Remain

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, OAMARU NORTH

FIFTH SUNDAY IN EASTER (2^nd April) 2021

 

Readings

Acts 8:26-40                                

Psalm 22: 25-31

1 John 4:7-21            

John 15: 1-8

 

It was a delight this week to engage in the on-line Gospel Conversations[1] that we are now running – an aid we hope to sermon preparation – and to find my fellow conversationalists there zoning in on two key themes from the seventh and final “I am” saying of Jesus. Perhaps we can mention in passing that seven was a number that often symbolised perfection in Hebrew discourse. Was John carefully suggesting, in his rendition of these sayings, that in them led the path to perfection in Christ? Or to put it a different way, was John saying that by adhering to the immersion, the saturation, the absorption in Christ that Jesus demands, lies the way to completion of our sanctification, our being made Christlike, our being made holy and acceptable to God? I suspect so, but let’s set that aside for a few moments.

Let us set aside, too. for a few moments the letter of John, written perhaps a few but not many years after his Jesus story, the Fourth Gospel. Though as we set it aside we may want to confirm what I suspect we all gleaned, that “love” is an over-arching theme on John’s mind. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

Though funnily enough – and by I suspect John’s careful design – that very verse from John’s later letter takes us to the heart of the Gospel-story John has written. There at the heart of the epistle reading is that other great verb that is at the heart of the “I am the Vine” teaching of Jesus. That verb, which we translate generally either as “abide” or “remain,” is a strong, an emphatic verb. “Remain” is a useful translation insofar as it picks up and echoes the Greek verb “mene,” and the related noun “menō.” The noun refers to a continuous, unfailing presence rather than a fleeting encounter. The verb contains far more of a sense of deliberate intentionality than the English “remain” does. So perhaps “the archaic “abide” is a better English word. To abide is no accident. Jesus is not suggesting we hang around him loosely, like an annoying sandfly, but that we utterly and intentionally attach ourselves to him, like a limpet. Or perhaps like a branch.

But as one of my co-conversationalists reminded us last week, (and if you are reading this online you will find the link below), there is an awful lot about pruning, too, in this Jesus saying. Sadly, as with so many scriptural passages, the Christian community has often turned this Jesus saying into an antagonistic weapon to be fired at perceived enemies of faith. Really it is a word to turn on ourselves, a word by which we, not anyone else, is scrutinized. So many gay friends for example of mine have heard in this verse nothing but accusation, the bitter distortion that says someone would, because of their sexuality, be dismissed to an eternal hell.  Those who peddle that distortion have missed the heart of the teaching themselves. They need to turn the pruning saw of God’s Spirit on the decaying branches of their own faith.

Though let us admit in context that Jesus is describing the pruning of branches from the vine, and the burning of those branches. It sounds an awful lot like the suggestion that there are those beyond the pale of faith, those whose celestial fate is somewhat fiery. There are occasional biblical verses – fewer than some imply – in which this is a core ingredient, that for there to be “the saved” there must be the “unsaved” (neither is a term I use). Yet my homework tells me that the scriptures that focus on this beyond-time fate are written in the face of persecution of the faithful. There they belong. Belief that white oppressors would receive their come-uppance in the future was a source of hope and strength to oppressed slaves in the Deep South of the United States. African-American Spirituals remind us that God hears the cries of the George Floyds, not of the Derek Chauvins. “Nobody knows the trouble I've seen / Nobody knows but Jesus,”[2]  indeed. We are reminded of that even if, the day after the Chauvin’s conviction, 16 year old Ma’Khia Bryant died in an altercation with police. More than 60 people, predominately black or Latino, have died at the hands of US police since Chauvin’s trial began.[3]

There is much to be pruned from us collectively, and much to be pruned from us individually. I’ll leave it to those who live and work with me to speak of all that stands as impediment to my integrity and lovability as a bearer of Christ. But I use the word “lovability” advisedly. For in the passage from John’s epistle we find words based on love appear no fewer than 29 times – getting on for 9% of the words used passage in English alone.[4] Johns’ writings of Jesus are overwhelmingly centred on love. Love is the fruit, though that word is Paul’s, not John’s, that stems from abiding on the Vine. Love is the fruit that is the hall mark of the community that abides in Christ. Love, said the early watchers of Christianity, was the hallmark of the Christian community, “See how Christians love each other” was the response that Tertullian imagined that pagans would have to the Christian community. Whether or not it was true is another matter. Today, sadly, I more often her the phrase used with bitter sarcasm.

