SERMON PREACHED AT
THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALANDTHE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL OF St JOHN THE EVANGELIST
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16
(19th July) 2015
Readings:
2 Samuel 7:1-14aPsalm 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.
[1] Or know the irony of Beethoven’s
“Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso.”
Sort of “have fun, but not too much fun”!
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