for all the saints

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

ALL SAINTS’ EVE (31^st October) 2021

 

Readings:

 

Wisdom 3:1-9

Psalm 24

Revelation 21:1-6

John 11: 32-44

 

We could be all terribly highbrow about the doctrine of sanctification, or perhaps analytical about the readings, except I think  we are treading deeply inside the language of the heart. If there is an occasion on which I set aside my tendency to hanker after matters Roman Catholic (and I apologize in advance for this can be offensive to my Roman Catholic friends – but hey, let’s offend in love!) it is when it comes to the doctrine of sainthood. I find on the other hand the hard-line Protestant approach to sainthood equally ridiculous: the fierce refusal to name saints, to name churches after saints, to use the world “saint" at all unless it is applied to all the baptised, is at least as offensive as the rather rigorous hoops that candidates for sainthood have to pass through in the Roman Catholic communion before they graduate to such status. Yes, all the baptised are saints. No, not all are outstanding in their Christlikeness – and it’s to the exemplary Christ-bearers I want to turn.

Though I will just divert for a moment to all the souls who may not thank us for calling them saints. The exemplary and the unexemplary, the stumblers and the fallers, the succeeders and the fail-lers: all, I believe, are captured in the outpouring of divine love that is creation and redemption. Some l think may take a little extra time before they encounter the fullness of divine love, but what is time amidst timelessness, time amidst eternity? And no, we can never explain that.

But let me introduce you to a few of the saints that have crossed my path. They won’t have committees of cardinals meeting to decide whether their bodies have decomposed or not, or whether statues of them weep or not, and they won’t be in the Books of Saints, but saints they are.

I think of Saint Molly of Orange who I mention every All Saints’ Day. Saint Molly was a parishioner of mine in Orange, New South Wales. Every time I encountered Molly she was doing something for someone else, caring more for them than she would ever dream of doing for herself. Year after year at this time I remember the day the town was hit by a massive storm, parks were trashed, houses un-roofed, trees scattered. I knew Molly lived alone and tried to track her down after the storm passed, I was worried for her – until I learned that mid-80s year old Molly had beaten me to it and was out and about in the town making sure the old people were alright.

Then there was Saint Leopold – I’ll call him Leopold of Parkville, because that’s where I met him and I barely knew him. He was a priest so I’m able to track down a few details but they tell us very little – he trained at the same theological college that I did, sixty years earlier – that’s sort of why I half met him. He served in two or three rural Victorian parishes, a couple of military chaplaincy posts, some administrative posts, a tutorship in the Caribbean. I barely met him, but I know that those details meant nothing to him. I think I only had one conversation with him. But in that conversation he made it clear that all the details of his years of ministry mattered little to him. In the last years of his life though he had found what he described as the pearl of great price. He was slipping I think into a touch of dementia, so he forgot to make clear what the pearl was, but it was clear that it was some total renewal of his faith. It was either an encounter with the charismatic movement or with a community justice movement that existed in Melbourne at the time – perhaps it was neither, perhaps it was both. A moment or two of research suggests it was both, for in the late 1970s St Leopold bought a terrace house in Melbourne’s Clifton Hill, which he donated to an Intentional Christian Community experiment called the House of the Gentle Bunyip. He had experience of intentional Christian communities in both New Zealand and Australia, though beyond that I know little. But as he spoke of his pearl of great price his eyes lit up, and this frail old priest became energised with holy energy. I never saw him again – funnily enough I may have met him once before when I had dinner at the House of the Gentle Bunyip, but that matters not at all. What matters is that I saw that afternoon, at a gathering at my theological college, the fires of holiness enflaming a frail old man, and the love of God shining through him. The Gentle Bunyip folded some years later, but Saint Leopold had gone on into the mysteries of God by then. The assets of the Gentle Bunyip, incidentally, were given over to an agency working with schizophrenics, amongst those most outcast of western humanity.

