Jesus and the rubber duckie fetishists

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST  

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16

(26^th July) 2015

Readings:        

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21
           

David, the great icon both of divine choice and subsequent leadership, is no advertisement for the flawlessness of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. David was gutsy and testosteroney, but serves at times as a classic example of Lord Acton’s “all power corrupts.” He gets it wrong, and no time more tragically than in the narrative we enter into today (and might, in a family friendly eucharist, omit next week! Indeed it should never have been separated into a two week story). So X-rated is David’s failure at this point that the unparalleled, brilliant Veggie Tales (bible stories that are for children but should be compulsory for all adults who think they understand Christianity) turn Bathsheba into a rubber duckie and add her, in that guise, to the wayward king’s collection.

It was of course Jesus in John 8 who made famous the saying “let the one without sin cast the first stone.” Interestingly that Jesus-saying took a long time to be accepted into the liturgical cycles of Christianity. For four or five centuries liturgical readings avoided any indication that forgiveness might readily reach out to embrace the most conspicuously sinful in society. These days we tell the story of the woman caught in adultery, from which the stone-throwing saying comes, late in Lent. We tell the story of David’s atrocious sin on this Sunday of every third year, and the story of God’s dealings with him next Sunday every third year. Perhaps a gospel of sin and forgiveness is too hot to handle with anything but reluctance.

But the gospel is about forgiveness. We might even say it is fundamentally about forgiveness before anything else. David and the woman of John 8 (not read today), are stories of sexual sin, and sadly as a Christian community we too often tend too closely to associate sin and sex, so that we forget those more fundamental structures of sin: idolatry and greed. Perhaps the rubber duckie version is right, for David coveted long before he committed the more dramatic sins of adultery and murder. And, as I often remind gatherings at baptismal services, our entire capitalist society is based on covetousness, the promise that this coffee or this car or this medication will bring us the fulfilment that we lack.

The Christian messages of forgiveness and reconciliation are not messages about waving a wand and making, as Annie Lennox put it, the bad things go away. The Christian messages of forgiveness and reconciliation operate horizontally and vertically, taking us to the dark places where we face our penchant for accumulating, by stealing if necessary, rubber duckies or sexual partners, or even with our studied nonchalance stealing the future from generations of mokopuna and the present from peoples facing rising sea levels, growing deserts, or simply economic and ecological devastation. The Christian messages of forgiveness and reconciliation operate horizontally and vertically, taking us to face a God who is not a plaything, a stern God who will next week (or would, if we had the reading) deliver fiercely harsh judgement (though not karma) to the wayward King David.

Judgement, not karma? I may leave that for another time, except to say that the mad crazy irrational grace that is present in the doctrines of reconciliation can break brutal cycles of suffering and revenge. The David story is an Old Covenant story, but by the time Jesus breathes new life into the wayward, deserting disciples or the persecuting Paul in the new dispensation, a new rhythm is making itself heard, a caesura for those of you familiar with the notation of both music and poetry, a radical, restorative break in proceedings. “Can we start again, please?” sings Mary Magdalene in Superstar. Yes, says the gospel of Jesus Christ: oh yes.

But it is the Fourth Gospel that sees the inseparable bond between forgiveness and eucharistic feeding. It is possible that John borrowed the feeding of thousands story from Mark, from the version we should have had (if lectionaries were better constructed!) last week. In Mark and John alike this feeding of thousands has internal hints of feeding as the way by which humanity is reconciled to God. In Mark’s gospel-account the story seems a little disjointed, hard on the heels of that other X-rated story, the beheading of the Baptiser. But is it disjointed, or has Mark the instinctive storyteller left us with a hint about human propensity for darkness and its contrast in eucharistic and justice-feeding?  Those terms need unpacking another time, but the mystical feeding on saving elements of body and blood and the justice-dimension of feeding the hungry bellies of community and world must never be separated.

John is more subtle: the passage before this is a contretemps between Jesus and the hypocrisy of the religious leaders: it is as if John were enacting that other much neglected biblical saying of James: “True religion is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained.” The entire Hebrew Scriptures would shout “amen.”

