SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
SUNDAY, MAY 29th 2011
(SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings: Acts 17.22-31
Ps 66.8-20 (ish)
1 Peter 3.13-22
John 14.15-21
Reverberating through the commands and instructions of God (in both testaments!) there is that powerful construction that is known to grammarians as the conditional tense. For Māori speakers here the same constructions is generated by use of the ka … ana formula, while in English it is usually generated by the combination of “if” and “then”. If you love me, then you’ll buy me an ice-cream. The “then”, though, is often hidden: if you love me, buy me an ice-cream.
In that childlike sentence, as in our biblical gospel passage, there is another hidden construction that we are going to have to take seriously if we are to extrapolate meaning for a twenty-first century multi-cultural, multi-dimensional, multi-optional world. For there, both in the child’s manipulative tantrum and our gospel-reading lurks that strongest of all tenses, the imperative. Often it is rendered in English with an explanation mark – and in spoken language with a raised or otherwise emphatic voice. In some forms it will earn a green wiggly line from Bill Gates, particularly when used with the verb “to be”: “be healed”, often appearing in the gospels, is an imperative, a command, whether or not Mr. Gates understands that to be so.
In our passage Jesus, as rendered by John, does not render the command to love as an optional extra. The construction is not a soft “if you love (aroha) me then perhaps you might give consideration to keeping my commandments”, which would be a conditional but not an imperative. Nor is it what we call an indicative, “because you love me you are keeping my commandments”. This is a conditional imperative, and as such it allows no wriggle room for the hearer or observer of the words of Jesus. It has a mathematical symmetry, too. “If you do not love me then you will not keep …”, and “if you do not keep, then you do not aroha”. These are stern, hard words of Jesus – so stern that some early scribes fudged and weakened them as they reproduced John’s writings.
They are stern words, but they are words issued with what a former prime minister of Australia somewhat bizarrely called “incentivization” – more normally known as incentive. They are words that lay a gauntlet at the feet of those who would follow Jesus. But – as some of us noted a week or so ago – the apostle John, like the apostle Paul, is well aware of the enormity and indeed impossibility of the interconnected tasks of loving and following Christ. To follow Christ is inevitably to fail – unless you rate better on the perfection scale than anyone else! Jesus, though, provides a promise: “I will not leave you orphaned”. It is of course a metaphorical promise – Jesus effectively picturing himself, in a rare departure from his norms, as our father who will provide, uncannily, an alternative parent. Language breaks down – our human parents can provide substitute guardians, but not, technically, alternative parents. John’s gospel is striving towards the Trinitarian language that became the language of faith in the centuries that followed, language that we jettison only at the cost of jettisoning orthodoxy. But – and the difficulties in the first and second centuries were not greatly different to our own – the emphasis is on the presence of the one John records as being called Paraclete, the one called alongside to make known to us all that we need of Jesus to carry on the journey to which he commissions us.
By opening ourselves up to receive that Spirit, by disciplining ourselves to obey the imperative of aroha – aroha well described by Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians, the famous thirteenth chapter – we can experience the life-transforming benefits of relationship – eternal relationship, transcending even our mortality – with the Creator of heavens and earth. We will know ourselves to be immersed in that aroha, embraced by that aroha, and indeed channels of that aroha to those around us.
TLBWY
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Monday, 27 June 2011
Don't Worry, Mene
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI
SUNDAY, MAY 22nd 2011
(FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings: Acts 7. 55-60
Ps 31.1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2.2-10
John 14.1-14
The story of the network of early Christian communities was not all one glorious narrative of victories and of harmonious co-existence, despite the attempts of Luke, which I discussed a fortnight ago, to harmonize all in the service of his story. If (as most scholars say!) John’s was the last of the more-or-less eye-witness accounts of Jesus to be related it is also the most the most obviously theologized. It is a document carefully shaped to meet the needs of the author and his perceived needs for his faith community. That much is true of each of the documents of the New Testament: we need to be honest about this if we are going to extrapolate genuine meaning from these documents today.
