SERMON
PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
NAPIER,
NEW ZEALAND: First Cathedral to See the Sun)
ORDINARY
SUNDAY 29 (20th October) 2013
Readings: Genesis 32.22-31
Psalm
1212 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
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