Lazarus danced

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER

FEAST OF ALL SAINTS

(November 1^st) 2015

 

Readings:

Isaiah 25:6-9

Psalm 24:1-6

Revelation 21:1-6a

John 11:32-44

 

For me, to hear Revelation 21 is stand at my own funeral. All we would need is to hear the triumphant strains of “And Can it Be?” and perhaps the clichéd but profound affirmations of “Amazing Grace” and I would know that was where I was. In fact I wonder often if the dead are present at their own funerals; not necessarily that we are “looking down from up there,” though that’s a good a metaphor as any, but that when it comes to be our turn we are being there, being aware, as C. S. Lewis put it (and as I quote ad infinitum!), that “at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read.” Let me tell you, if I have to put up with endless strings of repetitive and inaudible speeches I will personally break out of my coffin and kick some butt!

Well, no I won’t. We don’t have that option. Death to our finite, miniscule perspective, is inevitably a firm and inescapable full stop. It is so much that that now, when as human beings we like to think we’ve got the universe under control, we no longer die. We pass away, pass over, but never die. We are passed or gone to the other side, chooffed off, left the room, but never dead. Humankind, said T. S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality, and the reality we most bear is the reality that our lives and even loves are temporary, and in their temporal state hang by a thread.

I have mentioned in this place before the night when I was called out to pray for and bless still-born triplets. I have told in this building the story of the week I spent on a riverbank, sitting with a grieving family as they waited for the swollen waters to toss out contemptuously the body of their son and brother. I haven’t told, but now do, the time I stood with a family grieving the death of a son and brother who ultimately self-immolated because he had been the victim of years of shame and contempt and domestic violence. I have told the stories not to be a hero in my own narrative, but because that is what we are challenged to do as bearers of what Richard Gillard refers to as Christlight. We are called to do this – and especially those of us who wear our collars back to front are called to do this – not because we big note ourselves, but because deep in our DNA is the hope and even tenuous experience that God is bigger than the suicide of a shame-riddled husband or the death of triplets or the death of a bravado-fuelled teenager shooting a swollen weir when he should have been at school.

All around us last night children trick or treated in that horrible emulation of the worst of US hegemonic cultural imperialism, trick or treated because the feast of All Hallows’ Eve reimaged as ghoulishness and horror is more entertaining than the deep Christ-centred belief that can love can speak of a hope beyond the grave, even though death’s seemingly final embrace must be traversed first. The great Christian hope of resurrection, the great Easter hope of eternity, is too silly to embrace, but ghouls and sulky spiders are not, and can be triumphantly commercialised (as can Easter) by those great bastions of capitalism gone wrong, the lolly manufacturers.

However silly it may be we are left with the message of death and spiders and distorted pumpkins, or as poet priest R.S. Thomas put it, left in the place where a spider scuttles from the dry chalice:

the priest would come

and pull on the hoarse bell nobody

heard, and enter that place

of darkness, sour with the mould

of the years. And the spider would run

from the chalice, and the wine lie

there for a time, cold and unwanted

by all but he, while the candles

guttered as the wind picked

at the roof.

                        From R.S. Thomas, “Poste Restante”, in the collection Laboratories of the Spirit.

 

Is the community a place where death and ghoulishness have the final word, and indeed the church no more than a place where wizened prayers and dried up faith replace an “amen” of hope?

Our task is to say “no” in answer to that question. Our task is so to practice the presence of God, sometimes even believing six impossible things before breakfast, as Lewis Carroll’s White Queen famously put it (or put something!), so to practice the presence of God that God’s “yes” breaks through the short-sightedness of our human perspective. Our task is to continue to embrace the hope of the new heavens and the new earth that dwells at the climax of John the seer’s apocalyptic vision. Our task is to embrace and practice its promise until it begins to subvert the clanging voice of rationality and to whisper its own still small voice of hope despite everything.

Our voice is challenged still to speak these words of hope when we are confronted with the tiny bodies of dead triplets laid out on a white sheet, or when the swollen dead body of a miscreant teenager is lifted from a river, or the bodies of unlucky, desperate refugees wash up on the beaches of the lucky countries of the world. Our challenge is to breathe hope – sometimes when we don’t even feel it ourselves, like the fumbling priest of Thomas’ poem, or Grahame Green’s whisky priest in The Power and the Glory  – to breathe hope so that a grieving family can pick up the pieces and cling to a sliver of belief that life still has meaning.

For me there are some tiny, irrational reasons to do so. Somehow the early Christians were so filled with the spiritual presence of the Risen Lord as they broke bread together that they were transformed to proclaim resurrection hope against all odds, sometimes costing them their lives (sometimes costing Christians their lives today, as well). I might call that a liturgical and scriptural reason, and it is one that breaks into my experience, too, from time to time.  

