Jesus gets ouchie

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 28

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 4: 12-16

Psalm 106: 1-5

Mark 10: 17-31

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 28

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 4: 12-16

Psalm 106: 1-5

Mark 10: 17-31

 

It’s a little hard to ignore the fact that that gospel reading makes for uncomfortable reading for us all. The demands of the gospel are not to be trivialised, and there is a tendency for us all, and I include myself as I shall explain, to seize on the almost-closing words of this scene, rendered here as “for mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible,” to seize on them at the expense of dwelling on the all but terrifying demands of the paragraphs on either side. The man, Jesus’ interlocutor, goes away sad. That’s one bookend to the passage. “Many who are first will be lost, and the last will be first.” That’s another bookend to the passage.

And at the risk of making me squirm as much as maybe I make us all squirm, are not these chilling words particularly daunting when we recognise that we live in a town where houses that are empty or filled for only small fractions of the year are owned by people with other houses elsewhere – no matter how hard they may have worked to own multiple houses, the case still rests. It rests more weightily still when we recognise, as we will increasingly, that there are homeless people on our church and office steps, sleeping rough. It is, while I am no social work expert, too easy to say that they have other choices. The choices I hear from them, and from specialists in the field, is that either through employment or through mental health issues, these are people for whom there is an imperfect safety net even in egalitarian New Zealand.

But when I preach I preach not to make you squirm but to make me squirm. I may not have multiple properties, although as I live in two places at the moment I may squirm a little on that basis alone. But I have over the years spent an inordinate amount of  money for example on books which in rare moments of excruciating honesty I should probably admit I do not need, and if I can extrapolate from Jesus’ teachings on adultery and looking on sexually desirable human beings (for more than three seconds of course) as being a form of adultery, then by extrapolation I know that, when I dribble over the sight of a Maserati, Bentley, or Aston Martin, I know that I too if I had the chance would be driving one, and that I too am therefore trapped in the cycles of consumerism.

“Point not at others lest you notice the fingers pointing at yourself,” as Jesus didn’t quite say, though he says many equally telling things: many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

The challenge for us is to act rightly. For us who are all, regardless of our actual assets, comparatively blessed with riches (it is always worth remembering that we are in the top few percent of the world’s wealth owners), the challenge is to discern how best we can act philanthropically, how we can act generously, how we can act, preferably crazily, to benefit the lives of others in the dark holes, nationally and internationally, of poverty and injustice.

The author of Hebrews is, I grudgingly admit, right: the word of God (and she was referring to the Hebrew scriptures) is sharper than any two edged sword. As Christ bearers we have come to know Jesus, hopefully with a deep and intimate knowledge, as the Word of God, the embodiment of acting out all God’s demands and commands. The author of Hebrews is right because by the merciful power of God’s Spirit Jesus does draw alongside and even within us to guide us on a more excellent way. It is impossible – or I hope it is – to hear the words of Jesus to this eager would be Jesus-follower, and to the disciples standing by, without being challenged to take a long and hard look at ourselves and the standards of generosity and compassion that we set and follow ourselves.

As we look at our media each day and seeing telling signs of a civilization that is crumbling  (and I do not mean that lightly), we might well remember that it is God who builds up and tears down, and who may be handing over (to quote a phrase from Romans) at the very least the wealthy peoples of the world to the ramifications of our own somewhat indulgent lifestyles.

I am always told that a sermon should contain good news. Saint Hilda’s Chaplain Dr. Gillian Townsley somewhat rocked the socks off my recent gospel conversation when she emphasised that the good news in this passage is that we all die. 

Once we had a chance to pick ourselves up from her statement, for at the very least it was a somewhat unusual interpretive angle to place on this passage, she reminded us that death is the great leveller, and that we are, again at the very least through a veil of tears, invited to enter, to use now my words not hers, the loving judgement of God. 

Nearly all of us have got possessions badly wrong, but we can offer to our God of the best of what we have been able to do and implore and know the forgiveness of God where we have corporately and individually failed. 

It is small wonder that the earliest Christians wrote of judgement often in tandem with writing of tears. Yet in saying that, I have a deep sense that while there will be tears of sorrow in whatever the resurrection means, there will be tears of laughter too.