This does not mean we all need to be at theological college. It does however mean that those who have responsibility to preach and teach in the faith community must be well trained and must be prepared to be intellectually honest. The kind of gnosticism I have referred to elsewhere, practiced by scoundrels like Harold Camping, preying on the vulnerable, is best avoided by application of a modicum of intelligent understanding. Unfortunately this is no trivial issue: peddlers of false expectation sometimes have on their hands the blood of those whose lives are shattered.
The hallmark of John’s telling of the Jesus-story is that he wrote for a community in which the rule of love was the rule of life. Basing his Jesus story on the original eyewitness John’s experience of Jesus, both incarnate and risen, seen and experienced as the embodiment of divine love, the author (John or someone who knew him) founded and nurtured a faith-community built on principles of re-embodying, re-enacting that love.
“They’ll know we are Christians by our love”, some of us sang, occasionally and with unfounded optimism, in the 1960s and ’70s. But that unfounded optimism was exactly the problem faced by John’s community, too: as time went on the quality of love began to founder and dissipate, and the gloriously optimistic community degenerated into an all-too human narrative of power plays and the strife and jealousy I also spoke of in recent weeks. We see something similar in Paul’s bitter experience, as we watch in particular the Corinthian community stray from his idealized pathways.
Rules such as “love one another” or today’s “do not let your hearts be troubled” are, if we are to be honest, easier said than done. It is not some sign of epic spiritual failure if we fall short of their demands. Most of will experience a failure to love from time to time – I am reminded of the mother who once told us of placing her baby just a little more firmly than usual on the change table after being woken for the umpteenth time in one single night (this controlled but human response to the seemingly endless broken nights is a long way removed from tragic statistics of domestic and infant violence that so mar New Zealand’s contemporary society). Similarly, who does not worry from time to time as bills come in or the teenage children or grandchildren play up?
These sayings of Jesus are not mere guidelines, but they are (as Paul recognized) perfections to which we must strive yet by which we will always fall short. If we recognize that inevitability we need not be ashamed at our humanness. At the same time, as we hear Jesus’ command not to worry, held in tension with our knowledge of our humanness, we need not strain for the false optimism satirized by Bobby McFerrin in the late ’80s: “Don’t Worry Be Happy”.
In his telling of the Jesus story John emphasized what we might call the grace of abiding – the Greek word mene appears no fewer than 40 times in John’s gospel-account, albeit not always with full theological weight. The sign that a believer was abiding in Christ – I have tended to prefer the later phrase “practicing the presence of Christ” – was the quality of his or her ability to fulfill the demands of Jesus. Demands to love, demands not to worry – there are not many of them, in John’s gospel-account, but they are not to be taken lightly. They are in the end, though, the result of, not the prerequisite to, exposure to faith of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who draws all people to himself, not the brutal examiner who ensures that a certain percentage haplessly fail. So often in our proclamation of the gospel we make it appear that the latter is the priority.
We do this not least when we turn to the passages that were in their original context intended to be passages of invitation. Too often we turn the words of Jesus, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” into words not of invitation but of condemnation. Too often these become words that proclaim not the theological miracle that a way of access to the Creator has been gained in Christ, but a condemnatory claim that those who do not appear to us to be on that way will stand eternally condemned – like those of us who missed the so-called rapture of last evening in the thoughts of a small minded preacher-man from California. This saying of Jesus was designed to invite and not to terrify: for those who do not join us on the journey we pray nevertheless the grace and love of Christ in God’s time, that for them, too, may await the experience of seeing, as Paul put it, the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”.
For us, then may this be a passage not of exclusion but of joy-filled inclusion, as we rejoice in the encounter with the one who leads us on the way.
TLBWY
SUNDAY, MAY 22nd 2011
(FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings: Acts 7. 55-60
Ps 31.1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2.2-10
John 14.1-14
The story of the network of early Christian communities was not all one glorious narrative of victories and of harmonious co-existence, despite the attempts of Luke, which I discussed a fortnight ago, to harmonize all in the service of his story. If (as most scholars say!) John’s was the last of the more-or-less eye-witness accounts of Jesus to be related it is also the most the most obviously theologized. It is a document carefully shaped to meet the needs of the author and his perceived needs for his faith community. That much is true of each of the documents of the New Testament: we need to be honest about this if we are going to extrapolate genuine meaning from these documents today.
