Nostradamus and wibbly wobbly words

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
FOURTH SUNDAY OF EPIPHANY
(1st FEBRUARY) 2015
       
 Readings:   Deuteronomy 18:15-20
                    Psalm 111
                    1 Corinthians 8:1-13
                    Mark 1:21-28

More years ago than I dare to remember I was talking about prophets in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Someone raised the question as to whether prophets spoke today, and began to answer his own question, suggesting that Nostradamus was the last prophet.

I’d never even heard of Nostradamus. I went to the university library, but it had not heard of him, either. Eventually I found some of his writings. They were profound sayings open to endless interpretations (like clouds in the sky):

The young lion will overcome the older one,
On the field of combat in a single battle;
He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,
Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.

They remain popular, cosy, unthreatening. Realistically this typical example was so meaningless it could be applied to countless scenes, though it has generally been applied to the joust between Henry of France and the younger Comte de Montgomery. Things ended badly for Henry: he died as a result of injuries to the eye.

Nostradamus was a soothsayer, not a prophet in the Judaeo-Christian sense. As time passed, I refined my response to the question: do prophets spoke today? They do, but they speak a searing word of justice into the midst of injustice, reconciliation amidst revenge, compassion amidst greed. The future is God’s and God’s alone. So I think of Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, James K. Baxter, Desmond Tutu, Malala Yousafzai: many of you will have heard me on these and other names before. Some stand within the faith traditions of Jesus, others do not: the Spirit of God is not limited to institutions.

It is no accident that the Hebrew lawmakers spoke out against soothsayers: those who offer false narratives are very different to the great men and women of justice who speak with God’s voice of justice and compassion. Jesus warned: “On judgement day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name’” (Mt 7:22). In Matthew’s account those who practice charlatanism in the name of faith get short shrift indeed. There are many examples, and we will all be aware of damage done in and to the name of Christ.

Jules Gomes, Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral, observes, “As you read the prophets you will discover that biblical faith is not compliance but defiance; it is not passivity but protest. ‘It is protest against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be,’ says Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks.”[1] Prophesy, biblically, is not soothsaying, but searing analysis of the present in the light of God and God’s future judgement.

Paul gets prophesy. He gets that if the Christ community is to speak with an authentic voice in the corrupt communities that surround it then its members must look to the integrity of their own lives. Paul was vehemently opposing inauthenticity, every form of hypocrisy and abuse, in the Corinthian Christian community.

We need to get away from the habit of simply translating his words through 2000 years to the present, need to dig deeper and find out why he was speaking to each situation. If he makes a pronouncement about meat offered to idols then it is not our task blithely to pronounce that no meat that we eat has been used in such a way, and then eat nonchalantly, but to ask deeper questions of our food. Does genetic modification of crops threaten the well-being of future generations, thus becoming an idol to current gods of commerce? Are we breathing new life and meaning into Rachel Carson’s prophetic 1960s stance against pesticides in Silent Spring now applicable to genetic engineering? Are we consuming more than we need? Are we keeping the poor, present and future, trapped in hunger? Prophesy is “protest against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be,” says Rabbi Sachs.

When Paul speaks of being “puffed up” he is playing with words. He is using the Greek word for “enthusiasm.” It is where we become puffed up, filled with the wind of our own self-importance rather than the wind of God’s Spirit, that we become the foci of Paul’s wrath. If we are arrogant, full of our own cultural or aesthetic self-importance, using our privilege to oppress others, then we become the proud and the arrogant who are the recipients of Paul’s prophetic fury. When the Corinthians ate meat they did so in elitist riot, keeping the underclass believers in their place. The poor could not afford meat except the second hand meat previously offered to idols, and so were kept from the Eucharistic feast. What are we doing to keep others from the Eucharistic feast? The issue of meat is an issue of justice: what are we doing to ensure that our place of worship and encounter with Christ is open to the strugglers and the illiterate and the unsophisticated and the tone-deaf and the underclasses? Where do we stand under Paul’s prophetic glare?

The psalm perhaps tells us. The doctrine of the “fear of God” is unpopular. We remake God as a plaything in the image of our own preferences. To do so is dangerous. Today we commission Sam as an intern, the beginnings of a new journey, but by our baptism we are in any case all commissioned. If we carry out our commission of faith haphazardly or nonchalantly or arrogantly then we play nothing more than the Nostradamus game, sending neat but empty syllables into the ether of time and space.

