What if God were one of us?

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

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
FEAST OF THE PRESENTATION (2^nd February) 2014

 

Readings:      Malachi 3.1-5

                       Psalm 24
                       Hebrews 2.14-18
                       Luke 2.22-40

There is a temptation that Christians have fallen into from time to time, which is the temptation to see every scriptural reference to anything hot and burny as being a reference to some sort of place of eternal torment. Apart from the deep inconsistencies between this view and a view of the all-conquering, perfectly and eternally patient redeeming love of God, bigger than death, bigger than dysfunction­ality, bigger than embittered human wills and disfigured human myopia, there are an awful lot of times in which a biblical cigar is, as Freud somewhat surprisingly put it, just a cigar. (Actually scholarship suggests that Freud never said that, and that the saying emerged over a decade after his death, but while that may have some implication for biblical scholars it need not get in the way of an attempt at a sermon!).

 

Links between the messenger of Malachi and John the Baptist, and between Malachi’s prophesy and the circumcision of Jesus, and event a few weeks earlier in Jesus' life, and which we are primarily talking about but prudishly avoiding in the gospel reading, are tenuous at best if we want a linkage of intention: Malachi did not foresee the events of Jesus visit to the Temple. That is not the way our forebears in faith thought. But there is something about the life and death and resurrection of Jesus that divides like a winnower’s fork, and it is worth exploring that motif. The early Christian thinkers quickly saw that the person and work of Jesus Christ forced a crisis of decision. Sometimes we too narrowly formularize that decision, but I fear sometimes too we have left it so dismally undefined that a decision about Jesus becomes little more than a decision about apple pie or brands of underwear. We make a mistake if we think this is a decision about an eternal hell and its avoidance. We make a mistake if we think this is a decision about no more than a nice moral guide.

The remarkable and anonymous author of the book we call Hebrews makes clear that the person and work of Jesus Christ forces decision. Do we have no more than a dead white (or at least light brown) male here? Do we have no more than a moral teacher? I would suggest that if that is the case then well yes, Jesus, Budhha, Mohammed, Karl Marx, Te Kooti, Joseph Smith, Leonard P. Howell and L. Ron Hubbard and my pet budgie are, yes, pretty much much of a muchness. But I am not convinced that this is where the experience of the Risen Christ took our formative Christian forebears. I think the experience of the risen Christ was, and in our lives still can be, so powerful and life changing that Jesus was immeasurably more significant than my budgie or L. Ron Hubbard or Haile Selassie or all those who may or may not inspire us and who I may or may not have mentioned.  

But – and despite massive incentive to believe otherwise – these thinkers and pray-ers of the first century were identifying Jesus of Nazareth as one who divided history (our calendars later somewhat powerfully yet somewhat lamely reflected that).  More than that, they were seeing Jesus of Nazareth as Jesus of the Universe, and were seeing Jesus of the Universe as one who in the incarnate experience of Jesus of Nazareth had no less than stepped out of the annals of cosmology and into the banality and suffering of being human. In this man of Nazareth, and even down to the rites that were performed on his genitals as a Jew, the Incarnate Word and Command of God had become human vulnerability, justice-action, suffering-transcendence – as well as a pretty good moral teacher.

Many years ago, when I was far more involved in youth culture than I now am, I learned a stunning hymn-song composed by Old Testament theologian Norman Habel and set to music by Robin Mann. I remembered it far too late for inclusion in our liturgy today, and we would have to learn the very simple tune anyway, but maybe we can revisit it in future years. In this beautiful simplicity of Anna’s Song, Habel challenges us to become Anna the prophetess, to “lift this child to the sun, raise this child to the sky”. To this point it would not be blasphemous to say we have a motif akin to that of the Lion King, where the Christ figure Simba is lifted to the sun in offering and to see his kingdoms. But Habel takes the incarnation down from there, too: Lay this child on the ground, one with us, one with earth; Let God know in his Son, human clay, human birth. The incarnation takes God firmly into the grot and dross of your life and mine.

