Pah ruppa pum pum

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH
OF SAINT JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
CHRISTMAS DAY 2013

Biblical scholar N.T. or Tom Wright in a now famous sermon from 2007 challenged his listeners to rediscover their inner child at Christmas time. Citing that other Tom, T.S. Eliot’s enigmatic line ‘There was a birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt,’ Wright correctly in my opinion sees the two great festivals of the Christian calendar to be intrinsically entwined, life and death and in each case so much more, and to know that both these festivals do not genuflect to but critique the short-sighted analysis of human rational thought.  The Magi of Eliot’s poem entwine Christmas and Easter perhaps because they have grown old and the tendrils of dementia are tangling their memory banks, but perhaps also because there is and can always be no birth without death, no death without birth, and each is a tentative step into the miracles of God and of God’s universe.

There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

The magi, at the end of their lives, remember a transition, effected by an encounter with something beyond even or especially the comprehension of the wise of the powerful, and know that their lives were changed irreversibly, confusingly, bewilderingly, but irreversibly.

It is de rigueur to sneer at simplicity. Not, paradoxically at simplicity of visual art, where a simple transept of lines or indeed an interconnection of wiggles can evoke deep analysis and awe-inspired reverence in an art display, but simplicity of faith and thought. The awe of a child at Christmas is seen to be cringeworthy, surpassed only by the silliness of adults who continue to believe six impossible things before breakfast. The birth of a child from a peasant girl’s womb, or the mysterious transcendence of that other inescapable Tomb on Easter morning, these are seen to be the things of ridicule. Not least clergy and theologians back away from any sense that God might break out of human expectation, transcend our myopia, and in one mysterious solitary life two thousand years ago permit the mysteries of eternity to be incarnate in the mundanity and sometimes sheer tedium of human being.

Theologians and clergy will sneer, too, at simplicity, losing sight of its profundity in their satisfaction with their own erudition. It is popular to sneer for example at the gentle wisdom of the Romantic Centuries’ telling of the Incarnation in the carols of Christmas: no one is pretending, really, that the birth of Jesus was quite as the carols suggest, but that most of these have been useful if sometimes flawed vehicles of the unpretentious awe and mystery of a God who invades and transforms human existence. Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today. Even the folksy tale of the Little Drummer Boy, considered infradig by religious purists, and made famous originally by the Trapp Family Singers of Sound of Music fame in the 1950s, points to a profound truth: what is the best from our poor lives that we can give as appreciation to the God who draws near to us in Christ? 

We can’t intellectualize our way to faith. Paul referred to faith as foolishness to the wise, and we like to see ourselves as wise. Indeed we as adults have so lost touch with the inner child that we have taught our children not to be children. With deft and determined strokes of the sociological pen we have forced then to grow up too fast in a myriad of ways, some more deeply demonic than others. In doing so we have been stripping from them and ultimately from ourselves the awe inspired by a God who draws near, touches, transforms human lives.

Can I explain all this? The magi of Eliot’s poem flounder: ‘were we lead all that way for / Birth or Death?’ I suggest we cannot encounter the resurrection hope of Christ until we allow ourselves to learn awe and mystery and awe once more: was this a birth, or a death? The answer is “yes”. The God who infiltrated the womb of Mary, who transcended the Tomb of Joseph of Aramathea, and who still enters and transforms willing human lives can turn both birth and death into a God-filled, sacred journey into fullness of existence: the onus is on us to discover again the childlike, un-cynical expectation that says “Oh Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray”

TLBWY

Be born in us - even today

SERMON PREACHED AT THE ORMOND CHAPEL NAPIER
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT
(22nd DECEMBER) 2013

Readings:
Isaiah 7: 10-16
Psalm 80: 1-7, 17-19
Romans 1: 1-7
Matthew 1.18-25

The contemporary routines of Christmas – probably contemporary for nearly a hundred years now – create a psychological ‘disconnect,’ a parallel narrative of which even Dr Who might be proud. Our readings, prayers and intercessions take us on a journey that begins with expectation of the second-coming of Christ, and then segue clumsily into preparation for the first coming of Christ at Bethlehem to millennia ago. In the meantime our secular western world celebrates the madness of the Capitalist frenzy, with retailers doing their utmost, understandably, to ensure that all their survival needs and then their profit needs are met and hopefully exceeded in a gut-busting orgy of marketing and selling. In the midst of all this the Christchild and Saint Nicholas, in his commercialised rebadging as Santa, compete for attention, with the Christchild losing badly, and both in any case sneeringly dismissed as ‘fairy tales’ about an ‘invisible friend.’

It is not an easy time in which to recapture the heart and soul of the gospel writers’ tale. Of course, as I suggest in my notes on the gospel elsewhere (see my Pivotal Pokes blog of December 21st), it was not easy for them either. They were using the best tools available to them to express the inexpressible, the God incarnate in the person and work and life and death and resurrection of a prickly prophet, the son of the wife of a carpenter from Nazareth. Those tolls can still work two millennia late, but as John Lennon wrote (though he meant the words in a very different way) ‘Christ, you know it ain’t easy.’

