threepenny in the pudding

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

ELEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

27^th July 2008

Readings:

Gen. 29.15-28

Psalm 128

Rom. 8.26-39

Mt 13.31-33, 44-52

If we were to be serious and literalist about the scriptures of our faith we are faced with a problem in this passage from Matthew. We don’t need to be botanists to know that Jesus appears to have got a few things seriously wrong here.

First, the mustard seed is far from ‘the smallest of all seeds’, even if we disallow pores from the equation. Secondly, the mustard bush usually grows to a metre or two, very occasionally to three or more, and in no circumstances could be considered ‘greatest of plants and a tree’. And thirdly, mustard is an annual herb, growing and dying each year, (90% of it is grown in Saskatchewan, incidentally!), and therefore of far less use to birds than many middle eastern plants.

A literary critic named Frank Kermode once suggested, rightly I believe, that is anything in a text, including the scriptures, strikes us as odd, then we should have a closer look. Consider the mustard seed! What is it doing for us here? Was Jesus simply wrong – and if so, wouldn’t it have been easier for Matthew to have left this error out of his story? Why is it here? Perhaps one clue is that traditionally ‘trees’ were a familiar symbol of empires: The vast, majestic imperial tree of Rome was being threatened by something seemingly flimsy and ephemeral, and it would be, ultimately, the mustard seed beginnings of the Christ-community that would lead history, including us, into the futures of God.

So we probably don’t need to be rocket scientists to see that the contrast Jesus is drawing is between powerless, small beginnings – indeed the powerlessness of a crucified, convicted criminal on a Roman cross – on the one hand and the majestic redeeming love and creative power of God on the other. The tiny mustard seed beginnings are as politically illustrious as a radish in the garden, but the victory of God, both provisionally in the events of Easter and eternally in the coming of God’s Empire, will happen.

Strangely, the next mini-parable, too, is full of hidden surprises. We wouldn’t notice it (without the aid of scholars), but yeast was almost unknown as a symbol of something positive. Again Kermode would warn us: is something strange happening here? And why is the woman kneading ‘three satas’, in the Greek, a massive amount of dough, sufficient to provide bread for 100-150 people? Clearly whatever small thing happened as a result of the presence of the yeast, it was intended to have considerable impact, far more than one lowly woman or indeed one lowly mustard seed would normally expect. Out of the powerlessness of the woman or the powerlessness of the seed normal expectations and structures were to be overthrown: perhaps, as Matthew was writing, his community was fluctuating between 100-150 members, leavened by the yeast of Matthew’s gospel-telling.

It is interesting, too, that the verb used by Matthew to describe the woman’s placement of the yeast in the dough, hidden in our translation, is just that: ‘to hide’. It is not a normal word to describe a baker’s action: mum may once upon a time have hidden threepenny or ten cent pieces in the Christmas pudding, but ‘hide’ is not normally a word we use of adding yeast to flour. Kermode again: is something strange here? Are we indeed hidden as it were, in the world, and is creation, the world around us, as Paul puts it, waiting ‘with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God’? They are strange hints that we are indeed being called to be yeast in a world, and that we are called to be that miracle that can transform, when empowered by God’s Spirit, lives and communities around us. Firs, though, we must be mustard seeds, or yeast.

And the remaining parables give us a hint how that may be. For, although they are very different, the remaining mini-parables are about prioritising. Be it an unexpected pearl, or a pearly deliberately and systematically hidden, the response is the same: make this our single highest priority. Do that, Matthew is suggesting, and Jesus is suggesting, and we will be mustard seed, infectious, influential proclaimers of the Empire of God.

The parable of the net, product of a church under persecution, with the sinister threat of damnation and destruction of the opponents of God is not ultimately a parable for the western world. By that I don’t mean we can ignore it. I mean that it needs to be read through eyes of powerlessness, when all the persecuted community has left is the hope that its enemies will receive the wrath of God. In a western world we would be better employed in intercession, praying that our neighbours receive the mercy of God. The Church is not to proclaim itself as the net: our task is to be the re-prioritised and urgently loving people of God.

TLBWY

burn in hell?

