nations, and yet who for his pains was “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Let us proclaim the unique justice of God to our nation and to all the nations. Amen.

a place at the table

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St Peter’s, Queenstown

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT

(March 9^th) 2025

 

 Readings

Philippians 3:17–4:1

Psalm 27: 1, 3-6

Luke 13: 31-35 

 

I find it a little strange, when the Gospel passage includes my favourite verse from the scriptures, to find myself turning to Philippians to preach. Perhaps I might simply say how beautifully and humanly the lament of Jesus over his beloved city captures both his longing for humans to respond to his love, to divine love, and the sacred nature of the strange human hotspot, Jerusalem, in the purposes of God.

But it is to Paul that I find myself turning given the strange times in which we live. Who are those who he addresses as “living as enemies of the cross of Christ,” of whom he speaks, as he puts it, “even with tears”?

I think we find clues in his other writings, perhaps more than any in the letters to Corinth. There he watched with deep sorrow as a gospel of justice and compassion was turned into a convenient orgy of self-aggrandizement. The influencers, to borrow a word from this decade, the influencers of Corinth had cherry picked the gospel to suit their own entertainment. In Corinth Paul addresses the question of greed at the communion, the sight, which we hope is to us abhorrent, of the wealthy believers (so-called) shouldering aside the more vulnerable and uncertain in their desperation to have the best seats at the table, the best entertainment of the evening, the best, sadly, of everything that is not Christ and him crucified.

Before I glance very briefly at the replication of that behaviour in our own Christian world, in our own decade, let me emphasise that it is not so long ago that the very same patterns were deeply entrenched in Anglican Christianity. It is not so long ago that pews were rented by the wealthiest members of the local population, and the less well off were excluded, banished to lesser seats. When I say not so long ago I don't mean yesterday, but I do mean in the comparatively short history of this diocese. And while we may not do the same today the pattern is still deep in our DNA and there are many churches at which poor and timid newcomers are glared at if someone dares to sit in a long established worshipper’s seat.

But the problem that was so troubling Paul at Corinth, and which I think is hinted at in this address to the Christians at Phillipi, was that of turning the gospel of the crucified Jew into a celebration of power, privilege and prestige for a gentile few. Perhaps people of no other standing in society were grasping the opportunity that the new religion was offering them. Or perhaps those of standing in society had grasped the new faith with good intentions but had become quickly seduced by opportunities for entitlement – the exact opposite in fact of the gospel that was so dear to Paul.

And in Philippi he simply uses shorthand to describe this behaviour: “their minds are set on earthly things, their God is the belly, their glory is their shame.” Sadly there are forms of Christianity that replicate that today. The forms of Christianity that claim a privileged status for a particular country, a particular skin colour, a particular race, and do so on the pretence that each particular is in some way chosen by God. When status as “Christian” is used – is abused I should really say – to ensure that others are kept from the table, the struggle ongoing in the Cook Islands at this time, then we are seeing an anti-gospel.

“Kept from the table” literally in the case of the Corinthian Christians, where the powerful claimed the best seats and received the best food at the feast. But figuratively in our own world, where we claim a particular faith and its scriptures, buildings and professional representatives should be given entitlements while others are excluded.

Scurrilous religious leaders have often used the label of Christianity to privilege certain segments of society, turning hatred upon those not able to wear the label: upon Jews, Muslims, representatives of other religions or none. Equally bad, such assumptions of entitlement are often turned against otherness in the forms of sexuality, class, education, and a plethora of unspoken bases for exclusion.

When we adopt that attitude we step into the shoes that Paul describes as those whose god is their belly, whose sense of entitlement ensures they put themselves first and believe themselves to be closest to the heart of God.

The challenge for us is to ensure that no sense of entitlement ever creeps into our understanding of relationship to God, and that we continue to prioritize the needs of the broken and the vulnerable, inviting them to the place of honour at the table, literal or figurative.

steadfast

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St Peter’s, Queenstown

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT

(March 9^th) 2025

 

 Readings

Romans 10: 8b-13

Psalm 91: 1-2, 9-16

Luke 4: 1-13

 

I worked you a little hard, those of you who were here last week, so this week I want to do little more than float a few ideas as we journey into Lent.

Some background. Paul’s Letter to the Romans was unusual amongst the collection of his writings that we have. It was the only letter that he wrote (as far as we know) to a community that he had not spent some time with.

It is at the front of the body of Paul’s letters only because they are more or less arranged in size from the biggest to the smallest with a couple of wobbles where there’s more than one addressed to the same congregation. That has tended to give the letter extra weight in the history of Christianity. That is not a bad thing because  it is one in which he stated his case most clearly as he established his credentials for a group of Christians who knew all about him, or thought they did, but of whom many had not met him.

