Dancing in a fecund womb

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
FIRST SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS
(December 27^th) 2015

 

Readings:

1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26
Psalm 148
Colossians 3:12-17
Luke 2:41-52

 

Samuel’s story originates in the pain-filled piety of a young woman teased by a rival. In translation the name of the two wives of Elkanah, Samuel’s father, are “Fertile” and “Attractive.” Ms Attractive, Hannah, eventually experiences the delayed and perhaps miraculous conception after long enduring the taunts of her fertile co-wife. She is transformed from barrenness to the tender joy of birthing prophet Samuel. There is salvation here: the taunted if attractive woman Hannah had in her culture no reason to live but the bearing of children. God invades her life with blessing, and she bears the son by which she, in her culture, is redeemed.

Samuel grew up saturated in the dance of the faith that led his mother to cry out in pain for the only salvation she could know: a son. . The story of Samuel’s life is answer to Hannah’s faith that “the Lord raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.” Hannah dedicated him to the service of God. She gave back to God what God had given her. For us, as we emerge from the complex web of a virally capitalist Christmas there is a message about receiving much, even much that is unnecessary, and giving much out in response.

Giving back to God is not necessarily or even often a pathway to the cosy happiness that is the stuff of coffee or chocolate ads on the giggle box. It is a journey into the inexpressible joys – and occasional frustrating challenges – of living and breathing in the context of God’s eternities, the infinities of divine love. It is an invitation to participate in a story that is both personal and cosmic, anchored in time and yet endless and far beyond time, far beyond finitude, and far beyond our comprehension.

We, as the author of Colossians sternly charges us, are called to enact that story in our lives. Colossians  is a commission to love, to exemplary standards, even beyond-possible standards of love. It is that because that is what we have received in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. That is what we have celebrated liturgically these past few days: the coming of the eternity-transforming child into our world and our lives. As we were celebrating that we were celebrating the fact that our lives and the lives of those we love are not restricted to mere human experience but are caught up into the impossible eternities and eternal possibilities of God. The author of Colossians challenges us to be a people of exemplary love because that is what will attract others to the Way of the Cross, the inviting life and teachings and death and resurrection of Jesus.

Colossians challenges us to reach beyond vacuous promises of coffee and chocolate ads to a far deeper level of love that will reach through barren heartache and brokenness and then reach out to touch and transform the lives of others. Hannah, trapped in the bitterness of her rival’s taunts, cries in prayer to God. She receives the child Samuel as an answer to that prayer, but the cycle does not end there: she creates of Samuel a life so Godwardly focussed that he repeats the cycle. He having been saturated in the enormity of God’s love and justice turns and becomes himself a conduit of God’s love and justice.

And so the story is perpetuated. We may not see our biological children dancing in the aisles of faith – though some do – but we may still reach out so much, so warmly to the community around us that those we embrace with our welcome and our worship and our hospitality and our justice are touched and embraced by the eternities of divine love. Jesus and Samuel are saturated in love. Our task is to generate a Christ-family so saturated and saturating in love that we act as a conduit to the eternities of God.

How?

As the biblical authors knew well, the answers are not a kind of six-steps to conversion or join-the-dots to salvation or paint-by-numbers to gain eternity, nor are they the denial of needs for conversion or salvation or eternity. Nor are they bickering and backstabbing and complacent laisses-faire or indulgent narcissism and self-righteousness. Too easily we slip into senses of our own importance or greatness or even adequacy, when the witness of Samuel, of Jesus, of Paul and of others is that we are, except in the eyes of God and through the prism of Jesus, unimportant, small, and thoroughly unrighteous. Both Testaments are endlessly supplied with the texts and sayings of the prophets who addressed a self-satisfied people of God. Indeed, when you find Paul and his supporters encouraging his correspondents to “clothe themselves with love” it is almost always precisely because that is conspicuously what they are not doing. These are, as Phylis Tribble reminded us, texts of terror, and only after we embrace that stern critique can they become for us “comfortable words” of encouragement.

Quite simply, we are called to be a community of love. We become that by over and again exposing ourselves to the stern glare of a Creator-Redeemer God who reminds us that we are, in reality, the in-hospitable ones. We are the ones who turn away the desperate Mary, who laugh at the barren Hannah, and who crucify the love-dancing Jesus. We become a community of love, however imperfect and struggling, by over and again losing ourselves in the ecstasy of worship, seizure by the God of awe and majesty and might, an ecstasy of seizure like that of the psalm we recited; by losing narcissistic selfhood in the knowledge that we need Jesus; by losing self-assuredness in the knowledge that it is Jesus who touches and transforms our darkest fears and the sometimes even abhorrent inner recesses of our being, those darknesses that we barely admit to owning. We become a community of love by dancing ecstatically, like the psalmist, dancing with the Christ who picks us out of the gutters of indecency and not-good-enough-ness, then challenges us to invite others to our dance. That same Jesus holds us in warm, life-changing, self-transcending grace: he tells us to surrender the dark places, as well as the judgemental places, the critical places, the sclerotic, hardened places of our lives. He challenges us to become the embodiment of love that only he can make us.

As a cathedral people we are called to be transformed from Hannah the attractive but barren to Hannah the fecund, the fertile. Christ, you know it ain’t easy, sang John Lennon. This can become for us not a profanity, but a prayer, as we again ask Jesus to invade the barren and inhospitable chambers of our hearts and individually and collectively become a place of welcome to the seeking and embrace to the lonely. By the Spirit of Christ we can be enabled to open our hearts and our church to be a place where love is incubated in ridiculous, excessive, unrestricted generosity. That risky, mad generosity is the generosity of spirits invaded by the child who so puzzled Mary, the pondering mother. That mad, risky, generosity is the Way of the Cross to which we are called.

TLBWY

 

Welcoming the illogical Christ

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT
(December 20^th) 2015

 

Readings:

Micah 5:2-5a

Psalm 80:1-7
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-55
 

Every narrator since before Homer created his or her tale to take their audience to a particular perspective or experience. Whether the writer’s task be “mere” entertainment or a much deeper level of instruction, they seek to take us into a new perspective on what Douglas Adams called “life, the universe, and everything.” The gospel authors were no exception. They took thirty or forty years’ worth of remarkable, credible oral story telling about the man Jesus, dared to name him Lord, and dared to tell of his conquest of all darkness and suffering and even death despite his much publicised execution by Roman overlords. They dared to tell of a powerlessness that conquers even the most brutal and manipulative powers. They dared to turn reason upside-down.

Luke’s telling of the Jesus-story was based on his two or three decades of life-transforming encounter with the risen Christ. That Christ had been made known to him by the persuasive presence of the Spirit in evangelism and worship and fellowship and scriptural exploration. At the heart of that experience was the belief that against all appearances God the Creator had turned existence upside-down in Jesus. No longer was the brutal Caesar Lord, but the crucified outsider criminal was Lord. No longer were the proud and together and slick and polished the mighty, but the broken and the hesitant and the Not Very Clever. No longer were the dwellers in crystal palaces powerful, but the dwellers in culverts and bus shelters. No longer were the clever creative aesthetes the conduits of divine goodness, but the bumbling stumblers were.

