Love. Do not condemn.

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
EIGHTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (May 28^th) 1989

 

READINGS

Side chapel at the former Holy Trinity church,
Ringwood East

Sirach 27:4-7 / Isaiah 55:10-13
Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15
1 Corinthians 15:51-58
Luke 6:39-49

 

[I don’t think I would start a sermon in 2026 with a harangue like the one with which I began this one in 1989 - but that is the way it was!]

 

One of the problems faced by the liturgical churches in the modern world is that in an attempt to make scripture manageable we carve it up into small but meaningless portions. Worse, we then slavishly attempt to link together an Old Testament passage, a Psalm, a non-Gospels New Testament passage, and a reading from the Gospel, contorting them together and imposing on them a meaningless theme. 

You will or may have already noted that I am doing away with the “theme for the day” idea given to us in the prayer book.

To illustrate this, what better readings could one have than today’s? A collection of disjointed wisdom sayings that managed all but accidentally to find their way into the Old Testament, and which contrast futility with wisdom. A Psalm which rejoices in the psalmist’s relationship to God while cheerfully condemning God’s enemies (and the psalmist’s) to utter destruction, a Pauline slice that in three verses attempts to summarise what Paul says far more effectively in three chapters of Romans, celebrating the undoing of death. A Gospel reading taken wholly out of its context in Jesus’ teachings. 

We are given a theme, “whence comes goodness?”  Not it seems from An Australian Prayer Book.

The answer to the question “whence comes goodness?” is as trite as the question itself. From God. Okay. Sermon over.

But there is it seems a more profound question we must ask – and answer – and that is, “what is goodness?”

To answer that question in the light of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection we must turn to his own teachings. We have a bare snippet of those teachings as our gospel reading today, and must place it in context.

We have to begin that by remembering whose account of the gospel we are reading. Any two writers telling of the same events will do so with different slants. For Luke the emphasis is on Jesus as the one anointed by God to bring good news to the poor. In speaking of radically good news to the poor the Kingdom of God is announced and its fulfilment begun. 

Good News to the poor, though, is more radical than mere gaining of riches. It is the receipt of the blessing of God.

How blessed are you who are poor: the Kingdom of God is yours.

It is this proclamation that, a few verses before our current reading, begins Jesus’  solemn Sermon on the Plain, and this pronouncement was in turn foreshadowed in the Temple when Jesus proclaimed,

This task is being fulfilled even while you are listening.

He was speaking to the Temple on the text,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

Having made that solemn pronouncement, Jesus goes on to set out the responsibility of his Christian disciples, you and me, within the scheme of pronouncing God’s blessing to the poor. He tells the disciples of the commandment to love.

I say this to you who are listening: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly.

 Jesus demands of Christians a radical practice of love that does not look after its own, but by which we are asked to set our needs and the needs of our in-group far behind the needs of others. We are not a club, as so often we have tended to become, and as Luke’s Christian community would appear to have become. We are not even a club in the commendable way that service clubs are clubs. We are called to love those who seek to destroy us.

And Christ calls us not to judge.

Judge not, that you may not be judged. Condemn not, that you may not be condemned.

Do not, Jesus says, let the so-called security of our Christian morality lead us to point the finger at those who are unclean, lest God touch us where we are unclean. Do not point the finger at the practice of homosexuals, lest God touch the raw nerve of our sexuality. Do not condemn the sexual ethics of our young people, lest God touched the raw nerve of the same energy within us. Do not condemn the atrocities of South African apartheid, lest God touch the ugly wound of our own racism and the racism of our nation.

Love. Do not condemn. Sure, do not condone. But do not condemn. For we too struggle with beasts of sexuality or sexism or racism or countless other isms, including the isms of shonky business ethics, that rage within us.

Only in the context of those warnings does our Lord produce the warnings or illustrations that we heard read in our gospel reading this morning.

Do we have logs in our eyes as we condemn others?

Undoubtedly so.

Do we have our stems sunk deep into the good fruit bearing tree, that produces the fruit of self-denying love? Or are we thorns? Brambles?

For the words of the mouth flow out of what fills the heart.

Goodness is a life lived anchored in the radical love of Christ, the love that proclaims from the utter agony and loneliness of the cross,

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.

As we adopt and grow into that radical ethic of love, we too will become a part of the upside down and illogical message that proclaims a blessing to the poor, to the hungry, to those who weep.

