singing a love song

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FIRST SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS (28^th December) 2014

       
Readings:        Isaiah 61.10 – 62.3

                        Psalm 148

                        Galatians 4.4-7

                        Luke 2.22-40

 

In the endless world of the interweb, from Facebook to Twitter to the myriad other chatfests in which humanity indulges, there is an endless continuance of pixel-wastage on the meaning and the events and the actuality or fabrication of the Incarnation, the Bethlehem story presumably familiar to most of us.

There are as ever those who wish to defend every last detail of the biblical narrative as absolute and irrefutable fact. There are as ever those who wish to mock every last detail as some sort of sewerage polluting the minds of the gullible with vacuous and exploitative nonsense. There are myriad positions in-between, and, if we take the whole of humanity into account a myriad of perspective even beyond these bookends: myriads who to varying degrees know little or nothing about the Christian stories of the coming of the Christ child.

Every attempt to extract some sort of quantifiable truth from the scriptures of faith will end in tears. The reading of scripture in a post-enlightenment age, when empirical data is prized beyond all else, is hazardous. We are here no more engaged in a quantifiable process than we are when we kiss a loved one, savour a culinary delight, or bathe ourselves in the magnificence of a balmy sunset. The readings of our faith are generally either the love-poetry of faith or the encouragement and direction-giving of faith. Just as a road sign advising of a sharp turn ahead gives a broad stylised image of a sharp turn, so the scriptures of faith have broad and often stylised insights into the relationship between believers and the paths we are led to tread.

So, as the great Isaiah reassures his people that the hard times are, at least for the fore-knowable future, over, he caresses them with songs of love. This is not accidentally the language of bridegroom and bride, garlands and jewellery, for this is the language of that which cannot be expressed in words. Some of you will be aware of the expressions of pain that are coming from Christians and others exiled in terror from northern Iraq and Syria in recent weeks. Some of you may have seen the tears of the Bishop of Mosul as he related the sad tale of his proud people, a people who have celebrated the great feasts of their Christian faith in their lands for 1500 years. They have done so despite the invasions of the Tatars, of Mongols under Genghis and later Hulagu Khan, of the Ottomans and the British and the Russians and the Americans. They have done so alongside Jews and Muslims, yet for the first time in 1500 years they have under Da’esh (so-called and mis-nomered “ISIL”) been forced from the churches and their prayers.

The language of Isaiah is the language that refugees such as these might pour out if they were to be told that their lands had been rendered safe and they could return without threat or danger. This language of Isaiah is the language of ecstasy, as the refugees in the Australian razor wired refugee hell-holes might use if they were told that Australian and New Zealand governments had decided to welcome them with open arms, of if they were told their homelands of Afghanistan or Sri Lanka or Syria or Sudan were safe to return to at last. This is the language of ecstasy.

So too is the language that the psalmist generates. It is the language of love pouring forth from poets or a poet who has encountered the power of the presence of God in both the festivals of faith and the ordinariness of everyday life, and who has experienced the highs and the lows of the human journey and interpreted them as being all within the embrace of his or her God. A few poems before our psalm today the psalmist cries out with one of the most heartfelt and all-but unreadable sentences of the entire scriptures of our faith, yet here he or she is crying out in paroxysms of ecstasy, voicing the praises of all creation as we might if we were returned from exile or if a lost child were returned to us safely or if our diagnosis of terminal cancer had turned out to be an administrative error and we were now given the all-clear.

Our psalm is the language of the un-languageable, not the language of the concise and the measurable that so many from both the camps of faith and the camps of anti-faith are seeking. This is the hope and happiness of faith restored: “my whole being shall exult.” This is the unutterable yet uttered squawk of adoration: “praise him, all of me, praise him all of you” (and the allusion to John Legend’s “All of me” is not accidental, for that too is a love song).

Even the prickly Paul breaks into the language of praise as he delivers his situational diatribes of instruction. As he writes through gritted teeth to the not very astute Galatian Christians he breaks for a moment into an outburst of praise to the God he loves and is even more loved by: “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” Again and again even Paul’s most volatile letters – and some are – are interrupted by the outpourings of faith-ecstasy, his first century version of “You’re my end and my beginning / Even when I lose I'm winning /  Cause I give you all of me / And you give me all of you …”. This does not warrant scientific analysis, for this is the language of love.

 

So too is the language that Matthew and in this case Luke attach to the birth of the one they knew as Saviour, Messiah, God made flesh. Whatever happened in and around the birth and childhood of Jesus their stories were stories of love, not science. Can history in any case ever be quantifiable and unprejudiced? There are other stories too, delightful, playful stories that did not make it into the canon of our scriptures, though they too can inspire and edify our faith. The fact is that these stories resonated with the power-experience that the first and subsequent followers of Jesus underwent, and indeed as we let ourselves be embraced by the all-powerful love of the Creator as revealed in Christ and Christ’s Spirit they can equally resonate with us, equally enthral and empower our lives and our footsteps. Simeon cries out  in the language of fulfilment: “Master, now you let your servant depart in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation.” This is the language of a life’s dream satisfied, realised, completed. Many of us will never experience such completion, though I suggest that the language of grace says to each of us that our lives, no matter how broken or incomplete, are made complete in the fulfilment of Christ. That fulfilment dwells at the heart of the news we call Good News.