In this reversal Luke interpreted the whole of Jewish history as a history of expectation, a history of the hope that despite suffering and despair, despite Daesh and a myriad myriad shootings and road traumas and human catastrophes social and personal, despite all appearances, God’s “yes,” God’s promise first whispered to Abraham, would one day be fulfilled, and indeed was fulfilled in Jesus of the manger.

We know next to nothing about Luke, but he was not thick. He knew that Caesar still packed a mighty punch, that poverty was unromantic, that death either by natural causes or at the hands of a brutal state was fiercely unattractive for both the dying and for those who love them. But Luke’s years of worship and fellowship, practising the presence of God by building on his first life-changing encounter with Jesus, his years of breaking open the Hebrew scriptures and finding his Saviour writ large there, these had persuaded him over and again that it was not the silliness of belief in the resurrected Christ but the silliness of the failure to see beyond suffering and death that represented truncation of the human heart and soul. And so he either put into Mary’s mouth, or more likely recorded a poetic vision that had originated with Mary the mother of Jesus, the mystical Mother of God, the words through which the Christ-life must be lived: “my soul doth magnify the Lord … despite everything logical.”

This means though that as Christians we are not called to see the rational and coherent and strategic and sequential, but to see the vast and incomprehensible upside-down blessing of God, the inextinguishable blaze of Christ-light in which human experience of sensibleness and coherence and strategically planned-for and sequentially ordered existence is made inconsequential. He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their hearts. We are called not to see things as they are to us, but as they are to the eternal perspective of God. This is impossible, but aided by the Spirit of the Resurrection we can withstand God-given glances of the eternities.

Centuries ago the great saint John Chrysostom wrote to Christians who were experiencing persecution and death in a brutal reprisal initiated by the Emperor Theodosius. Theodosius had begun by stripping away the privileges of the city Antioch in which those Christians lived, removing therefore the comfortable protections they had relied on. History is slowly repeating itself.

For social chit chat today is increasingly toxic in its assessment of Christianity and its practitioners. Groundswells of murmuring and economic realities coalesce to indicate that one day even western or global north Christians will not enjoy the cosy infrastructural privilege that has been our Linus blanket for centuries. As this happens we might learn from Chrysostom’s sage warning: the honour of a city, Chrysostom warned, is not the favour of the emperor, or the large and beautiful buildings, but the piety of those who worship the God of Jesus Christ.

The beauty and security, the Linus blanket of a church or a cathedral or a diocesan infrastructure will crumble, but it is the prayers of the people, the journeying of the people in the way in which and to which we are baptised: these are the church and the cathedral and the diocese and the collected authenticity of the City of God.

To that we must witness by our mad-crazy actions. Are we a people who welcome and embrace the odd and dysfunctional or the just plain different? I speak not only of our big picture response to the world’s growing migration of refugees, but the far more difficult small picture response of our attitude to a noisy child or an unshowered street person or a person with prison tats in the pew next to us. Do we embrace or do we exclude? I know my first reaction, and I suspect I am not alone in needing to confess my reliance on comfort zones that do not represent the topsy-turvy Magnificat values of Jesus the Christ. Do we embrace and include those who are not from our socio-economic, chronological, ethnic or cultural milieu, or do we subtly (not least by our expectations of high literacy) exclude the lowly and the other, as we sing or read our Magnificat?

Advent is a time of preparation. Sometimes the temptation is even to make preparation distant and abstract, if aesthetically pleasing. Remembering the sage words of R.A.K. Mason’s “On the Swag” at least as much as those of Jesus the already-come and still-coming Christ, or indeed of Mary his mother, we need to ask once more whether our hearts are really prepared to encounter Jesus, to “bring him in, ” to “let the wine be spiced  in the old cove’s night-cap.” Can we pause to meet him in the upside-down, topsy-turvy world he simultaneously inhabits and promises, or are we prisoners of our own paradigms of comfort and propriety, orderliness and niceness?

 

May God help us to be ready for the coming, upside-down Christ of the Magnificat.  

 

The peace of the coming Christ be always with you.

 

---

[1] See R.A.K. Mason, “On the Swag”.

Comes forth a prickly bugger

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
ADVENT SUNDAY
(November 29^th) 2015

 

Readings:

Jeremiah 33:14-16

Psalm 25
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

 

Five hundred and eighty seven years before Christ the safe world of believers’ cosy relationship with God was shattered. Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt were at each other’s throats. Power surges and vacuums inter-twined. Villages and cities were slaughtered, populations upended, migrations and genocidal obliterations reverberated across once-fertile lands, and rivers ran with blood. Josiah had attempted to reform Israel’s faith and the complacent and self-satisfied people wanted little to do with his God. The Egyptians slaughtered Josiah, the Babylonians slaughtered the Egyptians, the Egyptians re-slaughtered the Babylonians and so it went on. Somehow, through it all, a tiny Middle Eastern tribe of not always nice, more-or-less monotheistic former nomads found and lost, briefly observed and lost again a bunch of laws and rituals that made them distinctive, though they by and large indifferently ignored the demands of their inconvenient justice-seeking, hope-promising God.

Into all this stepped a prickly bugger named Jeremiah, who began to warn his complacent compatriots that their self-satisfied pride was soon to come to an end.  Like many before me I am tempted to add that my use of the word “bugger” in a sermon will have caused some more offence that the fact that the people of God had become self-satisfied and complacent, or that the Middle East then as now was descending into chaotic slaughter.

That aside perhaps, Jeremiah dared to challenge the self-satisfaction of his people, was put on trial for his troubles, was rescued from execution, but died in obscurity and crippling sorrow, depicted in the Book of Lamentations. His people did not listen, his nation was destroyed, his faith-narrative almost – but in the end only almost – obliterated from the earth. Amidst all this he had continued to serve the God he trusted, and even, as his people’s complacent lives were shattered, had dared to suggest that God would one day bring hope to them again: in those days, he said, Judah will be saved. He died without seeing it.

It was as if Jeremiah spoke of God acting as a magnet, drawing God’s people into a future. It was an impossible, unseeable future, and whether Jeremiah promised good or ill he was hated for it. The Hebrews’ God was unsexy, demanding and frankly embarrassing, and compromise with marauding Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians made far more sense that the awkward demands of this risible and inconvenient deity. God had been a kind of useful entity in the Hebrews’ brief nationalistic glory days, providing entertaining and uplifting rites and a little bit of Zionist fervour, but when the going gets tough the self-satisfied get pliable, get compromisable, get unidentifiable.

