Trump's Tower: harbinger of divine displeasure?

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL
of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER
3rd Sunday in Lent
(February 28th) 2016

Readings:
Isaiah 55:1-9
Psalm 63.1-8
1 Corinthians 10.1-13
Luke 13.1-9

As one colleague mused to me over the past week, the readings today are ghastly.  To some extent the musings of Paul and the story told by Luke wrestle with one of the great questions of faith: where is God when all turns to custard? But they are part of much longer constructions, and it’s like one of those literary or music exams when you are given a tiny slice and asked to explain the passage in the context of the whole document. Paul seems to be wrestling with what is known as theodicy, where is God was nasty things happen, but we might ask today if a natural disaster is a direct action of God, or whether tragedy is not a part of a far deeper and more complex web of sin. Perhaps Isaiah’s redirection of emphases is closer to the mark: “why do you spend your money on that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy?”

 

I’m not a party political animal, or at least not from the pulpit, or I might ask serious questions in the context of this passage about New Zealand governments who spend allegedly millions of dollars on canvassing support for a new flag, US political structures that spend billions selecting one or another narcissist or big business bunny to run their nation and the world, or Australian governments that refuse even and at the very least the overtures of a New Zealand government to show a miniscule of compassion to the world’s most vulnerable people. As narratives of hatred grow on the continents north of us, and may yet grow on our own angelic islands, I have wondered aloud if we could call down a bit of a key-hole nuking display by the God who in Luke’s and Paul’s first century eyes causes towers to fall and serpents to munch on the lives of the unpleasant.

 

But it is Isaiah who this time provides a deeper perspective, an easier passage if you like that does not need thousands of words or musical constructs to explain its own significance.  Seek the Lord is the kernel of his message, and the message of the two or three figures we call Isaiah: seek the Lord so that whatever befalls you the Lord will embrace you with the warmth of love that transcends all injustice, all suffering, all failure.

 

Paul and Luke knew something else, of course. They knew that the Lord and the search for the Lord is malleable and pliable in human hands. Seek the Lord, but as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are demonstrating on that other scary side of the world, the temptation is always to find, instead of the Lord, a reflection of our own bigotries, and name him or her as God. To some extent, as Freud and other psychologists rightly or wrongly made clear, we all do. The challenge is to make sure that our infantile longings do not become the sum total of our faith: that when we seek the Lord we seek not a figure recreated in our own image, but revealed only and exclusively in the cruciform shape of Jesus the Christ.

 

Which means what? For Paul, and I fiercely believe he is the theologian par excellence of the gospel, it means that the whole self-sacrificial, justice proclaiming, love-challenging birth and teachings and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the be all and end all of all that we need to know of God.  Jesus, as he is made known to us in word and breaking open the word, and sacrament and saturation in the sacraments, is the litmus test as to whether we are recreating an infantile fantasy in the sky or are being challenged and transformed, individually, lovingly, then collectively by the immeasurably great Creator.

 

But this God of the Cross is no namby pamby infantile pet. This God cuts down fig trees. By this neither Luke nor I mean that God strolls around nuking those who don’t get it right. Were this the case I could fairly confidently say that the verbal vomits of Donald Trump would have been silenced years ago. No: just as the intricacies of creation become greater with almost every scientific discovery, so the machinations of God’s dealings with humanity become more and more intricate with every analysis. I suggested last week that Trump and his hatreds may well be the endgame of a western world – not just the USA – that has long since forgotten how to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with its God, and is now being surrendered by that same God to the crushing fall of a tower – symbolically even Trump’s tower – of self-interest and greed. As economies and ecologies collapse we are seeing a world handed over to the hardness, the sclerosis of its own heart as we the West spit on the bodies of refugees and desecrate the environment of vulnerable species.

 

Similarly in the crumbling of church infrastructures, administrative and physical, we are seeing ourselves broken because of our infantile fixations on shibboleths, on self-preservation, aesthetic and administrative excellence, our obsession with being the hospital with no patients of Yes, Prime Minister fame. Like the first century Temple, whose fall Jesus foresaw, we must all but certainly fall, metaphorically, before in the dark time that will come we can be again the light of the resurrected Christ.