This does not mean we all need to be at theological college. It does however mean that those who have responsibility to preach and teach in the faith community must be well trained and must be prepared to be intellectually honest. The kind of gnosticism I have referred to elsewhere, practiced by scoundrels like Harold Camping, preying on the vulnerable, is best avoided by application of a modicum of intelligent understanding. Unfortunately this is no trivial issue: peddlers of false expectation sometimes have on their hands the blood of those whose lives are shattered.
The hallmark of John’s telling of the Jesus-story is that he wrote for a community in which the rule of love was the rule of life. Basing his Jesus story on the original eyewitness John’s experience of Jesus, both incarnate and risen, seen and experienced as the embodiment of divine love, the author (John or someone who knew him) founded and nurtured a faith-community built on principles of re-embodying, re-enacting that love.
“They’ll know we are Christians by our love”, some of us sang, occasionally and with unfounded optimism, in the 1960s and ’70s. But that unfounded optimism was exactly the problem faced by John’s community, too: as time went on the quality of love began to founder and dissipate, and the gloriously optimistic community degenerated into an all-too human narrative of power plays and the strife and jealousy I also spoke of in recent weeks. We see something similar in Paul’s bitter experience, as we watch in particular the Corinthian community stray from his idealized pathways.
Rules such as “love one another” or today’s “do not let your hearts be troubled” are, if we are to be honest, easier said than done. It is not some sign of epic spiritual failure if we fall short of their demands. Most of will experience a failure to love from time to time – I am reminded of the mother who once told us of placing her baby just a little more firmly than usual on the change table after being woken for the umpteenth time in one single night (this controlled but human response to the seemingly endless broken nights is a long way removed from tragic statistics of domestic and infant violence that so mar New Zealand’s contemporary society). Similarly, who does not worry from time to time as bills come in or the teenage children or grandchildren play up?
These sayings of Jesus are not mere guidelines, but they are (as Paul recognized) perfections to which we must strive yet by which we will always fall short. If we recognize that inevitability we need not be ashamed at our humanness. At the same time, as we hear Jesus’ command not to worry, held in tension with our knowledge of our humanness, we need not strain for the false optimism satirized by Bobby McFerrin in the late ’80s: “Don’t Worry Be Happy”.
In his telling of the Jesus story John emphasized what we might call the grace of abiding – the Greek word mene appears no fewer than 40 times in John’s gospel-account, albeit not always with full theological weight. The sign that a believer was abiding in Christ – I have tended to prefer the later phrase “practicing the presence of Christ” – was the quality of his or her ability to fulfill the demands of Jesus. Demands to love, demands not to worry – there are not many of them, in John’s gospel-account, but they are not to be taken lightly. They are in the end, though, the result of, not the prerequisite to, exposure to faith of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who draws all people to himself, not the brutal examiner who ensures that a certain percentage haplessly fail. So often in our proclamation of the gospel we make it appear that the latter is the priority.
We do this not least when we turn to the passages that were in their original context intended to be passages of invitation. Too often we turn the words of Jesus, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” into words not of invitation but of condemnation. Too often these become words that proclaim not the theological miracle that a way of access to the Creator has been gained in Christ, but a condemnatory claim that those who do not appear to us to be on that way will stand eternally condemned – like those of us who missed the so-called rapture of last evening in the thoughts of a small minded preacher-man from California. This saying of Jesus was designed to invite and not to terrify: for those who do not join us on the journey we pray nevertheless the grace and love of Christ in God’s time, that for them, too, may await the experience of seeing, as Paul put it, the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”.
For us, then may this be a passage not of exclusion but of joy-filled inclusion, as we rejoice in the encounter with the one who leads us on the way.
TLBWY
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