the untraceable DNA of Jesus

SERMON PREACHED AT St ANDREW’S, MAHENO

and St LUKE’S, OAMARU

ADVENT 4 (December 22^nd) 2019

READINGS:

Isaiah 7: 10-16

Psalm 80: 1-17, 17-19

Romans 1: 1-7

Matthew 1:18-25

Many years ago,  when I was a broadcaster, I interviewed a rabbi in the lead up to Christmas. It became a strange assignment. Understandably the rabbi seemed to think it was his task single-handedly to dismantle the entire fabric of Christmas stories. With great delight he disclosed to me, with an Oxbridge accent, his great insight: the Hebrew of our passage from Isaiah does not mention the subsequent Greek interpretation, “a virgin shall conceive,” but refers to conception, not necessarily miraculous, by a young woman, probably in early adolescence.

Unfortunately the combination of his accent and a slight speech impediment meant that I didn’t hear the rabbi terribly clearly. I must have looked reasonably gormless as he drove his point home. I’m sure I continued to appear gormless for the ten minutes that he would have remembered me.

In fact there was no shocking new disclosure. It’s never been any great secret that Matthew invested a massive amount of symbolic meaning into his version of the story of the Messiah’s birth. Luke did the same, and the stories have been, at their best, powerful vehicles of the gospel message ever since.

But they were not designed to tell the mechanics of the conception and birth of the Christ. Twenty centuries of misogyny have ensured that aspects of this story have been used to maintain a deep fear of women and their role in human reproduction.

Enough said in a family setting, and besides, I’m a prude. But as I have often said in preaching, the critical take away from Matthew’s chronicle is not about the DNA of Jesus of Nazareth, but about a caring, compassionate God. This is the same God who flings stars across universes, and yet who cares for lowly and the humble and the not so lowly and humble, who cares for sparrows that fall,  and for you and for me. That is, as Mark’s more pared back gospel-telling puts it, is “the beginning of Good News.” In Matthew’s quill the story will end with “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Mark is more subtle. He has women telling the gospel story despite their abject fear.

Currently apocalyptic fires and unprecedented rising temperatures are ravaging our near neighbour. Much of the trauma is occurring in places where Anne and I have lived, had parishes, have family. Other near-neighbours face the drowning of their homes beneath rising sea-levels: we will soon see new waves of refugees as a result. One can only pray that they will not receive the razor wire incarceration that has been the response of many nations  in recent years and throughout history.

Do humans not see the image of God in refugees?

Every news feed provides examples of ways in which any pretence of decency is stripped away from the leadership of the free world. This has of course happened before. That is why I referred last time I was here to “an anti-Christ” rather than “the anti-Christ.” the latter is a phrase I simply do not use. Nevertheless the rise of hatred and erosion of public trust are deeply anti-Christ, and the blasé indifference of the wealthy nations to the most wretched of the earth is deeply offensive to God. Narratives of hatred have been enshrined before, in the electorally sanctioned rise of Mussolini and the parallel lead-up to Hitler’s Reichstag Republic. This will happen again, if God does not elect to intervene dramatically in the timeline of cosmic or at least human history.

We know that God cares, because Matthew bent over backwards to tell a potent story about the coming to us of God’s redeeming, healing love. He told a story of a God whose compassion and justice are revealed in a Bethlehem manger and will be revealed again in whatever form judgement may take. Matthew told the story, and the early Christians’ experience of the presence of God in worship and fellowship was so strong that they had no trouble in telling that story over and again throughout the crumbling Roman Empire. They even made Matthew’s and the other gospel writers’ words into Scripture, “holy writ.”  Their experience of the presence of the death-conquering, hope-bringing Immanuel was so potent, so confirmed again and again as the Christians read the Hebrew texts, that we hear it still today.

We do so even if the white noise of Christmas and of Western (Global North) complacency has all but drowned it out. We do so even if what one prayer-writer calls “our unhappy divisions” have all but drowned it out. We do so even if our own sinfulness (mine and yours) has all but drowned it out.

The Advent story with its reverberations of a God of judgement, the Christmas story with its reverberations of a God who draws near (even within) us, Immanuel, the gospel stories of Jesus’ teachings of compassion and justice, the sorry story of his being deserted by all but a handful of faithful but powerless women, the gospel stories of his suffering and death: these stories would have remained fatuous nonsense had it not been for the early and overwhelming experience of the death-conquering, risen Christ with them – and us – after the resurrection.

It is to that that our liturgies and readings point. It is because of that that, while I am not interested in the DNA of Jesus or the bio-mechanics of his conception, I am absolutely convinced that in the Jesus-event we see the unique, redeeming action of God. As Matthew and Paul before him knew at the time of a crumbling Roman Empire, human expectations and constructions were horrendously fallible – and still are. Empires wax and wane, still are, still do, but a greater truth lay beyond them. As individuals we may suffer, and will die, but the early Christians were dynamically aware of a greater hope beyond their sight, making itself known to them by faith. It is that life- and death-transforming hope that we are called to be messengers of, by our lives and, if necessary, our words.

