Corinthians and rabbits

 

SERMON PREACHED at St BARNABAS’, WARRINGTON

ORDINARY SUNDAY 11 (13^th June) 2021

 

Readings:

 

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13

Psalm 20

2 Corinthians 5: 6-17

Mark 4:26-34

 

As the beautiful simplicity of Jesus’ mustard seed parable reverberates in our ears, I want immediately to befuddle you by diving into the complexity of Paul’s strident, complex arguments with the Corinthian Christians. As Jesus delivers beautiful rural imagery, I want to delve into the murky depths of Corinth, pretty much the sin city of New Testament times.

Go figure!

For I believe the Corinthian texts are a powerful twenty-first century message. Running throughout Paul’s argument with the Christians of Corinth is his determination to counter an “eat drink and be merry” selfishness that had become the hallmark, not only of the city, but of the city’s Christians. Worse: the Corinthian Christians were determined to out eat, out drink, and out merry their non-Christian counterparts. Ironically they were determined to do so because they believed that there encounter with Jesus gave them permission to do so. Look at us: we know Jesus, we are saved (whatever that means), we can do anything. Okaaaay.

Or, to put it in contemporaryish terms, me now for there may be no tomorrow. Aren’t we all just “looking for a little bit of hope these days,” as British rock band Bastille put it a couple of years back? Yet, like most of human history, their hope offered little more than a one-night stand, “I'll be your rabbit in the headlights / We'll never get to Heaven.” It was the same message that Jim Morrison roared out a generation earlier, “Hello, I love you won’t you tell me your name,” and the same desperate emptiness the Corinthian Christians were espousing: “I’m free, because freedom existence only in the moment.” T. S. Eliot put it another way, generations ago (but not as long ago as the Corinthians):

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”

 

Paul would have none of it, but Paul was never particularly popular in Corinth. He offered a Jesus-message of a new creation, but it was somewhat of a long way off. Be disciplined now, he said, because in a life and a world you cannot see you will have the glorious experience of bliss. It’s never been a message that sells well, and I admit there have been many times in my life that “eat drink and be merry for tomorrow you may die” seems far more attractive. Yet I suspect me now, or “I know what I want and I want it now,” while timeless mantras, are mantras related to greater despair, hopelessness, and the horrendous suicide rates that are a tragic underbelly to youth experience today.

It’s not easy. Paul suggests over and again that the experience he had and we can have of the risen Christ breaking into our lives, and reasserting that awe-experience from time to time, is what Paul called an “earnest” of the greatness, the unbelievableness that is to come. But pie in the sky is easily mocked. Paul was easily mocked. Yet we have glimpses, and those glimpses are, it is hoped, more powerful than “I'll be your rabbit in the headlights.” “Eye has not seen,” Paul had written earlier, also as it happens, but not coincidentally, to the Corinthians. “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived … God has prepared for those who love him.”

Jesus, the rural, wandering Messiah, had told of a mustard seed. Paul doesn’t often repeat Jesus sayings – he didn’t need to as they were well known in the new Christian circles in which Paul was moving.  But Jesus had spoken often in weird, wonderfully poetic parables, and he told one of mustard seed. It was simple enough. A tiny seed becomes a large and impenetrable bush, offering, in its shade, shelter and protection to many birds. Elsewhere we find Jesus suggesting that God rather likes birds, for not one sparrow falls without the Father knowing, and we can surmise, caring. But I digress.

The mustard seed parable operates on at least two levels. In the encounter with Jesus and the Kingdom of God that he enacts, proclaims, brings, we find the challenge of justice. Where there is no hope of justice there is no hope at all, even if, for some such as the black slaves of US history, that hope is beyond sight. There is also challenge: we are called to be bearers of that hope. We are called to bear, proclaim, usher in glimpses of that justice wherever we see its absence in the lives of people, species, our planet. If we don’t then our silence speaks volumes of hopelessness.

But we are called too to rumour mustard seeds of resurrection hope – hope that emptiness and despair, where rabbits in headlights are not the final word. But it’s not easy to fix our eyes on a more distant goal. The seed that we have, and are, and are challenged to cast to the winds is tiny and vulnerable. It’s not east to believe]e in the bush that may in the purposes of God emerge. Yet as individuals, and a parish, as a diocese, even as the western mainstream (traditional) church, that is what we are called to do – and called to believe that God can and will do the rest even when we cannot see it, may nor, probably will not live to see it. The seed will grow. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and while “assurance” is an optimistic word it is a word that we are challenged by: live as if. Live as if love. Live as if justice. Live as if judgement. Live as if love has the final word – even over death.

It is pie in the sky. Yet it is, as Paul and his Jesus alike proclaim, the pie we are called to live and in turn proclaim. It is the pie, the resurrection and justice pie we are called to be, with the help of God, as a first fruit of that further pie. We are called to be rumouring pie in a pie-less world. It is preferable, I think, to being your rabbit in the headlights. But our history reminds us that our pie is credible only if we rumour it with integrity and compassionate action in all we undertake.

May God help us so to do. Because it's a tough call. 

 

 The Lord be with you.

te pouhere - say what?

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, OAMARU NORTH

TE POUHERE SUNDAY (6^th June) 2021

 Readings:

 

There is a selection of readings appointed from which to choose for this day. I have not attempted to impose a current festival, however important, on to an ancient text except insofar as there is a reference to the unity for which Jesus prays in John 17.

