SERMON PREACHED
AT THE
CHURCH OF St FRANCIS,
BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, APRIL 29th 2012
(FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings: Acts 4.5-12
Psalm 23
1 John 3.16-24
John 10.11-18
It is an unfortunate – from a pastor’s point of view – rule of reading that there is no one correct interpretation of a text, biblical or otherwise. The moment you or I read a text we will be informed not only by the words in front of us but by the landscape beyond us, beyond our reading site, by the story that has shaped us, by the story that has shaped the landscape that is beyond us – and do on. Post-modernity has in fact reached the point where the life of the text is miniscule – where the moment I tell a story and put it 'out there' in the universe it is painfully out of my control, spinning into whatever shape a hearer wishes to give it, based on his or her reading site, his or her life story, even his or her whim and fancy.
To some extent that sort of thinking has infiltrated theological scholarship as well secular forms. It has, I believe, some merit – some, but only some. Because ultimately, when Jesus or the lesser figures of our faith spoke or wrote about our faith, they were not engaging in any sort of a game, but in the presentation of (in Greek) ἐντολή, an “order”, “commission” or “command.” Even a post-modernist probably has to concede that there are circumstances in which an “order”, “commission” or “command” is not altogether up for negotiation or wildly random interpretation. When the regimental sergeant major commands attention the troops spend not a whole lot of time discussing nuances of the word.
But of course I am not suggestion that every word of the scriptures bears the full un-negotiable weight of the sergeant major’s command. At one level they bear more weight, but when it comes to interpretation we are not robots and we will negotiate our way through the maze. There are however boundaries: you will know by now that I am quite liberal in some areas, for example of sexuality and social ethics. In other areas I am not: when the followers chose to live and die by the doctrine of resurrection they were not engaging in word games.
To understand what Jesus meant when he described himself as ‘good shepherd’ is to enter an area somewhere between the regimental sergeant-major and the poet who writes on paper napkins so his words can never be repeated. Funnily enough the words of Jesus were effectively written on paper napkins too – he never wrote them down. They were well treasured and remembered, though, and eventually in the purposes of God they became scripture. There is room though for interpretation. But there are guidelines to interpretation.
And to be honest we’ve often got it wrong because we’ve often worn the wrong lenses. Too often our stained glass windows – potentially once one of our best story-telling methods – depicted a rather anaemic European shepherd carrying a fat Southdown, Romney or Perendale lamb home over green pastures. The stained glass artists borrowed from the parable of the lost sheep, the 23rd Psalm and our “I Am” passage and produced a fallacy. And, indeed, to a Northern Territorian I doubt of the notion of a Southdown, Romney or Perendale lamb conveys much meaning either. British romanticism and the science of fat lamb farming don’t work too well here – or in Arnhem Land. As indeed they did not in Palestine: a Southdown, Romney or Perendale lamb would not live long in the hills above the Jordan.
Jesus is in any case making direct allusions to Ezekiel – (a reading that would be considerably more helpful than a reading from Acts this morning!) – and his own envisaging of a powerful, rugged shepherd king who would quickly separate the Southdown, Romney or Perendale lamb from the real flocks of Damara or other middle eastern breeds – and separate them not to the advantage of the soft, white and woolly types (for many of the middle eastern sheep bear hair, not wool). This shepherd who knows his own is no effete European, and not really even a weather-stained Australian or kiwi shepherd, but a tough and uncompromising individual, well used to hand to hand combat with wild animals, wild weather, wild surrounds.
How, then would we convey this shepherd today? Not with images of an effete shepherd king, I fear: not a Johnny Depp playing in Pirates of the Caribbean. Nor with images of a cushy and comfortable and nonchalant Southdown, Romney or Perendale Western Christianity. Perhaps the faithful body guard who protects the US President from stray bullets? I am the good FBI agent? A Jesus-figure with Raybans to protect identity and a conspicuous shoulder holster making clear that this is no pussy cat to be messed with? Perhaps. Though the images raises questions too, questions about power and powerlessness, questions about machismo and compassion.