We can be authentic messengers only by the empowerment of the Spirit, who makes all of Jesus’ meaning present to us. As we rejoice, amidst the white noise of Christmas, may we know the peace and the dynamism of the Christ-child. He emerged from the womb of an obedient and brave mother. He would later die with her watching on. Yet he would transcend even death, and those who followed him would proclaim that Good News even to the ends of the earth and even to the present day.

God of light and life

grant that we may be ready,

like Joseph and the young woman Mary,

that we too may be willing

to welcome, gestate and proclaim

your saving presence in the world,

this Christmas and through all ages,

empowered by your Spirit

and always in and through

your Son our Saviour,

Jesus Christ,

born in a manger, died on a cross,

resurrected

and leading us onward

even in eternity,

Immanuel. Amen

always, always

SERMON PREACHED AT ST LUKE’S, MOSGIEL

ADVENT 2 (December 8^th) 2019

READINGS:

Isaiah 11:1-10

Psalm 72: 1-7, 18-19

Romans 15:4-13

Matthew 3:1-12

Some of us who grew up in the New Zealand education system will recall encountering Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory as a set text somewhere around the ages of fifteen to eighteen. For me, because I dwelt on the arty end of the spectrum of learning, it was one of the most valuable experiences, apart from a reasonably successful sporting career, of my schooldays. I was a rabid adolescent atheist when I read it, but somehow it sowed some seeds.

Graham Greene, for those who didn’t encounter him, was one of the most significant novelists of the twentieth century. A flawed human being, but we all are, he wrote novels that often had deeply theological implications, and arguably none more so than The Power and the Glory. The central character, a burned out, unnamed alcoholic Roman Catholic priest, is eventually shot, martyred by the anti-Christian Mexican authorities in their crusade against Christianity. But as he faces his death the eye of God narrator notes the arrival of another priest in his town. The symbolism is obvious: the gospel is not conquered. God is not conquered.

That thesis is of course unprovable. Advent is a time set aside to reflect on and prepare for the Second Coming of our Lord, however we understand that. Our own death? The collapse of human existence? A dramatic and divine intervention in cosmic history? The proof of Graham Greene’s belief, and mine, that the gospel will continue to be carried even after all human expectation is lost in a quagmire of defeat, is unprovable.

All of which I say because we the people of God, in all our myriad forms, are undergoing changes at least as dramatic as those faced by our forebears in the fifteenth century. That was when the world of Christendom blinked and found itself torn asunder. It had been torn asunder before, of course, but here we were again, looking at each other down the barrels of our Protestant and Catholic cannons. And canons, too, but that’s another matter.

 When Matthew was writing his story of Jesus, at another apocalyptic, scary time, he recalled clearly the oddball Baptiser proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Messiah. At the time Matthew was writing it was probably particularly important to recall those events, as some of the Baptiser’s disciples may well have still been awaiting his return in glory, rather than that of his kinsman Jesus. Matthew’s point was that John was pretty remarkable, but Jesus alone was the revelation of the heart of God and all God’s hope.

Matthew recalled clearly John’s expectations of an end of time outpouring, that he expressed in traditional Hebrew terms of fire and God’s Spirit. There is no need for us to dismantle that expectation, however we interpret either the first or Second Coming of Jesus. If God is the God who scatters time and space across nothingness, if God is the God who births hope in the womb of a Jewish peasant girl, if God is the God who touches and transforms your lives and mine (though we all are capable of forgetting that far too often), then God is capable of wrapping up cosmic history in whatever way God decides.

And if not, then, as Paul puts it, we are more to be pitied than all people – but I cling to belief that God’s promises are true, however unlikely, unprovable.

But what is this time of change that I refer to today and in many other contexts? Because I am a blow-in from the diocese, as I said in your newsletter, I have only a kind of passing authority to say this amongst you, but is my firm belief that we as church are being led by God’s Spirit into a time of cataclysmic but God-breathed reformation. For too long we have relied on a presumed authority and standing of the Church in society, presumed that we can wave a big stick and see the world around us tremble. Today that world is more likely to snooze indifferently. A few years ago I watched as a bishop (not ours) released what he paradoxically called a “confidential press release.” He was, I think, expecting a stampede of media attention, but the media, instead, got on with matters that were of interest to people. A strange official in an increasingly unimportant religious organization was not it.

As the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care in New Zealand, as well as other cases around the world, remind us, we have destroyed much if not all of the trust society placed in us. Our graced place in that society has crumbled. There are now no false gods for us to cling to. The only means we have to proclaim the gospel is our personal integrity. We for centuries proclaimed not what Paul refers to as “Christ who lives in me” but our corporate and individual importance. 