The nature of that blessing will be revealed only in the coming Kingdom.

look to the kauri

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St AIDAN’S, ALEXANDRA
and ST JAMES’, ROXBURGH
SIXTEENTH ORDINARY SUNDAY
(July 12^th) 2026

 

READINGS 
 
Isaiah 55:10-13
Romans 7: 1-11
Psalm 119: 105-112
Matthew 13 : 1-9 & 18- 23                                      

 

Praise to you, God, for all your work among us.

Yours is the vigour in creation,

yours is the impulse in our new discoveries.

Make us adventurous,

yet reverent and hopeful in all we do.

This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

 

Just over 40 years ago, when I was ordained, the world was living in the thaw of the cold war. I was no fan of President Reagan, but he and Gorbachev were seemingly talking like civilised human beings. “Star Wars” – the military defence system, not the movie after which it was named – and Glasnost were things.

For what it’s worth New Zealand was entering the era of the second term of Prime Minister Lange, though I was living under a different regime, that of Bob Hawke, across the ditch. It was an optimistic time.

The past is a foreign country.

It was a mirage. Or at least in part. It was at time of idyllic days when the Berlin Wall came down, apartheid collapsed, Lady Di got married. But we forgot to keep our eyes on the ball of ongoing justice, costly compassion. Faith, too. We became complacent. We thought the finishing line, whatever it was, was ours.

It’s been a rocky road since then. For me the pivotal moment was in 2015 when some ostentatious squillionare that I’d never heard of rode an escalator down into the foyer of a gauche building somewhere in the USA.

He was, he told the world, going to be President. America – or perhaps just white masculine privilege – would be great again. I suppose it had been once, but really? Earth’s proud empires pass away.

I don’t think that Trump has ever read Romans 8, and St Paul’s famous analysis of the human condition, of humanity’s need for God’s intervention. Because in the same year that Trump declared his tilt at the presidency, he also declared that he was not a person who needed forgiveness.

I suspect the great emperors of, Rome or, earlier, of Babylon, emperors like Nero or Nebuchadnezzar, weren’t too hot on the idea of forgiveness either. Why bother with it, when one is oneself a god? The centre of the universe.

Isaiah – probably the second prophet of that name and tradition – was daring to speak to his people of hope. That doesn’t sound daring. Except it was at a time when the divine light of hope was pretty much extinguished. By complacency.

Isaiah was daring to speak to his people of a memory that they had lost. Some of us have known personally that to talk of the past can trigger unpredictable responses in sufferers of dementia. The Hebrews to whom Isaiah was speaking were suffering a collective amnesia, collective dementia, forgotten the land God had given their ancestors. Land from which they had been exiled, once a bitter separation, but now just a distant “meh.” They were far from interested in returning to a bunch of old religious laws. Babylon was fine, thanks.

Isaiah was not winning any popularity stakes. To dare to speak of a God of justice and compassion at a time when cruising along with corruption was the flavour of the century was a Not Good Thing.  

Reading Isaiah reminds us of the importance of reading Isaiah. Seriously. Reminds us of the importance of hearing the voices of the prophets, ancient and contemporary, in the not altogether edifying times in which we live. The past is a different country. But dear God, we can learn from it.

Just over 40 years ago, I was no fan of Reagan and his ’nomics, no fan of military build-up, no fan of the growing and spuriously Christian Religious Right centred around figures like Jerry Falwell.

But nothing was preparing me for the deep-seated corruption and cronyism that is the hallmark of that once proud empire across the far north east side of the Pacific Ocean.

No matter what their personal beliefs might be, and probably are not, Trump and Putin have in common the absolute inability to read faith for meaning. Each has turned the glorification of something called “nation,” into their highest priority – or, more particularly, to use that concept as a means by which to enhance glorification and financial enrichment of their own selves.

Their false gods of Christian nationalism (Putinism and Trumpism alike) are tearing the world apart. In such a time the brave God-focus of Isaiah has something powerful to say to us.

Isaiah and the prophets incessantly called God’s people to dare to hope. To hope not in the strength of armies, but in the strength of the love and compassion and justice of God. Hosea put it succinctly when he spoke about the command to focus on “the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” Amos, when he spoke of “Justice flowing like torrents of water, righteous actions like a stream that never dries up.”

Isaiah, in a time of national amnesia, dared to speak of hope and joy. But not any old hope and joy, but hope and joy based on the deep and intimate knowledge of God and God’s justice for the vulnerable.

In the passage just before ours Isaiah cried out to his complacent people, “let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.”

