Shhh, don't tell

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE
and at All Souls’, Morven
SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY (22nd February) 2004

Readings:   
Exod 34.29-35
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3.12-4.2
Luke 9.28-36

Our gospel passage opens with Luke referring to former sayings of Jesus. Luke crafted his Jesus-account carefully, and places the Transfiguration event into the context of Jesus’ very challenging and uncomfortable demands of his would-be followers. Peter has just come up with the astounding insight that the wandering teacher Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah of Judaism: you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus has, as we too well know, responded with the equally astounding “Shhhh, don’t tell anyone.” This is strange behaviour for one whose task is to be known and to be recognized and to be proclaimed.

With hindsight of two thousand years and with our experience of hearing innumerable sermons we know the reason: Jesus would not allow Peter and the others officially to say anything about his identity until the full extent of the reach of divine love was revealed on the cross. It is in that great and painfilled cry of dereliction, or in the darkness that falls across the face of the earth at the moment of Jesus’ dying, that the full extent of the Jesus-event is revealed (however metaphorical the latter description might be). This is love that reaches even to the extent of those who cry out in God forsakenness, even to the extent of those who dwell in utter darkness. Such cannot be seen by Peter and the others in this moment of the story, as Peter reveals his insight into the identity of Jesus.

So Jesus responds to Peter’s insight in a manner that makes sense – with our hindsight. He begins to talk about suffering and about death and about the way of the cross. The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. It is a poor advertisement for the benefits of knowing and receiving Christ. But then our perspective shifts, and we find ourselves joining Peter on a remarkable encounter with God, high up in the mists of Middle Eastern mountain. It is the sort of encounter that would turn a hardened sceptic into a true believer. It is the sort of encounter most of us have never had.

Which is precisely why Peter gets it wrong. "Lord, it is good that we are here." In a sense there’s no denying that: an encounter with God, however terrifying, is not a bad thing to experience. But Peter wanted to tabernacle there, to remain there, keeping God as a mountain top experience, keeping God as the privileged insight of a select few. God will not play ball. Luke in fact is polite: "And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen." Matthew and Mark make it quite clear that the garrulous Peter, James and John needed very clear and stern instruction from Jesus to ensure that they took to heart Jesus’ earlier “Shhhh” and applied it to this encounter too.

That is why we have this reading now as we prepare to enter our Lenten journey. There is a sense in which we need, if we are going to undertake a disciplined Lent, to be reminded of the light at the end of the Good Friday tunnel. The great and impossibly unexpected joy of Easter is devalued and trivialized if we don’t recall something, even some small portion, of the cost of it. At the same time Easter’s dark prelude needed only to occur once: we remember, and even re-enact, re-present the events of the journey of Jesus to the Cross, but we need never undergo its darkness in full. We know the resurrection hints. [At Charleville: In a sense we know that Dimity will emerge from the waters of baptism, the waters we will shortly remember as “the dark waters of death,”] We need to know that we will pass through the waters of baptism from death to life, the same waters as those remarkable liberating waters of the Exodus of which we heard in the first reading and the psalm We need to know, for we need to know the God-breathed meaning to our lives that God’s Easter surprise brings us.

So as we begin our Lenten journey we are given a glimpse of the surreal, beyond-words encounter with God that lies ahead. We join, momentarily, Jesus on the mountain top. But we are called to step down and to begin a journey towards Jerusalem once more.

TLBWY

Not I, but Christ

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE
and at All Souls’, Morven
FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY (8th February) 2004

Readings:

Isaiah 6.1-13
Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15.1-11
Luke 5.1-11

A week ago (in 2004) some of us were encountering that best known of all Paul’s passages, the hymn to love: faith, hope and love, these three, and the greatest of these is love. In all Paul’s writings, and especially in those moments in his writings when he breaks in to the telling of his own story, his emphasis is on grace, charis, the idea that the encounter with God is not and is never earned or merited. This understanding lies at the very heart of Paul’s faith and action and teaching: we cannot earn our way into relationship with God the God of Jesus Christ. Or, to put it another way, it is and always is God only who makes the move in the divine-human relationship. This was the profound understanding that broke into his consciousness as he met the risen Lord on the Damascus Road: not I, but Christ.

As a result of that new focus, and of the joy of the encounter with God the God of resurrection, Paul recognized that the Christian community must be a community of love. He recognized that such love could not come from human effort: human love could be profound, but the deepest, profoundest love could only come by emptying the human self of selfhood, and opening to Christ, to the crucified but risen Messiah. Not I, but Christ.