The stories do not translate easily into our world. They can be distorted by well-intending or less well-intending believers, or mocked by those who for whatever reasons are antagonistic to the message of Christianity. We must wear that, as the early Christians did: the first known non-Christian reference to Christians and their message is not of the ‘boy born in manger saves world’ type much loved by somewhat clichéd Christian signposts, but graffiti portraying Jesus as a crucified donkey. The artist is conflating no doubt the Triumphal Entrance story with the Good Friday story, but demonstrates incidentally that the Christian gospel was not altogether easy to convey. Oh how I wish, sometimes, that God had performed these revelations of the saving self, the saving purpose of God in other ways!

But it is not our job to second guess God. What in any case can God do? Can there be a message more intimate than incarnation? A sort of celestial email pleading, bribing or otherwise coercing humans into belief and acceptable behaviour is poor substitute for enfleshment in the midst of human experience. A series of neon lights across the sky telling us what to do, believe, say, is unlikely ultimately to touch and transform the yearning human heart (and in any case is not every almost every sunset, almost every sunrise, almost every awesome display of aurora borealis or its southern cousin, is not every display of a peacock’s tail or a monarch butterfly’s wing or a chameleon’s mind-blowing transitions a display of the poetry of the Creator, and even yet so easily dismissed with the sneering superiority of some science?). Neither a divine email nor an inescapably bellowed divine voice is substitute for the gentle, nurturing presence of God that can but only can be experienced in worship, in fellowship, in meditation and in study of God’s story.

The Hebrew people longed for a coming Messiah – and indeed still do. We long for the touch of Christ in celestial return, winding up the suffering of the cosmos that we are blithely destroying, winding up, too, the sometimes immeasurable suffering of human lives that we witness either around us in person or around our world via the media. We cry, perhaps with puzzlement and with the first Christians ‘come lord, come, maranatha.’ As the psalmist put it, ‘how long will you be angry with you people’s prayers … let your face shine that we may be saved.’ Isaiah’s people longed for a sign, and perhaps they missed it, though in saying that we need to recognize the way, the many ways we their cousins in faith continue to miss signs of the work of God in our midst. Paul spoke over and again of grace, the invasion of human lives, undeserving all, by divine love. Matthew spoke of an angel’s words, ‘God is with us.’ Sometimes, as so much changes and our churches seem to collapse around our ears, symbolically and literally, it seems as though Joseph must have been misled, fooling himself and his successors. I though don’t think that’s true: it is fashionable to belittle our romantic carols, but there are few lyrics that resonate more within my own life experience than Phillips Brooks’ famous words ‘Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today,’ and ‘where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.’

It may not be fashionable to hang on to the seemingly archaic, odd, even risible tales of the birth narratives of Luke and Matthew but I believe, though they were never meant as scientific analysis of the DNA of Jesus, they point to an essential truth of the gospel: God does not email us from a distant star but, by invitation, enters into our very essence, transforming even our journey from darkness into light, and ensuring that, while it may not yet be apparent, even humanity’s deepest darknesses are penetrated by resurrection light.

TLBWY

Though devils all devour us

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
FIRST SUNDAY IN ADVENT (1^st December) 2013

 

Readings:       Isaiah 2.1-5

                        Psalm 122
                        Romans 13.11-14
                        Matthew 24.36-44

 A week ago Anne reminded some of us that, as the Christians drew together what, over the next three hundred years, were to become the New Testament scriptures, they did so by anchoring their new experience in and explaining their new experience by the more ancient texts of the Hebrews. Anne referred us to what we call the inter-testamental or pseudepigraphal writings and their descriptions of the divine light that conquers darkness. This week we find, as we begin a new church year, that the prophets were also a powerful lens of interpretation as the early Christians tried to convey their unprecedented experience of the triune God and of the Risen Christ.

The prophetic literature was a rich resource. Over and again, centuries before Christ, the prophets had cast their thoughts to the future, telling of a time when a person, chosen by God, would come to redeem the wayward and hurting Hebrews. Sometimes they predicted this Coming One as a kingly figure, sometimes, bizarrely, the later Isaiah appears to depict him as a suffering servant figure. Other portrayals emerge too, not all but many resonating with the Christians’ experience of the risen Christ. They expected this figure, who they rapidly identified not only as the historical Jesus of Nazareth, but as uniquely “Son” and “Lord”, to wind up human and even cosmic history. They knew too that the completion of that project still lay ahead of them, nearby or far off, and that they must weave a doctrine not only of “coming” but of “second coming” into their understanding of the universe. It is this complexity that we explore in our Advent journeying.

Complex it is. The long passage of time since the events of our New Testament means that any sense of second coming was for centuries repressed in all but the wackiest of Christian teaching.  At most preparation for the encounter with Christ was relegated to a sense of personal encounter with God in some form at the hour of our death or perhaps some future day of judgement – the dies irae so beloved by Mozart. We can retain that sense, but since that dreadful day when the obscenely named Trinity Bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert, humanity has been far more acutely aware of its own capacity to destroy itself. Since July 16^th 1945 we have had at our hands the means of our own destruction. Subsequent ecological crises, in particular those of increasing rates of species annihilation and accelerated climate change serve to remind us that the sword of Damocles dwells with us all, corporately as well as individually.  At the same time most of us remain reasonably well aware of our own mortality, too, at least after we reach the milestones of middle.