Nevertheless love is the sap that flows through the vine to which Jesus commands us to intentionally attach ourselves. To attach ourselves and by discipline – by intentionality – remain attached. When John Lennon infamously wrote “Christ you know it ain’t easy” he probably wasn’t intending it as a prayer. Yet it can be our prayer. We are called to love, and when, we as humans and our neighbours as humans are not totally loveable, that is not an easy calling to uphold. Yet John’s gospel-telling provides the formula. I am the vine, says Jesus. Abide in me. If we work hard at allowing the Spirit, who is called the Comforter or paraclete in John’s gospel-account, to prune, to nip away the unproductive and fruitless aspects of our life and of our communal life, then we become bearers of fruit.

May it be our prayer that as we move into God’s future that we surrender ourselves to the vinedresser so that we can become closer to the sanctified, perfected Christ-bearers, become the fruit that points to, attracts to a living, loving Christ of hope. Can we, by disciplined faith-lives, become bearers of the Christ who transcends all the hopelessness that we see around us? Can we as we abide in him radiate a living, loving Christ of light who transcends all the darkness that we see around us and around our world? May that be our prayer.

 

The Lord be with you.

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=0oYKG-ALX0g&feature=emb_logo

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVKKRzemX_w

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/64-people-died-police-since-chauvin-trial-began-2021-4?op=1&r=US&IR=T – but these statistics from April 19^th are already long-dated.

[4] Marginally lower in the Greek, if you’re interested, albeit by a margin not statistically significant: 8.9% in English (NRSEC Version), 8.8% in Greek!

donkeys and shepherds

SERMON PREACHED at St BARNABAS’, WARRINGTON

FOURTH SUNDAY IN EASTER (25^th April) 2021

 

 Readings

Acts 4:5-12

Psalm 23

1 John 3:116-24 

John 10:11-18

<<< “Henderson at Gallipoli, leading a soldier on a donkey,” from the J.G. Jackson Collection, Hocken library, University of Otago, Dunedin (Accession Number AG-577). Provided by Nigel Robson. - No known copyright restrictionsAWMM

You probably know the story, though it’s probably better known in Auatralia than here. John Simpson Kirkpatrick was a First World War Stretcher bearer, who was killed in action on 19 May 1915. He was one of many medical operatives and countless soldiers who died in that brutal war that was supposed to end all wars. It didn’t of course.

The story goes that on the morning of April 26^th, along with his fellows, Jack Simpson (which he became) and others from his Australian Medical Corps contingent were carrying casualties back from the beachhead to the shore, carrying the injured over his shoulder. As he was doing so he spotted a stray donkey. Having grown up handling donkeys in the northeast of England he realised how it could serve to rescue the wounded. He enticed it to join him, and used it to transport the wounded to comparative safety. Over the next 24 days he is believed to have rescued more than 300 men. Then he was killed by machine gun fire.

The story of Simpson and his donkey became entwined with that of Dick Henderson, also a stretcher bearer, also a Gallipoli donkey handler.  A famous water-colour ostensibly of Simpson but actually of Henderson, was painted by Horace Moore-Jones, probably in Dunedin. Moore-Jones didn’t realize that Henderson, not Simpson, was the man in the photograph that was the basis for his painting. That painting is now generally renamed “A Man and His Donkey.” The best-known reproduction of it hangs in the National Gallery of Australia, while a sculpture of Henderson and his donkey stands outside the National War Memorial in Wellington. 

The story is even more complex: Moore-Jones, himself a survivor of World War One injuries, was eventually honoured having died in an act of peacetime heroism, rescuing women from a burning hotel in Hamilton. Henderson too emulated Simpson’s heroism, continuing the donkey-assisted rescue work for some six weeks after Simpson was killed. Later, after serving in France and receiving the Military Medal for conspicuous bravery, Henderson was gassed at Passchendaele in 1917. He was repatriated, but never recovered his health, eventually dying in Auckland in 1958. However after years of silence he did eventually set the record straight about the figure in Moore-Jones’ painting. 

Have you come to the wrong place? Were we not here to break open words about a Jesus-saying, the fourth of seven (that perfect number) of Jesus sayings in the Fourth Gospel? 

Well yes, but Simpson, Moore-Jones and Henderson may have much to teach us. For while we may not know, or be able to unravel the stories of these three figures of the twentieth century, the overall story is well-known. On this day, ANZAC Day, many may remember, amongst other acts of war-time sacrifice, the stories surrounding Simpson and his donkey – perhaps there are still children whose parents read for them the Glyn Harper children’s book The Donkey Man.