 

So the invitation from these passages is to us all to open up once more our hearts to the warmth and playfulness of Christ, the justice seeking, life up-building Christ of manger, cross, empty tomb and eternal life packed away in the incomprehensible love-poetry of our faith.

 

TLBWY.

My Christmas Sermon!

It is my tradition to let others speak for me when we come to the highest and holiest days of the calendar - sorry if you expected my thoughts but how could I add to these!

My Christmas Sermon

Sorry too that I can't provide the text - purchase the book if you can!

Be born in us today

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT (21^st December) 2014

       
Readings:        2 Samuel 7: 1-11, 16

                        Psalm 89: 1-4, 19-26
                        Romans 16: 25-27
                        Luke 1:26-38

 

As some of you will know I was for a reasonably brief and surprisingly unhappy time in my life a programme maker with ABC Radio’s Religion Department in Adelaide. I’m sure much of the unhappiness of that period was of my own making, as I failed to come to terms with the task and the department, but for all that I was determined in the years that followed to ensure that in the darkness of that valley-journey there would be lessons learned and insights gained. For there to be otherwise would be to allow some breath of darkness to triumph over the light-bearing sense that God was at the helm, and I was determined at least to attempt to ensure that did not happen. As I crawled out of the period of darkness there seemed to be one overwhelming message scrawled on my consciousness: read the glimpse of the signs encountered there.

Now I don’t want to generate tedium by revisiting for you those years, but what had emerged was a deep sense of the growing marginalization of mainstream Christianity. My task had been to analyse and broadcast glimpses of all the spectrum of human religion, so it was not a specifically Christian task. I had slowly become aware, however, that while Islam and Judaism, Wicca and various re-emergent ancient religious were given great weight and respect, the mainstream of Christian thought was marginalised or mocked. Christianity, generally speaking, registered on the department’s broadcast scale when it was to be pilloried for wackiness, exposed for corruption, or explored in detail as a rapidly dying relic of ancient and torrid history. Attempts to broadcast meaningful and cutting edge Christian dialogue died on the cutting room floor.

Or perhaps I imagined that. Nevertheless it was in the midst of that impression-gaining that I seemed to detect (I won’t put it as stronger than that, for I claim no hot-line to God) a clear impression that we were entering into a time of radical marginalization. We were being pushed to the fringes of society, where we would remain as a specimen of ancient naiveté, a relic of past oppression, and fair game for portrayal as a quaint branch of human idiocy. Meanwhile the mainstream churches continued to act as though the water in the bath were not growing steadily hotter, as though we were still at the very centre and fabric of society, and that when we spoke society around us trembled. It didn’t.

It was all long ago and far away now, but I have seen nothing to suggest that, however many failings I had as a broadcaster the analysis God was bringing to me was not far off the mark. Interestingly at the time I read the comment of a young Welsh Bishop, Rowan Williams, who observed of the church “old styles come under increasing strain, new speech needs to be generated.” It seemed that regeneration was being forced upon us by God’s Spirit.

It was soon to be Rowan Williams again who emphasised that the Western Church should not dare to speak of persecution as if that was the name to put to its experience of being pushed to the margins. If we jump to the present we might prayerfully affirm that our sisters and brothers in other parts of the word are indeed – and always have been – experiencing genuine persecution for their faith. I have no idea if I could withstand the pressures they are experiencing, no idea if you would, no idea if we of the West would survive in faith. Williams was and is right: we are being marginalised, not persecuted. But we are being pushed by God’s Spirit far from the centre of society, pushed to the margins, and pushed there precisely because we had come, over centuries of complacency, to worship and serve not the justice-proclaiming God of the Cross but the Golden Calves of social status, aesthetic wonder and self-centred complacency. Just as David was threatening to do and Solomon later would we had built a comfortable place for God, and kept him, definitely him, on our payroll or, to mix a metaphor, in our pocket.

But like the people of Israel prior to the sacking of the first temple, we are being taken away by God’s Spirit, taken away from places where faith is cosy to places where faith is commitment against the dominant paradigm. We were and are being taken into a foreign land, a future that seems unclear, where comfort and security and infrastructure and complacency and arrogance, Sacred Calves all, are melted  away. I don’t know the shape of that foreign land as yet, for we are not yet wholly there, and may not be in our life time. I do know, though, that the cry of the psalmist is true: “My hand” says the God of David “shall always remain with him; my arm also shall strengthen him.” “My hand” says the God of the church, “shall always remain with you; my arm shall strengthen you.” But the core of the strengthening will not be golden calves of infrastructure and indulgence, but the powerful foundations of faith, worship, tradition, or of scripture, reason, and tradition as Hooker preferred to put it. It is to those we are being called to return, and the paraphernalia of religiosity is being sloughed from us.

As Advent ends I hope we have permitted the Spirit of God to touch something of the paraphernalia, the fluff in our faith lives. As we face an exciting because God-breathed future I hope we do so with a sense that there is new space for the God-child to be born there. I pray like Mary we can whisper “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Genuinely to do that is never easy, but it is what we will be inviting if we really mean what we sing in a few days’ time when we use Wesley’s words and pray-sing “Cast out our Sin and enter in, be born in us today.” May God go with us into the pangs of new birth.

 

Amen.