 

 

 

  

 

annual-ish mea culpa

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 27

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 1:1-4

Psalm 26

Mark 10:2-16

 

Because we are a liturgical, lectionary following (more or less) faith community I am faced with the ritual encounter with Jesus’ teachings on divorce almost annually. Because on the whole I’ve moved around far too much, and no I’m not running from something, just as Lord Byron would have called it, a restless soul, because I’ve moved around a lot I’ve tended not to have to preach on this passage and its parallels in the same place too often. Last year I escaped it because I was not yet with you, next year I’m going to be lying on a Hawaiian beach sipping pina coladas or something. Today I have no wriggle room. It is my annual mea culpa.

Because of course to those of you who are not visitors it will be well known that I stand here not only as a divorced person, but as a remarried person, with as it happens children on either side of the equation. Enough about me, Except to say that honesty is I think the best policy, and the severity of Jesus’ teaching is not to be trivialised.

So what this becomes is an exercise in which academic people call “hermeneutics”; loosely, the science of interpretation. As we can probably all remember from our secondary school days every text is open to a plethora, even an infinity of realistic interpretations. Jesus teachings on divorce and remarriage are in their biblical versions pretty much unambivalent, and yet most Christian bodies across the world, with the slightly slippery exception of the Roman Catholic Church, have chosen to ignore them. What is going on? And for that matter are they to be put in the same category as Paul’s teachings on hair length and hats, or are they, because they are apparently the words of Jesus, to be given extra weight, red ink perhaps, and in that case do we then have what scholars call a “canon within the canon,” biblical texts that are more important than others, to be taken more seriously than others?

These are big questions and we can probably save them for when you join in a theological studies programme, which of course I hope you all will at some stage in the next decade or two or three. But I put it out there because I believe the biblical texts are not something to be trivialised. A colleague who, sadly, died recently, once shocked me by his declaration that he was not going to have his life ruled by an old book. I cannot be so dismissive. The 66 books that make up the form of the Bible preferred by Protestants, or the 72 or sometimes 73 books in the Bible as accepted by the Roman Catholic Church, (which I prefer unashamedly), came to be collected together through sweat and tears and even blood, as Christ-followers sought to determine which books most accurately convey the will and the purpose of God, as revealed in Christ. It’s a long story. But it is not just an old book, but a collection of books that point to the heart of God.

So what do I do as a divorced and remarried person when it tells me that I am an adulterer, and indeed that by remarrying I have made Anne adulterous too? Put that way it sounds pretty brutal, and it is.

My response is to acknowledge who I am and where I’ve been. Strangely in my pastoral career I have often found this sad story to be encouraging for those for whom I have cared and to whom I have listened. While I am obviously not recommending that every clergy person should have a divorce, I have found on the whole that people have responded with relief that a person with their collar back to front is a person with glitches and scar tissue. But that is no excuse. My starting point must be that I acknowledge that I made bad mistakes in my life.

My continuation point is more important. The story of Jesus is the story of divinity meeting us in the dark struggles of being human. I came not to condemn, says Jesus, and we see that he meant it in his warm compassionate and welcoming attitude to so many of the struggling people that he met in his public ministry.

I am in any case relieved when it comes to the question of being adulterous that Jesus makes it quite clear that ogling, a human tendency that a great deal of our advertising industry is based on, and to which certainly many males and perhaps even some females have not been completely impervious, is basis enough on which we should all – well all of us who admit to this weakness – be plucking out our eyes.

In the end I think the question comes down to that struggle for integrity or authenticity. When, infamously, televangelists announced that they have had an affair but it’s all right because the devil made them do it, I suspect they are falling short of that very flexible question of integrity. I hope and pray that I and others who have sought to serve Christ despite the flaws in our lives do not fall into that obscenity. I hope that those of us who have gone through the painful journey of marital breakup and perhaps the joy-filled journey of discovering new love will have always been seeking damage control for children, decency in relationship with estranged partners, and a sort of never-ending acknowledgement, but not ongoing brutal self-castigation, that this has been an error, a glitch, a sin, in our journey as we seek to follow Christ.

We live in a remarkable age. I often feel the boundaries have been erased too radically. I remember with wry amusement our youngest son coming home from secondary school one day and announcing that it was terribly embarrassing that his biological parents were still married to each other, as he was, he said, the only one in his year group who had to suffer such shame. I remember both sons, and I usually avoid telling family tales, shrugging their shoulders and asking what was for dinner when told that a family member was gay. I remember, years after my divorce, talking with my daughters about the life-mistakes that I had made, which had been briefly publicised following my wrongful dismissal nearly a decade ago: There was neither surprise nor condemnation from these strong young women who had the most right to judge and find me guilty.