Love was to be the advertisement of the truth of Jesus: they would know the truth of the gospel, Paul knew, by the quality of love. For as long as the people of God were a powerless people, as long as they sought to present Christ without the barrel of a gun, that was the case. It was when Christianity became powerful, became a state religion, that it lost much of its credibility and, ironically, its power to transform lives. In the great missionary expansion of Christianity it was the authentic missionaries and martyrs, those who touched lives by the quality of their love rather than the power of their politics, who genuinely transformed God’s world. Not I, but Christ.

So, in the twenty-first century, we are forced back to a position of powerlessness. Our history is partially one of the abuse of opportunity, and, worse the abuse of power. We became a dominant religion, expecting if not forcing those around us to believe. We expected our children to believe because we had believed, and often, tragically, forced our faith upon them. We disciplined them to go to church, disciplined them in church, and were surprised and perplexed when the controls broke down in the 1960s, and they left in droves. Yet this is a God-given opportunity. Not I, but Christ. We cannot force others to believe, nor force ourselves to witness: Not I, but Christ. We can only be faithful to the Christ within us, and pray, and live to Christ ourselves.

By so living – and by familiarizing ourselves utterly with the habits of faith – we can become the advertisement for Christ that Paul asks us to be. Our acts of worship are, in part, the telling of the story that was the key to the early spread of the gospel. Paul boils the story down to its basest ingredients: For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared.

By our words, that is, by our story-telling, and by our actions of love, compassion and justice, which are a part of the story of Jesus itself, we become advertisements of Christ. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” We are to be as Isaiah, aware that we are inappropriate bearers of God, but leaving the rest to God. With Paul we learn to exclaim “by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.”

In the twenty-first century we have little choice – we live in a world persuadable by love, but unpersuadable by power plays and power games, or by neon displays of phoney power. So we proclaim and so you have come to believe, says Paul. So be it.

TLBWY

Skipping from Damascus

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE
and at St. Luke’s, Augathella
FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY (1st February) 2004

 

Readings:      

Jeremiah 8.1-3, 5f, 8-10
Psalm 70.1-6, 15,17
1 Corinthians 12.31-13.13
Luke 4.21-30

 

To Paul there could be no understanding of the gospel other than that which he had first encountered on the Damascus Road. There he had met, in vivid fashion, the risen Lord, Lord of the same Church that he, Paul had been rigorously persecuting. To Paul these Christians had been corrupters of his Judaism. There and then, on the road to Damascus, he had realized that his life of brutal obedience to the Laws of his Jewish faith, commendable as they were, were insufficient. There he had first encountered the words that were to be his motto: my grace is sufficient. Subsequently, during fourteen years of reflection in the region that he called “the regions of Syria and Cilicia,” he had internalized those words. He did not reject Torah, but rather recognized that his brutal subjection to it had in itself become a form of slavery, far removed from the liberation that his ancestors had received when God their Creator and his had set them free from the sweat yards of the Egyptian delta.

Perhaps we have all known Pauls. Ironically the Christian community, too, is full of them 2000 years later. Their adherence to the routines or to the appearances of Christian faith is beyond reproach. Their knowledge of the scripture or the traditions of the church can leave us feeling pathetically inadequate. Their attendance at every function of the church community might leave us feeling cavalier by comparison. They are known and respected in the wider community for their obvious Christian qualities. Yet somehow their faith leaves us unmoved when we encounter them; they represent in some way Christ without a smile, God without compassion. They leave us feeling smaller than we were before, sometimes dangerously smaller.

We need to get this right: there are others whose every moment is involved in the activities of the church, or whose knowledge of scripture or tradition is unparalleled. They, by contrast with the hypothetical dry-Pauls however, leave us feeling inspired, enriched, and the better for having known them. It is not their activities but their graciousness, their Christlikeness, that inspires us. Where that Christlikeness is informed by immersion in the depths of faith all the better and all the further removed it is from the dry and slavish religious obedience that had been the hallmark of the pre-Damascus Road Paul.