 

discomforting comfort, ye my people?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT (30^th November) 2014

           
Readings:      Isaiah 40:1-11

                       Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
                     2 Peter 3:8-15a
                     Mark 1:1-8

Outside academia it is little remarked that the author of the Second canonical Gospel, who we call Mark and who may have been an eyewitness of Jesus, a companion of Paul or even both, was one of few creative artists to invent a wholly new genre. As he penned his resounding words which depict a new beginning for humanity, he did so not with the expectation of admiration, but of conveying new hope. Quickly in his instinctive and urgent story-telling he diverts attention from himself (by the simple expedient of never permitting it), bypasses one of the great religious and cultural icons of his era (John the baptiser), and places attention squarely on Jesus.

He does so because Jesus is for him the issue. But he does so with words that for us are blunted by 2000 years of use and misuse and even abuse. In Greek: archē tou euangeliou yesu christou. The resonance and the danger and sheer subversive brilliance of his words are blunted by 2000 years of tradition. To Mark’s audience, these words meant “roll over, Caesar, a new boss is here.” These words were laughable. The so called new boss had been executed under Caesar’s delegated and disinterested authority two decades before. Only if light bulbs went on in the experience of the first hearers of Mark would these presumptuous words make sense. Only if the first hearers felt that their long-crucified messiah was indeed bigger than Caesar would these words achieve anything other than to have Mark despatched to a first century looney bin.

There, for a moment, we will leave Mark. He stood in the line of a series of brave speakers who had dared to subvert dominant paradigms with their preposterous pronouncements. Five hundred years earlier a second Isaiah had stood in the dangerous shoes of prophesy and told his simultaneously complacent people that their God was re-establishing their comfort and hope. The words that Handel rendered so brilliantly in the Messiah were daring words, disturbing words, and surprisingly unwelcome words: “comfort ye my people.”

The infrastructure of the Hebrew peoples had been shattered, the world they knew destroyed when the Assyrian Empire had swallowed them and all their security a century before. But they had become contented in their exile, and Isaiah’s words were deeply ambivalent: did they want to go back to the old ways? As prophets today speak of downsizing our infrastructure we hear the same lament: you can’t put the clock back, can’t stop the rape of the earth that produces climate change, can’t redraw the arbitrary boundaries that fuelled nationalism, can’t put back in the ground the uranium that casts the shadow of nuclear winter across the globe. The Assyrian and subsequent gods were sexier than the God of the Hebrews: did they really want God’s comfort? Keep your comfort, Isaiah, keep your comfort and your God.

But Isaiah dared to dream a dream of a challenging, different and un-complacent reality. He dared to dream of a less sexy existence but one in which the Creator God brought a deeper narrative of meaning into human lives and deaths. Superficiality is fine, but when the twin towers of commerce are destroyed by terrorist action, or a tsunami destroys a quarter of a million lives in a single boxing day surge, or when another tsunami wipes out a nuclear power-station and renders the ocean toxic, or when airliners disappear without a trace, or cyclones and typhoons obliterate entire cities, or terrorists kidnap hundreds of schoolgirls, then superficialities dissolve and humans lapse into stunned impotence and rapid-onset amnesia. When our language no longer permits the harsh truth of death, and we just pass or pass on or pass over, then when the reality of our own or our loved ones’ vulnerability sinks in we have no words with which to embrace hope and comfort. Isaiah would have none of it: Comfort, comfort ye my people.

His comfort would embrace reality, embrace truth, embrace pain, and there find hope without any denial. Isaiah was mad. He dared to suggest that his people reconnect with their demanding God, rediscover that all people, even you and me, are grass, are perishable, and wither and die. He dared to suggest that only in the embrace of God, only in the harsh and demanding disciplines of God, the embrace of a demanding God, could meaning to life be found. Like all the biblical writers Isaiah dared to suggest that the emptiness and the pain and even the sense of abandonment that is a part of human journeying is not a place to be denied or repressed or partied away. It is instead a place where we encounter the God who, in the very depths of God’s self, also knows loneliness and abandonment and superfluity, and only there begins to breathe the miracle of new life. Isaiah dared to suggest that pain is the place where God dwells best, because God knows it best.

So the prophets waved no magic wand. But the people of God who have stood in their line, including the first Christians for whom Mark told his crazy tale of a new and death-transcending Caesar-Christ, discovered something in the rites and rituals of their faith. They discovered that as they came together and suffered together and bore one another’s often quite heavy burdens, they began to discover that hints of light conquered even their darkness, and hints of hope transcended even their despair. They discovered that Mark’s claim of a death transcending Christ-Caesar was not crazy after all, no matter what the Roman authorities tried to tell and do to them.

In Advent therefore we are challenged to journey on through the superficiality in our lives, the complacency and what Peter calls the spots and blemishes in our lives, and find a deeper, inextinguishable blaze. We are challenged to find that it is in raw honesty that there breaks a yet more glorious Day, as William How put it. We are challenged to serve a different paradigm to that which surrounds us, putting aside the superficial and the sexy and finding instead the deep and uncomfortable places of the comforting God. At the end of Mark’s good news frightened women dare to live and tell out the resurrection story, however silly and even inconvenient it seems. We are challenged to do likewise.

