the untraceable DNA of Jesus

SERMON PREACHED AT St ANDREW’S, MAHENO

and St LUKE’S, OAMARU

ADVENT 4 (December 22^nd) 2019

READINGS:

Isaiah 7: 10-16

Psalm 80: 1-17, 17-19

Romans 1: 1-7

Matthew 1:18-25

Many years ago,  when I was a broadcaster, I interviewed a rabbi in the lead up to Christmas. It became a strange assignment. Understandably the rabbi seemed to think it was his task single-handedly to dismantle the entire fabric of Christmas stories. With great delight he disclosed to me, with an Oxbridge accent, his great insight: the Hebrew of our passage from Isaiah does not mention the subsequent Greek interpretation, “a virgin shall conceive,” but refers to conception, not necessarily miraculous, by a young woman, probably in early adolescence.

Unfortunately the combination of his accent and a slight speech impediment meant that I didn’t hear the rabbi terribly clearly. I must have looked reasonably gormless as he drove his point home. I’m sure I continued to appear gormless for the ten minutes that he would have remembered me.

In fact there was no shocking new disclosure. It’s never been any great secret that Matthew invested a massive amount of symbolic meaning into his version of the story of the Messiah’s birth. Luke did the same, and the stories have been, at their best, powerful vehicles of the gospel message ever since.

But they were not designed to tell the mechanics of the conception and birth of the Christ. Twenty centuries of misogyny have ensured that aspects of this story have been used to maintain a deep fear of women and their role in human reproduction.

Enough said in a family setting, and besides, I’m a prude. But as I have often said in preaching, the critical take away from Matthew’s chronicle is not about the DNA of Jesus of Nazareth, but about a caring, compassionate God. This is the same God who flings stars across universes, and yet who cares for lowly and the humble and the not so lowly and humble, who cares for sparrows that fall,  and for you and for me. That is, as Mark’s more pared back gospel-telling puts it, is “the beginning of Good News.” In Matthew’s quill the story will end with “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Mark is more subtle. He has women telling the gospel story despite their abject fear.

Currently apocalyptic fires and unprecedented rising temperatures are ravaging our near neighbour. Much of the trauma is occurring in places where Anne and I have lived, had parishes, have family. Other near-neighbours face the drowning of their homes beneath rising sea-levels: we will soon see new waves of refugees as a result. One can only pray that they will not receive the razor wire incarceration that has been the response of many nations  in recent years and throughout history.

Do humans not see the image of God in refugees?

Every news feed provides examples of ways in which any pretence of decency is stripped away from the leadership of the free world. This has of course happened before. That is why I referred last time I was here to “an anti-Christ” rather than “the anti-Christ.” the latter is a phrase I simply do not use. Nevertheless the rise of hatred and erosion of public trust are deeply anti-Christ, and the blasé indifference of the wealthy nations to the most wretched of the earth is deeply offensive to God. Narratives of hatred have been enshrined before, in the electorally sanctioned rise of Mussolini and the parallel lead-up to Hitler’s Reichstag Republic. This will happen again, if God does not elect to intervene dramatically in the timeline of cosmic or at least human history.

We know that God cares, because Matthew bent over backwards to tell a potent story about the coming to us of God’s redeeming, healing love. He told a story of a God whose compassion and justice are revealed in a Bethlehem manger and will be revealed again in whatever form judgement may take. Matthew told the story, and the early Christians’ experience of the presence of God in worship and fellowship was so strong that they had no trouble in telling that story over and again throughout the crumbling Roman Empire. They even made Matthew’s and the other gospel writers’ words into Scripture, “holy writ.”  Their experience of the presence of the death-conquering, hope-bringing Immanuel was so potent, so confirmed again and again as the Christians read the Hebrew texts, that we hear it still today.

We do so even if the white noise of Christmas and of Western (Global North) complacency has all but drowned it out. We do so even if what one prayer-writer calls “our unhappy divisions” have all but drowned it out. We do so even if our own sinfulness (mine and yours) has all but drowned it out.