If we dare to sing “teach me your paths, O God” we may discover that we are called out of the respectable into the ridiculous, called out of comfort into chaos, called out of complacency into naked exposure: only then after learning at last with Jeremiah and Paul and the great prophets of God that we have to fling ourselves broken and hopeless into the twilight realm of God’s promises, only then may we find the living warmth and embrace of the God who is always there, beckoning, waiting, weeping.

Global warming, clashing civilisations, travel warnings, the rise of apparently vicious and puerile Presidential candidates in the world’s most powerful nation:  we might well wonder what beasts are slowly slouching towards the Bethlehem of our cosy western comfort zones. Yet as Egypt, Assyria and Babylon treated Palestine as a battle ground it is hardly likely that things were a bunch of fluffy ducks for the Hebrews. Individual lives and the life of a corporate civilisation were under threat in 587 b.c.e. no less than in almost any decade since on almost any tectonic plate of God’s earth. Jeremiah though dared to speak of a living, pulsing God and God’s future despite the ever-present threat of personal or cultural obliteration and no-future, un-future. Today we might be more aware of earth’s every atrocity and idiocy, as far right terrorists hold shoot outs in Colorado abortion clinics, global temperatures rise, and the great empires of the post-modern era carve up Syrian airspace as they attempt to eradicate their own Frankenstein’s monsters, but for human beings the threat is the same: obliteration. And in the face of the unchanging universal threat Jeremiah dared to speak of a God who promises, who weeps, who cares even for a sparrow that falls (though those words were from a later prophet who saw the signs and dared to believe). Jeremiah asks us to read the signs of the time with a bible in one hand and remote control in the other.

But the bible we hold in our hands (and I hope we do), while it speaks of portents and portents of portents is not a time table. It does not speak of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, or Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. It is in itself a promise: “lo I am with you always, even to the ends of the ages.” It is the promise that humanity’s “no”, the decimation of God’s earth and species, the death of dodos and Hector’s dolphins and Baishan fir trees, this is not the final word. It is the promise that what Louis-Ferdinand Céline refers to as cancer cells creeping up our bowels or the sickening sound of sliding tyres and crunching metal is not the final word. It is the promise built on the experience of countless generations of imperfect human beings, the experience that humanity’s fragility is not the final word, that God’s “yes” is.

It is the final word that strangely dwells in humanity’s DNA. In our uncanny status as homo religiosis we long for meaning beyond life in a way that other animals do not, long with a longing that is often repressed, cauterized, trivialised, killed, sometimes with good reason. Yet in all this longing there is a hint of the truth of the imago dei, the image of God that is unique to the upright, laughing ape that we are. As homo religiosis cries out in a myriad ways “to you Lord I lift up my voice,” finding rites around life and love and death, we reveal our possession of this image of god, this signature of the God who is not just Alpha or just Omega but is Alpha and Omega; the signature of the Creator who beckons us from billions of years of yesterdays since we left the primeval swamp and on to an eternity of love in the presence of the God of Jesus Christ, in the presence of those we have loved and lost and will find again, in the many mansions of the eternal City.

In Advent we join the dance of those who have dared to believe.  It’s not a sexy journey. It’s not a journey of the elite or the sophisticated or the good enough, of the clever or the holier or cleaner or smarter than thou. It is the journey of those who know each day that we are not good enough, that we are a sin-doing people, that we are an arrogant and unholy people, that we are a people and I a person who desperately needs the healing, restoring love-touch of Jesus the Christ as we cry with the psalmist “pardon my guilt.” It is a journey in the end though that, if we dare to take it, will take us beyond the death throes of any and every being and any and every civilisation into the forever dance of God and those we love in God.

The peace of the beckoning Christ be always with you.

 

Prayer drunk yet?

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
ORDINARY SUNDAY 33
(November 15^th) 2015

 

Readings:

1 Samuel 1:4-20

(for the psalm): Samuel 2:1-10
Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

 

In my days as a Pentecostal worshipper I was often thrown into paroxysms of panic by the apocalyptic passages of the Bible. These are texts which in their first century setting were designed to assure the faithful not only that God knew the circumstances and trials that believers were undergoing, but also would bring surety and comfort in what were referred to by Jesus as “times of trial.” Mishandled, though, these texts brought to this believer and many of his confreres and consouers only terror. As newscasts brought evidence of war after war this new believer struggled to find comfort in the scriptures.

Images of highway pile-ups and planes crashing (long before 9/11), of graves opening and believers’ bodies rising to the heavens brought little comfort. There were wars and rumours of wars: Iraq, Lebanon, Salvador and, as it happens, Syria were just some of the conflicts thrust on my awareness, while Ronald Reagan escalated Star Wars and stared at Leonid Brezhnev down the barrels of his arsenal. They were heady times, though perhaps less heady than when Kennedy and Khrushchev stared each other down nearly two decades earlier, before my conscious time. Pentecostal doctrine, as I’ve mentioned before, was obsessed with the rise of a Polish Pope and an ethnically Jewish Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Though there were no more earthquakes in 1979 than any other given year, each one that did occur had millennialists scanning the clouds for the return of Jesus. Those with whom I was rubbing shoulders expected the Second Coming any day and planned accordingly.

It was as it happens ever thus. Wars and rumours of wars have ever been and ever will be, for as long as humans have breath. Earthquakes have ever been and ever will be for as long as there is an earth to quake. It can of course be acknowledged that improving media were generating heightened awareness of a global village by the late 1970s: images of the Iran/Iraq War were beamed to our living rooms daily from 1980 onwards. It is though also worth recalling, as I have mentioned before, that we were aware of one significant real change: since July 16, 1945 humanity had possessed the resources, for the first time ever, to obliterate itself and cast Mother Earth into nuclear winter. We still have that ability, and now always will.

The wars and rumours or wars, earthquakes and famines were ever thus and ever will be thus. But apocalyptic Christians have forever distorted biblical teachings, effectively fleeing to deserts to await the coming of Christ, as Montanus and his prophets supposedly did (but probably didn’t!) in Anatolia in the third century and as Jim Jones and David Koresh did in their toxic, lethal mixed-up confusions, and others will again.

Jesus was not suggesting that we retreat into silliness so that Roman armies need to rescue us from our isolated waiting spots. He was suggesting that we are aware of the world around us, but more important even than reading the bible with a newspaper in our hands (as Karl Barth allegedly recommended), is reading the bible with a transforming knowledge that it tells of a God who will journey with us into the darkest recesses of human experience.

This was no new doctrine, but a Hebrew doctrine in which the incarnate Jesus was deeply immersed. Hannah, one of the great Hebrew women of faith, was so immensely absorbed in the experience of God-with-her that, cast out as she was about to be on the scrapheap of womankind, she exhibited deep, deep faith in God’s presence and ability to hear and to answer prayer. Few of us will achieve such piety, stemming from a life of immersion in faith. She pours out her heart to God, first in silent petition, and subsequently in praise. In either context her piety was so intense that she might be accused of drunkenness.

