SERMON
PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN, and
ST
PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
ALL
SAINTS’ (November 4th) 2018
(translated
from November 1st)
READINGS:
- Wisdom 3: 1-9
- Psalm 24
- Revelation 21: 1-6a
- John 11: 32-44
It was a pivotal moments that I will
not forget. The gospel was read in the small chapel, and the proportionately
small congregation sat down to hear my colleague, presiding priest for the day,
break open the scriptures.
He began with a tale about Jehovah’s Witnesses
knocking on his door, and how we all knew that their reduction of the roll call
for the Reign of God to 144,000 was fatuous.
We nodded in agreement. We nodded too as he made a few more points about
Jehovah’s Witnesses. I have never been a huge fan of their theology, and though
I wasn’t sure it was the time or the place the points were well made.
We were still nodding in happy
agreement when said priest went on to affirm that of course we all knew that
the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead was nonsense. I nodded happily.
Then I realised what he had said. No, he maintained. It was obvious, he
maintained, that if all followers of Jesus were in some way to rise from the
dead there would not be room for them, so clearly this was nonsense.
How do you withdraw a nod? I sat with
my most vacuous look for the next few minutes as he explained that we were all
far more intelligent than those silly Christians who believed that boloney. I
suspect I was still sitting with my jaw on the floor when he concluded, and we
moved into a time of prayer and thanksgiving.
Prayer and thanksgiving for what and
for why and to whom I wondered.
Perhaps there was a time when I would
have agreed. I recall a brief window in my theological journey when I
jettisoned all metaphysical dimensions to our faith. Our faith was a political
program, liberate the oppressed, and that was it. The phase lasted a few weeks
and died. It died because why bother? It died because what had seized my life
some years earlier was not some political manifesto, though they are important,
but an experience that, in the ilk of St Paul, I would call an encounter with
the risen Christ. My life was not transformed by Karl Marx or Rachel Carson or I
dunno, Robert Muldoon or Ronald Reagan or someone from the other side of
politics.
Call it subjective fantasy if you
like, and certainly the complexities of psychology come into it, but my coming
to faith was not some sort of make-believe. It was powerfully experiential. Not
everyone has the privilege that I have of a risen Christ invading my
self-satisfied if crumbling time-before-faith. But I’m not sure that the
magnificence of the God we encounter can be reduced to some sort of infantile
loopiness, nor that contemporary Sadducees should steal the hope most human
beings feel in the face of that greatest of oppressions, Death.
As I worked with Indigenous people in
Australia and later with Māori here I became increasingly convinced that the
narrow rationalism of western culture could be a real hurdle as we attempt to
understand the radiance of the breadth and depth of God and God’s dealing with
creation and humanity. We know so little! So often I hear a rationalist cry
that my faith is a load of nonsense, that of course we know it’s nonsense, that
it is irrational.
Increasingly I am unconvinced. So
often I hear Christian practitioners themselves who, like the presiding priest
with whom I began, feel the need to reduce the gospel to the measurements of
their own mind. Fr David was telling me the other day of a golf professional
who, when asked the width of a golf course, would answer “six inches,” that
being the distance between the players’ ears. Wisdom, that.
There is a different wisdom-dynamic
at work in the dimensions of faith. In faith the possibilities of God are
beyond the distance from left ear to right ear travelling away from the skull. In
faith the possibilities of God are as far as the east is from the west, as far
as the journey to the boundaries of an expanding universe and beyond and back in
a circuit to the place where the thoughts began. In faith the possibilities of
God are infinite.
Yet they become localised in the life
of the man of Nazareth, localised still more in the tiny symbols of bread and
wine and the tiny words of scripture, and there begin to transform human lives.
They become like the beat of a butterfly’s wing, infinitesimally small, yet
they can reverberate through life and death and all eternity. They become the
spark of hope that inspires men and women to sacrifice their lives in the
service of a crucified God.
I think for example of the 20 Coptic
martyrs of Libya who in 2015 refused under threat of death to deny their
Christ, our Christ. So powerful was
their witness to the unseen God, in the face of imminent execution, that a 21st
captive, Ghanaian Matthew Ayariga, declared “their God is my God,” and while it
is uncertain whether he was a follower of Jesus beforehand, he elected in that
moment to be executed with the Libyan Christians. One does not have the sense
that he or they died for a fairy tale or for a piece of romantic nonsense that
should be dismantled by those with more powerful minds. One has the sense that
he died for a living, death-transcending Messiah of God who in death and in
resurrection was revealed as Lord. They are numbered this day amongst the saints
and martyrs who gather with us and all Christians as we pray.
Faced with a bevy of pseudo-followers
of Christ, a group who had chosen to dismantle the message of resurrection
because it was too hard to believe, Paul the Apostle angrily, or perhaps sadly
pronounced “they are more to be pitied than all people.”
As the
people of God – or a branch thereof – in the Wakatipu, while it is unlikely
that we will be called upon to be martyred for our faith, we are called to so
open ourselves up to the mysteries, the beyond rational mysteries of
resurrection faith, that we cannot imagine life or death without him beside us and
within us in our living and our dying. The saints who we celebrate this day are
those who by the initiative of God have transformed rationality to faith. To be
honest there are good, bad and ugly amongst them, as there probably is amongst
any group of Christ followers and even within each of us as individuals. The
process for recognizing and naming saints becomes a little bit silly at times.
Biblical
doctrine suggests that all who are in Christ Jesus are the saints, made holy by
his belief, his self-sacrifice, his faith. The idea is captured well by William
Bright in his great and heartfelt hymn:
Look, Father,
look on his anointed face,
and only look
on us as found in him;
look not on
our misusings of your grace,
our prayer so
languid and our faith so dim;
for, set
between our sins and their reward,
we see the cross of Christ, your Son, our
Lord.
The
saints continue to gather around us as we pray, make eucharist, and serve in
God’s world. Their lives continue to serve to remind us of the power of a life
transformed by faith, hope, love beyond rationality. The response to such miraculous
lives is not to dismantle faith and its mysteries, but to allow our arrogance
to be dismantled by God’s Spirit. May God help us so to do.
Amen.
***
NB. This will be my last regular sermon for a while as I conclude my interim ministry in the Wakatipu faith communities. This week I enter a new role as Diocesan Ministry Educator in the Diocese of Dunedin.
My thanks to those amongst whom I have ministered in the Wakatipu, and before that the whanau at Te Pou Herenga Waka o te Whakapono; to my referees, to my friends, and family, who have have continued to support me through interesting times past, and to the Bishop and panel from this diocese who have entrusted this role to me.
Kia kaha.
Kia kaha.
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