Yet in the end the bold claim that Jesus makes is in any case the daring and several times repeated “I am”. This is perhaps untranslatable in any language, but it is a provocative claim of oneness of the Creator whose word is perfect action, perfect integrity. It is this that we must, regardless of the academic interpretation word-games, convey in every culture, every context.
TLBWY
Sunday, 29 April 2012
Gay marriage?
From the Pew Sheet, 29.04.2012
As always with media statements my recent mention in the NT News regarding questions of so-called ‘gay marriage’ will have caused concern to some with opposing views. No offence is intended, and dialogue is encouraged!
Within the Christian community primary arguments against marriage of homosexual lovers have been based either on biblical texts or social history. There are a small number of biblical texts, Old Testament and New, that appear to make comment on homosexual acts. Broadly speaking they are taken to dismiss homosexual acts as either contrary to nature, offensive to God, or both.
I do not take these lightly. Nevertheless, the context in which such texts were written is a powerful ingredient in interpretation. Many Old Testament texts are dismissed by Christians as being ‘old covenant’. There is a form of self-service in this: texts that suit Christianity are maintained, while others, such as cleanliness codes, are dismissed. This is intellectually dishonest: our faith gives permission to look deeper. Hebrew models of marriage were not monogamous, and were predominately about property management—wives and children were property. I do not recommend a return to this! Nor do I think, as some do, that there are in scriptures any models of homosexual relationship. The question is not addressed except in contexts of rape or breached hospitality (see Ezek.16:49-50). Likewise New Testament texts do not address monogamous love as represented by, historically, Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris, or more recently Sophie Allouache and Penny Wong . Biblical texts condemn the opportunistic and unwholesome acts more associated with toilet graffiti.
Arguments from history strike a similar issue: marriage until the modern era was generally a property contract; at times of divorce this remains true. Private acts of partners outside the contract were ignored. It is this double standard that marriage reform groups are seeking to overcome. Of course some monogamous homosexual unions will fail as spectacularly as heterosexual unions. Human beings, especially in relationships, are flawed. But official endorsement of homosexual union may at least reduce the stresses experienced by many homosexual men and women as they live disjointed lives forced on them by the legal illegitimacy of their love. At the very least it may reduce teen suicide.
I realize there are arguments for ‘union and legal protection but under another name’, and I argued for that for many years. In the end I have been persuaded by arguments that this generates the status of ersatz– or Claytons-marriage, a second class existence that remains unsatisfying to those who cannot have the ‘real thing’. I realize there are arguments proposed against gay unions fostering, nurturing, or ‘begetting’ children, but I have long been convinced that love and nurture are far more important in the wholesome formation of a child than the genetic identity of the loving and nurturing stable parent-figures. I would be happy to enlarge on those views, if asked, at a later date.
So, yes, I have put my name to a letter, now signed by 77 clergy, supporting the Australian Marriage Equality in their attempts to extend the legal definitions of marriage to include monogamous gay relationships.
έ̉ν Χριστω̣̃ – (Fr) Michael
As always with media statements my recent mention in the NT News regarding questions of so-called ‘gay marriage’ will have caused concern to some with opposing views. No offence is intended, and dialogue is encouraged!
Within the Christian community primary arguments against marriage of homosexual lovers have been based either on biblical texts or social history. There are a small number of biblical texts, Old Testament and New, that appear to make comment on homosexual acts. Broadly speaking they are taken to dismiss homosexual acts as either contrary to nature, offensive to God, or both.
I do not take these lightly. Nevertheless, the context in which such texts were written is a powerful ingredient in interpretation. Many Old Testament texts are dismissed by Christians as being ‘old covenant’. There is a form of self-service in this: texts that suit Christianity are maintained, while others, such as cleanliness codes, are dismissed. This is intellectually dishonest: our faith gives permission to look deeper. Hebrew models of marriage were not monogamous, and were predominately about property management—wives and children were property. I do not recommend a return to this! Nor do I think, as some do, that there are in scriptures any models of homosexual relationship. The question is not addressed except in contexts of rape or breached hospitality (see Ezek.16:49-50). Likewise New Testament texts do not address monogamous love as represented by, historically, Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris, or more recently Sophie Allouache and Penny Wong . Biblical texts condemn the opportunistic and unwholesome acts more associated with toilet graffiti.
