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.