a small girl and an infinite gift

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, DUNEDIN

22^nd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

ORDINARY SUNDAY 21 (September 1^st) 2019

READINGS:

Sirach 44:1-15

Psalm 126

1 Corinthians 3:11-14

Matthew 5:1-12

May I begin to say I am slightly embarrassed to find myself preaching on this Sunday on which we observe the “Builders of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa.” When Ondine rang me to ask which readings I wanted I was caught on the hop: I have made it my practice for thirty years to emphasize the more “global” routines of shared readings, rather than more localised observations. I have promised however to be a good boy and stick with what I suspect was the preferred option of your Acting Dean, who happens also to be our bishop and my “boss.”

Forgive me though if I focus on just one conglomerate of builders. Forgive me, too, if I speak of something of which you probably know far more than I do. For I suspect most if not all of you will know the story of Tārore.

Twelve-year-old Tārore was murdered in the Kaimai Ranges on October 18^th – St Luke’s Day, coincidentally – in 1836. She was killed in an iwi’s revenge raid, killed by Paora te Uita, her body ritually mutilated before it was reurned to her pacifist and grief-stricken father, Wiremu Ngākuku. She was carrying in a kete, strung around her neck, a rare te Reo edition of the Gospel According to St Luke.

The story is long, and I don’t want to go into all the details, but as many of you know this small book transformed the life of Tārore’s killer. Te Uita asked a missionary, Ripahau, to explain the small book’s strange narrative. Shocked by the message that we so comfortably digest Sunday by Sunday, Paora Te Uita came to faith, sought forgiveness and reconciliation from God and from Tārore’s father, and providentially the book made its way to Otaki, to Ripahau again. The small te Reo volume went on to accompany Ripahau on his mission to evangelize the iwi of te Wai Pounamu, the mainland.

The bible, and portions of it, are not as sometimes is suggested, some sort of talisman by which to ward off evil. Miraculous tales do exist of men and women saved from bullet or blade by a bible in their pocket, and I have no cause to doubt them. That though is not the significance of the bible in human history or in Tārore’s tale. Tārore’s life, after all, was cruelly ended in mid-childhood, a tragedy in any century.

The impact of the small book in her kete was through engagement with the text: Paora te Uita beseeched Ripahau to unlock the narrative for him. We could do worse ourselves: two thousand years of Christendom and a couple of hundred years of post-Enlightenment arrogance have often all but closed western, global north hearts to the remarkable witness of the New Testament writers.

That was true in Tārore’s time. I am strongly committed to the use of te Reo in liturgy, as strongly committed as a Johnny Come-Lately can be to respect for and empowerment of tikanga Māori in equal partnership in the mission and resources of contemporary Anglican Christianity. I am committed because slowly I have learned it is that it was Māori like Ripahau and Wiremu Ngākuku who saw the difference between Europeanization, paternalistic imposition of a foreign culture, and the embrace of radical Christ-centred good news transcending hatred and death.

As it happens, as I came to know the tragic history of colonial contact across the Tasman I saw the same pattern there. As Europeanised Christians we need constantly to ascertain whether we are celebrating a false gospel, even in the twenty-first century, of European superiority, or the radical, manaakitanga of the God of the Cross. We are called to proclaim that broken God who came to be so well understood by Māori and Australian Indigenous alike.

I only partly digress. Convinced by the urgency of the message of the Cross – albeit sometimes badly warped by layers of European additions – Māori seized the message of Christ, fanned the fires, and spread Good News across the Islands of Aotearoa. From Otaki, te Rauparaha the younger used the terrifying mana of his father to spread with Ripahau an urgent new message of hope amongst the southern Iwi. The engagement with the scriptures that had converted Paora te Uita, led the murderer to seek the forgiveness of his victim’s father, breaking cycles of negative utu that threatened to tear a race apart. The scriptures fell into te Uita’s hands not through any merit of his, indeed through the opposite, but because a vulnerable child so loved the message they contain, the message that St Paul calls the message of the Cross, that she carried it with her in her futile flight to longed-for safety. The scriptures were not a magic talisman, but then and potentially now are the key to liberation of an oppressed people, reconciliation between bitterly opposed forces, hope beyond sight for all who suffer loss, grief, and even the universal curse of mortality.

