leap

 

SERMON PREACHED at St BARNABAS’, WARRINGTON

SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT (28^th February) 2021

 

Readings [altered from lectionary]

Genesis 22: 1-19

Psalm 22: 22-10

Romans 4: 13-25

Luke 13: 20-21)

 

 

Amongst the many metaphors and visual images used by Jesus, images and actions around food and feeding are amongst the most easily relatable. Wine, bread, yeast, these are for most of us highly relatable staples of existence. They are the stuff of everyday. In that alone they remind us that faith can be the stuff of everyday. That is at least one point that Jesus constantly emphasizes. “I am the bread of life,” he famously says elsewhere. Bread may not be critical to human existence, but food is: I am the food of life. Immerse yourself, habitually, in all you know and feel of me.

We forget that. We forget it perhaps because we are too familiar with eating and breathing faith. Those of us who practice faith easily find it to be of the stuff of life to pray, to sing, to mow church lawns and sweep church pathways. There is a sanctity in that. Perhaps because I live with so much awareness of non-faith it always amazes me not only that I see faith in myself, but that I find and see faith in others. Here we are in an infinite, growing universe, surround it often seems by infinite, growing problems, yet there are around us and amongst us, even we ourselves, who are willing to take the leap of faith that all existence is in the hands of a benevolent God.

Sometimes it is a leap. There is much to give us cause to doubt. Our human race does not reflect a lot of the image of God, that image that our scriptures tell us we transport in our very existence. Those we don’t like across the political or racial or gender or orientational divides don’t seem terribly signed with the signature of God. And then, in honest moments, we see ourselves in a mirror or in our mind’s diary and we wonder if we are too? St Paul, not in our passage but elsewhere, reflects grimly that all humanity falls short.  News media remind us daily that he wasn’t wrong. Then he sets the bar a little higher, suggesting that our faith should be such that we are willing to commit infanticide in our obedience to an unseen God; sadly our psych wards are filled with those who have read Paul too literally.

Perhaps I digress? Well yes and no. Our psych wards might be a little less full if we learned how to read these tricky scriptures of ours. Though I am a fan of Paul I’m not sure his reading of Genesis and the Abraham narrative is any more helpful than the Hebrew Scripture original helpful. We must learn to read his writings, too, with caution, for they transformed from topical correspondence to Holy Writ.

But what of a faith in which we learn to throw all caution to the wind. Let’s not raise sabres against our sons, but we might turn to other priorities in our private and our corporate life. We might ask pain-filled questions: can we lose these vain priorities that may actually be distraction? Can we serve, love, trust God with heart, mind, soul but not our desperate emphasis on structures, physical and administrative? Any person who has put up with my thoughts over recent years will be aware that I am often wrestling with the need to lose our false gods, our infrastructure, our shibboleths. I don’t want to place the Isaacs of our existence on the altar of trust, but perhaps we must?

I say “throw all caution to the wind,” and do so advisedly. Many of the great changes of church and society alike have been generated by great and often unexpected storms of God’s Spirit, the one who we variously call breath, wind, the ruarch, the spirit of God. The winds of change that blew the gospel across the Roman empire, the winds of change that for better or worse blew the church into recognition as an official religion of that empire as it crumbled, the winds of change that fired the prayers of the monastic movement, that fired establishment of hospital and university movements, that fired the reformation and its subsequent ripples through time.

There have been counter winds too – perhaps we’ve learned a little more about those in the last four years of American history; demonic ripples like Proud Boys and QAnon will not fade rapidly from our corporate memory. But in this context let’s look to the positive. Our growing understanding of the complexities of justice for minorities, defined by race, gender (not exactly a minority!), sexuality, and what we might call “bodiedness”: these are great Holy Spirit winds of change. Many of these winds have grown outside the boundaries of where Christians have often though the Spirit should blow, outside the confines of church structures and infrastructures, but are the breath of God no less for that. Breathe on me, breath of God. Breathe on us breath of God. Breathe again on humanity and all creation, breath of God.

So it is that we are in this decade being forced by God’s Spirit to throw all caution to the Spirit-wind once more, as economic collapse decimates the church blow by blow, yet whispers the promise of new, more Christ-centred, less human-dependent ways of rumouring resurrection hope in a sometimes somewhat confused and lost society.