 

TLBWY

 

this Song goes on and on my friend

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT (30^th November) 2014

           
Readings:        Isaiah 64:1-9

                         Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
                         1 Corinthians 1:3-9
                         Mark 13:24-37

 

The story of the People of God is one of repeated stuttered beginnings. It is a story of the thwarted dreams of God, of forgiveness and new starts, of repeated stuttered beginnings by the chosen people of God, of the thwarted dreams of God, of forgiveness and new starts, and so the cycle goes on like those songs that dance again and again, longer and longer and harder and harder and futiler and futiler like the famous whirling dervishes, but without the beauty of their manic dance. It is a story of being human, yet a story of being human in a vortex of history.

 

When the last Isaiah voiced his great laments it was not a story looking to have a happy ending any time soon. All that the people of God had loved and treasured was lost: the great traditions of the past, the glorious first temple that both represented and enacted God’s presence was gone. The priesthood of the temple was gone. Economic security was gone. The great traditions of liturgy and worship were gone. Even the sense of there being a God was gone.

 

Te Mata Peak, Havelock North

When the twentieth century began God was back in His Heaven and all was well. The great ecclesiastical traditions of Europe practised magnificent liturgies, hymned a glorious national God, ensured children knew their Our Father and wore clean socks. The great movements of Empire were at their peak. Like Te Mata Peak   the breath-taking way up ended in a precipitous fall; on 28^th June 1914, Gavrilo Princip took the lives of the archduke Franz Ferdinand his wife Sophie. It was a catalyst for chaos, and Europe plunged into the demonic throes of the Great War. God fell from heaven for vast swathes of those who had admired His remote and majestic glories, and Christendom, if not Christianity, died.

 

It had been the same for Isaiah and many of the great prophets centuries before. Isaiah cried out: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.” It is probably a cry than many in the theatre of war could repeat, though perhaps today we have so lost the narrative of faith that there is no longer anyone to whom to cry.

This too is not a new thing under the sun: many in Isaiah’s time had grown comfortable and jettisoned God in times first of suffering, then of plenty: “no one calls on your name or strives to lay hold on you.”

 

But Isaiah dared to dream a different dream:  he dared to dream of a God who could and perhaps would rend the heavens, though evidence was non-existent. He dared to hold to the vestiges of God even though God was long dead:  the vast ceremonies and majesties of God were not for him, but a God who would eventually, as we find in the next chapter, respond and say “here I am, here I am.” But of course this is a story of the thwarted dreams of God, of forgiveness and new starts, of repeated stuttered beginnings by the chosen people of God, and the so the cycle goes on: this is the song that never ends: it goes on and on, my friends (and if that has sowed for you an ear worm then welcome to God’s world).

 

It is strange that we sanitise the great and prickly prophet Paul by reading his letter to the Corinthians as Advent begins. As he greets the Christians in Corinth he does so with heavy irony – irony that will grow as the exchange of letters between Ephesus and Corinth goes on. “I give thanks to my God always for you.” While it is clear he did just that, it is also clear that his thanks to God are uttered through increasingly clenched teeth as his relationship with Corinth goes on.  As if a precursor to the 19^th century Christians of Europe the Christians of Corinth have become increasingly full of their own self-importance. God is being pushed to the majestic outer echelons of performance.

 

Rituals and performances of Corinth were increasingly excluding and alienating the poor and the broken and the simple and the spat-upon of the very elitist town: “for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind” says Paul, with biting sarcasm. Later he will mock surprise: “yet I hear there are factions among you.” Hardly as macro as the nationalistic factions of Europe that would replace Christian love with the weapons of war after June 28^th, 1914, but still a part of the same tragic human propensity for self-importance: “I am for Apollos, I am for Paul, I am for Serbia or Syria or Islam or the great American way” announced the Christians, and the simple, factionless Lord Jesus was pushed to the peripheries. Paul was livid. The God of Isaiah’s Hebrew people had left them to suffer their own outcomes for their behaviour: was the story to be repeated in the new Jesus people? And the cycle goes on and on, like the whirling of dervishes.

 

Can the cycle be broken? Eventually the God of Isaiah’s Hebrews said “Enough is enough. Here I am.” As it happens, in the end, and probably after Paul’s death, the God of the Corinthians finally persuaded them that divine presence dwells not in might and power but in the brokenness that we see in the person of Jesus of manger and Cross. The God who left Europe to its own devices on June 28^th, 1914 is still watching and waiting.

The God of Christianity like the God of Isaiah (for this is the same God) is longing for the Global North, the powers that emerged from the reshuffled deckchairs of post-Empire Titanic-Europe, to learn compassion and justice and the significance of the simple message that the Messiah was born not in a palace but a manger. Perhaps we have to undergo ecological and economic collapse of unprecedented proportions (and that will include the loss of our entire ecclesiastical infrastructure) before we finally learn to cry with Isaiah “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.” 

 

But this Advent as individuals and as a collective people of God we will re-enact at the very least a symbolic journey that reminds us that, when finally we give up our pretences of power and importance, we can be the people and the person to whom God will speak at last the words the words of the God of Isaiah, “I am here.” The question this advent is whether we will hear that voice, for it is a quiet one, easily drowned by own personal or collective chants of self-importance: “Keep awake”, says Jesus, and for centuries few people have noticed the fig tree.

 

TLBWY

Building a Church of Contrast

SERMON PREACHED AT ZILLMERE PARISH

YOUTH MASS, EVE OF TRINITY (25 May) 1999

 

“WHY BOTHER?”

