SERMON
PREACHED AT St MATTHEW’S, HASTINGS
100th ANNIVERSARY OF THE
CHURCH BUILDING
SUNDAY
8th FEBRUARY
ORINARY
SUNDAY 5, 2015
Readings: 1 Kings 8:22-23, 27-30
Psalm 84
1
Corinthians 3:10-17
Matthew 7:13-14, 24-25
Firstly, I make no apology for the fact that in the
next several minutes we may work quite hard. I believe the vision that drove
your forebears in faith to give life to this building is a vision worth
reclaiming, worth renewing, worth spending a few moments hard work to repossess
and reinvigorate. I do however apologize that you have a mere cathedral dean,
not our bishop, leading this part of today’s journey!
On the 28th June 1914 the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand was murdered, along with his wife Sophie, by a Bosnian Serb named
Gavrilo Princip. Like all moments in history it has a degree of random to it –
news of the assassination took two days to filter through to New Zealand
newspapers – but it is a useful moment on which to pin the Death of Certainty. Paul
Auster writes “… lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a
single second,”[1]
and as the archduke died they were. In that moment, we can say speaking
symbolically, the certainty of being a European Christian, and therefore of
owning “truth,” crumbled. Even as late as October 1915 a New Zealand academic
was approving citing poetry that extolled the romanticism of Britannia’s call:
Britain’s
myriad voices call,
Sons, be wedded, one and all
Into one Imperial whole,
One with Britain, heart and soul … [2]
Sons, be wedded, one and all
Into one Imperial whole,
One with Britain, heart and soul … [2]
The would-be academic was unable to cite an
authentic New Zealand voice extolling
the values of Mother Country or of war, though no doubt there were many in the
school and university magazines of the time. Why would he? Britishness was the voice of authority and security, and Tennyson
was, after all, a Lord.
As it happens the voice of certainty was beginning
to tremble a little before 1915. Erstwhile Hawkes Bay (albeit Ormondville)
resident poet Blanche Baughan was beginning to lament the harshness of the
land, “Well I’m leaving the poor old place, and it cuts as keen as a knife; /
The place that’s broken my heart – the place where I’ve lived my life,”[3]
but she was beginning to find an authentic New Zealand voice, writing of
“paddocks” not “fields”, and experimenting with snippets of te reo.[4]
She sees herself however as “Standing, small and alone,” and as such was
probably echoing the colonial pain that was still dominant when King and
country summonsed the Empire’s men homeward following Britain’s declaration of
war on August 5th, 1914. As it happened, though Baughan went on to
be a great and feisty New Zealand woman activist and mystic, she lost her
poetic voice, at least in part because she could not find poetic idioms by
which to express the cataclysms that rocked the world from 1914 onwards.
I had no tape-recorder set up in St Matthew’s,
Hastings, in February 1915, but it is likely that a sermon of the time was full
of patriotic fervour. Mr Brocklehurst, later Dean of the Cathedral, was vicar,
and a little bit of detective work soon indicates that he was a man who would
not only understand suffering and restoration, but a man who understood the
priorities of the gospel. Brocklehurst is clearly a fine priest, for he was
born in England and served in Australia before coming to Waiapu! More seriously
he was a man who understood narratives of suffering and hope. Ill health dogged
him long before he was so badly injured in the collapse of the Waiapu
Cathedral, including during his time in Hastings. For his funeral in 1957 Brocklehurst
stipulated that he not be the centre of attention, but that the focus should be
on “eternal life.” I suggest that this perspective at the very least focussed
his vision as he worked to the establishment (or re-establishment) of this
building in 1915.
Brocklehurst of course did not preach on the day
this building was dedicated: the Bishop,
Dr Sedgwick made a plea for the continuation of the faith of the Church of
England, and there is little in his sermon at that service 100 years ago that
suggests that he, any more than the colonial poets, was recognizing the extent
to which the certainties of Empire were collapsing. Sedgwick was a child of the
vicarage, a fin de siècle naval
chaplain, an Earl’s chaplain and an erstwhile priest of Bloemfontein and
Botswana, suggesting that he was not well-poised to recognised the collapse of
theological and sociological certainty that was going on around the world as he
addressed the people gathered in the new yet gothic edifice in which we now
stand. Certainly, unlike his contemporary the mystic poet Blanche Baughan,
Sedgwick is not showing any awareness that the old Euro-Israelite
interpretations, the establishment of little outpost temples of brick, needed
to give way to new traditions rooted in the whakapapa
of new peoples and new lands, or in the Māori values of manāki, mana-a-ki,
radical hospitality, radical “telling” of new story.
Sedgwick pronounced boldly a century ago that no new
theology would be taught in this place: how surprised he might have been to
read a subsequent curate of this parish, Numia Tomoana, who would one day write
eloquently of tupuna wahine, strong
ancestral women whose story melds creatively with the often forgotten story of
the tupuna wahine of Hebrew and
Christian narratives.[5]
How surprised he might be to find not Matua
Joseph Brocklehurst, but Wahine Helen
Wilderspin keeping alive the fires of faith in and from the building he
consecrated.
Perhaps Sedgwick knew that the newly built St
Matthew’s was a radical metaphor. For here the ancient lines of gothic
architecture were re-clad in the latest science of ferro-concrete which was
slowly dominating creative architecture. The ancient Gothic dream was here
recreated in state of the art modern reinforced cement, and the fact that it
stands post-1931 Hawkes Bay and post-2011 Canterbury earthquakes and subsequent
legislation suggests that something was strangely right here.
