SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELISTNAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT
(8th March) 2015
Readings: Exodus 20:1-17
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22
There
is a form of rather self-serving Christianity that likes to see Paul as the
great destroyer of the liberating teachings of Jesus. I think we should have no
doubt, and our ancestors in faith had no doubt, that Paul was the great intellectual
gift of God to the embryonic Jesus-movement. Paul interpreted Jesus not just as
moral teacher but as event in the service of God’s salvation of the
world. To the proclaimers of a shape-shifting gospel Paul destroyed the unanchored
freedom of Jesus’ wind-blown words. But the kind of freedom that unanchored teaching
in the wind provides is the freedom that Glover’s thistledown in the wind[1]
provides: transient good feeling followed by rampant thorny chaos.
Paul
did what Jesus could not do. He anchored Jesus’ words deep in the events of
Jesus’ life and death and resurrection. He anchored teaching in event. He did
so after nearly two decades of reflection on his own conversion experience and
the insight that provided into the relationship between Jesus, Judaism, and the
eternal truths of God. He did do not least by realising that whether we cite 10
or 613 commandments backwards, sideways and in our sleep, they will never and
can never take us into the heart of God and the salvation God offers. He did so
by recognising that the commandments point us on a journey towards God and
God’s redeeming, transforming, justice-demanding love, but can never take us
there. They are a signpost, not a taxi. He recognized, in opposition to the same sorts of religious hypocrites
that Jesus had faced two decades earlier, (and these are not representative of Judaism but of all religious hypocrisy) that the service of God is not a
burden but a joy-filled responsibility, and that our access to that joy is
available only in relationship to the Creator. He saw that this relationship in
turn was available only in and through and by relationship with the one who the
Christians were by then proclaiming as Lord.
If we
pause for a moment with traditional Judaeo-Christian teaching about God we find
that the Creator of the universe is infinite and infinitely good. Less than
that is less than God, and while that is a thought-choice we might want to
take, it is not the choice of Judaeo-Christian teaching. If we pause for a
moment with traditional Jewish relationship to the Commandments we realise that
we are not infinitely good, or perhaps even not much good at all. Later, when
not writing with quite as much haste as he was experiencing when he wrote to
Corinth, Paul would put it eloquently: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
I suggest if we do not believe that applies to us
then we know ourselves very poorly indeed. Even if we convince ourselves that
we are pretty good people and do not break too many of the ten commandments, we
are entrapped in a society that ensures we corporately make idols, worship
them, exploit and by our nonchalance or greed murder the poor, covet that which
is not ours, engage in the gossiping world that thrives on bearing false
witness. By our failure to observe an economic Sabbath, leaving land or
boundaries or time fallow symbolically or literally, we trap the earth in
cycles of exploitation, creating dust bowls and widening the gap between the
richest and the poorest nations and peoples and species of God’s earth. Paul
saw that, Paul got that.
Paul saw and got, too, that this vortex to
sinfulness in which we are trapped leaves an unbridgeable chasm between us and
the perfection that is the Creator God. At this point in much Christian
preaching it is traditional to insert images of atonement, of surrender to
Jesus, of being washed in redeeming blood. Some of those images are unhelpful
in a world in which blood has flowed too often in the name of Christendom’s
exploitation of others. But it is babies and bathwater once more: the Cross,
which Paul declares in our Corinthians reading was the sole content of his
proclamation, must still be the sole content of ours. We might well find the
traditional atonement imagery of washing ourselves or others in blood deeply
offensive: it is. But in jettisoning it we need to make sure that we are not
left with some good-time fairy god who waves magic wands and makes us all nice
people. God does not wave a wand. The Cross is not a wand, oozing antiseptic
blood or otherwise.
The Cross and the Cross alone is God’s entry into
failure. The Cross is God’s entry into loneliness and doubt and oppression and
defeat. It is not for nothing that, as black radical theologian James Cone
reminds us,[2] the Cross is a powerful symbol of hope for
oppressed peoples, for the Cross is God’s entry into despair. In the little
scene of Jesus in the temple we glimpse the power of institutional religion to
exploit and oppress. The Cross stands in opposition to exploitation and oppression.
The Cross is God’s entry into every lynching of the Deep South USA (often
perpetrated by Christians), God’s entry into colonial persecution of Indigenous
peoples everywhere, God’s entry into the deaths of the victims of Boko Haram in
East and North Africa and Daesh in the Levant, God’s entry into the suffering
and deaths of those who are victims of Indonesian government genocide in West
Papua and the silence of the world’s response.
That is why we have Matthew and Mark telling us
that Jesus cried out in the words of the psalmist “My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?” The Cross is God’s entry into every soul’s existence when the
owner of the soul has cried out “How can there be a God?” We might almost say
that the Cross means that God is closer to most genuine atheists than to those
of us who cosily cuddle God in the complacency of our selfish existence. Certainly
the Cross is God’s entry into the atheism that sees so much corruption and
injustice perpetrated by believers that it sets out to do without a god, though
perhaps not to the cosy atheism that is really “can’t be botheredism” more than
a genuine decision to go without the possibility of a loving, judging Creator
of All.
But to those of us who live cosily the Cross is not
entirely a word of exclusion. Particularly in the so-called “liberal” churches,
though, we need to recall and re-learn the language of evangelical
Christianity. The Cross is something we on the powerful side of economic and
ecological and sociological and intellectual and aesthetic and sexual
opportunity need deliberately and self-consciously to accept. We need, as I
reminded us all last week, to “forswear our foolish ways,” or as T.S. Eliot put
it, to turn, and turn again, to renounce our narcissism (for I doubt I’m the
only one that suffers that disease) “And pray to God to have mercy upon us.”[3] The cross, when we invite it and its victim into
our being can be again and again the place where God begins the work of
transformation, redemption, divinization, sanctification, whatever we might
call it, as God shrives from us the grot and grime of being less than we should
be. But we must learn again and again to surrender, to allow the invasion that
is God’s searing redemption to infiltrate us and our small lives.
We must surrender our intellectual and aesthetic
and economic and sexual power over and again so that we can find again the
truth that Paul battled and died so hard in proclaiming, the truth that is
“stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,” or to put it another way, grotty to the
religiously complacent and dumb to the intellectually sophisticated.
May God help us so to do.
Amen.
[1]
“Once I followed horses,
And once I followed whores
And marched once with a banner
For some great cause
sings Harry
But that was thistledown
planted on the wind.”
Denis Glover, “Thistledown.”
[2] James
Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree.
Maryknoll: Orbis, 2011.
[3]
See T.S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”:
And
pray to God to have mercy upon us
And
pray that I may forget
These
matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too
much explain
Because
I do not hope to turn again
Let
these words answer
For
what is done, not to be done again
May
the judgement not be too heavy upon us
Because
these wings are no longer wings to fly
But
merely vans to beat the air
The
air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller
and dryer than the will
Teach
us to care and not to care
Teach
us to sit still.
Pray
for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray
for us now and at the hour of our death.
