sandals in the clouds

KAUWHAU  at TE POU HERENGA WAKA O TE WHAKAPONO

(SOUTH NAPIER)

SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION (May 28^th) 2017

Readings:

Acts 1: 6-14

Psalm 68: 1-10, 32-35

1 Peter  4: 12-14, 5: 6-11

John 17: 1-11

If you live in a busy world not ruled by church dates and festivals, by the lectionary, then like me you probably missed Ascension Day last week. Since my, for want of a better word, departure from liturgical ivory towers, many events in the church calendar have passed me by. But I always had a theology that said I was privileged to say liturgies, pray and praise and lament on behalf of others too busy or too disinterested or too remote to do so. That was my job in Christ. Now I’m one of the others, and that’s okay, too, however annoying it might have been!

But I love the symbolism of the Ascension even if I missed the day.

We have no idea what happened, in factual terms, between Good Friday and Ascension Day. The scriptures break into mystical poetic language, language of mythology. This is not the language of lies, as many would suggest in our post-Enlightenment, so-called rationalist age, but language of love and poetry and mysticism and mystery. The scripture writers had only words, and words were not enough.

What they knew was that what happened between Good Friday and Ascension Day was worth living and dying for, however imperfect we might be. What happened between Good Friday and Ascension Day is what has inspired Christians, like the 28 or so martyred in  Egypt yesterday, choosing to live and die for Jesus. 

Nor was what happened between Good Friday and Ascension Day some abstract intellectual indulgence to be thrown away in the twenty-first century.  What happened between Good Friday and Ascension Day was not something to be sneered at because we think we’re smarter than first century Christians. I see that happening in countless circles of Christianity in the world, and particularly in Tikanga Pākehā circles of New Zealand, today. To adopt that attitude is to become a clanging gong, a meaningless sound, a beacon of emptiness in the cacophony of a dying earth.  To adopt that intellectualist attitude is to become a slave to meaninglessness and to empty the pews of faith.

As an aside I was told when I went to the cathedral that of course the resurrection was true. I got that, until the speaker went on to explain that the resurrection happens every spring, when daffodils reappear, or when the cherry blossoms bloom, or when a baby is born after a family has experienced bereavement, or someone gets over a crisis. Wonderful though those matters are, they are not the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the cold tomb of Joseph,  nor the liberation through space and time of all that Jesus was and is that Ascension last  Thursday and Pentecost next Sunday symbolize.

Because the Ascension, whatever happened (and I tend to have a more Doctor Who image of Jesus fading into time and space zones beyond our access, rather than his sandals hanging from the clouds as he heads skyward, but whatever) – whatever happened it was

• beyond human words, and
• the release of the man Jesus back into the eternities from which he had stepped nine months before his birth at Bethlehem.  

So words are not enough.  

The readings we have, beneath the veneer of actuality  – (the word we gave in broadcasting to the sound effects we put behind a voice to make it sound as though the interview were happening somewhere “real”!) –  the readings we have are the readings of love. Love for the risen ascended Lord who gives strength even in the darkest deepest times of trial. 

Even in the times of trial when we can no longer feel Christ-touch or see Christ-love and light, that touch and love and light is there, holding us. Even sometimes when we feel we are sliding in a vortex of despair, or being crushed by the weight of sorrow. Even when, as one hymn writer put it, “when human hearts are breaking under sorrow’s iron rod, there we find that self-same aching, deep within the heart of God.”  

Even when assassins gun down a busload of Christian pilgrims, men women and children, in Egypt, as happened yesterday, or hatred murders young concert- goers in a British city, there God is, and there the resurrection-life wrought in Jesus is, and the resurrection life begins.  Even when the leader of the free world seems to be leading the world into a spiral of meaninglessness, there God is, and the promise of resurrection and the new heavens and new earth that are foreshadowed in the Ascension, these do not fade away.

Resurrection is not the blooming of the rata or the kowhai or the pohutakawa, however wonderful they might be, for they are merely magnificent cycles of  the Creator’s gift of nature, granted to us as a taonga to preserve. Resurrection is not  the return of deciduous leaves that will eventually come after this winter.  It is the bursting out of death of the one who conquers all death.

The Ascension, inseparable from the Resurrection, is not some conjuring trick or a week narrative ploy by a naïve first century writer. The Ascension is an “Amen” to the Resurrection, as Jesus of Nazareth is released from the limitations of space and time.