As it happens our liturgies of faith take the same journey, from repentance to cleansing to pleading petition to the drunken ecstasy of thanksgiving, though I suspect few would look suspiciously at our rites and wonder if we were drunk! Nevertheless the journey is there in our worship, and as we practice rites with a lifetime of open hearts we may yet experience the uncanny transformation into Christlikeness that the Protestants call sanctification and Orthodox traditions call divinization: transformation into the person we are called by God to be, “Changed from glory into glory, ’Till in Heav’n we take our place” (as Charles Wesley put it).

But as the great interpretations of Hebrew traditions by Christ-followers affirm, especially in the book we call Hebrews, we are aided on that transforming journey by the Christ of Nazareth. He is known to us in his Spirit who invades us, dwells with us, purges us, but always travels with us, whether we name and practice this experience or not. Jesus has done the hard yards, even to the moment of crying out “there is … there can be no God,” yet even as he cried out remaining, as G.K Chesterton observed, God.

It was this that the language of apocalyptic was seeking to express: there will be bombings in Paris and earthquakes in California or Chile or Aotearoa, there will be god-awful suffering in Syria and Christmas and Manus Islands and at the razor wire barricades of Europe and Nauru, in the cells of our bodies and the road- and life-journeys of those we love, and in the slow and sometimes frightening gasps of the earth we are destroying. We need not go out into the desert to encounter the God who comes, but into our struggled and sometimes seemingly empty words of prayer, pouring out our hearts as Hannah did, not always seeing or experiencing answers, yet practising the presence of God, the God who comes, who comes even to us.

Sometimes (though of course being Anglican we might wait until no one is looking!) we might even learn to dance our ecstasy, or even dance or maybe cry our pain, or perhaps just allow our thoughts to dance or weep: to dance or weep in the sometimes frenetic, sometimes still presence of the God who dances and weeps too. Sometimes, as we learn to do that, we may even become so infectious in faith and hope and love, especially love, that others will see Christ too, and dance (wherever they may be, as Sydney Carter put it).

 

The peace of the dancing Christ be always with you.

Which Jesus?

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

ORDINARY SUNDAY 32

(November 8^th) 2015

 

 

Readings:

 

Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17

Psalm 127

Hebrews 9:24-28

Mark 12:38-44

 

Today we enter into that question Jesus put to his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Who is this that gazes across the Temple of Jerusalem and observes what are in economic terms the last gasps of a dying woman? Who is this who does nothing to alleviate her suffering but goes on to predict the not yet apparent destruction of corrupt religion, religion for which she gave her last economic breath? Who is this man Jesus? Why take notice of him at all, much less turn him into our Invisible Friend, or speak of him on Remembrance Day?

There are many ways to address this christological question, as many as there are bottoms on the clouds of eternity. Circumstances change, eras change: the breathing, thinking space of every observer of Jesus differs according to their life story. There are though some broad-picture categories that have been major keys to interpreting Jesus. Is he a role model to follow? The rather unpleasant, toxic nineteenth century atheist James Thompson offered a caustic (and sexist) critique of the presentation of Jesus as mere role model:

This poor sexless Jew, with a noble feminine heart, and a magnificent though uncultivated and crazy brain, did no work to earn his bread; evaded all social and political responsibilities, took no wife and contemned his own family; lived a vagabond, fed and housed by charity … and died with the lamentable cry of womanish desperation, perhaps the most significant confession in history of a life of supreme self-illusion laid bare to itself at the point of death. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

The extent to which Thompson got things wrong is common but excruciating, not least the significance of that powerful cry of dereliction from the Cross, but we might leave that for a moment. I suggest that there are moments in the legends surrounding Krishna or Gautama Buddha that I find more uplifting than some of the moments in the life of Jesus.

As it happens I would say the same of Jesus as a teacher. There are of course wonderful moments. For those of us who know the story the question “who is my neighbour” is powerfully answered in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and the image of the shepherd leaving 99 sheep to find the hundredth, while perhaps not good agricultural policy in the modern world, was in first century Palestine a deeply illuminating image of God’s determined compassion. But there are moments in the teachings of, say, Confucius or Karl Marx that I find every bit as illuminating as the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Many interpretations find in Jesus the social and religious revolutionary, the Che Guevara of first century Palestine. Certainly Judas wanted him to be that, and much liberation theology has emphasized that many of Jesus’ teachings, not least this story of the widow’s mite (when it is given its proper ending about the destruction of the Temple) do point to revolutionary ideals. But there was no revolution, and while some remarkable followers of Jesus (Oscar Romero and Desmond Tutu come to mind) have contributed to powerful reform, most revolutions have merely replaced one form of tyranny with another, and The Emperor Louis is merely replaced by The President Robespierre, or apartheid’s oppression replaced with Zuma’s corruption, and the peasants still starve.

As the early Christians gathered and told stories they were most deeply moved by another aspect of the life and teachings and death of Jesus. They were most deeply moved by their overwhelming sense of the resurrection of Jesus and their overwhelming sense of the presence of Jesus as they gathered. The suggestion that they were just silly and misguided naïfs is unconvincing: some were prepared to die in defence of their right to proclaim the revolutionary resurrection of Jesus, and many then and now did so.

There was a “been there done that” dimension to the Jesus they encountered in their faith journey. No matter what they underwent, they were strengthened by the experience of the Risen Lord journeying with them, journeying even into death and resurrection with them. It is this that the author of Hebrews is emphasizing as she depicts the journey of High Priest Christ through the brutality of human suffering and death and on to what she calls “heaven itself.”

Her congregation had grown bored, nonchalant, laissez faire about the Jesus thing. The Hebrews preacher was prepared to put one more bomb under the unidentified Hebrews’ collective backside, and the fact that we read her sermon still, 2000 years later, suggests that at least some got the message.

But does her message of a “been there, done that High Priest” have anything to say today? Today, as Israeli forces shoot dead a 72-year-old Palestinian woman; today as refugees continue to struggle and die in one of humanity’s greatest ever mass-migrations, the most significant since the two Great Wars we also acknowledge this day; today as we hear of the fightback of bacteria in hospital wards; today when "Innocent until Proven Muslim" is becoming an increasingly vitriolic attitude and we are threatening to lose our ability to feel compassion; today when in the face of ecological crisis we must wonder what world we are bequeathing our mokopuna?  

But also, as we observe the Remembrance that we must not forget, does her message of a “been there, done that High Priest” have anything to say, as we recall when troops and civilians died in their millions, 38 million dead or injured in World War One, 60 million dead and countless injured in World War Two? Did the meaning of Jesus die as war broke out? Does the meaning of Jesus die each time calamity breaks out, globally or personally?

Jesus does once and for all die to meaning if all we have is nice teacher Jesus, good example Jesus, or social revolutionary Jesus. But this is not who the early Christians discovered as they gathered in secret to worship, nor who the chaplains conveyed as they hunkered down in the trenches and hospitals and killing fields of not just two World Wars but of almost every war for two millennia.