Paul knew much about the Roman Christians and had met many, but not all. Messengers scurried backwards and forwards across the Roman Empire bringing messages and missives to Paul, and taking the same back to various centres. And while Paul had great faith in the Roman Christians he was, from past sometimes bitter experience, deeply concerned that there could be and should not be infighting and division.

We see that clearly in the letters to the Corinthians, but in Romans Paul is trying to cut problems off at the pass, as he tries to establish the city of Rome as his base for mission further West across what we now know as the South of France, Spain and Portugal. Paul wanted no division in the body of Christ.

So he wrote one of his most famous sayings. “There is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. ‘For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’.” Paul is at that point quoting from the prophet Joel.

Paul was not suggesting, and nor was Joel, that bad things would not happen to those who draw near to the heart of God. Paul’s own subsequent execution is a brutal reminder of that, though he did not know, except for perhaps some hunches, that this was going to be his experience.

The often said and well-meant slogan to the effect that God will not permit us to suffer beyond our ability to cope, . is not what Paul meant  and is not the case. God reaches beyond our inability to cope, beyond even our inability to believe in God anymore.

God cradles us in resurrection light and hope even when we or our loved ones can no longer feel or believe it.

But that is referring to extreme circumstances, including the darker valleys of every human life and every Christian journey. I do not claim that I, in any dark times I may have experienced, cheerfully set my jaw saying, “chin up, in Christ I can cope.”

I more likely muttered and swore until at last I was surprised by joy. For some of us that surprise dwells beyond the grave.

And that is really the kernel of Paul’s thought.

Whoever we are, whatever our circumstances, the divine love revealed in Jesus Christ is greater than our imagining, greater than our trials, and greater than our defeats.

Do not believe that those who are being killed in the Middle Eastern hell holes or the bombings of Ukrainian or Russian civilians can find the strength nonchalantly to proclaim “never mind God is with me.” Some will and do. Most can’t and don’t, regardless of their faith or unfaith.

No. Simplistic as it may sound, Paul is simply emphasising repeatedly that the life, light and hope exploded into human history in the moment of resurrection, and are the final word for all creation.

The resurrection hope brought to us in the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, whom we are invited to call Lord, to know as Lord, to worship as Lord, that never deserts us. That never deserts us no matter how often or even how permanently, at least in human time scales, we find no hope light or life.

On this Lenten journey we are invited simply to know that no matter our darkness or our suffering, our grieving, our mourning, our doubts and our darkness, and likewise all those components in the world around us, do not and will not have the final word.

Jesus in the temptation scenes was tempted to give up. We are less strong. Sometimes if not always we will give up.  Whether we know or don't we are embraced by the eternal unflinching and undefeatable love of the God of resurrection.

good fruit, bad fruit

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St Peter’s, Queenstown

EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

(March 2nd) 2025

 

 Readings

Isaiah 55: 10-13

Psalm 92: 1-4, 12-15

Luke 6: 43-45

 

 One of the first actions of those who would seek to control a populace is to eradicate the arts and humanities from the curriculum of schools and universities. 

Cartoonists are  often amongst the first to be silenced one way or another. The staff of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo became one shocking modern example when they were bombed on three occasions, most tragically in 2015. The suppression of artistic comment is not copyright to anyone oppressive or would be oppressive regime, though in that case the atrocities were perpetrated by Muslim extremists. I should perhaps add that I have never been a fan of the kind of satirical aggression that Charlie Hebdo represented, but execution is never a satisfactory solution to political, racial or religious differences. 

Less recently, and therefore less well known, was the execution of English cartoonist Stephen College – admittedly in the 17th century. He was fighting for the right of a Roman Catholic to succeed to the throne in England, and was hung drawn and quartered by Protestant militia. But look, too, to the patterns of dictatorships throughout history: German, Spanish, Ugandan … the list is endless.

Let me emphasise that my focus here is on the Jesus sayings around good trees and bad fruit, bad trees and good fruit. 

It is sometimes necessary to look at those who would be leaders of society and to make judgements. We are called to do so, based on their behaviour and attitudes. 

I had for example the misfortune yesterday to watch footage of the President and Vice President of the United States using the worst forms of bully tactics in attempts to cow the spirit of the president of Ukraine.

It was ugly, and without any judgement of what sort of a person Zelenskyy is, for I have no way of knowing, Trump and Vance betrayed deep inhumanity. It has of course long been a pattern of Trump’s behaviour, though I had never heard of the man prior to his descent into an ostentatious foyer on an ostentatious escalator back in 2015. I remember only too well his stalking overbearance as he paced the stage attempting to cow Hilary Clinton. 