Turn from corruption. Turn from calling good evil and evil good. Turn, as Isaiah would go on to say, to “bind up the broken hearted,” to feed the hungry, heal the wounded, rescue the refugee. Turn from fast-growing glitz of superficiality to the hard work of creating a place for the cedar and the kauri and the totara that grows slowly but with awe-inspiring structural and visual integrity.

Create  space for what Isaiah called “the word that goes forth from God’s mouth,” birthing light and life.

Isaiah was determined to put God at the centre of his people’s experience once again. Compassion, love justice. It is our task to find, to listen to work with those who are speaking Isaiah-esque words of compassion and love at a time when shallow glitz and cheap nationalism, “make x-nation or y-nation great again,” have become society’s mantra. It is our task to take the less glamorous way of the Cross, challenging corruption and proclaiming gospel in whatever small ways we can. 

Even in our small world.

Physiologus, perhaps

 

In the second century Physiologus the pelican was an icon of Christ

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
TRINITY SUNDAY (May 21^st) 1989

 

READINGS

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

 

I can do no more on Trinity Sunday than offer to you a few questions, a few thoughts, and a “so what.” The Trinity is perhaps the only Christian doctrine that is utterly distinctive. The doctrines of Creator, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Incarnation: all of these we share with one or more other religions.

As any good Jehovah’s Witness will tell you, the word “trinity” is never mentioned in the Bible. Yet, as our reading from Romans demonstrates, the notion is clearly there. In embryonic form, certainly, but there. Paul is beginning to speak of a one in three, of a mysterious relationship between the Creator, the Son, and the Spirit who enflamed the disciples with her strength,

We are at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ …

God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit

which has been given to us.

Yet if God is one, how can this be so?

Hear, oh Israel the Lord your God is One.

This is, in Jewish thought, the first of the ten Commandments. It is small wonder that Jewish people accuse us of worshipping three gods, and Muslims accuse us of claiming that God – as Spirit – slept with Mary.

We are speaking in the midst of a mystery, and speaking of a mystery. Now I see as through a dark glass. Are we speaking merely of three faces of God? God in a kind of a Fatherly mood, God in a kind of a Sonly mood, God in a kind of a Spiritly mood?

Not so.

Such a view was centuries ago dismissed as heresy, though most of us, if not all, would embrace it from time to time.

Why indeed have a Trinity?

The reason is simple. If we believe, with John and Paul and all the New Testament, that Jesus is the way in which God’s nature – God’s face on which no person could look – is revealed to the world, that Jesus must be of the same make up, the same substance as the Father.

I cannot reveal to you what it is like to be a cat because I am a human. And if, since the Ascension, it is the Spirit’s task to make known to us the nature of the Son and of the Father, then she too must be of the same makeup or substance or stuff as Father and Son. All must be one.

So for centuries, the ancient Church Fathers deliberated until they eventually came up with a formula that best maintained unity of God, as revealed in the Old Testament, while accommodating the Father, Son and Spirit language of the New Testament. We say it each time we say the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed. Shortly we shall say it again, in another form [the Creed of Athanasius was used].

Nevertheless, in the end it remains a mystery. Three is not normally one, and one is not normally three.

So why not throw it out? Why not join the Jehovah’s Witnesses who dismissed the Trinity, or the Jews or the Muslims or the Unitarians?

I believe there is one very good reason. It is the same reason as explored in my Lenten sermons. As I travelled with you through Lent, I sought to emphasise the miracle that the God of Christianity is not merely the God “out there,” the God who makes and then exits from the heavens and the earth. God, who created humanity, enters utterly into the grot and experience of human beings. God takes into his own being[1] the experience of pain, of loneliness, of death. God cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And God rises.

The fact is this: that each person’s experience of the triune God is the experience of the whole triune God. The only God we know is the God who self-reveals in Jesus Christ. We can only grasp so much, but Father, Son and Spirit, our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Comforter, are one.  God in trinity experience all of our human suffering, enter into our suffering, and offer from within us the hope that Easter, the Resurrection, is for us. For us, and for the starving, homeless, angry and bereaved people of the world. For us and for all who, like us, are flawed, tainted, imperfect.

For us.

So the Spirit now enters us to strengthen us in our knowledge of the Son who suffers for us, and to remind us of the Father who creates us.

That is the mystery. Unable to be made simple – like water, ice and steam – for God is not simple. Unable to be understood, only to be explored, believed, celebrated.

God, Father, Son, and Spirit.
God, Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.
God, who suffers as we suffer.
God, who rejoices as we rejoice.

 

All shall one day be made clear, when we see no longer through a dark glass, but see God face to face.