In the lead up to World War One the churches had recreated Jesus in their own image: nationalistic Jesus, nice Jesus, Jesus slavishly obedient to public demand. But that Jesus died without resurrection in the wars, and slowly we are learning to rediscover the life- and death-transforming Jesus, the been there done that Jesus who beckons to the suffering and dying of all armies, all civilians, all conscientious objectors, all who face incurable disease and even those who face the incurable diseases we have inflicted on mother Earth. Because what the author of Hebrews had discovered was “been there, done that” Jesus, the Jesus of the agonised Cross, the Jesus who took the experience of God from trenches to mountain top, the Jesus who offered resurrection wherever people reached out to receive him.

Shortly we will reach out to receive that Jesus in communion. The earliest Christians did so too; they did so because they knew the Great High Priest who journeys into every human hell hole to bring peace, the Great High Priest who inexplicably invites us through the curtain of death to the far country, “whose ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace.” They did so because Jesus transforms death into eternal life.  

Shortly we will reach out to receive that Jesus in communion.

 

The Lord be with you

Lazarus danced

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER

FEAST OF ALL SAINTS

(November 1^st) 2015

 

Readings:

Isaiah 25:6-9

Psalm 24:1-6

Revelation 21:1-6a

John 11:32-44

 

For me, to hear Revelation 21 is stand at my own funeral. All we would need is to hear the triumphant strains of “And Can it Be?” and perhaps the clichéd but profound affirmations of “Amazing Grace” and I would know that was where I was. In fact I wonder often if the dead are present at their own funerals; not necessarily that we are “looking down from up there,” though that’s a good a metaphor as any, but that when it comes to be our turn we are being there, being aware, as C. S. Lewis put it (and as I quote ad infinitum!), that “at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read.” Let me tell you, if I have to put up with endless strings of repetitive and inaudible speeches I will personally break out of my coffin and kick some butt!

Well, no I won’t. We don’t have that option. Death to our finite, miniscule perspective, is inevitably a firm and inescapable full stop. It is so much that that now, when as human beings we like to think we’ve got the universe under control, we no longer die. We pass away, pass over, but never die. We are passed or gone to the other side, chooffed off, left the room, but never dead. Humankind, said T. S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality, and the reality we most bear is the reality that our lives and even loves are temporary, and in their temporal state hang by a thread.

I have mentioned in this place before the night when I was called out to pray for and bless still-born triplets. I have told in this building the story of the week I spent on a riverbank, sitting with a grieving family as they waited for the swollen waters to toss out contemptuously the body of their son and brother. I haven’t told, but now do, the time I stood with a family grieving the death of a son and brother who ultimately self-immolated because he had been the victim of years of shame and contempt and domestic violence. I have told the stories not to be a hero in my own narrative, but because that is what we are challenged to do as bearers of what Richard Gillard refers to as Christlight. We are called to do this – and especially those of us who wear our collars back to front are called to do this – not because we big note ourselves, but because deep in our DNA is the hope and even tenuous experience that God is bigger than the suicide of a shame-riddled husband or the death of triplets or the death of a bravado-fuelled teenager shooting a swollen weir when he should have been at school.

All around us last night children trick or treated in that horrible emulation of the worst of US hegemonic cultural imperialism, trick or treated because the feast of All Hallows’ Eve reimaged as ghoulishness and horror is more entertaining than the deep Christ-centred belief that can love can speak of a hope beyond the grave, even though death’s seemingly final embrace must be traversed first. The great Christian hope of resurrection, the great Easter hope of eternity, is too silly to embrace, but ghouls and sulky spiders are not, and can be triumphantly commercialised (as can Easter) by those great bastions of capitalism gone wrong, the lolly manufacturers.

However silly it may be we are left with the message of death and spiders and distorted pumpkins, or as poet priest R.S. Thomas put it, left in the place where a spider scuttles from the dry chalice:

the priest would come

and pull on the hoarse bell nobody

heard, and enter that place

of darkness, sour with the mould

of the years. And the spider would run

from the chalice, and the wine lie

there for a time, cold and unwanted

by all but he, while the candles

guttered as the wind picked

at the roof.

                        From R.S. Thomas, “Poste Restante”, in the collection Laboratories of the Spirit.

 

Is the community a place where death and ghoulishness have the final word, and indeed the church no more than a place where wizened prayers and dried up faith replace an “amen” of hope?

Our task is to say “no” in answer to that question. Our task is so to practice the presence of God, sometimes even believing six impossible things before breakfast, as Lewis Carroll’s White Queen famously put it (or put something!), so to practice the presence of God that God’s “yes” breaks through the short-sightedness of our human perspective. Our task is to continue to embrace the hope of the new heavens and the new earth that dwells at the climax of John the seer’s apocalyptic vision. Our task is to embrace and practice its promise until it begins to subvert the clanging voice of rationality and to whisper its own still small voice of hope despite everything.

Our voice is challenged still to speak these words of hope when we are confronted with the tiny bodies of dead triplets laid out on a white sheet, or when the swollen dead body of a miscreant teenager is lifted from a river, or the bodies of unlucky, desperate refugees wash up on the beaches of the lucky countries of the world. Our challenge is to breathe hope – sometimes when we don’t even feel it ourselves, like the fumbling priest of Thomas’ poem, or Grahame Green’s whisky priest in The Power and the Glory  – to breathe hope so that a grieving family can pick up the pieces and cling to a sliver of belief that life still has meaning.

For me there are some tiny, irrational reasons to do so. Somehow the early Christians were so filled with the spiritual presence of the Risen Lord as they broke bread together that they were transformed to proclaim resurrection hope against all odds, sometimes costing them their lives (sometimes costing Christians their lives today, as well). I might call that a liturgical and scriptural reason, and it is one that breaks into my experience, too, from time to time.  

I am persuaded too (because once I was an atheist) that if I were to believe in a God at all, then that God, as St Anselm put it, had to be greater than all conceivable things, greater than death and suffering and war and ecological collapse, greater than a Roman Cross, and greater than my own death. I have clung to that knowledge even when the chalice of faith has been bitterly dry, and spiders have run from the rituals of a Sunday gathering or the echoing corridors of a hollow church.

But finally I am persuaded too because there are times when the embrace of the living, death-conquering, risen Christ is, above all odds, firmer than the sneers of self-sufficiency and rationality that surround me in the discourse of media and even the daily discourse of byways and church corridors.  Sometimes, probably just sometimes enough, amidst the turmoil of struggling to follow Christ, a voice commands that a heart-tomb’s massive door be rolled away and life be called forth from a dry chalice, and hope be born again, proclaimed with the words “unbind him, and let him go.”

I suspect Lazarus danced, that day.

 

The peace of Christ be always with you.