As we celebrate, despite my “worser” judgement, the “Builders of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa,” we could do worse that reflect on the love a small girl had for the Lord who she met in the Gospel according to St Luke, a love so strong that it transcended her brutal murder, and slowly transformed cultures of hatred into cultures of reconciliation and hope. We might ask that we too find such love for the risen Christ that our lives and deaths point only to him.

May God help us so to do.

embarrassingly close and wondrously warm

SERMON PREACHED AT St ANDREW’S, OBAN

(Rakiura/Stewart Island)

ORDINARY SUNDAY 21 (August 25^th) 2019

READINGS:

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Psalm 71: 1-6

Hebrews 12:18-29

Luke 13:10-17

If I have a concern about the place and the focus of much contemporary Anglican Christianity, and I do, then it is about the habit of Anglican Christian leadership and so-called “influencers” to sandpaper away the inconvenient wedges of our faith. I see this in various forms, and have for years, decades even. I see in in my travels around this diocese, but I have seen it elsewhere since the time of my own theological formation three and a half decades ago. Let me emphasise that I do not see it in the leadership offered by our bishop, nor the tutelage of Richard, who has ostensibly been your vicar and overseer for many years now. I just want to put that out there!

Nevertheless there is a common cultural cringe around Anglican and some other Christian circles at the thought of a God who dwells closer to us than breath, who clings closer to us than out own epidermis. Perhaps the cringe is a sort of icky-factor, a paradoxical fear that the God who dreamed into being our bodies and their functions, is somehow a bit embarrassing to have around when we do our human stuff.

It is a paradox of course, and one we should learn to live with once we have made the faith-leap of believing in an invisible Creator God. Do we believe in a God who lovingly etched the vast palette of our lives, as Jeremiah and the psalmist he echoes allude? Is it just possible that, if we do, that God might know our being and its functions, physical and emotional and psychological and spiritual alike, better than we do? Where then should I run to be hide from such a god? But why should I hide anyway?

I suggest – though this conversation belongs in a different place and time once I’ve flagged it – that this may well mean that God has far fewer hang-ups about our sexuality and other highly personal ingredients of our loves and lives than we or some of the scriptural writers (for they are flawed humans too) seem to allow. We get hung up on the peripheries – we major in the minors, as one academic friend of mine put it years ago. Do we really want to limit so drastically those who love and are loved by the God of the Cross?

Yet at the same this God, closer than our breath or epidermis, is the God of the Cross. This has nothing to do with what those outside the corridors of faith may believe, where they might find God. There’s plenty of nature, God’s artistry, around Rakiura /Stewart Island to wow the hardest hearts with the possibilities of God. But having made the leap to believe in the God of Jesus Christ, the God who drove by the divine Spirit the earliest disciples into the jaws of martyrdom in their dedication to the gospel, then perhaps we could have the decency to continue to hold to the powerful love-event that seals us within God’s heart. In the Cross of Jesus we find the incomprehensible extent to which divine love will reach to reconnect with us: reaching even to and beyond utter desolation, utter despair, utter god-forsakenness, and even there breathing resurrection hope for those we love and pray for.

We have an “ick-factor” about the closeness of God for many reasons. The most ignoble of those reasons, though, is because we want to generate for ourselves spaces where God is not permitted. Sexuality is one obvious example, but there are many far more serious examples that we tend to ignore. Perhaps sexuality is only paraded so readily because for many people it is easy to feel self-righteous: I wouldn’t do that so those who do should receive God’s wrath. Except Jesus suggests that it’s not like that: that we all have dark propensities, all are enmeshed in sinfulness (as Paul would later put it).

