Three sermons from long ago: (3) an unnamed servant

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
and at St. Luke’s, Augathella
FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(17th June) 2005

 Readings:
      Genesis 24.1-67
      Psalm 45.10-17
      Matthew 11.15-30


Here we dwell on one of those most powerful Hebrew tales – a novella, a short novel telling of the getting of a wife for Isaac, son of the promise received by Abraham and Sarah and generation and four weeks ago. The psalm fits our text, for it is a celebration of the bride as a gift of God.

Previously we journeyed with Abraham and Sarah as they received from God promise of the impossible. Their lives were barren, and yet God whispered a word of hope into their barrenness. Sarah laughed, and it was not the laughter of joy, but a perhaps-bitter, perhaps-mocking, at least doubting laugh heard only by the angel.

The promises long stays latent, and Abraham and Sarah bark up the wrong tree for some time, but eventually Isaac is born. Then, in one of the darkest tales of the Hebrew Scriptures, Abraham is obedient to God even to the point of offering the son of the promise to God in sacrifice. God intervenes – and we are not expected to dwell on the psychological impacts of that event, but on the extreme fidelity of Abraham. A ram instead is sacrificed, and history has in its sacred story a tale of the unimaginable extent to which our love of God should reach.

Although we don’t hear this part of the story in our Readers Digest liturgical version, Sarah now has died. Before she dies she laughs a very different laugh. It is the Easter laugh of the mad fool for Christ – the laugh of the one who has seen that God defeats the odds. It is an infectious laugh, and its echoes are not silenced by her peace-filled death. Like the dance of Jesus, from our gospel-glimpse at  Matthew 11.15-30, it is a moment we are invited to continue in our present. Her burial becomes an amusing tail of bartering for a grave, and if we read it we would find echoes of its financial opportunism in Genesis 24.1-67; note the noserings and bracelets that speak volumes to Rebecca's brother Laban!

For the narrative now has moved on to a new generation. Abraham is still alive, but the central player is now to be Isaac, for whom Abraham commissions an unnamed but remarkable servant to find a son. The promise realized in Isaac needs a future, and Isaac must marry if the generations are to continue even to “many nations.”

Isaac must have a wife. The servant who finds Rebecca is a parable in himself. He remains a nameless hero in the narrative of God. Often when I enter a church I wonder at the nameless heroes of faith who have believed and lived and rumoured the dreams of God and who are now forgotten in all but the memory of God: this is one such hero of faith.

Abraham is a great man of faith, but so too is this servant. He carries out his master’s bidding and more. He is unswerving in his belief that his task is the work of God, that God alone can make the journey succeed. It is no accident that the beginning and the end of the servant’s search is marked by prayer. His story begins “He knelt down and prayed …”, and concludes “Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his steadfast love and his faithfulness toward my master. As for me, the Lord has led me on the way to the house of my master’s kin.” This is the work of God and there can be no mistake about that.

The servant’s speech to Laban, the brother, and Bethuel, the father of Rebecca, also begins and ends with a focus on God. There can be no doubt who is the major, unseen player in this narrative. There is a hint that Laban has been greatly impressed less by the theology of the servant than by the expensive jewels bestowed on Rebecca and her household, but either way the brother is no fool, and the will of God is done.

Significantly the story ends with new words of blessing, spoken to Rebecca. They echo the words spoken a generation earlier to Abraham and the now dead Sarah, into whose family and line Rebecca now enters. They are the words of divine blessing spoken to the generations of those who have stood faithful in the tradition of Abraham, those who have seized the promises of God and clung to them in times if darkness and of light.

We could say so much more about this dense narrative. For now we are left with a demonstration of the promise of God in action. It is an inspirational promise – it lay more than almost anything at the heart of Paul’s faith, and his realization that in all the struggles of faith and life we are called to cling on to the promises of a God who proclaims “Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the ages.”

In the twenty first century, as the tide of orthodox Christian faith appears to ebb lower and lower and we find ourselves in the unfamiliar territory of a post-Christian society, we are challenged to recall that the promises of God to the ancients were not of instant gratification, nor easy to swallow. Our job is to keep on clinging to the God of Easter promise, and to place God at the beginning and the end of our daily journeyings. God is not a visible character in the journey of the servant, yet the servant clings to his task and to the promise received by his master Abraham. God is the unseen enabler of the story, and we are called to place ourselves into God’s hands, as individuals and as a corporate community of faith. To that task we are commissioned once again, believing against all odds, as Paul puts it, hoping against hope.