On the road, hearing other voices

I was on the road in the USA for the last two weeks, having my own sort of Jack Kerouac experience. Here then are links to the two outstanding sermons that I heard.

The first was at First United Methodist Church, Wausau, Wisconsin. The preacher was the Rev'd Gerald (Jerry) Morris. Jerry, born in Riverside California, is an Old Testament scholar, a children's author (author of the much loved re-tellings of Arthurian and other medieval legends) and pastor of that church.

Jerry's Sermon was the last of a series of sermons exploring the meaning and significance of the Bible. The earlier sermons are also available on the website of  First United Methodist, Wausau.



Later, after road-tripping out to Denver and back to Chicago, I attended St Augustine's Episcopal Church in Wilmette, Illinois.  There the preacher was assistant rector Fr Bryan Cones, formerly of Knoxville Tennessee. Fr Bryan's sermon reflected on impaired vision as it might affect the faithful ...

enjoy and be challenged.

How sadly turn away

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER

ORDINARY SUNDAY 26

(September 20^th) 2015

 

Readings:

Job 23: 1-9, 16-17

Psalm 22:1-15

Hebrews 4:12-16a

Mark 10:17-31

 

 

There is something deeply sad about the man who rushes forward to embrace the way of Christ, only to turn away from the invitation to come, to follow. To be so near, to be all but on-board the train for which, as the song puts it, “You don't need no baggage, you just get on board,” but then to walk away disconsolate, is a deeply oppressive image. I’m not of the “climb on board or burn in hell” school of theology, but have (most of the time) no doubt about the life-transforming benefits of the embrace of the Risen Lord. There is undoubtedly so much that can stop us feeling the life-changing embrace of Christ. There is undoubtedly so much, as the Parable of the Sower reminds us elsewhere, that lead us from the warm embrace of the Risen Christ into nothingness. There is, as the Parable of the Seven Demons reminds us, so much than can darkly replace the warmth of the Risen Jesus when we walk away, but that is not what Jesus is addressing in this sad story of a man who finds it all too much before he even begins.

This man is so close to the liberating embrace of Jesus, but the lure of the fast lane is too great. Jesus of course goes on to address the immediate question of the hold that riches has on this symbolic man, but there are a myriad bright lights that blind us to the gentle candle of Christ-light. How hard for those with wealth, says Jesus, and the obscene image of the world’s wealthiest devouring the life blood of the poor might have us rubbing our hands with conspiratorial and delighted agreement, but if we look only the material wealth of the zillionaires we may end up embracing no more than an eager socialism of jealousy, and drown from our own consciousness any awareness of the “How Hard It Is” gaze the risen Lord turns on us. How hard for those with wealth, sure, and that may well in international terms include us, too, but I think on the whole most of us think that it applies to others, and the laying of guilt trips about our place in the richest 2 per cent of the world will not open the recesses of our hearts to the life-giving Spirit of God.

But there are other How Hard It Is scenarios, too, and it is not only the rich man who walks from the embrace of Jesus.

How hard it is for the self-assured. I think primarily of those awful caricatures of Christianity who are so conceited in their hotline to God that they have no hesitation in condemning to hell those of us who are flawed, uncertain, imperfect, racially or sexually or culturally or bodily-functionally Other. We have spoken here before of the outrageous arrogance of the tiny but disproportionately arrogant Westboro Baptists in the USA, picketing the funerals of those they do not like.  But what of we in the highly erudite and educated Anglican churches, who will often deliberately or inadvertently look askance at those who don’t know their way around the prayer book, or who are less well clothed or educated or showered than we are? How hard it is for the self-assured.

How hard it is for the nonchalant. For those who faithfully cling to old routines and comfort zones of faith, knowing that they’ve served us well, knowing that they will more or less see us out if we can be bothered to keep practicing them, but caring little about the changes that must be made if new generations and cultures are to be embraced by the healing, forgiving, restoring love of Jesus. How hard it is for the nonchalant.

How hard for the cynical, the burnt-out, the all-wise and knowing. Yes, we might say from our position of intellectual superiority, I too used to believe that sort of stuff, but of course now know that it isn’t so. A bishop once told me he was tired of burned-out post-charismatics looking to him for preferment in his diocese in order to resuscitate their flagging ecclesiastical careers. How sad when we look back on those liberating days of charismatic ecstasy, days when the love-touch of Jesus was an immediate and life-changing phenomenon, when we look back though not with deep joy at the on-going caress of the heart-warming touch of God’s Spirit but with dry satisfaction that we know so much more now and have left that nonsense all behind. How hard for the cynical, the burnt-out, the all-wise and knowing.

Yet Jesus is not the purveyor of bad news. The wondrous dance of the one who is Lord is not a fire that spluttered and died twenty or two-thousand years ago, but a mad joyous dance that still goes on. For mortals, says Jesus, it is impossible, but not for God. I think of the wondrous fertile souls whose eyes light up still after seventy or eighty or ninety or more years of faith. Their prayers still reach out into a universe that they know remains deeply saturated with the presence of God. Their prayers still reverberate in the mysteries of a universe, still seem inexplicably to midwife change in the circumstances and situations prayed for. Sure: not always, or the hearts of terrorists would melt and global warming stop henceforth. But inexplicably, subtly: as the Archbishop of York put it, the more people pray, the more coincidences happen. For those who enter the dance, who join Sidney Carter’s Lord of the Dance, the more the universe seems to hint that despite everything, the dance goes on. How embracing the gospel is for the dancer.

How embracing the gospel is for the tenacious (even sometimes those who are tenacious only by the fingernails of faith). For those who against all odds manage to keep whispering into the ear of God, and whispering with or without words into human ears about God and about the mysteries of the Risen Christ. I think again of the mystic Bernard de Clairvaux’s heart stirring words:

Be thou my consolation, my shield when I must die;

remind me of thy passion when my last hour draws nigh.

Mine eyes shall then behold thee, upon thy cross shall dwell,

my heart by faith enfolds thee. Who dieth thus dies well.

To live is to practice for death, and occasionally as a priest I am privileged to enter the dying space of those who have been embraced by the dance of faith, tenaciously held to it even by the finger nails of faith, and died singing love even if the song is silent. How embracing the gospel is for the tenacious.

How embracing the gospel is for the joy-filled eternity breather – for those who realise how ever difficult it may be that the myopic depth of rationalist, empirical vision is not the dwelling place of God. I’m told I use big words so let me make it clear: how hard it is for those who will not see past dull. For there, just beyond our small brainwaves dwells the mad, manic dances of God that I have spoken of before, the dance of the deity who flings Andromeda and Ceres and black holes and a ladybird’s wing across the interstices of space. How embracing the gospel is for the joy-filled eternity breather who sees the poetry of God writ large across the universe. How embracing the gospel is for the joy-filled eternity breather.