I am persuaded too (because once I was an atheist) that if I were to believe in a God at all, then that God, as St Anselm put it, had to be greater than all conceivable things, greater than death and suffering and war and ecological collapse, greater than a Roman Cross, and greater than my own death. I have clung to that knowledge even when the chalice of faith has been bitterly dry, and spiders have run from the rituals of a Sunday gathering or the echoing corridors of a hollow church.

But finally I am persuaded too because there are times when the embrace of the living, death-conquering, risen Christ is, above all odds, firmer than the sneers of self-sufficiency and rationality that surround me in the discourse of media and even the daily discourse of byways and church corridors.  Sometimes, probably just sometimes enough, amidst the turmoil of struggling to follow Christ, a voice commands that a heart-tomb’s massive door be rolled away and life be called forth from a dry chalice, and hope be born again, proclaimed with the words “unbind him, and let him go.”

I suspect Lazarus danced, that day.

 

The peace of Christ be always with you.

On the road, hearing other voices

I was on the road in the USA for the last two weeks, having my own sort of Jack Kerouac experience. Here then are links to the two outstanding sermons that I heard.

The first was at First United Methodist Church, Wausau, Wisconsin. The preacher was the Rev'd Gerald (Jerry) Morris. Jerry, born in Riverside California, is an Old Testament scholar, a children's author (author of the much loved re-tellings of Arthurian and other medieval legends) and pastor of that church.

Jerry's Sermon was the last of a series of sermons exploring the meaning and significance of the Bible. The earlier sermons are also available on the website of  First United Methodist, Wausau.



Later, after road-tripping out to Denver and back to Chicago, I attended St Augustine's Episcopal Church in Wilmette, Illinois.  There the preacher was assistant rector Fr Bryan Cones, formerly of Knoxville Tennessee. Fr Bryan's sermon reflected on impaired vision as it might affect the faithful ...

enjoy and be challenged.

How sadly turn away

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER

ORDINARY SUNDAY 26

(September 20^th) 2015

 

Readings:

Job 23: 1-9, 16-17

Psalm 22:1-15

Hebrews 4:12-16a

Mark 10:17-31

 

 

There is something deeply sad about the man who rushes forward to embrace the way of Christ, only to turn away from the invitation to come, to follow. To be so near, to be all but on-board the train for which, as the song puts it, “You don't need no baggage, you just get on board,” but then to walk away disconsolate, is a deeply oppressive image. I’m not of the “climb on board or burn in hell” school of theology, but have (most of the time) no doubt about the life-transforming benefits of the embrace of the Risen Lord. There is undoubtedly so much that can stop us feeling the life-changing embrace of Christ. There is undoubtedly so much, as the Parable of the Sower reminds us elsewhere, that lead us from the warm embrace of the Risen Christ into nothingness. There is, as the Parable of the Seven Demons reminds us, so much than can darkly replace the warmth of the Risen Jesus when we walk away, but that is not what Jesus is addressing in this sad story of a man who finds it all too much before he even begins.

This man is so close to the liberating embrace of Jesus, but the lure of the fast lane is too great. Jesus of course goes on to address the immediate question of the hold that riches has on this symbolic man, but there are a myriad bright lights that blind us to the gentle candle of Christ-light. How hard for those with wealth, says Jesus, and the obscene image of the world’s wealthiest devouring the life blood of the poor might have us rubbing our hands with conspiratorial and delighted agreement, but if we look only the material wealth of the zillionaires we may end up embracing no more than an eager socialism of jealousy, and drown from our own consciousness any awareness of the “How Hard It Is” gaze the risen Lord turns on us. How hard for those with wealth, sure, and that may well in international terms include us, too, but I think on the whole most of us think that it applies to others, and the laying of guilt trips about our place in the richest 2 per cent of the world will not open the recesses of our hearts to the life-giving Spirit of God.

But there are other How Hard It Is scenarios, too, and it is not only the rich man who walks from the embrace of Jesus.

How hard it is for the self-assured. I think primarily of those awful caricatures of Christianity who are so conceited in their hotline to God that they have no hesitation in condemning to hell those of us who are flawed, uncertain, imperfect, racially or sexually or culturally or bodily-functionally Other. We have spoken here before of the outrageous arrogance of the tiny but disproportionately arrogant Westboro Baptists in the USA, picketing the funerals of those they do not like.  But what of we in the highly erudite and educated Anglican churches, who will often deliberately or inadvertently look askance at those who don’t know their way around the prayer book, or who are less well clothed or educated or showered than we are? How hard it is for the self-assured.