Christians – though they were by no means the first to do so – linked mortality, immortality and judgement in an unbreakable chain, and saw that the events of the life, death and resurrection, and the hoped for return of Jesus of Nazareth were inseparably linked with all these dimensions of their experience. Post-Enlightenment generations of Christianity have produced some degrees of scepticism about any dimension of existence beyond that which we can physically measure and experience, either in the life of Jesus or in our own future, but we hold Enlightenment values over the head of God at great peril. A god who is quantifiable, beholden to our tiny apparatuses of analysis, is frankly risible, and is not the God that I find pulsing through the veins of the scriptures of our faith.  As the early Christians turned for example to Isaiah and his great vision of a future interpreted, transformed and blessed by the creating and calling God, they did not see that future spluttering to completion in their own dying. They saw a God who reached beyond human comprehension, who their successor in faith would one day describe as possessing treasures beyond that which “human eye has seen or ear heard or heart conceived.” They found in the Isaiah-writings, for example, a God who would transform the shattering of human experience through which the Hebrews were to travel, eventually turning “swords to ploughshares, and … spears into pruning hooks.”

Was Isaiah speaking only of a transformation of present experience? Was he looking only to a time when his people returned to the holy Hill of Zion, free to live at peace without threat from bullying neighbours?  Was Isaiah’s vision of no more than a transformation of the political map of the Middle East seven centuries before Christ? Or indeed, was he speaking only of peace and justice at a global level – the eradication of military and fiscal disparity and oppression? Was his beatific vision – as yet unfulfilled we might add – only of Israel and for example Egypt or Babylon shaking hands and living together in peace? The Christians were adamant that in the events they had witnessed or heard of and experienced in worship, fellowship and exploration of scripture there was a greater reconciliation: that not merely Egypt or Rome or Babylon but all oppression and injustice, even the oppression and injustice by mortality and death itself, was conquered.  It was for this they were prepared to live and die, certain that the resounding “no” of death was not the final word.

So, then, the seemingly terrifying imagery of apocalyptic, in all its weird and wonderful but in reality totally accessible codes of fearsome figures and events, was no more than the language of encouragement. As Luther would put it centuries later, Though devils all the world should fill, all eager to devour us. We tremble not, we fear no ill, they shall not overpower us. Or, in less poetic language, no matter how great the evils that befall us – and they might – sorrow and separation and suffering and death are not the final word, but the precursor to God’s glorious and incomprehensible action of loving judgement and restoration, the “yes” that conquers every “no.”

It is to rehearse that dimension of hope, the dimension of a God whose love transforms all mortal experience, that we are commissioned in Advent. We prepare to hear, both personally and cosmically, God’s beckoning words, as the author of Revelation put it, “come, all you who are thirsty.”

 TLBWY

Sir Bob Jones: Nero redivivus?

 

You may, for better or for worse, be aware  of a recent toxic outpouring from the quill of erstwhile boxing mogul Sir Bob Jones.(1) In it he does his best to satirize Wellington’s Bishop Justin Duckworth and the entire Anglican tradition in one fell swoop. Jones is not Shakespeare, Einstein, nor even Lange or Muldoon, so his vitriolic tirade failed to excite any except those who are already convinced that every Anglican is either dead or a paedophile. It is therefore probably a good thing I failed to give him oxygen, having missed the brain explosion at the time and therefore failed to engage with the good pugilist. I doubt much would have been achieved by rational debate. The narrative of Jones’ history, if I recall correctly from the ancient depths of my memory, is not renowned for subtle or intellectual discourse.

Amongst the suggestions made in Jones’ tirade, apart from ad hominem attacks on Duckworth’s sartorial standards, were 1) that clearly  Duckworth was misguided because God did not send a thunderbolt of penal reform during his sojourn in the cathedral precinct, and 2) that Anglicans almost all engage in sexual libertinism every time they gather, so that synods boost the coffers of the sex-worker industry exponentially. Or something like that. Sadly I have to say that in 30 years of synod attendances around Australia and New Zealand I appear to have missed this recreational side-line, but Sir Bob would undoubtedly know the scene more comprehensively than I do.

In the last decade or two I have been suggesting that credible Christianity in the West is undergoing a form of persecution by exclusion and/or ridicule. Somehow I don’t think Sir Bob’s un-nuanced rampage quite fits the bill of “persecution.” Rowan Williams has been fairly outspoken in his attacks on comfortable western Christians who think they are being persecuted: “When you’ve had contact with real persecuted minorities you learn to use the word very chastely”, he warned, back in August.(2) Nevertheless, while he has a point, it is worth recalling that the greatest pogrom in history began with ridicule of the Jews. The fact that Jones can have his brain explosion published without censure by editors may point to the great values of free speech, but I suspect any similar attack on an Ayatollah, a roshi, a lama or a kaumatua would result in a media meltdown. Bishops are fair game.