The Advent story with its reverberations of a God of judgement, the Christmas story with its reverberations of a God who draws near (even within) us, Immanuel, the gospel stories of Jesus’ teachings of compassion and justice, the sorry story of his being deserted by all but a handful of faithful but powerless women, the gospel stories of his suffering and death: these stories would have remained fatuous nonsense had it not been for the early and overwhelming experience of the death-conquering, risen Christ with them – and us – after the resurrection.

It is to that that our liturgies and readings point. It is because of that that, while I am not interested in the DNA of Jesus or the bio-mechanics of his conception, I am absolutely convinced that in the Jesus-event we see the unique, redeeming action of God. As Matthew and Paul before him knew at the time of a crumbling Roman Empire, human expectations and constructions were horrendously fallible – and still are. Empires wax and wane, still are, still do, but a greater truth lay beyond them. As individuals we may suffer, and will die, but the early Christians were dynamically aware of a greater hope beyond their sight, making itself known to them by faith. It is that life- and death-transforming hope that we are called to be messengers of, by our lives and, if necessary, our words.

We can be authentic messengers only by the empowerment of the Spirit, who makes all of Jesus’ meaning present to us. As we rejoice, amidst the white noise of Christmas, may we know the peace and the dynamism of the Christ-child. He emerged from the womb of an obedient and brave mother. He would later die with her watching on. Yet he would transcend even death, and those who followed him would proclaim that Good News even to the ends of the earth and even to the present day.

God of light and life

grant that we may be ready,

like Joseph and the young woman Mary,

that we too may be willing

to welcome, gestate and proclaim

your saving presence in the world,

this Christmas and through all ages,

empowered by your Spirit

and always in and through

your Son our Saviour,

Jesus Christ,

born in a manger, died on a cross,

resurrected

and leading us onward

even in eternity,

Immanuel. Amen

always, always

SERMON PREACHED AT ST LUKE’S, MOSGIEL

ADVENT 2 (December 8^th) 2019

READINGS:

Isaiah 11:1-10

Psalm 72: 1-7, 18-19

Romans 15:4-13

Matthew 3:1-12

Some of us who grew up in the New Zealand education system will recall encountering Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory as a set text somewhere around the ages of fifteen to eighteen. For me, because I dwelt on the arty end of the spectrum of learning, it was one of the most valuable experiences, apart from a reasonably successful sporting career, of my schooldays. I was a rabid adolescent atheist when I read it, but somehow it sowed some seeds.

Graham Greene, for those who didn’t encounter him, was one of the most significant novelists of the twentieth century. A flawed human being, but we all are, he wrote novels that often had deeply theological implications, and arguably none more so than The Power and the Glory. The central character, a burned out, unnamed alcoholic Roman Catholic priest, is eventually shot, martyred by the anti-Christian Mexican authorities in their crusade against Christianity. But as he faces his death the eye of God narrator notes the arrival of another priest in his town. The symbolism is obvious: the gospel is not conquered. God is not conquered.

That thesis is of course unprovable. Advent is a time set aside to reflect on and prepare for the Second Coming of our Lord, however we understand that. Our own death? The collapse of human existence? A dramatic and divine intervention in cosmic history? The proof of Graham Greene’s belief, and mine, that the gospel will continue to be carried even after all human expectation is lost in a quagmire of defeat, is unprovable.

All of which I say because we the people of God, in all our myriad forms, are undergoing changes at least as dramatic as those faced by our forebears in the fifteenth century. That was when the world of Christendom blinked and found itself torn asunder. It had been torn asunder before, of course, but here we were again, looking at each other down the barrels of our Protestant and Catholic cannons. And canons, too, but that’s another matter.

 When Matthew was writing his story of Jesus, at another apocalyptic, scary time, he recalled clearly the oddball Baptiser proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Messiah. At the time Matthew was writing it was probably particularly important to recall those events, as some of the Baptiser’s disciples may well have still been awaiting his return in glory, rather than that of his kinsman Jesus. Matthew’s point was that John was pretty remarkable, but Jesus alone was the revelation of the heart of God and all God’s hope.

