SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELISTNAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
THIRD SUNDAY OF EPIPHANY
Readings: Jonah 3:1-5, 10
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.
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