Like Narcissus and his pond we looked into the gospel and saw, far too often, only ourselves.

Not all of us, and not all the time, of course. We have all known saints. The public saints, like Desmond Tutu, for whom, incidentally, we are called to pray at this time as he fights an infection. Or those private saints who have passed through our lives and inspired us – I will recall for all my life one dear parishioner who spent her spare time walking around her town visiting the “old people” who were far younger than she was, making sure they were okay.

But the winnowing fork of God is in the barn of our corporate and individual lives. Where we have played games with the gospel, reinventing Jesus in our own image, wherever we are on the spectrum of liberal to conservative, God’s winnowing fork is on our lives. The message of John the Baptist and of all the apocalyptic prophets of the scriptures, is a stern one. Repent and be baptised, figuratively and sometimes literally. Open that or this aspect, dimension of your life and mine – and I have many hidden corners too – to the gaze of God.

In the hands of many preachers that would be a terrifying threat. Yet I believe deeply that the gaze of God, the “wrath that is to come” is the loving, healing gaze, the loving healing wrath of God. Advent, and the advent moments of our entire life journey are not a thing of terror. They are not a “meh” thing, a thing of nonchalance, either. But they are not a thing of terror.

Whether we be an institution or an individual, whether we be pretty rough around the edges or pretty cultured and sophisticated (and I’m afraid I count myself amongst the rough and the broken) our task is to ready ourselves for the God who judges, to be revealed in what we call the Second Coming. The winnowing fork is an image not of terror, but of God’s invitation to set ourselves right, so to open our lives to God’s gaze that we feel nothing but divine love and grace.

For some of us that may take an eternity, but fortunately our God is an eternal God, and it is to that eternal, timeless God that we are called to redirect our lives – aided of course by the Spirit (who we will talk about, perhaps, another time). The whisky priest of Graham Greene stumbled on, as Emmylou Harris put it, into grace, never seeing the fruit of his stuttered ministry. So too might we. But the promise of God is “Lo I am with you, even to the end.” The irony of faith is, of course, that there is no end. “Lo, I am with you always, always, always.”

So that we too can cry out with St. Paul, “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things.”

the sun shall rise

SERMON PREACHED AT St MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS’, TE ANAU

ORDINARY SUNDAY 33 (November 17^th) 2019

READINGS:

Isaiah 65:17-25 / Malachi 4:1-2a

Psalm 98

2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

Luke 21: 5-19

In recent weeks our readings have reflected growing emphasis on apocalyptic, on often quite zany expectations and depictions of the end of time, of cosmic implosion, a divine mic drop that brings all existence to an end. Apocalyptic of the most lurid sort is only one strand in scriptural writings, but “apocalyptic” theology underscores most, though not all, scripture. The word simply means to reveal that which is hidden, and the hidden dimension, Jews and Christians amongst others would proclaim, is that God has a hand on cosmic history.  

Some Christian communities dwell on the “beam me up Scotty” dimension of these writings. They are not some cushy opiate of the people. These writings issue a deep challenge. We are called to hold to and provide hope as expectations collapse around us, especially expectations that our descendants will live in an improving word. Those expectations are dissolving. When I was a kid all was rosy, work would soon be a thing of the past, and all would be most well. As I watch newscasts of conflagrations in Australia, California, South and Central America, or deforestation, rising sea levels, glacier retreat, dying species, the never-ending plight of refugees, the concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer controlling hands, as I watch I cannot help fretting. Perhaps it was ever thus. Perhaps it is now more thus than ever it was.

The lens through which most biblical writers view the universe and its fate is often condemned for its other-worldliness. So it should be, if complacency is all it breeds. But God’s promise of hope-beyond-reason is not an excuse to sit comfortably and wait our rescue from the universe and its problems. As one commentator puts it, writing about Isaiah, “it was very tempting to dissolve the dialectic [the tension between choices] in favour of flight into apocalyptic visions of a blessed realm unsullied by the political realities of this world.” That, the scriptures warn us over and over again, is not the way to which God calls us.

Nevertheless the focus of our readings is on a goal beyond our sight. When I was a child my boarding school was visited annually by the indefatigable Keith Elliot VC. His only sermon, it seemed, was “keep your eye on the ball, keep your eye on the bible.” We pre-teens used to groan; still, first I have to acknowledge Eliot’s is probably the only sermon I have ever remembered, and second, I have to acknowledge a sense in which the old Wellington City Missioner was probably right, if at one remove. The focus of the bible is fiercely futurific, a future far beyond our sight or understanding. Again and again the biblical writers affirm, as Malachi puts it, “The sun shall rise (Malachi 4.2).” It’s pie in the sky, yes, and it has led from time to time to obscene Christian nonchalance, but at its best it has inspired the People of God, Hebrew and Christian alike, to profound endeavours in the service of God’s promise of hope.

