Maranatha and the butterly wing once more

SERMON PREACHED AT THE ORMOND CHAPEL
HOSPITAL HILL
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 17 (27^th July) 2014
       

Readings:       1 Kings 3:5-12
                       Psalm 119:129-136
                       Romans 8:26-39

                       Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

When Matthew wove together his collection of Jesus sayings, seeking to inspire his little community of perhaps forty or so people, nestling probably at Antioch in south-central Turkey, he did so with an eye to inspiring them to be the most effective witness possible to the Jesus-story. It is fair to say he incorporated (or perhaps accentuated, or even invented!) more Jesus sayings about judgement and end-times urgency than did his spiritual confrere Luke. It is probable that his little Antiochene community was under far more pressure to surrender its faith and its spiritual integrity than Luke’s.  He emphasises Hebrew Law far more than any other writer, perhaps as a corrective to a growing abuse of Paul’s teachings, teachings that already reflect a struggle with the questions of morality and law within Christian circles. These were volatile times. Antioch would go on, under first Peter’s, then Matthew’s, and then many others’ leadership, to become one of the great cradles of Christian thought. Paul, incidentally, never enjoyed a happy relationship with Antioch, though I like to believe the fable that Paul and Peter were martyred together, and like to believe that in the face of the imminent glory of God they got some differences sorted out.

So Matthew emphasized the importance of witness, witness to Christ in the maelstrom world of flux and antagonism around him and his Antiochean community. He used the teachings of Jesus to emphasize the need to cling on to Jesu-focussed integrity, so that this tiny little huddle of often frightened believers might indeed be the mustard seed of faith that transformed the wider city and region. I figure that Matthew, whoever he was (for he wasn’t necessarily the tax-collector of the story he narrates) might have been rather chuffed to see his town become one of the great Christian metropoli for nearly thirteen centuries, though he would have wept to see the bloodshed, not atypical of that region not far from where ISIS rebels are now persecuting, pillaging and slaughtering Shiite and Christian believers alike, would have wept to see the bloodshed that dominated the last four Crusade-pillaged centuries of his beloved hometown.

Mustard seed faith: it is a lovely image of how a small and faithful community can infiltrate the larger “meta-narrative” of the wider community. While I prefer to apply it primarily to the Jesus-story, there is no doubt that at this moment there are Jews and Muslims and Christians praying for peace and demonstrating peace-values, justice values together in the Middle East, swimming against the tides of ethnic hatred that dominate that region. There’s no doubt that a young woman like the feisty Malala Yousafzai, having survived an assassination attempt, is articulating a mustard seed faith in the power of girls’ education to transform the world. There is no doubt that those who continue to speak out against the power of the exploitative multi-nationals and self-interested governments on behalf for example of the people of Bhopal, or the sweat-shop workers of Bangladesh, or the refugees fleeing Sri Lanka do, like a prisoner striking damp matches in a darkened cave, sometimes succeed to change the world.

Like Matthew, Rachel Carson never lived to see her mustard seed of environmental concern at least begin to challenge international greed. Like Matthew, activist Steve Biko (whose icon adorns my cathedral office wall) never lived to see apartheid fall. In all these cases though the story is not and never will be over: bombs still fall on Gaza and Israel, corporate giants still rape the world’s resources, the ANC practices its own forms of exploitation now it controls South Africa, and the skies still pour their hard rain around the globe.

That is why I prefer to apply the image primarily to the Jesus-story of Resurrection and Second Coming: when women receive all the education we need them to have, injustice will still be perpetrated. When the executives of great multi-nationals finally discover compassion and justice new exploiters will rise to take their place. When Bangladesh or Sri Lanka become places of justice, new sweatshops will appear around the world, perhaps even in the nations that currently make up the crumbling empires of the global north. It was only when Europe finished stripping its forests bare to make capital, after all, that global south nations like Brazil or Burma emulated them in order to survive. From the Jesus-parable perspective only the fulfilment of the ancient prayer “maranatha, come Lord, come and wind up cosmic history,” will fulfil the mission of mustard seed faith.

We stand on the shoulders of Matthew and his small community of mustard seed believers. Hopefully, despite overwhelming doubts, we still whisper our prayers for the coming of God’s reign of justice and love. I believe the fulfilment of that reign is thoroughly other-worldly, yet its DNA can and must be implanted in this world, too. With Paul we participate in the groans of God’s Spirit, groaning in prayer as we witness Gaza, Sudan, north-east Iraq and countless more theatres of suffering. Like Matthew or Paul or Rachel Carson or Steve Biko we may never see even the flawed and tainted answers to our prayers, let alone their final fulfilment, but we join in the murmur of beating butterfly wings, participating in the rhythm that will one day initiate God’s eternity. For me when the evidence of human hatred becomes too great I fall back on the ancient (fifth century) Jesus Prayer of Orthodox Spirituality: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us”: the exercise of that mercy would be, in the end, the coming of the Reign of God.