There are many ways we have brought this on ourselves. For too long we viewed society with a degree of supercilious superiority. The days of that uncharitable self-satisfaction and sometimes outright hypocrisy are long gone in most quarters. We the Christbearers of the 21^st century are beholden to ensure we speak and act with integrity, as Duckworth has. No thunderbolts will ensue, but we might one day and by the grace of God once more earn the exclamation “see how those Christians love one another”.

 Є̀ν Χριστω

 

(1) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11151481

(2) http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/15/rowan-williams-persecuted-christians-grow-up

 

The post that disappeared

REFLECTION FOR THE ANGLICAN DIOCESAN  REGISTRARS
VIGIL OF ALL SAINTS’, 31st OCTOBER 2013

John 21.1-10

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ 3Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. 4The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10Then the disciples returned to their homes.

It is the set reading for the day, nothing special, except that it is the reading that dwells as close as any to the heart of all that we are – you! – are doing here. Let me though perhaps explain a bit about the lens through which I see our task: it is a lens that I would describe as the lens of core business. I fret often in church circles, not least in Anglican church circles, because it seems to me that our core business is so often displaced to the peripheries.

As it happens I have this week read the autobiography of Malala Yousoufzai, the Pakistani Muslim girl shot in the head but not killed in a Taliban assassination attempt just over a year ago. Very rarely does the biography, much less the autobiography, of a young person move me: when we are for example a closeted young person who has known nothing but a single sports obsession we know little enough about life to inform others. Malala is a rare exception … and I mention it because, though a Muslim, she has never lost sight of the simple fact that for her the justice demanded by Allah for all people is her core business.

Am I digressing? If so it is a scripted digression. I digress because our reading takes us to the core business of Christian witness. As it happens I am a universalist – not a pluralist, but that’s another matter – so I have no problem linking arms with the core business of Malala Yousoufzai. I would say though that the motivation for all our work as witnesses to Christ – which is surely what the nickname “Christian” first meant – is to bear witness to the resurrection of Christ. I am not here engaging with Malala – her God-breathed path is elsewhere, deeply profound, and deeply close to the beating heart of the triune God.

But I am not Malala. I am instead in the footsteps of those frightened men and women who first discovered not only an empty tomb but a resurrected Christ. It is from that encounter that all else that I do must stem: My re-memberance (and I explain that word elsewhere) of Christ in Eucharist and liturgy, my commitment to stewardship of God’s resources in and around my life, my proclamation of justice for all peoples and species in God’s garden, my preaching, my most of the time trying to be a half decent sort of a husband and father and citizen and Christian all begin with the encounter with the Risen Lord, the one made known to the faithful women and the less-faithful disciples in the appearances, and made known to me and subsequent struggling followers of Jesus in Eucharist and Koinonia and Canon and Liturgy and study and perhaps after that in nature.

The disciples who leave the tomb have not yet encountered the Risen Lord. Sometimes I feel contemporary Christianity has slipped back into their shoes, muttering about justice or money or sex or buildings but with no real interest in the underlying motivation, so that we sound like just one more interest lobby group in the community, and return to our homes saying nothing more. Soon, though, in the narrative, the frightened women (and then men) will begin to stutter the important words “he is not here, he is risen”. These are not words about an absent god, ironically, but about a God who is more powerfully present then they or we had ever dared to believe, the God who defeats the no of death and all “no”s of injustice, grief, and despair.

I don’t care whether we are registrars or deans or bishops or archbishops, these words and no other are the beginning of the work we do, because these words lead on to that unbelievable gauntlet cast down at the feat of Caesar and all Caesars: Jesus Christ is Lord.
 

Sadducees, Bishops of Bling ...

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 32 (10th November) 2013

(Oh ... with apologies for the last invisible post!)

Readings: Haggai 1.15b – 2.9
                 Psalm 145.1-5, 17-21
                 2 Thessalonians 2.1-5, 13-17
                 Luke 20.27-38

If you were to read through the Gospel accounts for the first time you would very soon get the impression that there is a bunch of bad guys called the Pharisees. They are often depicted as the opponents of Jesus, and some may have been (there are bad eggs in many baskets), but we need to be a little careful in our reading of scripture.  Historical scholarship today would emphasize that at the time of Jesus his own theological and missiological position was not too far removed from the Pharisees, and it is highly probably that the antagonism between the Pharisees and Jesus depicted by the four evangelists reflects a different situation, some decades later, by which time circumstances had driven a bitter wedge between Christians and their Jewish cousins in faith. 

This matters today not only because of a tragic fifteen hundred year history of more on than off oppression of Jews by Christians, but because in our world it is far more important to look for cohesion than enmity between warring faith-parties, and to condemn our cousins in faith on the basis of some reasonably volatile and even jaundiced first century writing – however understandable that jaundice may have been when Matthew Luke, Mark and John were writing – is to perpetrate evils far from the heart and purposes of God.