Paul was forced over and again to defend his understanding of the gospel. Vividly recognized on the Damascus Road, it had been honed in those fourteen years of retreat and reflection of which we know no more than that they took place. His was a fierce mind, and that his knowledge of the traditions of his people was, as he would put it with characteristic immodesty, second to none. But his encounter with the risen Lord had swung him from a fierce sense of his own adequacy in relationship to God to an equally fierce sense of his own inadequacy. It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me. Others wanted to correct his understanding of the gospel, changing it either into a very twenty first century western world gospel of “if it feels good do it” (Corinth) or into a very severe and loveless repeat of Paul’s own former Jewish obedience (Galatia).

Brutally he fought for the gospel: the Corinthians were new agers, rejoicing in freedom to exploit and live a me-now gospel. Peter, James and others had become Judaizers, ignorantly trying to turn Paul’s Damascus Road encounter with the Risen, joy-bringing Lord into a new Judaism, a new and rigorous set of laws. Paul would have neither.

And so always, as should be the case wherever and whenever we proclaim the gospel, Paul emphasized the grace, the underservedness of the encounter with the risen and healing Lord Jesus. Grace was always at the heart of all that he said or wrote. But grace is often an invisible sign of the workings of God:  sacraments, some of you will recall, were to be an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. The inner workings of grace are, as Paul knew so well, just that: inner. These are inner transformations, invisible to the neighbour who, thank God, cannot see our deepest struggles.

But there had to be a sign, and Paul was powerfully aware, with all the early Christian community, that there was. That sign was to be the quality of their love. Did their lives proclaim love that transformed injustice, loneliness, and all the other trials of human existence? If not then their lives were not being opened to the grace-working activity of the Spirit of Christ. But where they were opened to the grace-working activity of the Spirit of Christ the resurrection power of God would be inescapable. And so, in all Paul said and wrote, there was a litmus test: what is the quality of their love. For Galatians and Corinthians especially the answer was clear: we fall short of the qualities demanded by this great passage, the hymn to love. And where 21st century Christians have floundered that again has been the answer: we fall short of the qualities demanded by this great passage, the hymn to love.

So for us the challenge is the same as that faced by Paul’s many opponents. My grace is sufficient. Can we learn to open our lives to the challenging but transforming love of God, the God who takes us out of the driver’s seat?

TLBWY

 

God, when cattle are shot in the sun?

In my new capacity as an ex-dean and ex priest (I'm not heavily into that "for ever after Melchizedek" stuff) I will start a retrospective of sermons from my past lives. Occasionally when a historic or geographical reference needs explanation I'll annotate them but otherwise I'll let them be. I hope they are as encouraging for you to read on your journey of faith, un-faith or ex-faith as they were for me in their gestation and birth.

As they say in the pizza trade: enjoy ...

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, CHARLEVILLE
THIRD SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY (25th January) 2004

(my first sermon as priest in charge of Charleville,
together with Quilpie and the far south west of Queensland)

Readings: 

Nehemiah 8.1-3, 5f, 8-10
Psalm 18.9-10, 15
1 Corinthians 12.12-30
Luke 1.1-4, 4.14-20

There is a sense in our time of doom and gloom surrounding matters of faith, or more particularly Christian faith. Statistics tell us of the decline of the mainline churches, both in terms of influence and of attendance. We are often reminded that the fastest growing religions, at least statistically in Australia, are “no-religion”, atheism, (the two are different), and that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. We the Church have taken something of a drubbing in recent years.

Add to that sense the realization that our world, and particularly our rural world, is one of rapid change in make-up and in values and these become times of uncertainty indeed. A glance around many of our churches, rural or urban, a glance at the ages of our congregations, and we don’t need to be Einstein to figure that the future is not all sun and roses. It has been encouraging to note in our short time of exploration here in Charleville that this last observation is not altogether the case here; there are young faces, young families, young musicians to be seen, not least of all on Friday night, but we all know that there are many young people around us who know nothing of the Jesus story, let alone of the mind blowing complexities of our worship and of the rhythms of our faith.

There is, as the great Hebrew Preacher said, nothing new under the sun. The Hebrew people had come, through combinations of complacency and hardship, to forget the narratives and practices and challenges of their faith. They had forgotten those other words of the Preacher: remember your creator in the days of your youth. Or in the days of your prime, or the days of your aging – though the habits of remembrance are best established in the days of youth. They had forgotten the narratives of faith.