But what if God knows my greed, my sloth, my avarice, my – need I name all the deadly sins that were a useful encapsulation of human fallenness? I can harden my heart against God – dare I admit I often do? – but in the end will that as it were grow me godwards? Are not the great lives that have inspired us godwardly lives that have, often kicking and screaming, opened up to the God who is in any case already there? God’s “consuming fire” is a painful place: sometimes it is easier to open our lives instead to God’s consuming compassion and love, and there let the work of regeneration and “sanctification” continue.

Jesus is confronted by a woman trapped in her brokenness. There are for her no power games, only suffering. Jesus confronts those who entrap the woman in her brokenness, most likely doing so in their own self-righteousness. There is little doubt to whom Jesus directs his sternest words. There is little doubt that stern words from the heart of God are always addressed to those whose lives oppress others. There is little doubt that the God who is closer than breath or epidermis longs to chisel away the sclerotic tissues in our being and make us, even us more Christlike. But first we must open to God the awkwardest entrails of our being.

May God’s closer than life Spirit help us so to do.

Blessed art thou amongst women

In recent decades we have discovered that Luke, as author of the third gospel-account, introduced some important lenses to his text that history had too easily ignored. Luke is the writer above all who favours the cause of women in the stores, finding in many of the women around Jesus examples par excellence of how we are to follow in the Messiah’s footsteps. Above all in his telling of the story looms Mary, the Mother of Jesus. And, close to the beginning of his Jesus-story, Luke gives us a song, placed on the lips of Mary, that provides something of a lens through which the whole story of Jesus must be seen, And, by and large history has ignored it.

I recall as a child at One Of Those Schools that the Magnificat came up in readings from time to time – as did the great Magnificat hymn-interpretation “Tell Out My Soul.” I was underwhelmed. The mighty may be plucked down from their thrones, but as one struggling to survive near the bottom of the Lord of the Flies pecking order, it was clear to me that the mighty seemed firmly entrenched on their thrones. It was just one more of the reasons that I chucked Christianity soon after my confirmation at the age of just-13 (and refused to sing the hymns). Yet in the years that were to come, as the seeds of faith that had been sown gnawed at my atheistic soul, the words kept on percolating. 

For a while after coming to faith they just seemed pretty. But I wasn’t a third world woman. It would be when I began to read feminist and third world feminist theology that I began to hear the texts enflamed with divine power.

For Luke’s Mary sees the world upside-down. The haves have not, the mighty are weak, the fat starve. And still I look around me and it is not true. Trump is not svelte, nor dis-empowered. The poor starve on the scrap heap of history. Women continue in most cultures to be deprived of control over their lives and their bodies. Was Mary – or Luke’s version of her – wrong?

Luke’s Mary should be a driving force compelling us to change the face of society. Perhaps in the Global North that we once called the First World or “West,” yes, the power structures are changing a little, though the fate of women in contexts of domestic violence remind us that a little is very little. We are challenged to keep striving for justice. it only takes words and actions like those of reprehensible Australian shock jock Alan Jones, suggesting that our prime minister should have socks stuffed in her mouth, and the impotent frat-boy silence silence that was Scott Morrison’s response, to remind us that women are never far removed from the threat or reality  of violence. It wasn't so long ago that Jones suggested Prime Minister Julia Gillard should be put through a chaff-cutter. 

There is another aspect of the challenge that some contemporary Christianity fails to acknowledge. For there is also the scathing doctrine of God’s judgement. It is easy to blithely ignore it as the opposite of pie in the sky when you die – a sort of ogre in the sky instead – but we are challenged not to cherry pick our doctrines. We can’t have a warm cuddly God of love without the God who chastises God’s people through all the books of our scriptures. We cannot merrily wave away a God of judgement; we should address the faults in our own lives as much as we address the faults in society’s life. The fact is we by and large – and I speak for myself – address neither.