Arguments from history strike a similar issue: marriage until the modern era was generally a property contract; at times of divorce this remains true. Private acts of partners outside the contract were ignored. It is this double standard that marriage reform groups are seeking to overcome. Of course some monogamous homosexual unions will fail as spectacularly as heterosexual unions. Human beings, especially in relationships, are flawed. But official endorsement of homosexual union may at least reduce the stresses experienced by many homosexual men and women as they live disjointed lives forced on them by the legal illegitimacy of their love. At the very least it may reduce teen suicide.
I realize there are arguments for ‘union and legal protection but under another name’, and I argued for that for many years. In the end I have been persuaded by arguments that this generates the status of ersatz– or Claytons-marriage, a second class existence that remains unsatisfying to those who cannot have the ‘real thing’. I realize there are arguments proposed against gay unions fostering, nurturing, or ‘begetting’ children, but I have long been convinced that love and nurture are far more important in the wholesome formation of a child than the genetic identity of the loving and nurturing stable parent-figures. I would be happy to enlarge on those views, if asked, at a later date.
So, yes, I have put my name to a letter, now signed by 77 clergy, supporting the Australian Marriage Equality in their attempts to extend the legal definitions of marriage to include monogamous gay relationships.
έ̉ν Χριστω̣̃ – (Fr) Michael
Oh the deep deep hard work
SERMON PREACHED
AT THE
CHURCH OF St FRANCIS,
BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, ARIL 15th 2012
(SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings:
Acts 4.32-37
Psalm 133
1 John 1.1 – 2.2
John 20.19-31
If you journey through the New Testament – even in translation as most of us must – you will almost certainly become aware of the differing writing styles of the various authors. Mark, always in a hurry, Luke measured and carefully crafted, Matthew somewhere between the two but perhaps with a somewhat more uncompromising tone than Luke. Paul and others were writing a different kind of literature – Paul was writing largely instructive (didactive and exhortative) letters of encouragement, correction or admonition. The author of Hebrews was writing a sermon, the author of the Book of Revelation was writing, quite simply, an apocalypse. In today’s readings we find John – not the author of Revelation – writing in two different styles. In 1, 2 and 3 John he is, like Paul if more succinctly, applying corrective surgery by writing letters. In the Fourth Gospel he is writing an extended, theologised, visionary account of the events of Jesus’ public ministry.
John is a masterful writer, and probably top of the class of the New Testament authors. His Greek – though I am no expert judge – is beautiful, his imagery controlled and majestic. His is the understanding of the second person of the Trinity that is most magisterial – though Paul, writing some years earlier, sometimes equals or even surpasses it – the eternal Son, striding though history, incarnating divine command and surrendering to vulnerable, even victimised human life and death. And throughout this magnificent telling of the Jesus story – which nearly didn’t make it into the Christian canon – he uses powerful literary techniques, including a series of contrasts, to illustrate his story. Light and dark, reception (or believing) and rejection, perishing and living, to name some. Love is a major theme of John, and the sign that a person has heard and received the gospel, has passed from dark to light, is the quality of their love.
Love unfortunately can be a slippery ideal, and to be honest John was an idealist. While I wouldn’t draw too direct a comparison, John’s idealism was far closer to that of the Nimbinites of the 1970s than to the more structured Jesus communities of Matthew and Luke. By the end of John’s ministry as we see it in the New Testament he is becoming increasingly disillusioned with his Jesus community, as they fail to demonstrate the qualities of love that he believed were the only true sign of belonging to the risen Lord and his new Creation. Some scholars believe that John eventually gave up on his ideals, and defected from his own Nimbin community to the mainline faith communities founded by figures like James and Paul, where in his closing years he came to be respected and his writings preserved.