[system breaking down a little - I don't think I've posted this before: from warmer climes and relatively long ago]

SERMON PREACHED AT CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS
SUNDAY, JULY 17th 2011
(PENTECOST 5 / ORDINARY SUNDAY 16)

 FIRST SERMON AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
 OF THE REV’D DR MICHAEL GODFREY


Readings:
Genesis 28.10-19a
Ps 139 1-11, 23-24
Romans 8.12-25
Matthew 13.24-43

There was in the university days of my first exposure to Christianity, and perhaps there still is, an evangelistic line that goes something like: ‘if you died tonight where would you spend eternity?’ Although it is loosely based on some of the Jesus sayings, such as the parable of the barn in Luke 12, it not only misses the point of that parable in particular, but more importantly misses the point that Jesus never, except in the face of religious hypocrisy and greed, threatened hell to or for his audience. Of the eleven times the New Testament records Jesus referring to hell – always a translation of  γε΄εννα, a reference to the city dump – all are in the context not of the failure to believe but of the double standards of those whose hypocrisy prohibits the tentative and vulnerable beliefs of others.

Such a form of evangelism contrasts darkly with the openness and compassion of Jesus, who, despite referring to himself occasionally (and only in John’s gospel-account) as judge, spends his life not threatening hell but proclaiming God’s inviting love. Indeed one wonderful commentator, Marcus Barth (son of the great twentieth century theologian) once proclaimed, provocatively, that ‘hell is for Christians only’.

I have no adequate or even trite answer to misguided would-be evangelists who ask me where I would go if I died on any given day, but I suspect that by and large Jesus doesn’t either. I would rather approach the misguided question in terms of the compassionate and inviting love of the Creator God than with petulant threats of some form of eternal punishment, a doctrine that, although predominant in the history of Christianity, is by and large irrelevant to and absent in the biblical texts that should shape our faith. The language of judgment and of hell in the New Testament is directed at those who burden others around them with weights of fear and oppression, not at those who for whatever reason choose to believe something different to what you or I believe. Hell is for Christians only.

I refer to the New Testament. In the Hebrew Scriptures language of afterlife at all is at best shadowy and unformed, and, as a late development, is often utterly absent. It’s fairly safe to say the Hebrews only developed a refined sense of judgement and of heaven and hell after their exposure to Persian religion, Zoroastrianism in particular, during the Babylonian exile five or six hundred years before Christ. But the language of blessing, central to our Genesis reading, was and remains critical not only to the Hebrew people but to us, their cousins-in-faith: we serve the same God. The Hebrew people were, in the actions of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, called into special relationship with the one creator God. They were in this relationship called to be a distinctive people – the Covenant, and certain operations experienced by their men-folk, were one way to express or signify that relationship. 

It was not however, as so much Christian preaching implies, a relationship that was designed to leave non-Jews, non-Hebrews, burning in an eternal hell. And, despite occasional outbursts to the contrary, outbursts made always in times of persecution, nor was or is the New Covenant relationship with the Creator God, the new relationship made possible in Christ, supposed to leave those outside the Christ-community burning in some eternal hell, eternally weeping and gnashing teeth while a saved elite sip their celestial nectar and watch on in blesséd joy .

The people of God, old and new, are called to be blessing. This is the meaning of the words spoken to Jacob: all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. By this relationship to the Creator, the people of God, Old and New, are called to be a sign, and by being that sign are blessing to the communities around them. It is with this relationship to God in mind that Jesus calls us to be seed amongst wheat, or elsewhere calls us to be ‘in the world but not of the world’. It is this that is at the basis of Jesus’ response to the ten lepers, healing ten but rejoicing in the thanks of the one who returns to say thank you. We are called, if you like, not to ‘save’ the world, despite what our Dean and Administrator said the other night (not to contradict him, either), but to stand in the world as a reminder that it is saved, as a reminder that Good Friday in all its injustice and sorrow is not the final word on human existence.

Paul, as he sets about the most dispassionate and reasoned of his letters, Romans, is acknowledging this as he writes of ‘creation longing for the revealing of the children of God’. Despite the tragic mishandling of this passage in some hands, this is not about some part of creation finding itself to be eternally separated from divine love, watching as the children of God are in some way whisked away to a blessed eternity while non-believers are left behind, but rather the Good News that all creation, all people, even the nine lepers, are caught up into the unthwartable and eternal purposes of God. To this end we are called to be a people of praise, turning again and again, despite our inadequacy, to the God who invades our lives and makes us whole. We are called by our familiarity with the God we worship and love in Christ, the God who we can approach as ‘Abba’ (beloved parent), to proclaim glory. We are called by our practice of the presence of God, our liturgy especially, but our lives too, to proclaim God’s glory, the news that God’s is the final word to creation, and that that word is not the ‘no’ of mortality and injustice but the ‘yes’ of eternity.

It is this that is your task and mine, the task to which we are called together and in which we are all commissioned by our baptism.