TLBWY

Three sermons from long ago: (2) Sarah's bitter laughter

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
and at St. Luke’s, Augathella
THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(12th June) 2005

Readings:
 Genesis 18.1-15
 Psalm 116.1-2, 11-18
 Romans 5.1-115
 Matthew 9.35-10.8

A week ago we were confronted and hopefully challenged by the cry of dereliction not of Christ on the Cross, but of Sarah in her barrenness. Where there was no human way to go on, where her meaning for existence was removed from her, she and Abraham cry out and hear a word of promise from God.

We need to know, though, something that the Hebrew scriptures are not. They are not a story of instant gratification: they are not, that is to say, an advertisement for a sugar fix or a coffee fix. Nowhere in the scriptures, Hebrew or for that matter Christian, is the promise that all shall be made right now. The biblical literature a story of promise.

As we return to Genesis this week we find that, although we have skipped a few chapters of narrative, the promise remains unfulfilled. Abraham and Sarah have left their country, in accordance with the command of God, but they remain childless. Worse, they have become accustomed to their barrenness, and it has become a place of comfort. Indeed, if you know the story, you will know that Abraham and Sarah have fundamentally if humanly failed to maintain their belief in the promise.

They have elected for the easy and un-divine option; Abraham has had a child by Sarah’s slave girl, Hagar. They have stayed within the limitations of human insight, rather than raising their eyes to the heavens. It should not ever be forgotten that the Jewish scriptures reveal a God who is compassionate and promise-making also in his dealings with the slave girl Hagar. Her son “Ishmael”, the nomadic peoples of the east, is given a wild life, but it too is one breathed into being by God. That fact alone should be the basis for constructive conversation between Christian, Jew and Muslim, cousins as we are in faith.

Now we find further development in the saga. Abraham is the key character in the first half of our passage, and he is a person in a hurry. He runs from the tent to meet the stranger who is also strangers, he hastens back to Sarah, and demands that she likewise hastens in the preparation of the bread. He runs to choose a beast from the herd, orders his slaves hastily to prepare it, and only then slows down to stand with the strangers who are his guests.

The story slows down in the second half, as the camera shifts to focus on the “three men” who visit. One of these three – Christianity has always found significance in the fact that the narrative mentions both three and one – recounts the promise made my God in last week’s story, the promise of offspring. But the repetition of the promise is met only with the laughter of Sarah. It  is the laughter of disbelief, and of the human failure to hold to the divine promise of impossibility. Their hopelessness is normality, and the call of faith nonsensical. Theirs is a very twenty first century existence. Yet it is into their world that the stranger(s) speak again the promise of God.

The answer of God is, in playful Hebrew fashion, a question: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” It is a question we should wrestle with ourselves, as we witness the complexities of our existence.  Is anything too hard for the Lord: Is Iraq a question that the world has sought to answer with its armies, or Zimbabwe, a question we have sought to answer with feather-sized reprimands? Is illness, ours or the illness and suffering of our loved ones “too hard for the Lord?” Is drought? Is death, the last enemy that we do all possible in our society to avoid and to deny and to hide? Is this “last enemy” “too hard for the Lord?”

If our answer or Abraham’s is “yes”, then the Lord is simply not Lord, for there is a greater something beyond the grasp and capabilities of the one we have called “God”. Funnily enough and sadly enough, even within the Christian community, I find much speech and action that turns death and suffering into a demon seemingly greater than God.

The author of Genesis does not want us to answer yes to God’s rhetorical question. We are expected to let God be God, answering “No: there is not and cannot e anything greater than our god.” There may be “yeses” to our vision – we may have good reason to believe that our barrenness or even our death is the final and therefore tragic word, but we are asked by faith to see through the eyes of God.

Sarah laughs. It is the laugh of science at the possibility of a Creator God, or at the possibility of resurrection, at the possibility of life beyond death, or at the possibility of the New Heaven and New Earth envisioned by the seer of the Book of Revelation. It is the laugh of a society that will mock the God we love and seek to serve, dancing on sacred sites or beliefs, or maybe just too busy in the service of gods called money or security to pause before the God we believe in. Sarah is not mocked for her laughter and neither should we ever dare to mock or knock those who do not share our strange faith.

Sarah’s laughter does not have the final word. God’s promise is not dependent on her response, or on Abraham’s response. God has spoken and it will be done – in Italian it is called a “fiat”. God’s word is action, and, though Sarah laughs and has taken a poor option in the past and laughs in the present, the will of God, the promise of God, will be done.