It is always possible for us to indulge in cauterising, numbing our conscience. Macbeth speaks of it when he speaks of being so far in blood that sin will prick on sin. But ultimately it is up to us to be honest about our lives and to seek in both the highs and the lows of our journey to find ways by which we may proclaim and glorify our risen Lord.

 

 

 

  

spirit filled women

six strong women

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 29^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 26

 

 

edited excerpts from Esther 7 and 9

 

I overworked you a little last week and don't want to repeat that dose this week. But there is a bit of ground to cover – I will do my best to compensate by last week’s effort by simply floating ideas for you this week.

But you may recall in passing last week I hinted at what we should call “the force of the feminine” in our triune God. I don't want to cover that ground again, except to remind you that there have been many strong and eloquent women in the last four decades or so who have rightly reminded us, and forcefully reminded us, of the ways in which our understanding of God has been limited by the habits of maledom.

Without justification for example we have assumed male pronouns for God, yet even Jesus himself, while he speaks of God as father, also uses quite an intimate non-gender specific name for God, and even uses feminine images of his own ministry as he laments over his beloved city of Jerusalem. But more of that another time.

We have also with absolutely no excuse insisted on using male pronouns for the third person of the Trinity, she who, as we will sing later in this service, “sits like a bird, brooding on the waters, hovering on the chaos of the world’s first day.”

In the passage from Proverbs that some of us heard last week we encountered the strength of a godly woman, filled with divine feminine force, revealing the godly strength that dwells in her. We encountered too the strength of the biblical Naomi, mother of the equally stroppy Ruth, who carried in her loins, in whakapapa terms, genealogical terms, the genesis of King David and of Jesus the Christ. The women in the whakapapa of Jesus were not the sort who would take sedately the obscene and misogynistic claims for which one of the two candidates for president of the USA is infamous in his revolting boasts about conquering women with his alleged fame.

Today we catch a glimpse of one of another rare named woman who escaped the anonymity of Hebrew and Christian scriptures; the tricky, enigmatic and definitely unbowed heroin of the Book of Esther. I have used only representative slices of Esther; in the 21^st century, when we are bombarded with so many faces of violence in the world as we eat our dinner or breakfast, I don’t think it is necessary to be reminded of the brutal ways in which human beings execute each other.

But I do think it is necessary to be reminded of the strength and courage of those who stand up for justice. It is worth remembering as we glimpse a slice of the Book of Esther that not all are card-carrying adherents of our faith. The book of Esther, as I mentioned in my notes, contains no direct reference to God, yet it explores the strength and integrity of a woman who stands up in the face of evil.

We do not need to think hard or long to know that there have been many in human history. Some I could name would be controversial: I think of the young and feisty Greta Thunberg, or even more controversially Phoebe Plummer, and Anna Holland.  Others are less controversial, as I think of Malala Yousafzai, and her fight for education for young women and girls in Pakistan, Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who in her novels and public addresses has fought to defend women from exploitation and market manipulation; lesser-known Clara Gouin, a stay-at-home mom in Maryland; Donna Shimp, in New Jersey, who, like Gouin, fought Big Tobacco in the USA; Erin Brockovich who fought groundwater contamination in California; Rosa Parks, who fought for civil rights in Alabama and the wider USA.  Oh? And in New Zealand? Historically it’s hard to go past Kate Sheppard who fought for women’s voting rights, of even our own Penny Jamieson who did her best to crack the glass ceiling that women faced – and to a lesser extent still face – in New Zealand Anglicanism.

Some of these were card-carrying Christ-bearers. Others were bearers of what I might call the ethos of Christ, we might even say the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Jesus.

And therein lies a challenge – addressed by Jesus himself, in our gospel passage today, as he proclaims “anyone who is not against us is for us.” For we as a Christian, a Christ-bearing community are challenged to speak up, in word and deed, where we see injustice, and to stand with others, regardless of faith, as they do too. We need to ensure that we, to borrow Jesus’ example, stand in solidarity with all who bear a cup of water to the thirsty, and stand in firm opposition to those who cause the weak to stumble. Finding when and when not to do that is a journey of discernment to which we are all called  to engage in prayer and discourse, so that we can bear Christlike justice and compassion wherever we live and work.

like a child, be powerless

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 22^nd, 2024

 

 

Proverbs 31: 10-31

Mark 9: 30-37

 

 

As I sat down to get my head around our readings I found myself in a fascinating three-world kaleidoscope of information. As I often do I broke all my rules and omitted the psalm from our liturgy today; I did so in order to emphasise the magnificence and the radicalism of the very distinct passage from Proverbs. As that was reverberating through my mind I was also reading powerful writings by Bishop Penny Jamieson and some of the leading women’s voices from this diocese in the late 1980s and early ’90s. And if that wasn’t enough I find Jesus telling me that I am to become, you are to become, even the church is to become as if a small and seemingly unimportant, nameless child.