Perhaps there’s a sense, then, in which the Fourth Gospel and the letters of John are the idealised Jesus story – perhaps that’s why they nearly didn’t make it into the canon. But John’s is a profound insight not only into the ideals of love-life to which Jesus calls us – but for which we always, always need the help of his Spirit – but into the depths of the heart and mind of Jesus. It is John who gives us, as it were, the inner-recesses of Jesus’ mind. It is John above all writers who gives us the tenderness of the Incarnate Lord – handing, for example, his mother into the care of the beloved disciple (who was probably the author or the author’s source).
It is John, too, that sees the resurrection of Jesus and his breathing on the disciples as the beginning of a new Creation. We must never lose sight of this, his equivalent of the more popular upper-room event narrated by Luke. We are called to be the sign, the ‘earnest’ or first fruits, as Paul calls it, of God’s eternity. We are an impoverished sign, as the slow Nimbin-like disintegration of John’s community suggests – but we are the sign God has relied on. We need to learn from John: is our love and service for our neighbour such an example that they might long to reach out and receive our risen Lord?
The story – if the scholars are anywhere near right, and I suspect they are – of John’s Jesus-community is a reminder to us all. It fell apart, like the ideals of hippiedom, of Nimbin, of the Summer of Love, because it failed to do the hard work of faith. It failed to recognize that love is not a buzz, but a demanding commitment to work out and overcome differences. It failed to recognize that love needs reinforcement by disciplined prayer, disciplined worship, disciplined immersion in the scriptures of faith. It failed to remember that a life of faith in Jesus keeps going even when the warm fuzzies and good feelings have gone. John’s community danced and pranced in its enjoyment of the light and new life available in Christ, but forgot the deep, deep cost of Jesus’ redemption, forgot the deep, deep cost of the new life Jesus can breathe into us.
John challenges us not to forget, but to continue, against all odds but in the strength of the one he calls the Paraclete, the Comforter or Advocate, to be bearers of light in an otherwise dark world. He challenges us to spend our time proclaiming in word and action the peace that is not mere Nimbin cruisyness and catatonia, but the radical, hard work of love, justice, reconciliation, justice, the ingredients of God’s eternity, birthed in the work of the Cross.
TLBWY
AT THE
CHURCH OF St FRANCIS,
BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, ARIL 15th 2012
(SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER)
Readings:
Acts 4.32-37
Psalm 133
1 John 1.1 – 2.2
John 20.19-31
If you journey through the New Testament – even in translation as most of us must – you will almost certainly become aware of the differing writing styles of the various authors. Mark, always in a hurry, Luke measured and carefully crafted, Matthew somewhere between the two but perhaps with a somewhat more uncompromising tone than Luke. Paul and others were writing a different kind of literature – Paul was writing largely instructive (didactive and exhortative) letters of encouragement, correction or admonition. The author of Hebrews was writing a sermon, the author of the Book of Revelation was writing, quite simply, an apocalypse. In today’s readings we find John – not the author of Revelation – writing in two different styles. In 1, 2 and 3 John he is, like Paul if more succinctly, applying corrective surgery by writing letters. In the Fourth Gospel he is writing an extended, theologised, visionary account of the events of Jesus’ public ministry.
John is a masterful writer, and probably top of the class of the New Testament authors. His Greek – though I am no expert judge – is beautiful, his imagery controlled and majestic. His is the understanding of the second person of the Trinity that is most magisterial – though Paul, writing some years earlier, sometimes equals or even surpasses it – the eternal Son, striding though history, incarnating divine command and surrendering to vulnerable, even victimised human life and death. And throughout this magnificent telling of the Jesus story – which nearly didn’t make it into the Christian canon – he uses powerful literary techniques, including a series of contrasts, to illustrate his story. Light and dark, reception (or believing) and rejection, perishing and living, to name some. Love is a major theme of John, and the sign that a person has heard and received the gospel, has passed from dark to light, is the quality of their love.