Apocalyptic writings, often lurid and bizarre, often containing vivid references to the destruction of God’s enemies. They were never designed to be a detailed road-map of the future. They promised not a rosy immediate future free of climate change, cancer or anything else we don’t want, but the strength and focus to withstand whatever dwells ahead. As we encounter report after report of troubled times on God’s earth their message is clear: fear not, for I am with you, always. Whatever tragedies befall us and those we love, these are not the final word. These are not easy promises to adhere to, but they are the promises we are given.

Personally and publically, privately and universally, we as humans, and not least we who are Christians may face hard times. Faith in the Jesus of Good Friday and Easter, Bethlehem and Future Coming, is not a passport to easy highways. Again and again the words are words of “hope despite.” “They will arrest you and persecute you,” Jesus says, and this has been the lot of countless followers of Jesus. Our paths may be less spectacular, we pray, but the principle is the same. Persevere, and I, Jesus persevere with and within you, even to beyond-time.

In a fortnight or so we slide into Advent, with its growing confusion of expectation of the Coming Christ of timelessness and the already-come Christ of Bethlehem. But they are one and the same. Our footsteps are in his, wherever we stumble: “Oh let me see thy footsteps, and in them plant my own,” we used to sing. With that comfort we are called to offer more than “thoughts and prayers” for those in the world around us. Or, more accurately, we are called to ensure that our lives and resources are put at the service of those thoughts and prayers. For those whose homes have disappeared in the world’s fires or wars, for those whose cancers grow, for those whose banks call in and foreclose loans, “thoughts and prayers” mean little. Are we bold enough, our writer demands, to be the answer to our prayers for those whose crises come to our attention? Are we bold enough, empowered by the Christ-bringing Spirit, to be the hands and feet, the comforting arms and perhaps even the listening ears of Jesus to those around us? “It will be a sorry world,” says Old Testament theologian Paul Hanson, “that takes a vision of God’s new heaven and earth out of its social justice equation.” But vice versa, too. We are called to be a part of and to encourage that social justice equation for all who stumble in dark times.

We are called not to be, as the Thessalonians were forcefully reminded, “not to be idle … not to eat anyone else’s bread.” We probably don’t need to be Shakespeare to work out that there’s something of a metaphor as well as a literal meaning operating there: as we see the gap widening between rich and poor in our own country, and between rich nations and poor nations internationally, we might wonder if we are indeed “eating someone else’s bread,” or being idle in the face of national and international injustices.

With all our failings we are called to cling to the hope that is the weird, beyond rational, hope that is the crucified, risen coming Christ. We will never understand that intellectually, but as we practice over and over again the worship of God in liturgy, as we refocus over and over again in our liturgies on the presence of the Christ who draws us into God’s future, we will be, despite all that goes on around us, empowered to be “soul-gainers”: faith-growing, love-and-hope-sharing bearers of apocalyptic Jesus in the communities and world around us. 

May God so help us.

for more on apocalyptic

swearing at God

SERMON PREACHED AT St ANDREW’S, MAHENO

and St LUKE’S, OAMARU

ORDINARY SUNDAY 32 (November 10^th) 2019

READINGS:

Job 19:23-27a

Psalm 17:1-9 

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

Luke 20:27-38

I recall only too well the day I learned to swear at God. (This is not necessarily a practice I recommend as some sort of pious discipline, at least on record or when wearing my Educator’s or Archdeacon’s hats. I'm keen to keep my job! Yet in a strange way I do recommend it, and so, for those who reach for their pens to complain, I’ll stand by my words).

I was in my early twenties, walking across a large block, an acre or two of vacant land on my way home from university in Palmerston North. I was hurting. At the time I was dating the vicar’s daughter, and constant interference from fellow-parishioners who rightly or wrongly did not think I was a suitable companion for her had placed immeasurable strain on the relationship. We broke up, and as I walked I told God how I felt.

It wasn’t pretty.

Okay, a bit of post-adolescent Romeo and Juliet angst is not really the stuff of grand spiritual or theological profundity. I was grumpy with God. There was little point in hiding it. The God of our faith is not a god we can hide from. “Omniscient” is the technical word. Omniscient, omnipotent … lots of “omnis” are applied to God and it’s pretty darned clear to me that while God may not choose to flick the “on” button on those “omnis” at any given time or any time at all, a god without them is pretty second rate. I was angry with God because God wasn’t doing what I wanted. I suspect I didn’t have the final word that day, nor should I. Ever. And sometimes that hurts.

Still: Job was having a worse day than I was. He and his so-called mates were engaged in a bit of a tussle, but Job was engaged in far more than that. The “mates” were the sort who knew best what was good for Job. The sort of sanctimonious mates you do not want when life is full of nasty things, when the fan is slowly turning and the nasty things hit it, and the only words you can find are what Paul Simon errantly called “words I never heard in the Bible.”

Job had far more to contend with than a love-struck 21 year-old did.