Perhaps one more. I’ll disguise a name and place here, for fear of upsetting anyone. St Ursula of Somewhere remains one of the godliest people I’ve known. Shy, quiet, utterly devoted to her God, her family, her church. I was a bit of a waif and stray when I knew her, but her house was always open to me – and to other waifs and strays. She immersed herself in prayer, in the scriptures, yet never paraded any sense of holiness, never paraded anything that would attract attention to herself. She had an impish demeanour, was no meepy saint because, well, saints aren’t meepy. She brought up six children – I reckon she carried about 100% of that load because, well, busy husband and all that. She survived cancer, miraculously and lived for decades after it – living it seemed to me always for others. In her I saw God, and I know I was far from alone in that. Hers too is a life that passed through mine, and for that I will never cease to be thankful.

I could name others – the fine monastic priest, St Alan of Flemington, who was one of the finest liturgists and preachers I have ever known, but whose tortured life was cut short by AIDS. St Brian of Casino, another priest, a bloke’s bloke, who retired from priesthood to brew beer and drive a milk tanker – keeping the activities separate I hasten to add – and who was simply there if anyone ever needed him. Or saints Greta and Faye – their names too are changed – who’d lived on the land all their lives before retiring to a small country town, and their – both of them like Ursula somewhat impish – living a life of prayer and cheekiness and care for others, Faye always in the background (they were not an item by the way but it wouldn’t matter if they were) … Greta who once when I turned up around half past five in the evening to get a signature told me with a conspiratorial twinkle “they say you should never drink alone, but if I didn’t drink alone I’d never get to have a drink” before offering me a glass of wine.

For all the saints indeed. We’ve probably all known one or two. For their passage though our lives we give our heartfelt thanks to their God and ours.

are we there yet?

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

and at St Alban’s, Kurow

ORDINARY SUNDAY 27 (3^rd October) 2021

 

Readings:

 

Job 23:1-9, 16-17

Psalm 22:1-15

Hebrews 4:12-16

Mark 10:17-31

 

There was a period of scholarship – forgettably – when scholars did their best to ensure that the harsh Jesus-saying about camels passing through the eye of a needle wasn’t about camels and needles at all. Fortunately for us all that aberration was in the mediaeval era, probably not the high point of biblical interpretation. The short scholarly parenthesis is best forgotten except as a reminder that  scholarly attempts to wriggle away from the harsh claims of the gospel, or from the harsh demands of Jesus, are utterly misguided. For what it’s worth another scholarly interpretation, based on Greek misspellings, suggested that the original referred to a thick cord passing through the eye of a sewing needle. That too was incorrect – and denudes the Jesus-saying of its humour. Jesus was totally capable of illustrating his points with outrageous humour, and many of his illustrations were what we might call in an internet age OTT. Sewing with camels, anyone?

But beneath the humour was a serious point. Paul would put it a different way a decade and a half after Jesus (though probably about the same period before Mark recorded Jesus’ words). All fall short of the glory of God. We live an existence the very basis of which is short-falling. Ever tried passing a camel through the eye of a needle?

So Jesus is making a point that will recur often in the scriptures. Wealth – not evil in itself – is a noise that all but inevitably drowns out the voice of God. The love of riches is the root of all evil, says Paul. Prosperity gospel preachers who claim that God is telling you to buy them a Lear Jet have somewhat missed the point of needles’ eyes and camels. The saying, as Mark records it, is in the midst of a series of Jesus-sayings that remind us that the way to God is not a picnic, and the way with God is not a stroll in the park. Jesus and his followers called it the way of the cross and even after two millennia of turning an instrument of execution into pretty jewellery and bumper stickers we haven’t quite rid ourselves of the brutality of that symbol.