 

Reading: John 6.60-69

 

Words of eternal life?

 

What happened to Peter? He is full of contradictions. He is full of bravado, full of an incurable belief in his own ability, full of self-worth, yet full of insecurity. In the end he is full too of seemingly ultimate cowardice and failure. First to profess his loyalty to Jesus, he is conspicu­ous in his categorical denial of him, too. “Lord I will follow you even if it should cost you my life” (Jn. 13.37) with one breath, then “I tell you, I never knew the man” (Jn. 18.25) with the next. Here he is seeing the essence of Jesus’ ministry: “Lord to whom we should go, your words are the words of eternal life.” In the end he is to be full of seemingly ultimate cowardice and failure, yet as the gospel writers knew, and as the first hearers of the gospel knew, he was in the end the “rock on whom Christ’s Church was built.” This man who failed so utterly, so conspicuously after so desperately wanting to succeed, this man becomes the bearer of leadership in the embryonic commun­ity of faith.

Mind you, he was prickly. Peter and that other prickly character, Paul, the later convert to Christianity, spent most of their careers at each other’s throats. The politics of apparent hatred so perfected by the Howards, Bea­zleys, Beatties, and Borbridges[1] of the world was not unique to our era. Glimpse between the lines of the records of Paul and Peter struggling for their vision of Christianity and we see real, red blooded, feisty opponents struggling for dominance of the Christian mind. “As for these agitators” says Paul, “Would that they would castrate themselves” (Gal 5.12). Peter was more polite: “Paul our friend and brother ... whenever he writes of salvation, write some ob­scure passages” says Peter through clenched teeth (2 Pet. 3.16).

Red blooded: I wonder if that’s it? There is so much that is saccharine in our society - and no less so much that is saccharine in contemporary Chris­tianity. Contemporary?  It’s had its saccharine elements at least since the fourth century, when the emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be an official religion of the Roman Empire. From that time on Christianity ran and often succumbed to the risk of becoming complacent - or worse, powerful and arrogant.  How far a cry this was from the struggling, powerless but feisty understandings of Peter, Paul, and Jesus himself. The red blood has been sapped out of Christianity (D.H. Lawrence noted something like this in 1905), and much of the spirit dwindled into triviality.

But fear not! No longer are we living in an era when it is chic or comforta­ble to be Christian. For you Christianity is a challenge, demanding commit­ment. The Church today in Australia is facing at least three forms of persecu­tion.

 

1.            A bitter lesson I learned out of my time in the ABC was the ease with which mainstream Christianity is marginalized. I was employed by the Religious Department of ABC Radio primarily to present the complexities of theological debate to the Australian public. While I had always known that it is not the task of the ABC to promote Christianity, I was amazed how quickly that Chris­tianity and its concerns were shouldered aside. I spent time interviewing witches, druids, Roshis, Imams and Rabbis, and tended to interview represen­tatives of the Christian faith only when they were defending the role of the Church in sexual abuse scandals, financial or numerical collapse. I interviewed  some great representatives of credible Christianity; but  attempts  to get work like that to air, and the defences I had to establish against  criti­cism  that such representatives of Christianity were “boring” and  ”old  hat,” soon wore me down.

2.            Media portrayals of mainstream Christianity are by and large mocking. On the whole clergy and worshippers are portrayed in entertainment as doddery and/or bigoted. An ABC Compass documentary in 1995 portrayed the entire Anglican Church of Australia as bankrupt, aged and corrupt. Because I was one of many representatives of other aspects of Anglican Christianity interviewed and discarded for that dokko, I am aware how jaundiced its agenda was. It was not atypical.

3.            Then also, like the early Church, we face a threat of relativism.  Choose your truth, rub the tricky bits out of the Christian story - if it’s intellectually difficult, and rid your selves of it. Resurrection, the Trinity;

 

[SING “WILL YOU COME AND FOLLOW ME.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8lOfMjtxdE]

 

Some  years ago, following the Port Arthur tragedy, Anne was told that  while the  opening verses which speak of the experiences of suffering are fine,  the resurrective, hope-filled  final verses were too simplistic is  to  deny  the gospel  of its entire meaning. It is incredible twentieth century arrogance to assume that St. Paul was a naive first century fool when he told his people “If there is no resurrection then we are to be more pitied than all  people.” We are bearers of a word of hope, and that ii itself is a sign to our commun­ity that can transform lives from darkness into light.

Peter was feisty. The gospel stories concentrate largely on his failings.

Constantly  he  gets  it  wrong, tries too hard, tries to do  in  all  in  the strength of his own power, tries to demonstrate to Jesus that he really is the smart guy. In our gospel reading just now Jesus poured out an incredible human pain:  So he asked the twelve disciples: “And you, would you like also to leave?”  Many had already. The rough edges of the way of the cross were too much for them to take. Peter though responded with what we tend to think was the right answer: “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words that give eternal life. And now we believe and know that you are the Holy One who has come from God.”

Yet he too was soon to desert Christ. Peter’s desertion was no less of a failing than the betrayal of Judas. Jesus replied sadly: “I chose the twelve of you, didn’t I? Yet one of you is a devil.” He was, as our narrator said, referring to Judas Iscariot. But the only other person who gets called “Satan” or “a devil” in the gospels, is Peter himself. “Get behind me, Satan”, says Jesus, when bravadoed Peter once more tries to stop Jesus from taking the lonely, broken way of the Cross.