And how embraced by God we can be as we set aside our wealth (comparative only though it may be) and our self-assurance and our nonchalance and our cynicism and in our spirits join the dance of the Spirit, the dance that makes Jesus known to us, the dance that waters the dry bones of desiccated faith, the dance that can dervish-whirl, first becomes last and last becomes first whirls us through all the despair and suffering that saturates our newscasts, the dance that can renew our bones so that we become conduits of hope and peace and justice here in our lives and our town and wherever God calls us to dance.

Dance then, wherever you may be, said Jesus. But the rich man walked away. We though are invited still to dance:

“Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

 

 

The peace of Christ be always with you.

The Powerlesness of the Child

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST NAPIER
ORDINARY SUNDAY 26 (September 20th) 2015

Readings:
Job 1:1-2, 2:1-10
Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16

There is much syrupy teaching about the child as portrayed here in the presence of Christ. Most of it stems not from biblical analysis but from a Blakean, Romantic notion of childhood innocence.

 

 Blake’s poetic perspective is that children are innocents, wide-eyed and sweet, lamb-like, and that it is only as they transition into adolescence that they begin to slip outside their Eden, and begin to transition into wild-eyed monsters, more tiger than lamb.

 

Blake’s and the Romantics’ world view contains a modicum of truth, but little more than that.  Those of us who can recall the sleepless nights of infant raising, and who have (as one friend of mine once put it) placed a baby or toddler just a little bit more firmly on the change-table when it comes to the fourth or fifth nappy change in the wee-small hours, we might well question whether an infant is totally innocent und un-manipulative. Parents might after months (or in my case years) of sleep-deprivation side instead with St Augustine, who knew very little about children, but was so paranoid about processes  and results of human procreation that he was adamant that the child is a bearer of the mark of the devil from the moment of its conception.

 

Neither is a biblical perspective. Neither Blake’s nor Augustine’s is the perspective of Mark when he tells of Jesus’ response to a child placed in his presence: “let the children come to me” Jesus said, not because they were icons of innocence (like Blake’s “little lamb”), nor because they were beacons of intellectual inquisitiveness, as Plato and Aristotle recognized millennia earlier, but because they were amongst the most powerless in society.

 

In other words the one who will soon on the Cross reveal the full extent of divine love precisely in powerlessness, a victim of brutal betrayal and tyrannical oppression, takes a powerless being and tells us “this is how you must be.”

 

The implications of this are profound for us if we claim to be followers of Jesus. If I sometimes seem unimpressed by the behaviour of Anglican and other church bodies that still enact an old and no longer relevant paradigm of attempting to moralize from positions of assumed importance it is not only because I believe those are ancient and long-dead paradigms, but because they were wrong in the first place. Anglican synods especially expend an awful lot of hot air composing motions directing governments to do this or that, and church leaders and lobby groups still despatch missives attempting to tell politicians of the Right and the Left what they should be doing. We do not need to have advanced degrees in political theory to know that politicians have a well-designed round basket-ware receptacle for such directives.

 

Which is not to say we should do nothing. It is, though, to say that we need to change our lenses. If there has been a large though still incomplete shift in international discourse about refugees in recent weeks it is no accident that it began (more or less) with the shattering image, as I have said here before, of the dead child Aylan Al-Kurdi. Aylan was not an innocent in any metaphysical sense, nor was he guilty in any sense. He was utterly powerless, trapped in the tectonic shifts of politics and peoples, of clashing ideologies and civilizations, of economic opportunism and oppression. Ayla was trapped and killed by these and a myriad more “principalities and powers,” politicians and people-smugglers and arms-dealer and mercenaries to whom he, like the child in front of Jesus, was no more than flotsam and jetsam.

 

At this point we are given an insight into that magnificent force that we call people power – the power of non-violent protest and discourse. Suddenly after Aylan Al-Kurdi dies, with his mother and brother, suddenly career politicians changed their language of the current crisis from language of queue-jumping, language of implied voluntary migration, to the language of suffering human refugees in desperate need. God knows why it took a little boy to tell them what countless millions already knew, but sin is like that. (As an aside we might question whether the discourse of our American friends with regards to guns will ever change, or whether they will; stay for ever locked into a Wild West paradigm of rights to bear arms at will: “how many deaths,” Dylan asked 53 years ago, “will it take till he knows  that too many people have died?”).

 

We are privileged to take part in the great world-wide opening of eyes, calling on governments for compassion and direct action for those who have fled horrors beyond our imagining. But, while Jesus was speaking about human action for justice, he was also drawing on a greater, cosmic canvas, that too often drops out of our consciousness. He was speaking of the eternal injustices of sin, and the eternal reconciliations of redemption. His words, as recorded by Mark, were set down after he had passed from death to life in the greatest of non-violent justice-actions, the first Easter. His words are part of a story of the conquest of that greatest injustice of all, the injustice that death apparently transcends life and love, the injustice that says “no” to the dreams the Al-Kurdi family had for their children, the injustice that says “no” to the eternality of love as relationships die either in death or in irreconcilable breakdown.

 

He was then and is now still placing our life stories into his own, as the author of Hebrews puts it, going before us as one who is “like us.” He was and is placing our lives into the context of his own, picking us up as hitch-hikers on the doubt-conquering and injustice-conquering and death-conquering journey of his own life “through the curtain.” To change the time-stamp of the imagery he was and is inviting us to join in his eternal life-story as one goes before us, who paves the way for our own inclusion in the “yes,” the eternal presence of the God who creates hope and life and love and does not allow sin or death or injustice of any form to have the final word. He was inviting us to journey with him.

 

He was embracing the child because the child was powerless, as we too are powerless against the vastness and emptiness and seeming injustice of history and the universe. He was saying “come,” because “no” is not the final word, and you are invited into the yes-breathing eternity of God’s love and justice. Though we cannot see it yet he was offering good news even when political machinations seem lost, and the earth we are hell-bent on shutting down appears to be in its death-throes.

The peace of Christ be always with you.

Umbridge is Zeresh: who'da guessed?

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST NAPIER

ORDINARY SUNDAY 26

(September 20^th) 2015

 

Readings:

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10, 9:20-22

James 5:13-20

Mark 9:38-50

 

Take a vibrant, sexy heroine (a sort of alpha female, a Katniss Everdeen or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer of the fifth century b.c.e.), add a dastardly, toxic and malicious schemer (Sauron, perhaps?), blend in a Dumbledore-figure, season with a political buffoon (in which context I am not going to mention the fearfully disturbing Donald Trump), and conclude with the triumph of good over evil and you’ve probably got a best seller. As it happens the Book of Esther was so hot to handle that the early compilers of the Jewish and of the later Christian bible wanted to leave it out (it also fails to mention God, and the hero is not a particularly good Jew, for she does not observe the appropriate rites and customs of Judaism). In the end, though, popular opinion held sway, and this vibrant tale became so important that it forced its way into the Canon of Jewish and Christian Scripture, and in Judaism a feast day is even based on Esther’s triumph.