This in itself was divisive in the ancient world, where such a notion was unthinkable. In our world, where gods are playthings, it is more imaginable: you may remember the Joan Osborne song “What if God were One of Us”. The early Christians’ answer was that, since the Incarnation God has been one of us, and by the Spirit effectively still is, except that God is breathing resurrection-hope or eternity-hope even into the deepest large-scale atrocities of Syria or Ukraine. God is breathing resurrection-hope or eternity-hope even into the micro-calamities of your life and mine.  The child of Habel’s song is laid in the shade, sent down the road, and eventually lifted into the mysterious Beyond-Words of God’s eternal dance. The “one of us” of Osborne’s song just blunders along in loneliness until the pope phones her. The One of us of Anna’s Song and indeed of Simeon’s and Anna’s prophesies enters into your life and mine and there breathes resurrection hope. But to believe that is to be divided from the world of the Osborne pop song and of narrow rationalism by a winnowing fork and to experience the piercing of the soul by Christlight.

The old man and woman of the Temple, Simeon and Anna, was each transformed because they saw in the child Jesus the transformation of injustice into justice, death into life, darkness into light and all the so much more that the stories of Jesus go on to tell us. We see through a glass darkly, but if we let our lives be touched we can and will experience what the author of Hebrews and his milieu experienced, the transformation of our lives by one who knows what we know, goes through what we go through, and there breathes Easter hope.

Having experienced that – and we must ask for it over and again as we indeed do in liturgy – then we must offer ourselves to be agents of transformation and agents of hope and agents of evangelism in God’s world, so that others, too, can experience the eternal-life-giving touch of Jesus. We must with the help of God’s drawn-near Spirit live in such a way, and must reach out in such a way, and must welcome in such a way, that others, too, can experience the eternal-life-giving touch of Jesus. So may God help us to do.

TLBWY

Lighten our darkness we beseech you

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

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND: first cathedral to see the sun)
THIRD SUNDAY OF THE EPIPHANY (26^th January) 2014

 

Readings:        Isaiah 9. 1-4
                        Psalm27.1, 4-9
                        1 Corinthians 1.10-18
                        Matthew 4. 12-23
 

 I am occasionally privileged to encounter those who have set about reading the bible systematically through all 66 (or more) books, and I have to say I must take my hat off to them. It a thing I have never achieved, nor am I likely to. It is not altogether something I would recommend. Probably most readers would be defeated by the Book of Numbers, which reads pretty much like foreign language yellow pages, or Leviticus, which probably falls in second place in the tediousness stakes. Some opinions of course will differ! But to read on is a marathon effort; even a cover-to-cover reading of the 27 books of the New Testament is a reasonably brave undertaking (that I haven’t achieved, either!).

Yet I wouldn’t style myself (somewhat ambitiously, but still) as a biblical theologian if I didn’t think the scriptures of our faith were not the primary, first-call hunting ground of all faith and doctrine. I happen to like Wordsworth, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and J.K. Rowling (inter alia!) too, but, however profound some of my favourite authors, singer song-writers and other creative geniuses may be, they are not the repository of divinely-focussed wisdom, spiritually impregnated wisdom, that the weird and wonderful and sometimes tedious scriptures of our faith are.

If though you were to labour bravely on through the scriptures of our faith you would begin to find a clear sea-change if you survived Leviticus and Numbers. By the time you got to Joshua and Judges you would begin to find some ripping good yarns, if a little restrained compared to the exploits of Harry Potter. Ruth and Esther are magnificent high points by any standards, though we neglect them badly,  and from there on there’s some pretty nail-biting narratives, and some of the most powerful and evocative literature written in any language. When I was an atheist I treasured the Psalms not for their faith-stuff but, even in translation, for the sheer integrity of their self-expression; I thought it was misguided, then, but not now.