Love unfortunately can be a slippery ideal, and to be honest John was an idealist. While I wouldn’t draw too direct a comparison, John’s idealism was far closer to that of the Nimbinites of the 1970s than to the more structured Jesus communities of Matthew and Luke. By the end of John’s ministry as we see it in the New Testament he is becoming increasingly disillusioned with his Jesus community, as they fail to demonstrate the qualities of love that he believed were the only true sign of belonging to the risen Lord and his new Creation. Some scholars believe that John eventually gave up on his ideals, and defected from his own Nimbin community to the mainline faith communities founded by figures like James and Paul, where in his closing years he came to be respected and his writings preserved.
Perhaps there’s a sense, then, in which the Fourth Gospel and the letters of John are the idealised Jesus story – perhaps that’s why they nearly didn’t make it into the canon. But John’s is a profound insight not only into the ideals of love-life to which Jesus calls us – but for which we always, always need the help of his Spirit – but into the depths of the heart and mind of Jesus. It is John who gives us, as it were, the inner-recesses of Jesus’ mind. It is John above all writers who gives us the tenderness of the Incarnate Lord – handing, for example, his mother into the care of the beloved disciple (who was probably the author or the author’s source).
It is John, too, that sees the resurrection of Jesus and his breathing on the disciples as the beginning of a new Creation. We must never lose sight of this, his equivalent of the more popular upper-room event narrated by Luke. We are called to be the sign, the ‘earnest’ or first fruits, as Paul calls it, of God’s eternity. We are an impoverished sign, as the slow Nimbin-like disintegration of John’s community suggests – but we are the sign God has relied on. We need to learn from John: is our love and service for our neighbour such an example that they might long to reach out and receive our risen Lord?
The story – if the scholars are anywhere near right, and I suspect they are – of John’s Jesus-community is a reminder to us all. It fell apart, like the ideals of hippiedom, of Nimbin, of the Summer of Love, because it failed to do the hard work of faith. It failed to recognize that love is not a buzz, but a demanding commitment to work out and overcome differences. It failed to recognize that love needs reinforcement by disciplined prayer, disciplined worship, disciplined immersion in the scriptures of faith. It failed to remember that a life of faith in Jesus keeps going even when the warm fuzzies and good feelings have gone. John’s community danced and pranced in its enjoyment of the light and new life available in Christ, but forgot the deep, deep cost of Jesus’ redemption, forgot the deep, deep cost of the new life Jesus can breathe into us.
John challenges us not to forget, but to continue, against all odds but in the strength of the one he calls the Paraclete, the Comforter or Advocate, to be bearers of light in an otherwise dark world. He challenges us to spend our time proclaiming in word and action the peace that is not mere Nimbin cruisyness and catatonia, but the radical, hard work of love, justice, reconciliation, justice, the ingredients of God’s eternity, birthed in the work of the Cross.
TLBWY
Monday, 9 April 2012
hallelujah-ing our happies?
Almighty God,
whose son Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life of all who put their trust in him:
raise us, we pray,
from the death of sin to the life of righteousness,
that we may ever seek the things that are above,
where he reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
I have serious difficulties with this ‘collect for the week’, the collect of the week for Easter 2, from A Prayer Book for Australia, page 505. There is that glorious criticism of some Christians that they are ‘so heavenly minded that they are no earthly use’, and it is this demeanour that is encapsulated in this collect.
A Buddhist I was interviewing back in my broadcasting days told me how profoundly selfish the Christian gospel appears to a Buddhist, as we meander self-centredly through life rejoicing in our own inheritance in heaven. I have much respect for a Buddhist, who, in Buddhism’s true form (not its trendy western crystal-hugging counterfeits) seeks to annihilate all sense of self, and surrender into oneness with all existence.