Early in my theological journeys I leaned to emphasize what I refer to as the powerlessness of the Cross. Against the glorification of Jesus’ death it is an emphasis on the absolute absence of glory. More – the absolute absence of what we might call headline material in the events of the life and death and teachings of Jesus.

Does it matter. Let me at least hint at an explanatiuon.

As the disciples came to Jesus arguing on the road they were arguing about greatness and magnificence and neon lights or their firstst century equivalent. They were arguing about glory and greatness and headlines. Jesus, poignantly aware of the likely outcome of his conflict with authorities, turned instead to a powerless child, devoid of rights in his or her society, and said, effectively, be like this child, be this child.

Be vulnerable, be nameless, be someone who unlike the principalities and powers against which Saint Paul railed, unlike them, be without rights, be without power, be no one. As he soon would become no one, no person.

Let me turn for a moment to the woman of strength in Proverbs. This acrostic poem of course celebrates, as the opening line puts it, a remarkable woman. But a strong woman in her day was hardly a Margaret Thatcher if I may be a little historic, or, to maintain an even balance between the right and the left, a Helen Clark. And she was, in any case, cited as a contrast to the humdrum state of most of her kind.

This idealised woman of the book of Proverbs is at least in part a celebration of the mysterious figure we call Wisdom, the feminine force of God that came to be identified closely with the Christian understanding of Holy Spirit. But she is also a woman, and the very fact that women like her, like Ruth, like Naomi, who stand out in the Old Testament stand out precisely because opportunity for women to stand out were so few and far between. That should remind us that political and military and physical power still remained firmly in their hands of those with a Y-chromosome.

In 1991 Penny Jamieson, whose trailblazing journey cost her, I sense, so deeply delivered a remarkable address to women in the Waikato, reminding them amongst other things that the consecration of the world’s first female bishop was not the ushering in of Utopia, not the glorious and final entrance into the Promised Land, but just one step along the way as women and men in church and society, but primarily in the body of Christ, learned the meaning of Paul’s words: “neither male nor female.”

Woven into Penny’s address and, I think, her thought generally was the recognition that traditional models of power, especially patriarchal models of power, are counter gospel. Waving big sticks is not the way of the child – well it is when children are playing or misbehaving, but not the way of the child that Jesus places as a counterculture in the midst of the arguing disciples. It is not the way of the Giod who becomes powerless, for us, with us.

The church has a long way to go towards realising Penny’s ideal, and she herself is forced to admit in her address that she does not always attain it.

“The call to Christian women today is not to be contented with the Promised Land, with its isolated and all-too-temporary ecstasy, but rather to reach in open and shared vulnerability with men to the Cross of Christ and for the fulfilment of all that is promised in that Cross; to a future in which there will be “neither man nor woman.”

As part of that we are being called to rely not on social standing or other un-God power, but on the simplicity of powerless, authentic faith. Faith in the one who became utterly powerless for us. And there the journey of being church in the 21^st century begins.

Penny herself, and every female church leader since her (and there have been too few in this country) were often forced into a power-mongering mould. We are not, she emphasised, as yet, in the Promised Land.

We are though in challenging and uncertain times. We have been for some decades, but are arguably increasingly so. Certainly as church we are being forced rightly or wrongly to the fringes of society, forced rightly or wrongly to surrender much that our forebears took for granted. I make no secret of the belief that I believe an awful lot of our infrastructure will disappear in the next decade. Our buildings, our paid clergy (and yes, that is me), our few remaining privileges in the community will gradually turn to dust. 

There is more than one way to walk along the road arguing who is the greatest. If nothing else my research in the history of the diocese has reminded me that an awful lot of ink was spent in subtle forms of affirming that we, not they, (whoever “they” might be), should have the place of honour after the table. 