It was fascinating, even in relatively God-ignoring Australia, that in the weeks following September 11th there was a marked if temporary upturn in church attendance. It was as if those horrific events, played in dramatic detail again and again on our television screens, reminded us for a moment or two of our vulnerability and of our mortality. Could we have been one of those who leapt from the towers in a desperate attempt to escape the flames? What horror did the plane passengers experience? For a moment there was nowhere to hide. The tragic Bali bombing momentarily halted us once more to renew a sense of vulnerability, but after the live pictures of New York the after-the-event pictures of Bali seemed tame, unless we knew someone there, and our anaesthetised state was barely interrupted.

Since then of course we have had the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the litanies of lies and selective truths, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and we are immortal once more. It is easy, some would say even necessary, to blot out the fragile nature of our existence.

Farmers are never far from that harsh reality. Drought, flood, and market forces leave those of you who live most exposed to what St. Paul called the “elemental spirits of the universe” very aware of your vulnerability, and, as Lyn reminded us on Friday night, of the vulnerability of your livestock, shot as an act of mercy to save them from the ravages of Queensland drought. Farmers, sailors, and one or two others live very exposed to the elements. For them, for you, the narratives of faith can often ring more true than for those of us anaesthetized from the elements. But still the changes in our community have often been bewildering, and the narratives seem not to speak to us, or at least to our descendents, any more.

There is nothing new under the sun. The two great Hebrew leaders, Ezra and Nehemiah, recognized that their people had become complacent in their attitudes to their Creator God. Risking the wrath of the population they reminded them again and again of the challenges and demands, as well as the benefits of the Torah, the Law. The community eventually recognized the claims of God upon them, redressed their wrongs, and turned once more to the demands of God. The Jewish people continue to this day to celebrate this time of mass repentance with the Feast of Tabernacles, celebrated then by Ezra, and today impregnated with the memory of the repentance sparked by the challenges of Ezra and Nehemiah.

We as a people of God could spend the time that is ours and God’s bible-bashing our neighbours into belief in God and in the things of Jesus. It is however unlikely we would achieve a great deal. We can instead rally ourselves to a remembrance of the values and of the urgencies of God. Nehemiah, and, like him centuries later, Jesus himself, reconnected their own lives and the lives of those around them with the values and the expectations of God. Perhaps the “reconnections” of Jesus were not so much a reconnection as a re-enactment or reemphasis or re-arrangement of the Godhead inter-connections, rearrangements essential to his now being human. Nevertheless he stood amongst the people and began his public ministry with a restatement of the values of God. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, to proclaim…. That same Spirit challenged Ezra and Nehemiah to challenge their people to reclaim the values and the urgency of God. We are challenged like them to reprioritize to reconnect, to share together in the joy and the exhilaration of knowing God.

To do that we must work together. We must find again and again together the encouragement of our faith, our scriptures, and our fellowship. We must pray together, laugh and weep together, worship and act together. The bishop spoke at my induction on Friday of the green growth that has startled us once more since last fortnight’s rains, followed up in some areas by further rains in the past 48 hours. These, amidst all the hardship that you have endured in recent years, are reminders of the possibilities of God. We must learn again and again to be a people who give thanks to that God our Creator, to work together in demonstrating to those around us God’s compassion and love, and to be, even when we are not reminded by horror stories such as those of September 11th, a people of penitence and compassionate action in our community. To that task we are commissioned together. My task and Anne’s now is to learn how best to aid you in that journey to which you have long been faithful, to encourage you and journey with you as God’s future enfolds.

TLBWY

Prefigurement of grot exposure

SERMON PREACHED AT
THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, JANUARY 8th 2012
(BAPTISM OF CHRIST)

Readings:    
Genesis 1.1-5
Psalm 29
Acts 19.1-7
Mark 1.4-11

If you were to journey within your Tardis to the time when the first witnesses to the resurrection began to tell their evangel you would discover very quickly the truth of Paul’s ringing dis-endorsement. With deep feeling he describes the gospel as a ‘stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Cor. 1:23). Despite our western obsession with comfort, security, church growth and the demon ‘relevance’ – which I flagged on Christmas Day as an obscene distraction from the gospel main-game – there is no such sense of self-absorption in the first century. The early Christians had experienced, first hand or in the words and worship of their faith-neighbours, a life changing experience, the resurrection of the one they came to call the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. At the heart of the message that was changing their life was the incomprehensible news that a crucified criminal was God, and that in his unexpected victory over death hope for all humanity was born.