Mark tells us of the early public observations of Jesus: “they were amazed, for he taught as one having authority.” We might today say “mana”: that wonderful word from the depths of Polynesian languages, including Māori, that speaks not of some pretentious badge or title but of deep, deep authenticity. It is to that that the readings command us today. May we too address with integrity the unclean spirits, the social and economic and ecological and psychological and spiritual oppressions that permeate every nook and cranny of the world into which God commands us to go, proclaim, baptize.

Amen.




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[1] Gomes, “Prophets of Justice vs. Profits of Injustice.”  www.liverpoolcathedral.org.uk/642/ajax.aspx/download/209

Sulking Jonah, prickly Paul ... paradigms of faith?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
THIRD SUNDAY OF EPIPHANY

       

Readings:        Jonah 3:1-5, 10

                        Psalm 62:5-12
                        1 Corinthians 7:29-31
                        Mark 1:14-20

If you are familiar with the lectionary cycles will be aware that this day is the celebration of the Conversion of St Paul. I would love to claim that my failure to observe that great feast, bring together two of my favourite topics, conversion and St Paul, was because I was surrendering so great a liturgical and homiletic opportunity to a greater cause. Sadly it is not so – I simply failed to notice the feast on my calendar, so we journey on through the Sundays of or after (depending on what school you went to) Epiphany. My apologies to St Paul!

As it happens it’s not a bad set of readings with which to be faced when poised on the cusp of beginning an antipodean year. Yes, we all know that the church year begins at Advent, but realistically in the antipodes nothing begins before the end of January, so realistically we are beginning once more to dip our toes in the waters of faith-action. And we are confronted with a diversity of readings that reminds us how difficult, how challenging and yet rewarding it can be to be a People of the Book.

For that is what we are. It is as it happens what our Muslim cousins in faith call us, but it is what we are. We as liturgical Christians are all the more a people of the book, for we carefully ensure that our worship as well as our teaching is anchored in the written word. We are a people of the book. We jettison in particular the book that is our scriptures at great peril, for they are of the very essence of who we are, shaping, feeding, forming us. But what does a diverse collection of readings like these that we face today say to us? How do we read this book, these books (for the bible is many very different books) that we are dared and challenged and called to read?

The book we call Jonah, after its main character, is amongst other things, a glorious satire. Perhaps I am a particularly poor Christ-follower, but I see something of myself in the blundering prophet Jonah – not I hasten to add, that I have ever managed to convince an entire city to repent, not even had an entire city’s attention. Jonah gets so many things wrong: Apart from anything else he forgets to tell the people of the great city, an ancient equivalent of Tokyo or New York, that the message he brings is a message from God. He blunders along, annoying people, getting swallowed up and vomited out by fish, getting things right and more often getting them wrong, and suddenly despite his blunderings an entire metropolis gets a message from God. When they repent Jonah gets a fit of the sulks: like too many of us he was voyeuristically awaiting the moment when the judges kicked Nineveh out of the shared house, kicked Nineveh out of the chef’s kitchen, kicked Nineveh out of the prize-money. But the judge doesn’t, and Nineveh gets and responds to the message, and Jonah gets the sulks when his fun is spoiled. It would be as if I had spent my ministry striving for the inclusion of young people in the Church, but were to get the sulks because my new bishop is far younger than I am – or having fought for the ordination of women or gays were to sulk because women or gays are at last gaining rightful roles of leadership in the church. Jonah is a satire that makes us laugh at ourselves: do we want young people in “our” cathedral church? They may do things differently!

The psalms, by and large, are the love poetry of faith – even if one contains the chilling heartcry about the execution of an enemy’s children. The psalm on this occasion is a celebration of God’s faithfulness, of God as the source of meaning and succour to the psalmist’s life. There are perhaps times we can relate to this and times we cannot, yet this is precisely the strength of these 150 or so liturgical poems, running the gamut of human emotions and human relationships to the possibilities of God. They run even to the possibilities of no-God, and to the hatred of enemies, and if we think we are too pious to reach the former or the latter heart-cry then it may just be that we know ourselves too little, are deluded about our humanness.

