SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
and the COMMUNITY CHURCH, GLENORCHY
ORDINARY SUNDAY 21 (August 26th) 2018
READINGS:
1 Kings 8: 22-30, 41-44
Psalm 84
Ephesians 6: 10-20
John 6: 56-69
I mentioned in passing last week the sense of
heaviness that many of us feel as we digest revelations coming from inquiries around
the world into exploitation and predation that has gone on behind closed doors
in institutions that claim to be the churches of God. I referred to the sheer
horror of revelations emerging from the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania
and elsewhere; I could have just as easily mentioned the horrors that emerged
from two Royal Commissions in Australia, from which the Anglican Church
definitely does not emerge unscathed. I would imagine many more horrors will
emerge in the coming decade, and I’m sure few of us will find that our own
networks of faith are untarnished.
It is not a pleasant observation with which to
begin that process of breaking open the word that is my duty and ours week by
week. Yet as we wrestle with the texts we have to be honest about ourselves as
individuals and our-self as an institution. I am convinced that the Christian
community is at the moment undergoing its greatest reformation since the
sixteen century, and perhaps its most significant since the fourth century.
I’ll be happy to explore those claims at another time, but for now let us just
accept that these are tumultuous times, if not for us personally, then for the
Christian community of God collectively. It is worth us recalling in passing
that it is not just the monolithic institutions like ours and that of our Roman
Catholic sisters and brothers, but that many of the independent – and sometimes
rabid! – Protestant and Pentecostal churches, especially those whose almost
cultic practices and often fiercely patriarchal authority structures have
provided a bulwark to scrutiny, have been found to be harbouring predation and
abuse.
Few if any of us are above reproach – certainly if
the standards of Jesus or his apostle Paul are applied to us. As St Paul
famously noted, none of us can sashay up to the pearly gates declaring our
perfection. We need to take Paul’s
observations about the human condition very seriously if we are to be effective
proclaimers of the Reign of God. We all fall short of perfection.
Most of us fall short in reasonably insignificant
ways, though. Errors, what the bible names as sins, are writ reasonably large
in my own history, and I have never ignored or denied that. On the other hand,
when you read of the atrocities of predatory networks within the churches and
other organizations, or the wholesale treachery that is exemplified in the
politics of our neighbouring nation, or the utter corruption that is currently
writ large across the consciousness of the United States, our sins are reasonably
unimportant. Most of us are not called to be a King David, a King Solomon. – I’m
not really sure I would have enjoyed
that many wives and concubines. Most o0f us are not a Donald Trump, nor even a
Scott Morrison (or whoever is the ephemeral Australian Prime Minister of the
Day) or a Jacinda. Not many of us, as Paul says, are powerful.
We are called to be us. But we are also called to
be people of integrity. Our lives are designed to be advertisements of the
compassion and love and light and hope of the God we serve. Christian doctrine
suggests we can’t do that on our own, that despite President Trump’s demonic
declaration that he doesn’t need forgiveness, we do. I’d add that there are rather a lot of indications
surrounding Trump’s tawdry life that suggest he does, too. “Be strong in the
Lord,” commands the author of Ephesians, but in adding “and in the strength of his
power” he is not suggesting that we should engage in histrionic showmanship, snake-handling
or demon-delivering under neon lights, but we should open ourselves again and
again to the persistent but un-showy Spirit who touches the deepest recesses of
our being.
To be us and
authentic we do need again and again to turn back and open ourselves to the
searing gaze of God. The psalmist often suggests that in part that is achieved
by turning away from ourselves, by turning instead to praise the unfathomable
depths of the creator revealed in Jesus Christ, made known to us in the Spirit.
It is a rare thing for me to be out on walks in
this region without being gobsmacked by the majesty and might of the God who
twists mountain ranges, lays down schist, carves glacial valleys, yet cares for
the sparrow or the tui, the chaffinch or the riroriro that watches as I pass.
The psalmist gets that: “Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest
for herself and to lay her young” in the presence of the author of the
universe.
In the midst of such awe, and despite the calamities
on-going in world and church, we can do worse that to breathe a prayer to God,
seeking the continued strengthening of our faith and life, modification of the
dark places within our being, edification of our sometimes flimsy attempts to
be good and compassionate and just human beings.
I will admit, though, that as I watch the tumult
around me in world and church (and so select Luther’s famous hymn for this day)
I have been and often am tempted to chuck away my association with the institution
that, like me, so often and so conspicuously lets God down. I certainly don’t
want to suggest that the Church, despite being called “body of Christ,” is God.
Yet I often find poor fallible St Peter’s words powerfully appropriate: “Lord,
to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe
and know that you are the Holy One of God.” The Church is a horribly flawed institution,
and I believe it must crumble from its present forms. The Church is not God. Yet
it is what God in Christ initiated: “You are Peter, and on you...”
Not a monolithic institution, no, but a body. “Wherever
two or three gather there God is”: I cannot be a faith-bearer on my own. We
must find ways to be authentic gatherers-together, ways to ingest, as I have
been saying these past weeks, the mysterious life force of Jesus, ways to be
body and blood of Christ and bearers of Christlight in an always rapidly
changing world. That was what the author of Ephesians was telling us. That was
what Peter didn’t realise he was saying but later knew to be true. It was so
true that he was prepared to be crucified, perhaps upside-down, for his faith. And
though we are small players on the stage that is what we offer ourselves for, again
and again. We offer ourselves collectively first and as individuals second, always
holding tenaciously to the belief that just beyond our sight and understanding
is the eternity to which we are summoned, in which we are judged, and in which
all things can become clear.
TLBWY
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