---

[1] In 1989 I was still wrestling with adequate forms for inclusive language, including of the Trinity. I would put this differently in 2026.

that they may be one

 

If I leave my desk too long

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION (May 5^th) 1989

 

READINGS

Acts 16:16-34
Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
John 14:23-29

 

“I have given them the glory you gave to me,
that they may be one as we are one”

What is it, this mysterious and elusive unity that Jesus prayed for before his glorification and agony on the Cross? Where is the answer to his prayer? Why are we not one?

One of my few basic understandings of things scientific is that there is a law that basically says, “if you don’t put energy into a system then it degenerates or decomposes or fragments or generally becomes a mess.”

It often seems to me to be true. If I leave a sausage in the fridge too long it becomes green and furry. If I leave an apple on my desk too long it does likewise. If I leave my desk too long without an input of energy it becomes like it is at present: an atrocious mess.

Indeed, since today is the beginning of Marriage and Family Week, one might say that the same is true of home life. Without an input of energy a marriage decomposes to a waste land, and family life degenerates to frustration, boredom, disillusionment.

It certainly appears to be true of the Church. Since our Lord made his plea for the unity of the Church it has continually splintered into fragments. The Jews and the Greeks fought bitterly within Christianity in early decades. The East and the West formalised their split in the eleventh century, but it went back centuries before that. The Reformers and the Catholics, the Anglicans and the Presbyterians, Methodists, and other Protestant groups – even today we see new division between Anglicans and so-called Continuing Anglicans. In the Pentecostal churches I witnessed bitter divisions between pre-millennialists, post-millennialists, mid-millennialists, even a-millennialists (I’ll tell you one day what they all are!).

“I have given them the glory you gave to me ,
that they may be one as we are one”

Yet it is true also that there have been signs of improvement. No longer does the Catholic school kid cross the road sneering “protty pig” as a Protestant kid walks to school. No longer does the sensible Protestant presume that all Catholics are condemned to eternal fire unless they convert.

The fruits of seventy years of ecumenical labour are easily visible. Liturgies in Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist churches are becoming increasingly similar. Our scriptures readings each Sunday around this block of East Ringwood are almost certainly the same. We are being spoken to by the same God and at last hearing the same voice.

“I have given them the glory you gave to me ,
that they may be one as we are one”

But there is so far to go. Inter-communion is as yet far off, though many of us long for the day when we may legitimately eat our Lord’s flesh and drink his blood regardless of whether the Eucharistic rite is Roman, Anglican, or Uniting. That day will come.

But we must continue to expend energy, to place our energy into the system we call the Church. I believe that now, at Ascensiontide, the message is abundantly clear. Our Lord has expended his energy in bringing us salvation. It is up to us to continue the expenditure of energy to bring about the unity for which he longs, and to bring about the proclamation of the gospel to which he has called us.

Next Sunday we shall celebrate the coming of the empowering Spirit. There is, in other words, an input of energy into the Church since the Ascension of Christ. But there is also a responsibility on our shoulders to use our energy in the service of the evangel, the gospel. Or the gospel, too, may become green and furry. Or cluttered and disorgan
ised.  Or introverted and self-serving.

“Father, I want those that you have given me
to be with me where I am
so that they may always see my glory.”

 

The Lord be with you.

Shalom, I give you

 

The former Holy Trinity, Ringwood East

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 30^th) 1989

 

READINGS

Acts16:9-15
Psalm 67
Revelation 21:10, 22:1-5
John 14:23-29

 

“Peace I bequeath to you: my own peace I give you”

One of my pet hates is commercial broadcasting. That is not to say that from time to time I don’t watch the dreaded 7, 9 and 10, oh listen to the vast range of commercial stations across the FM and AM bands. But it is to say that I feel insulted and tortured by those stations, television and radio, as they incessantly bombard me with their message, their message of noise and money.

As a child at boarding school, where transistors were highly illegal, we used to snuggle them up to our dormitories at night, and listen to the request programme through the earphone until close down. For stations did close down then – and at the early hour of 11:00 PM. I remember clearly the depths of silence that used to descend on me as the station, 2ZW,[1] went off air, and then the deeper, more mysterious silence as the station transmitters were turned off altogether.

Then I would remove my earphone to hear only the silence of the night. Perhaps another boy in the dorm coughing on settling down after turning his illicit radio off, or tossing in his sleep. Or perhaps the engine brake of a truck, some distance away, grinding its way down the hill into the city. Then silence would descend again.

