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.