Only when Peter was finally utterly, utterly broken does he finally become the ne to whom Jesus commands the humble yet earth-changing task “Feed my sheep.” Only when we are broken can we truly be bearers of the living, loving God.

You and I are called to suffer. We’ll say that together later in this mass. We are called to the way of the Cross, and that is a way of challenge and suffer­ing, as well as joy and exhilaration. By being a people of faith we are called to rise, though not in our strength to be a sign to our world. The people of Israel, our ancestors in faith, were called out of Egypt not because they were particularly nice people, but because they were a people in pain; God chose to encounter them and breathe into their pain a sign of hope not only for them but for all people. And you and I are called to be Christ bearers in the same way. Peter wasn’t holy or nice. I’m not holy or nice. You’re probably not, either. But amidst all the darkness that we live amongst - amidst the dark pressures of education, sexuality, racism, unemployment and chemical (drug and alcohol) abuse, to name just a handful, we are called to shine a different light.

Even our worship must be different. So much that is Christian  seeks  to  be  noisier,  “funner”, brighter than the brightest lights of  Dreamworld,  sports extravaganza, but in the end risks producing only another form of noise,  fun, neon  or laser brightness. Peter’s mistake was to attempt to be a laser show for Jesus. Our responsibility is to be a people of contrast: amidst the noise, sow silence. Amidst the bustle, stillness. Amidst the false brightness, the laser shows of advertising, sports, entertainment, designed as they are to hide a deeper darkness of loneliness and emptiness, we are called to shine an unspectacular natural light of peace. Amidst the dog eat dog world of commerce and profit we are called to offer justice and compassion.

Peter learned that himself only when he was broken. Only then he became the person of love commissioned to build a Church of Contrast. We must likewise allow ourselves to be transformed as Paul put it into the likeness of Christ - changed into a people who contrast quietly, not imitate noisily, the emptiness of our world.

And to that end we place at the heart of our celebration this day the commun­ion. In a world that only does things that taste good, produce good money, or are spectacular, we shall simply break plain bread, be still, and allow an unusable and quiet Spirit of God to touch our lives again. The challenges are great. The rewards are God’s infilling of our hearts so that we no longer yearn for meaning, but instead become bearers of meaning to the world around us. Peter learned that eventually.

 

“Simon Peter, son of John, do you love me?”

---

[1] All high profile Australian politicians in 1999.

‘the earth is a witch and we still burn her’.

One of the by-products of deaning is that there are a plethora of Sundays in which I relinquish the pulpit to a variety of waifs, strays and dignitaries - on this occasion to the Bishop of Lynn (Jonathan Meyrick: see above: he's far more out there than I am). As it happens I can find no record of my preaching on the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time in Year A since my electronic records struggle to birth in about 1997, and if there are any other occasions prior to that I'd have to type them up. *Sigh.* So here's a sermon from three years and one week ago ... which I should have posted last week. *Sigh again.*

SERMON PREACHED AT

THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6^th 2011

(PENTECOST 21 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 32: CARE FOR CREATION SUNDAY)

          Readings:     Joshua 24.1-3a, 14-25

                      Psalm 78.1-7
                      1 Thessalonians 4.9-18
                      Matthew 25.1-13

 

Perhaps by way of apology I should begin by outlining my caution towards so-called special Sundays. A little like the ‘Year Of’ pronouncements that emanate, I suspect, from a small office in the labyrinthine corridors of the United Nations – with its religious ‘Year Of’ counterpart in the smaller but equally labyrinthine corridors of the World Council of Churches, these declarations can become a hailstorm of apocalyptic proportions, spitting passionate and often worthy concerns at us faster than the speed of light. It seems to me on any one day we can, if not exhausted, find ourselves in the Decade of Evangelism, the Year of the Child, the Year of Being Nice to Endangered Species, the Year of Looking Out For Nasty Weeds, The Month of Being Kind to Grandmothers, The Month of Protecting Endangered Rock Oysters, the Day of Remembering Dolphins and the Day of Making Sure You Are Proud of Your Prayer Book, all unawares. I’m a kind of Church Year and lectionary junky, not because I’m some sort of bombastic Anglo-Catholic (though I might be!) because I believe these are the best tools available to ensure that neither worship nor preaching becomes a cyclical focus on the Michael Godfrey personal obsession collection. By preaching and praying the liturgical calendar, imperfect though it may be, we are taken out of cosy comfort zones and forced to encounter the often discomforting regions of the scriptures of our faith. We are not forced into a form of dead mechanicalism, but are steered away from smorgasbord faith, popular in some churches (evangelical and liberal alike), where we pick and choose the flavours that we like.

That whinge aside, however, I am on this occasion allowing a degree of special focus in our thoughts, for Care of and Hope for what I call ‘God’s Garden’, Creation, is a fundamental mission of the Christian Community. For many years now the Anglican Consultative Council has recognized and affirmed five marks of mission:

·                     to proclaim the Good News of the Reign of God

·                     to teach, baptize and nurture new believers,

·                     to respond to human need by loving service,

·                     to seek to transform unjust structures of society, and

·                    to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.