The Sadducees however were a corrupt religious cult, a group of powerful and influential figures, with friends in high places. Their chief effect was to exploit the vulnerable in the service of feathering their own nest. Religious leadership of many forms, not least those perpetrating evil in the name of Jesus, are not above such practice today, as we see in the sensationalist religions and cults whose leaders demand tithes from economically vulnerable followers, pointing to their personal wealth as a sign of the efficacy of faith and prayer, but those who have used their positions of power in the church to serve their own search for personal and especially sexual gratification.  The notorious Roman Catholic “Bishop of Bling,” Bishop Tebartz-van Elst who resided in notorious wealth in the diocese of Limburg has at least been brought to heel by Pope Francis, but there are many charlatans in more free-wheeling so-called Christian churches who continue to perpetrate their exploitation unopposed.

These many “users of the Lord’s name in vain” are able carry out their exploitations by deadening – cauterizing – the voice of conscience within their being, a process made far easier when any theology of afterlife or judgement is excised from the story of faith and of human relationship to God. The Sadducees had a vested interest in denying resurrection, for resurrection is a doctrine that, while it has sometimes been abused, on the whole inspires the oppressed to stand up to oppressors and exploiters, or, at the very worst, to find at least a narrative of hope in the midst of their lives of potential despair.

If I am an Afro-American slave in the nineteenth century I may not overcome my masters with a Marxist revolution – yet­ – but I may find hope in the midst of despair so that I can battle on in providing my children with love and warmth and the touch of God. While the narratives of a Te Kooti or a Ratana may not be orthodox in a Christian sense, there is no doubt that they succeeded, alongside orthodox Christian teachings, to bring narratives of hope to oppressed peoples.  The Sadducees denied hope – as many contemporary Christians risk doing – and rejoiced in the outcomes of exploiting others.

Consequently there is no suggestion that they are entering in dialogue when they come to Jesus with their loaded question. This is not an open engagement with Jesus in theological korero­, as a genuine seeker or dialogue partner might bring, but a conversation of entrapment. The gospel writers portray Jesus as again and again rising above entrapment – but as engaging genuinely and often playfully with those who willingly listen. The Sadducees do not.

The tradition of so-called Levirate marriage was in itself not to be automatically condemned. It is highly doubtful that Jesus approved wholeheartedly in the practice, reflecting as it did the notion of women as property, but there is no doubt also that, like Paul’s infamous but often de-contextualised “wives obey”, it provided at least some channel of hope in a society in which women were valued only for their ability to provide an heir for men. A woman was protected by the doctrine – still extant in some cultures today – and, while no one would advise such a practice today, it is probable that many otherwise disposable female lives were saved by it.

Jesus does not engage with the practice itself, but with the hypocrisy of the exploitative religious leadership who are raising the question only in order to ensure that his narrative of resurrection hope, judgement and justice is silenced.  I hint elsewhere that we as a Christian community today should think very carefully before we denude our narratives of their internal words of resurrection hope and divine judgement: that is what Paul referred to when he warned the Corinthians against stripping the gospel of its hope of resurrection, and the words resound no less truly today.

There is much in this tiny scene that we could explore, but ultimately I want us to dwell with that one denuding dimension of faithlessness: if we strip our faith of the dimension of God’s compassionate judgement, and of the “eschatological” or “after-time” dimension of that judgement, then we not only trivialize all that the early Christians stood for, lived and often suffered and sometimes died for, but we shift our own existence outside the scope of God’s loving, searching, caring and eternal gaze.

If we do not stand and live our lives in the light of that miraculous, death-transcending light of the first Easter morn – and its inseparable promise of judgement – then our own potential to perpetrate evil – (or at least to perpetrate Not Very Good as most of us will have only small dimensions to our lives) – is left to have the final word. Jesus is unremitting in his response: that which dwells beyond our sight is more than we can imagine in its goodness, a pie in the sky beyond human comprehension.  It is also, however, a magnet drawing us on to see God face to face. In preparation for that encounter, we, unlike the Sadducees, should be practising and proclaiming resurrection hope, not exploitation and despair.

May the magnetism of God’s eternity draw us and those we love and pray for on towards God’s judgement and to mysteries and reconciliations and loves beyond comprehension.

Amen.

fifty shades of self-obsession

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 30 (27^th October) 2013
 
Readings:      Jeremiah 14: 7-10, 19.22
                       Psalm 84: 1-7
                       2 Timothy 4: 6-8, 16-18
                       Luke 18: 9-14

As Jeremiah the prophet turns his scorching gaze on his community he becomes a figure who is unlikely to be popular in the era in which we live, the era of post-modernity or perhaps even post-post-modernity. Jeremiah excoriates his people in chapter after chapter of analysis – analysis and critique that weighed heavily on his shoulders and ensured that his life was spent devoid of party invitations or glitzy coverage in the glossy media equivalent of his day. He ends his life, so far as we can tell, in sorrow-filled exile, probably in Egypt, questioning with the psalmist how he or his people can ever sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, or indeed can ever sing again.

Jeremiah’s scrutiny is miles removed from the mantras of post-modern self-absorption.  Enter our bookshops or the internet today and the adult best-sellers are either voyeuristic sexual fantasies, Fifty Shades of whatever your favourite obsession might be, or meaningless tomes telling you that your truth is within you that all you need to do is dig deeper, strive harder, astrologize more confidently, adopt this training fad or that dietary fad or this parenting fad, and your life will be complete, your family perfect, your happiness secured. It’s no accident that life coaches are a growth industry, along with personal trainers, boot camp masters; we are inundated with an endless stream of “selfies” that take over photographic transmissions on the same social media sites that make us lonelier and lonelier.