Yet something was confused too: the brick
constructions that Sedgwick strangely lauded in his sermon this day a century
ago, applauding the dismantling of flimsy if romantic wooden edifices, those
structures have largely turned to dust or bureaucratic disarray in these shaky
post-modern isles. They have mostly crumbled, just as the Temple of Solomon and
its successor, beloved in Sedgwick’s sermons and beloved by masonic rites and beloved
by British Israelites, were torn stone from stone and utterly destroyed, adding
poignant meaning to Paul’s warning that the faithful believer, not the
building, is the Temple.
The new world that was struggling to be born as the
certainties of the old Eurocentric universe collapsed was very different, and
slowly it would learn to listen to the ancient voices, the tupuna wahine and tupuna
matua of this and other ancient colonised lands, and to know that wisdom
was not the sole prerogative of the Britannia whose rule over the waves was
ephemeral at best. It would learn too to listen to the authentic voice of Paul
of Tarsus, who saw that “fire will test what sort of work each has done” and
who knew that personal faith integrity, not monolithic structures, would bear
witness to the risen Christ.
Brocklehurst I sense began to listen out of his own
suffering and heard those voices earlier than his erstwhile boss did, though in
the end I sense even the one time Earl’s Chaplain Dr Sedgwick began to hear echoes
of ancient and non-European voices. There are hints that Aotearoa sung its
redemption songs even to this anglophile bishop: after retiring and returning
“home” to England, Sedgwick subsequently made his way back to Aotearoa. He took
part in the consecration of that remarkably complex bishop Lesser, and then
stayed here to die and to be buried, receiving at last the radical hospitality
of Ngati Whatua, buried in the soil of their lands at Purewa. On the other hand
he would later be joined there by Sir Robert Muldoon, so maybe not so Māori
friendly or progressive a neighbourhood! But in the mysteries of apostolic
succession Sedgwick’s legacy was handed on to remarkable visionaries: Lesser,
Reeves, Mills and others have filled his sacred shoes and continued to whisper
a narrative greater than any of our flaws.
Ultimately the collapse of the old certainties that
was in full force a hundred years today was the collapse amongst other things
of a distorted Christian narrative. The gospel of a crucified God, of love in a
cruciform shape, had given way to a series of nationalistic gospels in which
the god of germanness or spanishness or frenchness or dutchness or englishness,
of colonialness, reigned supreme. On this day a century ago, New Zealand was
just learning that, three days previously, Private William Ham had become New
Zealand’s first Great War casualty. On
this day one hundred years ago Able Seaman William Edward Knowles became New
Zealand’s first naval casualty. The old certainties were dying with Ham and
Knowles, and Sedgwick’s secure world was crumbling as he stood here a hundred
years ago.
World War One would give way to World War Two, and
the ability of men and women to be the very opposite of civilised, would dominate.
The old certainties passed away. Sedgwick’s world of bricks and mortar, of
muscular Christianity, God and emperor, of pulled up socks and cleanliness that
was next to godliness, these had no answer to the horrors of the 1914-18 war,
or the subsequent horrors of Hitler’s and Stalin’s pogroms. They have no
answers either to the very post-colonial questions of a young Jordanian pilot
immolated by Daesh terrorists, or to the knowledge that we live on a warming
planet with rising sea-levels, dwindling resources, and an ever-growing chasm
between the richest and the poorest of humanity.
But the scriptures that have been read and broken
open in this place since that day 100 years ago do have answers. We throw out
the crucified, died and was buried form, and the rose again on the third day
form of God, at great peril, for that is what the churches of Europe had done,
and their usurper nationalistic gods died with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in
1914. We throw out the scriptures of our faith at great peril, for they speak
of the radical, compassionate manāki
of God, the one who stretches out arms in Christ, who welcomes the broken and
the dispossessed, the hungry and the hunted, the hung-out, strung out ones and
worse. The scriptures speak of a God who enters into a crucified death for
Jordanian pilots and Hawkes Bay cancer sufferers, for starving refugees and road
accident and drowning victims, and strangely for perpetrators and victims of
injustice alike, for all of us are capable of giving and receiving toxic
evil.
But it is not the British Voice of Alfred Lord
Tennyson and Days of Empire that calls us on, as we sing several times today, on
into a Promised Future, when we shall with Jordanian pilots and Japanese
journalists tread the verge of Jordan. It is a different voice. More like the
faint echo of Aotearoa that brought Bishop Sedgwick back to an unforeseen place
he never expected to call home, more like the whispers of ancestral voices that
have inspired ancient peoples since we clambered out of the primeval swamp,
more like the feisty wairua that
turned the slowly stilled poetic voice of a Blanche Baughan into radical
activism, the voice that will beckon us and our mokopuna is the mysterious voice that whispered despite the Cross
and despite the Tomb, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe”
(John 20:29) and who then added “haere.”(John
21:19). Haere, haere indeed, says the
Spirit who beckoned our forebears and who beckons us and those who follow us.
“Blessed are the dead for they die in the Lord
henceforth.” Blessed are our ancestors in faith who midwifed this place, and
blessed may our mokopuna in faith be
too, for they will midwife a very different place. And blessed may we be, if we
hold fast to the Taonga of faith in the God of the Cross.
Amen.
[1] Paul Auster, The Art of
Hunger, 279.
[2] From “Poetry and Patriotism”, Victoria
University College Review, October 1915, p. 17. The author is designated
only as “C”. The poem so quoted and approved is Tennyson’s “The Making of Man.”
[3] From B.E. Baughan, “The Old Place”, in An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry, 4.
[4] See B.E. Baughan, “A Bush Section.” Ibid., 4-6.
[5] See Numia Tomoana, “Te Karanga o te Atua”, in E. Fairbrother and J.
te Paa (eds), Our Place, Our Voice,
33-51.
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