How do you solve a problem like Maria, sings the mother superior. How do you solve a problem like Paul? For too long Christians have delved into the writings of Paul and found there either eternal if selective rules for all times, all peoples, all situations: “wives submit …”, or decided that he is so irrelevant that we never need break open his words again. How brutal a distortion either of those extremes is! Yet always we must ask who Paul was writing to, what situation he was addressing, what was the culture and circumstances surrounding those to whom he wrote his belly-fired, passionate letters of instruction. The Corinthian Christians were playing games with religion, using the Jesus-message as a tool of self-satisfaction and of the oppression of others. Christians have often returned to this abuse. How dare they?  Paul challenges them and us to live each day as if the eternal judge were about to tap us on the shoulder. Of course we fall short of such a demand: he tells us that elsewhere. As he warns his correspondents not to dwell in prolonged mourning he is not writing a twenty-first letter of psychological advise: mourning takes as long as mourning takers, even to the closure of our lives. But he is asking us to know that it is the risen, bigger than death Christ who is beckoning, coaxing us through the darkness into renewed light, first temporary, then eternal.

Or, indeed, as Mark tells us, the Christ who beckons us to stumble on in his still warm footprints. The call of the disciples is the call of fallible, broken, rather Jonah like human beings like me or you or Paul – so perhaps we have ended up with the conversion of Paul after all! The call of the disciples or the call of Paul or the call of you or the call of me is the call to stumble on, embracing the future as God’s future, despite all its unknowns. It is not a bad reminder as we stumble into the realities of 2015.

The Lord be with you.

 

 

God of an aching Paris?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
BAPTISM OF CHRIST (11^th  JANUARY) 2015


　　　　　　　
Readings: Genesis 1:1-5
    　　 　Psalm 29
                 Acts 19:1-7                 Mark 1:4-11

When the authors of Genesis and its two great creation stories set about telling their tales they did so not as a scientific explanation but as a theological explanation. In two different ways they wanted to speak of a God who breathed all that is known into existence, yet who still cares for and suffers with creation in its own on-going dramas. More than that, they wanted to speak of the paradox of a God who creates from without yet remains within, remains involved in creation in its personal and cosmic struggles. The second author even depicts God walking and working in and within the garden of the created universe, listening, punishing, caring, and remaining, ever-always.

When Mark sets out to tell the story of the one who he had come to know as the very heart of God – perhaps as one influenced by Hebrew thought he might dare to say the very entrails of God – when he tells the story of Jesus he begins with the strange and unavoidable historical observation that Jesus was baptised in the Jordan by his cousin John, baptised in a baptism for the remission of sin. It’s a tricky tale, because Christians came to know Jesus as sinless, and a nice deity should not be grovelling around in a river full of human sin. In fact the whole narrative of baptism shared by all four gospel writers raises that terrible question: what is a nice God like you doing in a grotty place like this? It is, ironically, the same question the authors of Genesis were addressing, but times had changed, and Jesus had happened.

Eastern orthodox depictions of the baptism of Jesus often show debris in the river beneath his feet. It is the detritus of human sin, left behind him. Some modern icons have used the modern detritus of a dying planet: batteries, tyres, broken glass, condoms and syringes. It is the same issue: what is a nice God doing in a place like this – and for that matter, what is a nasty notion like a condom doing in a sermon like this?

But if God is a rarefied and nice God then God is not in Paris when bullying and powerfully non-Islamic thugs shoot a Muslim policeman and assorted champions of free-speech. If God is a rarefied and nice God then God is not on our beaches and our roads when our loved ones die in far too great a number. If God is a rarefied and nice God then God has nothing to say in tragedy, and the death of a loved one echoes through the universe with a resounding "no", a resounding "my God my God why have you forsaken me", which is a highly theologised way of saying my God my God why do you not exist, why is the universe an empty and meaningless place?

When champions of freedom are shot in a Paris office no one should dance in the streets yelling platitudes about resurrection and eternity and justice. That was never the way that the gospel writers and Genesis writers were proclaiming. But slowly, by the authenticity of their lives and the integrity of their witness their story did begin to seep out into the Babylonian and later the Roman Empire: thuggery is not the end.

God (though even that word may be damaged seemingly beyond repair) still opens those divine entrails to the pain of the universe, still feels that pain, and is still drawing that universe to an as yet incomprehensible and invisible end in which death and injustice are not the final word. The Genesis writer was trying to tell us that the Source of all existence has not deserted existence, and still draws that first day existence through its pain to a final and future glorious Seventh Day. The authors of the gospels were trying to tell us, against all odds, that the cry of death on a cross or in an upstairs Paris office is not the final word, but another tragic parenthesis on the way to what the hymnist calls "that yet more glorious day." The Baptism of Christ, like the entrance of God into Existence, is neither more nor less than the very Source of existence hitching creation in all its ambiguity onto a trailer that ultimately leads to eternal life and light, in all its incomprehensibility.

The Lord be with you (TLBWY)