Sites like Snapchat ensure that we can have our nine seconds of fame, with or without clothes on; sites like Ask.fm not only pollute our computers with destructive malware but ensure that for one fleeting moment we are in the driving seat of fame until things get nasty and teenagers are driven to suicide by outpourings of vitriol from which they wrongly fear they cannot run or hide. For those who don’t pick my allusion, no fewer than nine teenagers have committed suicide after being hounded by hate-posts and vitriol on the enormously popular social media website Ask.fm. There is a huge cost attached to believing you are the centre of the universe, but our society wants us to believe it every day.

Jeremiah would have none of it. His challenge to take a look at ourselves is not aimed at self-obsession, but at our tendency to forget our dependence on our covenant partner and creator, the God of the Hebrews. Jeremiah’s viewpoint was inseparable from that of Jesus or indeed any prophet: turn your eyes off self and see instead the hungry and the needy that surround you, see in them the face of God, and do something about their plight. We need to know in any era that these stern assessments apply to us as individuals and as a collective community (and I freely admit that I fall as short as any). To reject the poor, in Jeremiah’s books, was to reject God: we hear too few of our hellfire preachers emphasizing this dominant strand of prophesy, because it is much easier and safer and more comfortable to condemn sexual lifestyles than economic lifestyles. This is not altogether unrelated to our self-obsession: we are so overfed and over resourced in the west that we have become utterly self-indulgent, while the have-nots of the world’s refugee camps or our streets remain far removed from our thoughts. Fifty Shades of thoughtlessness, fifty shades of amnesia, fifty shades of myopia.

There was much truth in that chorus of the 1920s revival, “turn your eyes upon Jesus”:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.

There is much truth in it - along with some nasty ambivalences. We need to ensure that the Jesus we focus on is not recreated in our own cosy and narcissistic image. To some extent we cannot help doing that: liberals, conservatives and all in-between will inevitably read the Jesus story through our own filters of experience.

Each of the terribly human needs that bring us to surrender to the lordship of Christ will infiltrate our understanding of him – and there is no doubt that a psychologist can have a field day with our motivations for discipleship. But we must strive for honesty nevertheless: conservative readers of the biblical story must ask whether in fact Jesus – or any of the scriptural orators – really spend as much time obsessing with sexuality and sexual practice as many Christians seem to suggest.

Liberal readers of the biblical story must ask whether the resurrection narratives are really as tamely subject to post-Enlightenment, modern analysis as many of us suggest, or whether in fact it is our own scientific method that stands subject to the greater intensity of a Creator God’s immeasurable capability. All of us must again and again remember that there is, no matter what pop-psychological authors might tell us in their self-help books and websites, no way by which we can by ourselves claw our way into the fullness of life the triune Creator designed for us.

Ultimately Jesus – and not only Jesus but all who stand in the prophetic line (though he is so much more) – ultimately Jesus challenges us to ensure that we are not putting ourselves in the centre of the universe, in the driving seat of our own existence. To do so is to enter an abominable loneliness. No-one claims it is easy to “let go and let God” – and there is not even any agreement on what those often overused words might mean – but we might well notice that it is to what Bruce Springsteen called “the hungry and the hunted” that Jesus turns over and again as he attempts to portray appropriate, Spirit-filled discipleship. As followers of Jesus the onus is on us to recognize our points of weakness, to confess them, to surrender again and again to divine Lordship, and to stumble on in the path down which the beckonings of the Spirit lead us, paths that will always entail challenges of justice, compassion and love.

TLBWY

 

"Blah-blah-blah-godstuff-godstuff"?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: First Cathedral to See the Sun)

ORDINARY SUNDAY 29 (20^th October) 2013

(First Sermon as Twelfth Dean of Waiapu, Vicar of the Cathedral Parish of St John the Evangelist) 

Readings:        Genesis 32.22-31

                          Psalm 121
                          2 Timothy 3.14 – 4.5
                          Luke 18.1-9

 

Ah, the joys of a new ministry! I look down on a sea of faces whose kaupapa (story) is almost universally unknown to me. It is my belief, and although I have never “deaned” before I suspect this is as true for a dean as for any priest or proclaimer of the word – that the sermon or kauwhau must be born out of knowledge and experience of the life-journeys of those who hear it. That today is impossible, and will be for a long time yet. Bear with me then: I will try to engage – and though I make no guarantee that I can quite subscribe to choristers’ instructions for brevity (after all there is mahi [work] to be done here!) – I will do my best not to bore you out of all potential for belief!

And what a feast of riches! So often I fear we hear the scriptures of our faith read or expounded in church and hear no more than blah-blah-blah-godstuff-godstuff- blah-blah-blah. For those on the fringes or outside faith there seems so little to excite or entice, for those within the fluffy perimeters (not, incidentally “parameters”!) of faith little to encourage or inspire.  In other contexts there is some sort of inspiration but it is more to do with manipulation and artificial atmosphere and hype than the Spirit of the hard-working God of the founding fathers and mothers of our faith.