At the heart of our faith (for no, I am not converting) is the remarkable revelation that the author of all creation does in fact care for us, individually: even for the sparrow that falls. Nevertheless the onus is on us is to ensure that we don’t turn that miracle of love into a self-centred gospel, rejoicing in our own happy times with Jesus, leaving the sparrow to fall uncared for (or the Buddhist scorned). If ‘that we may ever seek the things that are above’ means dancing and prancing around hallelujah-ing our own happies then we are to be as much pitied as those of our brothers and sisters who have decided the resurrection is a barrel of banalities.
In fact I suspect it was not meant to mean that, but just came out that way. For ‘the things that are above’ in the collect are probably meant to be the eternal values of love and compassion and justice at the heart of the gospel. These are values far greater than the prosaic ‘mateship’ that John Howard once sought to include in the preamble to the Australian Constitution. These are the values that dwell at the heart of Jesus’ cry the Cross, ‘Father forgive them’, the cry that dismantles hatred and turns it into eternal reconciliation and love. ‘Hallelujah-ing our own happies’ (rejoicing in our own happiness while others suffer all around us) is everything the gospel is not.
The collect can stay, but only as we realize that it is in scrutinizing our lives, seeing our lives (and deaths) as if through the eyes of God the Judge (an unpopular concept) that we become a resurrection people.
έ̉ν Χριστω̣̃ – (Fr) Michael
whose son Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life of all who put their trust in him:
raise us, we pray,
from the death of sin to the life of righteousness,
that we may ever seek the things that are above,
where he reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
I have serious difficulties with this ‘collect for the week’, the collect of the week for Easter 2, from A Prayer Book for Australia, page 505. There is that glorious criticism of some Christians that they are ‘so heavenly minded that they are no earthly use’, and it is this demeanour that is encapsulated in this collect.
A Buddhist I was interviewing back in my broadcasting days told me how profoundly selfish the Christian gospel appears to a Buddhist, as we meander self-centredly through life rejoicing in our own inheritance in heaven. I have much respect for a Buddhist, who, in Buddhism’s true form (not its trendy western crystal-hugging counterfeits) seeks to annihilate all sense of self, and surrender into oneness with all existence.
At the heart of our faith (for no, I am not converting) is the remarkable revelation that the author of all creation does in fact care for us, individually: even for the sparrow that falls. Nevertheless the onus is on us is to ensure that we don’t turn that miracle of love into a self-centred gospel, rejoicing in our own happy times with Jesus, leaving the sparrow to fall uncared for (or the Buddhist scorned). If ‘that we may ever seek the things that are above’ means dancing and prancing around hallelujah-ing our own happies then we are to be as much pitied as those of our brothers and sisters who have decided the resurrection is a barrel of banalities.
In fact I suspect it was not meant to mean that, but just came out that way. For ‘the things that are above’ in the collect are probably meant to be the eternal values of love and compassion and justice at the heart of the gospel. These are values far greater than the prosaic ‘mateship’ that John Howard once sought to include in the preamble to the Australian Constitution. These are the values that dwell at the heart of Jesus’ cry the Cross, ‘Father forgive them’, the cry that dismantles hatred and turns it into eternal reconciliation and love. ‘Hallelujah-ing our own happies’ (rejoicing in our own happiness while others suffer all around us) is everything the gospel is not.
The collect can stay, but only as we realize that it is in scrutinizing our lives, seeing our lives (and deaths) as if through the eyes of God the Judge (an unpopular concept) that we become a resurrection people.
έ̉ν Χριστω̣̃ – (Fr) Michael
Wednesday, 4 April 2012
Happy Easter
From my Parish Bulletin, Easter 2012
(I will intersperse my sermon postings with these shorter reflections from now on)
‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ wrote G.M. Hopkins in his “God’s Grandeur” (adding ‘Why do men then now not reck his rod?’). I remember some 24 hours after my coming to faith (33 years ago, now) hitchhiking home, electrified by the sense of God’s presence in nature around me. Thanks be to God I have never lost that sense that I had that afternoon, as autumn leaves fell and horses munched languidly in paddocks adjacent to where I stood, thumb out, entering a new highway. Which is not to say I feel that electrification of the Creator every moment of every day. I’d be exhausted, a wreck, an idiot of jibberation and malfunction. Human life cannot sustain superheated emotion for too long. But I have never lost access to the sense that I had, as I watched the horses and the autumn leaves, the sense ‘I know the creator of all this magnificence’.
