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