SERMON
PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN and St PETER’S QUEENSTOWN
ORDINARY
SUNDAY 9 / SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (June 3rd) 2018
READINGS:
1 Samuel
3.1-10
Psalm
139.1-6
2
Corinthians 4.5-12
Mark
2.23 – 3.6
When Jesus generated permission
for his disciples to pluck corn he knew exactly the wrath he was provoking.
When Jesus reached out his arm to heal on the Sabbath he knew exactly what –
and who – he was provoking. It’s a complex business attempting to explain what
the verb “to know” means when dealing with the one we call Son and Lord, but
it’s best to err on the side of humanity for now. Jesus knew, as any dismantler
of complex and corrupt institutions knows, that he was risking his life.
I have said from time to time in
preaching and writing that we need to be licenced to read the bible. I realise
that’s cruelly provocative and sends my more Protestant friends into fits of
apoplexy. Indignant, they will they reach for the works of Luther and Calvin
and others. Of course it’s not the
whole story. Casual, personal reading of scripture can inspire us, can warm our
hearts with the living flame of God.
But we need to be careful, need
to learn skills to dig deeper into these writings that we, somewhat
confusingly, call the “word of God.” Who wrote them, who first heard them, what
shoes were they standing in? Who and where are we as we hear them, read them?
What sand is in our shoes? What is the whakapapa we bring? Are we rich, poor,
male, female, from a loving or an abusive family, from an arts or a more
rationalist background?
Indeed we should read the
scriptures not by listening passively as X, Y or Z reads them, or even placidly
in our armchair, but as our Jewish friends teach us, actively, wrestling lovingly with the text, then wrestling lovingly
with one another as we share the text. Then we will find, as our Jewish friends
teach us, the truth in the white space between the black lines of print in the
page and in our understanding.
For example, most of us were
exposed to teaching that tells what a nasty bunch of sods the Pharisees were; oppressing
innocent people, picking on Jesus, plotting for him to be executed. A little
digging around tells us that at the time of Jesus that was not the case. The Sadducees were an unpleasant mob,
dismantling believers’ faith by denying the possibility of hope beyond the
grave, ensuring they remained oppressed, hopeless, downtrodden. There are many
that do that in our churches today, too. But the Pharisees not so much.
By the time Mark was setting
quill to papyrus times had changed. Christians and Jews had fallen out of love,
Pharisees had come to see Christians as troublemakers, the gloves were off. It
just might help us to understand our Jewish and indeed Muslim friends if we remember
that we – our forebears – were at least equally responsible for much of the
scar tissue of our history.
But if we dig a little deeper we
find some powerful truths. Does our faith liberate – as the ancient Hebrew faith
originally liberated – peoples groaning under a yoke of spiritual oppression?
These days of course most people ignore spiritual institutionalism, opting for
no spirituality or for a “spiritual not religious” traipse through life. I
believe there are problems with those options, though I concur that we have
badly polluted our message with the very forms of oppression that Jesus was
opposing. If we are to hear the voice of Jesus in this passage and respond to
his call then we must acknowledge and confess the ways in which we as church
have kept outsiders outside, and preserved our comfort zones inside.
The key to interpretation will
be that of grace. It must be the key to all our reading and interpretation of
scriptures – and therefore to all preaching. Where is grace in this scene, and
where is grace – or even graciousness – in our response? Jesus dismantles
corruption of the Torah, the Law, because it has been used to oppress
believers. Jesus invites disobedience to the oppressors because the truth of
the gospel – and the truth of the encounter with God, will set, will always
set, the captive free. Jesus invites the hungry to eat (it appears he wasn’t
hungry) and actively heals the disadvantaged man because gospel-light will
always address the disadvantaged and needlessly denied. Jesus subverted
oppression because gospel light will always embrace rather than exclude the
hurting. Jesus and his gospel light will not encourage oppression, Jesus and
his gospel will not discourage paths into fullness of love, Jesus will always
encourage routes that cast out fear and disappointment.
How we apply that will bring us
back to the white spaces between the jots that make up language, in speech or
in printed word. We will negotiate truth – and when truth doesn’t suit us we
will opt prayerfully to grow into it rather than to reject it. When we wrestle with
questions of exclusion we will look to err on the side of inclusion, not exclusion:
do we exclude because of gender, sexuality, class, economic and academic
privilege? If so we must seek to see where language of embrace, grace and
inclusion might redress that sinfulness on our part, so the broken can find a
way to Easter light. We may lose many of our security blankets, the shibboleths
and golden calves that have infiltrated and institutionalised our faith. That
though is what the radical, grain-plucking action of Jesus challenges us to do,
and he will lead us on the path.
TLBWY.
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