Next week we will celebrate Pentecost: that too is an amen, for in the coming of the Wairua Tapu we receive  our assurance, receive  the ability to live the beginnings of resurrection life, wherever and whenever we are. In the coming of the Spirit we are empowered to know the risen-ascended Lord in our hearts (as our Pentecostal friends , at their best, remind us!). In Ascension and Pentecost we are empowered to journey on our way to God and God-filled eternities.

Ascension:  beyond words, but in the words our scriptures give us we glimpse by faith and by poetry the inexplicable, liberating Jesus through space and time, so that all who live and die live and die in his unending, undefeatable love and light.

Amen.

candles and bombs

(from 15 years ago)


SERMON PREACHED AT St MARK’S, CASINO
and at St. John’s, Rappville
FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
(28th April) 2002

 READINGS:
Acts 7.55-60
Psalm 31.1-5, 17-18
1 Peter 2.11-25
John 14.1-14

 

After Moses died, Joshua stood with the Children of Israel on an embankment overlooking the Promised Land. Between the children and the land of plenty lay the River Jordan.  When the Seekers sang the song “We’re Moving On” that we’ve just heard they were adopting the language of the Negro spiritual. An oppressed people, the American Negroes, adopted the imagery of the Old Testament people of God – not the modern State of Israel – using the Jordan as a metaphor for death, longing for the liberation, the freedom, awaiting them on the other side. They had little else to hope for.

Sadly such a longing can be used to keep a people oppressed. Where their only hope is pie in the sky, and their oppressors care little for pie, or little about judgement, their longing for a better hereafter can be a means to keep them from getting too uppity. They can be threatened with the wrath of God: God gave me power over you, and if you speak out against me then you speak out against God. The tyrants of history, including sexual abusers, have kept their underlings quite and submissive with such threats.

It takes a brave slave to realize that Joshua’s vision across the Jordan River was not one of quiet submission to a vile overlord, but the result of God’s liberation of an oppressed people. God heard the cries of the Egyptians’ slaves in the Nile Delta, and led them from Egypt to the Promised Land. While we might argue for a long time about the relative underdog status of Palestinians and the modern State of Israel, it seems to me that when Israel looks at the relatively powerless people of Palestine down the barrel of their tanks and black hawk helicopters they are assuming the role not of the children of God but of the Egyptian Oppressors. Consequently, while no excuse can be made for the acts of suicidal terror carried out by Palestinian extremists, the State of Israel should not be confused with the people of God. Neither should it rely on or receive the support of misguided Christians.

But why talk about Joshua, when he appears in none of our readings? It is no accident that the names “Joshua” and “Jesus” are one and the same in Hebrew. The new Joshua, Jesus of Nazareth, is himself troubled in spirit, though he encourages his listeners not to be. He knows that his followers have not yet seen the powerlessness that lies at the heart of the Way of the Cross. Judas Iscariot expects a military overthrow of the Roman oppressors. Peter has boldly claimed that he will follow wherever the new Joshua-Jesus leads. But Jesus knows that liberation from oppression, while it may sometimes involve the miraculous overthrow of tyrannical or corrupt governments, will never be merely political change or military overthrow. The way across the Jordan of death into a face-to-face encounter with the loving-but-judging Father is not the way of bombs but the way of peaceful protest.

It was the unarmed Rosa Parks[1] sitting on the Southern buses that overthrew the apartheid of the American south. It was the peaceful process and advocacy of sanctions by Desmund Tutu, Nelson Mandela and others, not the guns of the ANC’s revolution, which overthrew the tyranny of South Africa’s apartheid. In the end it will be neither the hatred of Osama bin Laden nor the bloody retaliation of George Bush that brings hope for the future, but the way of peace represented by candles and doves and non-violent action.

Even in the horrors of yesterday’s massacre in an Erfurt school-yard,[2] revenge would never bring reconciliation or peace: only the candles and the tears will serve to give birth to hope in that shattered school and village.

So at one level, when Jesus told his followers of a heavenly house with many mansions – many rooms, we might say – he did so with great sorrow. They were expecting little more than a political overthrow; in the passage immediately preceding ours it was this kind of revolution Peter was foreseeing: “Lord I will follow you always.” Thomas and Philip, in our passage, are equally wayward of the mark. But while fighting sometimes brings peace, as our Anzac services reminded us this last week, that peace is only a shadow of its potential if it is not accompanied by the active search for justice.

