Tweeting for God

For 82 million years, since New Zealand floated off the edge of Gondwanaland, its parrots have evolved in directions far removed from their more vibrant and psychedelic Australian cousins. The prime native New Zealand parrots, kea, kākā and kakapo (and varieties), are positively funereal compared to, say, a crimson rosella or a king parrot. Yet ask a kaka to sing, and, while not quite either Kiri Te Kanawa or even Joan Sutherland, neither is its hymn the Mephistophelian snarl of a sulphur crested or red tailed black cockatoo or a galah. To be honest, given its skills at mimicry, a kākā would soon out-Kiri Kiri.  

Birders speak of “LBJs”, little brown jobs. The pardalote is a classic, though not particularly drab: it skitters through bushland leaving a trail of scattered song, tantalising the eye but rewarding the ear. To be fair Australia has an enormous range of birds, and many are exquisite songsters (the most beautiful, ironically, is perhaps the butcher bird). Aotearoa has a comparatively limited range of natives, but few fail to thrill the ear. Arguably the most mellifluous of all is, in fact an import, the song thrush, but let’s not let reality get in the way of a good story.

For there is a parable here. The beautiful trillings of an otherwise drab LBJ stir the heart, and, if the heart is godwardly attuned it may be stirred to join the bird, singing in praise of the Creator. The psychedelic flash of a flock of rainbow bee-eaters also stirs the soul, but, while its song is not that of a galah, it’s more Barry Manilow than Andrea Boccelli, and it is the colour, not the song, that moves us.

For me, more than any, it is a tiny New Zealand native called a riroriro that provokes the heart to praise. Only about 10 cms long, this tiny drab bird sings the descant of the forest, and its piping ventriloqual voice can float through a valley like the song of an angel. Perhaps I should stop any trans-Tasman rivalry, for there is an Australian warbler with a very similar song that is a relative of the riro riro, but, while not rare, it is far less ubiquitous and its song is less iconic in Australian culture.

This riro riro, then, is my (flawed) parable. Small, drab, all but invisible, its song rises to the heavens. Surely for those of us who will never paint the forests bright with the psychedelic colours of our being there is a message here: sing the song God gave us and we too can raise the spirits of a frost-encrusted valley. Frost, of course, is not exactly a problem in Darwin, but perhaps we can relate from experience somewhere sometime to the oppression of mist and frozen toes? You and I have a song to sing, the notes of life that God has given us. We may not, will not live in neon splendour, but in our small songs we may somewhere, somehow thrill the soul of those who pass us by.

Storming ICU for Jesus?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 10 / THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 
(9th JUNE) 2013

Readings: 1 Kings 17. 8-24
                 Psalm 146
                 Galatians 1.11-24
                 Luke 7.11-17

“The hope of the resurrection” say Baptist scholar Alan Culpepper, “is not grounded in the fact that the widow’s son came back to life but in the fact that the one who had the compassion to bring back the widow’s son has himself triumphed over death”

[You may as well know from the start of what may be a happy relationship that my favourite biblical word is the Greek verb splagnidzomai (you cannot use it in Scrabble). I love in part because I was once told, when I explained that it translated as "moved to the bowels", that such language was not permitted in church. I fear the good people of Christ Church, Wanganui must be a little more prudish than God or the apostles! I love it more though because it drives right to the heart of the differentness, if I may torture a word (I often do) of the God of the Cross. This is not the unmoved mover, but the God whose very bowels move at the plight of creation. We will find more of the significance of the moving bowels of God shortly.]

It is probably apocryphal, a sort of rural myth, but the story goes that some thirty years ago a group of Pentecostal Christians, emboldened by this passage or one of the similar resuscitation passages in the New Testament, stormed the critical care ward of Alice Springs hospital, demanding that the bewildered staff let them raise one of their friends from his or her life-supported death bed, because God had commanded them to do so. Unfortunately the security and nursing staff of the hospital were less persuaded of the significance or even existence of God in this critical moment, and the bewildered Christians were forcibly removed from the premises.

It is easy to be cynical about such a moment, and to mock the Christians for their misguided mission. Certainly they cost the wider Christian community a fair bit of credibility that day, but on the other hand there is a sense I can only admire their courage and their determination to overcome reality in the name of their beliefs. They were misguided, yet there was something impressive about their foolhardiness, and I can only hope that if the incident ever in fact occurred they were able to find Godward lessons in it, rather than find their faith stretched beyond breaking point at the thwarting of their expectation. I hope, too that the nursing and security staff weren’t turned away from the possibilities of the gospel of Jesus Christ by this gauche moment of Christian witness, albeit witness gone wrong.