How hard it is for the nonchalant. For those who faithfully cling to old routines and comfort zones of faith, knowing that they’ve served us well, knowing that they will more or less see us out if we can be bothered to keep practicing them, but caring little about the changes that must be made if new generations and cultures are to be embraced by the healing, forgiving, restoring love of Jesus. How hard it is for the nonchalant.

How hard for the cynical, the burnt-out, the all-wise and knowing. Yes, we might say from our position of intellectual superiority, I too used to believe that sort of stuff, but of course now know that it isn’t so. A bishop once told me he was tired of burned-out post-charismatics looking to him for preferment in his diocese in order to resuscitate their flagging ecclesiastical careers. How sad when we look back on those liberating days of charismatic ecstasy, days when the love-touch of Jesus was an immediate and life-changing phenomenon, when we look back though not with deep joy at the on-going caress of the heart-warming touch of God’s Spirit but with dry satisfaction that we know so much more now and have left that nonsense all behind. How hard for the cynical, the burnt-out, the all-wise and knowing.

Yet Jesus is not the purveyor of bad news. The wondrous dance of the one who is Lord is not a fire that spluttered and died twenty or two-thousand years ago, but a mad joyous dance that still goes on. For mortals, says Jesus, it is impossible, but not for God. I think of the wondrous fertile souls whose eyes light up still after seventy or eighty or ninety or more years of faith. Their prayers still reach out into a universe that they know remains deeply saturated with the presence of God. Their prayers still reverberate in the mysteries of a universe, still seem inexplicably to midwife change in the circumstances and situations prayed for. Sure: not always, or the hearts of terrorists would melt and global warming stop henceforth. But inexplicably, subtly: as the Archbishop of York put it, the more people pray, the more coincidences happen. For those who enter the dance, who join Sidney Carter’s Lord of the Dance, the more the universe seems to hint that despite everything, the dance goes on. How embracing the gospel is for the dancer.

How embracing the gospel is for the tenacious (even sometimes those who are tenacious only by the fingernails of faith). For those who against all odds manage to keep whispering into the ear of God, and whispering with or without words into human ears about God and about the mysteries of the Risen Christ. I think again of the mystic Bernard de Clairvaux’s heart stirring words:

Be thou my consolation, my shield when I must die;

remind me of thy passion when my last hour draws nigh.

Mine eyes shall then behold thee, upon thy cross shall dwell,

my heart by faith enfolds thee. Who dieth thus dies well.

To live is to practice for death, and occasionally as a priest I am privileged to enter the dying space of those who have been embraced by the dance of faith, tenaciously held to it even by the finger nails of faith, and died singing love even if the song is silent. How embracing the gospel is for the tenacious.

How embracing the gospel is for the joy-filled eternity breather – for those who realise how ever difficult it may be that the myopic depth of rationalist, empirical vision is not the dwelling place of God. I’m told I use big words so let me make it clear: how hard it is for those who will not see past dull. For there, just beyond our small brainwaves dwells the mad, manic dances of God that I have spoken of before, the dance of the deity who flings Andromeda and Ceres and black holes and a ladybird’s wing across the interstices of space. How embracing the gospel is for the joy-filled eternity breather who sees the poetry of God writ large across the universe. How embracing the gospel is for the joy-filled eternity breather.

And how embraced by God we can be as we set aside our wealth (comparative only though it may be) and our self-assurance and our nonchalance and our cynicism and in our spirits join the dance of the Spirit, the dance that makes Jesus known to us, the dance that waters the dry bones of desiccated faith, the dance that can dervish-whirl, first becomes last and last becomes first whirls us through all the despair and suffering that saturates our newscasts, the dance that can renew our bones so that we become conduits of hope and peace and justice here in our lives and our town and wherever God calls us to dance.

Dance then, wherever you may be, said Jesus. But the rich man walked away. We though are invited still to dance:

“Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

 

 

The peace of Christ be always with you.

The Powerlesness of the Child

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST NAPIER
ORDINARY SUNDAY 26 (September 20th) 2015

Readings:
Job 1:1-2, 2:1-10
Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16

There is much syrupy teaching about the child as portrayed here in the presence of Christ. Most of it stems not from biblical analysis but from a Blakean, Romantic notion of childhood innocence.

 

 Blake’s poetic perspective is that children are innocents, wide-eyed and sweet, lamb-like, and that it is only as they transition into adolescence that they begin to slip outside their Eden, and begin to transition into wild-eyed monsters, more tiger than lamb.