Where Mugabe can turn his jealousy and hatred on whites and Asians in Zimbabwe there is no peace. Where the children of Malawi are dying of starvation in their landlocked country, there is no peace. Where the most frightened of the world are paying corrupt people smugglers their every last cent for a dream of freedom, only to become the victims of campaigns of lies in a western, so-called Christian nation, there can be no peace. And where there is no peace, the “pie” of a heavenly mansion may be beyond reach. For that reason Jesus’ heart was troubled, even though he encouraged his listeners to be untroubled. Would they hear his call to justice? Would they hear his call for radical compassionate love? Certainly not until they saw the radical extent to which his compassion reached – the radicality of Cross and only-then resurrection.

Joshua stood at the Jordan, knowing the invitation was his to cross. The Jordan subsequently became a metaphor for own crossing from life to death to greater life. It is an invitation of which we should not be complacent. It is an invitation dependent on our preparedness to act for justice and love in our lives and the lives of those God places on our hearts.

TLBWY

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_school_massacre

Be holy - whatever that is

This from this liturgical Sunday 12 years ago!

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE

FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

(17^th April) 2005

Readings:

Acts 2.42-47              

Psalm 23                     

1 Pet. 2.1-10               

John 10.1-10              

We noted in passing a week ago Luke’s concern to emphasize the seamless unity of the Christian community, and the unhindered wave of conversions that swept across the Roman Empire. But Luke didn’t only emphasize the spectacular. He emphasized too the humble and the powerless-strange, the simple actions of breaking bread together, on what we might call sacramentality.

Peter too had a vision and an experience of a growing church. He writes as a pastor to his people, but he writes always also as an evangelist, believing that as his people stand out as a people of God, they will attract their neighbours to the way of the Cross. The outcome he expects is the same that Luke expects from wonders, signs and preaching – the conversion of those who do not believe.

To this end that Peter makes allusions to baptismal rites and reclothing: “reclothe us in our rightful mind” as one of the great hymnists wrote, likewise alluding to the ancient practice of reclothing a baptized person in white as they emerge from the waters. Peter is writing to a Christian community in which believers are being ostracized for their faith. He believes that persecution is a cause for joy, a sign that the Christian community is standing in the footsteps of Jesus. We are called as a people of God to live as strangers in this land, for we are citizens of another, far off country. Our behaviour is to be exemplary – a recurring theme in early Christian writings – for we are always an advertisement for the way of the Cross.

Only our motivation for behaviour differs from community. Ours is to be a motivation en-souled in new life, in our pilgrim status, and in our desire or others to experience the Christ we serve. Peter expects us to be longing for God’s gifts. He expects us to thirst for knowledge of Christ made available to his people primarily in preaching, but to us two millennia later in the process of breaking open the word not only in preaching but also in biblical study (logikos has implications of preaching and breaking open the word) and koinonia, fellowship. His mention of having “tasted that the Lord is good” may be a eucharistic reference in the same way that reclothing is a reference to the rites of baptism.

But Peter believes there is what we might call a conditionality of faith. We are God’s people in so far as we behave as an exemplary community: where we are overcoming differences and showing compassion & justice for each other and for the wider community in ways that are greater than those of  the amongst whom we are called to dwell, then we are being the people of God. But where we backstab or gossip or nurture old hurts, and where we run each other down, then we are ceasing to be advertisements for the risen Lord, and are no longer the people of God. Where, as he puts it, “malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander” dominate our existence we have failed in our vocation. These are the ingredients most likely to destroy our witness and our credibility. This is what Peter is building up a case that climaxes at v.5: if we are satisfactorily grounded, then we, as Peter’s community, can “be holy even as God is holy.” If we are not merely believing but obeying the difficult demands of Christ then we are “holy even as God is holy.” If we are unpopular for the right reasons, as the conscience of a community, then we are “holy even as God is holy.”

Above all, Peter reminds us, we are called to be a people of worship. Peter and Paul disagreed on much, but one thing they had in common in their faith was the centrality of this strange act of worship. “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. We are called to worship – for worship is proclamation. In this action of focusing out of our selves and on to the unseen God dwells the way of proclamation and of Christlike holiness, according to Peter.

TLBWY