Maybe it’s just me but correlation between ANZAC legends and the Jesus legends don’t always leap to the forefront of my mind. But … but …

For the Shepherd saying of Jesus, and the many other shepherd stories that surround him, are amongst the most well-known of his legends, if I may put it that way. Metaphors around shepherding and sheep appear often amongst Jesus sayings, more than 30 times in the gospels, nearly twenty in John’s version alone. Jesus the Shepherd – and still later the Lamb, appear frequently in the stained-glass windows of our churches. Yet almost always not only is the shepherd a very European shepherd, the sheep are almost always very meek and muddly sheep – Southdown or Romney at best. 

What if these images are the wrong shepherd and the wrong sheep? Or for that matter, what can these images convey amongst, for example, Australian Indigenous for whom shepherd and sheep alike are ridiculously alien concepts? And in any case haven’t our European scenes alienated us from the hard realities of the Sheep and Shepherd around the Jesus story? Are not shepherds in New Zealand, Merino country excepted, as likely to lead sheep to a double-decker truck and slaughter as to safety? Haven’t we become as muddled as Simpson and his donkey in popular telling?

How do we connect to the tough imagery of a Middle Eastern Shepherd and his sheep – the one, you remember, who will ho seeking the 100^th sheep, the lost sheep, at great risk to his own life? Perhaps not entirely in the way of hymn-writers of earlier centuries did! For there be dragons – or at least wolves, or wild dogs, out there where the 100^th sheep may have strayed, out there where Jesus leads us.

You may have seen the other day the story of Mayur Shelke, who leaped into the path of an on-coming train to save a child who had fallen on the tracks. The child’s mother was blind and could not see her child, though no doubt she could hear the approaching train. Rescuer and child survived, escaping with about a second to spare. But the story does not end there: now Mr Shelke, who received an award of 50,000 rupees, has given have the award money to the child’s mother, so the child and its siblings can receive a better education. He has also asked that any further rewards be given to help India’s desperate fight against Coronavirus.[1]

I am the Good Shepherd, says Jesus. I am the good stretcher-bearer, says Jesus. I am the hotel-fire rescuer, says Jesus. I am the good pointsman who rescues the child from a train, says Jesus. The shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, for the soldiers, for the small Indian son of a blind mother.

We become how we live. Somewhere in the formation of a Simpson, a Henderson, a Moore-Jones, a Mayur Shelke, are the seeds of goodness that turn in an instant, or for a season, to heroism. Jesus is not only talking of dramatic heroism, though of that too. He is speaking of a life lived for others. He is speaking clearly (and in contradiction to our Acts passage, a contradiction we must live with) of lives so saturated in compassion and justice that these strengths break out in a moment or a lifetime of being lived for others.

I can’t speak for you, but I know only too clearly that mine is not that life, yet I hope and I pray that as the journey continues the self-centredness at the core of my being can become the other-centredness, the Christlike compassion that touches the lives, enlivens however briefly, the lives that cross my path. Our task – it is worth recalling as we hurtle towards Pentecost – is so to open ourselves to the Spirit of the Risen Christ that we too can find the Shepherd qualities in us and live for others.

 

The Lord be with you.

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[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/india/video/man-who-saved-a-child-from-speeding-train-donates-half-of-his-prize-money-for-his-education-1794384-2021-04-23. Accessed Saturday, 24^th April 2021.

even me. even you.

 

SERMON PREACHED at St and St LUKE’S, EAST TAIERI (MOSGIEL)

THIRD SUNDAY IN EASTER (18^th April) 2021

 

Readings

Acts 3:12-19

Psalm 4                                                

1 John 3:1-7

Luke 24: 36b-48

 

 

When we open the scriptures, particularly perhaps those of the Second Testament, we need to bring a spirit – the Spirit too, we might say – of scepticism. Can scepticism be a gift of God’s Spirit? Maybe that’s the wrong word. maybe like a child we should bring a spirit of open-eyed curiosity.  Who and what is being revealed in this passage? Why? Isn’t that above all the question that opens the world up to children’s minds? Except you believe like a child (which probably didn’t mean that at all, when Jesus said it, but it can).

It’s imperative that we don’t generate some sort of “tablets of stone” mentality to the scriptures of our faith. That’s why fundamentalism – a nineteenth century aberration that does irreparable damage to the scriptures – is so destructive. We can ask another question. What was the author of our passage wanting to say to his or her audience? Why did Luke tell us of these scenes, and in this order? It may not matter, and our best guess is at best no more than a guess, but it may be a guess filled with the Wisdom of God.