In fact the fifth – (which incidentally reads like a sentence put together by a working party!) – was a late addition to the first four, and arrived on the scene in 1990. Nevertheless it is an important acknowledgement that Creation is an act of God’s sharing love, that the nurture of Creation is a commission given to humanity in the very creation stories, and that the lives of many of our sisters and brothers in the human race lie perilously balanced as we often selfishly devour and destroy the resources of God’s earth.

There is then a sense that all our interpretation and application of scripture at all times must incorporate a degree of concern for the garden God has entrusted to us. It would be forced to pretend it was there all the time – it would be forced to pretend every scripture selection commissions us to evangelize or to strive for justice – but it is there. And strangely it is there by implication on this day, as our readings towards the close of the liturgical year begin to pick up the crescendo of apocalyptic expectation. Even Paul’s impassioned and moving address to the Thessalonians, while hardly a Green Party manifesto, for as ever Paul commissions his audience to live their lives in such a way of love that they benefit and enhance the lives of those around them: ‘live quietly, … mind your own affairs, … work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one’. Paul was far from considering ecological issues, but if we are to read Paul in the 21^st century we must ask whether our western lifestyles really demonstrate propriety towards others. Many analysts suggest that the fury that runs through the veins of El Qaida is nurtured at least in part by the bitter gaps in economic status between the West (or, as it is now called, ‘the global north’), as we gobble up resources that could fuel and feed and clothe all the world. It is simplistic, but it is a partial truth.

Sadly, as the Christian community read its apocalyptic texts, as I have mentioned now many times, it read them from a listening or reading site vastly different to that in which they were written. Those of us engaging in the Advent studies will be reminded of this yet again during December. Too often, though, Christians, especially those with an apocalyptic or millenarianist bent,  have used expectation of a glorious Second Coming as an excuse to disregard or, more shamefully still, to hasten the desecration of the earth. Consequently that Christianity-averse writers such as Seattle songwriter Charlie Murphy can remind us bitterly ‘the earth is a witch and we still burn her’.

To ignore our responsibility to nature is to drive a wedge between the miracle of our origins, in which God commands us to ‘husband’ creation, and the expectation of Christ’s return. To drive a wedge in such a way is blithely to forget the doctrine of judgement, and to forget those parables in which Jesus warns us that will be asked to account for the gifts we have had entrusted to us. It is to forget, too, that while we often emphasize the ‘friendship’ of Jesus, parables such as that of the ten maidens are texts that remind us of our obligation constantly to evaluate and re-evaluate our lives in the light of the glare of Christ.

I do not believe we are called to follow any political party line in approach to these questions. I do believe, though, that we are called over and again to re-focus our lives to ensure that we nurture and care for the gifts that God has given us, and use them constantly in ways which glorify God. We are called to ensure that our lifestyles are not destroying God’s earth, and where they are, or where they are denying the livelihood and the very existence of our fellow humans and other species, to seek forgiveness, make alteration, and in that way to ensure our candles burn with eagerness as the bridegroom arrives. May God help us so to do.

 

TLBWY

 

Here's to the alb-wearers of eternity

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FEAST OF ALL SAINTS (2^nd November) 2014
               

Readings:            Revelation 7:9-17

                               Psalm 34:1-10
                               1 John 3:1-3
                               Matthew 5:1-12

Elsewhere [see below] I have introduced you to a lady named Molly Haxby. She is only one of the remarkable servants of Christ who have passed through the labyrinth of my ministry: everyone who has engaged in some form of professional ministry in the service of Christ will have many similar tales to tell. The author of Hebrews writes of a “cloud of witnesses”: what it means I do not pretend to understand, but over the years I have come more and more to treasure the belief that as we gather in prayer we are not merely “us” but “us with unseen hosts.” Molly died years ago now, but whatever that means I like to think she is gathered somewhere with the faithful, beyond human sight, yet there in a manner far more profound than we can understand. Molly’s life was exemplary in its living for others: dwelling now in what we variously call death or eternity I believe that living for others continues, inexplicably, irrationally.

It is not only within the community of faith that we encounter the witnesses of Christ. Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner spoke often and controversially of “anonymous Christians,” and while the term can be understood as paternalistic or “Christian-colonialistic” it was never meant to be that way. It simply affirmed Rahner’s deep conviction that the God of Jesus Christ is bigger than our boundaries, faster than our vision, further than our deepest distance in the lives of those around us and the crevices of eternity. Following the terminology of the author of Hebrews biblical scholar Margaret Barker challenges the Christ-community to become what she calls “little Melchizedeks.” Melchizedek was the foreign, non-Jewish priest who becomes the first high priest of Judaism when in Gen 14:17-24 he blesses Abram in the name of God. Melchizedek is the outsider who exemplifies the work of Christ beyond the boundaries of our expectations. Melchizedek is the Fred Hollows or the Bill Gates or the Jon Bon Jovi whose time and fortune is made available to ameliorate the plight of countless of the wretched of the earth.