Isaiah is narrative and poetry at its best.  Written by two or three authors over a period of perhaps two and a half centuries, it is a writing that is unswerving in the belief that God is sovereign – “boss” we might say – that God is not to be mucked around with, and yet that God is compassionate in divine sternness, loving in divine rage, redemptive in divine punishment. It would be foolish to emphasize either part of those or more equations: compassion over sternness, love over rage, redemption over punishment or vice versa. We do so at the peril of re-creating God in the image of our own psychological needs – something we all naturally do to some extent, but probably should avoid turning into a programmatic aim!

The people of God were in anguish. I think we can safely assume, as Rowan Williams sternly reminded us, that “anguish” is considerably more discomforting than the mild side-lining and inconvenience being experienced by western Christians today. We need however look no further than the plight of Christians in Pakistan or than Pope Francis’ prayers and appointments of compassion for the peoples of such impoverished nations as Haiti and Burkina Faso, to know that anguish is still a part of the experience of the people of God – in this case the Christ-bearing people of God.

So if we were reading through the bible from cover to cover Isaiah’s words of hope would explode on our consciousness like a scene from Mad Max. Amid anguish, Isaiah dares to speak of hope. We possibly capture something of the mystery of Isaiah’s speech of light-in-darkness when we read it in traditional Nine Lesson and Carol services from the heart of a darkened church, but I doubt any of us can capture the sheer electrifying surprise of it. Some years ago I was lying in the middle of a 3000 acre Queensland paddock, having been thrown from my horse. My daughter rode off, summoned an ambulance, and came back to hold me for the thirty minutes it took for help to get there. Her return, and then later the arrival of the medical team, shattered the gloom of lying in deep pain, blood and flies, and it first whispered, and then as a back slab was attached and drugs administered, shouted a word of hope in the midst of that fairly minor experience of despair.  Isaiah dared to do so much more.

We have little time for a God of hope in the rosy circumstances of the western world. In the growing turmoil of WW2 subsequent martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer dared to observe “men turn to God when they are sore afraid …”, adding perhaps laconically “All men do so, Christian and unbelieving.” I’m not sure whether that is true seventy years after he wrote the words while awaiting execution in a Nazi gaol, but I suspect times of trial may cause a few more people than statistics suggest to cry out to the possibility of a God.

But Isaiah was daring not to believe just for a divinely executed exit strategy from tough times, but with his protégé Martin Luther or indeed the author of Psalm 46, dared to declare

Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever.

I do not want to be tested on my ability to hold to Isaiah’s promise of light in darkness should the goings of my own life get tough. Nevertheless the preservation of these words for nearly three millennia, and their entwining over and again, their plaiting together with more and more words of light in darkness and promise amidst despair, suggests that enough people have found in them not just discomfort-abating remedy but deep life-and-death-transforming hope where all else has failed, even when death is the seeming final word.

A challenge for us is that we are called to embody this hope in the lives of those around us, we are called to mission Christlike hope and justice and compassion in our quite cosy world. To be honest few of us will succeed terribly well. But we may, as we surrender ourselves over and again to the One we call Light-in-Darkness and Hope-in-Despair, we may participate in that great movement of God’s Spirit that will ultimately birth the New Heavens and New Earth of the vision of later chapters in Isaiah and of the Book of Revelation. It is to that task we are commissioned each time we pray and break bread together.

TLBWY

Wheels, tyres, condoms and syringes lie ...

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH
OF SAINT JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
BAPTISM OF CHRIST
(January 12^th) 2014

 

Readings:        Isaiah 42.1-9

                        Psalm 29
                        Acts 10.34-43
                        Matthew 3.13-17

 

When I first entered theological college in Melbourne, and dutifully attended my first lecture, I was shocked to discover that the four gospel writers provide quite different perspectives on the moments in which Jesus was baptised. It wasn’t that this was a sort of “oh my goodness I can no longer believe this stuff” moment, as some of our more aggressive anti-Christian friends suggest, but an “oh my goodness, why hadn’t I noticed this before?” moment. The differences are subtle: who hears the voice of God? What does the voice say? Who witnesses the event? They say more, it is argued, about the perspectives and emphases of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, than about any great confusion around the event. All except the most fundamentalist of interpreters would argue that, given the passage of some three decades between the event and he writing, a shift or two in perspective and emphasis is hardly surprising.