Until the silence became the silence of my own sleep.

And the silence was a taste of peace.

Of Shalom.

To make such a claim is not to debase the mystery of Christ’s teaching, “peace I bequeath to you.” It is often only the child who can really perceive the awesome simplicities of Christ’s teachings. “Peace I bequeath to you.” The peace of God that transcends all understanding may be like the peace of a winter’s night after the noise of a radio, or the peace of a baby feeding after a frenzy of frustrated screams. We may all have our memories of peace.

But where is it now? We may have moments of it – not, ironically, at the passing of the peace in church, which is a symbol of God’s peace – but perhaps during or after the Communion. But where is peace in the life and teaching of a church that like Chanel 7, or Eon FM[2] constantly bombards us with action and information? Where in a church that seems to equate faith with work and the spirituality with being constantly and aggressively active, is there the Shalom of Christ?

“Peace I bequeath to you.”

When were you last still, deep within the stillness of God?

I am hoping that late this year or early next year we might be able to offer a parish quiet day. I am hoping and praying that stillness and silence – signs of God’s peace with us – may become a part of our communal experience of faith in Christ and of our liturgy. For it is when we begin to explore the depths of the stillness and the peace – the Shalom – of God that we begin to find the strength-in-faith that can lead us through the turmoil of everyday existence.

It is to offer that peace to the world that our Lord bequeathed to us his Spirit. As we prepare for the coming of that Spirit at Pentecost I pray that we may begin – or begin again – to discover that Spirit who empowers us and who strengthens us, but whose signature is peace beyond comprehension

---

[1] Later,  River City Radio, Whanganui.

[2] Later, Triple M.

wasps and dolphins

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St AIDAN’S, ALEXANDRA and ST JAMES’, ROXBURGH

SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

(May 10^th) 2026

READINGS 

 Acts 17:22-31                                               

Ps 66:7-19                                                     

1 Pet 3:13-22

John 14:15-21

Eternal God, light of the minds that know you,

joy of the hearts that love you, strength of the wills that serve you;

grant us so to know you that we may truly love you,

and so to love you that we may gladly serve you,

now and always. 

 

In the collect we prayed a few minutes ago, both the representative words I spoke and the scattered, uncollected thoughts of all our hearts, we sought a deeper journey into the heart of the Creator. In the psalm we found the psalmist bursting out with joy at the experience of seeing God’s footprints, fingerprints, love prints in the visible world.

The psalmist or psalmists often found those prints in the natural world, and, somewhat less palatable to us now, in the great movements of history. In military success, for example, though before we feel too horrified at that, we might remember that it’s not so long since our forebears emblazoned praise to God on plinths of statues rejoicing in military victories.

We simply have to acknowledge that this has been a part of the human story, that we are flawed, that we live together uneasily, that we shed blood either literally or through the exploitation of our planet and its species. Not you and I specifically, not very often. That's why our confession is plural. We have. I may have, but that’s not the point. 

Few of us have sinned extraordinarily badly. Unless we take to heart the animal liberationists’ heartfelt cry, “meat is murder”?

Despite having a few vegetarian offspring, I for one have never quite mastered the dissonance between my love for animals and … well, you know? Perhaps C. S. Lewis was right when he made Aslan differentiate between the dumb animals and the talking beasts – trees included?

I don’t know.

Part of me wants to be a Jain, sweeping the streets so I don’t kill living beings with my footsteps. Part of me will stop off at Jimmy’s Pies after the service and see if they have a venison or a steak and pepper left over. I’m worse – I apologize to inanimate objects, hoping desperately that a tree that I chop down or even a stone that I move doesn’t mind too much.

I drew the line at apologizing to a colony of wasps that I had destroyed a couple of weeks ago – they attacked me first! Nature is red in tooth and claw after all, and perhaps even the psalmists knew that.

Definitely even the psalmists knew that, though the words are Tennyson’s.

Though I was reminded, as I muttered about the wasps that attacked me, of the words of a pest destructor who destroyed a nest for me in Napier. “Wasp stings only last a few days,” he said. “Human stings last for ever.”

Do I digress? St Paul, as he stood in the Areopagus, knew only too well the brute forces of nature. While possibly the shape of this speech that Luke recalls reflect Luke’s style as much as Paul’s, we can be very sure that it was consistent with the latter.

We know that Paul knew the ups and downs of nature – human nature and the mysteries of what I’ll  have to call “natural nature.”  In a remarkable and powerful passage in second Corinthians he even boasts of all he has endured in the service of the gospel. It’s an ugly list, far worse than a few wasp stings gained not in the service of the gospel but in a random moment on a dog walk.