It’s all mystical stuff, and it must be, for it is otherworldly. It is though mere dross if we don’t also strive to change our lives to be the answers to our prayers, striving to live lives more fair, and just, and Christ-centred. It is our commission, not to mention our pearl of great price, as we obey Jesus’ command from the climactic end of Matthew’s story, “Go … baptize … teach.”

TLBWY

A Vibrant Soul: Rest in Peace.

Lynda Patterson 1974-2004

 

The National Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, the wider  church too, beyond our shores and beyond our denomination, was shocked last Sunday to hear that Dr Lynda Patterson, Dean of Christchurch, had died suddenly (of natural causes) the previous night.

Lynda has been for the last many months cast into the frontline of the conflict between Diocese and elements of the Canterbury community; she fought, with her bishop and close friend Bishop Victoria, for the right to rebuild the lost Cathedral in a manner meaningful to a new world and a new church. Lynda has been the stopping point for vitriol and abuse and threats since she stepped up as acting Dean in December 2011. She was appointed permanent Dean of Christchurch in November last year. She was not being melodramatic, a fortnight before that, when she told her fellow cathedral deans she believed the role might kill her. We knew it was true.

Originally from Northern Ireland, Lynda has been a prophet, a pastor and a priest, as well as a healer, a reconciler, and a theologian par excellence, something of a treasure in the NZ Church since David Coles ordained her in 2004.

The cathedral community and Diocese of Christchurch have lost a wonderful, vibrant human treasure: Bishop Victoria Matthews in particular has lost a close friend and confidant. The tight-knit community of deans has lost an inspirational friend and colleague. The loss is tempered only by the privilege of sharing in some small way in the too-brief journey of a wonderful and Christlike soul and servant of God.

Lynda Jayne Patterson: may she rest in peace and rise in glory.

 

MH17, Bentiu, Gaza and Boko Haram: resounding "no" of emptiness?

SERMON PREACHED AT

THE CATHEDRAL of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16 (20^th July) 2014
           

Readings:       Isaiah 44:6-8
                       Psalm 86:11-17
                       Romans 8:12-25

                       Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

If MH370 just a few months ago did not sufficiently remind us that human lives and infrastructure are unbelievably fragile, then the equally senseless loss of lives on MH17 has reinforced the message.  Yet we are terribly Eurocentric in our sensitivities: 307 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in the last eleven days, and that figure will already be out of date. According to Al Jazeera more than 2,000 Nigerians have died in insurgency uprisings in 2014, many at the hands of Boko Haram (and 200 kidnapped schoolgirls remain unaccounted for). Médecins Sans Frontières report that in one South Sudanese refugee camp, Bentiu, three children aged under five are dying, on average, each day.

The statistics are horrendous, and to avoid compassion fatigue most of us keep them at arm’s length until sudden tragedies occur. Human nature is such that a local story will tear at our hearts strings more than the frightening statistics that emerge from the lives of those who Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” Soft local news will sell papers and ratings far more than the ongoing narratives of the world’s tragedies, to which we allow ourselves to become inured.  It was probably ever thus.

The scriptures of our faith drive both to and from the heart of human tragedy and were written from the heart of suffering. Despite deep social pain the author of Isaiah 44 was able to voice words of hope and comfort: “Do not fear, or be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one” (Is. 44:8). Despite the tumult (and despair) around him the author dared to believe in the claims of the one God on his life and the life of his people. Despite, or perhaps because of the tumult (and despair) around him the author dared to proclaim the unique and demanding status and the absolute claims that God made upon his life and his people’s lives. Dare to believe, he demanded of his audience and of us.

He did not just demand belief, but demonstration of belief. It will be no surprise to you by now that I will always maintain that the first demonstration of belief is corporate worship. We are not a political party of either wing, fighting for justice for the dying children of Sudan, or for the dying children of the late term abortion clinics, or for dying mother earth. We are the servants of the God who is revealed primarily in the stark contrast of a criminal’s death and an other-worldly and beyond-words resurrection. We are not a political party of left or right, though we may sometimes support them; our compass bearing is, while never forgetting the wretched of the earth and the plight of the poor, set on a point beyond comprehension, a point beyond understanding, and a point that breathes resurrection hope even when Ukrainian insurgents shoot a plane out of the sky, or infants and children die of dysentery at the rate of several a day in a Sudanese camp, or our loved ones are killed on the road.

We are commissioned by God-in-Christ to demonstrate hope-beyond-death by our response to the broken and the mourning and the wretched of God’s earth here and now. We are commissioned to compassion and justice, but we are commissioned too to proclaim a divine love that whispers that the death of a Sudanese child in a refugee camp or an HIV specialist en route to an Australian AIDS conference is not the final word in their life or ours or our planet’s.

We know, of course, that there are those who profess the same faith that we profess, whose message of hatred or disinterest all but drowns out any breath of compassion from the witness of the church. We are often embarrassed by the outpourings of bigotry dressed up as a Christian message from some wings of the church. Homophobia or xenophobia dressed up as moral purity, or (and I think no less damaging) proclamations of the non-existence of God dressed up as theological sophistication, are equally the workings of tares amongst wheat, and need the purging fires of God. I can only really address the tares amongst the wheat of my own life, and pray God that somewhere in God’s grace the wheat will slowly strangle tares, for as long as I live this side of the grave.