TLBWY

that's not fair!

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

13^th July 2008

Readings:

Gen 25.19-34

Psalm 119.105-112

Romans 8.1-11

Matthew 13.1-9, 18-23

I foreshadowed last week that the story of the good and feisty Rebecca becomes the story of the chicanery of twins, (fraternal twins, obviously). The story of Esau (who you will recall was an hairy man!) and Jacob (preferred by his mother) is one of dubious morality: many of the great biblical stories are! Every parent and every teacher is likely to know the childhood cry ‘that’s not fair’. As adults we often dress the cry up in more complex language: ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’ I can offer no profound theological answer: perhaps all we can say as Christ-followers, for all it can sound terribly facile, is that ours is not the perspective of God.

I should note too that the Christian document we call the Letter to the Hebrews chooses to see Esau in an unfavourable light, a dullard who opportunistically sold his birthright and responsibilities when offered a chance by his smarter younger twin. Possibly so: but even so we have to recognize that God works through remarkable dark twists and turns in human lives, and Jacob was no angel, behaving equally opportunistically and with greater, slimier intelligence than that of his brother. Until we introduce a theology of grace into the story of Jacob we have only a very nasty individual indeed. But God has a habit of introducing theologies of grace into human lives, cutting through cycles of human fallibility and even cycles of human evil.

Ours is not the perspective of God when human lives marked by sin and degradation turn into lives invaded and transformed by grace. Grace of course is not a cheap way out: a life that has duped and cheated must face the carnage it has left behind: the tax collector who encountered Jesus offered to pay back four-fold all that he had dishonestly gained. Where we come to Christ we can repay God nothing: we can however repay our debts to our neighbours and society.

Paul saw this so clearly. A life invaded by the risen Christ is a life transformed, a slate wiped clean in the eyes of God. Once more it needs to be emphasized that the encounter with grace in Christ is not an easy option. Jesus is not a magic trick to get us a shorter sentence in the courts or an easy way out of civil law. People who play games with faith are not witnessing to the God of the Cross. But the life transformed in the encounter with the Risen Lord is a life made new with God – and therefore with itself. Such a life slowly experiences the healing touch of God’s Spirit, chipping away at the dross and the ugly and helping the life’s possessor experience transformation into what Paul calls the likeness of Christ. Sometimes that transformation process runs dry, as we refuse to let God’s Spirit deeper into our darkest recesses. But occasionally we are privileged to glimpse a life whose whole journey has been one of Christward transformation: I was privileged in such a way this past week as I sat at the feet of Robert Jewett, on of the great Pauline scholars and author of what will be for many years the watershed commentary on Romans. But it’s not only – perhaps not even often – the great and the famous who are so transformed into christlikeness: perhaps we’ve each known a life so transformed, in either the public eye or our own private experience.

These then, surely, are the lives transformed by God’s spirit? Jesus himself uses many images of the life invaded by God – fruit features highly as he urges his followers to be or to bear good fruit. Too often the christian community can be small minded and judgmental, expecting lives to be recreated in the image that we demand rather that watching God’s Spirit in lives way ahead of our arrival. Jacob the deceitful eventually wrestled with God, and became Israel our father in faith. Sadly Esau did stay trapped in his own self pity – until at last he and Jacob are reconciled and the potential cycles of evil are broken. The implications for us as individuals, as a  faith community, as a race, and as a culture are unmistakeable: will we stay embittered and small, trapped in our own history, or will we allow the Spirit of God to break through?

Perhaps we can only look at our own lives: am I so opening my life and its every recess up to the light of Christ so that I may bear good fruit? I hope so and pray so.

TLBWY

selling my soul to the devil?

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, WHANGAREI

EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

6^th July 2008

Readings:

Gen 24.34-38, 42-49, 58-67

Psalm 13

Romans 7.15-25a

Matthew 11.16-19, 25-30

If your memory is half decent you may recall that a few weeks back we began history’s fastest ever flirtation with and scurry through one of the great narratives of our faith [2017: the lectionary does that to us!]. We jumped like out of control exocet missiles from the bitter laugh of Sarah to the miraculous faith of Abraham on the mount of sacrifice, and, before we have a chance to absorb the miraculous intervention of God we find the miraculous child Isaac fully grown and getting his own wife. Really to dwell with the story properly we need to begin with the visitation of the three angels and the biter laugh of Sarah, and see her journey through to the joyous laugh in the chapters that we omitted. For Sarah, who laughed bitterly when she learned the impossible news she was to become the mother of a nation, becomes the woman who laughs with the joy of the universe as she sees God’s promise realized I the birth of Isaac: ‘Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”’ This is the laughter of grace, the laughter of a human life invade by the breath of God. There was an unfortunate phase in charismatic history when laughing in the Spirit became a world-wide phenomenon: while I think it was a plastic imitation of the laughter of Sarah, perhaps I need to swallow my scepticism and acknowledge that laughter can well be a sign of the invasion of God in human lives.

