Find love here, perhaps?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN, and the MISSION HALL, GENORCHY

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (25^th February) 2018

(first Sunday of an Interim Ministry)

READINGS:

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16                   

Psalm 22:23-31                                

Romans 4:13-25                              

Mark 8:31-38                                    

If I were to set a Lenten challenge for us as a people of God I would not ask for herculean commitments of self-denial. I wouldn’t overloading busy days with new commitments. I’d simply challenge me and you to ask “where is the love of God is revealed in each of our weekly readings?” I’m not going to labour through microdetails of each reading over the next several weeks – much less the next several months. I’m not going to forcibly extrapolate love letters from ancient texts. But so often as Anglican Christians we sit here stupefied, passive, hearing readings read beautifully, making little connection between the visions of the great saints and prophets of God and our own lives. So rarely can we make connection between a whole lot of verbiage and the triune God we worship?

Or am I the only reprobate who sites in liturgy hearing “Blah blah blah blah Spirit saying to the church”?

And in Lent? So often we hear only “Blah blah blah miserable sinner blah blah blah Spirit saying to the church.”

Or am I the only reprobate in church? Perhaps it’s too early in our time together for me to confess how mediocre a Christ-follower your Interim Priest is!

Let love be conspicuous. Let hope be conspicuous. Let justice be conspicuous. Mercy, too. All of these and more. “This is my covenant with you,” says God – somehow, who knows how God speaks? He is speaking to a tired old man. God speaks also to his even more burnt out, embittered almost, woman, his fellow-traveller.

Abraham and Sarah: tired, disappointed, yet recipients of words of love.

Actually, at 99 I would not be ecstatic to hear I was to be a father, but let’s assume Abraham and the more reluctant Sarah are products of a different world. Let’s assume the message is more akin to “I will make meaning of all your life and days and you will know eternal love, my friends.” Because I think most of us would like to think that at the closure of our life the God we have sometimes struggled to find might say, “Well done my friend, and welcome, and here’s meaning to it all.” Some like Sarah might laugh bitterly, but God persists, and she too will eventually know the warmth of divine hope. Some, like the billionaires buying up Wakatipu and Wanaka real-estate in apocalyptic binges might mock or panic as God acts in the world. As a Christ-community, our writers suggest, we must see the hand of God even in turmoil, and trust in divine promises however hard it is at times.[1]

God issues a covenant. It all sounds strange to us and I doubt many of the men in the room would leap for joy at the thought that their most private parts were about to be modified, sans anaesthetic, with a knife, but let’s leave the medical specifics. Well done, my friends, and I, the distant remote God, will be your friend and your descendants’ friends beyond all sight and understanding.

For this covenant was a word of love ... of hope, justice, all of that … but let’s stick with love. Love when there seemed to be no more love … okay, or hope, justice. But love. The word “yes” spoken to a people who had lost “yes” and were hearing and uttering only “no”.

A people not unlike our own western, global north – whatever – civilization – who are hearing only the life-denying words of climate change, economic and ecological collapse, US school shootings, failing infrastructure, and the collapse of institutions, our church amongst them. Yet God says “dream a new dream.” As the psalmist in an equally desperate time puts it, “Future generations will be told,” will hear a word and see sights and signs of hope and love. Paul will reassure the wobbling Roman Christians, referring to the Abraham story, that hope trumps despair.

Even the all too human, faltering Jesus deep in the despair of Gethsemane, is given words of reassurance and hope. In the next few weeks we will walk symbolically in Lent towards Gethsemane.  Lent is an “as if,” as if we are practising for the tough times of our own and our earth’s Gethsemane.  In a way it is not a rehearsal, either, for both Western Civilization and Mother Earth groan under the weight of our abuse. But we are a people of promise; with Abraham, with the reluctant Sarah, against all odds, all appearance and even all seeming experiences of being let down by life, we are dared to hope.

We are called to be a people looking beyond the apparent, looking to the unseen and sometimes even unbelievable. We walk with each other encourage each other (that, by the way, is why at high points in the liturgy we exchange the conversation “the Lord be with you / and also with you”), laugh and weep together in the shadow of the Cross and its never-to-be-denied resurrection. Together we will walk looking towards Easter and the greater hope Easter foreshadows, the hope of the new heavens, new earth.

It’s kind of nice that for a few months our paths have crossed and we can nudge each other along on that sometimes challenging journey of faith.

TLBWY

---

[1] See https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand. Retrieved Friday, 16^th February 2018.

gate-keepers and gospel

KAUWHAU at TE POU HERENGA WAKA O TE WHAKAPONO

TRANSFIGURATION (11 February) 2018

Readings:

2 Kings 2:1-12

Psalm 50:1-6

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Mark 9:2-9

Sometimes we see forms of Christianity that are obsessed with arrogant irrelevancy. I have seen places where order, etiquette and protocol are substitutes for love, for embrace, and for the manaakitanga that dwells at the heart of God. We have perhaps all seen church communities whose gate-keepers hold fiercely to a message that proclaims that their practice, theirs alone is the practice acceptable to God (if God matters at all in their discourse). In such places, if the practices that God – or in reality the gate-keepers – desire is carried out to the letter then all shall be most well, and fellow-journeyers can stay stagnant in a complacent bubble, untroubled by dwindling congregations and a changing world around them.