 

But we – or our successors – will be that again, for the promise of God was and is always “I will never leave you or forsake you.” Individually we may feel that God has left or is leaving the building, but God has dropped enough hints that this is not so, and it needs only our cries to bring divine light back into your heart, my heart, and the hearts of the world around us. God is faithful, and will not let us be tested beyond our ability to endure; the way out of the time of trial though may well begin on our knees, where the Spirit of God can again make her whispers heard.

TLBWY

Hugging the pig stinker

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER

2^nd Sunday in Lent

(February 21^st) 2016

 

Readings:

 

Genesis 15: 1-12, 17-18

Psalm 27

Philippians 3:31-35

Luke 9.28-36

 

It is a brave, or perhaps narcissistic person, who sets themselves up as an example to imitate. Yet Paul, in writing to his beloved Philippians, does just that. Was he a narcissist? Probably not, or his arrogance would not have generated the love that ultimately ensured his correspondence was handed on and has lasted two thousand years. Was he a fool? He suggests that elsewhere, and is not afraid of the title. But perhaps even more than that he sees himself to be increasingly, as his life of struggle goes on, a person saturated with, taken over by who he knew to be the risen Christ.

He knows that presence within himself through the strengthening he has received in daily life, in witnessing and working in often hostile contexts to proclaim the one who met him on the Damascus Road. In that conversion experience he began to receive a lifelong transformation of his being, his selfhood, his essence. He has known the presence of Christ in struggle, toil, tragedy, in fellowship and study and worship. As he writes what was probably his last long letter, writing in the shadow of at least the possibility of execution, he does not doubt the Christ who has seized and is transforming him.

He writes his last known longer letter to the Philippians, a people he has grown to love dearly. They have stood with him and supported him in journeys of trial and of horror. Unlike the Corinthians and the Galatians, these Philippians have grasped and lived by the gospel they and Paul share, and he draws strength from the knowledge that the risen Christ is continuing to work within them, transform them, and build them up for whatever lay ahead of them.

But he had left them long since. While Philippi and its Christ-bearing community had been a place of sanity and refuge for him, he had not felt called by God to rest on in his comfortable place (Semantic shift, the shift in the meaning of words, has ensured that the words “comfort” and “comfortable” have made a massive migration of meaning since the days of Book of Common Prayer). Like Andrew, James and John, accompanied by the this-time-stern Jesus, Paul had to come down from the sociological mountain top and return to the places of danger. He did so, as the other apostles had, and all except John paid for the decision with their lives. Perhaps in another way John did too.

That of course is as it should be. The crucified God of the Cross asks nothing less of us. We can gloss over this, but each day some of our sisters and brothers around the world risk their lives for this crazy inexplicable faith we share. The roll call of recent martyrs that some of us heard in the Ash Wednesday liturgies reminds us that, while there may be comfort in the Christ we serve, that comfort is not comfortable in the lamentable contemporary sense of the word. The comfort of Christ and Christ’s Comforter-Spirit is not an arm-chair of complacency, but a vocation that is comfortable in the ancient sense of the word, drawing strength alongside and into us as we face whatever dangers pass our way.

Jesus and his closest followers come down from the mountain. We must. A recurrent theme of Jesus’ teachings is that of avoiding the temptation to hold on to or look back to past days of glory. Lot’s wife, traditionally, was turned to a pillar of salt as she hankered after the safety and security she had left behind, but Jesus’ warning are only slightly less dramatic: shortly after this passage in Luke’s narrative Jesus will un-ambivalently warn his followers “No one who puts their hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Whatever the Mount of Transfiguration experience was, and the language is too surreal for us really to fathom it, there was no staying there. However cosy Paul’s experience of the Philippian Christ-community may have been, there was no staying there. However majestic and safe the glory days of Christendom and of Anglicanism’s part in Christendom may have been, there was no staying there. However majestic the glory days in which churches and cathedrals were constructed throughout the world and throughout the centuries, however majestic those days, there was no staying there, and the Spirit of God chose to drive Christ-bearers into different times and places.