The conception and birth of Isaac, like that of Jesus centuries later, is a miraculous intervention of God in human history. But the story-teller wants to make it quite clear that God works in ways other than the miraculous – or, rather, that the natural processes of history and nature are themselves miraculous. Isaac grows up, and, after his mother has died, finds himself a love-partner. Rebekah becomes one of the great characters of the bible, feisty, kind, industrious and fallible. It is to be twenty years before she gives birth to the ambivalent twins, Esau and Jacob, another story full of God’s miraculous workings in the ordinary and sub-ordinary workings, even in the chicanery of human lives. But to that some other time! Her fidelity to God is enormous, and she does not shrink from learning even from her own mistakes and sins.

To learn from mistakes and sins: that surely is the challenge of serving God. Not that we will never sin – much less never make mistakes. The old Book of Common Prayer prayed penitentially, in the Litany that we use each Friday, ‘forgive us our all our sins, negligences, and ignorances’. While it was written in a different era to ours, and I’m not sure that ignorance is a state requiring forgiveness, I do think deliberate dumbing down of our lives is, and the deliberate choice to ignore the signs of God in our lives and the lives of those around us, and the signs in the world around us, is needful of God’s forgiveness.

Fortunately Paul agrees with me! In writing to the Romans he exclaims ‘Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse;  for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened’. It is Paul’s belief that we as human beings – all human beings – have the opportunity to see the possibilities of God, the claims of God on morality and ethics, and the claim of God to have first place on human lives.

Arguably Paul sees more than anyone else the extent to which we fail in our calling as human beings. Rom. 7, this famous passage, is not altogether or even much about Paul – who elsewhere describes himself, boldly’ ads ‘as to righteousness under the law, blameless’. It’s a big call, and Paul does not make it lightly.

There is not altogether anything new under the sun. I lament much in our society – the taunting idiocy of the man in Whanganui yesterday who sold his soul to the Hell Pizza chain for $5000 last week may be a piece of minor gamesmanship, but his actions and the very existence of that chain – which I boycott – make it quite clear that ours is a society determined to mock any claims that there is an authority greater than what we can see or measure or scientifically prove. Such a society may arguably have fun, but is probably running risks even at a sociological level, let alone what we might call a ‘spiritual’ level. For to lose touch with that intangible entity that we might call ‘spirit’ is to lose touch with all that separates us from sheer animalism – that sort of animalism that produces a Mugabe or a Pol Phot. That at the very least should warn us that western society is taking huge risks on its current paths of consumerism and decadence.

Sadly it is a popular place to be. Life is more fun if we can sell our soul to the devils of our society. If I can, while my virility serves me well, sleep with whomsoever I want whensoever I want then life could be quite exciting, though I suspect something would slowly die with in me as I passed from partner to partner, experience to experience. If I can use and abuse whatever chemicals I like life can be a buzz, until the chemicals wear off and I need to find more, or to fuel my expensive habits with crime. These are extremes, of course, but the human determination to shut God out of the equations of existence. There are others: suicide rates, depression rates, domestic violence rates all suggest a society out of touch with the spiritual demands of a Creator God – though of course these do in a lesser extent exist even within faith communities when we fail to live up to God’s demands on us. By and large though, society remains, in the west, determined to sell its soul to the devil, whether in the form of the Hell Pizza chain or more dangerous flirtations with the dark side.

Paul’s response is to demand costly, Christ-focussed love of his people. We can only grow into that call by surrendering our lives to Christ. Like a soul we can’t touch Christ, though I believe we reach out and touch him in communion. We can way Christ or measure Christ or Christ’s Spirit in our lives, But we can experience his touch and his transformation as over and again we surrender ourselves to him. Paul calls that being ‘a slave to the law of God’. Jesus calls it joining in the dance: he plays his lute, but will we dance?