Old Testament theologian Norman Habel puts it succinctly: Job saw himself to be a “solitary mortal under siege, surrounded by the troops of God” (Habel 1985:295). It’s too easy to read Job 19 from a position of complacent comfort, too easy to lean back in our spiritual armchairs and hear, as another commentator Carol Newsom puts it, “the strains of Handel’s Messiah in the background” (Newsom 1996: 477). We can of course know that our redeemer lives, but that wasn’t Job’s experience. 

Sometimes we have to acknowledge the deep pain of human existence, the deep morass that gives New Zealand the highest rate of teen suicide and one of the highest rates full stop of suicide in the western world.  We may know that our redeemer lives, but we also live the grungy side of hope. The hope we find in the death and only-then resurrection of Jesus was no picnic in the park, after all.

Job like Jacob long before dared to wrestle with God, and his friends were unimpressed. God is not a matey, tame God, as C. S. Lewis once reminded us. But on the other hand there’s no point in playing games with an omni-many things God. God is not a mate, but in Christ we are enabled to be out there, to be honest, to be transparent to God the Father of the Crucified Son.

So I learned to swear at, within even, God. It’s a pity in some ways that the Thessalonian Christians hadn’t. Because they were beginning to play games with God, worse, to turn God into a plaything, “God on our side” as Bob Dylan famously put it.

The Thessalonian Christians were a cosy bunch. Like the Corinthians and Galatians that Paul would address later in his writings, these Christians had become complacent. Thessalonica itself was a city and region that prided itself in its cosiness to that other Lord, Lord Augustus Caesar. But the Christian converts were the God thing a little too far. They had become complacent, holier than thou. God was their mate, the return of Jesus was imminent, and they gave less than a fig about the world around them.

I am reminded of a strain of pseudo-Christianity in the world today. These pseudo-Christians are convinced that Trump is the chosen one of God, that the Temple will be rebuilt in Jerusalem, that Christians don’t need to worry one iota about the environment or any other human predicament because they soon will be rescued from mere mortal existence, and literally to hell with the rest. This, the author of Second Thessalonians saw clearly, was obscene.

These are strange times. Apocalyptic even. Times often are. These may not be the last time foundations of human experience are shaken. In the wake of World War Two Paul Tillich wrote (I have altered his pronouns in the interests of inclusive language):

… humanity is not God; and whenever we have claimed to be like God, we have been rebuked and brought to self-destruction and despair. When we have rested complacently on cultural creativity or on technical progress, on political institutions or on religious systems, we have been thrown into disintegration and chaos; all the foundations of our personal, natural and cultural life have been shaken …

These are strange times, and not the first. So too were the times of the New Testament authors. Today there may well be a “lawless one” (the word in 2 Thess. 2:3 is untranslatable), a leadership of chaos unleashed on the world wherein lies are truth and truth is fake. Donald Trump is not the first, and may not be the last anti-Christ to saunter God’s earth. [In the light of responses to this comment in my sermon I was delighted to find these thoughts from a worthier source. ] There will always be thuggery and corruption in corridors of power until the final surviving apocalyptic cockroach breathes its last. 

This though is no reason for Christ-followers to dance arrogantly on the hopes and fears of Greta Thunberg’s Millennials, or to ignore the plight of dying species or surrender our Christ-mission in any other way. God is not our mate, even if we stand in the embrace of the Son who pleads our case.

We have a God of hope, who “loves us and through grace gives us eternal comfort and good hope, who comforts our hearts and strengthens them in every good work and word.” 

Yes. 

Nevertheless we are still called by God’s Spirit to be a people who perform good works and deeds, whose good works and deeds match or better those of the most sacrificial givers and doers of the community around us, empowered to be so by God’s Christ-bearing Spirit.

Only in that way can we proclaim to our world the death- and annihilation-transcending God who turns Good Friday to Easter, who transcends suffering and death, who reaches beyond the empty world of the Sadducees to eternal hope.

 We will not proclaim the one who many will consider to be our rather invisible and laughable friend if we do not reveal divine love, mercy, justice and compassion by our lives. I may well have learned to swear at – or at least to be brutally honest in my relationship with – God, but there is no earthly or heavenly use in my having anything to do with God at all if I am not willing to put my hands and heart and feet and mind, such as they are, in the service of God’s love and justice and compassion and hope.

I may learn to be honest with God, to worship God, to dance and pray and read and mow church lawns and attend church meetings, all these things and more.  But if I have not, as Paul hinted in a letter to another troublesome group, if I have not the love made possible only by again and again surrendering to God’s rather prickly Spirit, then I am no more than a noisy stone in a tin can or nails on an old fashioned blackboard. 

I learned to swear at God once, but that was not the point. I learned that day to hold nothing back, to surrender my life again and again to the God of the Cross, the God who breathes order into chaos, life into death, eternity into mortality. I don't always remember, but sometimes I do. 

please leave us?