Blah-blah-blah-godstuff-godstuff- blah-blah-blah: it’s not what our forebears in faith heard when the author of 2 Timothy, for example, (who may or may not have been Paul) implored his listeners to anchor their faith in scripture. He meant, of course the Hebrew Scriptures, for the New Testament scriptures were not yet written or collected. The scriptures were as it was a “living word”, “inspired by God and … useful for teaching,  … reproof … correction, and …training…”. This was to him the equivalent of a Dan Carter physio workout – with all the emotional and physical pain and commitment and blood and sweat and toil, because this holding fast to Jesus was no walk in the park or bunch of fluffy ducks. And it is our task, somehow, to remember that costliness and energy of those who first (and sometimes still) risked their lives to hang on with this bizarre message of justice, righteousness and resurrection hope to which we at least try to adhere today. If nothing else we might recall the author’s plea to anchor any message of hope in scripture, in the narratives of faith, not in the whims and fashions of the fleeting social world that surrounded the Christians of his time and ours.

Indeed our lives of faith are called to be far closer to the wrestling with God that forms the storyline of the iconic renaming of Jacob-Israel. I fear sometimes that our god of the twenty-first century has become so plastic that she or he would quietly melt away were we to wrestle her, and we would be left merely wrestling and worshipping our own image, full of satisfaction when we win without realizing that we have also lost, and that we have merely recreated God, as no less than Nietzsche once tried, in our own image. Nietzsche taught us how to kill god, yet we have found nothing to replace God, and struggle I fear in the morass of our own self-importance now god is supposed to be dead. To say this, though, is not to claim that we did not make terrible mistakes in the alleged service of our God, too, as Nietzsche, for all his faults, prophetically warned us. We did, and we must not make them again.

How though do we avoid those mistakes of our forebears while hanging on to the pearl of great price for which they were prepared to live and die? Christianity is much on the nose in post-modernity, and when I see some of what passes for Christianity I tend to agree. God the nasty firebrand who stands on street corners proclaiming hatred for example of gays or Muslims or Jews or all of the above, god the exploiter, god the oppressor or the god who disregards a warming earth:  these are not the God of the early Christians or of the once very unpleasant Jacob who becomes Israel or above all of Jesus Christ. These are phantasms, sacred cows, and not the God of the Cross.

 As Luke tells the story of Jesus he provides again and again a litmus test of the authenticity of Christian witness: does our witness point to the upside-down topsy-turvy God who tears down the mighty from their thrones, as we hear in the Magnificat of Mary? Does our witness proclaim justice for the most broken and oppressed – human and other species – of the earth, or proclaim only our warm and fuzzy comfort? Is our witness anchored deep in prayer, wrestling with God in prayer, seeking and imploring that we may be the answers to prayer, seeking also that God’s answers to prayer may sometimes rise above the smallness of our expectations and become miracle?

I did not choose the readings for this day, but I believe they issue a manifesto, a challenge to us all as we begin a new chapter in your journey and mine. May God leave footsteps for us to tread in, still warm footsteps, and may we walk together as we proclaim in word and action the somewhat difficult, challenging, demanding and therefore unpopular God of Jesus Christ, the God of the Cross.

TLBWY

Is there no balm in Gilead? (So long, and thanks for all the fish)

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD

FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)

ORDINARY SUNDAY 25 (22^nd SEPTEMBER) 2013

final sermon at the Parish of the Good Shepherd, Fred’s Pass and Batchelor

Readings:        Jeremiah 8.18 – 9.1

                        Psalm 79.1-9

                        1 Timothy 2.1-10

                        Luke 16.1-13

 

If a first-comer were to pick up the books of the New Testament and read them from the opening pronouncement “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ” of Matthew to the closing “amen” of Revelation, even though these are not in any sort of chronological sequence, the reader would be hard pressed to miss gleaning something of a sense of urgency. Mark’s gospel-account is particularly urgent, as the author tells the Jesus-story in the shadow of what he considered to be the imminent return of Jesus. Can we or even should we still do this two millennia later?

For that matter, can we maintain any such sense of urgency even in the small time-frame of our own lives? Scholars used to say that there was a diminishment of apocalyptic urgency in the writing of Paul, occurring over a period of less than a decade. That is a less popular view these days, and I think it is more likely that his expectation of the triumphant apocalyptic return of Jesus came and went in waves of circumstance, and was gradually overtaken by his expectation of meeting Jesus (again) in his own forthcoming death, but the case remains:  his writings are full of apocalyptic urgency. But can we – should we – maintain that urgency?