Only the promise of God is a “definite”, not human longing. Long as they might to break through human barrenness, even using alternative tools to do so, the wok of God will be the only way in which their human predicament can be solved. It is sometimes the case that the “Yes” of God is a long time or an alternative way in coming, but we are called, as Paul clearly sees to be a people believing in the promise of God. The ultimate promise of God is that darkness and death are not the final word, but resurrection and light. It is that promise that we are called to bear in our lives

TLBWY

Three sermons from long ago: (1) Go out, risk living

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
and at St. Luke’s, Augathella
SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(5th June) 2005

Readings:
            Genesis 12.1-19
            Psalm 33.1-12
            Romans 4.13-25
            Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26

Walter Brueggemann describes Genesis 12.1 as “perhaps the most important structural break in the Old Testament, and certainly in Genesis.” Another, and perhaps the greatest modern Old Testament scholar, places the break just three verses before our passage: Claus Westermann breaks his magnificent three volume commentary on Genesis at 11.27, after the resounding cry: “Sarah was barren; she had no child.” This is the beginning of the human encounter with God.

At this point, were we reading through Genesis, we would find that we come to an end of the story of God’s creation and providence through nature. However we under­stand Genesis, we have so far been reading of God’s dealing with all creation, including all humanity. Tales of the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the species of the earth, tales of the creation and the fall of humankind, and of the results of that fall, have filled the first 11 chapters of Genesis.

Now the story changes. We move into what we call salvation history rather than creation history. In all but nine of the preceding previous 53 verses the focus has simply been begetting, generation after generation of begats to tell the story of the expansion of humanity. The sole interruption is the strategic and tragic tale of the Tower of Babel, the story of humankind’s attempts to build its own path to the heavens. But now, as the story teller’s camera zooms in, the story of begetting has reached a dead end: Sarah was barren. Only the intervention of God can save the story.

So God’s intervention is needed, for humankind can go no further. Sarah is barren. The history of humankind has encountered desperation and hopelessness. Sarah is barren. This, the biblical author wants us to realize, is the place where the encounter with God begins. It is only when we encounter barrenness and hopelessness and the realization that in ourselves we can be or do nothing that the encounter with God begins. It is no accident that barrenness as rhe place of salvation is a recurring theme in the Hebrew Scriptures: Rebekah (Gen. 25.21), Rachel (29.31) and Hannah (1 Sam. 1.2), as well as Israel itself (Is. 54.1) must all encounter their own barrenness before they become the person or nation God calls them to be.

It is into this context that God speaks. Not for the first time the book of Genesis makes very clear the message that lies at the heart of Christianity’s Christmas readings: when God speaks it is done. God’s speech God’s word, is action. In the beginning “God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.” God’s word is action.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. God’s word is action, and in Genesis 12 God speaks a word of hope into Sarah and Abraham’s world of hopelessness.

This is what Paul means when in our Romans passage he cites Genesis, saying that the God of Abraham “calls into existence things that are not.” At a literal level, God “calls into existence” the child that was not available to Abraham and Sarah through the processes of nature – through begetting when begetting was merely the process of history and of biology without desperate need for God. But God speaks into Abraham and Sarah’s lives, and therefore into the lives of the people Israel, and therefore into the life of all humanity, speaking a word of salvation. Where we are broken and surrender the purposes of God, there we can hear and receive God’s word of healing.

We live in a world of change. Like Abraham and Sarah we are confronted with much barrenness. We see the barrenness of western civilization, with a comparative obsession with the execution of God. We see our culture and so much of what we grew to believe in unravelling before our eyes. Some of what we see is no more than a media distortion – it is arguable whether chemical dependence or violent crime today are worse than they were, say, in the time of Ned Kelly. But we are seeing increased pressures on the rural economy, as well as changing climates, economic and meteorological. We live at a time of renewed biological threat – bird flu, for example – and of the apparent clash of civilizations, of the West and of Islam. We live in the shadow always of nuclear warfare. Are we as a world reaching a time of brokenness?

We may encounter moments of brokenness on a micro scale. Times of pain in our own lives, times when we realize we cannot make it on our own, relying on our own strength or even the strength of those we love. Are we as a world reaching a time of brokenness?

The call to Abraham is a call to move into God’s future. In the midst of brokenness and barrenness Abraham and Sarah are commanded not to stay petrified or fossilized, but to go out from their comfort zone. There is an all too human temptation to stay in the state or the place we know, even if it is a place of hopelessness. God challenges us, as he challenged Abraham. Like frogs in slowly heating water humanity has a tendency to stay put, never to move and take the challenging escape that God offers.