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S WAIKOUAITI

ORDINARY SUNDAY 30 (October 27^th) 2019

READINGS:

Joel 2:23-32

Psalm 65

2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

Luke 18:9-14

Human life is a short blink. I’ve just passed a significant milestone so forgive, please, a little introspection. Across the many blinks that make up the human story there have been countless phases of apocalyptic tension. History distorts vision. It has to if we are to get a grasp at all, unless we’re Bill Bryson or some similar brilliant communicator. In 2019 our vision is largely that of a global village. We know far more of all that is going on than our ancestors did, for better or for worse. The plight of Kurds, the rising tides swamping nations, the coming and going of ebola and the machinations of Brexit or  of impeachment are beamed daily into our consciousness. Apocalypse is global and personal: perhaps in the 21st century we are encountering both. Perhaps not.

For vaguely scientific reasons I do have the sense that humankind and its destructive path are leading us to a devastating sixth mass extinction, in which we as human beings are annihilating ourselves and most of our co-species. Other times have been cataclysmic, too: The Black Death, the Reformation, two World Wars. Now though, through nuclear weaponry and our less nuclear destruction of Papatuanuku, Planet Earth and her species, apocalypse is written large in our footprints.  “By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance, O God of our salvation; you are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.”

The scriptures of our faith are deeply apocalyptic in nature. The word itself means more than its common usage but let’s stick with that for now. Weird, wacky and end of times. The scriptures are infused from cover to cover with a sense of the fragile nature of human and even of cosmic existence. But they provide their own mysterious counterbalance: they are infused too with the message of a Creator God, who slowly reveals a divine cosmic plan to us, who slowly reveals, too, a relationship with us. The God who creates is the God who loves is the God who redeems despite humanity.  “By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance, O God of our salvation; you are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.” Sometimes the hope is stuttered: “no one came to my support, but all deserted me.” At other times it soars in confidence above all odds: “I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give to me on that day.” We all, I suspect stumble from doubt to exaltation over and again in our faith journey.

So too does the whole Body of Christ, the Church. In our Anglican branch we are probably facing our own apocalyptic times. Splitting asunder, as humans and human collectives respond in differing ways to human sexuality and its place in God’s world. “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector.” Sometimes – all too often, that is precisely the attitude that vomits from the church’s collective mouth. “Thank God I’m pure, thank God I’m saved.” Except I’m not. Not pure – and not in any “better than others” way, “saved.” We are all a stumbling work in progress. And the scriptures of our faith whisper over and again: Christ is with us in our stumbling, despite us he is with us, breathing apocalyptic, eternal hope into our small but sometimes over-powering darknesses.

Joel wrote to his people of an out-pouring of God’s Spirit over his people. In the 1960s and ’70s it was popular and perhaps for a season correct to see that reflected in the liberating experiences of the charismatic movement. I suspect the Spirit, this great nurturing, renewing presence of God, is pouring new energies into God’s people.  Not some sort of self-assured satisfaction or triumphalism, but the redeeming experience of God with us in brokenness. As the apocalyptic shadows increase, as out churches shrink and bicker and split, and world leaders rage out of control (as they often have before), as plastics strangle the oceans and clouds of gunge choke the atmosphere, God’s Spirit is whispering again those still, near-silent words: “lo I am with you.”

But at the same time God’s Spirit is warning us not to be the arrogant and self-confident Pharisee of Luke’s Jesus-story. “Please leave us” declares the archbishop of Sydney, directing his puritanical rage at those who do not hold his “turn or burn” views of human sexuality. “We have the truth” declare those who turn LBGTQIA+ humans away, and then turn a blind eye on the obscenity of nations where to be gay is to face death penalty. “Thank God I am not like those people, sinners.” Thank God I am not like the nasty people who permit the hurting and the questing and the uncertain into the holy churches.

And less I too find myself arrogantly pointing the finger, who do I turn away? What amongst my attitudes, and there will be many, says to my neighbour “you are not welcome to travel with me”? Do I turn away the less educated, the less middle-class, the less male, the less straight? I don’t know. But I do know that the Jesus Luke writes about warns me that it is as the powerful but hated and broken tax-collector that I am called to stand at the threshold of faith: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”  When I learn to be that broken one, there I begin to find the road map that God’s Spirit delivers us in every time of apocalypse. When we learn to be that broken one, then we begin to find the road map that God’s Spirit delivers us in every time of apocalypse. That lesson is the outpouring of God’s Spirit on the people of God in this age.