So Luke, like John last week gives us a series of resurrection appearances. They were writing decades after the event, but we can be sure the event was firmly ingrained in the corporate memory of the Jesus community. The writers didn’t dare make things up, because their words had to resonate as Truth, for Jesus, John suggests, is Truth.

Luke gives a four-part story: Jesus appears to the women, ineligible witnesses as they were in their culture, and offers words of hope: ‘He is not here, here is risen.’ Strange words indeed! I know one very evangelical theological college that has those words emblazoned across what they would call the Communion Table of their chapel – perhaps a provocative dig at more Catholic doctrines of the Eucharist. Or perhaps I’m not being fair, because surely those words are the very kernel of the gospel: death has not contained life! What more need be said? We whisper words related to these when we stand at the grave of, for example, a still-born child and whisper words of hope, offer what Paul called ‘a sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.’ I don’t understand these words, and nor did the women. But the rumour of resurrection has begun. The women are understandably terrified, as Mark makes clear in his most skeletal of resurrection records. Yet they do re-tell those haunting words. Do we?

There is too an all but hidden moment in Luke’s story, next. Peter, too, tantalised by the women’s strange tale, heads off and takes a squizz. And this once terrified man goes home, bewildered, perhaps even reconstructed by all that he encounters on that strange first day of the week. We will hear much more of Ambivalent Peter in Luke’s Second Volume, the Acts of the Apostles, wherein Deserter, infilled by God’s Spirit, becomes Rock on which the Body of Christ is founded.

Then Cleopas, and probably Mrs Cleopas, encounter Jesus, and eventually recognize him when he breaks bread as we will do shortly. He leaves them though with only – but also absolutely – the memory of all that he said and did alongside them. The words ‘memory’ and remember, in Greek terms, mean far more than ‘Oh yeah, I remember you,’ as erstwhile All Black captain David Kirk once said to me, not as a compliment but as a definite put-down. ‘Yeah, you perhaps happened and anyway it was long ago and far away’ is precisely what the Greek word ‘anamnēsis’ does not mean. Jesus became absolutely present to Mr and Mrs Cleopas as he broke bread with them, as he does each time he breaks bread with us in the rite of communion, if we let him.

The chapel of Ridley College Melbourne was, in a sense, fundamentally wrong: ‘He is here because he is risen.’ He is no longer limited in space and time but here now and here tomorrow and there too, and for you and for me and for all humanity for all time, when we so chose to experience him. But, as the risen Lord reminds Mary in the Fourth Gospel, you cannot cling to me, for I must be there, in Bonhoeffer’s words, for all people across all time. Not just Mary. Not just Mr and Mrs Cleopas, but you and me and every broken person in human history too.

Now he appears a fourth time, and speaks a word of peace. His appearance is heavier and at the same time lighter than reality, for he transcends locked doors, and overcomes fear – because perfect love does cast out fear, as the Fourth Gospel and Johannine Epistle writer yet again reminds us. And the peace the Risen Jesus speaks, and which we repeat in our liturgies – is not a gooey good feeling but the radical decision to do justice and embody hope and be love in our actions and if necessary our words too.

Luke tells us all this not for our entertainment because, as Gary Griffith-Smith expressed it in this week’s gospel conversation,[1] in the resurrection appearances the baton of Jesus is passed on to the floundering, foundering, disbelieving, doubting yet Spirit-filled disciples, and even to floundering, foundering, disbelieving, doubting yet Spirit-filled you and me. Perhaps this Easter we too have found the same hints of joy that led the disciples to stunned-mullet silence, startled and terrified, thinking we are seeing a ghost. Or perhaps Easter this year has seemed to us no more than an old wives’ tale (if you’ll forgive the sexist expression), as it seemed to the disciples when the women first came to them. Perhaps we have found only our doubts and unworthiness … yet the risen Lord of Luke’s and John’s and Mark’s and Matthew’s telling transcends even us, and the baton passes to us, and we can be sent out on a mission to God’s world.

And there we can, and God-willing will stumble on, even in this post Christendom, ecologically and economically imploding world. In the upper room of the world into which God has called us, God will enable us however imperfect we may be, to continue rumouring Christ-hope, resurrection hope, the hope of God-filled eternities to those who encounter us. even in the ordinariness of our unspectacular lives.

 

The Lord be with you

 

 

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[1] https://www.calledsouth.org.nz/gospel-conversations/