Interpretation is something we all do. Perspective is something we all do. There probably are- despite the clams of some interpreters, some  boundaries to what we might glean from a story. We are not, as philosopher Martha Nussbaum reminded us, looking at pictures in the clouds when we read a text. On the whole, though, there is wriggle room for interpretation depending on a whole host of factors, when we read.

Just adjacent to the door of my workspace, up in the deanery, there is an eastern icon of the baptism of Christ. Like all eastern icons it is in two dimensions, not attempting to force on the viewer too many restrictions of place, space or time, leaving wriggle room for interpretation. Jesus is as close to naked as could be decently portrayed, a loin cloth judiciously draped where it needed to be, but otherwise taking Jesus into what for a Jewish person were and are the dangerous places of over-exposure. The other time Jesus is dexterously protected from nakedness by artists is at his crucifixion: as a criminal under Roman law it is in fact highly likely there was nowhere to hide, no loincloth by which to protect the victim from the utter shame not merely of nakedness but of the ultimate degradation of bodily functions collapsing in an inescapable horror. The orthodox artists allow us space to imagine but also to flee from the abject terror of the exposure of Jesus.

There is a tradition, Protestant and Catholic alike, of dwelling almost voyeuristically on the horrors of that Jerusalem exposure, towards which the baptism of Jesus glimpses. That tradition dwells on our culpability for as it were placing Jesus there on the cross, and while that is true in all theological senses, it is probably not that helpful to go there.

Hymns of the " 'twas my sins that crucified my Lord" ilk convey something important about human beings’ propensity for sin – though we hardly need reminding of that if we watch television news each night – but such hymns probably underestimate, under-tell as it were, the greater story that God’s nature is a volition, an impetus to love that will always enter the waters of human degradation and shame (when eventually we let it). God’s love always transforms our ashes into beauty, our mourning into the oils of joy, our spirit of heaviness into a garment of praise, and our Good Friday into Easter (though if you recall the song I am alluding to there you might recall that this is primarily to serve not our edification and enrichment but God’s glorification: not a bad shift in focus, even in the 21^st century, and a major difference between Christianity and self-improvement psychologies).

Today then we celebrate the ancient and complex yet simple rite of baptism. We remember the strange event of the immersion into waters one who the Christians came to know as clean. We might ask, as I suggest Matthew, Mark, Luke and John ask in different ways, why the sinless one enters the waters of cleansing from sin. In much ancient iconography Jesus is displayed as emerging from waters in which symbols of human grot lie beneath the surface: modern iconography sometimes depicts Jesus emerging from a harbour floor of human grot, leaving behind wheels and tyres and car bodies and syringes and condoms and batteries and the flotsam and jetsam of humans’ disregard for the sanctity of earth and of life.

While it may not be totally helpful to dwell on our role in the execution of God on a Cross (though it should never be forgotten that we will always crucify goodness and justice and even love) it may be useful to remember that we are all the litterers of the harbour floors and the river beds of existence, that we all participate in the web that Christianity calls sin, and that it is in the midst of that morass that Jesus encounters and transforms our existence – when eventually we let him. The rite of baptism – whether that of Jesus or of every subsequent person who has been baptised into Jesus – re-enacts the journey from grot to beauty, the journey that dwells at the very heart of Christianity. It is to that journey that we are re-called this day.