I have recaptured—always as a gracing, never as a result of my own attempts—that sense many times since. I have experienced it in nature: sitting under a night sky somewhere south-west of Bourke, or in the dawn chorus of Birdsville, or on the hill above Byron, or at sunrise in the middle of the Nullabor. I have experienced it in liturgy—with Br. Ghislain at a Taizé Evening Prayer watching the sun set at Cottesloe Beach, or as a cantor chanted Evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Or the first time I experienced the liturgy of the Lighting of the New Fire, gathered in the dark outside the small suburban church of St George, Flemington, where my gloriously mad vicar, Fr. Alan Lewis, intoned the exsultet and named all time as God’s time.
Easter by Easter I have never lost the awe and the mystery of that first Flemington morning. It was probably my fifth Easter as a believer, but the first in which I was gobsmacked by the power of the sacred to pierce the mundane, the power of liturgy to transcend normality. As Melbourne woke up around us we greeted the risen Lord. Do not then be surprised if I am short-tempered with those clergy and theologians who do away with the Resurrection.
Do not be surprised that St Paul became my favourite theologian: it was Paul who wrote those resounding words ‘If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied’. Without the Resurrection we have nothing to say to the world, and I for one would have better things to do each Sunday. But 33 years ago I was seized by resurrection hope, and it will not let me go.
έ̉ν Χριστω̣̃ – (Fr) Michael
(I will intersperse my sermon postings with these shorter reflections from now on)
‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ wrote G.M. Hopkins in his “God’s Grandeur” (adding ‘Why do men then now not reck his rod?’). I remember some 24 hours after my coming to faith (33 years ago, now) hitchhiking home, electrified by the sense of God’s presence in nature around me. Thanks be to God I have never lost that sense that I had that afternoon, as autumn leaves fell and horses munched languidly in paddocks adjacent to where I stood, thumb out, entering a new highway. Which is not to say I feel that electrification of the Creator every moment of every day. I’d be exhausted, a wreck, an idiot of jibberation and malfunction. Human life cannot sustain superheated emotion for too long. But I have never lost access to the sense that I had, as I watched the horses and the autumn leaves, the sense ‘I know the creator of all this magnificence’.
I have recaptured—always as a gracing, never as a result of my own attempts—that sense many times since. I have experienced it in nature: sitting under a night sky somewhere south-west of Bourke, or in the dawn chorus of Birdsville, or on the hill above Byron, or at sunrise in the middle of the Nullabor. I have experienced it in liturgy—with Br. Ghislain at a Taizé Evening Prayer watching the sun set at Cottesloe Beach, or as a cantor chanted Evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Or the first time I experienced the liturgy of the Lighting of the New Fire, gathered in the dark outside the small suburban church of St George, Flemington, where my gloriously mad vicar, Fr. Alan Lewis, intoned the exsultet and named all time as God’s time.
Easter by Easter I have never lost the awe and the mystery of that first Flemington morning. It was probably my fifth Easter as a believer, but the first in which I was gobsmacked by the power of the sacred to pierce the mundane, the power of liturgy to transcend normality. As Melbourne woke up around us we greeted the risen Lord. Do not then be surprised if I am short-tempered with those clergy and theologians who do away with the Resurrection.
Do not be surprised that St Paul became my favourite theologian: it was Paul who wrote those resounding words ‘If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied’. Without the Resurrection we have nothing to say to the world, and I for one would have better things to do each Sunday. But 33 years ago I was seized by resurrection hope, and it will not let me go.
έ̉ν Χριστω̣̃ – (Fr) Michael
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)