TLBWY

thoughts on wet paint

SERMON (KAUWHAU) GIVEN at TE POU HERENGA WAKA o te WHAKAPONO

(SOUTH NAPIER)

ORDINARY SUNDAY 14 (July 9^th) 2017

Readings:

Genesis 24:34-48, 42-19, 58-67

Psalm 45.10-17

Romans 7.15-25a

Matthew 11.16-19, 25-30

We’re probably all reasonably familiar with the story of Adam and Even and the temptation in the Garden of Eden. What those of us who attend church probably don’t realize is that this story is  unfamiliar to the generations growing up after us. We, and our stories are far removed from public awareness these days.

That is a mixed blessing. But in any case, the story of the temptation in the Garden could have been told another way. God put Adam and even in the middle of Clive Square, and said, dudes, do anything you like, but don’t touch that bench over there. The paint’s still wet, okay?

Paul got that. Being Paul he used complex language. ‘I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.’ Whatever, Paul. Just don’t touch the paint.

We’ve all been there, some more spectacularly than others. But the message of Jesus is very clear: the moment we  claim that we are above fallibility, we have fallen. ‘Don’t throw stones in glass houses.’

Paul often referred to what he called ‘the flesh’, sarx, or in te reo, kikokiko.[1] It is the place where we reach for the apple in the garden or touch the wet paint – though the latter may be stupidity as much as sin, and is there a difference?  I do it, you do it, even bishops do it, though some forget that they do.

Speaking of bishops, which I do with great caution, an Australian journalist wrote yesterday of the anger being currently directed at Cardinal Pell. Elizabeth Farrelly wrote ‘Is this really an argument about religion? Or is it something else entirely?’ The anger directed at Pell is righteous to a point, and if he as an individual has knowingly perpetrated or covered up evil then so let it be. But much of the anger is the same as that that threw Britain out of Brexit, and Donald Trump helter skelter scary into the White House. It is anger at institutions, and the churches are a particularly meaningless institution, to those outside, at which to direct anger, for it seems to many that we do nothing but spoil human potential for pleasure. 

I saw the same in my own situation over a year ago. When news of my dismissal hit the media my incoming mail went ballistic. I have on file more than 20,000 words of support sent to or about me at the time, and copies of many emails sent to Bishop Hedge (though for whatever reason no complaint sent to him ever received a reply). 

I took much strength from that outpouring of support, but it left me uneasy. Was this just another opportunity for friends and strangers to excoriate a church leader for the sake of dissing (disparaging) an unpopular institution that is seen as an oppressive killer of joy? It probably was. Hedge had taken a stand on events from 25 years ago, events that were not predatory or criminal, and the public saw a distinction. The public are more grace-filled than some in the church hierarchy, and would have none of the attitude. The comments make for good reading. 

This is about sin. We do the things we do not wish to do. Anger directed at Pell is because of the perception that he has led an institution that is pointing fingers at sinners while sinning itself. Interestingly in New Zealand, where most sexual abuse took place in government run homes, we are less sure where to point fingers. 

By and large, where the church and its leaders perpetrate evil, I believe we should point fingers – if our own noses are clean. They never are.

But the issue in government-run and church institutions was the abuse of power. Perhaps that’s what some people saw in my situation too, though it pales into insignificance alongside sexual abuse. Abuse of power is evil, and rather than the yoke of freedom that Jesus promises in the gospels, perpetrators of power-imbalance impose crushing weight on their victims. As Lord Acton saw in the nineteenth century, power corrupts. The more we have, the more likely we are to use it abusively. I am very suspicious of the use of power in the church: service, love, hope, comfort, joy, these are the tools that the Spirit gives us. Power is not.

We are called to a dance. We are called to dance a dance of the joy of divine aroha,[2] arohanui.[3] We are called to a dace of tūmanako[4] (tūmanakonui, if there is such a word!).  We are called to a dance of rangimarie[5] and of te rangatiratanga o te Atua,[6] not to corrupt imitations.

Our churches are often empty. The terrible miscalculations in the public statements and behaviour of church leaders like Cardinal Pell and others serve only to reinforce society’s scepticism about our institution. Perhaps our institutions have to die – certainly the vastly expensive empires like those of Tikanga Pākehā face the stern judgement of God. The dance of God’s children, that I have mentioned before in this place, will go on. We must learn to dance, not judge, to invite others to the dance, not tell them not to touch wet paint.

---

[1] Gal 5.24: Ko te hunga ia o te Karaiti, kua ripekatia e ratou te kikokiko, me ona hihiritanga, me ona hiahia /  Those who belong to Christ have nailed their natural evil desires to the cross and crucified them there.

[2] Love.

[3] Great/immeasurable love.

[4] Hope.

[5] Peace.

[6] The righteous justice of God.