Those days are gone, and I believe that to be a work of the Spirit as we learn to be a gospel people whose mission is built on service and confession and love, and not on any expectation that we are great or important in society.

And if all this is a little esoteric as we weave together readings from Proverbs, from a former diocesan bishop, and from a powerful teaching moment as Jesus turned to face his own looming lopsided struggle with authorities and almost certain death, if all this is a little esoteric it is because the challenge is to see through a different lens, to see our mission no longer as a people with standing in society, but as a servant people with open arms and willing hearts. Our challenge is to be an unimportant people of God walking on that unspectacular road to Jerusalem and cross and above all resurrection hope.

who wouldn't does

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8^th, 2024

James 2:14-17

Psalm 146:5-10

Mark 7: 24-30

 

In Matthew 21, and unique to Matthew, Jesus tells a little parable of two sons. Son One says he will and then doesn’t, while Son Two says he won’t and then does. That is the Readers Digest version. But it is a useful key by which to explore the two loosely related passages that pop up this Sunday.

There are one or two or more parables in which Jesus may be interpreted as a character in his own story. They’re not necessarily the ones about judgement and gnashing teeth. It was, I think originally the great Swiss Protestant scholar Karl Barth who first offered a radical interpretation of, for example, yet another parable, the much more well known Parable of the Prodigal Son. It might equally have been tortured Danish poet-philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard; either way we are invited to dare to read that parable with Jesus as the son who travels into the far country, a country of murk, mire, and human grottiness. That son becomes  desperate and unclean.

Paul often indicates that Son-Jesus goes into grot for us. Even death on a cross. As one who subscribes to a theology of divinization, or as Anne puts it in her recent book, theosis, I would prefer to say that Jesus enters into the grot with us in that parable. There he turns our sows’ ears into silk purses, our mourning into joy. 

Matthew’s Parable of the Two Sons, is often interpreted demonically. It has been used obscenely to generate what is called a supercessionist doctrine of salvation. That is an evil reflection, seeing the flawed Hebrew and an irredeemably flawed people who say yes and then don’t, and the blessed Christian people who allegedly say no but even more allegedly then do.

It’s wrong. It’s demonic.  

Read properly, attuned to the whole Jesus story, that parable is however a useful tool when stripped of those demonic undertones of racial hatred. Perhaps Jesus told the story to gently poke fun at himself, as he realised that his vision of mission had been changed by a desperate outsider, an unclean woman, a foreigner. 

At the very least the parable of the Two Sons provides a useful key to this remarkable encounter of Jesus and a desperate Gentile woman.

These parables need to be held in tension, and can provide a key as we explore the great dichotomy of James (probably the brother of Jesus) with his emphasis on getting out there and doing it, Mark telling a story of a Syrophoenician woman who redirects the mission of Jesus, becoming the son who said he wouldn’t do but then does. 

The woman’s desperate longing realigns Jesus from an exclusive commitment to the people who allegedly said yes but then didn’t, to hearing our heart cries, too. For we are the people who in our DNA (or whakapapa) originally said no but then did. Jesus Who Wouldn’t becomes Jesus Who Does hear the heart cry of the Gentiles, our heart cry,  my heart cry and yours and the heart cry of every human in a hell hole of despair.

Scholars have spent a lot of ink arguing whether Jesus was playing games with the Syrophoenician woman, knowing all along with perfect knowledge what his plan was, a sort of mucking around to test the depths of the her faith. In that rather cynical reading and variations of it, Jesus knew all along that he would heal the child. 

I am happier with a reading that suggests she in a sense “converts” his understanding of mission through her desperation and passion. God hears passion.

The argument is asking the wrong questions. The Jesus who reveals the heart of God will respond always to the heart cries of those who are suffering. And let’s not kid ourselves: this does not mean that suffering suddenly ceases. Nevertheless, as the author of the quotation in my comments on the psalm makes clear,[1] God, seen or unseen, enters into the deepest hell holes of human suffering and breathes resurrection light.

I am not expecting you to follow some sort of sequential argument here. There isn’t one. We need to take from Jesus’ encounter with this desperate woman a reminder that in Jesus the God who is revealed is the God who will enter into the deepest places of human experience. We need to take from James’ feisty passage the reminder that it is no use believing this unless we are prepared to get our hands dirty in the places where people are hurting. 

In the encounter with the feisty Syrophoenician woman, a foreigner, an outsider, a person Jesus the Jew is not meant to hobnob with, he does hobnob. 