The process is not unlike the slow process towards official celebration of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton’s integrity was so great that thousands today read his writings and flock to his grave, but his dalliance with broad world-views and perspectives led to his omission from the official US Roman Catholic calendar. It’s no accident that Pope Francis named him as a hero of faith, alongside the equally prickly Dorothy Day, in his address to Congress this past week. It’s not unlike, either, the manner by which popular opinion  is driving the conquest of bigotry and fear with regards to matters of race, gender and sexuality. Popular opinion has slowly driven new thinking, slowly by the grace of God and the winds of God’s irrepressible Spirit, infiltrated the deepest recesses of Christian discourse, even if the final ramifications of that journey will not be upon us for generations yet.

Religious practitioners (and not always the professionals) will often so sanitize the faith they once loved that they leave it shamed and castrated, wriggling on the floor of human awareness. James K Baxter had some very forthright things to say about society’s emasculation of the God of love (which I won’t repeat in a family-friendly liturgy), and Hone Tuwhare said similar things about the symbolic neutering by pakeha of Māoritanga. We become guilty of it when we treasure propriety and process above the mad manic winds of God’s zaniness; order, niceness, and constructions of decency have again and again tried to silence the witness of the Jewish and Christian traditions, not least in that fateful time leading up to World War One when nineteenth century forms of Christian liberalism reduced the gospel to being nice and loving your country.

Esther made her dubious way back into the Canon of Scripture, perhaps more Dorothy Day than Thomas Merton, and has inspired (particularly women) ever since. The actual factual happenstances of her story are long since lost to us, and do not matter. She has inspired others to greatness. That is why we need a doctrine of the saints: those who rise above the humdrum and set imaginations on fire with the flames of God.

The Jewish people found inspiration in the story of this prickly, rule-breaking, protocol-ignoring almost-outsider, inspiration during the times when their own slavish devotion to rules and protocols and insider-protections began to fail them. These were the times when they were as we are confronted with changing circumstances and threats to their existence and ours. Esther’s Sauron or Voldemort-type enemy met his come-uppance and was ultimately and literally hoist on his own petard, as we heard.

Much Christian energy is expounded on keeping things as they were. Esther utterly fails to demonstrate interest in things as they were. She was not a particularly devout or observant Jew prior to her development of a stubborn determination to stand up for herself and, accidentally, for the fellow underdogs of the Jewish community. Yet at great risk to herself she becomes the advocate and saviour of her people. Esther, not an outsider, but a pretty decadent insider, suddenly becomes the chosen one to serve the purposes of God. “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.”

Far too often we become the Dolores Umbridge of the Christian narrative, waving our ‎8 inch dragon heartstring and birch wands to ensure things remain safe, comfortable and as they always were. If you have been following the James readings in recent weeks you may be well aware that our actions of self-interest and self-preservation have often demonstrated the opposite of Esther’s risk of self-sacrifice (Esther 4:16b), turning people away from Jesus rather than towards him. We can become like Professor Umbridge: she is in Harry Potter as great a villain as Voldemort. Strangely she has her counterpart in Zeresh in Esther’s story (see Esther 5:10b-15). Like Professor Umbridge, we too often wring our hands in despair and wish things were as they once were, and work to ensure they are as they once were, while the Spirit of God blows on into God’s future.

The bearers of good news do not wring their hands (or put their hands to the plough) and look longingly backwards. Pope Francis’ friends Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton were possessors of prickly volatility: so too were Hone Tuwhare and James K. Baxter. They were katiaki, custodians of taonga (treasure) from the past, but that served as their keel or rudder (or both), and not as the whole purpose of their boat.  It was as if something of the spirit of prickly but irrepressible Esther leaked into Day’s and Merton’s and Baxter’s and perhaps even Tuwhare’s DNA and they too became, whether they wanted to or not, whether they knew it or not, key players in God’s birthing of the future. “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” “Us”? Another sermon dwells there, methinks.

Our Christian communities today are not exactly beacons of integrity on the horizons of the young. As the Pope speaks out with a commitment to justice and compassion highly reminiscent of his chosen namesake Francis of Assisi (both, it seems, possessors of the DNA of Esther), some Christian communities of the American and American-influenced religious right draw lines in the sand and depict the pope as some form of Marxist anti-Christ. His doctrine is in the end little more than commendably orthodox catholic, though perhaps we can save that conversation for another day, too. Other Christian communities make pronouncements on a grand scale, big picture depictions of gospel-responsibility, but ultimately forget to notice the small picture beggar at the door whose need may be no more than a cup of coffee and a piece of bread.

Pope Francis, we might note this week, left the echelons of niceness and had lunch as best he could with the urban poor of Washington, leaving the rich and the powerful theorists reeling in his wake; this of course is the same man who has kissed the disfigured faces of war vets and disease survivors, who has replaced papal limousines with Ford Fiestas, and opened up papal apartments for refugees. “Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.” Or, as the Archbishop of Canterbury tweeted this week, “The more the Church cares for the poor, the more people recognise it for what it is: the Jesus movement.” To that, as we are possessors of both Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the Beatitudes, we might add “The more the Church cares for the poor in spirit the more people recognise it for what it is: the Jesus movement.” In both cases we are called to check to see how wide open our doors really are.

It may be that it is the absent young who are stridently telling us how we might be bearers of Christ and his Resurrection-hope in our community today. The morality they have been finding for a decade and a half in Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Matrix, Avatar, in re-visioned Narnia and Lord of the Rings narratives may well put our often self-interested narratives to shame. Only some of those narratives, though, hint at the great and irreplaceable dimension that Jesus tells of at in his response to the self-interested disciples, and which we lose at great peril, the dimension of judgement.

For while Tolkien only hints, Rowling hints, Lewis hints at a dimension of otherness,  and hinting is their task, we lose sight of the judgement of God at great peril. The risk for us as liturgical Christians is that we can become so obsessed with the preservation of order and propriety that we forget that the Jesus who we proclaim with our liturgy was a divisive figure, was a discomforting divider of wrong from right, of self-interest from compassion, religious hypocrisy from self-sacrificial goodness. We can spend so much time having lunch on Capitol Hill (or wherever) that we forget to serve and eat with the poor, so much time keeping things as we remember them that we forget the God who is birthing things as they will be. “Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?”

It is up to us, then, to turn again and again to the God who in Christ will (as we will later sing) “land us safe on Canaan’s side.” We are challenged to turn to God to forgive us where we have been more Haman than Esther, more Umbridge than Harry, more closed fortress than madly, eccentrically open community of welcome and embrace. The good news? God hears us as we say we’re sorry and welcomes us back to the mad and glorious dance of resurrection-faith of which the silly things we do in church are a playful foretaste. “Have salt in yourselves” says Jesus – or maybe it was Mark but either way with a twinkling eye because it was a silly thing to say – and then adds the un-silly “and be at peace.”

 

The peace of Christ be always with you.