Because she is a woman, and his attitudes to women are well-known. Because she stood in his way. 

Zelenskyy is not a woman, but he stands in the way of Trumpian schemes, personal or national, to gain mineral wealth and power. Bullying body language is a sad response, though it was probably wasted on the Ukrainian comic and satirist.  

For those of you who believe that politics should never enter the metaphorical pulpit, I largely agree. By and large I believe those who preach should not tell their listeners how to vote. And quite clearly I can’t do that because few who will hear me today if any have the right to vote in the USA, and if any happened to be USA citizens it is some considerable time before you get the chance to vote again.

Jesus takes us deeply into territory in which we assess the virtue of a person at least in part through their external demeanour and behaviour. There are of course some exceptions; a person suffering from virulent forms of mental illness can hardly be blamed for their behaviour. Tourette’s Syndrome is perhaps the most obvious example of this.

When I worked in inner city Melbourne I from time to time preached in a small chapel catering specifically to the needs of those who are living on or around the streets, and who often lived with the outcomes of mental illness. One in particular remains in my mind. He would, in a loud voice, pronounce a word that rhymes with duck to demonstrate his agreement or otherwise with statements I was making.

The word was of course unfamiliar to me, but one or two people indicated that some could find it faintly offensive. Can it be such when it is an illness, not an attitude of heart or spirit that is speaking? We adapted to the gentleman’s expostulations.

But in world politics today we are not in any sense dealing with mental illness from the leaders of the free world. In the lead up to elections I am often met with variations on a theme of “it’s the economy, stupid!” This phrase or something like it tends to be spoken when I am exploring suggestions that compassion and a bias to the most vulnerable and broken of God’s earth are the key navigational beacon as we ascertain who it is to whom our votes should go.

I am no economist, so my response is generally to smile vacuously, and to believe something quite different.

So we come at last to good trees and bad fruit and bad trees and good fruit.

We as a people of God are called, as the Bible puts it, to test the spirits. Politicians of course are becoming increasingly rancorous, perhaps because that is increasingly the form of entertainment we expect from them. That is a judgement on us.

I thank God for church leaders such as Bishop Budde, Bishop of Washington, who speak out of a deeply biblical sense of the priorities of justice and compassion. As I watched the performance of the president and vice president of the USA badgering the president of Ukraine I could not but think of the firm but compassionate words delivered by the Mariann Budde in her cathedral at the inauguration of the 47th Presidency.

“The good person” says Jesus “out of the good treasure of the heart produces good and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil.”

I do not think God is right wing or left wing. God does not always agree with me and in any case I’ve seen inspirational leadership and the betterment of society come from both wings of politics at different times. I do not believe that we can change politics in a far-off country. I do think we are challenged to speak out where we see injustice and to act out where we see a lack of compassion, wherever we are

Sometimes to do that is to be called woke or politically correct.

I’m not sure of the meaning of those words. I do know that Jesus hangs out with those who are broken and on the fringes of society. He sternly addresses those who are in positions of privilege and power when they abuse or oppress the vulnerable.

I began with cartoonists but I used the word as what scholars call metonym. I have mentioned Washington already. I referred to it as a geographical location, or a diocese in that particular case.

Such a word becomes “metonym” when we use it to represent all that is associated with the word and the place or activity the word describes.

“Washington” can also mean the US government. “Canberra” can mean the Australian government. “Cartoonist” can mean all who use the arts to express deep social truths, faith-based or otherwise.

“Cartoonists” in this sense are often amongst the first to find themselves up against the wall when a government becomes authoritarian, dictatorial, shuffling its way towards evil. Muslim extremists took lives at Charlie Hebdo because they objected to the rights to freedom of speech. Dictators kill those who threaten them. Ask Vladimir Putin.

Dictatorial leaders do their best to silence historians, novelists, cartoonists, even in the specific sense of those words. Some of you may remember the persecution of punk rock band Pussy Riot in Mr. Putin’s Russia or that of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in the United States. Rock bands and folk singers can easily find themselves up against the wall, metaphorically or literally.

So too can church leaders, and one thinks immediately of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King jr., Desmond Tutu. One fears for the future, and God forbid it may be this dark, of Bishop Mariann Budde.

God forbid, indeed, and let us be thankful that we live in a tiny and unimportant nation. But that should never lead us to complacency. We must speak out where we see indecency, close by or far away. We must speak out where we see bad fruit revealing the dark secret that the tree that bears it is rotten to the core. Sometimes we will disagree with one another, and we must do so in love, but Jesus throughout especially Luke’s account of the gospel, challenges us, dares us to speak out for justice and compassion.