May we learn the lesson God offers us.

inarticulate grunts of the heart

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, DUNEDIN NORTH

ORDINARY SUNDAY 29 (October 20^th) 2019

READINGS:

Genesis 32: 22-31

Psalm 121

2 Timothy 3:14 – 4:5

Luke 18:1-8

In an age in which we are, hopefully, increasingly sensitive to the nuances of sexist and other stereotyped perspectives it is important from the start of an encounter with our so-called “importunate widow,” however much she is or is not the merit-bearing character in this Jesus-story, that we see beyond gender and into all that this determined, desperate figure represents in the world of Jesus-parables. Utterly powerless in this first century Palestinian world this woman dares to approach the last precarious figure of hope open to her. Like those of us who represent a more liberal, progressive world, wondering if we will ever again see justice across the world in the biased realms of the US Supreme Court, firmly painted in the image of Trump’s priorities, our widow has nowhere else to turn. This is it. The last two of clubs is all that is in her hand.

How many others in our world tremble on such a brink? From the comfort of my desk I think of those whose reality I can’t imagine. Yet I must. Kurds deserted by the nation they trusted? Greta Thurnberg and the millennials viewing the dying planet their predecessors (most of us) are bequeathing them? Or those moments when we are forced against our screaming will to face our mortality, or perhaps vulnerability, and that of those we love? When we cry from the depth of our heart and the universe howls its silence.

Those of us who were here or somewhere similar last week encountered that strange Jesus-tale of the tenth leper, unpacked by the Rev’d Anne. As all and sundry are touched by divine love, providence, one “tithe,” one tenth turns and scampers back to give thanks. 

Be that leper, the gospel tells us. Because we are privileged to have been seized by grace, we are responsible to mumble, sing, shout our thanks and praise, as we do in liturgy, from the depths of our being, on behalf of a too-busy world. 

Once I heard a rabbi asked whether Jews should evangelize. Perhaps unorthodoxly, but from the depths of his heart, he replied “why would we do that … is it not enough that we carry the burden of relationship with an unseen God?” Burden and joy, but burden nevertheless. “As often as you eat/drink ... you evangelize, proclaim.” We as Christ-proclaimers bear that burden, yet are challenged to whisper resurrection-hope, prayer-hope, eternity-hope in a muddled and often hostile world. Shout to God because, like a despondent widow, we are desperate for our God to hear, and answer. 

And sometimes, more perhaps than we deserve, coincidences do happen around the edges of our prayers, and Berlin Walls come tumbling down or cancers abate or … and often they don’t, and yet we who have known and been embraced by God are challenged to stumble on.

Challenged and empowered. Last week we saw the thanks-giver go back to Jesus. This week we are challenged to be the not-giving-up thanks-giver: despite global warming, despite Trump, despite Brexit and Syria and cancer and the horror of another cross beside the road of our life we are called to stumble on. But not alone. 

St Paul in his writings tells of the divine and cosmic Spirit who groans in unison with our spirit – or perhaps attunes ours with hers so we slowly learn to groan in the tunes of heaven and its hope. If I may misapply the words of John Lennon, “Christ you know it ain’t easy,” but isn’t that in part the meaning of the Cross of Jesus? Ours are apocalyptic times, perhaps even more apocalyptic than those of Jesus in one sense, for we can destroy or planet, but apocalypse is apocalypse and our tears for justice for God’s earth are no more nor less heartfelt than the longings and pleas for justice of the powerless and importunate widow of our Jesus-story. 

The Orthodox, incidentally,  tell of the sacred gift of tears: when we and probably the importunate widow pour out our tears in prayer it may be that we are drawing even closer to the benevolent heart of God, though I’d hate to turn the grace of prayer into either melodrama or some kind of tear-competition. Still: in an era of compassion fatigue it will do us no harm to learn to weep for Kurds or for the LBTGQI youth turning to suicide (and shunned by some wings of our Christian community) or for the victims of chemical dependence or the too many homeless of our nation.

The ringing closure to our Jesus parable is the rhetorical question “will there be faith on earth?” You and I – but not alone for we are infiltrated by the hope-bringing Spirit of God – but you and I are called to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice in answer to that question put by Jesus. To be commissioned as a praying people of God is to be commissioned to struggle, as Jacob struggled with a seemingly hostile universe and its mysterious Creator. It is to be honest with God; that sometimes hurts if we genuinely rise to the challenge. It is to know that prayer itself, access to the Creating, Redeeming Sanctifying God is privilege, gift, and responsibility all rolled in one. It is to engage in mystery – what I have called from time to time the beat of a butterfly’s wing of prayer, to engage in what the hymn-writer called the “hush of expectation” … when “the breath of God is moving in the fervent breath of prayer,” and often not ever to see the impact of the movement of our hearts any more than the butterfly sees the cyclone its wingbeat initiated.

Above all this importunate, heartfelt prayer is our responsibility. As our lives are inspired by the God of liturgy and creation and love and hope so there is an onus on us: pray. Participate in the far more fervent breath of God. But we do not do so alone, and perhaps our prayer before all prayer, before answered prayer or unanswered prayer, Lord teach me, teach us, help us to pray, despite everything that is dark and sombre and mortal and seemingly hopeless. Lord teach us to pray. Teach us too to be prepared to be the answer to our own prayers though the answers will be so much more than our stumbling, thank God. And in my experience – and my prayers are usually no more than incoherent stuttering – the God unseen does somehow stir, even when Boris Trumps and Donald Johnsons and cancers and mortality seem to have a passing word.