The Church was ever thus. After the closing of the New Testament era womankind, originally liberated by the early Christian community, was silenced, and the mother of Jesus was pushed aside.  Slowly though the longing of many praying women generated a place for her. The feminine nature of the Spirit was re-gendered to a third bloke of the Godhead, and women devotees slowly found a friend in Mary. But the “masculised,” for want of a better word, church would have none of it. The men in power could not be rid altogether of Mary, but they could, inadvertently or not, push her to the outer regions of the universe, out beyond Sagittarius A*, the black hole cheerfully swallowing the Milky Way, out beyond Andromeda and who knows where, out to the fringes of the heavens. She was made queen of the heavens, given a sceptre, and told firmly to remain there, waving a blue wand and looking beatific.

Beware a disenfranchised woman! In the last century Mary has begun to wriggle free of bonds of male supremacy. In the Americas - the southern and central Americas, that is, not the complacent cosy nations of the northern continent - and in parts of Asia, Mary has begun to roar. The mighty if not yet torn down are trembling on their thrones. She is beginning to reassert herself, to remind us that where men have oppressed and repressed and ignored and mocked womanspirit rising they have done so at risk. The timespans of eternity are long, beyond our sight, but glass ceilings are cracking, and women in society and church are beginning to feel empowered. 

Luke is clear: Mary is not to be messed with. She does not replace or overrule the Holy One of God, but she stands close to the divine heart, and the divine heart hears, always, the cry of those who hurt most. A “marified” church or world will not be the eternal reign of God, for, in biblical terms, womankind too is marred by a propensity for evil. The rise of sexual abuse by women in schools is an alarming reminder of that. But however tragic it always is, it is a tiny glitch compared to the abuse suffered by women around the world. And, as a people called to proclaim and enact the justice of God, and as a people who will be judged by God, God the God who chose to dwell in the womb of a Palestinian peasant girl, we need to take seriously the demands that Luke sets before us. Are we prepared to envisage and act to encourage a world in which the hungry are fed and the mighty cast down?

The patron saint of this church is no blue statue, sterile and mild, but a feisty dwelling place of the God of all creation. That of course is incomprehensible, and should be, but at the very least we are challenged to fight for justice wherever we see that it is not present. May God, the God of Mary empower us so to do.

Amen.

English Jesus pure and holy

SERMON PREACHED

at the CHURCH of St JOHN, WAIKOUAITI

Ordinary Sunday 19 (11^th August) 2019

READINGS:

Isaiah 1.1, 10-20

Psalm 50. 1-8, 22-23

Hebrews 11. 1-3, 8-16

Luke 12. 32-40

In the lead up to the First World War, that tragically “great” war that was to end all wars, Christianity had been largely been reduced to bling. The European gospel was reduced to what many optimistic theologians, with no self-consciousness or sense of irony, had boiled down to a message of “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.” Boiled down to a mostly polite gospel of “Europeanness.” And manliness. 

The nineteenth century theologians were of course blind to the complexities of gender inclusive language. There are plenty of sociological ironies implicit even in that blindness, but there were other, deeper ironies, too, hidden in their pronouncements.

Did the historical Jesus really come amongst his people to love and die, causing a ruckus along the way, to proclaim no more than “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man”? Was such a message really ever going to upset either the Romans – what St Paul would later shorthand as the “Greeks” – or the Jews? Was that worth crucifying someone for? Or, if we adhere to the belief that Jesus was in some complex and unfathomable way the revelation of God’s self, was that such an exciting revelation? “The fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”

As an aside, I would add that we jettison belief in the centrality of Jesus at great peril. That too was a preferred tack of nineteenth century liberal Christianity, the Christianity that failed to stop great wars. But “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man?” That is no gospel. 