 

In Anglican churches today, most of us will do an unusual thing even by our standards. For this is a Sunday on which we look at and give thanks for their constitution. I doubt it is a document we look at often – I use it during future-planning consultations when a parish is  navigating its route to new ministry –  so-called vacancy consultations, (we’ll have one here some time in the coming months!) but that is about all. Yet a consultation-scan need not be quite as dull as it sounds. Nor should it be, as it becomes in some place I have served,  a sort of exclusive Anglican self-congratulatory thing, aren’t we good? aren’t we good? That is simply a wrong-headed attitude.

But the Pouhere is a profound piece of faith-work. In its most recent incarnation, the 1992 constitution, the compilers were emphatic about addressing past wrongs, about setting to right colonial injustices, about generating a different future, one that breathed more of the Spirit of the compassionate Christ.

The constitutional revisers recognized, as the liturgical scholars have long emphasized, that facing, embracing a new future begins always by recognizing the wrongs of the past. There is much that has been wrong in the colonial past, not least the Anglican past, and liturgically we should begin by saying sorry. We might note in passing that when we make our confession at the beginning of the liturgy we are not specifically confessing the naughty things we’ve done, though they too many be caught up into our lament, but the whole sorry state of humanity. WE have sinned, and as the priestly people Jesus has made us, we confess, in the plural, the sins of the world we live in. Those sins include the sins that dwell deep in our past, but whose ramifications continue today: sins of exploitation, disrespect, disregard, to name just some that are hallmarks of colonial insensitivity. E te Ariki, kia aroha mai: Lord, we are sorry.

Traditionally in liturgy , when we have confessed our sins and the sins of our world, we hear the presiding priest speak the words that God would and does say to all who truly repent. “you are forgiven, be at peace” – and stand up, now, in the divine presence. Our task, then, us to burst out in praise, spoken or sung, glorifying the God who forgives.  We become the walking-, striding-for-God people, moving out into God’s world to declare divine love and forgiveness.

By pausing in our liturgical cycles to observe Te Pouhere Sunday we are reminding ourselves of our imperfections – and of the ways in which God can breathe new hope and life into us as individuals and as the Body of Christ. The word “pouhere” is used to refer to the constitution, but its origin is not in legalese. Its origin is the post to which different waka are tied as journeyers come together to korero and mahi, to speak and work as one. Before I came down south from Hawke’s Bay I belonged to a wonderful  hahi, Te Pou Herenga Waka O Te Whakapono, the anchor or hitching pole of the waka of faith. The name was a reminder of that one post, the faith in Jesus that anchors the different journeys of being human, and even the different journeys of being a Christ-bearer.

The Constitution of the our Church establishes three equal but differing strands, Tikanga Māori, Tikanga Pacifica and Tikanga Pākehā. These strands have different backstories, different whakapapa, yet each of these strands leads back to the same encounter with Christ. Sadly, the three strands experience vastly different resources. That flawed nature of our present state of being is something we must address – precisely one reason why we must be a sorry-saying people. “If a brother or a sister has wronged you,” says Jesus,  and goes on to address questions or restoration. Effectively tikanga Pākehā is reminded by tee Pouhere that we have done wrong, as our fiscally weaker sisters and brothers enjoyed smaller slices of the pie that God had given the Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.

It was a painful reminder, and it isn’t over yet. I was at a recent meeting at which Tikanga Māori Archbishop Don Tamihere laid down some blistering challenges to the assembled Tikanga Pākehā educators and leaders, challenges about equality and equity. Not for the first time I had to take a long hard look at my assumptions, and swallow discretely. The three Tikanga Pouhere or Constitution is one attempt to answer the prayer of Jesus for his Church: Father may they all be one, in resources, opportunities, and gifts, as we are one. We’re a long way from perfection, but perhaps we are beginning to navigate by the right truths, to build on the right foundation.

The confession that we use in liturgy is a lament. Laments are as ancient as the winds, and they need to be ancient, for exploitation and division are at the heart of the human condition. It is that human condition that we are challenged to say “aroha mai,” I am sorry, for, each time we engage in the Christian rites of Communion. I personally may not have used or abused my sisters and brothers directly, but I have participated in structures that have done so. Or perhaps I have personally, anyway?

Peace, Albert Einstein warned us, is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice. What he actually said was this: “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” The Global Peace index has found New Zealand, alongside Iceland, Portugal, Austria and Denmark, to be the most peaceful countries on earth. But we are not Nirvana yet, and must strive always for improvement.

The concepts undergirding the New Zealand Anglican Constitution, te Pouhere, are the longing for the three ethnic strands of The Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand and the South Pacific to work together in a just sharing of knowledge, insight, material resources and opportunities.

In so many ways that hope is far from fulfilled. It has never been and is not yet terribly equal: compare the number of Tikanga Pākehā stipendiary clergy with the Tikanga Māori numbers. Assess the value of Tikanga Pākehā’s properties—especially buildings—and compare that with Tikanga Māori. And that's before we even consider the assets and opportunities of Tikanga Pacifica – or take into account disparities in personal income, life expectancy, and myriad other indicators.

Te Pouhere Sunday in the modern tradition of contemporary New Zealand Anglicanism is a means to acknowledge, lament the flaws that divide people of faith across barriers of race. In practical terms Te Pouhere, the constitution that we remember and give thanks for today, ensures that Anglicans come together in a handful of contexts to hear one another – marae style we might say – and alter our paths and responses when our sisters and brothers point to injustice and unChristlikeness. It is perhaps honoured more in the breach than the observance, but it is at least a step towards reconciliation and cooperation.

The Lord be with you.