What does all of this mean? What does it mean for us as Anglican Christians in a far south-eastern patch of the far south-east corner of God’s globe? It means we are going to be best at being leaven in the lump when we get back to the basics of our faith. Praying, reading – though I would add “understanding,” reading for meaning – the bible, living out the life of Christ, living as a people of resurrection hope, living as a people of justice and compassion, living not as an organization but as a people enriched by the experience of the risen Christ in our midst. It means proclaiming Christ by living for others. It means being conspicuous a little by our oddness – a people of the eucharist, of hymns, of prayers – and a little by our ordinariness, earthed in the rhythms of community life, picking rubbish from the pavements, saving species, visiting the lonely.

It is to this role as leaven in the loaf that we are called this Lent.

 

Greater cuzz, lesser cuzz

 

SERMON PREACHED at

HOLY TRINITY, PORT CHALMERS

FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT (21^st February) 2021 

 

Readings

Genesis 9: 8-17

Psalm 25: 1-9

1 Peter 3: 18-22

Mark 1: 9-15

 

Back at the beginning of December we encountered the opening verses of Mark’s gospel-account. In those eight verses that we read that day – I don’t expect you to remember! – Mark produces a couple of quite remarkable stylistic quirks. He was inventing, in many ways, a whole new form of literature, a theologically weighted slice of life story about a historical figure, a figure who was known indirectly to the audience.

Mark loads the story with theological and spiritual meaning, yet paradoxically begins not by speaking of Jesus – and certainly not speaking of himself. He begins by telling of John the Baptist.

And now, fifteen or so sentences into his story, he turns to his topic. Sort of. The delay has been a part of his stylistic quirkiness. The delay is important: he tells us nothing about himself, unlike post-modern writers, because as far as he is concerned, he doesn’t matter. He may or may not be the Mark who accompanied Paul on some of Paul’s journeys, but Mark isn’t interested in that. He agrees with Paul: “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” Mark doesn’t matter except in so far as he radiates Jesus.

He began by writing not about Jesus but about John.  It is easy for us to forget it, but Cousin John was the bigger name in Mark’s era, much better known than Jesus. Mark is emphasizing the degree to which normal assessments do not apply when the Jesus story begins. A crucified Messiah, a revelation of God made complete in death (though we will add resurrection to that mix): this is never going to be a story that conforms to expectations. And having emphasized that the unexpected, the broken, the not neon lit is the place where God’s heart is revealed, Mark goes on to tell the tale.

Yet even now there is a twist. Nazareth is not the direction from which your average first century seeker would expect God to come. I think we can safely assume that Mark is following historical detail here, so it seems God, too, does not bow to human expectations. I have got into trouble occasionally when using real places to illustrate this aspect of the gospel, but perhaps if we were to think of – but not name – the communities in Otago from which the heart and revelation of God might be  low in our expectations that a god would appear then we will have the idea. Nazareth was, shall we say (to be safe), a Detroit ghetto, not a New York Central Park penthouse.

And things got more complex still. The stranger from Nazareth approaches the famous if prickly cult figure and asks to be baptized by him. My analogies break down. John the Baptist was well known, popular even in an “ouch that hurts” kind of way that would later get him beheaded, but if “people from the whole Judean countryside” went out to hear his message we can be pretty sure he was a headline-hugger. To that extent it might seem uncomplex that Jesus joins the crowds flocking to him. A hobo from Nazareth could do with a bit of washing and restoration. But John himself turns the tables on expectation: no, cuzz – not you. And the on-lookers might have taken a bit of a second look. But Jesus insists, John acquiesces, baptizes his cousin, and then makes the powerful declaration that is so famous “I baptize with water, but he will baptize with the Holy Spirit.”

We could spend an entire morning wondering what that means – but we have other work to do before we can get home (and I can catch my plane). Perhaps we can paraphrase: “This Jesus will make known and available to you absolutely everything you need to know and experience of the Creator.” It’s a big claim, and John’s feisty followers, who may have been sliding into a bit of what we today might call “virtue signalling,” would have been aghast when they heard it – either from John at the time or from Mark years later. By the time Mark was writing, the followers of the Baptizer had a bit of street-cred: we were baptized by the bloke who Herod beheaded.