There were many years in which I dismissed anything that was not empirically quantifiable as nonsense. Gradually I shifted, particularly as I returned in my mid- to late- thirties to reclaim the centrality of the resurrection as the heart of my faith. For some years after that I saw the resurrection of Christ as the exceptional event in the laws of God’s on-going creation, the one moment in which God’s eternity breaks into God’s scientific universe. Yet in the twenty-plus years since then, and under a number of influences, my perspective shifted. I remain deeply aware of the seeming determination of God to limit divine action in the contexts of prayers for the Middle East or other large scale theatres of suffering. I no longer posit an answer to that divine recalcitrance, except to maintain my deep-held belief that we as God’s praying people must continue to pour out our prayers for such tragic contexts. At the same time I am persuaded by that memorable phrase of the archbishop of York, the more I pray the more coincidences happen. I treasure too the thought that our prayer might be the butterfly wing-beat of change.

I increasingly acknowledge these days the presence of the spiritual, unseen and un-understood world beyond my ken. While I don’t condone a sensationalism of that world such as that to which the charismatic movement sometimes tended, I can, after my experiences of Indigenous wisdom and spiritual sentience, no longer dismiss this. Who are we post-Enlightenment westerners to pretend paternalistically that we have a copyright on truth?

Parallel with that discovery, I have increasingly opened myself up to awareness of those unseen witnesses, the saints, who surround us with the love and the energies and the purposes of God. Does this mean my Molly dwells nearby, as if in a Dr Whoivan alternative time-zone, inexplicable, but present? I’m not sure. I certainly don’t think there is some sort of monkey colony on my shoulder, watching my every move, from toileting to praying. Perhaps the saints afford us the same privacy we afford one another! Yet, and particularly under the influence of so-called pre-Enlightenment cultures, and their awareness of spiritual realms beyond rational explanation, I no longer limit God’s universe to the merely rational. I am these days far more willing to be aware, for example, of the kind and benevolent presence of those who have prayed before us in this place; caring, smiling, perhaps even guiding as we struggle on through our myopic vision. Romantically I sometimes wonder if Kate Williams (who we hope soon to honour with a new window) and Edith Barry don’t in particular smile kindly on our struggled efforts to keep the flames of faith alive. All those, who have fought to live and proclaim the values of the Reign of God as set out in the Beatitudes of Jesus, those who lived faith but who have moved beyond our sight, may well have a special role in the on-going purposes of God. They will continue to do so this side of the New Heavens and Earth, that for which we pray in the Lord’s Prayer and that which is the driving hope of the Apocalypse of John from which we read before.

We all know, too, the phenomenon that one friend of mine refers to as “the diaspora of friendship.” In the vast and unfathomable matrix of God’s dealings with us and with humanity lives pass through ours, often enriching our lives and our faith-lives beyond comprehension or measure. I do not see God as a celestial multi-dimensional chess player, but I do sometimes wonder at the inexplicable gifts of both transient and lasting connection that pass through the chemistry of our being as we crawl from cradle to grave and onto birth and understanding beyond this sight. This is mystery, and mystery is the dwelling place of God.

What though of those strange writings of John of Patmos? I would not have written a book about them if I did not believe they had, not in some spooky sensationalist way but in some open secret way, something powerful to say to us as we journey the years God gives us, the hallowed years that are embraced on our paschal candle between alpha and omega. The strange imagery of the Book of Revelation is not some sacred mushroom munching gobbledegook, nor weird and occult (secret) conspiracy code, but the proclamation of an open secret: God wins, and wins despite the tears: God will (the tense is significant) wipe away the tears from broken humans. Above all at the heart of the Book of Revelation is the belief that God is in control, despite Da’esh, despite rising tides, despite a warming earth or advancing cancer, despite mortality in all its brutal forms.

While some branches of Christianity see this doctrine as an excuse to do nothing about the destructive anatomy of humankind and its greedy exploitation of the garden of God, I believe that when the control of God is held in tension with the doctrine of the saints it teaches us otherwise, teaches us answerability to the God of judgement. The blessed of the beatitudes are not the complacent and self-satisfied but the army of doers. The saints, robed in their white albs which ours are designed to remind us of, are those caught between the already and not yet, those who live as if Christ were to tap them on their shoulder and seek an account of their lives this minute. The saints know their unreadiness for that shoulder tap, yet live in eagerness for it: what have you done for the least of these my sisters and my brothers, the poor and broken people and species of God’s earth? The saints inspire us and perhaps, who knows, even guide our stumbling footsteps. The saints, like my Molly Haxby, are those who enthuse us despite their fallibility, from either side of the grave.

Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honour
and power and might
be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.’

TLBWY

 

 

[on the late Molly Haxby and Matt 5:1-12]:

I have long harboured a deep sense of the saints who gather with me, with us, as we pray and as we serve. The poor (or poor in spirit, in Luke’s version), the mourners, the meek, the list goes on. You and I have encountered them more often than we deserve, as they pass through our lives, slowly or fleetingly, in the vast celestial waltz we call existence.

Back in December 1993 I was living in Central NSW when a massive storm swept through the region. It terrified  many residents in my parish for an hour, lifting roofs and throwing ancient trees to the ground. As the winds settled and I headed off to visit vulnerable parishioners I found I had been beaten to it: one of my eldest parishioners, a nonagenarian saint named Molly Haxby, was already ahead of me, “visiting the old people to make sure they’re okay.” There are saints in many shapes and sizes. She walked everywhere—not just after storms—and spread Christ-love wherever she went.

We’ve probably all encountered saints: the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted-for-faith. In the great choreography of God they remind us that divine holiness pops up wherever God chooses, and our lives are the richer for the encounter.]