 

Blake’s and the Romantics’ world view contains a modicum of truth, but little more than that.  Those of us who can recall the sleepless nights of infant raising, and who have (as one friend of mine once put it) placed a baby or toddler just a little bit more firmly on the change-table when it comes to the fourth or fifth nappy change in the wee-small hours, we might well question whether an infant is totally innocent und un-manipulative. Parents might after months (or in my case years) of sleep-deprivation side instead with St Augustine, who knew very little about children, but was so paranoid about processes  and results of human procreation that he was adamant that the child is a bearer of the mark of the devil from the moment of its conception.

 

Neither is a biblical perspective. Neither Blake’s nor Augustine’s is the perspective of Mark when he tells of Jesus’ response to a child placed in his presence: “let the children come to me” Jesus said, not because they were icons of innocence (like Blake’s “little lamb”), nor because they were beacons of intellectual inquisitiveness, as Plato and Aristotle recognized millennia earlier, but because they were amongst the most powerless in society.

 

In other words the one who will soon on the Cross reveal the full extent of divine love precisely in powerlessness, a victim of brutal betrayal and tyrannical oppression, takes a powerless being and tells us “this is how you must be.”

 

The implications of this are profound for us if we claim to be followers of Jesus. If I sometimes seem unimpressed by the behaviour of Anglican and other church bodies that still enact an old and no longer relevant paradigm of attempting to moralize from positions of assumed importance it is not only because I believe those are ancient and long-dead paradigms, but because they were wrong in the first place. Anglican synods especially expend an awful lot of hot air composing motions directing governments to do this or that, and church leaders and lobby groups still despatch missives attempting to tell politicians of the Right and the Left what they should be doing. We do not need to have advanced degrees in political theory to know that politicians have a well-designed round basket-ware receptacle for such directives.

 

Which is not to say we should do nothing. It is, though, to say that we need to change our lenses. If there has been a large though still incomplete shift in international discourse about refugees in recent weeks it is no accident that it began (more or less) with the shattering image, as I have said here before, of the dead child Aylan Al-Kurdi. Aylan was not an innocent in any metaphysical sense, nor was he guilty in any sense. He was utterly powerless, trapped in the tectonic shifts of politics and peoples, of clashing ideologies and civilizations, of economic opportunism and oppression. Ayla was trapped and killed by these and a myriad more “principalities and powers,” politicians and people-smugglers and arms-dealer and mercenaries to whom he, like the child in front of Jesus, was no more than flotsam and jetsam.

 

At this point we are given an insight into that magnificent force that we call people power – the power of non-violent protest and discourse. Suddenly after Aylan Al-Kurdi dies, with his mother and brother, suddenly career politicians changed their language of the current crisis from language of queue-jumping, language of implied voluntary migration, to the language of suffering human refugees in desperate need. God knows why it took a little boy to tell them what countless millions already knew, but sin is like that. (As an aside we might question whether the discourse of our American friends with regards to guns will ever change, or whether they will; stay for ever locked into a Wild West paradigm of rights to bear arms at will: “how many deaths,” Dylan asked 53 years ago, “will it take till he knows  that too many people have died?”).

 

We are privileged to take part in the great world-wide opening of eyes, calling on governments for compassion and direct action for those who have fled horrors beyond our imagining. But, while Jesus was speaking about human action for justice, he was also drawing on a greater, cosmic canvas, that too often drops out of our consciousness. He was speaking of the eternal injustices of sin, and the eternal reconciliations of redemption. His words, as recorded by Mark, were set down after he had passed from death to life in the greatest of non-violent justice-actions, the first Easter. His words are part of a story of the conquest of that greatest injustice of all, the injustice that death apparently transcends life and love, the injustice that says “no” to the dreams the Al-Kurdi family had for their children, the injustice that says “no” to the eternality of love as relationships die either in death or in irreconcilable breakdown.

 

He was then and is now still placing our life stories into his own, as the author of Hebrews puts it, going before us as one who is “like us.” He was and is placing our lives into the context of his own, picking us up as hitch-hikers on the doubt-conquering and injustice-conquering and death-conquering journey of his own life “through the curtain.” To change the time-stamp of the imagery he was and is inviting us to join in his eternal life-story as one goes before us, who paves the way for our own inclusion in the “yes,” the eternal presence of the God who creates hope and life and love and does not allow sin or death or injustice of any form to have the final word. He was inviting us to journey with him.

 

He was embracing the child because the child was powerless, as we too are powerless against the vastness and emptiness and seeming injustice of history and the universe. He was saying “come,” because “no” is not the final word, and you are invited into the yes-breathing eternity of God’s love and justice. Though we cannot see it yet he was offering good news even when political machinations seem lost, and the earth we are hell-bent on shutting down appears to be in its death-throes.

The peace of Christ be always with you.