The events of Jesus' life were – surprisingly perhaps to us – less well-known. And once more Mark turns to strange scenes to narrate them. Jesus begins not with a triumphant success – in fact the only public triumph of his ministry will quickly turn to custard when the crowd turns on him in Jerusalem – but with a surreal encounter with darkness and evil. Mark is telling us something important: the way of Jesus will go to dark places, will not be revealed in neon lights, will not be trumpeted from the gold citadels of glamour and success. It will begin and end in darkness, wrestle with temptations, with apparent failure, and with mortality. Yet temptation, failure and death will not be the final word. Sixteen chapters later some frightened women will hear the words “he has been raised,” and they will flee in terror. Yet the message entrusted to them will reach even to us.

What do we make of this as we attempt to scan the future of our small parish, congregation, church? What do we make of this as so much that we once held dear, here in Port Chalmers, but also across the diocese, across the nation, across the former Christian world, appears to be crumbling around us? The answer is more complex and yet more simple than we think. The critical thing, though, is that God in Christ will not be restricted to our expectations. Jesus will go out to be tempted, to wrestle with our temptations. fears and doubts. They will not have the final word. He will go on to cast brokenness out of human lives, to touch us with love and light and healing. He will and does invite us to go with him, even in our century, stumbling after him as so much that we thought was important and certain crumbles around our ears. He invites us to the way of the cross. Later this morning we will get some glances as to how we might walk in his footsteps. For now we just need to know and cling to the words he later gave the frightened women, and which they faithfully stuttered out: “go … tell … he is ahead of you.”

 

God in the meh

 

SERMON PREACHED

AT

St JOHN’S, WAIKOUAITI

ORDINARY SUNDAY 6 (14^th February) 2021

 

 

 

Readings

2 Kings 5: 1-14

Psalm 30

1 Cor 9:24-27

Mark 1:40-45

 

As we encounter Naaman the General we encounter a strange aspect of our own Christian humanity. Here in Waikouaiti, around the diocese, and I suggest around the western world in mainstream churches we are aware of the struggle to keep our infrastructure alive and well, our churches earthquake standardised and insured, our buildings painted and polished, our liturgical vestments distinct, our prayers formalised and carefully structured. I for one am deeply committed to all these aspects of Christian life. But they are not the be all and end all, and we live in a faith-era when God’s Spirit may well be driving us back to bedrock. What is the core of our faith and its practice?

What, says Elisha, if we are looking for the saving works of God in the wrong place? Clinging to the wrong things? What if the works of God, the access to God, the gifts of God are right there before us as we walk and talk and sleep, and we need only to set aside our busy-ness and blindness to see them, experience them, be immersed in them? Or, to put it a more meaningful, active way, what if we set about seeing the hand of God in the everyday, in the ordinary, and indeed discovering that the ordinary is indeed extra-ordinary. Many who work the land are deeply aware of this: nature red in tooth and claw is nature the generous, too: the soils are turned, the rains come, the earth yields its crop (which is not to suggest that the work involved is not often brutally hard). The ordinary is miraculous, and Elisha sends Naaman off to bathe in the river.

Perhaps not an ordinary wash. Bathe seven times, says Elisha. Not an ordinary river, either. In the Jordan, says Elisha. Still, to Naaman the General it seems a little ordinary. I am reminded of the simple rites we have of communion. Go, says Jesus, eat bread and wine. But perhaps not eat as we would at a picnic. Eat with intent, eat with blessing, eat with the knowledge that this is the rite he gives us to knit together once more, to member together again, the whole history of God’s dealing with humankind and indeed all creation. This is the rite we must perform long after our buidings are gone.

As a people of God we must also be able, willing, and ready to see the spectacular in the ordinary. I have been a part of liturgies in which God is powerfully,  over­whelmingly present. I have been a part of (and admittedly conducted) liturgies which been a bit “meh” – preaching sermons is the same. Yet strangely I have often found that what I experience as a “meh” day others experience as a wow day. God will not be limited, thank you very much, to my small feelings.