Jesus spoke these words in a world that operated on what today might be called a zero sum basis. First century economic were based largely on the premise of a limited-goods society: if I have goods then you miss out, and I will attempt to do all I can to accrue goods with the result that you are increasingly beholden to me to receive even the scraps that fall from the table – as it  happens a key to interpreting another Jesus moment, that we shall flag but leave for now. Some of us might recognize that it is ever thus: we may dress it up in a modern economy, but we might note, must note, that the rich do not benefit the poor by their accrual of limited resources. “The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor” wrote Cohen in a terse exposé of universal exploitation.

Jesus, then, was not mucking around beneath the gentle overtones of humour. But nor of course was he shutting the door on hope. The author of Hebrews describes the word of God – and remember John refers to Jesus as the Word – as sharper than a two edged sword. Jesus himself speaks of the choices he presents as providing no in-between spots – and indeed the witness of his ancestors simply foreshadowed that: chose this day who you will serve. Binaries may be unpopular in post-modern society but in some of the contexts of our faith binaries are a thing. The thing. Though I don’t think here we are talking about choosing heaven or hell, as many would tell us.  But that’s a complex subject for another time. What we are choosing is the difficult path that is Christ-following, as against other paths that are not.

The more important point that the author of Hebrews is making is that we are surrendering ourselves to a Saviour, a priest, a God who has been there done that. Matthew and mark make this point when they tell the visual tale of Jesus Temptation in the Wilderness. Whatever we might be seduced by along our journey, Jesus has had bigger issues to deal with. And yes we will fall short – it’s not even that we will succeed. Paul too constantly talks about the human, even the follower-of-Jesus-humans – volition to failure. Except that this is not the end. The Christ who has been there – even to the point of utter godforsakenness, will pick us up, wind us up, patch us up and send us on into his footsteps one again.

And the strange thing is that this side of the grave we won’t see the outcome of the journey. But it’s the journey Jesus leads us on.  Scholars give it fancy names – divinization, as I prefer to call it, or theosis, the transformation into the likeness of God that we were always designed to attain from the moment of our creation.

The answer to the infamous kids’ question “are we there yet?” I’m afraid, is no. It is awfully hard to get camels through the eyes of needles, and we have an equally awful lot of distractions from that task. But with the help of God and beyond our sight we can and will.

rending asunder

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

ORDINARY SUNDAY 27 (3^rd October) 2021

Readings:

 

Job 1:11, 2:1-10

Psalm 26

Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12

Mark 10:2-16

 

 

I love it, every few years when this reading about divorce – either in Matthew Mark or Luke (I so like John!) – comes up in our lectionary. So, for those of you who don’t know my story: yes I am divorced and remarried. There: a disclaimer! But it raises the question “How do we read the bible?” 

Another personal revelation: I doubt if any here were particularly aware of it, but a few years back some unglamorous aspects of my personal history were aired for about 24 hours across New Zealand media. The fact that they were was my own choice, because someone in a powerful position was making statements about me that implied that I was a far more heinous creature than I actually am – and lest these shady hints seem interesting I can assure you I am an utterly boring human being. Nevertheless as the storm in a teacup continued I was most upset, amid an edifying chorus of support that arose despite my obvious failings, when a solitary and sensationalist columnist in a tin pot local paper accused me of hypocrisy. I preached, he alleged,  one thing in a pulpit while practising another. I could assure him, if he ever bothered to listen, that I had never preached on human failings in matters moral, sexual or otherwise marital in any context at any time. 

But, as is so irritatingly human, I remember several years later primarily that one vicious poke amongst the countless outpourings of support. It’s hard, being human. I hope I tell the story not to wallow in my own self-importance, but because at the heart of all my teaching I hold dear the belief that Christ meets us at the very centre, or to put it in another perspective, the very darkest depths of our being human. At our fail-point. 

Most of us, and I include myself, aren’t very interesting, in our darkest depths. Our stories will not make, as Emmylou Harris once put it, the News of the World. The movie about me or about you will probably not be made. Yet it is in our “me-ness” that Jesus meets us. In our mediocrity, our ordinariness, Jesus meets us. And, for various reasons, the matter of divorce that Jesus addresses here, sternly, has become a factor in most of our lives, either personally or by extension through the lives of friends and family.