 

TLBWY

On Inconvenient Boundaries

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH
OF SAINT JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
SECOND SUNDAY OF CHRISTMAS
(January 5^th) 2014

 

Readings:        Sirach 24.1-12
                        Psalm: Wisdom of Solomon 10.15-21
                        Ephesians 3.3-14
                        John 1.10-18

Amongst the many themes of the Hebrew Scriptures that were allowed to infiltrate and inform the thought of the early followers o Jesus was the identification of Jesus with Wisdom. He becomes many things, of course, as the Christians, like Mary, pondered these things. He became the Suffering Servant of the Isaiah tradition. He became the sacrificial scapegoat of the Leviticus tradition. He becomes the Son of God, the Christ of God, he becomes most powerfully Lord, challenging the supremacy of Caesar and almost risking the oneness of the Hebrew God. Less popular in some circles, he becomes Wisdom, she who searches for and even embodies the search for meaning in human existence. It is perhaps for that reason that I am loathe to restrict the workings of God merely to some identifiable organization – church or, worse, denomination. The search for meaning breaks out of the straight-jackets of institutional religion. While there will be few surprises in this cathedral culture at that dismantling of boundaries, there are many circles in which the thought is abhorrent: God’s saving work is too often restricted to human boundaries.

There can be sloppiness entailed in the blurring of boundaries. In some circles of faith there is a kind of ‘anything goes’, in which the central elements of our faith are blancmanged into a pot pourri of compromises: anything goes because nothing matters. Such faith is a demonic parody of the faith that was being midwifed by writers like the author of the Fourth Gospel and the author of the letter we call Ephesians. The centrality of Christ was non-negotiable. Where and when that Wisdom Christ emerged was a broader issue: there are others not of this flock, warned Jesus.

I prefer to see the Wisdom-Christ at work in lives that radiate that same commitment to love, compassion and justice that I see incarnated in Jesus’ own life. Those who have heard me before will know that I bang on endlessly about the work of the Spirit embodied in the lives of an Aung San Suu Kyi, a Fred Hollows, a Steve Biko, a Malala Yousafzai: they, incidentally, represent the best of Theravada Buddhism, atheism, a-religious political activism and Islam for starters.  I see disgustingly much that is unChristlike in practitioners of my own religion, in all its shades of high and low, liberal and conservative. Nevertheless it is to this odd faith that you and I have been called by God and that leaves us little wriggle room: the narrative if Jesus, in all its subsequent flaws, is the narrative in which God has called us to walk. There is a specificity about Jesus to which we are called to anchor ourselves – however inconvenient his abuse by others might be – and to that we are to remain faithful.

Within that sometimes inconvenient set of boundaries we have a responsibility placed on our shoulders: the responsibility to be Jesus to those around us. You don’t have to know me for long to know that I fall far short of that task – and you might too! That is why in liturgy we must spend that little bit of time in the process we call confession and absolution, that little bit of time enacting a ritual drama to remind ourselves that we are not as good as we should be, and that it is only be the workings of God that we can enter into relationship with the divine and divine eternities at all. We leave these small rites out of our liturgy at the peril of becoming sloppy in relationship with God, and that is a peril that I take seriously. But if we allow these strange rites and others to shape us we can become the ambassadors to the community that God calls us to be: we may not be wise, as Paul reminds us in his famous address to the Corinthians, but we can become sufficiently saturated in Christ that we can reflect his wisdom in and to the world around us. By being saturated in Christ through our exposure to him in worship, in fellowship, in scripture and in discipline we can reflect and bear his love to the community into which God has called us, we can ‘bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ’, as the writer to Ephesus put it.

As we enter into a new calendar year, full of challenges and changes, resolutions, successes and failures, we are called, as we were in the beginnings of our church year several weeks ago, to make a place for the Wisdom of Christ. By allowing that wisdom to transform and re-make us, individually and collectively, we can be bearers of Christ into a world often unaware of his benefits or the need of humanity for him, but which is all too dysfunctional without him (as we are!). May God go with us in that responsibility to bear witness to the wisdom of the child of Bethlehem, the man of Nazareth, the victim of Jerusalem, the here and yet coming Messiah.

 

Amen