The reason liturgy came to be so carefully crafted in its current shape is to take us on a journey through our acknowledgement that we are not good enough, even if ironically it forgot readings about grace in its early centuries. Liturgy takes us through forgiveness and enacted reconciliation, for we can all be David and his rubber duckie fetish, all be greedy and destructive. The sharing of the Peace reminds us that reconciliation is never just abstract and vertical, with a distant God on a distant throne: that will be hollow until we recreate it in our horizontal relationships with our neighbour of present experience and even our neighbours of future generations. Talk about reconciliation and forgiveness will be dead like the religiosity of the Jewish elders in the passage before ours, dead until we do justice not only for those who we like but those who we find unpleasant, and those who we don’t know, and those who are not yet born (with all the implications of that challenge for rising sea levels and nonchalant abortion rates).

All the feeding miracles make it clear that God’s grace operates in crazy, over the top, over abundant ways. I have mentioned to some of you that this is why I insist that our administration of communion  does not recycle the last mean drip of wine in the bottom of a near dry-chalice, making that drip go round and round for the last many people, but is generous and abundant and crazy-superfluous. Ingestion of alcohol means that we probably shouldn’t go the whole hog of sacramental craziness (and the Corinthian correspondence from Paul makes it clear that some early Christians got this wrong too far that way!). Still:  we must attempt to avoid the implication that ours is a stingy faith of candle stubs and recycled wine dregs. Our cruets should always be crazy-filled before we start and our consumption of these good things of God at least symbolically generous.

But the feeding miracle is not only about the endlessness and manic-generous hospitality of eucharistic feeding but also about the justice-feeding of those who have nothing. Our giving for the food bank and our giving for offertory and our targeting for missions should be erring well on the side of twelve-baskets-left-over generosity, not can-we-afford-it calculation. I have not yet heard of a church community go bankrupt through generosity, but rather through mismanagement of morals and properties. We could do worse that to heed the recent words of Pope Francis: “You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That’s how prayer works.”

The gospel reading goes on to be about the storms of nature and of life and about the presence of God in them. As the globe warms and tides rise and Daesh expands and certainties wobble we might well understand that storms can be literal and can be metaphorical. We will leave for three years’ hence and for each Holy Week and Easter the unpacking of the mysteries of God’s presence in those wobbles, but for now we are challenged to take seriously reconciliation and forgiveness, grace and the mad generosity of God, and to hold that hand in hand with the challenge to be a people who are in Christ a people of forgiveness, grace and mad generosity. For we all have a little of the failed, foibled David in us. That’s why we don’t throw stones.

TLBWY

Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST  

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16

(19^th July) 2015

Readings:        

2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Psalm 89:20-17
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
           

As an internet junkie I watch with shame the demonic carry-on of those religious practitioners who perpetrate hatred in the name of Christ. The evil machinations of the Westboro Baptist Church, infamous for their picketing of the funerals of anyone who they consider to be less Christian than they are, are perhaps the most infamous demonstration of such bigotry, but to be honest they are no more than an extreme form of many such groups. Outpourings of hatred directed at various shades of gays, socialists, Muslims, and any form of liberal are de rigueur in some circles, and all attempts at intelligent engagement is curtailed with appeal to their version of biblical interpretation: the bible says.

It’s no wonder that such forms of Christianity have given fuel to the words “bibliolatry” and “bibliolatrous.” Confusion regarding the way in which the scriptures of our faith became “word,” or the way in which they may still be referred to as “word,” has led to fossilization and even deification of words that were never meant to be a rod for human backs, never meant to be set indelibly in the concrete corners of atrophied human hearts and souls. Jesus, who would often dig into Hebrew scripture, even asserting that he would never subtract from sacred Torah (Mt 5:18), while portraying himself as “fulfilment” of that pool of sacred thought, never saw himself as replacement for it. It is even more doubtful, and some liberal theologians would say tragic, that he expected a new set of writings, those we call “New Testament,” to come to be used as a weapon in religious and moral warfare. Jesus was no bibliolater; nor were any of the great characters of earliest Christianity.

 

Sadly that all changed, and the one who is Living Word, the Risen Lord, is often conveyed as God’s vehement nay-sayer to life. Scratch beneath the surface of the community that by and large no longer cares whether Christianity and its gospel exist, and if there were some strand of thought about us it would be that we are wowsers. We are, in Jesus’ own terms, the placers of millstones around the necks of those who want to live and love.