Naaman was blinded by his own sense of privilege. A leper is normally a pariah, and he was certainly forced further towards the fringes of his society by the debilitating disease. But even in his condition he demands obsequiousness, demands privileged treatment, demands five-star treatment. He receives the outcome he longs for, but not the methodology he thought appropriate. Privilege will blind us to the places where might see God. He attempts to place demands on the ways and places in which God might work: God will have none of it.

I opened with a litany of the issues we face as a western, privileged people of God. Over and over again I have found signs and messages of the harsh warnings the western Christian community is being delivered: we have sat for too long in a privileged state, demanding that our privilege be preserved by God, and demanding simultaneously that God rescue us from the closures that are threating our existence as a visible people of God. As Western Church we are undergoing death by a thousand cuts. Like Naaman we are telling God how it must be stopped and how we must be redeemed. The history of the people of God tells us that God does not desert the People of God – but God also delivers some very harsh reprimands.

I reserve the word “resurrection” for the historically unique event of the action of God in resurrecting Jesus from the dead. My theology is conservative enough to believe in that – however shakily at times – as an event in history. Unseen by humans, though the resurrecting Christ was seen by some and their accounts still reverberate around the globe. Unseen because we cannot see so great a sight as eternity defeating death – but let’s leave talk of that till Easter. I reserve the word “resurrection” for that Easter event – and for the yet to be event of our own resurrection after the last great mystery of our death.

Many of my colleagues through my career have spoken of resurrection as a cyclical thing – daffodils after the winter, church rebirths after closure. I prefer to think of these as “phoenix rising.” Cycles of life – more prosaic than God’s utter, immeasurable redemption of creation. But as a part of the warp and weft of existence they can remind us that God is as miraculously present in the normalities. Then, every now and again God asks us to reach beyond the normalities – to let bread and wine be for us body and blood – to let a moment be charged with the grandeur of God, saturated with the promise of God. Naaman wouldn’t accept that.

But at a time when we are watching God’s stern pruning of our complacent western church, we might find messages of hope amidst the warf and weft of financial and administrative and architectural normalities. Our infrastructures collapse and close and that may be just one more message of God’s work in the world. But God is with us – with us in the closures, in the uncertainties. God, in a sense, asks us to bathe seven times in the Jordan – to take a slightly unusual approach to the strange times we live in, to find the sacred despite the mundanity. Our privileged existence as Western Christians has blinded us to much that we are called to see and be. But God calls us to hold tenaciously to the promise that God is with us always, even to the end of the age: as things get tough we can enter into our phoenix experience of so much crumbling around us, to hold to that promise, that God is beckoning to us to emerge cleansed from the waters into which we are challenged to dip ourselves.

 

eagles' wings

 

SERMON PREACHED

AT

St LUKE’S ON THE TAIERI (MOSGIEL)

ORDINARY SUNDAY 5 (7^th February) 2021

 

 

 

Readings

Isaiah 40:21-31

Psalm 147:1-11, 20c

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Mark 1:29-39

 

To understand the magnificent poetry of second Isaiah we have to place our passage into the context of the passage in which he originally framed it – that of course should always be the case with biblical passages. For once the historical setting of the passage is a little less important to know, except that Isaiah’s people were an utterly crushed and broken people. They had lost their spirit. We have probably seen pictures conquered or enslaved victims of colonial expansion: Second Isaiah’s people were as them.

And to them Isaiah spoke a word of hope:

those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; 
they shall mount up with wings like eagles, 
they shall run and not be weary, 
they shall walk and not faint.

It is deservedly one of the most well-known and loved passages of Hebrew and Christian Scripture. Some with long cinematographic memories will remember Chariots of Fire and the stirring rendition of these words by Ian Charleson, playing the part of Eric Liddell. “They shall mount up with wings like eagles.”

It is a timeless passage, but it is at its most timely when a people are broken. In 1981, when I was a young undergrad seeing Chariots of Fire for the first of many times, I was not a broken person, nor part of a broken people. I was cock-a-hoop in the full flush of youth and of new-found faith: “they shall mount up with wings like eagles.” But my country, our country, too was a place of confidence. Waitangi Day and its Treaty were quaint excuses for a last gasp of Summer holidays, often accompanied in the Manawatu by disappointing wind and rain. Western society, too, was cock-a-hoop. Ecological and economic collapse were still only faint and largely disregarded rumours.