For us then, as a people of God, there is no complacent security on the mountain top of past experience. We as a people of God are being driven out of contented rest on the laurels of former days. Fiscal, sociological, geological and meteorological forces, to name just some, are the tools of a God who is driving us down from the safe places of a Mount of Transfiguration, with its tabernacles of cosiness, the glories of a past, down to a future warmed by God’s footprints but indecipherable to us. Just as God allowed Cyrus, the brutal civic leader, to be a tool of reformation of Isaiah’s complacent people Israel, so God is today handing a New Covenant people over into the ramifications of our own self-satisfaction. The horrible and hopefully not to be realised image of a Donald Trump presidency is a warning of what we may birth, of what even now in Yeats’ words may God forbid be slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

This, though, is a global north, a former western world matter, not merely a US matter. There are many more Donald Trumps around the corporations and clubs and churches of the world. Such beasts may be born if we don’t rediscover the core business of Christians humbling ourselves, of Christians worshipping with humility, of proclaiming and doing justice in our local community and our global community. Such beasts may be born if we don’t rediscover the core business of Christians permitting the hurting and unclean and unpretty to sleep on the couches of our hospitality, of welcoming God’s hurting hungry people into our midst with every fibre of our individual and corporate being, our planning, our strategizing.

It is a brave, or perhaps narcissistic person, who sets themselves up as an example to imitate. Paul did, because he was so broken, so opened to the Spirit of Jesus, that as he put it elsewhere, it was no longer he who lived, but Christ who lived within him. As a people of God we are commissioned, as we say each week, to re-member – that is to knit together, to member together again in our midst – the radical, compassionate, welcoming actions of Jesus the Christ. We are called to recreate – in reality to permit God’s Spirit to recreate – in our worship and actions the irresistible welcome and embrace of the God who wrapped a pig-stinking prodigal in divine arms. We are called to be touched, our hearts strangely warmed, our attitudes changed by that God, and then to continue that embracing mission in the streets outside. We are called in Lent to say sorry to God where we have failed to hear that invitation, to receive God’s mercy, and then practice that inviting mercy with our every fibre in church and community.

By the grace of God may we be conspicuous by so doing.

 

TLBWY

The hour I first believed?

SERMON PREACHED at THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL

of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, NAPIER

5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

(and last before Lent)

(February 7^th) 2016

 

Readings:

 

Isaiah 6:1-13

Psalm 138

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Luke 5:1-11

 

The entire relationship of God’s love for both the Hebrew and Christian chosen people is a story of unexpected and unmerited encounter between God and ordinary and sometimes plain awful human beings. Jewish theologian Jonathan Sacks over again reminds his readers that the Hebrew – we must extrapolate for the Christian – people of God were and are not a particularly spectacular or important or deserving people: far from it! They and we are simply a touched people – and I use that phrase with total awareness of the nuances of the word “touched.” They have however been burdened with the commission to, as Sacks puts it, “brings heaven down to earth” (To Heal, 37). As a people privileged to be in relationship with the Creator, as a people touched by a celestial vision, they and we are called to be conduits of a story that is not merely local and immediate but universal and eternal. Those who have been touched by God must radiate compassion and justice and above all love, so that their faith becomes, not, as Marx thought, the opiate of the people, but endless energised protest against meaninglessness  and emptiness and injustice, exploitation and oppression and extinction. When the people of God become that – and occasionally they do, the catch in the net in the deep water can be immeasurable indeed.

The challenge for us is to believe and grow into, with our hearts, what we profess with our minds and lips. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians he was painfully aware that the people of God were playing games with their new religion, strutting around in the Corinthian community with claims and attitudes of self-importance, self-obsession, and religiously sanctified arrogance. Like the phylactery-wearing hypocrites Jesus warned about in the marketplaces of the Holy Land, the Corinthians were wearing neon signs, drawing attention to themselves, reciting the mantra “aren’t we good.” Aren’t we good at public speaking, aren’t we good at sexual freedom, aren’t we good at staging magnificent love feasts in which the powerful rejoice in the finest food and the vulnerable are left at the bottom of the heap, picking at the leftover scraps of faith. Some were even pronouncing their allegiances to founding figures as a badge of honour: “I’m particularly good because Apollos brought me to faith … ah, but I am better for Peter converted me …”. Some even claimed Paul as their talisman, their banner, and he was not amused.  I’m particularly good because I do this in the church, and don’t I do it well, and isn’t it good that all that we do is so polished and refined.