 

I say “we,” but wasn’t I speaking of the fundamentalists of the Deep South USA and their far-flung imitators? Few of us would endorse the bigotry or bibliolatry that pickets funerals of returning servicemen and women on the basis that they fight for a nation that increasingly tolerates homosexuals. Even members of the KKK have objected to Westboro’s filth-spewings, and it could well be argued that even mentioning them provides oxygen for their paroxysms of hatred. Few of us would endorse even a moderate form of anti-gay-activism, and most of us sanction an expression of liberal Christianity that is tolerant and all-embracing.

 

As an aside I might suggest that there are forms of liberalism within Christianity that are as intolerant as some forms of fundamentalism. There are varying forms of Christianity that assume a sardonic sneer if a visitor can’t find their way around a prayer book, believes that Moses wrote the first five books of the bible, David wrote the psalms, or Paul wrote Ephesians, doesn’t know the difference between a sursum corda and a prie-dieu, or a demi-cul and morendo,[1] and gets its knickers in a knot if someone comes to church with ear expanders, full body tats or a parrot on their shoulder. And it is precisely variations on a theme of this kind of exclusivism that we much search for within our own corporate and individual souls if we are to be a people of God who have genuinely “abolished the law” and “proclaimed peace to those who are far off.”

 

For our task as a people of “resurrection, life and hope” is to be conduits of radical welcome: “peace to those who are far off, peace to those who are near.” This will always mean welcoming that which makes us uncomfortable. It was encouraging to see Helen Jacobi on the news the other night reminding the media that St Matthew’s in the City is a church that will not turn away the homeless with sprinklers, as some churches around the world have done. But there are more ways than mere sprinklers by which to turn people away: our challenge if we are to be bearers of Christ-peace is to ascertain what there might be in our attitudes and behaviour that pushes away the troubled and the broken, the confused and the strung-out, the not-quite clean and the very unclean. If we are to be bearers of the leper-lover Jesus then we need to dig deep and ascertain what forms of leprosy in our community most unsettle and offend us, what discomforts us, what irritates us so much, creates so much noise in our heads, that we lose focus on the sacred things of God and worship instead at our own shrines of self-importance.

 

I don’t think we should give oxygen to the fuels of hatred-fire that burn in the bellies of a small number, perhaps three dozen ultra-fundamentalist and self-satisfied haters in down-town Kansas City. Westboro Baptist in a sense need not trouble us. Yet I fear there is more than one way to be a community that rigorously and assiduously rebuilds the wall that Jesus, according to the Paul of Ephesians, has torn down, the wall that divides the seeker from the saved. There can too easily be forms of Westboro Baptist in us, too, and we need to cry out to the God who heals and redeems so that they may be broken down, or we, too, will remains just a few dozen people, albeit a quieter few dozen people, on the edge of town. Where we strive for some kind of excellence but forget accessibility, where we strive for efficiency but forget fun, where we polish our liturgical and organizational and musical and other forms of operational machinery but forget the manic, mad warmth of the Spirit, then it may just be that there is a mote in our eyes disempowering our ability to remove the specks from eyes around us; if that is the case we are on the same sad spectrum as the Kansas human-haters, for we too are barring those around us from the love-touch of Jesus.

 

We commit violence to Mark’s gospel-account when we deconstruct his carefully crafted passages and remove his key point. In the missing verses from our gospel-reading there is the inconvenient truth of a Jesus who feeds the sheep who have no shepherd. Jesus has, in Greek, bowel-moving compassion on the seekers and the searchers, the hung-out and the strung-out. With all the statistics of loneliness and alienation and chemical dependence and domestic violence that leak into our lives from our giggle-boxes and other media every day we should be top of the pops in our desire to be a place of “resurrection, life and hope.” The fact that we are not may just mean that the walls Paul yearned to see torn down, walls that Jesus tore down, are firmly back in place. We need to seek God’s help to find out where they are, and the empowerment of God’s wild manic Spirit to tear them down once more.

 

TLBWY.

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[1] Or know the irony of Beethoven’s “Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso.” Sort of “have fun, but not too much fun”!

