surrender the shibboleths

SERMON PREACHED

at the CHURCH of St JOHN, WAIKOUAITI

Te POUHERE SUNDAY / OS 12 (23^rd June) 2019

READINGS:

Isaiah 42:10-20

Psalm 42

2 Corinthians 5:14-19

John 15: 9-17

For a few minutes we are going to place ourselves into the sandals of the ancient Hebrew people. We should do this more often: there are many ways in which their suffering prefigures and encapsulates every people’s life-experience. For now let’s just accept that they too are sufferers of the human condition, that condition under which we stumble in the 21^st Century, nearly three thousand years after them.

Frustrated perhaps, grief-stricken perhaps, the great poet-prophet Isaiah – actually the second of at least two Isaiahs – sought to bring comfort to his troubled people. He did so with a suitcase full of bewildering images, the best known of which is probably that of the suffering servant.

Isaiah himself was probably referring to the Hebrew people themselves as the suffering servant of God. Their task, as he understood it, was to reveal the one Creator God to God’s world. But centuries later it became the turn of the early Christians to make sense of the new realities they in turn were experiencing. They too were seeing the collapse of old certainties and safeties. They suffered the corrupt practices of the deteriorating, oppressive Roman Empire. They saw the certainties of the Hebrews’ faith in YHWH crumbling around them … Roman gods were sexier and easier to follow. They had encountered the rumours of the Resurrection of Jesus, and subsequently experienced the powerful sense of his unseen presence in their fellowship and worship. All this was confusing enough. Yet more even confusingly, some of them who had chosen to follow the new Resurrection faith were hated for their troubles, as they trusted in and followed their crucified Messiah.

So some of the Christians’ new teachers turned for inspiration to the powerful yet enigmatic images coined by Isaiah. They did not have access to the writings we call the New Testament. They had the Hebrew Scriptures, and they had new lenses, new life experiences through which to read them. They turned to the shadowy figure we know as The Suffering Servant. It is, as is so often in the case in our scriptures and tradition, a strange description of a Saviour, a Messiah, or indeed of God, though nearly 2000 years have perhaps hardened our hearts to the strangeness. They have done so at great peril to our witness.

That this Suffering Servant messiah sacrifices himself to bring hope, redemption to the world ceases to surprise us. We’ve heard it all before. Yet to most in the ancient world this was an obscenity. Gods might be a bit odd, even naughty at times, and might kilwas an obscenity. Gods might be a bit ofdd. ril to our witness.

a Messiah, or indeed of Gol each other from time to time, but on the whole they tried to keep from getting themselves killed, and certainly didn’t put themselves deliberately on the scaffold of human vulnerability. This servant does, and so had the Carpenter of Nazareth that the early Christians were now calling divine. Strange.

Isaiah’s strange message to the Hebrews had been that they were called to suffer, to be sacrificed, to be like a mother opening her life to the physical pain of child-birth and the emotional pain of child-rearing. This is no place for a god to belong, no way for salvation to be brought about. Isaiah was almost certainly pilloried for his claims: the Christians were.

The first Christians held tenaciously to their strange belief that Isaiah’s message had something to say about Jesus Christ and about the role of the Church, the body of Christ in the post-resurrection world. The earliest known reference to Christians depicts us as idiotic believers in a crucified donkey. Perhaps in the 21^st Century we need to learn how to look idiotic again?

Because we try not to; but when we try not to we forget that the great apostle Paul was adamant that he came like a fool to the people he met. We have cosied up for too long to the institutions of powerful societies, have come too easily to believe that the institutions themselves are the gospel, and that the madness of a suffering servant or a crucified God has nothing to do with us.

As we watch Western society crumbling around us we are frightened, like drowning sailors afraid to reach past the logs that we are clinging to, in order to grasp hands reached out to us, the hands of a suffering servant reaching out to us from the place where despair meets hope.

