SERMON PREACHED at St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
ORDINARY SUNDAY 20 (August 19th) 2018
READINGS:
1 Kings 2: 10-12, 3:3-14
Psalm 111
Ephesians 5: 15-20
John 6: 51-58
It is little
comfort for those who have lost friends and family in the 35 years or so since
HIVAIDS spread across the globe, but the pandemic nevertheless
brought to the consciousness of the postmodern world a renewed ancient
awareness that had long been suppressed. We had tended to forget, unless we
were hippies, the powerful image of blood as force, energy for life or death.
That imagery runs throughout the scriptures of our faith and through the oral
and written traditions of most if not all ancient faiths.
I find it a useful
image as we attempt to understand the Eucharistic imagery that has been running
through our John passages for three weeks now. John dwells on Jesus’ own image
of eating bread, or consuming the life force of Jesus, presumably in the
ancient rites of Eucharist. As I suggested last week, John is a master of
what scholars call metonymy, of using a single image to encapsulate vastly
greater meaning – as when “Washington” means “The USA and its government,” or “nukes”
refers to the entire military arsenal of a powerful nation.
So for three weeks
we have concentrated – laboured, really – on this imagery of ingesting the life
force of all that Jesus is and did. We know from the doctrine of the Trinity
that the task of the Spirit is to make available to believers all that we need
of that life force of Jesus. It’s a simple equation: if we don’t need it (in
the purposes of God) then it will not be available to us. Even the glimpse we
get on this day of the Old Testament relationship between Solomon and God gives
is a sighting of that equation, if effectively in reverse. So John reminds us of
the powerful words of Jesus, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide
in me, and I in them.”
If you have been
following the revelations surrounding the Roman Catholic Church in the USA, and Australia, and even hints here in New Zealand for that matter, you will be tragically
aware of the extent to which the privileges of faith can be manipulated and
abused. As many writers have pointed out, the moment at which the Church got
into bed with the State, at least symbolically at the time of the Edict of
Constantine in 313 A.D., was the moment we began to lose our integrity.
The other day I was
passing St Peter’s when I saw two young, rather giggly women walk into the
church. Within seconds they were pulling faces and fleeing out again, still
giggling. Who knows why? But it clearly wasn’t simpatico with their beliefs, tradition and aesthetic Perhaps it was in itself a metaphor for all that we have got
wrong since the Emperor made us official more than seventeen centuries ago.
As we
watch the brutal and deserved exposure of corruption in the Catholic Church in
Pennsylvania we cannot be too complacent: no branch of the church, since
Constantine, has been immune from corruption. As I have suggested here
already, the current dismantling of our potentially demonic power structures is God’s judgement.
Too often in
ingesting the body and blood of Jesus we have inoculated ourselves against its
true demands. It demands not that we become rich, powerful and sleek players in
society, but that we become vulnerable, even broken followers in the Way of the
Cross. For too long our church leaders – and the more hierarchically empowered
the more corruptible they have often been – for too long our church leaders have
seen themselves as princes and politicians, deserving the admiration of the faithful, and
expecting society to tremble at their pronouncements.
While some – I’m
tempted to say few – have been walking embodiments of the humble servant king,
they have been so despite rather than because of their inherited place in
society. Let it be quite clear here that I am not pointing fingers at anyone or
any station in the church, but rather observing that the more priests, bishops,
and even lay-leaders set themselves – ourselves – up as heroes in our own
narratives the further we stray from the humble, soon to be broken Jesus.
Instead Jesus
invites us to ingest his life force; his humble birth and homeless ministry, his
lonely death abandoned by all but the faithful, powerless women, his teachings
of love and compassion and justice. Only after these does he impart his mysterious
yet universe-altering resurrection and inconceivable future, and invite us to
join in them. I suggest our bearing of the cross in Wakatipu should not primarily
be in the spit and polish of magnificence, but in gentle acts of compassion for
those who are hurting in our midst, for the lonely and bedridden and those who
are frightened by the future.
In a region with
the fastest growing property prices in New Zealand that is no easy task, but
around us many are hurting; our task is neither more nor less than to
ask God to show us ways to bring resurrection life and hope to them.
TLBWY
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