sand-papering the match ball of faith

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 17 (July 29^th) 2018

READINGS:

2 Sam 11.1-15

Psalm 14

Ephesians 3.14-21

John 6.1-21

Even when I (briefly!) moved in fundamentalist Pentecostal circles, in the late 1970s, I felt deeply uncomfortable when I heard this psalm, and its near-counterpart in Psalm 53. It was delivered as a sort of spiritual QED, the definitive put-down to anyone who does not believe there is a God. Even in those heady first flushes of faith I felt uneasy. I had been an atheist, and admired then as I continue to admire today those who’s committed searching leads them to conclude that there is not and cannot be a God.

This is not the same as lazy disinterest. This is the weighing up of probability and eventual decision that, despite the complexity of the question, we must decide that we are going to live on in a universe without a Creator, without any external source or guide. It is a brave finding, and one in the end that I was and am unable to maintain. To those atheists I apologize that solitary texts have been torn from their context by adherents of Christian traditions, used as a weapon in a war of spiritual dogma.

The context of this psalm was far more complex that such sneering dismissal of atheism indicates. The psalmist was writing for those for whom there was no question that there is a God. His QED is more akin to what I would prefer to deliver to those who continue to practice within the context of faith, but who dismantle the faith of those around them. Such people declare that, for example, there is no such thing as resurrection (and you have heard me on that before) or that “God” is no more than a useful construct of human intellect.

While I am not altogether a believer in hell, I could despatch such as these to the Judecca, the deepest human realm of Dante’s Inferno. There they would meet with those who have used religious prestige to persecute and prey on the vulnerable. I am in good company: Saint Paul poured contempt on those who considered themselves strong enough in faith to trample on the beliefs of those more vulnerable, more dependent on God and God’s grace (see e.g. the heavy sarcasm of 2 Cor 12.9-12, 13.9). Resurrection may not be comprehensible, and never was, but to stand within a community of faith and debunk it from pulpits and other soapboxes (very different to expressing personal and understandable doubts) is a crime far more despicable than professing a love of cricket while sand-papering the match ball.

Contemporary evildoers akin to those of the psalm, then, are not atheists, but those who stand within a faith-filled world-view and then dismantle the faith and hope of believers. To stand with a family who have lost a child and declare only a bleak and empty universe, when such a family are clinging to some hope of future reunion, this is betrayal. It is not the same as standing and with those who have no other-worldly beliefs.  There are other ways for non-believers to find hope amidst grief, and we can affirm their search, with love.

Our psalm can be allied in a similar way to religious leaders who use their power within a faith-institution to build up their own wealth, prestige or sexual gratification. This is common, and is deeply evil. Those who exploit the poor with imposed prosperity gospels (be faithful to my version of God and grow rich), who impose tithing (a bitter distortion of Hebrew Scriptural teachings), those who use religious influence to gain sexual gratification, these are deeply evil; these are the focus of our psalm.

Such as these stand, as biblical commentator Hans-Joachim Krauss eloquently put it, under the “scrutinizing look of God.” Unless we completely cauterize our hearts and souls (and many, sadly do) that scrutinizing look is an uncomfortable place to stand. For those that do cauterize their souls I suggest there may be some awkward truths in the doctrine of divine judgement. That doctrine is often conveniently dismantled by those same people, modern day Sadducees.

Our primary task is to scrutinize our own lives. What in me is hypocritical, abusive, predatory? I’m not going to tell you! Yet I must always turn Krauss’s “scrutinizing look of God” on myself. What in me takes a chance on the universe and acts as if there is no scrutinizing look of God? Can I, having deadened that searing scrutiny, then exploit, abuse, pillage without fear of judgement? The truly great atheist, agnostic, Hindu or Muslim can utilise the same criterion. What in me exploits, abuses, pillages, lives comfortably at the expense of the comfort and security of others around me or others yet to come? Psalm 14 put that question to us, not to the authentic adherent of other faiths or none. Psalm 14 challenges hypocrisy, not, as was implied when I moved in fundamentalist circles all those years ago, honest dis- or unbelief.