Jesus’ teaching was it seemed pretty much not negotiable. Some of you will know that I am writing the history of the diocese (I remind you of that from time to time not to big-note myself but so that I have compulsion to continue in what is not always a labour of love!). In the 1890s our Dunedin Synod, alongside that of our Presbyterian neighbours, issued warning after warning to the national government that divorce laws must not be weakened. The clear teachings of Jesus, they argued, must not be diluted. 

Long after my father died I learned that, in the 1950s, he divorced his first wife. To the best of my knowledge he never received communion again, for the Church of England forbade a divorced man to receive the sacrament. 

Were these strict law-protecting synodspeople in the 1890s and through to the 1960s right in their attempts to preserve strict regulations? By the letter of the law they were right. Yet in their literalism there was no room for human weakness. Our world is more nuanced now, and so as it happens is our church, though the battles were fierce. I certainly still could not receive a clergy licence in the Diocese of Sydney.  

Yet today we know that some people, women and children especially, have been forced to abide in hells under the guise of the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage.

We know too that there are disproportionately high statistics on domestic abuse emerging from the highly patriarchal Diocese of Sydney, and from its clergy marriages in particular. As one writer put it, “The emphasis on the indissolubility of marriage in [Sydney] diocesan teaching has been a powerful factor in trapping women in violent marriages.”[1] The writer adds “In some cases we are told we cannot be on music teams, or teach Sunday School classes, or lead in prayer, because as divorced women we are inappropriate role models.” In Dunedin we can be proud that our women were at the forefront of the move to permit divorced women membership of women’s groups.

Domestic violence, abuse … or just sheer energy-sapping misery – these were often ignored by those who argued for a not-negotiable approach to the question. Yet there are other Jesus-sayings about the letter as against the spirit of the law, and about millstones and causing little ones to stumble. These might equally be applied when we wrestle with seemingly bald Jesus-statements that I for one have so clearly disobeyed.

Depending of course on our attitude to the bible we might realize that there are many commandments that we disobey each day, each time we gather to worship. Few of our women wear hats in church these days – or keep silent! Few of us gouge out our eyes when they cause us to sin. This last Jesus-saying in particular flies in the face of almost the entire advertising industry, which is based on the premise that we will always covet those things that are better than what we already have; that Jaguar, this coffee, those pills will make our life all we want it to be.

Every time the strict teaching of Jesus comes up in the lectionary cycle my first response is to cringe. I know my story. But I know too the context in which Jesus was teaching, when divorce was effectively the end of a woman’s life, when Herod like a patriarchal celebrity traded – (and executed, as did the founder of the Anglican Church) – wives on a whim, when women and children were no more than commodities. 

While the bible is not as Dan Brown seemed to suggest given to secret codes, the equivalence between first century words and contemporary meaning is not always direct. Jesus delivered a harsh teaching as a warning to opportunist men who would dispose of women as little more than unwanted property. We might extrapolate from this reading far less about marriage and far more about selfishness in other aspects of our contemporary, throw-away society – discarding everything from effluent to McDonalds plastics to the lives of living creatures, human and others, as if they were no more than a worthless commodity.

Jesus' words still ring powerfully true – and I know for one that I fall short of their fulfilment.  But that is why day by day we turn back to the Christ who by his Spirit enables us to grow into the likeness of the God who loves, forgives, and restores us.

 

 

 

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[1] “Abused Clergy Wife’s Message to the Church.” ABC News October 22^nd, 2018.  https://tinyurl.com/s5vctzdu. Accessed October 2^nd, 2021.