If Paul described this as ‘stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ it was because it was. No Jewish person was readily going to accept the idea of a crucified Messiah. Paul’s Deuteronomy-based reflections in Galatians on the cross as a tree, on which, if a person were hanged, they would be cursed (Gal 3.13) were at one level a little tenuous, probably a shorthand version of a sermon he had preached (perhaps more than once!) during his Galatian sojourn. But there is no doubt that alongside the naked shame and bodily impurity of a crucified criminal was not the place a Jewish person would hang out looking for a Messiah. To a Greek – that is to say any Roman Empire non-Jew – the problem was similar: gods might conceivably hang out in human-like form but were not subject to the laws of suffering and death. What’s a nice God like yours doing hanging out on a cross was a likely Jewish or Gentile response to the unattractive gospel of Jesus Christ.

The complexities of the humanity and divinity of Jesus the Christ were worked out in the era after our scriptures were collected and sealed as canon, though it is clear enough that the earliest Christians were scratching around to find words and images that conveyed their experience that this was the case: the crucified human was divine. As they gathered in worship they knew that the one the disciples had known personally was powerfully with them – released in space and even time through the events we know as resurrection and ascension. They knew, too, that the whole of his life had meaning – including some of the events that puzzled them. There may be some of those we don’t know about – his life of love, his favourite foods, his skills or otherwise at carpentry. There are other awkward events that they do reflect on: what was a nice God doing receiving a rite of ‘baptism for the forgiveness of sins’?

Generally we refer to the sinless nature of Christ – a reference driven as much by theology as by biography. Jesus in life and death was soon identified in various senses as a sacrificial lamb, and the influential sacrificial practices of the Hebrew people demanded the purity – effectively sinlessness – of the victim. Whether Jesus did naughty things or not (and we might wonder at his lurking around in the temple for an extra day as a precocious teenager!) his identification with and transformation of human sin is such that he came to be described as sinless. Whether he did naughty things or not, whether he thought naughty thoughts or not, Christians soon saw Jesus as the means by which God entered into and redeemed sinful human nature.

This though was not inconsistent with what we might dare to call the ‘history of God’. God – if we accept that God exists, and since we’re reading this I assume most of us do – is the God of surprises. The very act of creation, in its immeasurable timelessness, is an unnecessary and wanton act of love. God, in what we might call triune community, triune perfection, has no need to share time, space and eternity with any other being. There is a Greek word dei, no doubt present in every language, which we these translate with the clause ‘it was necessary that’. But nothing is necessary, nothing is binding upon God. It is not necessary for God to create an other with whom to share divine, divine joy, divine eternity. Yet God is love, and love chooses to share.

Love makes us vulnerable. If we love we are likely to weep. If we love we are likely to feel moments of intense pain as well as unquantifiable joy. God does not need to weep, yet in opening the heart of God’s existence up to an Other, in flinging creation across nothingness, in peopling at least one planet with fallible humans made in the divine image, God is opening the heart of God to suffering and pain. God does not need pain, but it is in the risk of love to choose pain where pain will touch and transform the lives of others.

God does not need to suffer. Yet the God who flings stars across the empty vault of heaven has chosen and will always choose to suffer in order to redeem. The baptism of Christ prefigures, foreshadows the later entrance of God in Christ into the very deepest depths of human degradation. This is not a ‘had to’ but a ‘will always’: the love of God will search (and I would add eternally search) for the lost sheep and enter into suffering to bring that sheep home. It is that which Jesus enacts as he enters into the waters of human sin: it is that which he will complete when he enters into and transforms the murk of human death. This does not protect us from suffering, from sin, from death, but transforms our darkest moments into the light of resurrection and eternity.

The baptism of Jesus in the Jordan then, is the prefigurement of all that he will go on to achieve and make available eternally to us. The baptism of Christ in the Jordan, where in orthodox art he is often depicted as leaving behind the grot of human existence, is the prefigurement of resurrection.

TLBWY

We interrupt this scattercast ....

We interrupt this scattercast ....

Please note: as I am not currently practising as a priest or preacher I will revisit old sermons, which I hope will be of use to readers, reflecters and searchers ...

I will try to bring them into liturgical year sequence as soon as I have access to my files (in a few weeks' time, I hope!)

It is to be hoped (I guess) that normal transmission will one day resume.

In the mean time though, here's one (forthcoming, after this posting) from 2012 exploring themes of God's exposure in incarnation to the grot of being human ...

Kia ora

Kia kaha

Arohanui