As it happens Chariots of Fire and the Springbok Tour occurred in the same year in New Zealand. But 1981, surely, was the year cracks appeared in New Zealand’s cosy colonial complacency. Wei began to tear apart and were brought face to face with some of the darknesses of our past. Post-contact New Zealand has had it easy in so many ways, when we think of the Hebrew People, or of the brutal conflict that nations like Myanmar, Belarus or even the United States face today, or the brutal conflict that has often been the story of colonised nations.

Isaiah though was not welcomed by his audience. He spoke of hope – but he spoke too of the cost of following the Creator God. The Hebrew people had been crushed by Babylon, but ironically even “crushed” may seem, sometimes, preferable to the demands of a God. Am I truly free if I permit a Supreme God to infiltrate my life? The Babylonians may be oppressive, but at least they’re the masters we know.

The comparisons with our own era are not direct, but there are connections. Do we really want to believe in a God who makes certain demands of us? Moral demands, ritual demands, “cognitive” demands? Or to put it another way, do we really want to believe in a God when science appears to tell us we’re nincompoops for doing so? Might not the light of God – we would add “revealed in Christ” – penetrate too deeply to our darkest recesses? Do we – can we really believe in God – and do I admit that I struggle?

Yet can we not? Can I not? Isaiah, like Jesus centuries later, answered by turning to the world around him. Who determined the earth’s measurements? It’s not a conclusive argument. But it’s an argument of love. Did both the beauty and the tyranny of our universe just appear? We can argue either way, but as we allow ourselves to be overawed by the infinite beauty and glory of the cosmos around us, something may begin, if we do not drown it out, to whisper to us. Beauty, yes, and terror, yes, but in the stories of our faith even the hint of a goodness, a greatness that may reach beyond the darkest horrors. To me it seems to, and may for for you: beyond the horror of Good Friday is there a glimpse of Light? Beyond the collapse of Empires, from which we are not protected, or the collapse of our lives, from which we are not protected, is there a whisper of something greater. Yes, says Isaiah. And they shall mount up, with wings.

And even in the cycles of history, are there not hints of hope? For four years on the international scene where we have seen the brutality of a nation handed over (in Paul’s sense of the word) to its own darkest urges, are we being invited to see a glimpse of decency reborn? And while Myanmar or Belarus today may seem dark, have there not been hints of hope in the history of nations around the world, of people around the world, of lives around us? Flawed hints, yes, but shadows of dawn’s reddening light.

As bearers of Christlight that is what we are called to live and to proclaim by actions and if necessary by words. Brutal death and destruction, corruption, insurrection and military take-over have their day, but are they the final word? A Gorbachev replaces a Chernenko, yes, and yes is replaced by a Yeltsin and a Putin, yes, but may not a Navalny yet rise despite Putin’s deepest fears? QAnon and KKK offshoots may arise in the USA, but might they not be replaced in God’s time by agents of justice and compassion even for those at the bottom of the socio-economic heap of humans and species? And sometimes it is hard to believe it, but while weeping may last a night time, joy comes in the morning (Ps 30:5).

Against, sometimes, all signs, we are called to be bearers of that joy and clingers to that hope. In a world reeling from Covid and from economic shockwaves and ecological collapse we are called to be messages and signs of hope. We are called to be hope. As our churches close we are called to be hope. As the Jesus story fades from society’s memory we are called to be agents of fresh energy in that story. We are called – and when we struggle are called again – to be “those who wait for the Lord.” We will do that by actions of love, compassion, and justice, most of us on a tiny, micro-scale. We are called, most of us on a tiny, micro-scale; called to be agents of hope, speaking words that drive out demons of hopelessness, loneliness, despair, of abuse and hatred, exploitation and corruption. We won’t be particularly good at it, but by the Spirit of God we will be enabled, as Bruno Bettleheim once put it, to be “good enough” at it. We are called to be a stumbling but Spirit-enflamed contrast society of Jesus, rumouring a world in which they shall and we and all shall “mount up with wings as eagles,” and God shall be all in all.