Our liturgy implies that. This is why we undergo a representative rite of confession before we break open the word – or, I suggest in Lent and Advent, after we have broken open the word. We have undertaken that symbolic rite today. So where now – if for a moment we accept that we have opened our lives to the scrutinizing look of God?

The psalmist recognizes that the prevalence of religious hypocrisy should throw us back on our knees. He challenges us to pray that God will exorcise the double standards in our own lives. In liturgy we go on to enter a sort of pre-enactment of the grace-filled world to which God’s energies are drawing us, the world in which we gather with all redeemed sinners and hypocrites around the table of God.  We gather knowing that God is drawing us towards that glorious, all-inclusive eternity. The processes remain mystery und unfulfilled as yet, but we will remember that we personally are unworthy and need a whole lot of fine-tuning in our lives. We should remember and lament too that there is some spectacular evil-doing still continued in the name of Christ, not least by those who use the name of Jesus to exploit others to buy their Lear jets, or build their mansions, or satisfy their depraved appetites.

Having pre-enacted that completion we will offer our flawed selves, “soul and body,” to go out in the world and live out God’s love and justice. To the author of Ephesians that means we go out, having “bent our knees to the Father” and touched “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” We go out to be channels of the power not of our own egos but of “him who is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” Then and only then can our self-sacrificing love begin to be that love that feeds the bellies and the souls of the thousands who are hungry on the hillsides of human existence.[1] May we go out cleansed of all hypocrisy and renewed in the faith of Christ.

TLBWY

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[1] See – I did preach on the gospel passage!

Mad Mary

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

FEAST of St. MARY MAGDALENE (July 22nd) 2018

READINGS:

Song of Solomon 3.1-4

Psalm 42.1-10

2 Corinthians 5.14-17

John 20.1-2, 11-18

There has been much written and spoken about a predominantly Christian, perhaps Jewish too, reticence if not terror of the energies of sexuality. On a scale of reading interest Christian books on sexuality, certainly back in the days when I worked in a Christian bookshop, rated alongside books about flossing.

They were the better ones: others merely reinforced the subjection of women to the will of their male partners, reminding them that it was only in practising something called “submission” that they could find true worthiness as women. Police and social workers three, four decades later have a different way to describe the experience of many married women of that era. The scar tissue of many women is such that belief in a loving God became impossible because the brutality of oppressive partners shouted down all dreams of nurture and of enrichment.

That I should raise the issue at all on the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene highlights a twisted history of Christian interpretation, or “hermeneutics” as it becomes named in academic circles. The fact that a woman from whom demons were driven comes to be, by the Mediaeval era at the latest, associated with prostitution says more about the interpreters and controllers of Christian thought than it does about the woman Mary of Magdala, or indeed women in general.

Mary of Magdala gets sucked into a vortex that declares women must be either virgins or whores, and historical role models for women tended to nestle uneasily at one or the other of those extremes. In fact we know nothing much about Mary of Magdala beyond two immeasurable facts: one that Jesus clearly loved her deeply, and two, that this faceless woman becomes the first in human history to proclaim the rumour that is at the heart of Christian faith: “I have seen the Lord.”

My suspicion – or perhaps I project too much of my own damaged psyche? – is that the Judaeo-Christian fear of womanhood, embodied in part in our treatment of Mary Magdalene, reveals far more about ourselves, or at least our hetero-sexual male-selves, than we care to admit. Lovers of film, literature, or French culture will know that the French use the phrase “la petite mort” to describe a serious aspect of human experience. You will know too that my cautious circumlocution (or beating round the bush) at this moment is living proof that I like many of us feel uneasy in talking about human sexuality in the context of liturgy and faith and worship.

I suggest in fact that “la petite mort” and liturgy are both wonderful foretastes of the eternities that dwell ahead of us. Literary philosopher Roland Barthes argues that la petite mort is what we should experience when we read fine literature. To me it is certainly no stretch to apply that notion to liturgy too. Billy Joel’s more mundane phrase “to forget about life for a while” possibly alludes to something similar (less eschatological, perhaps). But for me all these experiences hint at the inexpressible joy of an eternal existence in the presence of the Risen Christ, where the light of the eternal city is the Glory of God. That experience begins with Mary Magdalene’s famous pronouncement: “I have seen the Lord.”

