I am with you

 

SERMON PREACHED at St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

22^nd ORDINARY SUNDAY (August 30^th) 2020

 

READINGS

 
Exodus 3: 1-15

Psalm 105: 1-6, 23-26, 45c

Romans 12 : 21-28

Matthew 16: 21-28

 

Given the phenomenal amount of ink (including toner!) that has been applied to the commissioning of Moses, the beginning of the great Exodus event, you could well prepare yourself for an extraordinarily long sermon! I’ll do my best to thwart that expectation, but there are few more influential moments in at least the Hebrew scriptures; perhaps only the resurrection narratives of the Christian scriptures surpass this momentous passage in God’s relationship to humankind. In these moments of encounter, God dares to implant a new dream in the mind of the shepherd Moses. We’ll find another shepherd somewhat central to the stories of Jewish and Christian people alike, in David – and the virgin’s son Jesus will go on to name himself as “the great shepherd.” There is much going on here.

But let’s start with the dangerous threshold on which Moses stands. He is beyond the wilderness. Whatever is meant by this, it is no easy place to be, and not the sort of place you want to suddenly experience appearances of God. There, on the slopes of Horeb – or Sinai – Moses encounters more than he had expected. It is worth pausing momentarily, just as in his inevitable puzzlement and shock Moses pauses. His life has been up to now more reprobate than a life of spiritual leadership, yet he quickly adjusts: he recognizes his own unworthiness to experience the encounter. We can fairly assume that he does what he is told, removing his sandals on the holy ground. We are told he goes further: recognizing his human shortfall of the expectations of God he hides his face.  The God he has encountered is no mate.

But nor is Moses totally acquiescent. If we know our Moses story, we will know he is an impetuous soul, which is how he came to be tending Jethro’s flock in the first place. God is not choosing a pussy cat to lead the People of God to freedom. Moses will argue with God – perhaps we will be reminded of Jacob and his wrestling match with God. But Moses will also surrender to God. We can learn much from both these actions. It does not harm to wrestle with God, in prayer; it does greater good to surrender to God as God nudges our lives in the way God chooses for us. Moses is not deaf or blind to the signs around him: “Here I am, Lord,” he responds. Our moments of encounter with God tend to be a little less dramatic, we hope, but the same response if asked of us. “Here I am, Lord.”

There are ways in which Moses is only a bit-player in this scene. God’s heart is moved not by anything Moses has said or done, but by the desperate cries of the People Israel. Moses will spend much time in coming chapters explaining why God has got things wrong. God will not be swayed by the man’s pleas: “I am with you” is God’s unambiguous response. Moses again and again will look to his or his people’s past. God will time and time again point to a new future.

We in the Christian community would do well to learn from this relationship. The past, the whakapapa of our faith is critical, a gift from God, just as the call and naming of Abraham’s descendants has been a gift from God.  But God would not leave them either in their past or in the precariousness of the present: it is time to dream a new dream. God will indicate this  over and again. Moses never altogether quite gets it, but God does. The people, though not Moses, will eventually reach their Promised Land, albeit with many trials along the way.

The difficulty for twenty first century followers of Jesus is that we are in a context not altogether unlike that of Moses. As we look back on the history of Christianity, certainly since it became a force of power across the footprints of the old Roman Empire, there is much for us to be ashamed of. One of the few things we know of the younger Moses is that he had killed. Not without some justice or righteous anger, but killed, nevertheless. “‘Vengeance is Mine’ says the Lord” is a lesson Moses will take the rest of his life to internalise.  Or, as Paul goes on to say, “bless those who persecute you.”

Moses takes a lifetime to learn it, but he will make “vengeance is God’s” a centrepiece of his final speech. Christians have too often decided that vengeance and retaliation, oppression and victimization is ours to impose. The current parlous state of Christianity in the Europeanized world is precisely God’s brutal reminder that vengeance is God’s alone: our task as so many certainties crumble around us may well be, like Moses, to surrender the old certainties, the false gods that have left us comfortable and complacent.