In many contexts political leaders will, when expedient, find some way of swinging the word “God” from the rafters to produce a cosy feel-good glow. Trump is a master of the art. Boris Johnson does not need to be, though he manipulates the remnant of the Englishman God’s xenophobic hatred of outsiders. Australia’s Scott Morrison is happy to enlist God to his side. Bob Dylan saw the risks powerfully in his scathing poem “With God on our Side”: “You never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”

God is reduced to a convenient plaything, wheeled out in times of battle or nationalistic fervour. I was at a sesquicentennial liturgy at my old school a few years back. As I emerged from the  marquis in which the liturgy was staged, one of my old confreres emerged near tears. It was, he murmured, so beautiful, to sing the old hymns again. The old hymns we sang included “I Vow to The My Country,” with its soulful placing of nation before god at least poetically, and “And Did Those Feet,” in which Blake emerges from his fog of magic mushrooms to reassure himself that Jesus and his stepdad meandered around the hills of England, presumably during a sabbatical from carpentry.

Or at least it seems that way, and to most who have sung those hymns over the centuries any deeper analysis to find the God of the Cross of Jesus is simply superfluous.

The triumphant nationalistic god who led his troops in war was a brutal imposter. His foot- and finger-prints still cover much of who we try to be and what we try to do as followers of Jesus Christ today. The collapse of the church’s presence and role in society has been the death throes of those triumphant, nationalistic gods who once were marching as to war. The move of our Triune God’s Spirit in recent years has been to throw us back on the bedrock of the God of the Cross, the God who suffers in human suffering, the God who refuses those political machinations or the glorious techno-show liturgies of faux-faith. These  are exposed as the work of the Satan in the Temptation narratives.

The move of God’s Spirit in recent years has been to draw us into intimacy with the one addressed in what Henry Burton called “the fervent breath of prayer”: fervent prayers whispered from breaking, vulnerable human hearts. The move of God’s Spirit in recent years has been to remind us, by dismantling so many of our false expectations, that it is precisely “hands that flung stars into space” that are “to cruel nails surrendered,” as Kendrick puts it. 

In the bitter irony of a crucified God, and there alone, God births the blessings of eternity in human lives. This is not an “out there beyond reach” god, not a traipsing around on national flags god, but God who draws into the deepest experiences of human torment and death – every torment and death – and there begins the work of resurrection.

So the God of the Cross, the God of our readings, turns away from religious arrogances that look for god or play with gods in wrong places. The God of Jesus Christ turns away from us when we rely on our prestige or our past or our investments or any other false god to keep our churches going. The God of Jesus Christ turns away when we offer what Isaiah calls “the multitude of your sacrifices” without first offering our vulnerability and our brokenness and our absolute need for God in our lives, individually and corporately.

None of us quite live up to that. We are, thank God, followers of the merciful and forgiving God, revealed in the life of Jesus, revealed in Jesus’ own attitude to obtuse and recalcitrant and basically rather dumb disciples. The God of, and who is revealed in, Jesus Christ asks us for readiness, alertness, openness to all God’s doings in history and in our lives. The God of Jesus Christ asks us to measure our lives by the yardstick of Jesus’ own compassion-wielding and justice-seeking life and teachings. None of us live up to that. As Mary Magdalene memorably sings in Superstar, we are prompted to call out again and again (as we do in liturgy, at the Confession), “can we start again, please?”

At a time when narratives of hate and exclusion are becoming the war cries of international leaders, often tragically aided and abetted by those who call themselves “Christian,” we are called to assess ourselves. Are we triumphantly proclaiming a god who will fulfil our pet agendas, protect our pet interests and structures, maintain imagined racial and economic and religious purity, come at our beck and call to do our political bidding, trampling on human lives to do so? 

We can fairly safely bet that if this is the case then we are not proclaiming the broken yet risen God of the Cross of Jesus Christ. And if that is the case then we are called to fall back metaphorically or literally on our knees to start again in our relationship with God. The collapse of civilizations and ecosystems and economies around us may be dire warning that this is (though not for the first time, albeit perhaps for the most severe time) our eleventh hour. “Be ready,” says Jesus, though we never are. And for that again and again we implore the healing mercy of the God who never ceases to whisper, “come, follow me,” and holds our hands as we do.