What history has done to this remarkable woman, this first proclaimer of the unique event of The Resurrection, is to turn her into some sort of sanitised sinner. When Jesus Christ Superstar came out in the 1970s it was panned in some circles for suggesting there was some degree of hanky-panky between Jesus and this woman – or this conflation of women – but my response has long been “meh.”

That Jesus and Mary alike were sexual human beings is obvious. What they or anyone else did with that great divine gift of being human is strictly their business not ours. But the brutal application of a lens of saint or sinner, Madonna-virgin or street-wise whore to this woman probably does as much as anything to explain why two generations of human beings are absent from our pews, and why we are so woefully out of touch as an institution, with the mainstream of our society.

Whoever Mary was, and whatever her relationship with Jesus was, she GETS the Resurrection. I don’t think at this point, as some theologies suggest, that in her mourning she held a committee meeting and passed a motion saying that we’d better get on with doing whatever it was that Jesus was doing, bible-bashing or cleaning up waterways, to choose two extremes popular in different wings of Anglican Christianity.

No. Mary was seized, transfixed, and then empowered beyond social paradigms and beyond human sociology, empowered to be the first witness to the impossible.

That the Risen Jesus chose her may partly reflect his highly charged love for her, but more importantly it affirms what Paul was trying to express in his letter to the Corinthians as we read a couple of weeks ago: God chose the foolish in the world to shame the wise (1 Cor 1.27).

Mary had no credibility as a witness in first century Palestine. Regardless of any details of her sexual history, she was a woman, alone, her word uncorroborated by any passing bearer of Y chromosomes. Yet Jesus chose her. “God chose the weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, that which is not, to reduce to nothing things that are so that no one might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor 1.27-28). God chose irrationality. God chose Mary.

Resurrection is not rational. Our response for two thousand years has generally been to impose rationality and logic and lifelessness and power paradigms on the texts of our faith, silencing Mary. Our response has been to rely on hierarchical power structures that exclude the vulnerable and the broken, that exclude mainly, but not only women, that exclude the confused and the misused and the abused and, as Dylan put it, “the mistitled prostitute.”

Weeping Mary Magdalene stands as a powerful symbol, a potent reminder that human integrity and authenticity, not hierarchical power (or dare I say it a purple shirt and silly pointy hat) stand at the heart of the Good News of Resurrection. For Mary Magdalene was the first, and she went and proclaimed “I have seen the Lord,” and while we are still sceptical and cling to our power structures, her rumour is still reverberating against all odds around the universe.

TLBWY

which dance?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 15 (July 15th) 2018

READINGS:

2 Samuel 6.1-5, 12b-19

Psalm 24

Ephesians 1.3-14

Mark 6: 14-29

I’m not sure that a person walking into our church today, armed with no prior knowledge of the scriptures of our faith, would feel enticed by the gospel we attempt to proclaim. Two readings depict cynical and destructive human nature with such eloquence that we might feel nothing more than reinforcement of the despair, or near-despair, that emanates from almost every daily news-cast.

For when the great Jewish peasant-king David dances in ecstasy before the Ark of God, Princess Micah, who once loved David deeply, now responds only with cynicism and loathing. Strangely she had good reason.

Let’s not make this a gender-based scene. It is so easy to loathe, so easy and tragic to allow love to turn to hate. It should be said, in fairness to this all but unknown Hebrew woman, that she has good reason to hate the man she once loved, for his treatment of her is at best ordinary, at worst abhorrent. But hatred kills the human soul.

We learn in the passage that follows ours that the dance of David in our strange scene was so ecstatic and manic that he forgot the limited power of robes to conceal the graphic details of the human form (he says, discretely!). Princess Michal had good reason to look on and scorn the man whose life she once saved, the man she once loved (1 Sam 18.20). He treated her badly. Love is a risk.  