In this encounter Jesus may or may not be coerced to change his mind, change his vision; we need not be afraid of interpretations that suggest that, for Jesus himself tells yet another parable of a desperate woman who knocks endlessly on the front door of the home of a sleeping judge in order to get her way. Jesus both reveals and speaks of the God he calls “Father,” God who does respond to the deepest cries of the human heart – though awkwardly we have to add a sort of rider saying “even if we can't see it.”

We can also rest assured that if we are going to find Jesus as a character in his own parables he will turn up in places that shatter our expectation of where a nice God should be. One of my favourite phrases which I have either stolen or coined is “what’s a nice God doing in a place like this?” Mark, James, and even the Psalmist, remind us of that tricky realisation that God will be who God will be and is not limited by our boundaries and expectations.

[1] “Happiness is not the absence of pain and trouble but the presence of a God who cares about human hurt and who acts on behalf of the afflicted and the oppressed.” J. Clinton McCann “The Psalms,” New Interpreter's Bible, vol. 5, 1264.

embrace the vulnerable

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

AND ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1^st, 2024

 

James 1:17-21

Psalm 26:1-8

Mark 7: 1-2, 6-6, 8

 

 Amongst my suitcase of theological heroes, one is extraordinarily ambivalent. Martin Luther, who I consider something of a lesser hero then Martin Luther King jr., was profound in his understanding of Pauline theology and the significance and achievement of God in Christ, the Incarnation. He was horrible in his anti-Semitism. Not of the kind that some people today refer to as anti-Semitism, that is to say speaking out against some of the atrocities perpetrated by the State of Israel, but of the more traditional, pre-1948 model, whereby anybody with Hebrew or Jewish DNA was somehow deficient or even evil. That is an abhorrent and evil worldview.

I mention this because Luther also gets a fail in my assessment when it comes to his attitude to cherry picking scripture. The most famous example of that is his diffident attitude to the epistle we call James. I tend incidentally to agree with those scholars such as Luke Timothy Johnson, who see no reason to suggest that the source of this epistle was not the brother of Jesus of Nazareth, the one we know as the Christ. Perhaps that’s a conversation for another day, but I put it out there anyway, if only to flag that I am unpersuaded by those methods of interpretation that decide that if tradition affirms something then it is clearly wrong.

I only partly digress because in this epistle and this reading in particular we find some deep and inconvenient wisdom. Martin Luther with his correct but obsessive and blinkered focus on God’s grace in the event of the cross found it necessary to describe the epistle of James as a “right strawy epistle” unworthy of his serious consideration. 

While I guess we all do it and always have done it, we can’t just shoulder aside biblical texts that don’t suit us. Luther doesn’t quite achieve that but he certainly comes close, and at best inadvertently gives us permission to do so.

James sees clearly the contrast between light- and life- and truth-bringing relationship to scripture and to God, on the one hand, and the playing of Antichrist games, or what I believe is the real meaning of using the Lord’s name in vain, distorting the gospel to suit racist or sexist or even homophobic bigotry, on the other. And of course the last of these is a highly complex minefield and not I think it is simple as waving an ideological wand.

Nevertheless in a year in which, if you have the misfortune to be like me deeply aware of and troubled by US politics, you’ll see there is an awful lot of what James warns us against: hanging out with the wrong crowd. And again, as I say in my notes, this does not refer to reaching out to and caring for those who are rough around the edges, which I hope has been a hallmark of my ministry for nearly 40 years. It does however mean avoiding hanging out with those who are cruel, those who are bullies, those who are exploiters of any form including sexual predators, those who disfigure and deny the lives of those around them, the underdogs, the broken, the emotionally, spiritually, psychologically or physically disfigured.

James challenges us to set such attitudes aside. As a litmus test I, not James, would say: where do we find the imago dei, image of God, that beautiful concept explored in the opening chapters of Genesis, in this person or that person with whom we are rubbing shoulders?

And if ever we wanted confirmation that James and Jesus were closely entwined in their thinking, it is in the records of Mark as he gives us Jesus’ interpretations of Torah, the Law. If this were a lecture not a sermon I would also go into the relationship between Mark and Paul, but for now let us simply say that James, of whom Paul was not always a fan, Mark, with whom Paul may have had a blistering falling out, and Jesus, all speak with one voice on this issue of integrity, of avoiding being soiled by the lack of integrity of others.