God calling

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST  

NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND
ORDINARY SUNDAY 14

(5^th July) 2015

Readings:        

2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10

Psalm 48

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Mark 6:1-13
           

 

 

We speak too often in church circles of vocation, or calling, as if there were blinding flashes, Pauline conversions, or voices in the night. For those who suspect the Dean climbed out of a loony-bin window it would come as no shock to know that I experienced no such cataclysmic awakening. Certainly my coming to faith was something of a struggle, albeit an ineffectual one, against the God I didn’t believe in, but from there the journey to the bishop’s door and ultimately to a very different bishop’s altar rail was a reasonably unspectacular one. There were stumbles and nudges along the way, but no epiphany, no voice in the night, no blinding signs on the road to Damascus. Just once, when I was picked up hitch-hiking south from Tauranga, there was an unexpected conversation with a half drunk lapsed catholic, driving home from the races more or less on the correct side of the road, chattering at length about his dream that one of his many sons would become a priest, and encouraging this stranger to think about it.

That aside, I suggest the calling of God dwells far deeper back in the divine construction of our whakapapa [back-story] and our DNA (the two not unrelated). What were the forces that coalesced to make a chaotic Arts student ready to hear that drunken angel’s message that May afternoon in 1979? For me there were various confluences of experiences and gifts, later tested through various trials of application, discernment, evaluation and training. Along the way there were mistakes and discoveries, joys and tears, and still I stagger on and will for a good few years yet. But this is not about me, not even about priesthood, not even about leadership, but about the gifts the Creator God sows into our psyches and our souls, into our stories and opportunities, our blind alleys and our sweeping open highways.

For “vocation” is not about wearing a collar backwards, but about growing into the person we are called to be. The gifts that wriggle their way through the helixes of our DNA are the gifts God has conjured up for us, and we are called to utilise them in ways that breathe light into the life of others, ways that midwife the coming Reign of God, ways that touch and transform the lives of those whose paths we cross. Paul, long before he wrote the bizarre passage that opened the epistle reading today, was adamant (as every good Jew was) that there must never, could never be room for boasting in the human journey. To boast, to the Jew, was to deny the source of our abilities and opportunities, to take to oneself the kudos that belongs to God. While some psychologists might suggest that ascribing the sourcing of talent to God belittles or downplays the human self, I suggest it is otherwise, that our perspective is maintained in an appropriate focus, and we are placed where we belong, far from the centre of the universe, enmeshed in the goodness and grace of the Creator who calls us into being. 

Having been called into being we are then called to grow into the person God longs for us to be. We are, in biblical terms, made in God’s image, but the variations on that theme are infinite. Personality profiling schemes like Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram give us glimpses of the variations of being human, the variations that Paul called “diverse gifts.” Collectively we bring them together and begin to represent the Body of Christ, despite our limitations. The “I”s and “E”s, “N”s and “S”s, “F”s and “T”s, “P”s and “J”s of a Myers-Brigg profile begin to resemble a community that can exist and proclaim and radiate divine love, and as we share those divine gifts we grow in interaction with one another and with the tasks and contexts God provides.

So, when Paul climbs down from the surreal language of hallucinations and visions he reminds us of something important. We are called into different roles with different gifts, gifts of administration and compassion and vision and application, of empathy and leadership and musicality and numeracy and skills of baking and carpentry and singing and big vision and small detail. We are called, as he wrote earlier to the Corinthians, to use the gifts to build up and not to tear down, to support one another and to be as Christ to one another and to the world into which God places us.

Paul wished often that he had gifts that he did not have. Perhaps he too was an administrative flibbertigibbet, perhaps he felt he lacked oratorical skills, perhaps he was physically or emotionally damaged in some way: it is not our business! The outcome though (as every Alcoholics Anonymous adherent knows) is that he knew he could not rely on his own strength, but was cast back incessantly on the guidance and goodness of God. It’s not a bad place to start, and one I have come to know well in the years since the then Archbishop of Melbourne placed his hands on my head, the ordination that was in turn nearly a decade after a half drunk catholic picked up a hitch-hiker on the way home from the Tauranga race track.

As we, to borrow the Alcoholics Anonymous phrase, “let go and let God” (which does not mean becoming vacuous and passive automatons), we create space for God to dwell and work in (the reverse of the holy process by which God, by withdrawing Godself from the universe, created space for the universe to dwell in). By knowing our own weaknesses as the place in which God can meet us, and our strengths as the gift of God for the service of love, we can grow into and even become the calling, the vocation that God entrusts to us. Individually and corporately as a cathedral people of God we are challenged to set aside, metaphorically at the very least, bread, bag, money, and above all ego, and simply allow the gifts of God to work in us and through us.

 

 

Amen.