SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
(10th May) 2015
Readings: Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
1 John 5:1-6
John 15: 9-17
A week ago I suggested
that Luke’s Acts-volume has often distressed me. It has struck me as an odd and
embellished narrative, even though I am painfully aware that much of the
impetus for the charismatic movement that was to sweep through the mainstream
churches in the 1960s and 1970s was re-readings of many of the Spiritual
out-pouring scenes in Acts, the second chapter of Acts in particular. It is no
coincidence that two significant elements of charismatic renewal were a family-based
music group called The Second Chapter of Acts, and a book by Dennis Bennett
entitled Nine O’clock in the Morning;
together these fuelled many experiences of uplift and ecstasy. (We may even
sing Annie Herring’s Easter Song here, one day!) Dennis Bennett is described on
one (slightly self-serving!) website as “the Episcopal priest who verbally
fired the shot that was heard around the world.”
I am not entirely a fan
of the charismatic movement, though I believe it provided a necessary
re-invigoration of the mainline churches, and certainly turned my then
new-found faith in unexpected and heart-warming directions. Like many movements
it later became self-aggrandizing and elitist. It served however to remind
mainstream Christians that there is indeed a Third Person of the Trinity, and
while sometimes charismatic excesses turned the manifestations of that Third
Person in to demented and ridiculous Cross-denying behaviour, at its best the
encounter with the Spirit of the God of the Cross took us back into an
encounter with a living and dying and living again saviour who proclaims
justice and love throughout time and space.
The narrations of
spiritual renewal were, as I say, based in re-readings of the Book of Acts. In
today’s reading of Acts we find Peter preaching a (twice interrupted!) sermon
that takes us into the experience of spiritual re-invigoration. By the 1960s
mainline Christianity was tired and confused, and whether Dennis Bennett was
the catalyst or not, something re-invigorating swept through its corridors from
that time. Scholar Colin Brown suggested that the New Zealand movement began at
my former parish, All Saints’ Palmerston North, and my alma mater, Massey
University, from the mid-1960s,[1] and was associated primarily with the teaching of
then curate Ray Muller, who was later Parish Development Co-ordinator for
Wellington Diocese. Whatever happened back then, many lives were changed, and
ordinary people were enriched and transformed. Perhaps for that period we of the
mainline churches were yet to grow into the transformation of unjust structures,
that key mark of mission in Anglican ecclesiology, yet even if not especially
that must begin (but not end!) with the transformation of our own sometimes
deadened lives. The Holy Spirit of Christ came to be known as the empowerer of
human lives (even though as yet she was not the feminine of God that I will be
suggesting she is at the next service!).
The charismatic movement,
then, enflamed (but did not destroy), a wooden church. The Book of Acts however
stands as a testimony to a movement of God that went outward and onward from
Jerusalem, its place of origin. Like the man who put his hand to the plough,
the Book of Acts challenges the Church of God not to look back, except in so
far as it clings tenaciously to its whakapapa, its energised story. A
spiritually extraverted worship that forgets to look back to that extent will
be thistledown, blowing like Dylan’s answer on the wind. A spiritually
energised movement that tenaciously holds only to the past and its own good
times will stultify and turn into the wooden structure it sought to replace.
Sometimes the charismatic movement did that, but there have been signs of God’s
hand since, too, leading us into greater awareness of the call to social
justice and the deep spirit-enriched possibilities of the liturgies of the
millennia. It is to these combinations that we in general and we as a Cathedral
people of God specifically are called.
We might do worse than to
learn, even if our circumstances are thank God less dramatic, from our brothers
and sisters of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town. I was privileged to visit there
a few weeks ago: it formed so big a part in big picture terms in the overthrow
of the demon of apartheid in South Africa and in small picture terms in Anne’s
reinvigoration in faith a quarter of a century ago. There liturgy, the great
poetry of our faith, and social action came together as they must if we are to speak
of and pray to a God who has compassion, as the God of Exodus and Cross clearly
does, on the grieving and the broken and the outcast of the earth. In liturgy
the Spirit falls upon us to reinvigorate us to become the hands and feet, or as
James K Baxter once put it, the body and blood of Christ in the world.
Liturgy, indwelt by the
Spirit of Pentecost, challenges us and simultaneously empowers us to be the
place of God’s hospitality, the place of welcome and homecoming to the
marginalised. Who are the marginalised in Napier? Where are the marginalised in
Napier? How can we find and be the empowerment of God’s Spirit to make them welcome
in this place that is theirs, at least if not more than ours? These are the
questions to which the Spirit challenges us. The search, the prayerful search,
for answers is yours and mine alike as we learn to stutter and then sing a new
song to and for the Lord who has done and is doing, as the psalmist puts it in
powerful understatement, “marvellous things.” The litmus test though will
always be along the line of: “what are these actions of liturgy or evangelism
or outreach or social justice doing to touch the outsider and the hungry and
the seeker?” We have much to do together to seek answers to that question, but
if our search for answers continues to be grounded in prayer, in a spirit of
cooperation and openness to the future-birthing Spirit then we will be the
people of cooperative love that Jesus, in the Fourth Gospel, challenges us by
God’s Spirit, to become: abide in my love … love one another.”
Amen.
[1]
Brown, Colin, “How Significant is the Charismatic Movement?”, in Colless and
Donovan (eds), Religion in New Zealand
Society, first edition (1980), 105. Given that Colless and Donovan were
Palmerston North’s Massey University academics there may be some historical
bias, though Colin Brown himself was less associated with Palmerston North.
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