hatred in the name of God

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN and St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 10 / THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (June 10th) 2018

READINGS:

1 Samuel 8.4-11, 16-20

Psalm 138

2 Corinthians 4.13 – 5.1

Mark 3.20-35

I remember wryly my early days of Christian faith, when I encountered the terrifying concept of “the unforgiveable sin”, the “sin of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit.” For days, or was it hours, minutes even, I fretted. What if I slipped up, and was cast for ever into the depths of a fiery hell?

I didn’t see the world or my faith in those terms for very long, but the memory of the feeling remains. Slowly I grew a sense, through worship and through study, that God wasn’t some draconian ogre. (If you know the meaning of “draco,” much depicted in the Harry Potter books, you’ll know the implausibility of a draconian god). The God revealed in Jesus, and throughout the scriptural witness, was not an ogre waiting for me to trip up, nor longing to slam the door on the unblessed, but a God of embrace, of welcome.

The God revealed in Jesus is the God who is the mother hen of the lament over Jerusalem, holding the chicks to her breast in welcome and protection. God is not a cosy mate (Aslan is not a tame lion), not an “anything goes” sort of God. God is not the false god blasphemously proclaimed by those who have perpetrated great evil in the name of the church in various forms of fiscal, even sexual predation. “By no means,” Paul would exclaim.

God is patient, loving, kind, all the things depicted as hallmarks of love in Paul’s great Hymn to Love in First Corinthians. God is love, says John. God waits, and God has eternity to wait.

Those who have perpetrated evil, using positions of power and influence that the Church once had, now rightly being stripped from us, come as close to the unforgivable sin as is humanly possible. Sexual and financial predators, yes, but also those currently in the Unites States equating Donald Trump with divine rights, applauding as children are torn from their parents at border security sites. Like – if in equal and opposite terms – those who named Jesus as Beelzebub, those who name Trump as a chosen one of God are blaspheming the Holy Spirit. The inchoate, shady, undefined sin against the Holy Spirit is not something we will stumble into by accident. It is evil we may chose.

In the perspectives of eternity (for God is patient, God is kind), even the perpetrators of this current evil and historic evils like it may eventually bow their knees to the judging God and finally and eternally find grace. We leave that to God.

The Spirit of God will dwell not on the shoulders of Trump and his brown-shirt goons, but in the bodies and souls of those who are trying to comfort howling children and grieving families torn apart by xenophobia and nationalistic exceptionalism. The Holy Spirit will be – is – at work in the many, not necessarily of the flock named “Christian,” the many who are offering solace and speaking out for justice and compassion.

But we, we here, are, as Paul put it, a people not particularly wise or powerful or of noble birth in social terms (1 Cor. 1.26). We are not on a grand stage. We are a more or less ordinary bunch of people, albeit crippled a little by white privilege, and for some of us male privilege too. For us there is not yet much likelihood of stumbling into catastrophic evil action.

Except ...

… Was it Bonhoeffer, or more probably the recently late and great James Cone, who said “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act”?

It doesn’t matter who said it: the scriptures constantly imply it. And was it Martin Luther King or Albert Einstein who said that “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice”? It is probably an amalgam of sayings by both great men, but it matters not who said it, for the scriptures constantly imply it.

For as long as we remain immobile in the face of injustice, justice is not flowing down like the mighty fountains of the prophets’ dreams, and the Reign of God is held in abeyance, and we are the “blocking people of God” who are not the real whanau of Jesus.

The liturgical peace that we will share soon, its meaning totally badly taught in most liturgical churches that use it, is meant to be a solemn pronouncement of the possibility of and longing for that peace of the prophets’ many visions; swords into ploughshares, a lion dwelling with the lamb, a child playing safely by the lair of a deadly snake, justice rolling like a mighty river. We enact that peace, hopefully sincerely.

Jesus stood in his own home town and pronounced that demons were being bound in his name. Let’s not be infantile about the demonic. In the desecration of immigrant families in the USA and behind razor wire in and around Australia, in the death of fleeing children in the Mediterranean, we are seeing the demonic. And while it’s less dramatic, we too, within our shores, are seeing too many like Chris and Cru Kahui or Nia Glassie, who would be in their teens by now, or those dying from criminal neglect, material or medical, or those dying by suicide after various forms of bullying and ostracism. Demonic.

And wringing hands, as I and many of you no doubt are perhaps prone to do, is not enough, and I preach to myself, as well.

Those – even family – who were blocking Jesus from his kingdom-proclaiming, kingdom-producing mission, were approaching ultimate blasphemy.

We are all human. Our energies dwindle. But we too block the work of God when we fail to speak out about both social and the less clearly definable spiritual injustice.

I will define the latter more fully another time, though I have hinted enough in recent months that those who denude the gospel of its eternal dimensions, those who rob the resurrection of its everlasting meaning,  those who turn the God of the Cross into a convenient feel-good plaything, are all guilty of spiritual injustice. Social injustice is more tangible. We must find ways and energies to exorcise it where we see it. But both-and. Spiritual injustice is evil, too, and I have seen it actively perpetrated or passively condoned by church leaders.

“Do not lose heart,” (2 Cor. 4.16) writes Paul. To maintain gospel-energies we need to implore again and again – and respond to again and again – the prompting of that Enemy of Apathy, the Holy Spirit whose coming we invoked at Pentecost.

As it happens we implore the coming of that same Spirit several times in each Eucharistic liturgy: “Send your Holy Spirit that we who receive … may indeed be ...” It is a dangerous prayer, yet we pray it, or words like it, week by week. Then week by week we ask God to “Send us out in the power of God’s Spirit.”

Dangerous prayers, dangerous praying.

But if we pray these prayers believing them, and then consciously act on them in our daily lives and networks, we can be the people of God that Paul was imploring the Corinthian Christians to be, rising above their petty squabbles and myopia, looking not to the immediate but to the challenging eternal. We too are dared to be that Spirit-filled people, not the energy sapping people mocking Jesus with their cynicism, negativity, complacency. May we be the resurrection-justice proclaiming people of God that Jesus calls us to be.

TLBWY