But I do think they got it wrong, if the event ever took place. I admit I am something of a sceptic about almost all healings and even more so about alleged resuscitations,  though I do allow some room for the surprising and unstoppable actions of God. On the whole, though, I suspect God is not at our beck and call for spectacular sideshows, even in the name of “witness”, and that in any case even raising the dead would have little evangelistic impact on those who do not want to believe.

More important than failed spectacles in hospital wards is what Luke is telling us about the ministry of Jesus himself. Last week we saw a healing by what is called fiat, a command issued that is immediately fulfilled, obeyed even by the forces of nature and the spiritual world. This week it is rarked up (if I may use what I believe is a kiwi verb) to a new level, as a mere healing is trumped by a resuscitation. This of course is not a resuscitation of the CPR type – yet nor is it resurrection, as we shall see. Like the raised Lazarus, this resuscitated man will one day face death again. Perhaps like some who I know he will face his own death with greater calm than might otherwise have been the case, or perhaps like Kerry Packer he will come back from over the brink happily sneering "there's nothing there, folks." The fact is we know nothing about him: his name, his mother’s name, his emotional responses to life and death: all are lost to us because all are unimportant to us. This is not a story about a nameless young man and his mother, but a story of the revelation of the heart of God.

For the heart of God - or indeed the gut or the bowels of God - here enter into that most visceral form of human grief, the grief of a parent who has out-lived her or his child. I write “her” or “his”, but in this narrative it has to be a "her", because the grief of a mother is not only the grief of lost love, but the grief of total doom. A woman had no hope in widowhood beyond the support of her son and his family: with her son dead she too is effectively dead, and all hope has left her world. Luke is taking himself into dangerous realms – realms far more risky than those entered by the Alice Springs alleged ward-stormers – because he was writing in a world in which the hallmark of a decent god was feelinglessness, unmoveability, immutability. Yet he is writing of a God who feels, who feels even into the deepest entrails of divine being. This is so wrong if the idea of the early Christians was to appeal to, to be relevant to, the populace in which they lived out their faith.

Not insignificantly this is also the moment that Luke, in his Jesus-story,  refers to Jesus as “Lord” (v. 13): previously characters in the gospel have called him “Lord”, but Luke himself has held the title back. It is a significant moment: God-in-Christ becomes “Lord” for us and to us when he enters into our deepest moments of vulnerability and hopelessness, and there breathes resurrection light. As the bowels of God move with our suffering, so resurrection-light breaks into the most ghastly bowel-moving, visceral experiences of being human.

He does not allow us to stay there. He enters our pain, but there he commissions us to be his hands and feet, entering into the pain of those around us. The hallmark of the earliest Christians, and their strongest evangelistic weapon (as it were), was the quality of their love for the vulnerable, and especially, as it happens, for those most vulnerable of all, first century widows. Communities were gobsmacked: see how they love, they said of the Christians. Would they say it of you or of me? I suspect most of us fall short. I do.

This was not entirely a new thing. The Old Testament people of God drew strength from stories such as that of Elijah and Elisha, the first from 1 Kings that was our Hebrew Scripture reading this morning the second Elisha story from 2 Kings. There are many differences, but as Luke deliberately echoes the 1 and 2 Kings stories we are expected at the very lest to make two connections outlined in the dissimilarities, his deviations from the Hebrew texts. In the first place we might simply say that, if it is good enough for our cousins-in-faith to take hope and strength from the stories of Elijah and Elisha, then it is surely good enough for us. They even risked ritual uncleanliness by touching the dead - can there be greater compassion that theirs? Jesus in fact doesn't touch the body - though we know from other stories that he is not afraid of uncleanliness.  No: Luke though wants us to take another step. This is an event like that of Elisha and Elijah, but oh so much more, for here the man is healed not by actions and rites of prostrations on the body,  but by the simple command, the fiat of the God whose word or command and action are one and the same – and we are commissioned to know that this God is revealed in Jesus the Christ.

Where does this leave us? Not in the end, I think, storming the critical care units of our hospital, but knowing and acting out in our lives the realization that even death is transformed by the healing, hurting, healing light of Christ – your death and my death and the death of those we love. I firmly believe that if we denude our faith of this critical and inexplicable dimension then we are wasting divine time and human. “The hope of the resurrection” say Baptist scholar Alan Culpepper, “is not grounded in the fact that the widow’s son came back to life but in the fact that the one who had the compassion to bring back the widow’s son has himself triumphed over death” (Culpepper: "Luke". NIB IX, 159). We are called to live not denying death but celebrating the conquest of all deaths, all tragedies, by the glorious resurrection of the one who commanded the widow’s son to rise.