Our task is to hear instead the voices of those who cry for compassion and justice across the screens of our television news and other media feeds each day. We may well lose all the Linus blankets – of, for a stronger metaphor, the false gods of power, privilege and prestige that the western church has clung to for too long. Our buildings, our tax breaks, our stipended clergy: all are being stripped from us and we are called to find the God who speaks from a burning bush, called to turn aside to new realities and listen to their message.

Which is not to say that every voice that whispers is the voice of truth. Do the messages that we see in media and read in our own hopes and dreams, do they point to the God of the Cross, the God who will always prioritise the plight of the vulnerable and disenfranchised?  Who are the beneficiaries of our priorities? Of our survival, or the survival of the most wretched of the earth (species and peoples)? As Mr Trump in a far-off land slams the activists who are calling for justice for the disadvantaged, we must ask whether the God of Moses called for the protection of the powerful Egyptian Empire or the liberation of a suffering people. Black Lives Matter, because black lives are made in the image of God. #MeToo because God, too, has been victimised and raped.

The story of Moses will point to the need to ask questions that take us out of our comfort zones. The tendency of the church for hundreds of years has been to draw boundary lines that clearly define the ins and the outs of belonging, lines which define the alleged wrongs and rights of practising our faith. The encounter of Moses with the sight of burning bush and speechless angel, and the sound of the voice of God, redefines expectations, rejigs calibrations of faith. Moses is not a particularly deserving servant of God – he has blood on his hands, after all – but he is a chosen servant of God. Because God has chosen him – as God will choose the great prophets throughout Jewish and Christian and perhaps other histories. We are not particularly deserving servants of God – and because we are not, we need to get rid of any sense of entitlement. 

We begin not with God needing us, but God choosing us. We continue not with expectations of comfort or reward, or even the expectation, Moses reminds us, that we will see the fruits of any labours we fulfil. Jesus, in our gospel passage, makes it clearer still: where we wish to protect our interests, to save our lives, we will not succeed. Those who want to save their life, will lose it. We continue by reminding ourselves that our experience of God in worship, in fellowship, in all aspects of divine touch, is a privilege not a right. We continue by reminding ourselves that we are called to serve not our own interests but the needs and interests of others.

For us as Christians in the world today this may mean much more to come that is unsettling. We are far removed now from the world in which Johnny Jones generously if ambivalently boosted the presence and resources of Christian faith in our region. The very things that for 160 years enhanced our gospel-mission may well be the things that, at least to some degree, now hold us back. The Spirit who startled Moses in lands beyond the wilderness is the same Spirit who is stretching us, challenging us to speak with integrity of love, of justice, of peace and reconciliation, and above all of the mysteries of resurrection faith in a world beyond the wilderness that was Christendom, state-sanctioned Christianity.

For our purposes here we should give the final say to Paul, that prickly saint whose known world collapsed around him and experienced new birth when it did. As he wrote to attempt to establish his credentials to the Roman Christians, perhaps already lapsing into a Christian arrogance and complacency, he pulled no punches:

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.  Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’  No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

It’s not a bad manifesto.

 

 

 

 

pesky powerless ones

 

SERMON PREACHED at St BARNABAS', WARRINGTON
20^th ORDINARY SUNDAY (August 16^th) 2020

 

 

READINGS

Genesis 45: 1-15
Psalm 133
Romans 11: 1-2a, 29-32
Matthew 15: 21-28

 

Bishop Steve, Rev’d Anne and I were in the Diocesan Office yesterday, amused that we all had to preach on this gospel reading, one of the most vexatious in the three year cycle. Will no one rid me of this troublesome woman – a variation on King Henry II’s alleged response to Thomas a’Beckett, seems to be the most common response of preachers to the task of preaching on this passage. In many preachers' Henry's  words seem to edge their way towards the lips of Jesus, at least in thought if not speech.

What do we do with her, and with this scene? Is she a stroppy, obstreperous woman, not unlike the importunate widow of one of the famous parables of Jesus? Is, as some suggest, Jesus just playing some sort of a mind game with her to “test her faith” (that obscene phrase that is a direct contradiction of all that is faith is in the New Testament). Does she by her superior intellect outwit the Messiah and open his eyes to the wider ramifications of his vocation, broaden his understanding of the gospel? Perhaps she's an angel! The bad interpretations are myriad, and they are based in an inappropriate approach to the passage.