But for the purposes of our story we might just recognize that in this moment David was so ecstatic, so manic in his love for God, that all propriety is lost. Perhaps we should dwell somewhere in the balance between propriety and ecstasy, but for a moment let us just be reminded that it is possible to be so awed, so overwhelmed by the experience of God that we lose sight of proportionality. Perhaps, if only for a moment, let us forget the back-story of Princess Michal’s wounded heart, and see only that she has seen something she does not understand, and shut down her heart contemptuously.

For the risk is that we too can do that too easily, seeing and scorning and “dissing” the views and enthusiasms and ecstasies of others. Too easily we make our own experience the criterion, the normative, by which all else is judged. When we do this we shut ourselves off from the learning experiences we might gain from seeing the art and love of God at work in people and cultures and even faiths that we do not understand.

But we have a second dancer. The obscene dance of Herodias’ daughter Salome has been powerfully depicted in the arts, especially, as some of you will know, by Richard Strauss, by Gustave Flaubert, and especially by Oscar Wilde. It is a brutal twist on the theme of honey trap, a cruel reminder that sexuality and seduction are among the Achilles heels of humanity. It is a deeply disturbing New Testament scene.

Yet sometimes we need to be disturbed – as we reminded ourselves at Pentecost when we sang in praise of the disturbing Spirit of God, the “enemy of apathy” who hovers over the waters of creation. As we watch the extent to which some forms of Christianity have been seduced by power and privilege, dancing with programmes of hatred and exclusion, we might pause to realize how easy it is to become Herod. He wrings his hands pathetically as he is seduced to immeasurable evil by the machinations of his enraged and vengeful wife (and let’s remember to rise above gender stereotypes, here, too.)

Trump’s supporters remind us that it is far too easy to distort the gospel to a dance of self-interested privilege. Too easily we create a white pseudo-Jesus, false-Jesus. To easily we condemn those we don’t like to live in poverty, exposing them to receive brutal racist attacks, or turning a blind eye, as Europe’s Christians did in the 1930s, as the vulnerable are taken away by brown-shirts or their modern equivalents in the night.

It can all seem so far away. Yet though we live on the other side of the world we need to make sure our attitudes or even our complacencies don’t subscribe to an evil dance. To make sure we don’t, we need to look again and again at the attitudes and teachings and actions of the real Jesus. The real Jesus constantly reaches across divisions of hatred and exclusion, walks with and talks with and heals the underprivileged and the powerless and the broken and the outsider.

It’s not too much of a distortion of our texts to remind ourselves that the author of Ephesians gives us a strong hint, a clue as to how we can be bearers of real Jesus. For the relationship with Jesus begins with grace, an undeserved gift, not privilege.

It begins, continues, and ends with our not being good enough. It begins and continues and ends with the knowledge that we too can be callous Davids. That great king of the Jews is to say the least an ambivalent servant of God. We can be hurting Michals, scheming Herodiases. We can be seducing Salomes, dancing a honey trap (or, in the interests of equality, let’s remember too, the predators who have used power imbalance as their trap). We can be hand-wringing Herod Antipas, who leaves the prophet that he admires hung out to dry and die.  

Our challenge is to reach, as Jesus did, and always with the help of the Spirit of Jesus, to reach across the abyss, with actions and with words, to those who are hurting, broken, excluded.  Who are they? Even in Queenstown they are all around us. We might even risk asking God to show us.

If we do enough as individuals, as church, as servants (as we will shortly sing in Richard Gillard’s “Servant Song”), if by the Spirit of God we reach out with Christ-light in the night-time of human fear, then we will be dancing the dance of God. There is no guarantee that there will not be the cynical glares of those we have hurt in the past, as Princess Michal was hurt, but our dance of faith may rumour resurrection hope in empty lives. 

That’s the dance that we are called to perform. Can we even envisage being so ecstatic, so manic in love for God, that all propriety is lost? Yet this our God is the God whose promise, far beyond our small ken, is eternity. Perhaps we can learn to dance God’s “yes” to all that God made, all that God pronounced good, all that is. Perhaps we can learn to dance with God.

TLBWY