TLBWY

God as Boss

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
PRDINARY SUNDAY 9 / SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST  
(2^nd JUNE) 2013

 
 Readings:        1 Kings 18:20-39
                         Psalm 96
                         Galatians 1.1-12
                         Luke 7.1-10

Over the last couple of hundred of years, if not for ever, the absolute will of God has been a not altogether popular doctrine. I suggest possibly for ever, since we find Abraham having a few difficulties with God in Genesis 18, as he attempts to negotiate on behalf of the city of Sodom, but possibly that’s stretching my bow too far. Perhaps we should limit ourselves to the modern era, since the time when the earth was rolled up into a ball and our home became no more than an infinitely small bit-player in an infinitely big universe.

There is a paradox, there, for at one level, as the sun stopped circling the earth and the boundaries of creation spread further and further away from down-town Rome (or Jerusalem, depending on your slice of history), humans took less and less cognizance of the Psalmist’s “what is  a person, that you should be mindful of her.” Humanity, floating around an unimportant star in an insignificant galaxy in a spreading universe, placed itself at the centre, and flung the Creator out beyond the abyss, taking absolute will with him – or her. Humanity decided God was unimportant and decided to call the changes on the universe.

In other words, for at least three hundred years we have not been fussed with the idea “your will be done / on earth as it is done in heaven.” We’ve become less and less fussed with the idea of heaven, too, but that is in part a different story. We have gradually re-written the psalm to become “what is God, that we should be mindful of him, her it … ?”

Ahab had similar problems. His people had some allegiance to their God, but the gods of Baal were sexier, and they were kind of keen to have them, too. The God of Judaism and Christianity tends to be, as the scriptures put it, a jealous God, and wasn’t too fussed about sharing human hearts with bronze cows and orgiastic fertility gods. It’s probably not just since the modern era to be honest, but we too have done a fairly good job of flirting with orgiastic gods, trivializing the Creator (rather than seeing that, in an expanding universe, the creativity of God and the compassion of the God who cares for a falling sparrow is greater and greater to behold).

As the current Royal Commission will demonstrate, there have been far too many in our midst who have failed to believe in a God who might judge us by our actions, far too many who have forgotten to remember the stern words of Jesus about children and millstones. Far too many who have replaced God by putting themselves at the helm of the universe. This of course is to over-simplify, for readings of history tell us it was ever thus, but this is no excuse. We have fallen at the feet of Baal.

We have tended to forget about a God who created at the beginning of time and a God who judges either at the end of time or throughout time, depending on our comprehension of time (and mine is highly un-linear).  The Royal Commission that will shine its torch through our corridors – the corridors of the church in all its forms, will do us good. We can only weep and say sorry for the victims of abuse that have not necessarily been my victims or your victims but are all our victims. And when we hear of abuse it becomes nigh-on impossible to speak of the will of God, for to suggest it was the will of God that a child should suffer so at the hands of those who claim to be Christ-bearers is sick beyond words.  Where was the God who wills the centurion’s servant to be well?

For those who suffer, either at the hands of humans or at the hands of nature, I suspect we have no words, only the actions that pray God may speak louder than words about a healing, resurrecting God. I can only pray that those who suffered may judge us all kindly, for one day, in my theology, it is the victims who will on behalf of God judge the perpetrators. It is a solemn thought, and one I have long held, tempered only my equal and opposite belief that one day all, even the most evil of humans, might learn to surrender to the love and healing of the wounded Christ.

These, then, are just musings, not as it were an unpacking of our scriptures. But they are not unrelated. Ahab finds those who want to keep God as a convenience but their own hedonistic lifestyle – the attractions of Baal – and is not altogether kind to them. They have removed the question of a stern and judging God from the equation of their lives, and the implications of that choice are unattractive. We need to learn from them: God and the conscience he gives us may be slowly silenced in our lives but the risk of doing that is high. We can shut God up, killing those divine whispers in our ears, but we do so at great peril of our humanity. Jesus, like God, commands creation to obey his will, but we are not God.

How then does this leave us as we seek to stumble in the way of the Cross in 2013? It leaves us – or it should – refusing to play games with the gospel. We are called to be servant followers of Jesus, as he was and is a servant revealing of the heart of God, the servant king. We are called to find ways to express our love for God and for one another and for our neighbour in actions of service. God may be the one who heals by a simple word, but we need to know we are not God. Few of us have too many difficulties with this, until it comes to being servants of one another, or, more accurately, of Christ in one another. We prefer to control with our cheque books or our words, trying subdue God to our will, trying to reduce God the creator to the level of a good time Baalite god.

Instead we need to recall that it is God, not we, not you or I who is the boss, who commands the servant’s demons to release him, and raise him from the death bed. We are less glamorous, I suspect, and can only look for opportunities to serve one another – to serve and never abuse or exploit – as we seek to be the body of the Christ.

 TLBWY