Paul was apoplectic with rage. Our somewhat lame translations of his correspondence often neuter the powerfully un-Anglican language that flowed from him. Just go castrate yourselves, he told another group of opponents in Galatia. What makes you strut around parading your superiority, your polish, your expertise, your social standing, he asked again and again. And again and again he reminded his Corinthians that he by contrast was pretty darned unremarkable: a lousy orator, an unattractive figure, a former bully and head-kicker, perhaps literally, who only became an effective follower of Christ when he surrendered all pretence of polish, skill, importance or honour. Only when he recognized the degree to which he was a failure, desperately in need of the touch of the risen Christ Jesus, did he or could he become a vehicle of meaning, of love, of righteousness, the channel of peace that his spiritual doppelganger St Francis would pray to become centuries later.

Psychologists might not like it, but there is an immeasurable degree to which we must learn that same lesson. Was I brilliant as a teacher, lawyer, architect, priest for decades, brilliant in administration or oratory or pastoral conversation or art or intellectual insight, at music or dance or hospitality or creativity? Have I given away my riches to this cause or project, given away my time to this programme or foundation? It is as dross – the word Paul uses is not repeatable in church – unless it is utterly surrendered to and indeed sourced by the Spirit of God. It is as dross unless our single focus is that of proclaiming with every pore of our being and every action of our doing the resurrection of the Jesus by whom our lives are given purpose, transformed, redeemed, even “saved.” Paul wanted no adulation or paycheque or sycophantic followers, but only to know that he was a conduit of the Good News of the Christ who conquered death.

Of course none of us will ever achieve this saturation of focus. We all, as Paul reminded that other group of recalcitrants in Galatia, fall short. What he does ask is that we remember that we fall short, that we remember our inadequacies, that we remember that, without the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ we are mere flotsam and jetsam in an empty universe. Yet at the same time we are challenged to recall and make known again and again to ourselves and to those with whom we rub shoulders in the body of Christ, to make known the warmth and energy of the embrace of the Christ who meets us in worship and fellowship, who touches and transforms and exalts and redeems us. We are challenged by Paul to remember the warmth that we experienced, as John Newton puts it, the “hour I first believed”, the warmth that elsewhere Paul describes as a “holy kiss,” or the warmth of “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” We are challenged to ensure that the hot breath of the risen Lord still circulates in our lungs of faith. If we have lost that energy of faith or lost that compassion of care then we are challenged with the Corinthians to repent, to turn back to God, to be renewed in the transformation of our minds.

We are challenged to be grasped again in what we believe. If our experience of the love-touch of the risen Lord has dwindled, as poet R.S Thomas put it, to no more than a spider scuttling in a dry chalice, then we need to seek the revivification that only comes from the risen Christ. If in our fierce intellect we have rationalised the central event of the resurrection of Jesus, the event that transformed the fire-breathing Paul, If in our fierce intellect or rationalism we have made of resurrection no more than empty words and symbols, then we need to seek the revivification that only comes from the risen Christ. If we are no longer awestruck, electrified by that news, compelled by that encounter to go out and rumour that news of resurrection, then we are, as Paul goes on to put it, no more than a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If we do not demonstrate by our Christ-infused love for one another, for those around us, and those beyond us, but instead count the mean butt ends of our candles, administer the last dry sip of wine to a gaggle of expectant recipients, or worry more about the state of our buildings than the hunger of hearts that may enter them, then we are, as Paul goes on to put it, no more than a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal, and we must all, as Lent reminds us, turn back again to the energising Christ of the first Easter.

If we get that right, encounter the risen Christ, be embraced by the risen Christ, embrace the risen Christ in one another, warts and all, then we may just find our net is cast in unexpected depths, and that it draws in an uncountable plenitude of the goodness of God.

May God help us to turn and turn again, as T. S. Eliot put it, this coming Lenten season, so that we can in this and each of our places, public and private, know the place anew, as if for the first time, and be seized once more by the joy of the risen Lord.

 

TLBWY