This side of the grave? We must not lose sight of the “not yet,” the rumour of resurrection that is the complete and future encounter with a healing and forgiving and resurrecting God. That encounter, in which God is seen (though the verb is inadequate) no longer through a darkened glass or a circumcised human intellect, that encounter is the only dimension of our faith that can ultimately  make any sense of the tragedies of missing or destroyed airliners, of economic and social and political injustice, of the death of the earth’s species, or even of the simple random injustice of metastasizing cancer cells . When Paul wrote of creation’s groaning for completion he was not writing of some future extinction point but the utter and eternal transformation of meaninglessness into meaning and of temporary existence into eternal existence; transformation of mortality, as he put it in his correspondence with the Corinthians, into immortality.

Creation’s fulfilment for which Paul yearns is not merely the fulfilment and redemption of all humans, and certainly not merely all Christians, while others burn eternally. It is unrighteousness and injustice, not, thank God, we who are unrighteous and unjust, that will be purged in the fires of which Matthew’s Jesus often spoke. Any proclamation that denudes the gospel of God’s “it is good” to existence, God’s “yes” to creation, God’s “yes” to those who we have loved and to those who have been loved but who have died in an airbus downing or a Sudanese camp or the Gaza, anything less than the promise of resurrection hope for them leaves us will nothing to say. Nothing to say, apart from, as Paul again puts it, mere dross (his word is stronger): anything less should be pruned from our proclamation.

To proclaim anything less than that leaves us with no more than human hatred gunning down an airbus, or killing Palestinian civilians or South Sudanese infants.  To proclaim anything less that all creation will one day rejoice, and that all life will one day “shine like the sun in the kingdom (Reign) of heaven,” and that all who have died will one day live, is to sell short the good news of Jesus Christ. In word and action we who bear Christ must not proclaim less than the fullness of Easter hope, or Flights MH307 and MH17, and Gaza and Bentiu and Boko Haram have the final word. Let it not be so in your life or mine.

TLBWY

Another retrospective: Jacob was an slimy man

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(17^th July) 2005

 

Readings:      Genesis 28.10-19

                        Psalm 139.1-11, 23-24
                        Rom 8.1-25
                        Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43

A week ago  we heard the story of Esau, the hairy man, being cheated of his birthright by the wily younger brother Jacob. Esau, you may recall, was famished, and surrenders his right to inheritance for the immediate gratification of a plate of pottage. 

There are a number of ways we might water down that story, one that has always struck me as a study in the ways in which slimy cunning over common sense. There is a sense in which Esau deserved to lose that which was his by right – he was hardly likely to have been at death’s door if he was able to hold a conversation with his wily brother, and so it seems he was is a sense simply irresponsible in giving away that which should by rights have been his.

Perhaps indeed he was no more than a paradigm of the twenty first century – for surely more than any other at least in the last twenty ours is the era of instant gratification. “Hello, I love you won’t you tell me your name” wrote tragic icon Jim Morrison in the era of hippiedom. In his day the words were shocking and provocative, risqué and daring. Today they are passé. Almost any movie or tv programme works from the common assumption that if you find someone cute you sleep with tem and then find out later if you have anything remotely in common: “will you still love me tomorrow?” was Carole King’s more honest and timeless cry from the heart. Esau was interested in the tonight – Jacob, however slimy he was, was interested in tomorrow.

In that alone there is a message for us as the people of God. We are called not to live as a people with no tomorrow but as a people who believe that tomorrow is God’s tomorrow. W are called to live as a people who believe in the judgement of God. Many of the parables of Jesus are parables of judgement- and this is especially and disproportionately the case in the Matthew account of the Jesus story. Will you still love me tomorrow? The gospel, particularly in Paul’s hands, is clear that we cannot earn the love of God, yet there are strong hints that we should at the very least live and act as though we had to. Therein lies a paradox at the heart of Christianity: we cannot earn our ouvre to God, yet we should live as though we are desperate to please our God and our judge, for he sees us as if though the eyes of our neighbour.

Jacob though stands for something else. What Jacob does in tricking the not-very-bright Esau is far from a model of how we are to behave in the service of God. Yet God has revealed the divine name as not being a name, controlled and neatly tucked into a box by the speaker, but an action. “What is your name?” asks Moses, and God, who will not be backed into a corner replies with the indefinable sentence “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be.”

God demonstrated this in the lives of the Fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, long before Moses encounters the divine presence at the burning bush. Esau may be not very bright, and Jacob may be a slime-ball, but God turns their rivalry into one of the great tales of faith. For Jacob, over the next several weeks of our readings, grows into the great father of faith that he tricks Esau into letting him become.

God’s will is done, and is done despite our human foibles. This willing of God is in our story today ratified by a promise: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” As was the case with the promise given to Jacob’s grandparents, Abraham and Sarah, God is faithful to his word. God’s word is action. As we shall see in weeks to come, the people of God are born of this determination of God. This is the promise in which we too stand: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go…”

 

TLBWY