SERMON PREACHED AT St ANDREW’S, OBAN
(RAKIURA / STEWART ISLAND)
THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT (24th March) 2019
READINGS:
Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 63:1-8
1 Corinthians
10:1-13
Luke 13:-1-9
Coming to you as a stranger – which I know is frequently
the option here – makes it difficult to break open the word with authenticity
amongst you. The art of proclamation, preaching, is a transaction between parties
immersed and conjoined in the Spirit of God. Biblical authors, collators, society
and its changes, your story, my story, all engage. The points in common are common
enough, but the disconnections can be brutal. Forgive me if in my foreignness
(relatively so, of course: I haven’t arrived from Mars, though some have often
thought so when I’ve preached!) our lines in the stave do not harmonize. At the
very least may our souls sing from the same source and the same destiny, sing
in the same embrace of God.
I say this particularly because the readings all
take us to stern places today, journeying as we are through Lent. But I say it too
because here in our nation we have been taken to stern places, places from
which we can only stutter in deep lament. We will never forget, though we may
repress, the moment when we heard of the shootings in Christchurch ten days
ago. For most of us the pain will pass, because it’s reasonably abstract. Less
abstract perhaps than shootings in the USA, cyclones in southern Africa and Arnhemland
and Arizona, but abstract nevertheless. For us personally new days have dawned
without palpable grief. But they have dawned with a niggling sense that
something has changed. Watersheds do that. Our 9/11 has changed us, just as the
world’s 9/11 changed us.
Our readings – from long ago yet from today, too – take
us to the heart of God of judgement. While often in the church we have
trivialised this stern, what I in my writings call (after C. S. Lewis) “Aslam
is not a tame lion” aspect of God, we do so at peril. Christchurch was not in a
simple obscene sense God’s judgement, any more than Good Friday was the bitter
and bloody act of a vitriolic God. But Christchurch was the outcome of our
silent self-satisfaction and our acquiescence with evil, the joint evils of
xenophobia and complacency. A brutal reminder that we are as tolerant a society
as we are a clean green society, and that the veneer is very thin.
Good Friday, towards which we are journeying
through Lent, was likewise a brutal reminder, the brutal reminder, that humanity will always crucify love and
justice and compassion (and if we doubt that, we might recall news statements
today that there are serious death threats directed at our prime minister right
now).
That the Christchurch killings took place is an
event from which we are brought to crisis, to judgement (the words are the
same), and are a call to ameliorative, restorative action. Christchurch was our
moment to cry out in a dry and weary land where there is no water
(metaphorically speaking), our striking down in the wilderness, and our cutting
down in the orchard.
We the Church are not in a
position to wave big sticks. In the Church (in all its forms) we have often done
so, or finger-pointed at the community around us. Our permission to do that, if
it ever existed, has long been exposed as a fraud. Our sorry histories of
exploitation and abuse are something we are called deeply to repent. While that
is partially a story for a different time it is not entirely so.
We cannot wave a big stick at society, but we can
demonstrate the integrity of the gospel we are called to proclaim. We can be
speaking and acting out of conspicuous love, justice and compassion, and doing
so in the face of the growing narratives of hatred towards our Muslim brothers
and sisters.
Speaking up for the persecuted includes not only
our Muslim whanau but all our persecuted minority brothers and sisters. We
might, as we speak in Lent about conspicuous justice, love and compassion, and
about the judgement of God, note that bikies have been more visible in their
actions of love and support for our friends than many Christian groups. We
might at this time lament those pseudo-Christian leaders (and I will name Brian
Tamaki) who have used this time to worsen the pain of our Muslim friends.
We surrender a theology of God’s judgement, running
through our readings today, at great peril. But other themes run through these
scriptures, and we ignore them, too, at peril. As Paul writes about the history
of the people of God, and of the failings of our predecessors in faith (and
there is nothing new under the sun), and about God’s judgement, he writes as always
with a deep sense of the God who draws near to and enters the human predicament
in Christ.
We surrender the doctrine of Incarnation, too, at
great peril. I am not here critiquing our Muslim, Jewish and other neighbours,
for whom this doctrine is incomprehensible, perhaps silly or even offensive. I
critique those who espouse faith in Christ while dismantling the meaning of his
existence. For us God is not merely out there at the edge of the universe or
universes, but has drawn near to and indeed entered human experience in the
Incarnation and in Pentecost’s coming of the Spirit.
For Paul, God in Christ enters
into our own stumbling and failure, as well as our doubts and uncertainties.
God in Christ enters and transforms our failures into the Easter hope. We speak, in a
time of ecological and sociological and economic crisis (judgement) not with
empty platitudes but with individual and collective experience of lives transformed
by God. This is the God who in Christ by the Spirit enters us and converts us
and our world from darkness to light, from despair to hope. We must speak by
our actions and attitudes, and only then perhaps by words, but we speak (or
should) nevertheless. We remain silent, frozen in the headlights, at great
peril. We ignore the central traditional resurrection faith of our forebears at
great peril for without it we have nothing to say.
The readings take` us to a place of
judgement, crisis. They take us to a God who in Christ draws near and even
within us.
They do not leave us in the shadow of Good Friday. In
the apocalyptic language often favoured by biblical characters, yes, the axe is
at the foot of the vine or the tree. Yet that, we know, is not the final word.
We must not forget, or again do so at great peril, a third great theme of
our scriptures, that of grace and its spiritual bed-fellow, resurrection-hope.
Am
I good enough to bear witness to the love and compassion of God? I don’t have
to be an extraordinary sinner (though I do quite badly well) to know that the
answer is no. I stumble, I fall. As the old confession wisely used to put it, I
do the things I ought not to do and leave undone the things I ought to have
done. I suspect we are all stumblers on the Way of the Cross: the reminder in
the Stations of the Cross that some will observe on Good Friday, that Jesus
stumbles, enters our stumbling on the journey to death and resurrection. That
is a powerful sign of hope. For in the end, while we cannot, must not be
complacent in the face of darknesses, we are nevertheless privileged to know
the transforming energies of the eternal one who walks with us, leads us in God's warm footprints to eternal hope and life. We know the God who refuses any
name beyond “I am,” but who beckons us always to the hope beyond our
understanding and the eternities beyond our sight.
Amen.
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