This is not a piece of reportage. The first writers and audiences of the scriptures – Hebrew and Greek, recognized the genres of communication they were encountering and altered their expectations accordingly. They did not have our (misguided!) expectation that a factual, blow by blow account of events was being heard. In any case lawyers, literary scholars and philosophers may well point out today that there can be no such thing as absolute accurate reportage, at least without a recording device, and possibly not even with that (can a microphone record a wink or a smile?). 

Matthew, not least because he was writing thirty years after the events, is giving a nuanced and theologized account of an encounter that was no doubt widely known to have occurred. He is making a point as he sets about proclaiming the coming reign of God. Our job is to ferret as best we can, after two thousand years, his meaning. And we do so, of course, aided by that mysterious unseen presence of God’s Spirit who guided Matthew and who guides you and me.

But if not reportage, which does just seem to give us a stroppy, desperate woman, a rather offensive Jesus, and Jesus changing his mind, what then do we have?

We have what the French would call a Symboliste story, in which powerful symbols work their way through the narrative and from which we can extrapolate meaning no less than Matthew’s original audience could. The woman shows remarkable determination and remarkable faith. Do we, by comparison? In the rapidly changing, fluxing, unsettling world that 2020 is throwing at us, can we find desperate faith, born of the determination to experience God breaking in to our moments and our days, or fears and our joys? When we are confronted by what the famous hymnist called “change and decay in all around” are we willing and able to cry out “Lord, have mercy”? Do we dare to believe against all appearances that God is present in the ravages of pandemic – far more difficult of course to believe in Beirut or Brazil than in Warrington or Wakatipu (chosen for alliteration, of course, rather than any theological point: Warkworth, perhaps? Or Wellington.).

As is the case in most of the Jesus encounters, this woman is an outsider, to be feared, mocked, abhorred. She should know her place. Yet in her desperation she is dogged, determined, lacking the finesse of social conventions. Too often – despite countless Jesus-encounters like this – Christians pull down the shutters on the desperation and integrity of those outside our cozy boundaries. This is a woman who shows great faith. It is Peter, the ultimate insider, who shows little faith. If we are to be honest, how often must we admit seeing greater faith, love, compassion and justice in our atheistic or couldn't care less or Buddhist or Muslim neighbour than we find in ourselves or, sometimes it seems, anywhere in the Anglican or wider Christian community? But the stories of the gospel-tellers will always challenge us to look at ourselves, not others: we are not called to judge, or at least not to condemn, our neighbours, but to condemn that in our own lives – my  own life – which is not able to withstand the steady gaze of Christ.

God’s action will never be dependent on our theology or other interpretation. Theology is a valuable tool of the gospel, but it is not the gospel. Jesus responds because the woman has great faith, not because she has correct faith, or enough faith, or polite faith. For the “greatness” of her faith is not its ideology, but its desperation. And while not all our desperate prayers are answered as we would sometimes like, I believe they are answered, and our lives and hopes and dreams are caught up in the eternities of God, even when all seems lost to us.

The woman of our story is prepared to be brutally honest, and even argue with Jesus. While she is an outsider she is not the first in a long chain of those willing to wrestle with God. Abraham seeking to defend the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, though he doesn’t get his way, is honoured by God. Jacob wrestles with God and is honoured by God. Jesus will later plead for a way other than death to complete his mission, but surrenders to God’s will, nevertheless. Honesty and integrity go a long way in our relating to God.

This powerless outsider woman receives the answer she seeks to her desperate plea. We won’t always, but we are called to imitate her nevertheless, to throw our desires for our loved ones, for our neighbours, for our world into the heart of God. We will not always, perhaps not even often see the answers we want to our prayers, and sometimes the silence of God seems to crush us. Yet we are called to wrestle on, as individuals and as church, to throw our longings and our lives into the heart and hands of God. Integrity in faith, like that of the Syrophoenician woman, is born that way, and the Reign of God is proclaimed in integrity.