Matthew recalled clearly John’s expectations of an end of time outpouring, that he expressed in traditional Hebrew terms of fire and God’s Spirit. There is no need for us to dismantle that expectation, however we interpret either the first or Second Coming of Jesus. If God is the God who scatters time and space across nothingness, if God is the God who births hope in the womb of a Jewish peasant girl, if God is the God who touches and transforms your lives and mine (though we all are capable of forgetting that far too often), then God is capable of wrapping up cosmic history in whatever way God decides.

And if not, then, as Paul puts it, we are more to be pitied than all people – but I cling to belief that God’s promises are true, however unlikely, unprovable.

But what is this time of change that I refer to today and in many other contexts? Because I am a blow-in from the diocese, as I said in your newsletter, I have only a kind of passing authority to say this amongst you, but is my firm belief that we as church are being led by God’s Spirit into a time of cataclysmic but God-breathed reformation. For too long we have relied on a presumed authority and standing of the Church in society, presumed that we can wave a big stick and see the world around us tremble. Today that world is more likely to snooze indifferently. A few years ago I watched as a bishop (not ours) released what he paradoxically called a “confidential press release.” He was, I think, expecting a stampede of media attention, but the media, instead, got on with matters that were of interest to people. A strange official in an increasingly unimportant religious organization was not it.

As the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care in New Zealand, as well as other cases around the world, remind us, we have destroyed much if not all of the trust society placed in us. Our graced place in that society has crumbled. There are now no false gods for us to cling to. The only means we have to proclaim the gospel is our personal integrity. We for centuries proclaimed not what Paul refers to as “Christ who lives in me” but our corporate and individual importance. 

Like Narcissus and his pond we looked into the gospel and saw, far too often, only ourselves.

Not all of us, and not all the time, of course. We have all known saints. The public saints, like Desmond Tutu, for whom, incidentally, we are called to pray at this time as he fights an infection. Or those private saints who have passed through our lives and inspired us – I will recall for all my life one dear parishioner who spent her spare time walking around her town visiting the “old people” who were far younger than she was, making sure they were okay.

But the winnowing fork of God is in the barn of our corporate and individual lives. Where we have played games with the gospel, reinventing Jesus in our own image, wherever we are on the spectrum of liberal to conservative, God’s winnowing fork is on our lives. The message of John the Baptist and of all the apocalyptic prophets of the scriptures, is a stern one. Repent and be baptised, figuratively and sometimes literally. Open that or this aspect, dimension of your life and mine – and I have many hidden corners too – to the gaze of God.

In the hands of many preachers that would be a terrifying threat. Yet I believe deeply that the gaze of God, the “wrath that is to come” is the loving, healing gaze, the loving healing wrath of God. Advent, and the advent moments of our entire life journey are not a thing of terror. They are not a “meh” thing, a thing of nonchalance, either. But they are not a thing of terror.

Whether we be an institution or an individual, whether we be pretty rough around the edges or pretty cultured and sophisticated (and I’m afraid I count myself amongst the rough and the broken) our task is to ready ourselves for the God who judges, to be revealed in what we call the Second Coming. The winnowing fork is an image not of terror, but of God’s invitation to set ourselves right, so to open our lives to God’s gaze that we feel nothing but divine love and grace.

For some of us that may take an eternity, but fortunately our God is an eternal God, and it is to that eternal, timeless God that we are called to redirect our lives – aided of course by the Spirit (who we will talk about, perhaps, another time). The whisky priest of Graham Greene stumbled on, as Emmylou Harris put it, into grace, never seeing the fruit of his stuttered ministry. So too might we. But the promise of God is “Lo I am with you, even to the end.” The irony of faith is, of course, that there is no end. “Lo, I am with you always, always, always.”

So that we too can cry out with St. Paul, “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things.”