Abraham’s story offers an alternative. We are invited to discover it by treading out towards alternative places, places as yet unknown but places that are foot-printed by God. God gives us a future. That future is ours to grasp

TLBWY

Is this a kissing book?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
PENTECOST (8^th June) 2014
           

Readings:       Acts 2:1-21
                       Psalm 104:24-35
                       1 Corinthians 12:3-13
                       John 7:37-52

Pentecost is a love story. Not, of course one of those love stories: some of you may remember the wonderful lines from early in The Princess Bride:

The Grandson:                                  Is this a kissing book?

              Grandpa:                                           Wait, just wait.
              The Grandson:                                  Well, when does it get good?
              Grandpa:                                           Keep your shirt on, and let me read.

It’s not like that at all. It is probably best captured in the words of the creative arts, in great literature, film or poetry, because we have over the centuries become inured to the passion of the biblical texts. Ironically, by becoming a part of our sacred liturgies – which in turn we have robbed of their wonder, drama and intrigue – they have developed a “meh” factor, and we no longer, usually, hear the drama and the passion and the love. Pentecost is a love story.

We have in many ways been reading a love story since Maundy Thursday. We read of the gut-wrenching love-lost of that night of betray and arrest, and the shocking tragedy of death on Good Friday. Some of us at this Cathedral heard the sickening crunch of the falling cross, a kind of creatively mixed metaphor, on Good Friday. And, from Easter morning on, we have been hearing a new motif, hope breaking into human darkness, light breaking into human despair (I mix my pairs deliberately), eternity breaking into mortality, and joy breaking in to the deepest human mourning. I am of course echoing in part Psalm 30:

You have turned my mourning into dancing;
    you have taken off my sackcloth
    and clothed me with joy,
so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
    O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you for ever.

But, for the first Christians to be able to turn, following the events of Good Friday and Easter, to texts such as Psalm 30 these words had to ring with the truth of their experience.  In other words, there had to be more than a minute issued following a committee meeting of the disciples that said, in the infamous and much abused words of German theologian Willi Marxsen, die Ursache von Jesus geht (“the cause of Jesus goes on”). The telling out of the good news in the early post Easter growth of the church was not the result of a procedural directive issued by a meeting of the disciples’ executive. It was a result of the powerful observations and experiences of the first Christians as their fear and dejection was turned to joy and empowerment by the resurrection appearances of the one they had lost.

Nor, despite the implications of some contemporary theology, was the transformation that took place in the lives of the first disciples just a matter of them collecting together a whole heap of images and stories common to other religions of their day and mixing them into a mishmash of new religion. The doctrine of resurrection itself was not a heady concept borrowed from Egyptian or Mesopotamian or any other mythology of a dying and returning redeemer, but a woefully inadequate way of expressing the facts that they encountered in the first days of the new revelation of God’s love. Shattered, broken, disillusioned, they encountered restoration of hope and the birth of a whole new inexpressible understanding of God’s relationship with humanity.

Later, though words fall short in describing the impossible, they were able to let go of their experience of the risen Lord, allow him to pass from their sight, yet experience anew in the coming of the Comforter, the one whose coming we celebrate today, a renewed and equally powerful if invisible experience of the presence of that same Lord. As they gathered in worship, and particularly in the sacramental signs of bread water and wine that we celebrate this day, they knew the risen Christ to be so powerfully present that not even death could dim their experiential vision. (Which is not to say some didn’t lapse: they did. But enough were so transformed that they story spread outwards and downwards even to our present time and place).

Above all they continued to experience in fellowship and scripture and sacramental liturgy that same warm love, made present by the Spirit who we celebrate, that some of them had known in the flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth. This was inexplicable, and in many ways inescapable, unless they deliberately turned their backs on the experience. This was the love that was made eternally possible by the coming of the Pentecostal Spirit of Christ. Pentecost is a love story.

We have not always lived out that love story that begins on this birthday that we celebrate. Even as early as the letters of Paul we find radical failures to love as we should love – that is why his letters to the Corinthians and Galatians in particular are so strident, even angry, as they experience the implications of tough love and his opponents’ betrayal of love. We too will let love's demands down from time to time – or each day – abut can turn and turn again to God’s redemptive healing. Pentecost is a love story, and slowly we can be transformed into the face of love – if we let God’s in-dwelling Spirit seize our lives.

If and as we do that – and it’s a lifetime journey touching every aspect of our lives from care of the environment to the love of our friends, families and enemies, but as we do that we can be an enactment of the dream of the great John after whom our cathedral is named: “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living waters.”  Pentecost is a love story. Today is an invitation to be a part of that story.

TLBWY