That place of encounter is the Good Friday Tomb of Jesus It is the place a god should not be, the place that we find it easier to make tame or dismiss altogether. We do so because it doesn’t really fit our view of the universe in a post-Enlightenment, rational world. In rural regions we are powerfully aware of the departure of shops and banks and post offices and police stations and churches. Where we still have them we cling to them tenaciously as if they were the good news of Jesus Christ. They are not, and neither will we be bearers of Good News as we cling to them.

We cannot sing the new song that Isaiah commands us to sing, cannot sing anything meaningful in a world whose societies are crumbling, certainties dissolving, ice caps melting, skies overheating, if we cling to false gods. The God of the Suffering Servant, the God opposed to false securities, is tearing them down. Outsiders like Dennis Glover and Maurice Shadbolt saw the safety nets crumbling a long time ago, but they found no resurrected Jesus to speak into the vacuum that was forming. We must do so, for that is our task.

To do so we are called to surrender the false gods, the shibboleths. That always hurts, but the false securities are deafening all of us to the new song that Isaiah sang and the early Christians sang and Christians are still singing in genuine place of persecution (or places of genuine persecution). These are painful, uncertain times, but we are called to bear Christlight in them. Only then will we really sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, give glory to the Lord, proclaim God’s praise in places of raw vulnerability and pain, or experience the glory of the God who transforms death into life.

We are called to be a resurrection people. We are called to hope against all that is rational, for our loved ones,  for our loved institutions, for our loved but abused planet; our hope will become real when it is focussed on the heart of the gospel, on the death and resurrection of Jesus, and we surrender our attachments to the peripherals. These are difficult times, but the one who passes through suffering and death into resurrection and the mysteries of eternity is the one who wants to lead us on.

May God help us to surrender ourselves, all that we are and all that we shall become, in the service of the Servant who turns suffering into joy, and death into life.

AMEN

cyclonic spirituality

she sings like a cyclone

SERMON PREACHED

at the CATHEDRAL CHURCH of St PAUL, DUNEDIN

PENTECOST (9^th June) 2019

READINGS:

Acts 2: 1-21

Psalm 104: 24-35b

Romans 8: 14-17

John 14: 8: 1-27

As we engage in one of the three great feasts of the liturgical year, the Christian calendar, we are confronted with one of the great conundrums of Christian conversation. How do we speak of this “third Person of the Trinity,” this shadowy figure that one parishioner of mine years ago insisted on calling “Spook.” We’ve been mainly tongue-tied for 2000 years, so why bother? Next week I hope someone in this sermon-spot might apply the same question to the beyond words (or numbers) conversation about the Trinity. But for now: who is this Third Person?

Why bother? Aren’t there better ways to get bums on seats in our crumbling buildings? For that matter, aren’t we better off simply repeating the mantra “spiritual, not religious,” beloved in some circles? Some say so. I believe they’re wrong. I believe they dance on the graves of those prepared to live and die, sometimes prematurely, for these teachings.

So let us pause, for a few minutes, acknowledge that we dwell in a mystery. A few minutes, while inadequate, are necessary to open hardened, sclerotic hearts to mysteries greater than mere human being. Who is this Third Person of Pentecost?

One problem is that in the scriptures of our faith alone there are two main strands of conversation about this strange elusive Person of the Godhead. She (and we’ll touch on gender soon) is the one who inhabits the second verse of our scriptures: the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind (ruarch) from God swept over the face of the waters. Trinitarian theologians affirm that she inhabits even the first verse, albeit gently: in the beginning, when God created. God: triune, community God. She, Pentecostal Spirit, inhabits, too, the bewildering twenty-sixth verse of that first chapter of Genesis; Let us make humankind in our own image.  There God in the plural is at one level a mere grammatical construct, what scholars in their precision call “a plural of deliberation in the cohortative”!  Good with words, those academics are! But the words in the playful truths of interpretation are more than mere grammar. They open doors to admire the mysteries of a community of God, God who is Three-in-One and one-in-three, eternal paradox.