I have been writing this week of the suffering of a group of missionaries, some from this diocese, who sought to bring Christ love to China in the 1930s. They weren’t bible-bashers, they were bearers of compassion. Some of them died for their attempts. Or – if we look at the honours board at St James Roxburgh, we will see the name of Nurse Esther Tubman. I was writing of her, too, recently. Like the missionaries ten years later she, in the best way she knew, was seeking to bring hope and healing to those in dire need.

Paul looked at the plinth in the Areopagus and saw the good in divinity and humanity alike. He spent the last couple of decades of his life seeking to demonstrate that goodness and justice and love was embodied not in po-faced religiosity, in laws and regulations and trying to look good, but in the life and teachings and actions and death and above all resurrection of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

He was executed for his troubles of course, because he poked the bear of civic and religious hypocrisy.

While most of us are living more sedate lives it’s worth remembering that not so long ago Alex Pretti and Renee Good poked the bears of brutality and injustice in the Unites States. So too did Martin Luther King, in a manner much more programmatic and direct. So too is Pope Leo, and Bishop of Washington Mariann Budde.  It is only the mysteries of time and space that prevent you and me from the dangerous underbellies of existence in Trump’s USA or Chiang Kai-shek’s China or the Kaiser’s war.

We are called to be who and where we are. That too is mystery, unfathomable. Our task is to respond to the God who has called us by worshipping, and by allowing our lives to be a waling advertisement of Gospel hope.

By proclaiming with our mainly quiet lives, that this same God who casts universes across heavens and inexplicably creates wasps and dolphins, mountains and mudslides alike, is the God revealed in the life, teachings, death and the craziness of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ.

That’s what Paul dared to proclaim, respectfully, as he stood amongst the people of Athens.

 

Easter, 1989: Follow

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 8^th) 1989

  

READINGS

 

Acts 5:27-32
Psalm 118:14-29
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31

 

One of the advantages in having pew bibles in a church is that there are occasions when we can turn from the individual text that we are considering on the day to the broader context of that text’s place in the complete gospel, epistle, or whatever it might come from. It is also possible to compare texts with other passages.

I am going to ask you to turn in your pew bibles to the end of John’s account of the gospel (incidentally I won't refer to it as John’s gospel because each gospel account is not the author’s but Christ’s good news). And we will read the verses immediately preceding today’s gospel account – don’t close the bibles after Jan has read the passage!

Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look  into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew,“Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and she told them that he had said these things to her.

 

What you have heard there is the original ending of the fourth gospel account. If you glance down the text to John 21: 24-25 you will find a second ending.

Most scholars will tell us that the hand that wrote most of the fourth gospel is not the same as the hand that wrote today’s reading. So we must ask the essential question that we must ask of every scripture reading: why? Why is there a second ending?

Each of our four gospel accounts was written for a different community. With a little bit of educated guesswork, scholars are able to identify the location or make up of each community involved. John’s gospel account, for example, is fairly anti-Jewish, and was almost certainly written for a Gentile Christian community.

It would seem that soon after the original author of John finished writing or narrating his memories of the Jesus event, something changed dramatically within his community. The most likely thing is that he died, and that following his death disputes broke out over his importance. Wether he or Peter was the “right” evangelist to follow. By the end of the third letter of John, for example, we find a writer expressing quite different attitudes to those expressed in the gospel account.

So we find the author concerned to portray Peter and the “beloved disciple” alongside one another. To compare their strengths and weaknesses, and to emphasise that it is not they, but the Christ they preach, who is the focus of attention.

The reading draws the attention – our attention – to Jesus’ central command.

Follow me.

It is this, not the command to Peter to feed lambs and or sheep, or the various questions as to the quality of Peter’s love, that lies at the heart of this reading.

Follow me.

It is this message that lies at the heart of the gospel. If we turn to the opening of John’s gospel account we will find the same command being obeyed.

The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.

 

In Mark’s gospel account we find this again.

As he was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.

 

So the desired response to the gospel message – to an encounter with the risen Lord – is as Jesus here commands: “follow.” At the end of Mark’s gospel accounts he simply tells the women that he has gone ahead of them, that he will always go ahead of us.

The response that Jesus seeks from us is to follow. To follow him out into the community with the message “Christ is risen.” Squabbles over whether we prefer Peter or John – or Rome or Canterbury – pale into insignificance as we learn to obey the greater command: follow.

Are we following Christ?