Lord, teach us to wrestle as Jacob did. To pray as an importunate widow might pray. 

Lord, teach us to pray. Amen.

the narcissist who wanted a white house

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, GLADSTONE

ORDINARY SUNDAY 25
(22^nd September) 2019

READINGS:

Jeremiah 8:18–9:1

Psalm 79:1-9
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

If we were to look in the scriptures for a sign that the God of the Cross is not beholden to Christian (or any other) expectations, the signs would be found not least in the parables of Jesus. Time and again the teachings of Jesus pluck from the world around him unexpected symbols of the upside-down priorities of God. These crazy upside-down priorities were foreshadowed in the Magnificat when the “Mighty” shall be plucked down from their complacent thrones, and the “Humble” lifted up into the heart of God. Some of the Jesus stories can seem cosy and “meh” to us now: poor Lazarus and the once-powerful oppressor, Dives, with the unfathomable gulf between them in an image of judgement. That, or cosy, now-saccharined tales of shepherds and lambs. The stories weren’t cosy, then, but two thousand years can deaden a lot of ear canals. But what do we do with corrupt villains who, in the hands of Jesus the story-teller, become signs of the purposes of God?

Anyone who knows of my utter contempt for the current leadership of the USA and indeed the UK would be a little surprised if I suddenly proposed “the kingdom of God is like a failed business tycoon who seized the White House.” Dig a little deeper and we might find that there is something about the single-minded corrupt megalomania of the current president of the USA that does speak of priorities and focus. Dig a little deeper still and we might find that God is not limited to expectations of pollical rights and lefts: as it happens I do believe that Trump, Boris and others my well be instruments of the judgement of God on a complacent and greedy world: we’ve got, internationally speaking, what we deserve. Perhaps we need to learn to listen to the prophets in our midst: to Greta Thunberg and Gen Z, who care about God’s planet. But more of that in a moment.

There is something desperate, single-minded, about the corrupt servant of today’s parable. This is not a suggestion that we should utilise greed and self-interest as agents of faith – though God knows there are enough Lear-jet touting Christian hypocrites that do just that. But this parable has been so disturbing enough for preachers and scholars over the centuries that they have bent over backwards, trying to find ways to water down the oddity of Jesus’ use of images of scheming and corruption as vehicles of gospel meaning.

Jesus was less prudish. The steward is desperate to gain possession of the trust and security he has lost. Jesus raises some not altogether hypothetical issues about the degree to which we desire the gifts of God, the gift of the knowledge and radical all-inclusive embrace of the God who longs for our readiness. The parable demands that we place our lives in the service of God’s love, no holds barred, desperate for the encounter that can transform us. The parable demands urgency. There was a business tycoon so narcissistic that he destroyed a world to gain the White House.

Urgency is the very life ingredient that Greta Thunberg is demanding of the world each time she speaks. The gospel is not merely a programme of this worldly social activism, yet nor is it blasé and nonchalant about the planet God has given us to love and to care for. The gospel demands that we are urgent in our care for the gifts of this life, at least as much if not more than the urgency we might ascribe to that which dwells beyond our sight: be desperate, says the gospel. Nonchalance, complacency: these are the enemies of the gospel. We all slip into them. We all need the breaking and prompting and prodding of God’s urgent Spirit.

Greta Thunberg, this uncanny prophet: we might recall that she is only the latest in a series of chosen voices, female voices through history, that have spoken with cataclysmic urgency from their position of vulnerability and desperation. Joan of Arc, Rosa Park, Malala Yousufzai, Rachel Carson, to name just some. These are the stewards of Jesus’ parable, looking into the abyss and calling us to respond from our cosy laissez faire armchairs. Dare we, we are tempted to ask? Dare we not, asks the steward. Jeremiah spoke out of the deep urgency of apocalyptic grief as the world collapsed around him. So too does Greta Thunberg. So too must we speak about material and spiritual concerns of God.

With urgency we are challenged not to succumb to what Bob Dylan called the worst fear – the fear to bring children into the world – though obviously population cautions are called for on a groaning earth. We are called to speak of hope, not despair. Called to seize faith amidst the emptiness of our community, and live it transcendently, conspicuously, compassionately in the interests of God’s people and God’s earth. We are called, like Greta Thunberg or Malala Yousufzai, to challenge hopelessness and oppression, to seize purpose rather than remaining possums in the headlights of degeneration. We are called to act, empowered by God’s Spirit of hope and light and life. We are called to speak of hope against all odds, but simultaneously to act to bring about the changes that voice that hope. We are called to be as provocative and urgent as a steward facing the collapse of his world.

May God help us all to be so.