Jesus looks closely at those who play games with God, those whom he designates with telling accuracy as hypocrites. At those who use their religious sanctimoniousness as a weapon with which to bludgeon the vulnerable and the broken and the timid and the uncertain. I think immediately of those in our society who bludgeon those considering IVF or abortion, those wrestling with or rejoicing in sexuality which is alternate to mum dad and the kids behind a white picket fence, and those outside the Christian community for whatever reason. Jesus has no time for those who bludgeon the vulnerable with the sanctimonious use of biblical texts and self-serving, un-critiqued traditions.

And so all I can do is once again float the ideas that our passages present to us. Even the psalm, which can appear disturbingly self-righteous, is in context a recognition that any kind of righteousness can only be imparted by an ongoing desire to open ourselves up to and be formed by the love and the compassion and the justice of the God we cannot see,  the God who is revealed in our scriptures and in our liturgical practises.

wipe your nose

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the MISSION HALL, GLENORCHY

SUNDAY, AUGUST 28^th, 2024

 

Ephesians 6:10-20

 

Excuse if you will two brief preambles before I address the famous passage from Ephesians. The first is to say that I do not believe that in Anglican preaching we remain totally enslaved to preaching from the gospel passage, and I feel that for now we have extrapolated as much as we can from the bread sayings of Jesus in John. 

And secondly I will confess that there are occasions when I feel no sermon within me. I kind of know that many would be delighted if I said, arrgh let’s skip the sermon. I would be delighted too, accept that I sincerely believe that breaking open the word is a fundamental responsibility of a clergyperson, week by week.

Enough. As I say in my notes, I heard this passage from the tail end of Ephesians at the closing service of every term of my five years at prep school in Whanganui. The gravelly voice of Rodney Gould interned the words sombrely. This little boy, yet to become the adolescent atheist that he later was, felt the solemnity of the responsibility to which he was being commissioned. Put on the armour of God.

I can't speak for that enigmatic man Rodney Gould, but I suspect in many private school settings the armour of God resembled a private school uniform far more than it resembled the heavy baggage of the First Century soldier. And the duty of every small prep school boy was to remember to keep his shoes polished, his nose wiped, his knees clean, and not to use naughty words. I'm not sure about the command regarding my nose, but I'm pretty darned sure I failed the rest of the expectations of either Rodney Gould or the author of Ephesians.

But by the time that author, who I suspect was a disciple of Paul rather than Paul himself, wrote his letter to the church in Ephesus, Christ-bearing was becoming no trivial matter. Jewish and Roman leadership alike were getting a little bit antsy about this new cult, for at its best Christians were thumbing their nose at religious hypocrisy and at state corruption. And that is no easy stance to maintain without ruffling a few feathers, and, worse, gaolers’ keys.

All this passed over the head of that small boy, his mind already drifting to whichever James Bond movie he was going to watch over the holidays, and whether there would be time to fit in some riding lessons before school went back. 

And it is incredibly easy for it all to pass over our head too. There is at present little in our world that resembles the world of the First Century Ephesian Christians. We are not being persecuted for our faith, though we are perhaps being shouldered out of the place of honour in society that we had come to see as rightfully ours. 

That shouldering aside is, in my belief a work of God’s Spirit, for as a Christian people of God we had come to trust in shibboleths of social standing rather than Christ’s call to integrity and to seating others in the seats of honour. 

We are not being persecuted for our faith, though we may have to learn, as the early Christians did, that our faith is only one in a marketplace of many and of none, and the task of proclaiming Christ and him crucified, as Saint Paul puts it, can only be achieved by the integrity of our lives, and by the whispers of our love for our neighbour, and especially for the disadvantaged.

None of that crossed my mind as I listened to Rodney Gould and thought of the excitement of a two hour drive home, for even then to be in a moving vehicle was my greatest joy. And I would not dare to claim that in the five decades since I have gained any greater comprehension of God or gospel. 

But I have come however stumblingly, to recognise the importance of God’s claims on my life, God’s demand that I offer myself as a living sacrifice, what our writer calls keeping alert and always persevering, not just in our prayers but in our whole of life witness. 

And as I think these words I am reminded of a song that some of you may have known from a Christian singer of the 1970s, Keith Green, killed far too young in a plane accident, and wise beyond his years. He prayed to his God and mine, “make my life a prayer to you.” 

If and as we pray that prayer we may indeed be donning the whole armour of God.