Cut Peter some slack

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

ORDINARY SUNDAY 19 (26^th September) 2021

 

Readings:

 

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10, 9:20-22

Psalm 124

James 5:13-20

Mark 9:38-50

 

In Mark’s gospel-account we have we have the work of an instinctive story-teller. In this series of glimpses into Jesus’ relationship with his followers – and the implication id s that we too are those followers, they are simply  obtuse and obtuser – or to put it in real English, dumb and dumber. With apologies to Peter and the crowd, you really just don’t get it, do you? And yes, I shall put my fingers over my ears and refuse to hear you, Peter, saying “and nor, bro, do you.” I hear “lalalala,” okay? I’m not listening!

You know – I mean really … does a couple of hundred words back Mark tells a weird story about Jesus, when he talks about defecation and the Kingdom of God (Mk 7:17-23) then playfully warns his followers to concentrate, or they will join the ranks of the ne’er do well. Perhaps the warning is they never left them. Sand yeah, Peter, I can’t hear you saying “an’ nor bro, did you.” Lalalala.

But it’s not just Peter and his mates, I guess. I mean the Pharisees. C’mon! Jesus feeds a whole lot of hungry people out of nowhere, and those religious of his day trundle along and say “Jesus mate, show us a sign that you’re who you say you are.” But Peter, really you take the cake. You even tell Jesus that he’s the Messiah, pay lip service to getting it, and then try to stop him doing Messiah stuff. And yeah I get that you were expecting a bit of a revolution and the overthrow of the Caesar, but really? Hasn’t Jesus just been saying that outward appearances don’t count for much, that it’s what’s in the gut that matters? As it happens in a Covid era we might begin to get that: if I do meth, it’s revealed in the sewers. If I have covid it’s revealed in the sewers. Jesus didn’t miss much, eh?

And now, Peter, James, John, you’ve had a really big Wow moment, just you and Jesus up a sort of Palestinian Mount Cargill, and you start bickering about who’s the top dog? And some other passing dude performs a really life giving miracle and you whinge because you didn’t get to do the histrionics? C’mon.

This of course is all masterfully knit together by Mark. Matthew and Luke get all a bit po-faced about it, and I guess it’s good we get their stuff too. But Mark strings us along. Man, we’re the suckers here.

I once had a colleague who shall remain nameless, but he was a masterful storyteller. I remember once he told us a story which had us all killing ourselves laughing because one of the characters in the story was making an absolute fool of himself. And then suddenly the nameless storyteller turned on us and said “Come on guys you are that person.” And we realized we were. How often do we see those outside our doors and whinge­ because they are doing the work of God? Those who are working astronomical hours to keep us safe in an age of covid?

Basically, and to be fair, it’s not surprising, and we need to cut Peter and his sometimes mates a little slack. The Hebrew people had long expected a Messiah. They did not expect him to start talking about suffering dying, and then some nonsense about rising again. That was not in the playbook.

But there’s strong hints that we are as western Christianity replicating those same errors. The Christian community presents, by and large, as a group of nay-sayers. The most popular faces of Christianity are those who wave big sticks and condemn others who don’t behave they way they do – or in some case they pretend to do. Too many bearing the name of Christ condemn those who declare that love is love, condemn those who are seeking to save vulnerable people from a rampant virus, condemn those of other faiths who perform stunning acts of compassion and kindness – giving a cup of water – with more credibility than many Christian spokespeople do.

Mark was a stunning storyteller. He tells, with humour, tension, energy – of the Jesus who enters into the dark places of human existence, the Myanmars, the Afghanistans, the Covid wards, the suicide statistics and there, in these hells, releases hope, compassion, kindness. Mark’s telling conveys the warmth of the Messiah who would soon be crucified yet who loves even today. Mark tells of the Jesus who does all this and then says to us, ‘c’mon, you lot, do likewise.” And even that isn’t the end of the story, because Jesus sends his Spirit to guide, warn – I always want to say “warm” because that too – and revive us, his church. And our simple task is, as best we can, to go, do likewise. Aided as we can be by the Spirit of God.