For centuries that apocalyptic dimension of Christianity was suppressed. I do not mean it was suppressed in a Da Vinci Code sort of manner, but simply that it was put in the too hard basket of Christian teaching. There were moments of apocalyptic fervour: the lead-up to the end of the first millennium was one such moment, and the events of the Reformation led to another, but on the whole apocalyptic ferment was left neatly filed under “I” for ignore or “E” for excruciatingly embarrassing. In particular it was embarrassing to perpetrators of state religion – unfortunately deep in the DNA of Anglican Christianity – and even in my 1960s exposure to Christianity any notion of a second coming was seen as quaint and embarrassing. It’s no coincidence that it’s only since the detonation of the bomb obscenely named “Trinity” in the Jornada del Muerto desert on July 16^th, 1945, that any notion of apocalyptic has escaped the clutches of the idiot fringes of Christianity and returned to the mainstream (which, despite appearances to the contrary, does not indicate that the millennialist idiot fringes were or are not idiotic after all, for their focus remains deeply askew). Apocalptic has drifted very slowly into Anglican thought, so we have been deeply embarrassed when Jesus appears to teach that we should have so great a sense of urgency that we should behave like a rotten and corrupt farm manager. Jesus clearly was not terribly Anglican.

Yet this strand of New Testament thought is deeply important. If we lose it, then we run the risk of becoming precisely the sort of visionless Christianity that has often dominated our history. We run the risk, and this is deep in the essence of Anglicanism, of believing that civic leadership is the ultimate expression of divine will: as our formative Book of Common Prayer tended to express it, God appoints kings first, then magistrates, then bishops, then mere clergy, and last of all you, hoi poloi, whose task it is to do exactly what you are told, and ensure no boat is ever rocked. It is a miracle that Anglicanism has ever produced figures the likes of Trevor Huddleston, or his protégé Desmond Tutu, or the current ecclesiastical leadership who tend to be more prepared to critique corrupt or self-seeking governments. For a doctrine of apocalyptic, at the very least, reminds us that God is, as the Veggie Tales so aptly put it, bigger than the boogie man, bigger than corrupt or myopic governments, as well as being bigger than the calamities that may devastate our individual existences.

I would not want to suggest that Jeremiah lost sight of God: far from it! The abject heaviness of heart that characterises his world view is a direct result of his critical analysis of the corruption of the leadership of his day. I make no secret of my belief that our own civic leadership deserve the same scorn, as they use asylum seekers as cannon fodder in games of political one-upmanship, though I would add that our church leaders, too, have been utterly self-seeking as they spent decades hiding corrupt and exploitative predators within our own ranks, desperately attempting to avoid shame and fiscal horror of exposure to the powerful scrutiny of the law. For that matter we would do well to remember, as the Fitzgerald Enquiry reminded us a decade or two ago, that the law itself is not above corruption: and so the cycles of human sinfulness continue.

So is there indeed no balm in Gilead? There certainly is not if we either deaden the voice of conscience, that gift of God that inconveniently reverberates around the human soul until we cauterize it, or if we remove any sense of the judgement of God from our life-equation altogether.  We can take these options in a myriad ways, pushing God’s “still small voice” out into realms of irrelevancy, deadening divine scrutiny, making excuses: we can’t afford to be exposed to legal scrutiny in case we are bankrupted by legal proceedings, and how could we carry out our task then? So said the gospel never. I suggest that if we believe that – and I fear we have – then we have set up, like Jeremiah’s people, false gods, and worshipped them. Or, indeed, as Jesus put it: we have served Mammon, not God.

The winds of change are blowing through the church in all its forms. Our infrastructures are being stretched and broken, for I fear we have believed they, not the Spirit of God, would save us. God knows I do it too: anyone who claims perfection is a liar, and anyone who claims it is easy to face a shifting, uncertain future is not really much more honest. Is there no balm in Gilead?

Jeremiah was a miserable old soul, so much so that for a while the name Jeremiah was common parlance for a party pooper. He was far more John the Baptist than party-going, story-telling Jesus, though the prophetic tradition of justice-seeking embraces both of course. In the end though Jeremiah was kept on focus through his dark night of the soul by his constant awareness of the presence of God, a presence far greater than the corruption that surrounded him, far greater than doubt and despair. Such awareness is both a gift of God and, paradoxically, the result of discipline and hard work. I don’t set myself up as an example, but pray God that my life and yours can be a learning curve in that direction.

The author of 1 Timothy’s injunction to “lift up holy hands” is no more than an invitation to pray – the so-called orans position of prayer adopted in charismatic-pentecostal worship was probably the original and most appropriate pose, though I make no secret of my belief we lose bent knees at great peril.  The author’s invitation is neither more nor less than a demand that we work hard at the experience of closeness to God. We need though a reality check: are we worshipping because it brings us warm-fuzzy feelings as individuals?

Our paths have briefly crossed but the challenges put to us by Jesus’ story of a corrupt steward are applicable in all our individual journeys and in our corporate journey as members of faith communities in the service of God: Are we talking about mission and evangelism and justice and other ministries of the Church because we want to prop up shaky institutions? Jeremiah, would have no time for either, and Jesus stands firmly in Jeremiah’s footsteps, even if he has a better sense of humour. Or are we engaging with God because we love God, because our lives are touched and transformed by God, because we want others to know and share this side of the grave the warmth and the magnificence of the One we will encounter in our own personal death or in the final apocalypse of human history, whichever, whatever form that may take? May the answer be the love of God, for you and for me, as we tread the tracks God has beaten for us.

TLBWY*
 

*Please note there will now be a break in sermons until October 20th, after I am installed as Dean of Waiapu in New Zealand