This glimpse of the Spirit is no plaything. Call me a wuss but as a poor air-traveller I was painfully aware of the winds of God as our airbus bobbed like a cork-in-a-maelstrom in the skies from around Palmerston until we touched own at our airport two nights ago. I remember only too well as a home-alone seven-year-old cowering from the winds and falling trees at my Kapiti family home, as the Wahine storm thrashed its fatal way through the lower North and upper South Islands. I remember a storm cell in northern New South Wales flinging heavy doors at head-height through my back garden, flinging cricket-sized hail stones through the windows of our rectory as my daughter and I sought protection in the centre of the house.

The wind of God is not a gentle zephyr, not a plaything, but potentially a life-shattering cyclone. Yet, if our hearts are not too hardened, she is also the force that draws winds from our own souls as we witness Aoraki Mt. Cook for the first time, or the MacKenzie country, or watch a desert moonrise or one of the startling dawns that Anne and I are privileged to watch from our Careys Bay home, splitting the horizon into reds and yellows and purples and blues above the Otago Harbourmouth.

But the first Christians? They found a new identity of the Spirit. John told of the moment in which Jesus breathed New Creation into the nostrils of the frightened, puzzled disciples after the Resurrection. We might call that moment the first hongi of faith, re-creating God’s hongi of the man built from clay in the second creation story of Genesis. Luke tells a different story. He tells of disciples cowering in fear in an upper room, cowering as I once was as those windows shattered around my daughter and me. But the disciples were suddenly empowered as the risen Lord appeared, fiercely tangible, and breathed New Life, New Creation into their troubled souls, transforming them from chickens to eagles, willing to soar (not to mention die) in their new found strength. Languages shattered at the Tower of Babel are unified once more, discord made into harmony, and the language of resurrection life remains a single language despite our petty divisions and hatreds within the body of Christ.

So who was this, who is this Spirit who transformed those frightened few? She is the ruarch of creation, terrifying in potential. But she is also the only means by which Christ and all that he made known of the heart of God is released from an upper room in Palestine and made present to you and me and all who have opened our hearts to Jesus. Her job-description, if I can put it that way, incorporates both the wind that blows through a thousand paddocks of James K. Baxter’s memorable phrase, capable of smashing creation and its lives. She is also the one who can empower us to participate in, be transformed by, be agents of all that Jesus was and is. All aroha-love, aroha-compassion, all prophetic justice-seeking speech and action (for in the Spirit speech and action are one) on behalf of the poor and the broken people and species of earth, all resurrection hope as we hold in our hands the hands of the dying or hold in our silences the grief and despair of the bereaved, all these are the gifts of the Spirit who makes the risen Jesus present and known throughout space and time.

There is so much more I could say in this love-song to the Third Person. She is the Spirit of wild-empowerment, who moves in many ancient religions. She is hinted at in the Māori mythology of Tāne, Tāne-mahuta, Tāne-nui-a-Rangi, who created First Person from the blood and breath of his own being. She is present in myriad versions of the Rainbow Dreaming of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island mythologies, and even in the brutal mythology of Gilgamesh. She is often female, and that need not stop her from making known to us the risen Christ.

She is no plaything. Yet she is the gift of the Risen Christ, making him known and present to us as we stumble in his Way. She is not to be trivialised as “Spook,” though centuries of our disinterested, confused language about her enhanced that caricature. She is not the entertainment of the charismatic movement, though in the corridors of our stuffy churches we perhaps needed that manifestation, for a season, of her healing power.

She is the “enemy of apathy” of John Bell and Graham Maule’s hymn, who mothers creation, hovers on the chaos of the world’s first day, opens to us the scriptures and reveals Jesus to us in them, and empowers us to be his hands and feet and body and blood in the world. She is God with us and in us, for as long as we permit her to be so, and sometimes, thank God, when we do not.

Let us continue to sing her praise in word and silence and music, and pray that we may through all our lives and beyond be transformed by her gentle but irresistible presence.