SERMON
PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
of
St JOHN THE EVANGELIST NAPIER
ORDINARY
SUNDAY 26
(September
20th) 2015
Readings:
Esther
7:1-6, 9-10, 9:20-22
James
5:13-20
Mark
9:38-50
Take a vibrant, sexy heroine
(a sort of alpha female, a Katniss Everdeen or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer of
the fifth century b.c.e.), add a dastardly, toxic and malicious schemer
(Sauron, perhaps?), blend in a Dumbledore-figure, season with a political
buffoon (in which context I am not going to mention the fearfully disturbing
Donald Trump), and conclude with the triumph of good over evil and you’ve
probably got a best seller. As it happens the Book of Esther was so hot to
handle that the early compilers of the Jewish and of the later Christian bible
wanted to leave it out (it also fails to mention God, and the hero is not a
particularly good Jew, for she does not observe the appropriate rites and
customs of Judaism). In the end, though, popular opinion held sway, and this
vibrant tale became so important that it forced its way into the Canon of Jewish
and Christian Scripture, and in Judaism a feast day is even based on Esther’s
triumph.
The process is not unlike the
slow process towards official celebration of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
Merton’s integrity was so great that thousands today read his writings and
flock to his grave, but his dalliance with broad world-views and perspectives
led to his omission from the official US Roman Catholic calendar. It’s no
accident that Pope Francis named him as a hero of faith, alongside the equally
prickly Dorothy Day, in his address to Congress this past week. It’s not
unlike, either, the manner by which popular opinion is driving the conquest of bigotry and fear
with regards to matters of race, gender and sexuality. Popular opinion has
slowly driven new thinking, slowly by the grace of God and the winds of God’s
irrepressible Spirit, infiltrated the deepest recesses of Christian discourse,
even if the final ramifications of that journey will not be upon us for generations
yet.
Religious practitioners (and
not always the professionals) will often so sanitize the faith they once loved
that they leave it shamed and castrated, wriggling on the floor of human
awareness. James K Baxter had some very forthright things to say about
society’s emasculation of the God of love (which I won’t repeat in a
family-friendly liturgy), and Hone Tuwhare said similar things about the
symbolic neutering by pakeha of Māoritanga. We become guilty of it when we
treasure propriety and process above the mad manic winds of God’s zaniness; order,
niceness, and constructions of decency have again and again tried to silence
the witness of the Jewish and Christian traditions, not least in that fateful
time leading up to World War One when nineteenth century forms of Christian
liberalism reduced the gospel to being nice and loving your country.
Esther made her dubious way
back into the Canon of Scripture, perhaps more Dorothy Day than Thomas Merton,
and has inspired (particularly women) ever since. The actual factual
happenstances of her story are long since lost to us, and do not matter. She
has inspired others to greatness. That is why we need a doctrine of the saints:
those who rise above the humdrum and set imaginations on fire with the flames
of God.
The Jewish people found
inspiration in the story of this prickly, rule-breaking, protocol-ignoring
almost-outsider, inspiration during the times when their own slavish devotion
to rules and protocols and insider-protections began to fail them. These were
the times when they were as we are confronted with changing circumstances and
threats to their existence and ours. Esther’s Sauron or Voldemort-type enemy
met his come-uppance and was ultimately and literally hoist on his own petard,
as we heard.
Much Christian energy is
expounded on keeping things as they were. Esther utterly fails to demonstrate
interest in things as they were. She was not a particularly devout or observant
Jew prior to her development of a stubborn determination to stand up for
herself and, accidentally, for the fellow underdogs of the Jewish community.
Yet at great risk to herself she becomes the advocate and saviour of her
people. Esther, not an outsider, but a pretty decadent insider, suddenly
becomes the chosen one to serve the purposes of God. “Teacher, we saw someone
casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not
following us.”
Far too often we become the
Dolores Umbridge of the Christian narrative, waving our 8 inch dragon
heartstring and birch wands to ensure things remain safe, comfortable and as
they always were. If you have been following the James readings in recent weeks
you may be well aware that our actions of self-interest and self-preservation
have often demonstrated the opposite of Esther’s risk of self-sacrifice (Esther
4:16b), turning people away from Jesus rather than towards him. We can become
like Professor Umbridge: she is in Harry Potter as great a villain as
Voldemort. Strangely she has her counterpart in Zeresh in Esther’s story (see
Esther 5:10b-15). Like Professor Umbridge, we too often wring our hands in
despair and wish things were as they once were, and work to ensure they are as
they once were, while the Spirit of God blows on into God’s future.