It is in some ways a metaphor for the outlook of Christianity in much of the post-colonial world. It surfaces in many forms: provided we appear to make the right noises about God it matters not one iota if we are predators, abusers, tax dodgers or worse. As long as we join the right political parties it matters not one iota if we are predators, abusers, tax dodgers or worse. As long as we wear the right clothes or drive the right cars it matters not one iota if we are predators, abusers, tax dodgers or worse.

These are demonic distortions of Christianity, present in many forms of the Church of God, high and low, left and right. Although I am not aware of it in tikanga outside of my own – and remain a grateful manuhiri* in tikanga Māori – we need to avoid any impression that we believe any part of the Christian community is immune from such attitudes.

Paul finds it in almost all the churches that he writes to; arrogance raising its head in different forms in different contexts. Aren’t we good, say the Corinthians: we can do anything we like because we have perfect freedom in Jesus, freedom greater than anything those mere mortals out there can understand. Aren’t we good, say the Galatians, because we adhere more strictly to the rules and regulations of faith than those sad people out there. The Romans and some Thessalonians had their versions, too, and there are hints that the communities particularly of gospel writers Matthew and John, of the Hebrews, and of the epistle writer James had similar traits. Aren’t we good says one church group, because we wear stylish clothes, speak out about pollution in the rivers, and though we do often travel in oxygen-sucking jets to attend our important conferences we do so with our fingers crossed and always serve our coffee from jars marked “ecologically sustainable” or “trade aid.” Aren’t we good, says another, because we never get caught having illicit sex, never publicly condone abortion, never swear or drink when anyone is watching and always vote for the party that wants prayer in schools and parliament.

Aren’t we good?

Confronted by such attitudes I often turn to Paul, but he was only one in a long sequence of irritating, challenging, prickly prophets castigated for speaking out against hypocrisy. The prophets were awkward customers. We may glibly read of Elijah and forget that while he was a thorn in the side of the elitist, corrupt government of his day, bitterly criticising King Ahab for his duplicity. He was also a flawed servant of God who, like Job never really grasped the breadth and depth of divine love, and was not above having a sulk when things didn’t go his way. We may read, too, of Elisha, with his “double share of … spirit," and forget that he was a thoroughly flawed human being, petulantly punishing children who called him names, and possibly being less pious than we sometimes think in grimly accompanying his mentor Elijah to the apparent closure of his early existence.

I highlight these flaws in the chosen people of God because we spend far too much time expecting God to be in the nice and right places. We expect God’s people to be right and nice people according to our own cultural preconceptions.

But God does not dance to our tune. Jesus, in parables such as the famous Parable of the Good Samaritan, constantly pointed to the God outside our boundaries. To the God in today’s contexts who might be found in whichever wing of politics we don’t belong to. To the God who is at work in the hands of an atheist or a Muslim or wherever else our prejudices tell us God should not be. God may equally well be radically absent in the hands of those we believe should be servants of God: bishops who forget to sift truth from untruth, youth leaders and pastors who forget to protect the sanctity of those in their care, kaitiaki pūtea moni** who forget that the money in their care is not to be buried in the ground (or their pockets!) but to be used expansively and generously to serve God in the lives of the poor or even to proclaim recklessly God’s love, generosity, or sheer bewildering beauty.

I speak of course as one who has never pretended to be un-tainted. Yet there is and must be a difference though between those who play games with the gospel of God and those who are genuinely unabashedly hypocritical. The corridors of God’s eternal love will be filled with those, like sullen Elijah or petulant Elisha, grumpy Job or impulsive Peter, doubting Thomas or irritable Paul, those have stumbled along with all their flaws sincerely seeking to serve God. There have been a myriad Christ-bearers through history, those who genuinely stumble, genuinely seek to find God in that very stumbling, genuinely seek again and again to turn their face to the searing light, transfiguring light and redeeming love that is found in the welcoming arms, the manaakitanga*** of the divine Trinity.

There will also sadly be those who lie or conveniently replicate the lies of others, who deliberately deceive, cover the traces of their errors or deception, and do their best to maintain public profile as squeaky-clean executive servants of Christ. Anything to achieve their intentions! Faced with these people we must sometimes just fall back on a doctrine of judgement: the God who, as Jesus puts it, sees in private will in the eternities to come expose, then lance, and only then heal their hypocrisies. Somehow – though we are called to allow God alone to be the judge, we must still find ways to scan the human heart, to look for the best, to look to restore and redeem rather than to condemn

Above all we must look to ourselves. Do we play games with God, attempt to shield ourselves from the gaze of God, re-create God in the image that suits us? I hope and pray not. As the world of fundamentalist US nationalistic Christianity, which has placed the flag of America into the rightful place of the Cross of Jesus, as that form of Christianity collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy – as colonial mainstream Christianity has also had to do in decades past – we must look to our own mission. We must, as some of us will say on Ash Wednesday, turn to Christ and be faithful to him. In doing so we must allow the Spirit to strip away our falsehoods and our game-playing. We must ensure even these words are not empty, finding ways to seek out and serve Jesus in the lives of those who are hurting. We must, as the Spirit tells the flummoxed disciples at the mount of Transfiguration, “listen to Jesus.” And in our daily lives we must accidentally demonstrate that this is what we are doing.

*manuhiri: guest.

** manaakitanga: tradition of hospitality

*** kaitiaki pūtea moni: custodian of finance (treasurer)