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.