The bearers of good news do
not wring their hands (or put their hands to the plough) and look longingly
backwards. Pope Francis’ friends Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton were possessors
of prickly volatility: so too were Hone Tuwhare and James K. Baxter. They were katiaki, custodians of taonga (treasure)
from the past, but that served as their keel or rudder (or both), and not as
the whole purpose of their boat. It was
as if something of the spirit of prickly but irrepressible Esther leaked into Day’s
and Merton’s and Baxter’s and perhaps even Tuwhare’s DNA and they too became,
whether they wanted to or not, whether they knew it or not, key players in
God’s birthing of the future. “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in
your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” “Us”? Another sermon dwells there,
methinks.
Our Christian communities
today are not exactly beacons of integrity on the horizons of the young. As the
Pope speaks out with a commitment to justice and compassion highly reminiscent
of his chosen namesake Francis of Assisi (both, it seems, possessors of the DNA
of Esther), some Christian communities of the American and American-influenced
religious right draw lines in the sand and depict the pope as some form of
Marxist anti-Christ. His doctrine is in the end little more than commendably
orthodox catholic, though perhaps we can save that conversation for another day,
too. Other Christian communities make pronouncements on a grand scale, big
picture depictions of gospel-responsibility, but ultimately forget to notice
the small picture beggar at the door whose need may be no more than a cup of
coffee and a piece of bread.
Pope Francis, we might note
this week, left the echelons of niceness and had lunch as best he could with
the urban poor of Washington, leaving the rich and the powerful theorists
reeling in his wake; this of course is the same man who has kissed the
disfigured faces of war vets and disease survivors, who has replaced papal
limousines with Ford Fiestas, and opened up papal apartments for refugees. “Whoever
gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by
no means lose the reward.” Or, as the Archbishop of Canterbury tweeted this
week, “The more the Church cares for the poor, the more people recognise it for
what it is: the Jesus movement.” To that, as we are possessors of both
Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the Beatitudes, we might add “The more the
Church cares for the poor in spirit the more people recognise it for what it
is: the Jesus movement.” In both cases we are called to check to see how wide
open our doors really are.
It may be that it is the
absent young who are stridently telling us how we might be bearers of Christ
and his Resurrection-hope in our community today. The morality they have been
finding for a decade and a half in Harry
Potter and The Hunger Games, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Matrix, Avatar, in re-visioned Narnia
and Lord of the Rings narratives may
well put our often self-interested narratives to shame. Only some of those
narratives, though, hint at the great and irreplaceable dimension that Jesus tells
of at in his response to the self-interested disciples, and which we lose at
great peril, the dimension of judgement.
For while Tolkien only hints,
Rowling hints, Lewis hints at a dimension of otherness, and hinting is their task, we lose sight of
the judgement of God at great peril. The risk for us as liturgical Christians
is that we can become so obsessed with the preservation of order and propriety
that we forget that the Jesus who we proclaim with our liturgy was a divisive
figure, was a discomforting divider of wrong from right, of self-interest from
compassion, religious hypocrisy from self-sacrificial goodness. We can spend so
much time having lunch on Capitol Hill (or wherever) that we forget to serve
and eat with the poor, so much time keeping things as we remember them that we
forget the God who is birthing things as they will be. “Salt is good; but if
salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?”
It is up to us, then, to turn
again and again to the God who in Christ will (as we will later sing) “land us
safe on Canaan’s side.” We are challenged to turn to God to forgive us where we
have been more Haman than Esther, more Umbridge than Harry, more closed
fortress than madly, eccentrically open community of welcome and embrace. The
good news? God hears us as we say we’re sorry and welcomes us back to the mad
and glorious dance of resurrection-faith of which the silly things we do in
church are a playful foretaste. “Have salt in yourselves” says Jesus – or maybe
it was Mark but either way with a twinkling eye because it was a silly thing to
say – and then adds the un-silly “and be at peace.”
The peace of Christ be always
with you.
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